As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, I wanted to hear how those who lived through the Holocaust are making sense of today’s surge in antisemitism against the backdrop of what they personally endured. So, I spoke with two women who survived, rebuilt their lives far from Europe, and are now watching events unfold. Personal disclosure: One of those interviewed here, Miryam “Mimi” Wise, is my grandmother.
The television in Rena Quint’s Jerusalem apartment never goes dark. News runs constantly, voices and images flickering across the walls decorated with the framed faces of her family and friends.
“I’m terrified,” she told The Jerusalem Report recently about the rising antisemitism around the world.
On the other side of the world, in a quiet Sydney suburb, Miryam “Mimi” Wise does not bother to soften her tone: “I’m angry as hell.”
Both women survived the Holocaust as children and went on to build new lives on opposite sides of the world.
Warning the world
Quint and Wise have both spent decades telling their stories in classrooms, museums, and intimate living rooms to make sure that future generations understand the horrors they endured – just for being Jews.
Now, as two of a quickly dwindling number of Holocaust survivors remaining, both women are witnessing antisemitism surge once more and are wondering how much influence their testimony still has.
Born in Piotrków, Poland, in 1935, Quint survived the war as a hidden child, passing as a boy working in a glass factory before being deported to Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, the sole survivor of her family, she was taken to Sweden and later adopted in the United States, eventually settling in Jerusalem with her husband.
In 1937 in Milan, Italy, Wise began her life in a different corner of Europe, moving as a baby with her parents to France, where they lived under false identities and hid with her younger brother on a farm and in small villages until liberation. Later, she immigrated to Australia with her parents and grandparents.
Both women built new lives: Quint in Israel, where she worries about Jewish continuity and urges Jews to stay close to their Judaism; and Wise in Australia, where she feels that the country which once gave her family refuge is now failing its Jews.
Recognizing the signs
Quint looks for patterns. She talks about the Nazi book burnings and who lit the fires: university students.
“In 1933, there was a big book burning… who did it? College students. So now we have Columbia,” she said, referring to the major New York City university, noting that places her family once saw as prestigious now feel hostile.
She pointed to campuses where Jewish students feel exposed instead of protected, highlighting that the boycotts and the chants, such as “From the river to the sea,” are just updated versions of old mechanisms.
“Which river, which sea? They don’t even know,” said Quint, adding that the scale and coordination of protests do not feel spontaneous.
“They said Kristallnacht was spontaneous. There was nothing spontaneous about it. It was planned. And so is this,” she asserted.
Wise’s starting point is not Europe but Australia. She speaks first with gratitude for the country that took her parents in after the war, stressing how they learned the language, worked hard and, as she put it, “took our place in Australia as Australians.”
The anti-Jewish marches and slogans trouble her, but what angers her most is the silence from “the powers that be” – a government she expected to offer at least basic reassurance. Instead, she said, she has been left “deeply disappointed.”
Proof and attention
Quint returns again and again to the question of proof. She keeps documents and records not as memorabilia but as protection: family papers, adoption files, German lists that show who went where and when.
“I told you I have to prove everything, right?” she said.
“Proof, proof, proof.” Her question to deniers is blunt: “Germany isn’t denying it, so why are you denying it?”
For her, archives in Germany, Jerusalem, Washington, and Los Angeles are part of the answer – places where names, dates, and train numbers can be checked long after survivors are gone.
Wise worries less about formal denial and more about whether anyone is actually taking in what the remaining survivors say. She described her mission simply: “We need to educate non-Jews… We have to teach. We have to keep on talking.”
But she also wonders aloud: “We keep on doing it…, but are they listening? Are they understanding?”
A recent screening of the film Nuremberg, she noted, left Australian audiences “absolutely shocked,” suggesting that even now, many people are seeing unfiltered images of the Holocaust for the first time.
Place and vulnerability
Quint’s perspective is sharpened by proximity. In Jerusalem, she has watched war and antisemitism unfold at the same time: October 7, sirens, and reserve call-ups, alongside protests and social media campaigns targeting Israel and, by extension, Jews.
“I’m really scared, and I really don’t sleep at night, thinking of all the things,” she said.
Of all the October 7 horror stories, she thinks a lot about the little girl, Avigail Idan, who saw her parents murdered and ran to a neighbor, who became her “new mother.”
“That’s what happened to me… It’s just history repeating itself,” Quint said.
Wise was more explicit. She said that being a Jew in Australia feels different from being a Jew in Israel.
“In Israel, they’re Israeli, their religion is Jewish, and they have an army to protect them,” she said.
In Australia, Jews are a small minority. She spoke appreciatively of communal security groups, but concluded: “We have no protection… We really don’t have anything.”
She expressed little confidence that the government or the police would intervene when antisemitic chants or threats appear – a point made by many in the community both before and after the recent Bondi beach attack on the first night of Hanukkah.
Her advice to her own children if things do not improve is blunt: “Get the hell out of here… There’s only one place to go in the world, and that’s Israel.”
The shrinking window
Both women are acutely aware of the passage of time.
Quint stated it flatly: “In a few years, there won’t be any survivors.”
That reality sits behind her insistence on proof and her willingness to keep saying yes to groups asking her to speak, even when the schedule is tiring.
Wise talked about the same reality. More of her peers, she said, are no longer able to speak clearly. She notices that some words which once came easily now sit “on the tip of my tongue” and will not come. That awareness is one reason she keeps accepting invitations to talk about what she endured.
“While I can do it with clarity… then I will do it,” she said, explaining that it is so people can still understand her.
Last lessons
Wise’s message to young people – Jewish or not – is drawn from Shakespeare. She mentions Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, the reminder that if you strike a Jew, he bleeds. “We’re all human beings… we’re all valuable… we all have something to contribute,” she said.
Quint’s emphasis is different but parallel. Alongside her insistence on documentation, she talks about Jews staying close to their traditions, communities, and sense of peoplehood, so that continuity itself becomes an answer to those who hoped the Jewish story would end.
“We have to laugh as much as we can, we have to love as much as we can, and we have to make sure that Israel is safe and free,” she said.
With survivors dying out, she asks her listeners to become “our ambassadors” once she and her peers are gone.
Both women are still talking to audiences because they know they are among the last who can say, “I was there” and be believed on the strength of their own voice.■