The following IS NOT in any way meant to be misconstrued as a “one up” with regards to my friend’s post on the holocaust. Rather, being a lout, it took these words to start a thought process and the following regarding "the Other Holocausts" NOT even remotely mentioned by "the world". Also, this is the 'time' set aside to commemorate the "great famine" in the Ukraine, where millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by the Soviets.
One MUST remember that NOT just Jews were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.
My great uncle, a Cossack in the Elite Guard of Tsar Nicholas II, was an Orthodox Christian, who also reposed in Auschwitz.
What are presented below are portions of articles and books which deal DIRECTLY with the MURDERS of innocent Slavic people. The word “Slavic” is used because NOT ‘just’ Russian, Ukrainian or any other nationality was systematically exterminated by the Soviets under Stalin.
Millions upon millions of people were sent to their deaths in the Soviet Union alone.
Most notably were the untold millions of Russian innocents sent to their deaths after the coup by the Bolsheviks, and then under their eventual “leader” – Stalin.
The Ukrainians, under Khrushchev, gave up millions due to his "created famine” and that does not count the ones sent to their deaths by the earlier Soviets.
Many countries “gave up” many millions of peoples.
(As a directly related topic, one MUST NOT forget the 40,000,000 innocent babies in America which have been butchered by the allowance of different “Herod’s”. This despicable butchery STILL GOES ON in Russia – as this is written.)
Abortion is rampant in Russia. I believe that one in three unborn babies are burchered.
After “searching” just on “Kolyma” (the infamous Russian Death Camp) many, many items came up.
What were most interesting were two articles written by two young people. They are just ordinary individuals, yet their words are extra-ordinary, and most importantly…words which should be (but probably will not be) listened to and absorbed.
One cannot forget the extermination of the expatriated soldiers at Katyn forest, or the present extermination of Orthodox Christians, as we speak, in Serbia and elsewhere.
All this in the name of “what”?
Every bit of this is the evil one’s work – yet...“who” “allows” “it”?
One portion of an article on the genocide in Latvia:
“On a personal perspective... there are few who are unaware of the Holocaust. The Soviet army was generally hailed as "liberators" of the Jewish death camps in Germany—but what is virtually unknown is that Stalin's reign of terror spared no one, blind to race and creed. It was only after Peters read These Names Accuse and began researching more information that the truly horrific scale and indiscriminate nature of Stalin's genocide began to become apparent—along with a near total ignorance of it in the West. And Russia has done nothing to come to grips with or to even acknowledge that past. Siberia was far from a uniquely Latvian experience.
However, it would seem that Stalin did seem to have a particular vendetta for the Latvians—ordering all ethnic Latvians in the Soviet Union shot just for being Latvian. Perhaps Stalin had simply wanted to erase any memory that when insurgents captured Moscow in 1918, it was 10 batallions of Latvian infantry (18,000 men) that guarded the Kremlin, that defeated and later executed the insurgents, and thus—in one of the greatest ironies in history—saved Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution.”
Portion of an article/book on Kolyma:
And fate made everybody equal
Outside the limits of the law
Son of a kulak or Red commander
Son of a priest or commissar . . .
Here classes were all equalized,
All men were brothers, camp mates all,
Branded as traitors every one . . .
Alexander Tvardovsky,
"By Right of Memory"
This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs.
Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration.
Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps.
Even more broadly, ";Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.
Article in the 25 January 2005 Moscow Times:
Seven million died in the 'forgotten' holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor Toronto Sun
Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin's Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives.
Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles.
At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks.
The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as "terrorists" by the U.S. and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers.
Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.
Ukraine was sealed off.
All food supplies and livestock were confiscated.
NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements."
Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union's Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week.
Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold.
Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda.
Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times' Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform."
Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."
The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine.
The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe.
When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began.
Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
Though Stalin murdered three times more people than Hitler, to Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe."
The British-U.S. alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime.
Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe in 1945.
After the war, the left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed.
For the western Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murderers.
