Holocaust distortion rarely announces itself with the bluntness of denial; more often it appears in the form of casual statements, recycled clichés, and phrases so familiar that their violence becomes almost invisible.

In Central Europe — especially in Hungary — one particular cluster of expressions has become disturbingly common, circulating in clinics, fitness programs, diet advice, and increasingly in the algorithmic churn of TikTok: from the assertion that “there were no fat people in Auschwitz” to the supposed pearl of wisdom that “in Auschwitz you’d lose weight,” and all the variants that treat genocide as a shorthand for bodily discipline. The wording shifts, but the conceptual structure remains stable: the Holocaust becomes a metaphor for weight loss, a rhetorical device for shaming, motivating, or moralizing, detached from historical reality and stripped of ethical boundaries.

Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are not the same, even if they often travel together. Denial rejects the basic facts of the genocide, claiming that the gas chambers did not exist or that the murder of Europe’s Jews is a “myth.” Distortion, by contrast, accepts the existence of the Holocaust but rearranges its meaning: it excuses or minimizes the crimes, shifts blame, inflates national heroism, or treats the machinery of persecution as a metaphor, a joke, or a tool for other agendas. The Auschwitz‑diet trope belongs squarely to this second category. It does not deny that the camps existed; instead it misuses them, turning genocide into a shorthand for discipline, weight loss, or moral toughness. In terms of impact, distortion can be more pervasive than outright denial, precisely because it disguises itself as common sense, humor, or professional advice rather than explicit ideology.

Holocaust distortion has many faces, and its forms often reflect the size of the local Jewish community, the country’s wartime history, and the current political climate; each context produces its own couleur locale. In Hungary, survey data from the Claims Conference and its partners suggest a striking combination of high awareness and deep distortion. Around 98% of Hungarian adults have heard of the Holocaust, one of the highest awareness rates in Europe, yet 55% do not know that six million Jews were murdered, and 27% believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed. Nearly half of Hungarian adults (47%) say that Holocaust distortion is common in their country, a higher share than in Austria (34%) or Poland (27%). About 38% report encountering Holocaust denial or distortion on social media.

In other words, almost everyone here has “heard of” the Holocaust, but a very large share misunderstand its scale and encounter its minimization as part of everyday life, both offline and online.

The cases that reach the media — the 2021 Hungarian television incident, the dismissal of a senior physician in Lower Austria in December 2025, the Bulgarian episode last year — are only the visible surface of a much larger phenomenon. Beneath them lies a vast, unreported layer of one‑to‑one interactions in which medical staff invoke Auschwitz in consultations, often with Jewish patients who are placed in the impossible position of having to absorb the comment, challenge it, or risk further intimidation.

The vulnerability in these encounters is heightened by the circumstances in which they occur. These comments are often made in examination rooms, during consultations, at moments when patients may be undressed, physically exposed, and dependent on the clinician’s goodwill. In that setting, the power imbalance is almost absolute: the patient is not only outnumbered but literally without cover. Challenging the remark risks embarrassment, retaliation, or withdrawal of care; staying silent means absorbing the violence of the comparison into one’s own body. The cruelty of the metaphor lies not only in what is said, but in the fact that it is said at precisely the moment when the listener is least able to defend themselves.

These encounters rarely become public, not because they are rare, but because they are routine. They form the everyday texture of a distortion that thrives precisely because it is delivered in private rooms, in professional settings, and in tones of authority.

The risks are not distributed evenly across audiences. For Jewish patients, for Holocaust survivors, and for their descendants, the casual invocation of Auschwitz in a clinical setting can be acutely retraumatizing, forcing family memories of persecution and hunger into the space where they seek safety and care. What might register to a non‑Jewish listener as an “unfortunate joke” lands, for those with direct or inherited trauma, as a repetition of the very dehumanization their families endured. This is not an isolated problem of individual insensitivity; it intersects with a longer history of antisemitism in medicine and in public discourse, where Jewish suffering has been minimized, instrumentalized, or treated as material for moral lessons aimed at others. To tolerate such language in clinical environments is to signal that this history, and the people who carry it, are still negotiable.

