A Holocaust
by Oleksandr Boichenko
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of the 100th - at that point it was already called ‘Lviv’ - Division of the First Ukrainian Front entered the territory of the almost emptied out Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. A few days later, Soviet film crews arrived there to film “The Chronicle of the Liberation”. Children were once again put into their striped uniforms and forced to roll up their sleeves and show their numbers for the cameras. On this occasion, on January 23, 2020, a professional descendant of killers of millions of Ukrainians (and, of course, not only Ukrainians) Vladimir Putin arrived at the World Holocaust Forum in Israel in order to explain to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israeli President Rivlin, and a few dozen foreign heads of state and government gathered at Yad Vashem - to the sound of their applause - that while there have been many tragedies in world history, there have only been two truly grand ones: the Holocaust and the Siege of Leningrad. And also, that there are many problems in today’s world but, once again, only two truly grand ones: antisemitism and russophobia. Netanyahu, Rivlin, and a few dozen foreign heads of state and government happily agreed with him.
Meanwhile, eleven years ago, terminally ill and aware of that, Tony Judt said in conversation with Timothy Snyder, “As a state, Israel - in my view irresponsibly - exploits the fears of its own citizens. At the same time, it exploits the fears, memories and responsibilities of other states. But in so doing, it risks over the course of time consuming the very moral capital that enabled it to exercise such exploitation in the first instance… In the years to come, Israel is going to devalue, undermine and ultimately destroy the meaning and serviceability of the Holocaust, reducing it to what many people already say it is: Israel’s excuse for bad behavior.”
Tony Judt was not only a great historian but also a Jew who in the spring of 1967 was searching (with Zionist enthusiasm) for volunteers in England and later on proceeded to travel to Israel to contribute to the victory in the Six-Day War - first by working in a kibbutz and then by volunteering in auxiliary forces. Therefore, Judt had a moral right to make any sort of statements about Israel’s subsequent policies. He did have that moral right; however, to me, those words seemed like an outrageous exaggeration until recently. After Putin’s show at Yad Vashem they no longer do.
I will return to the triumph of Putin’s will on Israeli soil later. In any case, media outlets around the world have dedicated countless materials to this subject, so anyone who wanted to know already does. Meanwhile, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld’s book “Blooms of Darkness” continues to be much less known, at least in Ukraine. His novel “Katerina”, translated by Viktor Radutskyi and Ivan Bilyk, has not gained a whole lot of publicity either. Which is a pity: for what it is worth, the novel is written from the perspective of a Ukrainian village woman who saves Jewish children from other Ukrainian villagers. And even though these villagers are unequivocally portrayed as anti-Semites, Katerina herself turns out to be such a positive heroine that in Europe and in the US the author, according to his own confession, is harshly criticized, “being accused of idealizing Ukrainians”.
So, “Blooms of Darkness”. Having been born in Stara Zhadova, a village in Bukovyna, Aharon (according to his Romanian documents - Ervin) Appelfeld later lived with his parents in Chernivtsi, where the war caught up to him when he was nine years old. Having lost his mother right away, he was deported together with his father to a labor camp in Transnistria, which he promptly escaped and spent the rest of the German-Romanian occupation hiding wherever he could or wandering around villages with other displaced people. When a Soviet offensive took place somewhere between the rivers of Southern Bug and Dnister, Aharon enlisted as, let’s say, a “son of the regiment” at an army field kitchen, traveled with it to Yugoslavia, learning the full range of Russian curse words on the way, and finally - through Italy - got to Palestine. There, he mastered Hebrew and went on to become one of the most famous Israeli writers and the author of forty-seven books, including “Blooms of Darkness”.
Quite simple from the stylistic and compositional point of view, this semi-autobiographical novel is capable of eliciting in a reader reflections that are not at all simple. The location is not explicitly mentioned, but any person from Chernivtsi can easily recognize their city. Time period: the Holocaust. Two main characters: a Jewish boy Hugo, more or less the same age as the author, and a Ukrainian prostitute Mariana, more or less the same age as Hugo’s mother. Having no other way to save her son, the mother places Hugo in Mariana’s dubious custody, and Mariana promises to protect and watch him “like a hawk”.
That is how he ends up in a brothel closet and through the cracks in its walls he tries to understand what is going on beyond this mysterious establishment, in it, and in Mariana’s bed. Little by little, the boy and the prostitute grow closer together. In the minutes free from occupant clients, she lets Hugo into her room and bathroom, bathes him, hugs and kisses him, until one night… what should we call it... she gives him his first lesson in adult love. Then the second, the third, and so on. Meanwhile Mariana keeps her promise to Hugo’s mother, too, risking her life more than once; therefore, the fact that he was the only person from his family to survive is entirely her accomplishment.
No doubt, this is for the sake of empty curiosity and nothing more, but it is tempting to fantasize whether Yad Vashem would award such a Mariana with the “Righteous Among the Nations” title, making her the whoever saves one life saves the world entire? Or would it decide that in her actions she was driven by a desire to corrupt a minor? Because, keeping in mind the opposite examples of a greedy NSDAP party member Oscar Schindler and a selfless metropolitan bishop Andrii Sheptytskyi, the Yad Vashem logic can work in different ways. However, in “Blooms of Darkness”, Putin’s NKVD predecessors who, following that same 100th - at that point not yet called ‘Lviv’ – Division, enter Chernivtsi, do not care about such dilemmas in the slightest: they catch Mariana, shoot her for cooperating with the occupants and continue onwards to the West. Alright, I remember Mariana is but a literary character. However, history also remembers, for instance, Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust fire, after which he died like a martyr in Lubyanka.
Furthermore, those in the know remember how the honoring of the Holocaust victims looked five years ago, when heads of state and government did not applaud Putin in Jerusalem (an event paid for by his servant and, coincidentally, the President of the European Jewish Congress - Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor) and instead visited - without Putin, who was not invited - the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. They came not to give cynical speeches but to listen to speeches of the concentration camp’s ex-prisoners. For a second there, I was under the impression that the world had finally realized an obvious truth which I had once seen on a poster in Krakow: “Today, Hitler sits in the Kremlin”. Surely, five years ago, inviting him to a Holocaust memorial event was an idea that only a degenerate like Czech President Zeman could come up with.
Since then, because of the Kremlin’s Hitler, the blood of thousands and thousands of innocent people has been spilled in different corners of our planet, including Jewish blood, including on Israeli soil. It has been spilled and it continues to be spilled - now accompanied by the applause of the “world leaders” who this ghoul openly mocks, faking the past before their eyes and feeding them fairy-tales about fighting hatred, national egoism and chauvinism, meaning all the things he has been building his international politics on for the past two decades. The triumph of Hitler’s upgraded version at Yad Vashem is a moral holocaust on a global scale and of magnitude that has not been seen since the Holocaust. I am afraid - but I also hope - that the world pays for it accordingly. Because a world in which such things are possible does not have a right to exist.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Boychenko