In the spring of 1944, the Nazis forced my grandfather Chaim, his wife Bracha and their eight children onto cattle cars hurtling toward Auschwitz.
Upon arrival, Bracha and seven of their children were murdered in the gas chambers and turned to ash.
My grandfather’s story was once a horror story of a different era of unfathomable hatred.
A time that, until three weeks ago, we referred to as “Never again.”
Yet “Never again” happened again.
Hamas terrorists invaded villages in southern Israel Oct. 7 and exterminated whole communities.
Entire Israeli families were turned into smoke and ash, no different from the fate my grandfather’s family met in Auschwitz.
But the brutality of the crimes is not the only commonality between the savage Hamas Nazis and the German Nazis.
They share a common ideology.
The Einsatzgruppen Nazi death squads were committed to exterminating the Jews, just as the Nukhba Hamas terrorists are committed to exterminating the Jews and Israel.
The Nazis sought a judenrein — Jew-free — Europe, just as Hamas seeks a judenrein Israel, on its way to a judenrein world.
Hamas members are modern-day Nazis, from their appalling inhumane violence to identical genocidal ideologies.
Yet Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, is no Adolf Hitler.
He is not the leader of this genocidal death cult hell-bent on world domination.
That role is held by the supreme leader of Iran, the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khamenei.
Hitler’s Third Reich was envisioned to be a thousand-year empire stretching across continents just as Khamenei envisions his radical Shia hegemony to stretch across the region and beyond.
Just like the Nazi regime, the ayatollah regime sows death and destruction everywhere it touches.
Today the world is watching the rise of a Shia Islamist Reich, yet just like during the rise of Nazism, the world is deafeningly silent.
The UN Security Council, the very body tasked with maintaining global security, has convened seven times since the Oct. 7 massacre but still has not condemned Hamas for the intentional murder of Israeli civilians.
The sad truth is that some members of the Security Council have learned nothing in the past 80 years — that silence in the face of evil is evil itself.
It is my duty, on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people, to remind them what staying silent during such dark times means.
In the Security Council on Monday evening, I donned a yellow star inscribed with the words “Never again.”
I announced that I would wear the star in every UN meeting until the Hamas atrocities are condemned and until we eradicate Hamas.
I wear my yellow star not as a symbol of victimhood or shame but as a symbol of strength and pride.
As a reminder that we, the Jewish people, swore to fight back to defend ourselves.
Never again is now.
The difference between 1943 and 2023 is that today, Jews have a strong state and a powerful military.
We are not defenseless.
We are Lions of Judah, and we will defend ourselves against those who seek to annihilate us.
In the face of the UN’s silence, our enemies have become emboldened.
They have seen the UN General Assembly applauding efforts to prevent the Jews from defending ourselves, and they heard the secretary-general portray understanding for the Hamas slaughter.
This is precisely why we have seen the most staggering rise in Jew-hatred since the Nuremberg Laws and their aftermath.
The antisemites have been empowered.
They now know that slaughtering Jews is met with silence.
They have been so galvanized by the UN’s inaction that they cannot wait to butcher Jews themselves. Calls for “gassing the Jews” are heard in Sydney. Chants for a judenrein Palestine, “from the river to the sea,” can be heard from California to New York.
Islamist battle cries against Jews are being screamed in London, Brussels and Paris.
An airport in Dagestan, Russia, was flooded by Islamist-terror supporters who searched for Jews to lynch.
Comprehend the weight of this moment. Internalize that the world stands at a crossroads, just as it did in the 1930s.
Israel has made its choice.
We were shown that genocidal Jew-hatred did not die with Hitler.
The Israeli people, and Jews around the world, are strong.
We are unbreakable.
And we are going nowhere.
Israel will prevail.
We will bring our hostages home.
And the citizens of the Jewish state will live in peace and freedom.
Gilad Erdan is Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.