ROME – A well-known Italian Holocaust survivor has publicly rebuked Pope Francis for suggesting that Israel be investigated for “genocide” regarding its dealings in the Gaza conflict.
“Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide,” said the 93-year-old Edith Bruck in an interview Monday with the Italian daily La Repubblica.
Pope Francis has already described Israel’s military incursions in Gaza as a “massacre” of women and children, but recently upped the ante by calling for an inquiry to determine whether Israel’s attacks in Gaza constitute genocide.
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pontiff stated in a book-length interview with Hernán Reyes Alcaide titled Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Towards a Better World, excerpts of which were published Sunday.
“We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies,” he said.
“I am sorry that the Pope spoke of genocide. It is an inadequate word, which is used too easily, in fact belittling the only true genocide in history, the one we experienced: the Shoah,” said Bruck, who once received Pope Francis in her Rome apartment.
Pope Francis’s words also prompted an immediate reaction from the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See, which rejected any comparison between Israel’s military operations and a genocide.
In a statement published on X, the Embassy said: “The massacre of October 7 was a genocidal massacre against the people of Israel. Israel is acting in accordance with international law and in self-defense. Any attempt to call this self-defense by another name is to single out the Jewish state.”
A Hungarian-born Jew and survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen, Bruck said that the bloodshed in Gaza is a “tragedy that concerns us all,” but insisted that Israel is not attempting to eliminate the entire Palestinian population.
That is rather “something Hamas wants to do,” she said, noting that Hamas has said it “wants to wipe out all the Jews in the entire world.”
The pope probably used the word genocide “because he doesn’t feel the weight of the phrase he’s saying. And that’s why he says it too easily,” Bruck said.
“He has no control over what he says: he is not Italian, that’s why I think maybe the sentence slipped out,” she added. “It’s happened before.”
“I am very close to the pope, I don’t want to be angry with him. He even came to visit me at home,” Bruck asserted. “But that’s not enough.”
“He came to my house to ask for forgiveness for everything that had happened to the Jews. But it is not enough. He should deal a little more with anti-Semitism,” she added.
The risk of using the word “genocide” too easily is that it diminishes “the gravity of real genocides, using the word when it is not appropriate. Genocides are something else.”
“The Armenian genocide was a genocide. The million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz was a genocide, along with the other five million Jews, who also burned in the concentration camps,” she said.
But Gaza, that is “not genocide,” she said.