The Holocaust That Never Happened

[Behind the Aegis]

Why is it so hard to communicate the experience of Jews in Soviet territories during the Holocaust? It’s because there are so few stories.

Countless films have been made to help us relate to the experience of Western European and Polish Jewry. The images of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz are burned into our minds. But I have yet to see a feature film treating the experience of a Jewish woman in the Janowska concentration camp in Lwów or a Jewish child trying to survive the extermination of Odessa’s Jewry at the hands of the Romanians.

In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, we asked several young Russian-speaking North American Jews to interview Holocaust survivors from the Soviet Union.

The stories they brought back are unlike most of what American Jews’ collective memory of the Holocaust contains. Most take place in the summer and fall of 1941—the chaotic first months of the German-Soviet war and occupation, and the early stage of the Jewish genocide. The Holocaust at this point is far from the well-oiled machine we remember it as. At this point, the most high-tech solution to the “Jewish problem” is still Einsatzgruppen commander Friedrich Jeckeln’s “sardine method” of packing people as tightly as possible in the shooting pits before murdering them.

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[modrepub]

1. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

Was one of the first historical perspectives on what happened in central and eastern Europe during WWII that I have read. In some respects, the genocide in the countries between Germany and Russia was far more brutal than I had been exposed to. What was fascinating to me was the training of Jewish separatists in Poland. These folks would flee eastward when Poland was divided at the start of WWII then make their way into British Palestine and become the instigators who founded modern Israel.

For the Jews in central Europe, WWII exposed them to 2 bad choices. Stay and take their chances with the Nazis or flee eastward with the Soviet Armies who didn't want or trust them. Kind of like being offered the choice of either crossing piranha infested waters or crossing a pit of cobras. Under these circumstances it's no surprise Jewish populations in the affected countries suffered up to 100% attrition during WWII.