For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.
The Jewish people, understandably, saw their Holocaust as a unique event.
It was Israel's raison d'etre. Raising other genocides at that time would, they feared, diminish their own. This was only human nature.
While today, academia, the media and Hollywood rightly keep attention focused on the Jewish Holocaust, they mostly ignore Ukraine.
We still hunt Nazi killers, but not communist killers.
There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.
Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.
We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.
But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria?
Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.
The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.
My deepest apologies for not specifying who the following two individuals are. If one cares to, all they have to do is “search” (google) with the words “Kolyma Death Camp”.
The material presented may “seem” ‘lengthy’, but (1) If just “sites” were presented to search, many would not, and (2) the material is here for as many people as with to may read.
Portions from a book. One is from a survivor of Kolyma:
There was one special characteristic of this land, which made Kolyma exceptional among the many northern regions of Siberia. This particular feature was its rich deposits of gold, or gold placers, as geologists call them. After the discovery of gold and its mining potential, the land became subject to extensive exploitation in which the hands of political prisoners became the basic tools in the state-run operation.
Millions of so called "enemies of the people" perished in the gold mines of the cold North when used as slave labor. There was a dual purpose to this system; the exploitation of human resources and the simultaneous destruction of people opposed to the system. Nature and Stalin made Kolyma the land of gold and death.
Long before this once-ignored corner of Siberia gained its questionable prominence as the "White Crematorium" and "The Land of White Death";
Kolyma - a wonderful planet,
Twelve months of winter and the rest
One long summer.
TO: Whom it may concern:
I am one of the millions of slave laborers who were part of Kolyma's tragic past, and who, like so many nameless others, were slated to become historical dust and pass into oblivion in the Great Soviet Plan.
I am one of those who experienced Stalin's cruel terror, through painful incarceration in Kolyma's gold mine and the hard labor camp at Magadan, in the severe arctic climate of Siberia.
As one of the fortunate survivors of this insane era of Stalinism, Communism, and dehumanizing slave labor, I feel obligated to write about those who suffered and perished, and to preserve the truth of these events for future generations.
Those few of us who survived must ensure that posterity holds these crimes as a warning against ambitious and cruel rulers who have neither understanding nor compassion for their fellow human beings.
Stanislaw J. Kowalski
Two letters written by young people:
Dear Michał,
You asked what interests me most and what I would like to change. The answer is: people's mentality. I would like people to learn how to solve conflicts without spilling blood, so that the color of their skin, their religious faith, or political convictions stop being a problem and a pretext for human annihilation.
Human beings, the most highly developed species living on our planet, follow the "law of the jungle." Ironic, isn't it? Since prehistoric times, people have been trying to dominate others. In the twentieth century, we have seen individuals who wanted to master the world in order to elevate their own race. Thus Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany, set out to conquer Europe in the name of the superiority of the Nordic race. He soon found thousands of people willing to help him destroy the world. People from all over Europe died en masse, as a result of slave labor, starvation, inhuman living conditions, beatings, torture, and executions in the concentration camps that the Nazis built.
Nazism struck full force at children and young people, who have been the greatest asset of every society since the dawn of humanity. Some 2,226,000 children were murdered in Poland. The figure speaks for itself. It includes the almost total destruction of Jewish and Roma young people.
Children regarded as racially inferior and unsuitable for germanization were spent to special camps and death camps. The crime against the children was committed in the largest death camps in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bełzec. Minors were also imprisoned and murdered in such prisons as Pawiak, Montelupich, Rotunda Zamojska, Lublin Castle, and the children's prison in Łódź. The perpetrators applied the same savage means of extermination against children as against adults. Children were sent to the gas chambers and crematoria.
However, no camp matched the dimensions or the notoriety of Auschwitz. With an initial capacity of 30,000 prisoners, that camp was continually expanded.
