Our blissful wise men have established an everlasting rule:" Do not judge your neighbour until you have been in his position yourself (Rev. 2: 4). But even we who were in this situation when there is a need to understand and to sentence, we begin to stumble. How was it possible that millions of people were destroyed in the cruellest way, and the world was stubbornly silent? "David Kahane
The Holocaust ... What is this? Apocalypse? Plague of hatred towards the whole nation? These are the most terrible crimes of the "brown plague" against humanity. Extermination of the whole people. This historical event is a Universal human tragedy.
For the first time, the "Holocaust" as a term was used in the first decade of the XX century. In everyday life, the word came from the Greek Bible texts and meant "conflagration". It was used in relation to Jewish pogroms, to the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Later, when Hitler became the dictator of Germany, Nazi racial policies, based on the concept of racial hygiene, were implemented. Its essence was the division of people into representatives of the higher race and elements of the lower races. This meant the persecution, sterilisation, and the elimination of people belonging to the "inferior" group: people with physical and mental disabilities, Gypsies, Slavs, Jews, political opponents, homosexuals and representatives of other minorities and groups. This bureaucratic, methodologically organized operation on the extermination of people called the "Holocaust."
What is the ideology that strikes with careful thoughtfulness and detailed elaboration of measures aimed primarily at the complete destruction of the whole people?
The Jewish Holocaust was described in the books of Eli Wiesel, a Jewish writer who passed through the Auschwitz and Buchenwald hell. After his first book "And the world was silent", published in 1956, the word "Holocaust" began to be written with the capital letter.
Since the beginning of the Nazi regime, concentration camps have been set up, where Jews, Gypsies and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred have been sent to. For control of the situation, there were created forced labour camps and the ghettos for the Jewish population. For further deportation of people, Nazis organized the transfer camps. A huge number of them functioned over Germany and the occupied territories.
In 1938, the world was shocked by the events of "Crystal Night". Nazis committed a massacre of Jews, many of whom were crippled or killed, and thousands of people were sent to concentration camps.
During the war, special punitive detachments, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, followed the army to carry out operations for the mass destruction of lower population groups, including Jews and Gypsies. In the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of people were shot, sent to the ghetto and into death camps.
At the end of the war, the SS, with the aim of preventing the release by the Allied troops of a huge number of prisoners, moved them by foot and marches and trains. These were the so-called "marches of death". The Holocaust took place until May 7, 1945. What was that? It was the deliberate destruction of the Jews, which was divided into three stages.
By 1940 it was planned to solve the Jewish question by mass exile from Germany and other regions occupied by it. The second stage was the beginning of the concentration of all Jews in the ghettos, which were opened in Poland and other eastern regions occupied by Germany. It lasted until 1942. The third stage envisaged the final solution of the Jewish question, the essence of which was the systematic physical destruction of the people. People were killed, the local Jewish culture was destroyed, and the memory of this unique integral part of the culture of Eastern Europe was destroyed.
In a way, the Nazis succeeded in solving the Jewish question. Can you somehow understand the Holocaust? What it is? Antisemitism, at that moment peculiar to the mass German consciousness?
If by the thirties the number of the Jewish population was about 8 million, then by the end of the "all-fire" period it barely reached 2 million people. Together with the Jewish people, the "brown plague" buried representatives and other nationalities. More than 31 million Slavs and 500,000 Gypsies were slaughtered with Famine, executed or killed.
The largest death camps Auschwitz were located in Poland. Here in the crematorium and gas chambers 12 thousand people died daily.
On January 27, 1945, the prisoners of the largest Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Auschwitz were liberated. This January day became synonymous with the terrible crime against humanity in history and was declared the day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust.
In 2005, a monument to victims of the Holocaust in the form of a stone labyrinth, created from more than 2700 concrete slabs of different heights, was opened in Berlin. Passing between them, you can notice that it is quite difficult to find a way out. A similar idea by Peter Eisenman, an American architect, clearly provokes dismay and anxiety. It was what the Jews felt during the war: that they had nowhere to escape, and nowhere to hide. People surrounded by other people made an unprecedented and massive destruction of the people - the Holocaust. What it is? How was it possible? Where was the point beyond which you must not go, in which people ceased to be human beings?
The Holocaust is a terrible example of the Nazis' hateful ideology. But how many after it there were still deportations, repressions, direct genocide. Is it possible to change anything? Human indifference, unwillingness or inability to sympathise with, indifference to cruelty, to someone else's pain, the oppression of human rights or of the whole people can again lead to disaster. They say that changing the world can be possible if you change it yourself.
It is believed that the point of reference, the place from which the Holocaust began, is the ravine Babyn Yar in Kyiv.
During the Nazi occupation of Kiev in 1941-1943, Babyn Yar became the site of massive shootings by invaders of the civilian population and Soviet prisoners of war, Jews and Gypsies - on an ethnic basis, as well as Soviet activists, underground members, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, hostages, "saboteurs" , violators of the curfew and others.
A major event in Babyn Yar's history was the massive campaign to destroy the Jewish population of Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941. In these two days, almost 34,000 Jews were shot here.
The date of the tragedy was not chosen by chance. On this day - September 29 - in 1941 there was a great Jewish holiday Yom-Kippur or the Day of Atonement, and the next day, in the Orthodox church it was the day of Faith, Hope, Love and their wise mother Sophia. The scriptwriters of the first series of the Last Judgment needed not only to destroy the doomed but to trample, to deprive the victim's souls of their faith. And, equally important, to completely ruin the souls of the performers, allowing them to kill victims with impunity even in the light Christian holiday.
Further executions of Jews took place on 1, 2, 8 and 11 October 1941, when about 17,000 Jews from the Kiev suburbs and the region were shot away.
During the two years of the Nazi occupation of Kiev, Babyn Yar was the site of regular shootings (and graves), the covered cars regularly arrived from the street Korolenko, 33 to Babyn Yar (Security Police and SD services). They killed the victims with no matter what their nationality is. First, they were shot away. And since 1942 they were executed right there in the Gaswagens. Here on February 21, 1942, a prominent Ukrainian poet Olena Teliga was shot away and buried. Here many Ukrainian underground members were executed.
Different publications give different figures of the total number of people destroyed in Babyn Yar, from about 70 thousand to 200 thousand people. In 1946, the Nuremberg trial estimated an estimated 100,000 people, according to the findings of a special state commission to investigate Nazi crimes during the occupation of Kiev. Most bodies were burnt by order of the German command in 1943.
The main question, which appears to mankind, is how a person can destroy all human things in himself and become an active bearer of total destruction, indifferent to the suffering of the victims, or the silent partner of almost ritual human hecatomb.
The German philosopher Theodore Adorno once noticed that after Osvenets, sophisticated piano music seems impossible and absurd. And the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky argued that "it is possible to write poems after Oswiecem, but otherwise."
Curiosity to the history of this war does not decrease, and not only among historians and specialists. Many people living in the 21st century are trying to comprehend the terrible lessons that the war has brought for not to repeat them.
