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The Forgotten Holocaust in the Soviet Union

(Tablet) Izabella Tabarovsky - Boris Maftsir, an Israeli filmmaker, went deep into the forests of Belarus to film the remnants of Tuvia Bielski's partisan camp and document instances of Jewish resistance that have not been widely known until now. Maftsir says we keep retelling half the story - the story of the destruction of Western European Jewry by a mechanized, industrial-scale killing machine. While half of all the Shoah victims died in the Soviet Union, people there died in mass executions in ravines, forests, and village streets, at the hands of Germans or local collaborators, in front of people who had been their neighbors. The Nazis almost never bothered with organizing the Soviet Jews into ghettos or transporting them to faraway places. Jews began dying the moment Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. By the end of 1942, the Germans had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist. Of the Soviet Jews under Nazi occupation, an estimated 3 to 4% survived.
2017-01-27 00:00:00
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