Yad Vashem reflections (1) - we need to remember all the victims

Today I had the privilege of visiting Yad Vashem, probably the world’s most famous Holocaust Museum. It is fittingly located in Jerusalem, the holiest city in the Jewish faith- and holy as well to Muslims and Christians. Yad Vashem documents the horrific attempt to systematically annihilate Europe’s Jews by Hitler’s followers: German Nazis and their collaborators, inspired by the sick and twisted ideology of National Socialism. It is hard to describe what it is like to be in this building.

It is full of pictures, videos, interviews, and relics of that horrific time in human history.

Go there and you will see a collection of shoes of people who were murdered, as well as an actual boxcar that was used to transport people to the death camps. The evidence is overwhelming, and anyone with a brain that is not blinded by racist propaganda cannot deny that this horrific atrocity against the Jewish people did take place. There are those who do deny that the Holocaust happened, I can only say I feel sorry for them.

I would like them to come and see the plaques on the walls containing the names made by families of the dead, some of them even listing when and where they were murdered. I doubt if it would make a difference, minds that are consumed by hate often are incapable of rational thought.

I have a lot respect for the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto and those who resisted in the concentration camps and those who fought in the woods as partisans, either with other non-Jews who opposed the Nazis or in their own units. I am filled with admiration though for those who managed and did everything they could do to maintain a semblance of normal life. Parents who loved their kids and tried to give them an education while sorrounded by people who hated them and let them know in every possible way they were, in their eyes, unworthy of life. Rabbis who ministered to their people, knowing that they faced particularly awful abuse for keeping to their traditions. Inmates in Dachau who ate and slaved and died together.


Yad Vashem does a very good and I would say very important job in documenting Hitler’s genocide against the Jewish people. It should not and can not be forgotten or allowed to happen again.

What it unfortunately does not do is document the equally horrific and brutal genocide of most of the other victims. In addition to the 6 million Jews who were murdered, the Holocaust also consumed the lives of more than 10 million Slavs (7 million Ukrainians, 3 million Poles and millions more Russians and Byelorussians). Slavic people suffered most numerically, yet there is no mention of them in the museum, except to say that ‘thousands’ of Polish intelligentsia were killed, pointing out that many of the SS were Ukrainian, and showing pictures of Polish women trying on clothes that belonged to deported Jews and a picture of Polish policemen guarding the Warsaw ghetto. I do not know enough Ukrainian world war two history to comment about it, except that they were ruthlessly murdered by the millions by both Hitler and Stalin, and that while there were many who joined the Nazis, many others died fighting them.

I can comment more on the Polish history, since my family is Polish and so were my grandparents, who lived through the second world war. This is going to be long. Perhaps I have written about this already and am repeating myself. I make no apologies. Like the suffering of the Jewish people can never be forgotten, nor can the suffering of my people or the suffering of other victims of injustice. We must give voices to people who are being persecuted and preserve the memories of those who were murdered. This is all the more important when the world chooses to ignore their suffering and pretend it never happened.

Hitler’s minions occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945. During that time, they managed to kill 6 million Polish citizens. 3 million of them were Polish Jews, 3 million were Polish non-Jews (predominantly Catholic Christians since Poland’s population is and always has been mostly Catholic). Like Jews, Poles had no human rights. Like Jews, they were considered untermenschen. They were seen as nothing more than slaves who were to be driven off their lands, enslaved, and eventually murdered. They were not human beings.

I have no doubt that the pictures of the Polish woman and the policemen are authentic. In every society there are people who take advantage of the suffering of others and there are those who allow themselves to sink into following the most depraved human instincts and temptations when occasion arises, and who act like beasts towards those who are vulnerable. Yes, there were Nazi collaborators who were Polish. There were also French collaborators, Czech collaborators, Serbian collaborators, Dutch, Danish… in every country that was occupied there were those who went along with the Nazis. They included Jews. In the Warsaw ghetto, the Nazis relied heavily on the Jewish police, who rounded up their fellow people and beat them and shot at them and transported them to the death camps to be murdered. Many of them did it to save their own lives. Too late they found out it did no good.

I read that Poland’s Jewish population before the war was composed of 3.3 million people. Only 300,000 survived. That is truly a horrific testament to the hatred of the Nazis. It is also a testament to the heroic courage exhibited by many Polish people during the war. Of the 300,000 Jews who survived, some survived the death camps, others fought with the partisans. An overwhelming majority however survived because they were hidden by Polish people. Families, clergy, single people, city dwellers, villagers, teachers, labourers; people of all backgrounds and professions took their Jewish neighbours in and hid them. The risk for doing so was not a slap on the wrist or a fine. It was almost always death, usually family included.
In Polish villages, farmers who were caught hiding Jews were locked up in their homes or barns along with the whole family and the person or people they were hiding- then the building would be drenched with petrol and set on fire with everyone inside.

Nazi collaborators in Poland were relatively few, and they lived in constant fear. They were not afraid of the Nazis, they were afraid of most of the Polish people who hated them even more than the imperialists they served. Many were killed by fellow Poles during the war, most of the rest suffered the same fate after the occupation ended.

In his book, Martyrs of Charity, Dr. Waclaw Zajaczkowski documents the names of over 3,000 Polish Chritians who were murdered for helping Jews. It is estimated that over 50,000 in total were murdered for helping their neighbours. Helping Jews in Poland during the Nazi occupation meant the risk of certain death, yet many tens of thousands if not more did so. And for being Slavs, Polish people too were on the list of people to be exterminated.

I would highly recommend Dr. Zajaczkowski’s book. Of course, it too is biased. His claim that only in Poland helping Jews meant an automatic death sentence, in reality any Slav who did that anywhere in Eastern Europe paid the same price. While rightly attacking Yad Vashem for mostly focusing on what happened to the Jews and not mentioning the suffering of Poles, Zajaczkowski falls into the same trap. While describing the Holocaust of Polish non-Jews, he fails to make any significant mention of the mass murder of non-Polish Slavic peoples. The plight of the Ukrainians, Russians and Byelorussians is almost completely ignored. The mass extermination of the Roma is not even mentioned.

Why am I saying this? We are all guilty of bias and it is very easy to get caught up in issues that affect us and forget or ignore others around us. This is as true of historians as it is of us today.