The 1919 Massacre of Ukrainian Jews |
The Origin of the Holocaust It is commonly
believed that the mass murder of 6 million European Jews began with the
appointment of Hitler as chancellor of Germany in 1933.
The facts are otherwise. It was on February
15 in 1919 that Ukrainians murdered over 1000 Jews in the town of Proskurov.
These murders continued until 1921 in both the Ukraine and Poland, so that it is
not surprising that the Christian population in both countries were most eager
to continue this slaughter when German armies invaded these countries and
demanded that the population participate in the killing of the Jewish minorities
in both countries. As German armies entered Ukraine and Poland in 1941, the mass
murder of the local Jewish population was merely a continuation of the slaughter
of Jews which began in 1919 and ended in 1921. In a number of
Polish and Ukrainian towns, Jews were locked into synagogues (Greek for
assembly), which were then set on fire, burning the Jews to death. Guns were
aimed at the doors, so that any Jew attempting to escape could be shot. In both
Poland and the Ukraine, 300,000 Jews were starved to death. In the Ukraine, the
population showed the German invaders the homes of Jews. This led Germans and
Ukrainians to enter these homes and kill all who lived there, including sick
patients in their beds and little children. In a ravine called Babi Yar the
Ukrainians murdered thousands of Jews. Then the populations of both countries,
like the Germans, stole all the possessions of the slaughtered Jews. In Poland, German
troopers entered Jewish hospitals and tossed newborn babies out of the windows
of maternity wards. The tiny children died on the concrete below as their little
heads burst on impact; their brains flowed out of their tiny skulls.
In Germany, Austria,
and other European countries, the population tore Torah scrolls to pieces,
despite the fact that Christians were reading the same Bible in translation. Even in France, the
country which prided itself on having been the first to make freedom of religion
a cornerstone of French democracy, the population was happy to send French Jews
to the German gas chambers so that Christians could steal all Jewish property. The truth is that
the Holocaust was a European enterprise fueled by religious hate and greed . It
is significant that the killers of Jews in Europe knew the Jewish victims for
years as neighbors and even relatives but murdered the Jews whom they had known,
not only because of religious bigotry, but also because the murder of Jews was
allowed and encouraged by church and state, and because sadistic cruelty was
allowed. Today, in the 21st
century, Americans distinguish themselves by condemning religious hate and
persecution despite the existence, even in the USA, of anti-Jewish propaganda
fueled by Arab immigrants. Eastern Europe, once
the home of ten million Jews, is today devoid of any sizable Jewish communities.
The mass murder of Jews is hardly possible now, as there are not enough Jews in
eastern Europe to kill, and because Israel exists despite Arab efforts to repeat
another holocaust. It is evident that
the murder of Jews in eastern Europe made the Nazi killings less horrible, since
all murders make the next murders less important and part of normal life.
Killing Jews was normal behavior in eastern Europe when the Germans came there
in 1939 and carried out what eastern Europeans had done for years. Furthermore, the
Nazi mass murders led to the disregard and forgetting of the atrocities already
common to Poles and Ukrainians before the Germans came. Shalom u'vracha. |