HISTORY

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OPINION

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by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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The Holocaust was a unique phenomenon. But its perception is double-faceted, to some degree, in the eyes of some Jews and non-Jews alike, hence my use of the term “split image” to describe the phenomenon.

In July 2010, I was in Paris with David Silberman, Latvian author of И Ты Это Видел, a book of testimony and accounts by Jews mainly from Latvia, originally written in Russian and which we together worked on getting published in French. We met Serge Klarsfeld, the well-known French historian and Holocaust authority in France, also a Nazi-hunter. He succeeded in bringing Klaus Barbie, among others, to trial.

I had noticed he held a copy of a book he had just purchased: The Black Book by Ehrenburg and Grossman. So, I surmised that he wanted to learn about the Holocaust in the Soviet republics. I understood quite well his dilemma because, although I had begun to learn about the Holocaust at the beginning of the 1970s, to me, until September 2009, my only iconic representation of the Holocaust was situated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I had already visited twice in 1982 and 2006, its symbols having been the gas chambers and the crematoria.

I had discussed it with Belgian survivors of Birkenau during my first visit to that awful hell site in 1982. I knew the classic works of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Wiesław Kielar. I had also read the testimony of Olga Lengyel, Miklós Nyisli, also the posthumous testimony of Sonderkommando prisoner Zalmen Gradowski. I knew the work of Hermann Langbein on Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had even had read Rudolf Hoess’s sickening book. As for what had happened in the Soviet republics, the only book I had ever read was Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar.

In 2009, by chance, thanks to a city trip to Riga I discovered what had happened to the Jews of Latvia during a visit to the Jewish Museum, having also bought Silberman’s important book of testimony.

In his pioneering work on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Yitzhak Arad best summarized the difference in treatment and killings of the Jews:

In the occupied Soviet territories, the methods used in carrying out the robbery, as well as the mass murder, differed from those used in other occupied European countries (…) The murder of Jews was carried out in the vicinity of their homes, rather than in distant extermination camps.

Let us be honest: the fate of the Jews from the Western European countries as well as those from Poland murdered in the death factories or ghettos established in that country has given birth to an abundant literature, both from historians and survivors, that, after the first decades of neglect and ignorance, has molded our way of seeing and thinking about the Holocaust as a whole. Compare the difference in publicity given to Eichmann’s trial in Israel (1961) and the trial of the Einsatzgruppen in Germany (1947-1948). Of course, the film industry came to the aid of the people in the West.

During my own studies, between 1957 and 1965, not once had there been any mention of the Holocaust at my different schools. The 1978 NBC mini-series Holocaust provoked a discovery or in some cases revival of interest in the fate of European Jewry. So too, later on, with the appearance of Sophie’s Choice in 1982 and the absolute highest in terms of audiences, Schindler’s List in 1993. Nowadays, unfortunately, there has also been a spate of films trivializing the abominable death factory that Auschwitz-Birkenau had been. These include The Boy in the Striped Pajamas based on John Boyne’s best seller, and The Zone of Interest based on Martin Amis’s book. But, as a film buff, I never saw a single film depicting or having as its main theme the fate of the Jews in the Soviet Union, with the exception of the film on the Bielski Brothers in western Belarus.

Important works by historians or survivors about what happened in the ghettos, the work camps, and on the killing fields in the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, had not succeeded in traversing the Iron Curtain. Who would have ordained, from a historical point of view, that the works of Latvian Jewish survivors Elmar Rivosh, Bernhard Press, Frieda Michelson, and David Silberman on the Holocaust, or Max Kaufmann’s collection Churbn Lettland (The Holocaust in Latvia) should not have attained a wider world audience?

Or, for Lithuania, would the works of Rachel Margolis, Yitzhak Rudashevski, Avraham Tory, Dov Levin, Yitzhak Arad, have been less interesting for Western intellectuals, history students concerned about the fate of the Jews in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the war? Would any of them have been in at least a historical league with Wiesel and Primo Levy? Is Ponary Diary by Kazimierz Sakowicz, the Polish witness of the convoys being brought to the Ponar (Ponary, Paneriai) execution site, near Vilnius, not one of the most important works showing how the Nazi genocide machine worked its almost daily routine? Would in fact Yitzhak Rudashevski’s diary of his ghetto life in Vilna (where he perished) necessarily be of less interest than Anne Frank’s iconic journal?

Should The Extermination of the Latvian Jews 1941-1945 under the direction of Rabbi Menachem Barkahan, or the epic Holocaust in the Soviet Union by Yitzhak Arad, not be in a primary list of histories of the Holocaust?

There is one historical aspect that still bothers me in the great divide between West and East. That is the notion that the Holocaust started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union and the murdering mobile units of the Einsatzgruppen who immediately began to slaughter the Jews in these territories.

Few people, even noted historians from both sides of the great divide know that the Holocaust began in Poland as soon as September 1939. Because there had been Einsatzgruppen already carrying out in that country. On November 27, 1939, Commander-in-Chief East (of Poland) Johannes Blakowitz addressed a complaint to his Army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch, a noted Nazi and racist:

Furthermore the troops do not want to be identified with the atrocities committed by the Secret Police and refuse any cooperation with these Einsatzgruppen which serve almost exclusively as execution squads.

The same source mention that “Wehrmacht soldiers also took part in September 1939 alone, they shot more than 1,200 Jews. Through the end of 1939, German occupation authorities assisted by the Wehrmacht murdered approximately 7,000 Jews.”

This citation is from The German Army and Genocide, Crimes against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians 1939-1944’ published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Martin Gilbert mentions a figure of five thousand Jewish dead in Poland for September and October 1939 (in his The Holocaust – The Jewish Tragedy’).

But one other fundamental tool in the annihilation of the Jews began in Poland by putting all Jews in the General Government into ghettos, depriving them of food, letting them squirm in living conditions conform to the idea that the Nazis had of their twisted version of Darwinism, letting them starve to death. Martin Gilbert mentions the figure of 2,000 dead by starvation for the month of January 1941 alone, quoting Ringelblum: “People are falling dead or unconscious in the middle of the street.” Emmanuel Ringelblum systematically chronicled the Warsaw Ghetto, where he perished in 1944.

Even if a basic blueprint for the systematic destruction of the Jews in Poland has not been found, it is historically sound to affirm that the Holocaust began in that country as soon as September 1939 – one could say, in the macabre context of the period, almost in an amateurish, even, improvised way. But, later in the USSR, the Nazis would adhere to these two forms of Ausrottung der Juden: death by starvation or work labor in the ghettos and camps, and death by execution squads.

It is a pity that so many people in the West have no idea about what happened to the Jews in the Soviet republics and that people in these former Republics have scant notions about what happened to the Jews to their west, including Poland.

Two courageous Frenchmen have tried to correct the split image we have of the Holocaust. In his lengthy documentary-film Shoah (9 and a half hours, 1985), Claude Lanzmann also examined what had happened at the time of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet republics and interviewed, among others, a survivor of the Burning Sonderkommando at Ponar. Michaël Prazan recently dedicated a remarkable study in his work on the Einsatzgruppen: the acclaimed 2009 documentary and accompanying book. Both are titled: Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades (French: Einsatzgruppen: Les commandos de la mor).