Let me give you a brief description of what happened in that factory of death. The countless victims who died quickly were the lucky ones. Those who were spared the gas chambers experienced such dreadful suffering and abasement that the details can only be imagined with difficulty: starvation, cannibalism, the humiliation of the daily roll call, pseudo-medical experiments -- sterilization, castration, deliberate injection with the viruses that caused different diseases, the mockery of religious practices, executions staged like theatrical productions, and sexual perversion....
On January 27, 1945, the day when the Red Army liberated the camp, they found only 7,500 prisoners still alive, including 90 pairs of identical twins. The Auschwitz camp had been designed by the best architects as an industrial recycling center. Commandant Hoess's office contained a chart showing the "end product" of the various "production departments."
Aside from the synthetic gasoline produced in the camp chemical plants, Auschwitz supplied gold to the banks of the Third Reich, as well as tons of fertilizer produced from ground bones, and soap, haircloth, lenses "recovered" from eyeglasses, and scrap metal from prostheses and artificial limbs.
The Nazis had plans to annihilate or subjugate other peoples, and to occupy the whole territory of Europe. According to the theoreticians of National Socialism, the conquest of "lebensraum" was to permit the unfettered growth of the German people. Any attempts at resistance were ruthlessly eliminated. The aim was the practical realization of Hitler's principle that "the only peoples that can be pushed into the ranks of the slaves are those whose ruling strata have been eliminated."
According to their plans, the land annexed by the Third Reich was supposed to be wholly germanized within ten years and colonized by Germans, including settlers from the Baltic countries and the eastern Polish lands that had been occupied by the Soviet Union. When they conquered new territory, the Nazis destroyed and plundered monuments, state property, and the national cultural heritage.
An integral part of the extermination policy was the suppression of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The Nazis also carried out the consistent repression of Protestantism.
Soviet Russia also had a policy of genocide.
The plan to eliminate Poland from the map of Europe was a joint German-Soviet plan.
The Soviet NKVD exceeded the Gestapo in cruelty. The Soviets spent a longer time "experimenting" in the field of state terrorism. Like the Germans, they developed a system for classifying people, and this served as the key to their "purge" operations.
In many ways, Stalinist terror was worse than Nazi terror. After interrogation by the NKVD, innocent people were sentenced to death or deportation into the depths of Russia, to hard labor, banishment, or the camps. People were deported in overcrowded cattle cars. In the middle of winter, they were carried to destinations thousands of kilometers away.
There were cases in which the victims went mad, froze, starved to death, or committed infanticide and even cannibalism during these journeys. Those who survived the trains faced further journeys to the farthest reaches of the Soviet empire below the decks of river boats or in trucks. Many froze to death before arriving at their destinations. Almost half of the 1,500,000 Poles deported in earlier years died before the proclamation of an amnesty in 1941. The victims included 100,000 Polish Jews. The exact figures will never be known.
Perhaps the statistics are less important than the fate that some people prepared for others. Yet I think that the numbers can convey the enormous tragedy of the situation.
I do not like the word "approximately."
Imagine, Michał, that this "approximately" could include your grandparents, your relatives and friends, who wanted to live and love. There is much eloquent eyewitness testimony to the suffering of those who died and those who survived this nightmare.
The scars of wartime injury and violence persist in people to this day. It may seem that no one would ever again want to carry out ethnic cleansing after the period of Nazism and Stalinism, that the nightmare of the death camps was the ultimate lesson and that it would not be in vain. Reality, however, has turned out differently. The wars that broke out in the Balkans are highly reminiscent of that epoch. It turns out that communism and nationalism are still alive. The extreme varieties of nationalism, such as fascism, racism, and chauvinism, have not passed, but rather have only been interwoven with patriotic rhetoric.
You have certainly been following the course of the war in Yugoslavia and asking yourself what has happened to human dignity, and why there are laws, declarations, and international conventions, if no one wants to respect them. I know that you are more interested in ecology than politics, but you can hardly remain indifferent to recent events in the Balkans. We Poles are not in any imminent danger -- but the Yugoslavians thought the same thing not long ago.
