An Anniversary forgotten

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auschwitz, Birkenau, Death, Fascism, Italy, Nazi, Primo Levi, WWII

This past week was the 75th Anniversary of the arrival of Soviet troops in Poland in their offensive to defeat Nazi Germany and so called liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camps. Currently I am reading a biography on Primo Levi, the celebrated Italian author from Turin who was interned at Auschwitz from February 1944. In the biography by Ian Thomson written in 2019 on the centennial of Primo Levi birth, we have a very good picture in Levi’s words of what that camp life was like, of the people he knew, of those who died and those who survived. We also read about the Germans at the camp who ran the factories for I.G. Farben and BASF. In order to survive Levi says; you had to find a way to do as little as possible to preserve your energy.

Levi had a long career in Turin as a chemist and he became a celebrated author of poems, short stories for children, science fiction and on his own life experience. His work took him to Germany in the 1950’s to 1970’s and he writes about his view of Germans and Germany and also of his own country Italy and its long period under the Fascist dictatorship which led to Italian Jews like himself being singled out and how after 1945 Italy continued and continues to this day to have in its political life the heirs of Mussolini’s ideals.

Levi’s book If this is a man and his other book Truce speaks of his experience while incarcerated. Levi survived the camps because he had been educated and worked as a Chemist, his skills were in demand. After the Soviets arrival he then recounts how going home was not so simple. The Soviets had their own agenda, a harrowing tale.

During my posting to Warsaw, Poland I was delegated to go to Auschwitz- Birkenau 3 times for official remembrance ceremonies. The camps are near Krakow and a small sign on the highway to Krakow indicates the cut off to the village of Oswiecim. A quiet little village with a railway crossing it the camps are just outside the village limits.

My first visit was a commemoration for the Sinti people and the mass extermination of 2 August 1944 in the sector of the camp housing them. The Sinti and Roma imprisoned in the camp came primarily from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bavaria and Moravia, and Poland, with smaller groups arriving from France, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia/Croatia, Belgium, the USSR, Lithuania, and Hungary. There is also mention of Sinti and Roma citizens of Norway and Spain.

It is estimated that about 23 thousand men, women, and children were imprisoned in the camp. About 21 thousand were registered in the camp (including the more than 370 children estimated to have been born there). A group of about 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma was murdered immediately after arriving at the camp, without being entered in the records.

Of the approximately 23 thousand Sinti and Roma deported to Auschwitz, some 21 thousand died or were murdered in the gas chambers. There was one man at the ceremony who had missed being gassed simply because the night before he was transferred to a labour camp and survived. It was very strange to see one survivor out  of many thousand who perished being present to bear witness. His survival depended on Fate.

The terrible thing about those camps was how they had been set up as of 1933 to exterminate all enemies of Nazi Germany at first all German Opposition political figures were targeted, intellectuals and artists. Then the long list of enemies of the Reich, people from all walks of life, from criminals to political prisoners, to activists, people belonging to groups declared to be sub-humans like the Sinti and Roma people, Jews, priests, nuns, any religious denomination, resistance fighters, POW who were marginally better treated, homosexuals, and anyone who simply did not fit into the Nazis book for a perfect society. This also included members of Royal families of Europe who worked against Nazi occupation of their respective country.  Everyone had a badge to wear to identify the group they belonged to and the number tattoo on their arm. Since the usual life expectation was 3 months, the number on one’s arm could show if you had lived beyond the usual 90 day period, some like Levi did. The memory of Auschwitz-Birkenau is that of a large industrial death factory whose sole purpose was to exterminate quickly those the Nazi had identified as undesirable.

Today some 75 years later, Auschwitz has become a name in history books. Far too many docu-drama have in my opinion cheapened the memory of the atrocities to the point of trivializing them. During my visits to Auschwitz I did hear comments from visitors which illustrated the depth of ignorance and indifference to what they were seeing, I could not help thinking that these same people could probably have been inmates if we went back in time.  In the biography of Primo Levi, a quote from him illustrates how to think of this horrible episode in history, Levi says: We must master the past otherwise the past will master us.

