A Holocaust survivor has called on Fox News and Greg Gutfeld to apologize after the host’s recent remarks suggesting that Jews could survive in Nazi concentration camps by “having skills.”
“[The] Fox News host should apologize, [the] Fox News network should apologize. There’s absolutely no room for fake news like that,” Michael Bornstein, who spent seven months in Auschwitz as a child, told CNN on Tuesday.
“I’m disgusted, basically,” Bornstein said of Gutfeld’s comments. “My father was an accountant. And he had, basically, negotiating skills. He and my brother were gassed in Auschwitz.”
“My mother knew how to pack ― learned how to pack ― bullets. Bullets that killed Jewish people,” he continued. “There were over six million people killed in the Holocaust, over a million people killed in Auschwitz. And there is no silver lining to killing six million people, or talking about slaves, and the benefits of slaves and learning in what they were doing.”
Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, Bornstein’s daughter, joined her father on CNN. She said they were used to seeing Holocaust conspiracy theories on the internet, but that it was shocking to see a host at a major news network spewing “the same kind of garbage that minimizes the murder of six million people.”
The father and daughter are authors of the book “Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz.”
Bornstein, who was 4 years old when Russian soldiers liberated the camp, was compelled to write the book after seeing footage of himself as a child on a Holocaust denial website.
Gutfeld attracted widespread condemnation, including from the White House and prominent Jewish organizations, over his remarks on “The Five” on Monday.
The subject arose during a discussion about Florida’s new Black history curriculum, which will teach students that enslaved people “developed skills” that could be used for “personal benefit.”
Gutfeld cited “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a bestselling book by Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl. The author explores in the book how people can find meaning, even when faced with suffering and death.
“Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful,” Gutfeld argued. “Utility, utility kept you alive.”
Critics have accused the Fox News host of minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust and misrepresenting the message of Frankl’s book.
There has been an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents in recent years, both in the U.S. and abroad. In a report released in April, the Anti-Defamation League found that the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. had increased by more than 35% in the past year.