How do young people compare with the adults who are infected with the virus of hatred and the demons of aggression? I think that there are similarities -- who else teaches the young? Today's youth is highly differentiated, with different hierarchies of values. It is hard to talk about young people in general; no such judgment can be factual. The older generation looks down on "today's youth," seeing young people as worse, less cultured, poorly educated.
The truth is not so straightforward. Young people are not worse. They may indeed differ from their parents' generation, but this does not make them worse. One of the most commonly held opinions about young people states that each generation is worse than the one before. Young people today have a greater voice in family decisions. They can decide how they want to live their own lives. They have more freedom in their social lives, and this is accepted by their parents.
There are cases in which overworked parents have less time for their children, who in such cases learn from their peers in schools, dormitories, or youth centers. The children who grow up in "artificial environments" are the children of mass culture, educated by television and the internet. Because of technological developments, the differences between generations are increasing faster than in the past. The changes in the political system, culture, and civilization can make young people feel lost. They abuse alcohol and narcotics with increasing frequency. They begin having sex at an earlier age, and they treat sex in an instrumental way. I can see such negative phenomena around me. Tell me, Michał, if you have observed the same thing in your school or neighborhood.
Education should start in the family. Unfortunately, there are many pathological families where the parents drink or commit crimes. The children in such families are the witnesses or even the victims of assault and rape. Aggression is grafted into them before they even leave home, and violence leads to more violence. Children from families like that start school with a burden of bad experiences. Their behavior infects their peers at school or on the streets, and the circle of evil begins to spread.
People from homes full of bad habits are bitter and filled with hatred and mistrust of the world around them. They need a good deal of warmth and devotion from others before they are able to straighten out their twisted minds. Self-respect is an important element in helping this sort of young people.
It is worth emphasizing that those who behave aggressively towards others are weaker than their victims. The rebellion against the real world is caused by fear or the lack of courage to meet the standards set by parents, teachers, or bosses. Then we look for others like us, because we are afraid to be alone. This is how criminal gangs and subcultures form.
Those who do not express a wish to cooperate cannot be helped. The way to help such young people is to offer them ways of developing their interests: sports clubs, artistic or theatre groups, computer sessions, games, or helping those in need, such as the handicapped or elderly. This can be attractive and yield positive results, since they quickly come to feel needed or even irreplaceable. The promotion of violence should be eliminated from the mass media. Television often shows films that are lessons on how to commit crimes and escape legal responsibility. Parents, schools, and educational institutions should point out to children and young people that the purpose of such films is to show that evil is always punished.
We have learned to accept foreign models without asking what ends they serve. Many things are permitted, but it is not permissible to break the law or to harm others.
Young people should cooperate with their peers from other countries. They should show the world that they can stand up to violence together.
What do you think about the causes and results of aggression? Perhaps you know a reasonable solution. We all need one. I'm waiting for your answer.
Agata
Dear Sara,
I'm sorry it took me so long to answer your letter but, to tell the truth, I really did not know how to answer it. I kept asking myself how the things that happened in Auschwitz were possible.
Perhaps I was unable to answer because I was raised to be "sweet" and to have an unwavering faith in human goodness. Precisely for that reason, not admitting the thought that people can act in such a cruel way, I did not need to ask questions. And so you asked them.
A lot has happened since you were last here, and I think I have matured enough to be able to make certain judgments.
You mentioned other concentration camps and labor camps. You mentioned Katyn, Kolyma, and Treblinka. You asked where they came from.
Unfortunately, they were invented by people in whom certain character traits developed in a particular way. Traits such as hatred of other people, contempt, traits causing behavior that insults human dignity, that scorns individualism, that reduces people to the level of an impersonal crowd, a mass of people who are nothing more than statistics in an account book.
