Today we focused on two significant genocides – The Holocaust and the Ukrainian Famine:
The Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime, led by Adolf Hitler, and their collaborators as a central act of state during World War II. Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the Roma (Gypsies); Soviets, particularly prisoners of war; Communists; ethnic Poles; other Slavic people; the disabled; gay men; as well as political and religious dissidents. All totaled, approximately 11 million lives were lost. Some scholars, such as Donald Niewyk, include Soviet civilian deaths, producing a death toll of 17 million or more.
The numbers are what get to me. They are uncomprehendable to me. Each number a life. In each of the genocides we have studied, the sheer magnitude of death is incredible.
Artists have been struggling with ways to express the numbers. Here are a few:
http://www.sixmillion.org/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/6millionpeople/
http://www.peoriaholocaustmemorial.org/news.html
The genocide was perpetrated in two phases. The genocide evolved and escalated over time due to the lack of world response to the atrocities.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Here is a link to a chronology of Holocaust:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html
Concentration and Death Camps
Dachau was the first concentration camp established in Nazi Germany - the camp was opened on March 22, 1933. The camp's first inmates were primarily political prisoners, Social Democrats, Communists, trade unionists, habitual criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, beggars, vagrants, hawkers.
In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns.
The Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing with the institution of death camps; Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek. Following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, January 20, 1942, the "Final Solution" was an official policy and a major obsession of the Nazi regime. It was at that point that death camps were constructed for the express purpose of systematic, large-scale murder by gas (Zyklon-B pellets) with body disposal through cremation.
Easily the most notorious of all the killing centers, Auschwitz-Birkenau had a dual function: a concentration camp where inmates were used as forced labor and an extermination center. The Auschwitz complex was divided in three major camps: Auschwitz I main camp; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, established on October 8th, 1941 as a extermination camp; Auschwitz III or Monowitz, established on May 31th, 1942 as a work camp.
Historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Roma, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over ten thousand prisoners of other nationalities. The overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas chambers. The majority of the Jewish deportees died in the gas chambers immediately after arrival. During peak operation from March 1942 until November 1944, more than 20.000 people could be murdered and their bodies burned in a single day. In fact, the single day highest output was 24,000.
Again, the numbers, the sheer magnitude of death is incredible, unconscionable, and unforgettable.
This is a complex subject greater than this blog entry can fully explore or give honor so I leave the subject with this poem, shared with me by Jeff Huberman and written by his father, Max Huberman, who passed away May 10, 2008.
NATURALLY THE JEWS
by Max Huberman
. . . Hitler and Goering had ordered
the bombardment of Warsaw and
intellectuals, nobility, clergy and,
naturally the Jews’.”
Three thousand soldiers
Wait in a Brooklyn depot;
Home now
From the charred bones of Belsen
And smoking logs in Leipzig,
Home now
From the choking stench of Dachau
And busy gas vans of Buchenwald,
Home now
From Penig and from Hadamar
And mad skeletons in Nordhausen
A great V sign
Glows in a Brooklyn harbor,
And words:
“WELL DONE” and “WELCOME HOME”
Stare back at tired, happy faces,
Faces older,
Faces of men who are now home –
Home now from a clash with fascism.
The charred and twisted bones
Have long been deeply buried,
And now
Fields of big, bright cabbage shine,
Fondly nourished by a new
Strange manure.
The stench has long been gone,
Replaced by clean, fresh winds,
And now,
A hausfrau’s smile lights a face
Well scrubbed with a new
Strange soap.
The many mad, weird skeletons
Have long since ceased to dance,
And now
A pretty maedchen proudly swings
A purse of smooth texture with
Strange tattoos . . .
Boots of many victors march
Through streets cleared of rubble;
March past
A warehouse clean and bulging
With many bloodstained shoes,
Correctly paired;
Neatly sorted down to the size
Of an Aryan child aged one
Three thousand soldiers
Would like to erase forever
All memories
Of hate, pain, death, smells,
Sights of mind itself rejects –
But memories
Persist and grow and live again
Each time the ranting despots
Shout hate –
Hate for a black-skinned artist
Singing the songs of a free land,
And also
Hate for an earnest cleric
Daring to worship a God of Truth,
And also
Hate for the weary seeking the house
Their sweat and blood alone have built.
And always
Where hate is called on the thinkers,
And hate is called on the toilers,
And always
Where hate is preached to common men
Who sing of peace and brotherhood
The hate makers
Know all the clever methods;
The ancient, easy scapegoat –
Naturally, the Jews.
Copyright © 1946, Max Huberman. All rights reserved
Afternoon - The Ukrainian Famine
In the afternoon we focused on the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 also know as the Holodomor.
In 1932-33 millions of Ukrainians died in the largest Famine of the 20th century. This Famine was not caused by a natural calamity such as drought or epidemic or pestilence. It was not the result of devastation or privation caused by a cataclysmic event such as war.
The Famine in Ukraine was engineered, orchestrated and directed from the Kremlin. It was implemented by Stalin and his comrades in order to complete Ukraine's subjugation to Moscow.
Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR: dekulakisation, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families; and collectivization - the effective abolition of private property in land and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in 'collective' farms under Party control.
Dekulakization was the attempt to eliminate kulaks as a class. “Kulak” is a derogatory term initially used by the Soviets to identify so-called “capitalist peasants.” These peasants were thought to have been a threat to the Soviet State and the process of converting the peasantry into collective farm workers. They owned property and land, and may have sold goods or services in order to increase their wealth.
When Stalin initiated the “dekulakization” of the peasants, the kulaks’ land was taken from them, their personal property seized, and families split up as their heads were killed or deported to do forced labor in “special settlements” located in unpopulated areas of Siberia and Soviet Central Asia
The 'terror-famine' that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization, which set impossibly high quotas, removed every other source of food, and prevented outside help - even from other areas of the USSR - from reaching the starving millions. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself.
The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million.
The Soviet regime dumped 1.7 million tons of grain on the Western markets at the height of the Famine. It exported nearly a quarter of a ton of grain for every Ukrainian who starved to death.
Victor Kravchenko was a Soviet official who escaped from the USSR Embassy in the United States in 1944. He described his life in the book I Chose Freedom. In 1933 he was one of the Communist agents assigned to safeguard the new harvest, the "Harvest in Hell" as he calls it:
"Although not a word about the tragedy appeared in the newspapers, the famine that raged ... was a matter of common knowledge.
What I saw that morning ... was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back ... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror.The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone (weak from hunger), their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless."
Kravchenko was shocked to discover a butter plant was wrapping its products in paper titled in English USSR Butter Export.
"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people had forgotten how to sing. I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of fat foreigners enjoying our butter ..."
Source: http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/gregorovich/
Evening
In the evening, I was happy to lead a session on Drama about Genocide. We focused on Kitty Felde’s play A Patch Of Earth, a tale of atrocity and remorse told by the Bosnian Serb Drazen Erdemovic.
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