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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Can we ever learn from history?

Another example of "man's inhumanity to man" posted on YouTube is circulating in the Ukrainian community.

Explanation at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum site:

During the Lvov/Lemberg [sic] massacre of June, 1941, the retreating Soviets killed several thousand mostly Ukrainian nationalist prisoners who were being held in several prisons throughout Lvov [sic]. The Germans blamed the massacre on the Jews and used the NKVD's atrocity as propaganda to incite a pogrom in which over 4,000 Jews were killed. A further 7,000 Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.

It keeps happening over and over again because humanity refuses to learn from history. Very sad.

2 comments:

Taras said...

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it...

>>As part of the Operation Barbarossa campaign against the USSR, the German army conquered Lwów on June 30, 1941. The invading German troops included detachments of Ukrainians in German uniforms. Immediately after the Germans entered the city, Einsatzgruppen and civilian collaborators organized a massive pogrom in retaliation for the retreating NKVD's mass-murder of approximately 2000-4000 prisoners (including intellectuals and activists) at the Brygidki prison. Although Jews had also been among the victims of the NKVD, they were accused of having cooperated with the Soviets, by some Ukrainians.

Some authors refer to the civilian rioters as "Ukrainian nationalists", although their actual political orientation and relation to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is still subject to considerable debate, as the Soviet historians who for a long time had the best and often exclusive access to records of the era were under tremendous pressure to portray nationalist groups negatively. During the four-week pogrom from the end of June to early July, 1941, nearly 4,000 Jews were murdered. On July 25, 1941, a second pogrom, called the "Petliura Days" after the slain Ukrainian leader Symon Petlura[1][2], was organized; nearly 2,000 more Jews were killed in Lvov, mostly shot in groups by civilian collaborators after being marched to the Jewish cemetery or to the Lunecki prison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w_Ghetto

Pawlina said...

It is my (recent) understanding that the majority of victims at Babyn Yar were, in fact, ethnic Ukrainians betrayed by "civilian collaborators."

So yes, Taras, you are right about history. Unfortunately, as a rule human beings tend to be rather poor students of history.

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