By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The chosen people were chosen by the Nazis for extermination in World War II on the sole basis of their blood. Many Jews of the USSR fell victim to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty of August 23, 1939, because of which during the war on Soviet territory the Soviet authorities kept all possible silence about the Nazis’ crimes against the Jewish population.
Isaac Deutscher, a British biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, wrote: “Stalin’s propagandists found nothing better to do than to be embarrassingly silent. He forbade them to respond with a counterstroke that would have exposed the strange, inhuman nature of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He was afraid… of appearing as the defender of the Jews, a role that nothing in the world could force him to take on. He was frightened by the response that anti-Semitism received in the masses, and the readiness with which Russian and Ukrainian Jew-haters supported the Nazis in the occupied territories only strengthened his similar fears.”
Deutscher further writes that “the press and radio were silent about the destruction of European Jewry, which took place in the fascist rear. They barely mentioned the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, and if they did write about them, they did so in such a way that no one would guess that Jews constituted the main contingent of victims.” Because of this conspiracy of silence, many Kiev Jews died at Babi Yar.
The Nazis were defeated in World War II, but Nazism lives on and continues to make up smears about the Jews, including the popular claim that they did not fight in World War II. The blood libel “Jews didn’t fight” coexisted with the official false statement: “It was not Jews who were killed during the occupation, but Soviet citizens.” The places of mass extermination listed “Soviet citizens” as having been murdered. The Holocaust was hushed up in the USSR: Jews in these places were executed not because they were Soviet citizens, but because they were Jews.
The involvement of Jews in the Soviet army during World War II was denied by many people I met in Kiev of my time. This denial is akin to denying the Holocaust. We know from world history that living Jews get in the way. But it turns out that many Europeans are also hindered by dead Jews. That is why Holocaust denial or challenging its extent is common. The Jews have unwittingly been placed in a “privileged” position, holding the world record for the extermination of a people that is second to none. The Holocaust became an unbearable burden for some Europeans, eastern and western. Resentment at the “greatness” of the Jewish tragedy is called “secondary anti-Semitism.
According to “primary” anti-Semitism, Jews are inferior people because of their negative traits and deeds, including the maliciously libelous allegations of crucifying Christ, poisoning wells, eating the blood of Christian babies, racial inferiority, economic predation, a desire to take control of the world, and destructive revolutionism.
The concept of “secondary anti-Semitism” was introduced by Peter Schoenbach, a disciple of one of the leaders of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno. The Dutch political scientist Lars Rensmann interprets “secondary anti-Semitism” as a new source of criticism of the Jews, motivated by the desire of some Europeans to suppress the guilt of their people for complicity in Nazi crimes against the Jews. Israeli psychologist Zvi Rex said: “Germany will never forgive the Jews of Auschwitz.” According to German political scientist Klaus Leggevi, “secondary anti-Semitism” discriminates against Jews not because they are “Jews and enemies of Christians,” but because they “received unjustifiably high compensation as Holocaust victims […] exert moral and financial pressure.
“The Jews did not fight” – the echo of this eternal insinuation has been and will continue to be heard. The Jews of Kiev did not fight, for they were exterminated in September 1941, exterminating all those who could not leave. About 150,000 Jews of Kiev and other places in Ukraine were murdered at Babi Yar. “The Jews didn’t fight”-the lie about Jews not shedding blood in the war-is also a blood libel, the newest blood libel in Jewish history. Jews didn’t fight, they died, they were killed at Babi Yar. Before I left for Israel, I brought my five-year-old son to Babi Yar. We came to say goodbye to those who could not leave with us. And then we stood in Bergen-Belsen and in Dachau and looked at the past.
Dear Mara!
You went to the front of World War II, just as your favorite writer Ernest Hemingway’s hero Frederick Henry went to the front of World War I. You left home with a smile on your face. You never returned from that war. You died at once – in August 1941. I tried to reproduce your image in conversations with your father, my grandmother’s brother. I often looked at your only photo sent to your grandmother, my great-grandmother Fanya, with the inscription “Dear and dearly loved grandmother from the grandson, a regimental school cadet,” taken on 17 April 1940 in Krasnogvardeysk.
I was reading the two letters you managed to write to my mother. You wrote: “The war is coming, it is looming, like a black shadow over the overturned land. War has its own voice. It is the rumble, the roar, the howl and the sorrow of parting, parting with your relatives and with those with whom you have just been lying in the dugout and in the trench.”
You did not know that a few days after your letter was sent you would be parted in the same way by those who were lying next to you in the dugout and in the trench. You did not know that your mother’s entire family was executed at Babi Yar. In Kiev, the Nazis did not lock Jews in ghettos and force them to wear yellow stars as they did in the rest of occupied Eastern Europe. The Nazis rushed to kill the Jews. German troops entered the city on September 19, 1941, and on September 29, Judgment Day, the shootings began. In the first two days, 33,000 Jews were executed, and by October 11, another 17,000 were killed, those who did not come voluntarily at the order of the Nazis to die on Judgment Day. They were fished out and killed two weeks later.
Ten people hid and escaped. Of the 50,000 Jews left in Kiev, ten survived. The Ukrainian collaborators gave away almost all of the Jews. Only 29 men survived. They were shot, but not killed. They crawled out of the earth-filled ditch and escaped the executioners. Thirty-nine of the 50,000 Jews survived. The survivors were those who escaped the denunciation of their neighbors. There were three times fewer of them than those who crawled out of the ditches after the shootings.
After a thousand years of life in Kiev, a place was found for the Jews in Babi Yar, which was a tract, or chain of ravines more than two kilometers long and 50 meters deep. Tens of thousands of corpses could fit there. A thousand years of Jewish history in Kiev fit in ditches 50 meters deep. Most of the exterminated Jews were women, old people, and children. The male population fought at the front. You didn’t find out about the destruction of your family. You didn’t get to hear that “Jews didn’t fight.” You did not learn that this war was a Homeland war, but not for you, for you were by birth deprived of the right to the Homeland. You haven’t fully felt how homeless your people are.
You did not learn that your cousin Leah, my mother’s sister, was “stoned” during the “cosmopolitan” anti-Semitic pogrom in 1949. You wouldn’t know that on March 8, 1949, International Women’s Day, the holidays were over for her, for she read the order for her dismissal from her job for “slaving over” the “Western” music of Beethoven, Debussy and Ravel. After that black day, for many years in a row, she wore mourning robes on this festive day for women.
You did not learn that my father Yakov Gordon, with whom you debated world literature, was declared in the same 1949 a “traitor to the fatherland” for praising the great German poet of Jewish descent, Heinrich Heine. You did not learn that my father was accused of treason and of collaborating with foreign intelligence. You did not learn that I, the son of your cousin Dora, was accused of treason against my country and detained on suspicion of spying for Israel thirty years after the cosmopolitan pogrom.
You had no wife. Your children, my third cousins, were never born and never became my friends. You never managed to grow old. You stayed a twenty-year-old boy, a soldier. You were not born a soldier – “soldiers are not born,” soldiers die. You liked to live, to laugh, to talk wittily. You and I do not know each other, Mara, for I was born after that war. You died with arms in your hands, fighting the Nazis in Estonia, somewhere on Dago Island. I came to live in our nation’s country and held a gun in my hands, too. So, did my son and my daughter. Jews have fought, Jews are fighting, but over and over again it sounds and will sound: “Jews did not fight”.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.