The forgotten horrors that hide in the Holocaust's long, dark shadow
Western Holocaust commemorations have a peculiar uniformity to them. They speak of Nazism as a warning against intolerance and chauvinism. They recall the dead. They speak of the genocide as a single event, that for all its cataclysmic scope and impact was nevertheless short-lived and with a clear beginning and end.
This way of remembering is a tragedy in its own right. It downplays a long history of persecution, ignores the Holocaust’s deeper roots in favor of the emotional salve of simplistic moral lessons, and detaches the specific gas chambers and killing fields from a broader history of which they are an apotheosis, not an aberration.
There is a more Jewish telling of the Holocaust, one that notices that the 20th century was already among the bloodiest periods in Jewish history before the start of the genocide, that includes the flight of millions of Jews out of Europe and the way those who remained were delivered into the Nazi embrace by Western immigration quotas. It is a version of the story that begins not in 1939 or 1941, but in 1880.
Jews began their mass flight from Europe following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, an event that sparked mass popular pogroms in the Russian Empire and saw new laws enacted against its already oppressed Jewish subjects. These pressures from above and below slowly increased, culminating in the massacres of the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, which claimed the lives of well over 100,000 Jews.
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