Primo Levi (174517) 1919-1987, born and died in Turin, Italy in the same house at Corso Re Umberto 75. 

two view points

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Canada., documentary, Germany, Marshall Plan, Nazi, post war, UK, USA, war, WWII

Recently I was surfing on You Tube and found two short documentary films both made in 1946. One is British and the other is American, same topic, same story but completely different approach. The British one is highly moralistic and full of condescension, preachy and negative. The American one is Bon Enfant in tone that American way of being optimistic and full of yes we can do this and all will be well now, no worries folks, we are here to make friends and build the future. I often long for that America which appears to have vanished.

Of course the two documentaries are about Germany 1946, the war is over, the Nazi regime defeated, its leadership dead or in jail. Now it is time for re-construction and with that post war view of all is possible. The American want to bring prosperity to the defeated nation, it shows us a German family, father, mother and two kids. Father works in a factory, responsible fellow, mom the good housewife and the kids happy. The nightmare of the Nazi dictatorship which lasted 12 years is over. The narrator even inserts German words into the dialogue so the viewer can see that the former enemy is now just a simply guy wanting to get on with life. The family has a meal together, father smokes a pipe, kids do homework and their home is simple but clean. For all you know this could be an American family. The American documentary is somewhat naive, you think of innocents abroad as Mark Twain use to say.

Contrast this with the British documentary, it is full of reproach against that awful people who inflicted two world wars on the World in the space of 20 years. Forgetting that the First World War was about Europe including the British sleepwalking into a conflict that could have been averted. The narrator then goes on to mention the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 as further proof of the perfidious Germans. Forgetting to tell us that Queen Victoria, the most German of British Monarchs cheered Bismarck on that one and only changed her tune when her Ministers told her the public could not understand her pro-German sentiment.

The British documentary shows you a lot of devastated German cities, people walking about aimlessly, stunned by the defeat and the catastrophe they brought on themselves. The narrator says “What are we to do with these people” “should we let them starve”, ” Kill them all”. All rhetorical questions of course, the narrator goes on to say it is our duty to reform them and educated them so they can set aside their terrible ideas. He also brings in Christian principals and values, all is presented as a burden for the civilized British people. Redemption of the German people will come through atonement for sins, the narrator then goes on to name German Industrialists like Krupp who made money from the war, comical really, as if no one in Britain ever made a huge profit from the war. Everyone must be punished! Emphatically states the narrator almost in hysterical tones.

Looking at it I thought, well here we go again, same nonsense from the British and the French we saw in 1919 which lead directly to hardship and the rise of Nazism. Luckily this time the new Super Power America is there to set the tone and by 1948 Britain will be pushed to the margins as the Empire crumbles, same fate awaits the French and their colonial empire.

You certainly do not see in the British documentary any spirit of Internationalism, it is still about revenge and the old European rivalries. The documentary in itself speaks to a British audience, holding fast certain beliefs about the enemy, which cannot be revisited or re-interpreted. In Canada we also bought into the British interpretation of the war and to this day presentation follows orthodox lines. The Americans being a new Super Power can be magnanimous, they have no past sins.

The British documentary forgets to mention that the war could not be won by Britain alone, all the Commonwealth countries and Canada came to the rescue. Britain was almost defeated by Germany during the Battle of Britain. They also forget to mention that Edward VIII and Ms Simpson’s were Nazi sympathizers and if Britain fell they would have been happy to help Herr Hitler, sanitize Britain and get rid of Churchill and brother George VI. Unclassified documents today show what had long been suspected but never mentioned publicly.

I just found those two documentaries fascinating and indicative of the post-war period.

