From slaughter to revenge: Why the world still does not understand the Holocaust

Фото: Depositphotos

All holidays and memorable dates have their usual ritual. On New Year's Day they put a Christmas tree, bathe in the ice hole at Epiphany, roast turkeys on Thanksgiving Day, fool around on Halloween, March are given flowers on March 8;

About why the World Holocaust Day did not bring the world closer to understanding what was happening, understood for publication Rosbalt journalist Vladimir Bader.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the UN General Assembly 13 years ago. It is celebrated on January 27 - on the anniversary of the liberation by the Red Army in 1945 of Auschwitz - the largest death camp, where the Nazis killed about two million Jews.

This date and this occasion determined the content of this day, its tone and pathos.

scheme

Of all the flurry of events, publications, broadcasts, films and performances on the title theme that spill over every January 27 January, a familiar scheme has emerged with a clear distribution of roles and emotions.

Here are the Jews - the unfortunate wordless victims. They are sorry. Here are the killers, the murderous executioners are the Nazis, and if the total is the Germans. They are to condemn. Here are the liberators - they saved. They are grateful: what would happen to us (the more common option would be with you) would be, if not for them! But we are today, already everything: let's not forget - neither the first, nor the second, nor the third.

And about the first - no reservation, no mistake of the author. And the correct case is dative: not them, but them.

This was best expressed by Zakhar Prilepin, now the first public patriot of Russia, who replaced Prokhanov, now a perfect clown, and surpassed him in that role. In 2012, the then-non-political instructor of the DPR army battalion and part-time TV presenter on several federal Russian channels, a singer, actor and musician, a multiple winner and recipient of government grants, but simply a writer, frantic Zakhar in his “Letter to Comrade Stalin” written supposedly by Jews under the pseudonym “Russian liberal public”, formulated a list of the eternal debts of the ungrateful rescued figuratively and in detail, as in the manifesto. Here is just one quote:

“You saved the life of our family. If it were not for you, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have been strangled in gas chambers, neatly spaced from Brest to Vladivostok, and our question would be finally resolved. You put in seven layers of Russian people to save the life of our seed ... ".

About the Jews, because of them the main speech, will be more later. For now - about the scheme itself.

The meaning of the establishment of the International Day of Remembrance is to know, to remember, to be terrified, so that it never happens again with anyone ... However, you can not remember everything!

Memory is selective: everyone chooses from the past only what helps, elevates, or at least allows one to come to terms with the present, and what hinders, seeks to weed out, discard, obscure.

This is typical of people, but even more so with countries and peoples.

Hence the current pattern of role stereotypes. It is good because it allows you to be in the know, to show participation and complicity, and not to go into details. And in them the devil hides.

The executioners

About the villains ...

In the Holocaust memory scheme, these are the Germans. Without them nothing would have happened. Hitler is their leader. And, perhaps, only they, with their discipline and thoroughness, could come up with and build such a perfect machine of destruction, with such obsession to go towards the set global goal - daring in design and incredibly complex technically.

Their guilt is obvious, generally recognized, including by themselves - at the state, national, mental level. They are the only ones who repent. Even the Austrians, who met with the nation-wide rejoicing of the Reich and organically merged into it, present themselves as victims, call for repentance with anger to reject and readily vote for neo-Nazis.

The Germans have no one to hide behind. But behind them all hid.

And the Lithuanians, who cracked down on their Jews with enthusiasm and fanaticism, did not wait for the German orders (in Kaunas, the occupation authorities even stopped the pogrom that began before their arrival and raged for two days). Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagayte, who published our book two years ago - about the participation of her compatriots in the Holocaust, became an outcast in her native country, among friends and even relatives.

Photo: beider.co.i

And Ukrainians, who canonized the murderers of Jews as national heroes: they honor, give them monuments, name them in honor of their street, put them in textbooks, arrange festivals in memory of them. There a book similar to the one that Vanagaite wrote is unthinkable. Even the Ukrainian Jews, sensitively catching the patriotic spirit, find excuses for the atrocities of their compatriots against their fellow tribesmen.

Iosif Zisels, chairman of the Association of Jewish Organizations of Ukraine, last year published a post where he explained the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the murders of Ukrainian Jews during the war with their revenge for the murder in Paris by Samuel Schwarzbard Simon Petlyura in 1926 year. Pure Jewish ingenuity. For the act of a Jew (by the way, justified by a French court), a half million men, women, children after 15 years are logical and justified.

Photo: beider.co.i

The same in Latvia, where the famous pilot, traveler and writer Herbert Cukurs, who became the executioner of the Riga ghetto during the war and killed for his "exploits" by the agents of the Mossad in Uruguay, is again a national hero.

And in Poland ... There, as in Lithuania and Ukraine, the massacre of Jews began before the arrival of the Germans, and during the German occupation, the local population massively helped the Nazis to carry out a "final decision". The Poles, who saved the Jews, hid it from their neighbors even after the war - they were afraid of reprisals from them. A wave of pogroms and murders of Jews swept through Poland and in the postwar years.

