Its 2023 so everything has to be a political statement about what is happening now, even when it is remembering events of 78 years ago, the liberation of Auschwitz. And so, on Holocaust Remembrance day we all look back and remember.
I think of the family of my fathers friend Janos Nyiri who did not survive and went to Auschwitz and of the remarkable escape of Janos. I think of Olaf’s godparents Joe and Iska neither of whom have any cousins left in Corfu and Poland respectively. Never again must folks be allowed to rewrite history, marginalise an entire ethnic group and ultimately start killing them.
At Auschwitz itself there was a ceremony with former inmates and their descendants and also descendants of some of the German guards. But for the first year there was nobody there was nobody there who liberated the camp or their descendants. Because it was the Russians who liberated Auschwitz and they were banned. There were no descendants of the Ukrainian staff at Auschwitz either. We should not consider the fact that so many Ukrainians so hated Stalin that they fought with the Germans and murdered vast numbers of Jews. Don’t mention the Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division and what it got up to. Do not mention the most celebrated Ukrainian nationalist and vile anti-semite Stepan Bandera, who 74% of Ukrainians now view favourably but whose OUN units drove the Lviv pogroms of 1941 where thousands of Jews were butchered.
Instead at Auschwitz and indeed widely across the West we were again asked to consider Holodomor as an act of genocide by Russia against Ukraine. But the problem with this is that it is a deliberate misreading of history to fit the current GroupThink (a daily two minute hate for Russia) as I explained in detail HERE. The events of the Holodomor were awful and a reason Stalin’s soul burns in hell but they were not genocide by Russia against Ukraine.
Rewriting history, “othering” – a ghastly 21st century phrase, is not good. The Nazis said the Jews stabbed Germany in the back in World War One. They did not, As Hitler knew so well, the German Jewish community fought and died bravely in the First World War. German Jews supported the war just like the Aryans. But the Nazis rewrote history to marginalise and demonise a whole race. Surely on the 27th January we should be saying “Never again” to that sort of thing. Instead, we indulge in it on an industrial scale as our leaders and those in the GroupThink seek reasons to whip up popular support to drive for more war and bloodshed in Ukraine rather than working for peace.