This British exclusionary spirit still exist today, the latest is the Brexit vote on 23 June, will Britain leave the European Union over some imagined fantasy of not being able to control their own destiny? As if Britain today could go at it alone, what of all the British citizens now living, working for years in other EU countries, out of the EU means they go home to the Sceptre Isle which would certainly created an economic crisis of large proportions. Again it is this idea that people have to play by our rules and Britain is not open to working with others unless it can dictate the terms.

General DeGaulle back in 1969 said that Britain should not be allowed to enter into the Common Market as the EU was then called. He could foresee problems because of British attitudes. In Europe the rivalries die hard, sad really.

 

 

 

Books I am reading

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Bolchevism, Fallada, Germany, Lenin, Nazism, Russia, Soviet, Stalin, terror, USSR, WWII

Recently I started two books, one was given to me by someone who came in for an interview at the Museum it is entitled Alone in Berlin, by German writer Hans Fallada (nom de plume) whose real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen (1893-1947). He was the greatest writer of the XXth century. Fallada suggests that morality under the Nazi Dictatorship was not measured by the size of the struggle; it mattered only that one did not capitulate…the very act of writing Alone in Berlin – to say nothing of the stunning political clout of the novel itself – implies that for Fallada, the artist’s true role under fascism was chiefly one of bearing witness.

The story starts in an apartment building in central Berlin where several families live. All have different economic conditions, a retired senior Judge, an old Jewess, a worker and his wife, a Nazi party family with sons in the SS, a shifty alcoholic and his prostitute wife and their 5 kids. Tragedy strikes when the worker Quangel and his wife learn by official letter of the death of their son Otto, a soldier in the German Army invading France, this death will make of them resisters, the book is dark and full of anguish and fear. The Quangel write postcards denouncing the Fuhrer and leave them around Berlin. The Gestapo and the SS embark on a hunt to find whoever is responsible and it is a game of Cat and Mouse. The reader understands that many Germans resisted the Nazi, hated them but given the politics of fear and the Police State with the constant threat of the Concentration Camp for anyone resisting or criticizing the Fuhrer, people kept their heads low. Fallada who lived through it all also explains how the Nazi regime financed itself through extortion of the public in general and Party members.

Primo Levi called this book ”the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis. I have read other books about German resistance and living conditions during the Nazi dictatorship, it has been 75 years now and more biographies and diaries are coming out, it was not a black and white picture many shades of grey and complex reality. The picture is one of a society in turmoil and we have to ask ourselves what would we do if we lived in such atmosphere where the police can arbitrarily arrest you, beat you up, kill you or send you to a concentration camp. Where the wrong word can mean a death sentence, where no one can be trusted, where no one will be foolish enough to come to your defence.

A few years ago I read two biographies entitled Purgatory of Fools and Berlin Diaries 1940-45, it was the stories of two sisters of Russian-German origin, Marie Princess Vassilchikov and Tatiana Princess Metternich. Both worked at the German Foreign Ministry as secretaries and were implicated in the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944. They miraculously survived the war. However they do give a gripping account of the horrors under the Nazis.

The other book is about Joseph Stalin, who was not Russian but Georgian who becomes  the all powerful dictator of Soviet Russia under the Bolcheviks. Entitled Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It gives a psychological picture of the man and his family and entourage. It also re-establishes in reality what actually happened from 1917 onwards, removing all the romantic nonsense about the Revolution or that it was done for the people. What we see is how the people, the peasants, millions of people were starved, put to death, a country destroyed by fanaticism similar to what we see with the Taliban today. It was not the overthrow of the Tsar or the old Aristocratic Regime that was achieved, since the regime stop to exist in February 1917 by the sudden abdication of Nicholas II forced out by his cousins, a surprise to all including the Bolcheviks. No it was the fanatical pursuit of an inhumane ideology ”Bolchevism” to create the new man, a robot  basically who only thought in terms of means of production, devoid of any human feelings described as Bourgeois sentimentality.