What makes this trope particularly insidious is that it is wrong on every level, beginning with the most literal one. Extreme calorie deprivation combined with forced labour is not a model of weight loss; it is a medical emergency. No responsible clinician would recommend starvation-level intake, unsupervised exertion, or the physiological collapse that follows. To present the conditions of a concentration camp as evidence of “effective weight loss” is not only grotesque but medically incompetent, a collapse of professional standards that should be unthinkable in any healthcare setting. Genocide is not a clinical category, and it has no place in medical reasoning.

The historical distortion is equally stark. The idea that “everyone lost weight in Auschwitz” ignores the central fact of the camp system: most deportees were murdered upon arrival. Those deemed “unfit for labour” — the elderly, the ill, the disabled, and anyone whose body appeared unsuitable for forced work — were selected for immediate killing. Starvation was not a universal experience; it was a tool of annihilation applied to those temporarily spared. To use this as a metaphor for dieting collapses categories that should never touch, reducing the machinery of genocide to a cautionary tale about personal discipline.

Alongside its historical and medical distortions, this rhetoric also reinforces stigma against people living with overweight or obesity, ignores the multifactorial nature of weight, and turns a complex medical and social issue into an occasion for blaming those whose bodies do not conform. At its most brutal, it carries the implication that larger bodies belong not in a clinic, but in Auschwitz.

Yet the ethical dimension may be the most corrosive. When genocide becomes a metaphor, it ceases to be a historical event and becomes instead a moral intensifier, a linguistic shortcut for severity, extremity, or consequence. This linguistic habit does not arise in isolation. It belongs to a wider erosion of precision in which terms once tied to the machinery of persecution — “Nazi,” “Gestapo,” “Hitler,” “Auschwitz” — are pulled out of their historical context and repurposed as emphatic shorthand for anything perceived as harsh, restrictive, or merely inconvenient. The scale of genocide is miniaturized; the scale of the present is inflated. When words that once described a system of organized murder are used to dramatize a traffic fine, a bureaucratic delay, or a political disagreement, they cease to function as historical markers and become free‑floating intensifiers. What disappears in this exchange is not only accuracy but the boundary that keeps atrocity from becoming a figure of speech. The result is a flattening of meaning in which the Holocaust becomes available for casual comparison, moralizing, even humor.

Social media accelerates this process. TikTok, with its preference for engagement-optimized virality detached from context, turns Holocaust references into content, detaching them from history and reattaching them to trends, challenges, and motivational rhetoric. Young audiences encounter genocide first through memes, not through education. Distortion spreads faster than correction, and the algorithm rewards repetition over accuracy.

The cluster of phrases — “there were no fat people in Auschwitz,” “in Auschwitz you’d lose weight,” and their many variants — is therefore not a harmless set of expressions but a conceptual framework that blends medical misinformation, historical falsehood, and ethical erosion. It thrives because it feels familiar, because it has been repeated so often that it sounds self‑evident, because it is delivered by professionals whose authority shields the distortion from scrutiny. But familiarity does not make it acceptable. When genocide becomes a metaphor for dieting, something has gone profoundly wrong in our cultural relationship to the past, and naming this distortion — clearly, publicly, and without euphemism — is the first step toward restoring the boundary between history and rhetoric.

What should replace this trope is not another extreme image, but precise language about health, risk, and care, without metaphors that borrow their force from other people’s suffering. Medical professionals have more than enough tools without reaching for Auschwitz as a shortcut. The ethical line is simple, even if practice is not: some historical events are not raw material for rhetoric. They mark a boundary that professionals, above all, should refuse to cross. If we are serious about both historical memory and patient dignity, then the first step is to say plainly that genocide is not a figure of speech, and that it has no legitimate place in the vocabulary of care.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)