Polonia mon amour

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality
By Timothy Snyder, The New York Review of Books, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 12, JULY 16, 2009 (USA)

Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls for a complete review of the way we see the Holocaust, because the symbolic power of Auschwitz has closed our eyes to the fact that until 1943, when most of the Western European Jews were deported to concentration camps, a third of Europe’s Jews were already dead. “The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.” Leggi tutto – segnalato da signandsight.com