Declan Hayes
When I visited
Kraków for some dental treatment in late January 2022 just before Putin sent
his peace-keeping forces into Ukraine, I made a point of not visiting either
Auschwitz or Schindler’s factory for the same reason I did not visit
Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum on the two occasions I visited Zion. Quite
frankly, not only have I a gut full of hearing about Anne Frank, the boy in the
striped pyjamas and Holocaust survivors who, like the old soldiers that they
are, refuse to die, but I hate having propaganda of any sort rammed down my
neck.
That said, I am
not a politician or social influencer like King Charles, and so I am not
expected to show up, like Megan Markle, to give hugs and kisses at jamborees
like that which Auschwitz will host on the 80th anniversary of its 27th January
1945 liberation by Russia’s 322nd Rifle Division.
I say Russia and
not the Red Army or the Soviet Union because, as the Red Army’s 322nd Division
was raised in Gorky in Moscow, it was overwhelmingly Russian, a not
inconsequential point that Russian President Putin probably knew when he
accompanied 322nd veteran Ivan Martynushkin and Auschwitz survivor Irina
Kharina to Auschwitz some years ago.
Although
Martynushkin will, if he is still alive, probably be a no show at Auschwitz
this year, so too will Russian President Putin, Belarusian President Lukashenko
and Venezuelan President Maduro, who has a $25 million bounty on his head
because he refused to cede power to American puppet Juan Guaidó, whom former
Irish MEP Mick Wallace accurately described as an unelected gobshite. And,
though the hard line Times of Israel has predictably castigated Maduro, who was
raised in the one, holy and apostolic Catholic faith, as an anti-Semite, even
they are forced to admit that his grandparents “were Jewish, from a [Sephardic]
Moorish background” and that, in short, Maduro’s family are as much Holocaust
survivors, as are those of Dubliner, John Boyne, who wrote the Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas, and who spent his childhood amidst Dublin’s Jews, who spent
their entire time building exclusive golf clubs when Hungary’s Jews were going
up the chimney at Auschwitz.
Although both
the world and his mother have heard of Boyne’s fictional boy in his striped
pyjamas, the publicity attending that is as nothing to what Anne Frank, a young
Dutch Jew who perished at Auschwitz, has posthumously had bestowed on her. And,
though I have no intention of reading her juvenile jottings, poignant though
they may be, I am more interested in the fate of those 22,000 Dutch citizens
who perished in their 1944/5 famine unless, as seems to be the case, they are
children of a lesser God than the equally unfortunate Ms. Frank. Or how about
this excellent article by Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the few Irish historians and
authors worth his salt, which tells us of the Soviet famine (9 million dead),
Churchill’s deliberately concocted 1943 Bengal famine (2 million dead), China’s
Henan famine (2 million dead), the Dutch East Indies’ Java famine (2.5 million
dead), Vietnam’s famine (1 million dead), Greece’s Great Famine (300,000 dead)
or Austria’s famine (100,000 dead)? Are they all too children of that same
lesser God, or are they too worthy of remembrance?
Before returning
to Lukashenko and Putin, let me say that, having read MI6 officer Norman Lewis’
Naples ‘44, I quickly travelled to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, such was
the effect of his powerful writing on me. Although I could not praise Lewis’
haunting writings on Southern Italy or French Indo China highly enough, anybody
who even thinks that the Neapolitans and the Vietnamese got off lightly
deserves very much more than a Mike Tyson punch in the mouth.
Which is the
very least any Belarusian of Lukashenko’s vintage would give you, were you to
run your mouth off there, in what was the very epicentre of World War Two, the
Great Patriotic War as they called it.
Not that Putin’s
hometown of St Petersburg, Leningrad as it was then called, got off lightly and
members of Putin’s own family were among the over 1,000,000 St Petersburg
residents who perished as a direct consequence of Finland’s Final Solution to
their very existence.
Although Putin’s
Presidential role dictates he must play the diplomat and, although NATO’s wags
like to believe he is hamming it up in clips like this where he braves
torrential rains to salute Russia’s own unknown fallen, that is to negate his
formative years in St Petersburg where the savagery of the Finns and their
German and Italian allies must never be forgotten.
Although
Putin’’s own formative experiences probably partially explains why he
accompanied 322nd veteran Ivan Martynushkin to Auschwitz some years ago, it is
also indicative of why we should read this Taipei Times interview with
Martynushkin to get not only a deeper and fuller appreciation of what the 322nd
and the entire Red Army and Russian people suffered but to more fully
understand whatever relevant lessons Auschwitz has to offer us as well.
Although I will
never visit the propaganda museums of Auschwitz and Zion, I must say I enjoyed
my visit to their equivalent in Saigon, where the young Vietnamese children
there with me enthusiastically lapped it all up like ducks to water and good on
every last one of them for that and for the curators for helping to instil
national pride in those future Ho Chi Minhs and Võ Nguyên Giáps.
But, quite apart
from some minor point scoring of the sort that now typifies Auschwitz and the
plethora of Holocaust museums in the Western world, my hope is that Russia,
India, China, Indonesia and the rest of the civilised world would take a leaf
out of Vietnam’s playbook, scale it up and make worthwhile museums and memorial
libraries in Kazan. Mongolia, Henan or some similar venues to all the victims
of imperialism, not only in Auschwitz but also in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola
and countless other places like Bengal and Vietnam that deserve to have their
stories told as repeatedly and as forcefully as has the story of Anne Frank and
John Boyne’s fictional boy in his fictional pyjamas.
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