On Monday evening, prompted by ABC’s “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg making harshly insensitive comments about the Holocaust in which she insisted, “It’s not about race. It’s not about race. … It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about. … These are two white groups of people,” an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor tweeted a message to “The View” challenging them to have her on the show.
Lucy Lipiner tweeted, “Hi @TheView, I am a Holocaust survivor in NYC. I might be 88-years-old but I have the energy to come on your show and talk to @WhoopiGoldberg and all the girls about the Holocaust. I think we can have a meaningful conversation together and heal wounds. DM me! Love, Lucy.”
Hi @TheView,
I am a Holocaust survivor in NYC. I might be 88-years-old but I have the energy to come on your show and talk to @WhoopiGoldberg and all the girls about the Holocaust.
I think we can have a meaningful conversation together and heal wounds. DM me!
Love,
Lucy pic.twitter.com/B7p9yFYQ3J— Lucy Lipiner (@LucyLipiner) February 1, 2022
Lipiner, the author of “Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust,” was six years old in 1939 and living in Sucha, Poland, when the Nazis invaded and she, her older sister, and their parents were forced to flee. Lipiner’s mother lost her entire family in the Holocaust, and Lipiner herself wound up barefoot and hungry in Siberia and Tajikistan in central Asia before she finally arrived in America.
Goldberg initially apologized for her comments, but later on Monday night, as The Daily Wire reported, doubled down during an interview that aired Monday night on ‘The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, telling him, “I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me. So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.”
“People were very angry, and said no, we are a race. And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize,” Goldberg added. “I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying. And because of it they are saying I am anti-Semitic, and denying the Holocaust, and all these other things that would never occur to me to do.”
Colbert prompted, “Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race? Asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”
“This is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg said, adding, “They — they had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I’m thinking, how can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?”
“So it all really began because I said how will children — how will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?” Goldberg continued. “This wasn’t — I said — this wasn’t racial. This was about white on white. And everybody said no, no, no, it was racial. And so that’s what this all came from.”
“So once again, don’t write me any more, I know how you feel. Okay, I already know, I get it,” Goldberg concluded. “And, uh, I’m going to take your word for it. And never bring it up again.”