This is not about anti-Semitism, and it’s not about being too sensitive, which often is code for don’t be sensitive at all.
Pat Bagley’s May 8 cartoon, with the use of the image of the Auschwitz gate, with “Drill Baby Drill” written across the top to depict the threat of extinction of wild animals, is hurtful to our families and disrespectful to the murdered millions.
All I know of one side of my family is a group photograph from the 1930s of about 20 Russian Jews who were murdered. As a teenager, my aunt out-swam her attacker at a lake while the Brown Shirts drowned her girlfriends. My teachers had numbers on their arms.
Do you think there are no survivors who might have been affected by Bagley’s drawing? Do you think there are no Holocaust survivors living in Salt Lake City? There are. Imagine they open the paper to their trauma depicted in this way.
Was there a politically timely or edgy social reason to use this image of horror that actually reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” (German for “Work sets you free”) under which so many individuals and families, not nameless masses, walked into the hands of brutal murderers?
Was it shock value? The urgency of the plight of wild animals? The original gate saw no wild animals walk through it.
Mark M. Cantor, Salt Lake City