Sixty-five years ago, the advance troops of the Allied Forces operating in Poland, most of them Russian, first became aware in April 1944 of strange areas of deep forest. In clearings of 20 acres or more they repeatedly found evidence of huge fires, the ground charred to a depth of 9 feet in places and the remnants of charcoal blackening the whole cleared forest floor.
Early reports postulated these clearings, perhaps as many as 200 of them, were the sites of secret factories, burned to the ground by the retreating German army. But if something had been made on those charred locations, the transportation means and military intelligence told them that nothing ever left these sites. Locals, unaware of these secret camps, could offer few clues except whispers of horror.
Desperate, fierce fighting continued all through the spring and summer of 1944, the Allies attacking from the east (Russian forces with U.S. and British advisors) and the southwest (British and U.S. forces coming up through Italy). After June 6, D-Day, the triangle of attack on the Third Reich was in full force.
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Then, on July 24, 1944, weeks after D-Day, the Russian army advanced near Lublin in Poland and came across the burned, abandoned Majdanek concentration camp. The charred remains appeared, like so many of those other forest burnings, a puzzle. Except Majdanek had been hastily burned and the remains of upward of 5,000 bodies were easily uncovered.
In the end, German records, those not destroyed at the site, revealed that 360,000 had been killed there, their bodies either burned or heaped into mass graves. Enraged by the discovery, the Allied Forces knew what to look for. In January 1945 they liberated Auschwitz.
It would be almost a full year before U.S. and British troops advancing into Germany came across the first grim Western Front discovery: Bergen-Belsen camp, revealed on April 15, 1945. With records captured (and the Allies estimated in 1947 that 50 percent of all such records had been destroyed), the Eastern and Western front death toll was staggering. These were numbers no one could even count up to (Note: Try. Try counting even to 1 million, it will take you a week).
Had no one known of this slaughter? Had no reporter or journalist uncovered or guessed what the Nazis had planned? Some had, and had not been listened to. As just one example, in the Daily Telegraph, a prominent London newspaper, reported on Nov. 12, 1938, that Jews and dissidents were being sent to concentration camps. A month later they reported reliable sources as saying sterilizations and exterminations had begun. And yet, no one in America or most of the world reacted.
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Today, systematic extermination of a people is called genocide or holocaust. These are simple words that those of us who did not live in those times (or, cowardly, may have pretended they did not exist) can barely understand, much less value the depth of their meaning to those who witnessed or experienced such horrors. And because we were not there, and are grateful we did not have to live through those times, we avoid discussing the real horrors, rehashing the true numbers and the profound impact on the psyche of all humanity. There are those people, specifically selected and targeted in this horror, who vow never to forget and never to allow us to forget. What is shameful is that we, the lucky, get tired of listening to their reminders.
So, just in case you, with your genealogy, ethnicity or religion, feel you had little in common with those who were made to suffer, let me give you some current estimates of the depth of the catastrophe. Remember, if you trace your family back, no doubt somewhere down the line you will discover a long-lost relative in the Holocaust. Mathematically, simply, this many people are, with certainty, related to virtually every other person in the Western world.
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To the best of our historic knowledge, based on German records recovered and human remains uncovered, those who perished at the hand of the Nazis and their allies number approximately 20 million Russians of various faiths, 10 million Christians (including 2,000 priests), more than 6 million Jews, all the Gypsies known (or found after January 1943) in Eastern Europe, several hundreds of thousands of Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Rumanians and Yugoslavs, tens of thousands of French and Italians, northern Europeans (particularly the Dutch where as many as 200,000 perished) and, of course, thousands of anti-Nazi Germans, Austrians and all other nationalities. The overall figure is believed to be between 38 and 40 million people. And that does not count the 15 million reported missing at the time, still unaccounted for.
Here, 65 years later, is a chance to reflect, observe remembrance and make sure the next generations learn the lessons well and quell the idiotic doubters once and for all.
Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, N.Y., now lives in New Mexico.
