75 years ago

75 years ago September 30, 2016

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARIAN_archive_472645_Wreath-laying_ceremony_in_Babi_Yar.jpg; RIA Novosti archive, image #472645 / Igor Kostin / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

well, 75 years ago yesterday, when I meant to write about it, was the start of the Babi Yar massacre.

Here’s the Deutsche Welle reporting, with the story of a child who had a close call.

Here’s the USA Today with a more general history.

Here’s Wikipedia.

And here’s a post I wrote a while back reflecting on the Holocaust and the concept of “fighting back.”

As it happens, I’ve read a fair amount about the Holocaust, and I’ve been disappointed in how little it was covered in my oldest son’s world history class last year.  I suppose they figure that since “teach about the Holocaust” is a requirement in middle school, that’s good enough.

But it seems to me that, though most people know about the Holocaust in general terms (though I’m coming up empty in trying to find polling on the level of knowledge of Americans), their knowledge is limited to Auschwitz and the concept of a concentration camp as a site where the strong worked as slave labor and the weak, and the young and old, were gassed.  It’s all very mechanical, industrial.

Babi Yar was not.  At Babi Yar, and the many, many other similar massacres, individual soldiers and local collaborators (it often seems to be Ukrainians, even in Poland) killed individual Jews, one shot at a time.

The “industrial” Holocaust becomes something set apart from the rest of history, a unique act, that we can compartmentalize.  We can say, “never again,” and believe we have fulfilled that promise as long as no one sets up industrial killing centers with Zyklon-B.

But what does “never again” mean if we recognize that Babi Yar, and all manner of smaller-scale Babi Yars, were also a part of the Holocaust?

Do we have a moral obligation to act in accord with a “never again” pledge in other cases where an ethnic group, or a community of whatever kind, is a risk of massacre?  Or do we not really mean it?

 

image:  wreath-laying ceremony at Babi Yar, 1991, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARIAN_archive_472645_Wreath-laying_ceremony_in_Babi_Yar.jpg; RIA Novosti archive, image #472645 / Igor Kostin / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


Browse Our Archives