THE WORLD SEEN FROM UNDER A STONE

Most of us have  heard of the Holocaust of the last World War, in which either five or six million Jews and anti-Nazi intellectuals and Gypsies were killed and burnt using modern techniques of mass-produced murder. The brilliant film "Schindler's List" about a German business man who saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of Jews and also made a profit, that film was unforgettable, not least because of its portrait of the commander of the concentration camp, a romantic sadist, and of Schindler himself, a cynical, promiscuous but kindly realist.

But now, I hear, there are people who say that the Holocaust never happened, that the whole story was invented by the Israelis to justify their current nasty treatment of the Palestinians. Mind you, the people who make these claims are themselves more than a little odd even though they are actuated (as seems probable) by kind motives. Let me explain.

These revisors of history are mainly French. One, an 83 year old Catholic priest, the Abbe Pierre, whose life has been spent  in  working for the poor and homeless, is a popular public figure. He has a friend, Roger Garaudy, a philosopher, who has written a book denying the reality of the Holocaust. According to the Spectator Garaudy has been a Communist,  a Catholic, a Protestant, and (from 1983) a Muslim. He has always been a supporter of downtrodden people, and the particular group of downtrodden with which he now concerns himself is the Palestinian. So,  inevitably, he is anti-Israeli and resents the sympathy, mostly due to the Holocaust, with which the world,  and especially the Americans,  have invested the Jews. But I  fear that these  good men are sadly mistaken. There is no doubt about the Holocaust and its horrors.

A recent book, by an Australian whose family came from the Ukraine, describes  the lives of men who were recruited by the Nazis to do the foot-slogging work of the executioners, the machine-gunners, the gas-chamber operators, the stokers of the crematorium furnaces in the Hitler-inspired death camps. The upper-class officers were, of course, Germans. But the common labourers of death were often from the Ukraine, and were once unhappy, starving citizens of the USSR.

The Hand that Signed the Paper, by Helen Darville, is set in the vast plain of Central and Eastern Europe, of Poland and the Ukraine, with its Rivers Dnieper, Dniester and Kalka. This fertile plain has been fought over and settled and re-settled from the start of history. Settled or merely invaded by Indo-Europeans, Tartars (or Mongols) Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Volksdeutsche, Russians, and last but one,  by Communists. Genghis Khan, the brilliant Tartar war leader of the thirteenth century expressed opinions which would probably not appeal to President Clinton, "The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."  I doubt if the clasping was to express his sympathy. 

In the Ukraine,  much later, Stalin interpreted Karl Marx's ideas in his own way. He hated the idea of a prosperous farming community, with farmers successfully cultivating their own land. So he slaughtered the small farmers and turned their farms into huge "collectives", resembling, as far as possible, urban  factories. The result of this idiocy was a famine which cost 7 million Ukrainian  lives. And the initial arrests of the "rich" Kulak farmers were  accompanied by the savage and public murder of protesters and their families.

The revolution of 1917 which brought the Communists to power was led by a group, mostly middle-class intellectuals, which contained many Jews: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Martov, Dan, Axelrod and Vera Zasulich, and the ordinary Ukrainians believed that the Communists from the cities who directed the collectivisation and caused the famine were largely Jewish. This belief, whether or not it was justified, led to strong antiSemitic feelings among the Ukrainians, much as  such prejudice was later encouraged among the Nazis. Hitler associated Moscow with the "Zionist world conspiracy".

So when the German armies first marched victoriously into the Ukraine in 1941 it was easy to recruit young, angry, hungry peasants into the Death's Head battalions of Hitler's SS, with the promise of food, a smart uniform, wages, whores and an important and special task.

For a few of them their first task was behind the machine guns at Babi Yar where the Jews of Kiev were massacred in orderly instalments, and where the SS provided first-aid services for those SS troops too sensitive to continue their tedious duties at the guns, where they succumbed, in spite of coffee-breaks, to headaches, nausea, vomiting and the bad feels.

Listen to the Croatian top tennis player, Goran Ivanisevic, whose friends taught him how to use a machine-gun. "It was tough to control but, oh, it was a nice feeling - all the bullets coming out. I was thinking it would be nice to have some Serbs standing in front of me."

The young Ukrainians, many of whom were illiterate, were taken to training camps, fed very generously, uniformed and drilled into the desired state of automatic obedience to orders, the first requirement of all military service.

For one group, the notorious death camp of Treblinka was their place of work, and their home the pleasant  village beside it, a village which became more and more prosperous as the war continued. Many of those murdered there had carried with them into the camp small valuable objects, watches, rings, jewellery, and in their mouths pretty gold teeth. Few such valuables were actually burned. The victims themselves became a gold mine, a diamond mine and a watch mine. 

Near the mine the village became a cosy, gemutlich, gossipy small town, with tired men coming home from work to be cherished by their ladies and to play with their small children. The nature of their work was known but seldom mentioned. Rarely a sensitive young man might break down in tears and hysteria, induced by the stress of being a whole-time murderer,  to be sent off on leave for a few days.

When defeat and the end of the War began to become obvious the SS discipline continued to keep the executioner-guards at work until almost the last moment, when they were ordered to take to the remaining prisoners on a march to the west, not far in front of the invading Soviet Army. On that march it became clear that Germany was defeated,  so the guards and the prisoners melted into groups, the prisoners aiming to survive, the guards to turn into more respectable citizens.

If you turn over a big stone the creatures under it run if they can, run anywhere even if it turns out to be in the wrong direction. And among the SS guards some survived that similar crisis, ending up (minus any uniform) in South America or Australia. In 1996, some fifty years later, some of the younger ones, now ancient but still just alive, are occasionally  identified as one of those heartless murderers. Should they be punished?

To me it seems like punishing hatred, hatred in the abstract, hatred acquired by seeing your own family locked into your house and burned. To see that and NOT acquire hatred would be the remarkable exception. So perhaps Darville's book is justified, though it is far from an agreeable read. Her title comes from Dylan Thomas:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.  

To hate is human, to forgive superhuman but not impossible. Could it be time,at long last, for forgiveness?

Let me hear your comments: e-mail me at jackleacock@jackleacock.itgo.com