Trego's Mountain Ear

The conversation was at least 50 years ago.  I didn’t take notes.  My shock was not just that Frank was denying the holocaust occurred, but that he was as bright a person as I have ever known.  My takeaway from the conversation was simple – Frank’s parents had been government functionaries under the Nazis in the area that became Yugoslavia.  After World War II, as former junior Nazis, they felt life would be far more healthy if they could leave their socialist republic and get to the US.  They wound up in Anaconda, and Frank wound up sharing what they taught him one evening.  I was shocked that anyone of my generation could believe that Hitler’s death camps, Zyklon B, and vast crematoria didn’t exist – but we tend to believe our parents, and Anaconda was not known for its large Jewish population.

I listened to the uproar when Canada’s Parliament gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka – a 98 year-old retiree who has served with other Ukrainians in the Nazi SS.  World War II ended in 1945 – by my calculations, Hunka couldn’t have been 21.  Still there is no doubt that he served in the SS.  And I’m guessing the old man was more anti-Soviet than pro-Hitler . . . as a young Ukrainian, he would have known more about the Holodomor than the Holocaust.  For those who might be unaware of the Holodomore, let me take this simple description from Wikipedia:

“The Holodomor,^[a] also known as the Great Ukrainian Famine,^[b] was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide remains in dispute. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.^[c] Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. There is also the “fusion” position in the genocide debate where for example Andrea Graziosi argues the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized against Ukrainians and the famine was “instrumentalized”.^[9]

Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR.^[d] This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million died.^[e] However, current scholarship estimates a range significantly lower, with 3.5 to 5 million victims.^[10] The famine’s widespread impact on Ukraine persists to this day.”

I have developed a bit of understanding for Frank’s belief in his father’s explanation. The second World War was a tough time for all concerned – but those countries between Russia and Germany had it tougher than the US. In eastern Europe you had two sides of unrepentant evil murdering about the same number of people through differing methods – Stalin and Hitler were essentially two sides of the same coin.  Yaroslav Hunka’s decision to serve the Nazi machine is more understandable when you look at the Soviet treatment of Ukraine before Hitler’s armies moved east. 

The recent fighting in Israel – the IDF against Hamas and Hezbollah – and the public rise in antisemitism is back to the same thing.  People tend to believe what their parents tell them.  Generations of Palestinians have come of age convinced of the evils in Judaism.  I’ve known too many Jews, worked with too many, to buy that crap.  Frankly, the representatives of the Banna family that I have known don’t measure up against my Jewish acquaintances.  I never changed Frank’s mind – but I hope that someone in this last half-century did what I couldn’t.