Six on WW II: Timothy Snyder - Poland vs. History; Europe’s most famous Nazi hunters worry about where the continent is heade
panaritisp
"Treating the bombing of civilians as a global theme, as the museum does, can unsettle stories of the war that are limited to one national perspective. Germans generally associate the bombing of civilians with the end of the war, with the devastation of German cities like Hamburg and Dresden by British and American air raids. Some Germans use these bombings as a kind of counter-balance to German atrocities in the war. Yet a global history of bombing civilians demonstrates that Italians were doing the same in Ethiopia much earlier, following standard European imperial practice. It was Germany itself that brought the imperial practice of mass bombing of civilians to Europe, during the Spanish civil war and then, massively, during the invasion of Poland. As German forces entered Poland in September 1939, the Luftwaffe experimentally bombed defenseless towns, and killed about 25,000 people in Warsaw alone. The American photographer Julien Bryan, who was in Poland at the time, caught on film German planes strafing fleeing civilians, or simply civilians who were at work in the fields. His camera is in the museum’s collection. But if bombing European cities was a German innovation, Americans will hardly be exonerated in this exhibit, which concludes with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How the different powers treated prisoners of war is another theme of the planned museum that brings out crucial insights about the conflict. Here the museum gives special attention to a major German war crime that is almost entirely forgotten. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, German forces deliberately starved three million Soviet prisoners of war. Here and throughout the museum, it is the curators’ insistence on a global and comparative setting that allows a shocking crime to take on an apprehensible form. The German effort to annihilate millions of captured Soviet soldiers makes no sense without some understanding of Nazi racism and Nazi obsessions with food security, which are the subjects of neighboring exhibits. Similarly, the museum will examine the starvation siege of Leningrad, in which another million Soviet citizens perished. One of the texts featured in this section is the heartbreaking diary of a Russian girl, Tanya Savicheva, whose family perished around her: “Only Tanya is left.”
The idea of a radical restructuring of society through war was common across Europe and Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. The planned museum will highlight the different approaches to occupation of the Soviets (before 1941, when the USSR becomes prey rather than predator), the Japanese, and the Germans, while showing that all three sought to rapidly transform the lands they conquered on a very large scale. Once again, German war crimes emerge more clearly in this comparative setting. The German intention to starve tens of millions of east Europeans, known to historians as the Hunger Plan, and German colonial settlement schemes of the early 1940s, known as Generalplan Ost, take on new meaning when juxtaposed with Soviet transformations of the very same territories in the 1930s (which brought famine to Soviet Ukraine and mass shooting actions in 1937 and 1938) and Japan’s efforts to pursue its own vision of economic autarchy and political domination over a large swath of Asian territory."
|
"On August 1, 1942 Frank visited Lemberg and addressed a public gathering. “It is impossible to thank the Fuhrer enough for having entrusted this ancient nest of Jews, this Polish poorhouse, to strong and capable German muscle,” Frank’s son Niklas reports him as telling his audience, in In The Shadow of the Reich (1990), his excoriating account of his father’s inhumanities. Two weeks later, most of the remaining Jews were rounded-up for extermination, as Heinrich Himmler and the governor of Galicia Otto von Wachter met in Lwow. A few weeks after that Socha’s Jews took to the sewers. There is no more devastating first hand account of the period than that provided by Louis Begley in his fictionalized memoir, Wartime Lies (1991), which describes his experiences as a young boy struggling for survival in the city under Nazi control. “Jews found families to hide them so they would not have to go to the ghetto,” Begley writes of the life around him, “and after a week with their saviours they were denounced and shot.”
As In Darkness’s sensitive exploration of group identity and tension suggests, there were no angels in this period, and no single group had a monopoly on terror. Leopold Socha, the man who protects the Jews in the film, was a Pole, but his actions cannot stand for the Polish population in general any more than the actions of the ruthless Nazi Hans Frank, can define every German, or those of the evil Ukrainian officer Bortzik define every Ukrainian. This is the film’s complex lesson: the good Pole saves a few Jewish victims from a bad Ukrainian who is working with ghastly Nazis. The message may or may not be accurate, or capable of being generalized, but it surely explains why the film has been well received in Poland but apparently not yet scheduled for release in Ukraine.
Lviv remains a remarkable city today, although its ability to fully engage with the past is not always apparent. Many of the scholars and writers I have met while teaching at the Law Faculty of Lviv University and also at the new Ukrainian Catholic University over the past two years are eager to engage with the city’s enormously rich history. And while Lvov’s Jewish and Polish roots are now more or less completely extinguished, the signs are there if one looks closely enough, below the surfaces, behind the facades, and etched into doorways.
But recovering that history is not easy. A strident nationalism has emerged across Ukraine in recent years, as the country seeks to define itself in the post-Soviet era, and in the run–up to the European Football Championship in June, which Lviv will co-host with other cities in Poland and Ukraine, the country is once again under scrutiny. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders have recently announced that they will not attend the games unless certain human rights abuses are addressed, including the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko."
Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past
|
|