The author Montefiore gives us a detailed psychological portrait of the people in Stalin’s entourage, few actual Russians, many were Jews who occupied top positions around him, their families, the children, their lack of education, their poverty and in the case of the Jewish colleagues the oppression they felt in Russian society. Even after the so called Revolution, Bolchevik Jews could not be promoted to senior positions because they were considered non-Russian, though non-Jews like the Armenians, Ukrainians, Abkazians, our other Ethnic groups could. Stalin will eventually get rid of all of them in his purges.

Montefiore did meticulous research much through interviews of the children now aged, and newly opened Kremlin State Archives , diaries and personal journals of who they were. We see Lenin the petit bourgeois, from a small noble family whose father was a Tsarist bureaucrat, Lenin who was absolutely convinced that in 1919 the world was going to fall into an orgy of blood and revolution, who believed that the people were with him, totally delusional. When he realized that nothing of the sort was happening, he turned to absolute violence against the very people he claimed to be wanting to free. As he said quote Change will come through total terror. Something Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia years later will copy.

Trotsky the Jewish intellectual despised by all for his grandeur and aloofness, forced into exile and later assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin’s orders.

Stalin the Georgian street urchin, low birth and next to no education raised in a violent family background dominated by superstition and blood feud typical of the Mountains he came from, ready to kill for any reason. Stalin’s second wife Nadya, an unstable self-centred egoistical schizophrenic who after a party in 1932 will go to her bedroom in the Kremlin palace and shoot herself. Followed by the horrible vengeance of Stalin on his own family and all his close friends who he will blame for her death. Stalin himself is paranoid and violent, though highly intelligent and manipulative, always suspicious and ready to believe in conspiracy against him. A man who has no scrupules about exterminating, his own word, millions of innocent people simply because they do not fit into Bolchevik ideology. The mass starvation in the Ukraine where 10 million peasant died to satisfy the Five Year Plan for grain export to the rest of the Soviet Empire. The life of luxury on special trains taking the entourage and their families on vacation in the Crimea or to Sochi, the lavish banquets and constant drinking binges while the whole country is in flames gripped by a Civil War and then the purges 1936 of entire families, the old revolutionaries Stalin came to despise and fear, they knew too much. What the author shows us is that the entourage of Stalin who were rough necks of low birth and little education enabled him to become the Boss. He dominated them with his quick grasp of events. But also Stalin’s children how they did not fare very well, his first son Yakov from his first marriage, died during the Second World War a prisoner of the Germans in 1943, Stalin refused to save him for political reasons. He second son Vasily who will become a general in the Soviet Air Force drank himself to death unable to cope with such a father. Svetlana his daughter will fare a little better, but just, she will escape to the West and finally return to Russia to a life of oblivion, the crimes of her dead father followed her everywhere. The only one who appears to have done relatively well is Artyom his adoptive son who became a general and wrote two books about his adoptive father Stalin. He died in Moscow in 1981.

Lenin and others had no plan for the new promised Proletarian society, Bolchevism led to a dead end and Communism and Karl Marx mere shiny objects of little meaning used to retain absolute power over the masses. Stalin with the help of people like Beria, Molotov and others developed a State Secret Police to maintain a system of constant terror, creating the infamous Gulag. Even during the Second World War which again caught the Bolcheviks by surprised, so certain they were of their pact with Hitler to divide the world, Stalin would spy on his own troops at the Front and shoot here and there soldiers on the mere suspicion that they might not be faithful to him. He signed order 270 condemning as traitor any Soviet soldier who surrendered to the enemy or was made a POW.  Some 28 years in power and the total destruction of a society is the legacy of Stalin and his henchmen.

Stalin lived like a Tsar using Palaces and Dachas surrounding himself and his cronies with opulent luxury while the people had nothing. A sad commentary on a revolution that was not and almost 70 years of rule by one ideology. It explains a lot about Russia today and the many problems it faces. If you love history this is a great book.