Auschwitz only an introduction to the holocaust.

[Cain]

A pair of great articles in the NY Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

And http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22980

I wish that I had mentioned the German mass murder of the Roma and Sinti. The persecution of these groups was never as systematic as that of the Jews, but it bears comparison. Roma and Sinti were arrested in Germany beginning in 1938 and later deported to Poland or subjected to sterilization; shot by police in occupied Poland throughout the war; shot by Einsatzgruppe D in occupied Soviet Ukraine; shot in reprisal actions in Serbia; killed at the Jasenovac camp of Germany's puppet ally Croatia (about 15,000); ethnically cleansed from territories conquered by Germany's ally Romania; included in the killing orders during the massive German reprisals in Belarus; gassed at Che mno (about 4,400) and at Auschwitz (about 4,600, in addition to about 20,000 who died of hunger, disease, or mistreatment there). 225,000 is a reasonable preliminary estimate of the number of Roma and Sinti killed by the Germans and their allies. It is to be hoped that further research will allow us greater certainty.

August 2, 2009, marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liquidation of the Zigeunerlager, or gypsy camp, at Auschwitz. In view of the rise of anti-Roma sentiment in today's Europe, Mr. Lane's reminder is timely.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

The anti gypsy sentiment in the UK seems to be the only form of racism not openly challenged and is almost acceptable. Travellers camps come across all sorts of issues in this country, not sure about the rest of the continent, but thanks for some very interesting articles, Cain, your contributions are consistently interesting and well thought out.

but being you, you probably know that already.

[Kai]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country.

All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance. The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.

More at the link. Found via WhoIsIOZ?

[Cain]

Thank you, though I actually nicked this link from www.whoisioz.blogspot.com, the funniest anarchist on the internet.

I usually read the similar and excellent London Book of Reviews, but for some reason, I just don't visit the NY version that much.

[Cain]

Ooops....I posted this in Aneristic Delusions, like, two days ago.

[Kai]

Ooops....I posted this in Aneristic Delusions, like, two days ago.

Shit, sorry. Was away for 3 days (no internet) and didn't see.  

Feel free to merge mine to yours, or delete at will.

[Cain]

I prefer your title....I'll see if I can merge the two.

We should really work out some timeshare for linking to these sort of things...

[Kai]

I know we both read WhoIsIOZ? rather obsessively, so maybe yeah that would be good.

That, and Iason just one upped me on Tree Lobsters in the pic thread today. Considering I discovered that comic its a real  moment. 

We all read the same blogs mostly. This sort of thing is going to happen.