Alison Croggon wrote:
>The gulags and forced famines of Stalin still don't occupy the
>same kind of imaginative place as the Nazi concentration camps, although in
>many ways they were just as horrific, and killed more people. Why doesn't
>the name Kolyma cause the same shudders as Auschwitz?
>
>
Because people like me never heard of Kolyma until just now, and thank
you for bringing the name forward. My entire awareness of the gulags
was that people who didn't get shot under Stalin's rule were
"disappeared" into the wilds of Siberia, never or almost never to
return. I had no name to put on the place or region.
Saying what I just said doesn't answer your question about why Auschwitz
and not Kolyma. I am not sure an answer is possible and I'm flailing
around. Maybe the victims need to tell the story: that is absurd but
it's all I can think of. Jews needless to say have talked and written
at length about the death camps: "Never again" was not simply the motto
of that _vilde chaye_ Meier Kahane. I knew about the Katyn Forest
massacre--another Soviet monstrosity--before I saw the incredible
memorial statue at the foot of Exchange Place in Jersey City: a Polish
trooper lunging forward with a fixed-bayonet rifle through his back, and
with plaques inscribed in both English and Polish describing what
happened sometime in 1940 to 15,000 captured soldiers and officers of
the defeated Polish army. It is frightening and heartbreaking.
Who needs to tell the Kolyma story in order for its name to cause shudders?
ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
|