8 February 2010 Like smoke in the wind

8 February 2010 Like smoke in the wind


In autumn of 1941 the Wermacht waged blitzkrieg in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine as Hitler’s armies were launched into the USSR. Falling back before the German armies, the Red Army followed Stalin’s directive to leave nothing of use for the Germans. The retreating Soviets set every field of grain on fire, denying the Germans the harvest but also denying it to the Soviet citizens left behind German lines. “Scorched Earth” has long been a weapon of war in the Steppes. The grain harvest needed to feed the always hungry USSR and to replant the fields for the next crop was destroyed, carried away in heavy smoke, in signs easy for anyone who understood this part of the world to read. Scorched Earth, empty bellies, and propaganda machines on both sides of the main line of battle cranking out excuses for the populace to help them hate the right targets.

Stalin’s lies were directed, primarily, against the Nazis. WWII became the Great Patriotic War for the survival of the Rodina, the motherland, and it is still known by that name today, long after Stalin and Hitler are dead. There was also some attempt to blame Jews for the hunger, starvation, and millions of deaths that the USSR suffered. Capitalism was always a valid target for the Soviet propaganda mill and Jews are always associated with the international Jewish conspiracy. Never mind that the Bolshevik revolution would not have succeeded without its Jewish masterminds, that Trotsky saved the revolution and built the Red Army; Jews were somehow profiting from the pain of good Soviet citizens.

Hitler’s underlings sent the Einzatzgruppen into the Soviet Union behind the Wermacht with the express purpose of killing every Jew they could and of deporting the remainder to the death camps or to slave labor camps. These units of auxiliary troops were somewhat few in number to carry out the horrific task of murdering or deporting millions of Jews. The planners in the Nazi hierarchy counted on the help of the citizens of the states they were invading to carry out round-ups and executions. They did not underestimate the willingness of the newly defeated to blame their troubles, once again, on their Jewish neighbors; and to join in the opportunity to loot, rape, beat, and kill every Jew they could reach. From the Baltic States to the Black Sea, the Soviet citizens were taking their places in a long history of pogroms and murders based upon long-standing anti-Semitism.

Those Jews who could not flee to safer locales, beyond the reach of the Nazis, died in mass graves, forest executions sites, and in some cases by being burned alive in their own homes. The Ukrainian citizens had no love of Jews and were all too happy to burn their property and farms in revenge for what they had been told was “the Jews’ war.”

All through the Pale such Aktions took place. Good Germans watched and encouraged good Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, as they wiped Shtetls off the map. Today, no one knows how many Shtetls vanished. In the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., there is an elevated corridor made of glass. Every square inch of available wall and ceiling space is etched with the names of Shtetls that vanished from site during the years 1941 & 1942. Like the crops of those years, they are smoke in the wind, frozen in time lest we allow them and the people who lived in them to be lost from memory.

Like smoke in the wind, those names, and the ones that no one knew to record, tear at my eyes.