In Hungary, local police collected and dispatched Jews to death camps and exterminated them on the spot. The lists for deportation were made by the municipalities in France, and the French police caught them and kept them in transit camps. In Holland, too, almost no one escaped deportation there. Anne Frank's family was arrested by a Dutch police outfit, albeit with a Gestapo representative.

Without the Germans, nothing would have happened. But without the help of the local population and local authorities, they would have failed.

As it failed, for example, in Denmark, where the authorities sabotaged Gestapo orders, and the local population helped the Jews to flee en masse to neutral Sweden (now they say - not for free, but what does it matter?). And in Bulgaria - an ally of Hitler's Germany, which, by agreement with the Reich, was obliged to give its Jewish population to him for reprisal. But the Orthodox Church and Parliament were opposed. Three times the trains to the Sofia station were driven to send Jews to the death camps, and three times they left empty.

But not only the states occupied by the Nazis and the peoples inhabiting them were involved. He participated in the whole world, including the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition.

Partners

Initially, Hitler had no plans for the total extermination of the Jews - he was still looking at the world community, and the task was too complex. The Jews were going to simply take away property and drive out — to force them to emigrate. But they had nowhere to run. Nobody wanted to take these outcasts.

The compassionate world community gathered in July 1938 at the proposal of the USA and under the auspices of the League of Nations an international conference on the Jewish problem - in France, in the city of Evian-les-Bains. Participated 32 countries. None agreed to host the Jews of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (only those three countries that were under Nazi rule were discussed at the time) —the difficult economic situation, high unemployment, and extra mouths and hands.

The US said that the quota for the entry of refugees this year has already been exhausted. Great Britain, in whose administration Palestine was then, also refused to increase the quota for Jews - 75 thousand by 5 years: the British government did not want to anger the Arabs. Holland agreed to provide transit to other countries, if they are found. But not found. Now, if the German authorities allowed the Jews to bring with them capital and valuables - then somehow ... But the Reich authorities would not allow it - and the question would disappear. The Jews were left to fend for themselves. Subsequently, ships with Jewish refugees were sent back from the shores of the United States and from Palestine. Their passengers were then in the camps.

It was then that, making sure that the whole world didn’t give a damn about the Jews, Hitler realized that no one would help them, but it wouldn’t stop him from getting rid of the hated tribe - and the “final solution to the Jewish question” consists in their physical destruction.

The rest was a matter of technology.

So - not only Hitler, not only Germans and their accomplices. The list of participles is longer ...

Liberators

Jews began to kill immediately with the outbreak of war. Mass executions began after the seizure of the territories of the USSR, as early as August 1941. But soon the natural difficulties of such a simple approach were discovered: very slow, expensive and tiring for the staff. The scale of the task did not match the outdated methods. We needed a new, systematic approach. He was identified by the Nazi bosses at the Wannsee 20 conference in January 1942 of the year. It was the start of the creation of destruction technology at the industrial level.

The world powers — the governments of the United States, Great Britain and the USSR — learned about its scale in December 1942. Did not do anything. Allied strategic aviation has already bombed Germany. Since 1943 th attacks have become regular. It was worth destroying the access roads to the death camps — at least it slowed down the pace of destruction. But they did not fall a single bomb.

Bombing routes carefully bypassed the Nazi death factories. They worked smoothly until the 1945 of the year. At the end of 1944, the efforts of the main logistics of the Holocaust of Adolf Eichmann at Auschwitz reached a peak.

The Soviet command also did not adjust the plans of the offensive in an effort to save the prisoners of the camps. Zakhar Prilepin is lying about the “seven layers of Russian people” that Stalin put on European fields to save the Jewish seed. He, of course, was laying, and in these layers were including the Jews of his army - 200 thousands of 500 who fought in it were killed. But the fate of the Jewish prisoners did not bother him, as did the Russians.

Photo: beider.co.i

When the 27 of January 1945 of the year Soviet troops entered Auschwitz (the most terrible camp - Auschwitz II, Birkenau, took part of Colonel Gregory Yelisavetsky, a Jew who turned to those rescued in Yiddish), about ten percent of the surviving prisoners remained there - the rest of the Germans managed to steal “marches” of death".

This, of course, does not diminish the feeling of gratitude. But on Memorial Day, everything should be remembered.

Casualties

The fact that the Jews meekly went to the slaughter is a common opinion. Once Nikita Khrushchev, then the head of Ukraine, openly expressed it with scorn and explanation, why there is no need to perpetuate the memory of those killed not in battle, but in the shooting pit. Monuments were not erected, but the ruined ones used — for the lack of tile in those difficult post-war times — the sidewalks in Ukrainian towns bridged with Jewish tombstones — inscriptions outside to make it funnier.

Opinion has not changed. The same reproach (but with a sympathetically apologetic tone) I heard quite recently from a Ukrainian historian, a solid archivist, when two years ago I came to the place of the death of my father's family, and saw an old cemetery covered with forests and a firing pit, already elevated above the ground and covered with piles broken bricks (grandmother, aunts, my cousins ​​and sisters were killed in the quarry of a brick factory near Volochisk).

