When Samir Khosla boarded a flight to Israel in early November 2023 – barely a month after the Hamas massacre on October 7 – he anticipated a tense security landscape and a country deep in turmoil. What he did not expect was a personal shift so profound that it would eventually take him to Auschwitz, reshape his understanding of antisemitism, and impel him to launch a quiet campaign for Holocaust education across India.
Khosla, 53, is chairman of Delhi-based Dynamic Staffing Services (DSS), which has sent about 500,000 Indians to work in more than 30 countries. Thus far, he has brought more than 3,500 workers to Israel, which is a new market for him.
At first, his relationship with Israel was professional, transactional. Today, Khosla said, it has become something far more intimate.
“I’ve lived on four continents,” he told The Jerusalem Report in a recent interview, “and yet I still didn’t understand antisemitism – not the nuance, not the depth. I didn’t understand it until I came to Israel; until I heard people’s stories.”
What began as a business trip – responding to Israel’s request for more international laborers to fill the void left by Palestinian workers after October 7 – has evolved into an unexpected personal mission: to introduce Holocaust awareness in his home country where, he said, most people “maybe remember a few paragraphs about it from school” but rarely grasp the enormity or the machinery of the Nazi genocide.
Point of change
During one of Khosla’s first trips to Israel, a colleague took him to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Center in Jerusalem. The experience, he said, unsettled him in ways he had not anticipated. And his friend told him that he could not fully process what had happened to the Jews unless he visited the notorious Auschwitz death camp.
“At Yad Vashem, you start to understand the scale. But my friend said Auschwitz would change me,” Khosla recalled.
A year later, he and his wife accepted an invitation to join the April 2025 March of the Living trip to Poland.
“I’ve seen Schindler’s List. We’ve watched the movies. But nothing prepares you for the scale” of what happened in the Holocaust, he said. “The most shocking thing was the industrial system that operated to inflict this suffering. We had no idea. I don’t think anybody has any idea.”
Clearly moved by the experience of his trip to Poland, Khosla said that some images have stayed with him – particularly a display of human hair inside one of the remaining blocks.
“You see the suitcases, the children’s clothes – those are inanimate objects. But hair is a living thing. That really tore us apart. That’s the level to which they were stripping people of their human dignity,” he said.
Another realization stunned him: “Those photos we see of emaciated survivors in striped uniforms? I never knew that those were taken on the happiest day of their lives – the day they were found by the Allies.”
History of displacement
Khosla told the Report that his connection to Jewish history surprised him because of the way it echoes his own family’s trauma.
“I am the product of a refugee family,” he explained. “We lived in Lahore for 200 years. Then the same mapmaker who drew Israel’s borders drew India’s. Overnight, we were in Pakistan – and my family had to literally run for their lives.”
His grandmother’s gold helped the family escape during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan when clashes saw up to a million people killed and displaced tens of millions – making it one of the largest forced migrations of the 20th century.
“When I tell this story at Shabbat dinners, my new Israeli friends often say, ‘Your story is a very Jewish story.’ And they’re right,” Khosla said.
For many Indians, he pointed out, persecution is not an abstraction. There were pogroms against Hindus in Kashmir in the 1990s, mass atrocities during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and countless personal accounts of flight and survival across the subcontinent, Khosla said.
“So even if we don’t know about the Holocaust, we understand mass displacement; we understand persecution.”
Affinity with Israel
Inspired by this revelation, as well as his experiences over the past two years in Israel and in Poland, Khosla said he is seeking a way to bolster Holocaust awareness and education in his country of nearly 1.5 billion people.
With ties between India and Israel at an all-time high – driven by defense cooperation, agriculture, tech innovation, and a growing labor corridor linking the two states – he believes Indians will be receptive to this, even if it will be complicated.
Public sentiment in India is overwhelmingly sympathetic toward Israel, Khosla noted, adding that “Indians naturally see Israel as a kind of ally.”
He said there is a natural affinity between Indians and Jews, explaining, “In our Indic cultures – Hindu, Buddhist – we believe the world is one family.
“Acceptance is a norm in India,” Khosla said. “Jews lived in India for 2,000 years without systemic persecution. So, when we learn about the Holocaust, we feel it differently. It goes against our core values.”
Khosla now hopes to find a way to integrate Holocaust awareness into his company’s training centers in India, which prepare tens of thousands of workers for jobs abroad – many destined for Israel.
“These workers come from villages, they live in communities, they have huge networks behind them. One worker might influence 10 family members,” he said. “Then tens of thousands become hundreds of thousands.”
Workers destined for Israel already learn basic Hebrew, Israeli cultural norms, and local geography. The Holocaust, he said, should be part of that foundation.
“We haven’t done it yet because we want to do it right… But everyone in Israel has been touched by the Holocaust, so it feels essential,” he said.
Age of disinformation
One lesson from his visit to Auschwitz, the businessman said, has remained with him more than any other: the silence.
“The march was silent. Auschwitz itself is silent. And you realize that in silence, terrible things can happen,” he said. “People knew at the time. The Brits knew. The Allies knew. Silence has a price.”
Today, Khosla warned, silence has been replaced by noise and disinformation.
“We live in a noisy world of media. If people’s first exposure is disinformation – if they see enough dead-baby videos – opinions start to shift, even against logic,” he said, adding that with India among the world’s most active consumers of YouTube and WhatsApp, misinformation spreads rapidly.
“The ‘do nothing’ approach is already showing results,” Khosla emphasized. “There is a very obvious media bias against Israel, and often against Jews,” but “it’s unfounded. So there needs to be an effort to impart correct information before malicious forces contaminate views.”
Carrying memory forward
After nearly two years of encounters with Israelis, hearing survivor testimonies, and his own reckoning in Poland, Khosla said he now feels a profound moral obligation.
“I walked away with a message of hope,” he reflected. “You can try to decimate a people; but if they want to survive, they will. Human resilience is extraordinary.”
For Khosla, the responsibility is growing – especially as Holocaust survivors age.
“Soon, the survivors will be gone. Their stories must live on,” he said. “Indians have a culture of stories – we remember people, ancestors, family journeys. Holocaust stories are stories of people, too.”
His company’s expanding presence in Israel, he believes, offers a unique opportunity to build a bridge of understanding.
“We have access to hundreds of thousands of people,” Khosla said. “We have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to raise awareness. If not us, then who?”■