Day 25

Long before German bureaucrats met in 1942 at Wannsee to plan for the deportation and mechanised murder of European Jewry in extermination camps, before Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor or Belzec were built, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators in the towns and villages of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. These first mass victims of the Holocaust were not transported in crowded cattle cars to secluded industrialised killing centres that define the term “Holocaust” for most of us. These victims – mostly women, children and old people – were taken from their homes, on foot or by truck, to locations just outside the towns and villages where they lived. There they were shot at close range, one human being killing another, and all in the presence of local residents, non-Jewish neighbours, even friends. The murders were co-ordinated by German special killing squads – the Einsatzkom- mandos – but the shooters included units from the surrounding area, as well as willing local nationals or volunteers. These killing sites are now all but invisible. They offer up none of the architectural design that shape the iconic imagery of the Holocaust such as the “Arbeit Macht Frei” encased in ironwork, or the chimney of a crematorium. Even the place names: Bogdanivka (where more Jews were murdered than Babi Yar), Busk, Novo Zlatopol – and hundreds of others, fail to register or resonate with most students of the Shoah.

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