The forgotten Holocaust
When Americans and Western Europeans think of the Holocaust, we tend to recall the narratives of survivors writers like Primo Levi and Anne Frank, and the horrors of Auschwitz. But worse horrors, if it is not obscene to speak comparatively in this way, happened in places where there were no survivors, writes the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in the latest New York Review of Books:
"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.…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.
The numbers of dead that Snyder mentions at various points in his essay are astounding even for someone used to reading about World War II. The German leadership, he writes, planned to intentionally starve as many as 80 million people in order to make room for the Aryan colonization of Eastern Europe and Russia.
And the German military leaders who have recently received attention and praise in the popular media for attempting to kill Hitler in 1944? (I.e., Tom Cruise's "Valkyrie.") A number of them "were right at the center of mass killing policies."
Snyder is at work on a book called "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin."