When we arrive at Auschwitz on an excursion, as we come across a hamburger stand on our right and a group of tourists setting up folding chairs and getting ready to have a picnic on our left, we think "Nothing similar can ever be a threat to us and such things will never happen. It was all a long time ago." We would gladly forget that the gas chambers, crematoria and barbed wire ever existed, or that anyone was in of the death factory. Some people are even quite happy about the fact that the public does not realize that labor camps, for example, existed within Soviet Russia.
Do you know that the Universal Encyclopedia in my country, both in the edition of 1973 and that of 1983, contains not a word of what the Gulag was, or whether any such camps ever existed in Kołyma? In other words, the four million prisoners who stayed were the Kołyma labor camps, and who died there between 1937 and 1953, never existed!
Do we really have the right to think that such recent history cannot repeat itself? I am afraid that we do not have such certainty, because it is already happening now.
Why are we unable to remain alert? Why can one doctrine or one man control so many minds and manipulate them so perfectly?
Contemporary society can easily produce tyrants of the dimensions of a Hitler or a Stalin. I hear normal young people like you and me saying that aggression is fashionable and it doesn't really matter whom it is directed at. It's "at random," like playing the lottery. This looks like an everyday scene from Auschwitz, a scene in which one of the bored SS- men, or some capo, eliminates somebody "at random" in the same way.
Shouldn't we be on our guard when we hear such words? I think we should look around our closest surroundings and start from scratch. We should begin with our home, with the demands and expectations that others have towards us, and ours in relation to other people. I know, as well as you do, that one day when I become a mother it is I who will shape this being whom I bring into the world.
As a seed will never take root in bad soil, so good will never grow from hatred. The good soil has to be prepared for a young, still unformed person, so that good can grow.
In our contemporary world, unfortunately, the shaping is rarely done by the mother or father. This role is automatically taken other by whatever the child or young person most often has contact with during the day. So it is not the parents, but the immediate surroundings-school, or the media: the press, TV and radio. Whoever is in control and exercises direct influence on the various messages and information broadcast by the media therefore has unlimited, total power over society. He is able to manipulate millions of people. The despots of the twentieth century knew how to manipulate the masses through propaganda. They won the support of whole societies for aggression, intolerance, and violence.
What led millions of people to accept this?
Most of all, people are afraid of what is different. They fear some sort of threat. That is why they are easily overcome by an obsession about their own superiority, and why they desire to eliminate the element that could become a threat to them. That's the way it has been for centuries, beginning with great wars among nations, through individual crimes such as regicide, and ending with mass murder at places like Auschwitz and Kołyma. Kosovo also has a chance of joining the pantheon of places associated with genocide.
Kosovo proves that history has not taught us anything. It means that we are still too naďve to oppose evil. If the situation from fifty years ago can repeat itself in the Balkans, then society must be rotten on the inside.
Parents who want to have a normal standard of living today are not able to devote enough time to their children. Despite the best of intentions, they are blind to the changes taking place in the minds of their growing children. Yet the media have a great influence on growing children. Personality models and authorities are taken from films and television series.
This all leads to conditions favorable to the rise of hatred. Then comes the need to give vent to it in the form of aggression and violence. Sometimes completely without any reason, for fun. Sometimes to create a new order in which the young will have power and authority that they could never obtain without using force.
How can we prevent this? First of all, we must observe children’s behavior, not neglect it, and devote a lot of time and attention to it. We should inculcate certain values, which will form the basis of future behavior. We should control the child's contact with media, so that the television set does not become the point around which everything else revolves.
We must learn the art of compromise. We must be open to different solutions and not lock ourselves into narrow ideologies. We must learn how to talk to each other.
Yours truly,
Katarzyna
Katyn - one of the sites in western Russia where some 15,000 Polish officers, held as prisoners of war since 1939, were executed by the Soviets in 1940.
Treblinka - one of the German "Operation Reinhard" death camps, situated at an isolated locality in occupied Poland, where 800,000 or more Jewish victims, mostly from Poland, were murdered during the Second World War.
These, and any other forms of genocide should NEVER be forgotten.
John