newsGenocides and ethic cleansings continue to haunt us. Aren’t we all sick to death of those two meaningless words “Never again!”
Memories are made of this: Kulaks were seen by Stalin as wealthy exploiters of the “struggling urban-based Russian masses.” This frightened woman was forced to leave her home with her children and face a cruel and bitter world without food or husband or friends to support her. Her crime? She stored a few bags of corn and vegetables to feed her family.
When it comes to remembering genocides, January is the cruellest month. This year, a handful of Jewish survivors shared their memories of what it was like when soldiers from Russia and the Ukraine liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. But what if we did not have their testimonies, or the remains of death camps in the wartime German occupation of Poland? Who would be able to remember, asked one of America’s most acclaimed historians 30 years ago.?
By Trevor Grundy
Articles and books of quality should be read not just when they are written but when they are most relevant.
Plans for ethnic cleansing in the Middle East make the subject bang up-to-date.
Donald Trump’s ghastly Rivieras of Blood speech in Washington last night about moving over a couple of million Palestinians out of their homeland and into the middle of nowhere is a wake-up call if ever there was one.
Thirty years ago, the American historian Anne Applebaum wrote an The Weekly Telegraph of February1-7, 1995 headlined – The Reich regrets, but where is the guilt for the gulags.
She opened it by recalling what Primo Levi said when he saw Russian and Ukrainian soldiers entering Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
The Jewish writer told us that they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky.
He watched this sight by accident.
The Nazi guards had not intended that any survivors should remain; nor did they want to leave any physical evidence of what had happened there.
Historian Anne Applebaum
She asks awkward questions that demand answers
After dismantling the Treblinka camp in 1943, the Germans sowed the fields with grain, planted pine trees and used the bricks from the crematorium to build a farmhouse.
But because the Germans left Auschwitz in a hurry and because Auschwitz was so vast, several thousand people survived and some evidence remains to this day: rusting gates, half-burnt barracks, watchtowers, railway lines, heaps of clothes, spectacles, hair, suitcases.
Because so much was left in 1945, survivors were able to join up their often clouded with fear and hate memories.
There are monuments and memorials to the murdered Jews, Romas, Russians, Ukrainians, Pole, Hungarians, homosexuals, Lesbians all over Germany and Eastern Europe.
Stories about what happened to Jews under Nazi-rule in Europe abound.
Can you think of anyone who hasn’t seen Schindler’s List? Anyone who has not read memoirs, seen films and documentaries about the Holocaust or listened to lectures at school or in college or heard sermons by religious leaders on the BBC?
They are now so common we tend to take them for granted.
Applebaum’s bomb-shell question was this –
“What if they did not exist? What if we did not have the survivors’ testimony and the building remains of Auschwitz – as well as the memorial at Treblinka, the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the photographs taken at Belsen?
She wrote -“To imagine what the world would be like if we had forgotten the Holocaust, it is necessary only to attempt to ponder the millions who died in Stalin’s gulags. Try to do it, and no images comes to mind – because there aren’t any.
Russian schoolchildren are lectured about Nazi atrocities but their own are never mentioned. The Khatyn Memorial near Minsk contains the six metre statue of a Russian man carrying his dead son after German soldiers razed his village to the ground in 1943. There is another place with a similar name – Katyn – which is near where Russian soldiers murdered 20, 000 Polish officers in May 1940. That atrocity was blamed on the Germans for decades and was accepted as gospel even in America and Britain until Gorbachev admitted the atrocity was committed by the KGB, not the Nazis. (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
There was no conquering power to discover the Siberian camps and photograph their inmates.
When Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that the Soviets had murdered 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere during the war, it was too late to send a crew to film the corpses.
Until recently, the Soviet state did not admit the gulags had existed, or that there had been such atrocities: that meant there was nothing like the train timetables which tell us how many Jews arrived at Auschwitz, for example, and nothing like the death warrants and Siberian prison documents which have become available in the past few years.
Solzhenitsyn novels did not make up for their absence,
“Given the lack of evidence, perhaps it is no surprise that the camps have not become memorials, let alone museums.”
She reminded her readers that at Vorkuta, where hundreds of thousands died, people continued to live there because they had nowhere else to go.
“In other places, camp buildings have simply faded back into the forest, unmarked and unremembered.”
Applebaum went on to say that this lack of evidence of the images has been profound in Russia.
“During the 1980s, when perestroika was just beginning, it seemed for a time as if the hunger for information about the past was unquestionable: gulag survivors’ memoirs sold millions of copies, and a new revelation about the past could sell out a newspaper.”
The war cemetery at Khatyn is a sacred place for Russians young and old alike, Russians who are told to always remember the 186 villages utterly destroyed by the German Army in 1943 (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
Writing so long ago, the author said: “More recently, new history books are badly reviewed in Russia or ignored. There were no war crime trials in Russia. The Russians never see monuments to Russian crimes. Public feeling about the past has been limited. Feelings of guilt are hard to find.”
She went on: ”But the absence of guilt in a nation like Russian is worrying: part of the reason Germany has been so genuinely transformed from dictatorship to democracy is that the Germans were, unlike the Russians, forced to face their history. They lived through war crime trials, built monuments to the Holocaust, donated large sums of money to survivors. Hardly an evening passes when there isn’t a documentary or a talk show on German television dealing with the past.