Photo: beider.co.i

Photo: beider.co.i

Were going? We were walking! Like any unarmed in front of a terrible and brutal force, and even in the crowd, where mostly women, old people and children. Like the Ukrainian youth who were forced into forced labor in Germany. Like Soviet prisoners of war - countless at the beginning of the war.

There were about two dozen, at least well-known, uprisings in the Jewish ghettos and several in the camps, among them the only successful - in Sobibor, which was led by a Soviet prisoner of war, Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky. Only recently, the last surviving member of his party, Arkady Vayspapir, died in Kiev; he chopped down two SS men with an ax.

But, basically, they died submissively, and this tormented not less losses. Especially the Israelis.

In the Jewish state, its memorable day of the Holocaust is the Day of the Catastrophe and Heroism of European Jewry, and it is timed to the beginning of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, when the doomed Jews fought for three weeks with the SS-men - German, Ukrainian and Latvian. The difference of memorable days - both in the name and in the occasion - is significant.

For a long time, Israelis were ashamed of the Holocaust. Considered a national disgrace. They were already bold and strong masters of life - in contrast to the downtrodden Jews of exile. What happened to their brothers during the Holocaust (the majority remained relatives in occupied Europe) was also a moral catastrophe, desecration of a dream. Did the Jews kill themselves like cattle? This is an insult to all of us! Holocaust survivors who survived the horrors of ghettos and concentration camps in Israel were treated with contempt and arrogance, called “soap”.

All this continued until the 1960 year, when the Mossad agents tracked down and stole Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, brought him bound like a ram to Israel - and were put before a public court in Jerusalem. Only then, during the interrogation of the chief executioner, witnesses and experts, the Israelis, proud to arrogance, understood what was actually happening with their brothers in Europe, repented and were horrified.

The Avengers

Later it turned out that not only mourned. I interviewed the writer and scientist, Professor Michael Bar-Zohar, who first unearthed this story.

Immediately after the war, or rather at the very end of it, three independent groups of Jewish avengers arose independently of each other.

One consisted of fighters of the Jewish brigade of the British army. It consisted of prominent personalities who then made up the color of the Israeli army. Among them is the future commander of tank forces during the Six Day War, Israel Tal, the creator of the unique tank battle system and the Israeli Merkava tank, one of the first IDF General Staff chiefs Haim Laskov, the future head of military intelligence and the Northern District commander Meir Zorea.

Under the guise of the officers of the British military police, they traveled around occupied Germany, catching SS officers, Nazi functionaries involved in the extermination of Jews, visited them at home at night, led them into the woods - and killed them.

They had detailed lists of Nazi executioners. It is possible that the future president of Israel, while the colonel of the British military intelligence in the British occupation zone Chaim Herzog, helped them.

The second consisted of Jewish partisans operating in Eastern Europe. It was headed by Alex Gatmon. These soaked the Nazis with the cruelty peculiar to the partisans — sometimes they simply choked them.

The worst was the group led by Abba Kovner - a Jewish poet who led the uprising in the Vilnius ghetto, and then the commander of the Jewish partisan detachment.

Photo: beider.co.i

After creating the organization of the avengers after the war, he first focused on the individual destruction of high-ranking Nazis: they died in automobile and industrial accidents, died in hospitals, fell out of the windows. But then Abba was set on fire with the idea of ​​total revenge: for six million Jews six million Germans were to die. Plan: to poison the water supply in Hamburg and Nuremberg.

The poison for them was produced in the only scientific institute in Palestine - now the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. According to rumors, one of the future presidents of the future state of Israel also had to do with this — either Efraim Qatsir, or the first president of the state, Haim Weizman, a professor of chemistry, who was actually a liberal among the founding fathers.

Bags with poison Abba carried to the ship, the next to Germany. Someone issued it. Before the arrest, he managed to throw poison overboard - poor fish. The English military police interrogated him, but they had no information about the poison. They believed that he was going to organize terrorist attacks in the British zone of Germany. Imprisoned in Cairo.

The avengers who remained at large still delivered poison to Germany. But they did not poison the water supply.

“We didn’t care that innocent people would die, women, children - after all, they didn’t spare our women and children either,” one of them said later. “But in Hamburg and Nuremberg there were already many families of American servicemen. They should not have suffered. Only because of this had to be abandoned.

Refused, not really. In the largest prison camp for SS soldiers near Nuremberg, where 36 contained thousands of prisoners, they still smeared the poison with a loaf of bread. The exact number of victims is still unknown - they say several hundred.

Thank God that the global plan failed. Should this tragedy happen - perhaps there would be no Jewish state. The best of their revenge on the Nazis was the creation of Israel.

It's all about the victims. And about the scheme according to which it is customary to recall the Holocaust. And at the same time about why the Israelis have a different memory about him than those who recall the tragedy beyond its borders, even the Jews.

We know that the guarantee of our life and existence of our people is only that we ourselves determine our own destiny and are able to protect ourselves. From here, one can move on to contemporary political realities, and to an explanation of why Israel refuses to whiten its teeth and make concessions at the request of the rest of the world, relying on someone. It was already with us, and it was the Holocaust.

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