‘Nobel Prize in stupidity’: Holocaust survivor wants AOC out of Congress

Holocaust survivor Ed Mosberg (pictured) wants AOC removed from Congress.Getty

Original By Doree Lewak

There are few remaining survivors of concentration camps. Ed Mosberg is one of them.

And the 93-year-old from Morris Plains, NJ, has no time for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statements last week, when she called the southern border’s migrant detention centers “concentration camps.”

“She should be removed from Congress. She’s spreading anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity,” Mosberg told The Post. “The people on the border aren’t forced to be there — they go there on their own will. If someone doesn’t know the difference, either they’re playing stupid or they just don’t care.”

On June 18, the Bronx/Queens politician posted a video on Instagram in which she said: “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are — they are concentration camps.”

Mosberg, who lost his entire family during the Holocaust and himself survived both the Plaszów and Mauthausen camps, said: “Her statement is evil. It hurts a lot of people. At the concentration camp, we were not free. We were forced there by the Germans who executed and murdered people — there’s no way you can compare.”

On June 21, the Holocaust-education group From the Depths, of which Mosberg is the president, extended an invitation to AOC via Facebook, encouraging her to tour “German Nazi concentration camps” with Mosberg. He said he hoped to take her to the museum and memorial site at Auschwitz, where his mother was murdered.

But when other members of Congress encouraged the freshman representative to take Mosberg up on the offer, AOC publicly declined. She tweeted to Iowa Rep. Steve King:

The last time you went on this trip it was reported that you also met w/ fringe Austrian neo-Nazi groups to talk shop.

So I’m going to have to decline your invite. But thank you for revealing to all how transparently the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain. https://t.co/TQkaPEESoD
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 23, 2019

Following a 2018 trip with From the Depths, King reportedly met with a group founded by a former Nazi SS officer.

Mosberg said he was very disappointed by AOC’s rejection.

“She should be taught a lesson,” he said. “If you’re not there, you will never know what happened. She doesn’t want to learn — she’s looking for excuses. I would like to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in stupidity.”

AOC’s rep told The Post, “She made a distinction between a death camp and concentration camp. She’s been pretty outspoken about the issue.”

If she accepts his offer, the nonagenarian said he would personally give her a tour of camps.

“I can show her where they killed my mother, my grandparents and cousins so she understands this,” he said. “I will bring her to the place where they give my wife’s mother [benzine] injections to the heart and put her on the fire.”

Mosberg, who was born in Krakow, Poland, witnessed unspeakable horror during his teenage years.

Mosberg still wears a uniform from the concentration camp he was in so people remember the atrocities of the Holocaust.Tamara Beckwith

“I saw people being hung, being beaten to death, [attacked] by dogs. I was laying on the ground, [the Nazi guards] were trying to kill me.”

A badly beaten Mosberg had nearly lost the will to live by the time he was liberated by American troops. “I didn’t want to leave,” he recalled. “I didn’t know where to go.” He spent months in an Italian hospital before immigrating to the US with his wife, also a survivor, in 1951. They settled in Harlem, and he eventually became a real estate developer. He still wears a camp prisoner’s uniform during lectures “so people remember,” Mosberg said.

The father of three and grandfather of six has been back to the camps dozens of times and helped lead educational tours, including last year with Republican and Democratic members of Congress at Auschwitz.

From the Depths has taken 20 members of Congress, including New York’s Carolyn Maloney, on its educational tours.

“They were very shaken and upset learning about the torture, torment and murder,” he said. “They think every congressman should go to see it. She [AOC] doesn’t want to go. Unless you go into that dark place you can’t understand it.

“Eventually you will see she will lose all the Jewish vote in New York.”