Since 2006, 27 January, the liberation day of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945, has been officially declared by the UN as a day of remembrance for the persecution of the Jews in the Second World War. But in many countries, that day passes quietly. In the Netherlands this is mainly because we are already commemorating May 4th, but in Eastern Europe there is a darker reason that they have nothing to do with this day…
In 1996, German President Roman Herzog proposed to the UN that every year on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the victims of Nazism in Europe commemorate. In 2006, 27 January, the day in 1945 that the Russian army liberated the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, was declared International Holocaust Memorial Day, a day when you can reflect on the horrors that Nazism brought.
When you think of the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War, you almost automatically think of Auschwitz. The gate with the text 'Arbeit macht frei', the film images of cattle wagons packed with Jewish victims arriving at a specially constructed extra long platform, Jewish slave laborers who had to live in barren barracks.
Auschwitz, located near the Polish village of Oświęcim, was one of the largest concentration and extermination camps of the Nazis. It is the camp to which Anne Frank and her family were deported after being betrayed in their hiding place in the Secret Annex. More than a million people died in Auschwitz, mostly Jews. Isn't it logical to designate the day that Auschwitz was liberated as a memorial day for all Holocaust victims?
Chaotic war
Not if you look at how differently people in Eastern Europe in 2014 deal with memories of the Holocaust. “The story of the persecution of the Jews in the camps that Auschwitz symbolizes is only a Western European image, and then only a small part of the whole story,” says Rob van der Laarse, professor of 'War Heritage'. in the Westerbor chair at the Free University and also quartermaster of the new Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
For the NWO research project Terrorscapes together with an international team of experts, he conducts research into what kind of stories the various Holocaust and genocide museums across Europe actually tell.
“We often see the Holocaust as a gigantic machine in which everything worked perfectly. But the images we have in Western Europe are not how Auschwitz actually functioned for most of the war,” says Van der Laarse. “That long platform, for example, was specially constructed for one of the last transports of the war; 400,000 Hungarian Jews who unexpectedly came to Auschwitz at the end of 1944, and whom the commanders had not counted on at all.”
“The camp commanders were always surprised by the chaotic developments of the war. Auschwitz was in fact a gigantic industrial city. Built by the Nazis in an attempt to relocate German industry to the east for fear of an Allied invasion to the west. Although prisoners worked under poor conditions, Auschwitz I, the original camp with the infamous gate, was initially not so much an extermination camp. Auschwitz II-Birkenau – the symbol of the Holocaust – was not built until 1942. Those barren barracks that can now be seen there as reconstructions were not originally intended either.”
“They wanted to build better barracks, but were surprised by the advance of the Red Army and the unexpected success of the European persecution of the Jews. While the flow of Russian prisoners of war stopped, the number of Jewish slave laborers grew. Even Birkenau's capacity soon proved insufficient. In haste, therefore, they have set up horse stables.”
One Jew, one bullet…
The fact that camps such as Auschwitz, but also the extermination camp Majdanek, located further east, still exist as museums, is largely due to the Russians. The Red Army liberated both camps and turned them into a memorial site during the war. “Many camps in the east, including Auschwitz, were originally built for Russian prisoners of war, who were treated brutally there,” says Van der Laarse. “The Russians had a great interest in preserving the camps as a memorial to fascism, as a warning and to dispel anti-Communist sympathies. Austria was allowed to become independent from the Russians, who occupied the country after the war. But only on the condition that Nazi camp Mauthausen would be preserved as an anti-fascist memorial.”
In Eastern Europe, therefore, they don't like a place of remembrance like Auschwitz, or January 27 as Holocaust Memorial Day. For many Eastern Europeans, the liberation of the concentration camps coincides directly with the start of post-war communist rule.
But there is another, much darker reason why many Eastern Europeans still prefer to keep quiet about the Holocaust. “Many Eastern Europeans were themselves very guilty of murdering the Jews,” says Van der Laarse. “Some six million Jews died during the war. It is estimated that about half died in the camps. Where has the rest gone?”
“In Ukraine and Belarus alone, at least a million Jews were killed with the voluntary help of nationalists, after which local residents looted property and moved into their homes. In Poland there are villages that were almost entirely Jewish before the war. After the war, however, there were no more Jews to be found in areas such as Galicia, where Yiddish (spoken by Jews, Germanic language, ed.) used to be spoken. Izbica, in eastern Poland is a good example. The Jews were taken away, executed with a bullet (the Germans used the strike slogan 'one Jew, one bullet; one bullet, one Jew') and dumped in a mass grave.”
“Eventually the village became a concentration or transit camp for European Jews, on their way to the extermination camps. To this day, the locals know exactly what happened in the hidden Eastern European 'Holocaust by bullets' and where the mass graves are, but it is largely hushed up. Also during the school lessons about the Holocaust more or less mandated by the EU.”
Hardly research
“For example, the genocide museum in Budapest, founded by the centre-right government of Viktor Orbán, makes no mention of the Holocaust, while it was the Hungarians themselves who put 'their' last 400,000 Jewish compatriots on the train to Auschwitz; the Germans asked don't even care. As far as the memory of the persecution of the Jews is concerned, there is a real discord across Europe. Remembrance places such as Auschwitz or Majdanek are nowadays mainly visited by western tourists.
“Because people themselves were so involved in it, Eastern European historians hardly do any research into the genocide by the Nazis. Their focus is mainly on communist terror, such as the mass graves discovered by the Nazis in 1943 in Katyn, where some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered by the Russians. The Nazis managed to exploit this in their propaganda, as a deterrent to the "Jewish-Bolshevik plot". In many Eastern European genocide museums, genocide always refers to the crimes committed by the Russians.”
When it comes to the holocaust, there are quite a few competing stories going around in Europe. Victims of one country are often perpetrators in another country. Now that the Eastern European countries have also become members of the EU, it becomes clear how difficult, if not impossible, it is to investigate the horrors of the Second World War in a joint manner. Not to mention a joint commemoration.