The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 66

The Saber
shootings of Jews” and they “built and
guarded the gassing facilities at Treblinka,
Bełżec, and Sobibór.” Despite this,
Soviet propaganda after the war was
“helpless to explain how so many people
produced by the Soviet system had
proven to be useful collaborators in the
mass murder of so many other people
produced by the Soviet system.” By extension,
the reality that this mass killing
by Soviets of Soviets (and others) was
facilitated and encouraged by “a totally
alien system (Nazism)” poses a problem
for Soviet communist purists and those
who try to whitewash this history. 41
Identifying the Holocaust solely
with Auschwitz can also lend to separating
“the mass murder of Jews from
human choices and actions” and isolating
that geographical location from everywhere
else that was affected by it. The
perimeter of the camp “[seems] to contain
an evil that ... extended from Paris
to Smolensk.” This evil might manifest
itself through images of “mechanized
killing, or ruthless bureaucracy, or the
march of modernity, or even the endpoint
of enlightenment” when one
thinks of it. This minimalist approach
turns “the murder of children, women,
and men [into] an inhuman process,”
when in fact it was a very human process.
“When the mass murder of Jews
is limited to an exceptional place and
treated as the result of impersonal procedures,
then we need not confront the
fact that people not very different from
us murdered other people not very different
from us at close quarters.” 42
We must not repeat the mistakes
of the past: we must not suppress, re-
3