Date
Author
Беседовала Светлана СТЕПАНЕНКО; Киев
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
“The death camps began with Babi Yar”
-- The date of September 29, 1941, when the executions took place at Babi Yar, coincided with the religious date of Judgment Day. On that day, believers and non-believers were gripped by religious fear: they were deprived of their lives on Judgment Day, when the Almighty decided the question of whether a person should live or not. The sinister significance of Babyn Yar, which began the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War, cannot be underestimated. With the executions at Babi Yar, the Nazis tested Europe for tolerance. Since there was no reaction from the civilized world to the criminal actions, another six thousand executions of the same scale took place in the European territories conquered by the Germans. It was a hidden Holocaust in which three million Jews died. These are people whose memory has been completely erased, which is what the Nazis wanted. Neither their names, nor surnames, nor gender are known. The impunity of the Babi Yars led to death camps.
- How did Germany, this cradle of European philosophy and culture, come to the horrors of the Holocaust?
— Germany has been moving towards this for more than ten years after Hitler came to power in the 1930s. The ideology of the extermination of Jews is set out in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1922. The Holocaust was provoked by the competitive struggle in the German economy. In Germany in the 1930s, Jews had a lot of power and money for those times. The idea of using this money seemed extremely attractive to the Nazis. However, such a policy would not have met with understanding among the German people, who respected the problems of property and democracy.
Therefore, Hitler's supporters chose the tactic of a gradual attack on the civil rights of Jews, testing the degree of tolerance of the Germans towards anti-Semitism. It all started with the fanning of everyday anti-Semitism. Jews were prohibited from visiting certain parts of the city, wearing certain types of clothing, and then walking on the sidewalks. The Nazi government banned Jews from certain professions, such as stockbrokers, dentists, and financiers. Jews were then forced to sew a yellow star on their clothes. All this ended in 1938 with Kristallnacht, after which an indemnity was exacted from the Jews in favor of the German state. Using the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew as a pretext, the Nazis declared Jews responsible for nationwide unrest.
—You said that death camps appeared after Babi Yar. What was the scale of this terrible Nazi policy?
-- In January 1942, a conference was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where high-ranking SS man Adolf Eichmann, on Hitler’s instructions, formulated a program for the “final solution” of the Jewish question. In Poland, six concentration camps were built for this purpose, including Auschwitz. The death machine was so powerful that, following the lives of Jews, it began to absorb the lives of other Europeans. In Germany alone, 1.1 thousand concentration camps were organized, in Europe - even more. These “holdings” employed 18 million people, 12 million of them died from slave labor.
The Second World War claimed the lives of 6 million Jews, 20 million Germans, 30 million Soviets and 50 million Europeans. Add to this the economic degradation of Europe, including Germany. This was the price to pay for the fact that someone wanted to take something away from someone. Not only Jews, but any people who want progressive development for themselves should learn lessons from the tragedy of the Holocaust. If we are civilized people and want our countries to prosper, we must fight xenophobia and anti-Semitism. A state that ceases to restrain predatory instincts, wanting to win the competition in this way, leads the nation to degradation and the economy to disaster.
— Were the Nazis, who were at the origins of the Holocaust, punished?
- The Talmud says that you cannot hope for a miracle. The Creator begins to help us when we have done everything we could. This is exactly how everything works out in this life. Adolf Eichmann was captured by Peter Malkin, a general in the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Before his death, he told me the story of Eichmann's capture in Argentina. Malkin was so afraid of accidentally touching the mouth of Eichmann, who uttered the words about the “final solution” of the Jewish question, that he carried out the operation to capture him wearing gloves. Eichmann was taken to Israel and hanged, and his ashes were scattered in the desert.
The end to the tragedy of Auschwitz was put by a resident of Ukraine, Major Anatoly Shapiro, a most modest man who, before his death at 92, wrote a book of poems about the Holocaust. Actually, the history of the Holocaust ended on January 27, 1945, when Major Shapiro stormed Auschwitz. We bow to the memory of other Ukrainian righteous people - now there are more than a hundred of them living - who, risking their own lives, extended a helping hand to the Jews. Many of these righteous people were ordinary women in whose gardens the Nazis carried out executions.
—What did the world lose as a result of the Holocaust?
- These losses cannot be estimated. I will tell you only about one case. I collect works of Jewish artists, photographers and sculptors of Russian and Ukrainian origin of the twentieth century, who made a huge contribution to world art. An outstanding role was played by the artist Chaim Soutine, who is very little known. He was born on the border between Ukraine and Belarus and lived all his life in Paris. In Israel, he is considered a victim of the Holocaust: he died on a Parisian street because no one dared to help him as a Jew. I was horrified when I saw Soutine's grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. There was not a single letter on his grave: only the date of death - 1943 - and a cross on the tombstone. People who did not want his grave to be destroyed completely depersonalized it so that no one would think that a Jew was buried there. The Nazis had a plan to destroy the memory of Jews, especially prominent ones. We have completed a large program to create a museum of avant-garde art of Holocaust victims, which has branches in Moscow, Geneva and Tel Aviv. This is just a fraction of what the world lost before Nazi Germany's death machine was stopped.