The reasons are not hard to find. What shocked people about the final
solution was that it was politically irrational--the victims were for the
most part, among German Jews, gypsies, etc., innocent of any ant-German
sentiment, among the Jews of occupied countries no more ant-german than
anyone else (the Armenian genocide was at least as politically motivated as
it was ethnically), and that it happened in one of "our" countries, not
those strange backward almost subhuman asiatic despotisms, where "we" could
have expected such things to happen. Russia and Turkey didn't betray the
Enlightenment and our expectations of ourselves.
Mark
At 04:24 PM 1/24/2005, you wrote:
>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
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