As hard as this may be
to believe, it is entirely possible that in a few years, Europe will
no longer set aside a special day to commemorate the Holocaust. Instead,
Europeans will mark August 23, the day of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop
nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which
paved the way for the German and Russian invasions of Poland, as
a day of commemoration for the victims of Nazism and communism.
Given the enormous increase during the past decade in Holocaust
awareness and education, such a prediction might sound very unlikely,
but if the campaign being currently waged by Lithuania, Latvia and
Estonia, with support from other post-communist countries, to equate
communism with Nazism succeeds, that will be only one of many very
problematic changes in the manner in which Europeans relate to the
annihilation of European Jewry.
PERHAPS THE MOST disturbing aspect of the problem is the virtually
total ignorance and apathy of Israel and the Jewish world in response
to this campaign, which has been conducted for well over a decade
and has recently been upgraded with very worrying results. Only last
week, for example, the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE (Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe) which met in Vilnius, Lithuania
passed a resolution calling for the establishment of August 23 as
a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and Nazism, with
the only opposition registered by Russia and a few European communists.
The truth is that in this regard, the handwriting has been on the
wall practically from the renewal of Baltic independence. Since 1991,
in meetings with senior Baltic officials, in response to our demands
that they acknowledge the extensive scope of Baltic collaboration
in Nazi crimes, prosecute local Nazi war criminals and rewrite the
history textbooks to accurately reflect this reality, they always
tried to divert the discussion to their suffering under the Russian
occupation and the role of Jewish communists in Soviet crimes.
Thus it was hardly surprising that in when these governments decided
to establish historical commissions to investigate the crimes suffered
during their occupation, they insisted, despite protests from the
Wiesenthal Center and other groups, on combining the research on
local Holocaust crimes with that on communist crimes in one unified
body.
Another related phenomenon was that Baltic leaders consistently
repeated the historically inaccurate mantra that communist crimes
were genocidal. I will never forget my meeting in Vilnius in the
early 1990s with Vytautas Landsbergis, then Lithuanian head of state,
who in response to my gift of a volume on Holocaust research, reciprocated
with a book on the mass deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia, which
he referred to as "our Holocaust."
Add the total failure of the Baltics to prosecute local Nazi war
criminals, the efforts to divert almost exclusive blame for the murders
to the Germans and Austrians, and the establishment of genocide or
occupation museums which which totally ignore local Holocaust crimes
and Nazi collaboration, and the pattern becomes crystal clear.
About two years ago, emboldened by the failure of the European Union,
the United States, Israel and the Jewish world to hold the Baltics
accountable in a meaningful manner for their manifold failures in
dealing with Holocaust issues (prosecution, restitution, documentation,
etc.), these governments intensified their campaign to create official
symmetry between communism and Nazism.
THEIR FIRST major success was the June 3, 2008 "Prague Declaration
on European Conscience and Communism" signed by Vaclev Havel
and numerous members of the European Parliament, which called for
the establishment of August 23 as an official day of remembrance
for Nazi and communist victims "in the same way Europe remembers
the victims of the Holocaust on January 27, as well as an "Institute
of European Memory and Conscience" to serve as a museum, research,
and educational center on these crimes. The rationale presented for
these steps points to the "substantial similarities between
Nazism and communism" and warns that "Europe will not be
united unless it is able to reunite its history [and] recognize communism
and Nazism as a common legacy."
While one can sympathize with the legitimate desire of the victims
of communism for recognition, there is nothing innocent about this
declaration which clearly seeks to undermine the current status of
the Holocaust as a unique historical tragedy and relativize it to
divert attention from the extensive collaboration of Balts with the
Nazis and the abysmal failure of all their governments since independence
to adequately deal with these issues.
On September 23, 2008, more than 400 members of the European Parliament
signed a declaration supporting the establishment of August 23 as "European
Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism" and
on April 2, 2009, a resolution similar to the Prague Declaration
passed in the same body by a vote of 533-44 with 33 abstentions.
A month ago, however, when I asked the members of the Israeli global
forum on anti-Semitism whether anyone had heard of the Prague Declaration,
not a single member responded positively.
It is clear that the time has come to start paying attention to
this insidious campaign being conducted primarily by Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia to alleviate their guilt for Holocaust crimes and displace
the Shoah from its unique status. If not, we are likely to soon find
ourselves facing the cancellation of the numerous important achievements
of the past decade in Holocaust commemoration and education and forced
to fight an uphill battle against a new and distorted World War II
historical narrative.
jpost.com
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