When considering the immense nature
of that historic tragedy known as the Holocaust
it is easy to think of it in homocentric terms – as if it were one
all-encompassing event stretching across Nazi-occupied Europe from the late
1930s to the end of WWII. Actually it
was a “whole” made up of many sad and sadistic pieces. The little-known “piece”
I write about today emerged from research started several years ago when I
became interested in work carried out by the post-war nation of Israel for the
purpose of identifying and honoring largely forgotten individuals from among
all the nations who had stepped forward to help Jewish victims, such as Oskar Schindler, a Polish businessman,
often paying with their own fortunes and very lives to do so. Those mostly lost
and unheralded “heroes” are commemorated and remembered as The Righteous Among the Nations;
and they number in the thousands.
The Ponary region of Lithuania, with
borders which had been “re-drawn”, first by the League of Nations at the end of
WWI, the Russians upon annexation in 1939, and the Nazis in 1941, was the scene
of a particularly brutal chapter of history. The principal languages there were
Polish and Yiddish reflecting the large (and unloved) Jewish population. To
successive SS Einsatzenkommando units
sent in following invasion with the mission of liquidating the Jews, the
simmering hatred of the Christian population for the Jews seemed a ready-made
tool worth making use of. Also just
“begging” to be utilized were a number of large circular excavations dug for
petroleum storage tanks which had never arrived.
With the promise of restored rule as
a dangling “carrot” the Lithuanian Police, Militia and just ordinary citizens
were “recruited” to do most of the “dirty” work, herding 3,000 Jews,
intellectuals and other undesirables (men, women and children) each day to the
edge of the excavations where they were disrobed, shot or clubbed to death and
dumped in the holes. Observers who managed to escape the slaughter reported
that not all were dead when covered with a light layer of sand in readiness for
the next day. Between June and December, 1941, between 190,000 and 195,000 Jews
were murdered in the Ponary massacre; 95 % of the Jewish population,
representing the largest loss of life in a single location in so short a time
period in the history of the Holocaust.
A Sergeant (feldwebel) in the German Wehrmacht named Anton Schmid deployed to Vilnius, Lithuania in the fall of 1941,
observed first the sadness of Jewish families being forced into the Ghettos and then the grizzly carnage going on before
his eyes in nearby Ponary. A former shop-owner in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, he had been drafted into the
German Army like so many other Austrians, and fitted into the hated gray
uniform. Unable to reconcile his respect for human life with what he was seeing
– especially the murder of children and babies - he began hiding away as many
Jewish prisoners as he could, one-by-one and two-by-two and caring for them
while he obtained documents for their escape. He is credited with saving the
lives of some 250 before he was discovered and imprisoned. He was executed on
April 13, 1942; 74 years ago this week as I prepare this column. He has been
honored as one of those Righteous Among
the Nations, both in Israel, where a street bears his name and in his
homeland, where once his neighbors threw rocks through his mother’s windows
because he was seen as a traitor.
Beginning at the end of September,
1943 the orders came to destroy all evidence of what had taken place at Ponary
as the advancing Russians threatened discovery. Now the past horrors played out
again – in reverse - as the burial pits had to be reopened, emptied, and the
human remains burned in giant wooden “pyramids” (after gold teeth and other
valuables had been removed, of course.) Bones and other pieces of evidence had
to be pulverized, mixed with sand and reburied. 3500 sets of remains would be
burned in each pyramid with the fires allowed to burn for three days. Once
again, it was local citizens and militia members who did the work while 80 Nazi
guards looked on.
As Edmund Burke reminded us: “all
that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.” Now
and then and here and there brave men and women such as Anton Schmid and others like him prove that humanity is not dead
yet.
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