“This constant atmosphere of guilt has had its effect on German politics. Th German parliament debated for weeks over whether to send peace-keeping troops abroad: the very thought of Germans in uniform outside Germany, for whatever purpose, was too much for many German politicians.”
In 2025, Stalin’s crimes have been removed from history books. Mot young Russians refuse to believe there was mass starvation in the Ukraine or that Stalin and the KGB picked up and murdered hundreds of thousands of Russians who dared utter a word of criticism about the regime that ran a great country into the ground for so long, with such cruelty.
Women in Moscow during a rainy day in August 1987. What they spoke about, we will never know. Conservations were monitored and things only started to change but slowly when “Gorby” cane to power in 1985.: (Picture: Trevor Grundy).
Said Applebaum in 1995: “If they really remembered that Stalin, in the name of communism and Great Russian imperialism, deported thousands of Chechens to Siberia, the inhabitants of the Kremlin would be unable to drop bombs on civilians in Chechnya today. By the same token, if we in the West really remembered the crimes against civilians carried out by the Russian-led Soviet state, we would also find the Russian bombing of Grozny unacceptable – as unacceptable as, for example, the nation of Germany bombing the Sudetenland.”
Said Applebaum: “The repetition, on every anniversary, of Auschwitz survivors’ stories is part of what makes another Auschwitz impossible in Germany.”
Today (2025) in Russia, there are no markers, no memories, no teaching of past atrocities.
If you never did anything wrong, why say sorry?
Said the American historian: “The repetition of Vorkuta survivors’ stories would help to make another Vorkuta impossible in Russia.
“Only when the Russian themselves begin to understand this will Russia, like Germany, begin to transform itself into a civilised democratic nation and only then should we treat the Russians as ‘normally’ as we treat the Germans.”
Trevor Grundy writes:
January 27 is now part of mankind’s DNA. And if it isn’t in some parts of the world, then it should be.
The Holocaust is the most appalling crime in human history.
Hopefully it makes those who mourn remember other genocides which are not well-known to the general public because they have not been turned into films starring famous actors.
Here are some of the worst –
- 2003: Darfur region in Western Sudan About 400,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced.
- 1994: Around 800,000 Tutsis killed in Rwanda. Most of the world’s media was in South Africa celebrating the birth of the Rainbow Nation.
- 1992: Bosnia and Herzegovina. At least 100,000 dead between 1992-1995 and in July 1995 the genocide involving 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.
- 1975-1979 Genocide in Cambodia., Pol Pot and his killers in the Khmer Rouge slaughtered and starved anything from 1.5 million to 2 million people – 25 percent of the Cambodian population of 7.8 million in 1975.
- 1949 and the years that followed in China. Mao’s agricultural/land reform policies led to the death of around 27 million people.
- 1937 The Rape of Nanking. Japanese killed around 300,000 Chinese men, women and children. Japanese soldiers raped at least 20,000 Chinese women.
- 1932-1933 The Holodomor Genocide in Ukraine. Death by starvation of around 25,000 a day. In all, an estimated seven million Ukranians died of starvation. It was a man-made famine engineered by Stalin.
- 1915-1918 Genocide in Armenia carried out by the Young Turk movement in Istanbul. At least 1.5 million dead.
- 1904-1907 Herero Massacres in German South West Africa (Namibia). Around four fifths of the population slaughtered by the Germans, around 50,000 to 65,000 men, women and children
- 1988-1902 British concentration camps in South Africa led to the death of 22,000 Boer children under the age of 1 around 4, 277 women and 21, 676 men
- 1983-1987 Gukuruhundi in Zimbabwe. Around 20,000 to 50,000 members of the Ndebele ethnic group slaughtered by North Korean-trained members of Robert Mugabe’s Five Brigade.
- “Democratic” Republic of the Congo in recent years – an estimated 5.4 million dead through war, starvation, disease since 1998.
- On the six o’clock BBC News on
- February 5, 2025 the BBC’s International Editor Jeremey Bowen said that following a speech by President Donald Trump the night before in Washington most Palestinians feel that that they are trapped in a genocidal moment. Trump said that America should take over Gaza and turn the bombed to pieces part of the Middle East into some sort of Riviera for rich people. Whether what happens in Gaza will soon turn into genocide (and ethnic cleansing) remains to be seen.
Trevor Grundy was a naturalised Zimbabwean citizen after independence in 1980. He was invited by the Soviet Government to visit Moscow, Leningrad and various parts of Belarus in August 1987. At that time he was a journalist based in Harare, representing Deutsche Welle, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and several Afrikaner newspapers in South Africa including Beeld. His trip was paid for by the government of the Soviet Union and was strongly supported by Dr Nathan Shamuyarira, then Zimbabwe’s Minister for Information. During his visit to Moscow, several high-ranking officials specialising in African political affairs told him (on the record during a recorded interview) that the Gorbachev Government was about to end its military and financial support for the African National Congress (ANC), a story which was reported by Grundy to several media outlets in South Africa and with the full knowledge of the Zimbabwean Government which was anxious to improve relations with Moscow after Russia’s support for Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU movement rather than Mugabe’s ZANU (PF).In February 1990, the Soviet Union had ended its support for the ANC and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Four years later in 1994 he was inaugurated President of South Africa and a new dawn broke in a war-weary country.