Lest We Forget 

Article by Stephen Woodward. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin. 

I thought I might share with you a historical debate, that as of late I often find myself engaging in over the pub table. This concerns the judeocentrism of the public presentation of the Holocaust. Now, one in no way wishes to diminish the suffering of the Jewish race, which undoubtedly was one of the most horrific crimes in mankind’s history. However it would seem that other victims of the Holocaust are often put to the wayside. Groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs and even the disabled were also subjected to imprisonment and extermination. It would seem that public awareness of the persecution that these groups suffered at the hands of the Nazi’s is somewhat lacking. 

Recently I had the unique opportunity to talk to a survivor of Bergen-Belsen; a French Jewish lady who now lectures in schools on the nightmare that she was subjected to. It was somewhat discomforting to discover that she was unaware that Homosexuals and Poles were also subjected to the horror of the concentration camps. Again, on a visit to the Imperial War Museum’s poignant and chilling Holocaust exhibition, I was disconcerted by the lack of information provided to the public on non-Jewish victims. Such was my disillusion that I filled in a comment card commending the Museum on their world-class exhibition but expressing my concern that groups such as Gypsies were under represented. The response; a rather curt letter informing me that there are in fact four mentions in the exhibition of Roma victims. I found two, yet even with meticulous searching I had trouble finding one sentence on a huge information board. The other was buried in an interactive computer menu. This, in my mind’s eye, is a great tragedy. That such groups should be forgotten is undoubtedly what the Nazi’s would have wished for. True there are historians who do actively study the non-Jewish victims, but it is public awareness of this that worries me. 

Yad Vashem, of the ‘Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority,’ defines the Holocaust as “the murder of close to six-million Jews in Europe.” This seems rather inadequate when we consider that, with the addition of non-Jewish victims, the number of dead from the camps rises to a staggering eleven to seventeen million. 

Nevertheless there are still historians such as Steven T.Katz, Lucy Davidowicz and Yehuda Bauer who maintain that the Holocaust and the Death camps were targeted specifically at the Jewish like no other group. The suffering and deaths of the millions of minority groups in the camps should not be ignored and cannot be said to be any less important. Indeed many even suffered worse. For example, the majority of Homosexual survivors of the death camps were reincarcerated after the liberation of the camps by the allies. 

I am somewhat sceptical of those who now encourage the use of term “Shoah” to relate to the genocide, which further restricts association to the Jewish community instead of acknowledging the wider suffering. In an age when we are losing direct contact with this period of the past, it is important for us not to allow myths to form over an event as horrific as the Holocaust. It was not a wholly Jewish phenomenon, nor should it be remembered as such.

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