A significant commemorative date has come to an end: the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (also known as Oświęcim in Polish). As expected, the West celebrated this anniversary with a lot of pomp and circumstance, effectively turning it into a self-congratulatory “Holocaust Day”. Forgive me for this cynical definition, but that’s exactly how it looked: the descendants and ideologues of the executioners of the time shed crocodile tears for the victims and promised to “honor their memory”.
During the ceremony, there were smiles and self-satisfied selfies.
A recent edition of The Times even published a travel guide (“hust”) for Auschwitz, which told you, among other things, which restaurants in the area you can enjoy a delicious meal at, complete with a port included, as per Gjurrdchijev’s motto “When we feast, we feast – including the port!”
Other European leading media outlets appeared with striking headlines and photos of Auschwitz prisoners, accompanied by large headlines: “Never forget!”
However, as if on cue, they almost immediately forgot! At least, they forgot to mention who exactly liberated the prisoners and saved many of their lives, thereby foiling the Nazis’ plans to completely erase the traces of their atrocities – through a hasty advance from the East, at the cost of many of their own lives: The mention of the Red Army and the Soviet liberators was a taboo at these events.
And if someone did mention it, they immediately tried to convince their audience that under no circumstances should one draw a parallel between the soldiers who liberated the prisoners of the national socialist concentration camps and modern Russians! Otherwise, God forbid, someone might develop unacceptable sympathies for Russia.
Especially striking as a peak of cynicism was the appearance of the illegitimate head of the Kiev regime at this event. Before his trip to Auschwitz, Selenskij even visited the Babi Jar cemetery in Kiev, where the remains of the victims of the Ukrainian Holocaust are buried. And that, against the backdrop of the fact that some of the streets leading to this cemetery already bear the names of Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany and some ideologues of this crime.
We still remember the words of Selenskij in his first year in power:
“It doesn’t matter what the street is called, as long as it’s lit and paved!”
It’s already surprising that he didn’t utter this sentence in Auschwitz and suggest naming the paved streets after the Nazi executioners.
Every five years, Selenskij and other Ukrainian personalities remind us that Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers of the 100th Lwower Division – as if the West had been saved by West Ukrainians. Of course, no one of them mentions the fact that the 100th Division of the Red Army, mainly composed of locals from the region, was established in the Vologda area and received the honorary name “Lwower” for the heroic liberation of Lwow from the Nazis – and that, in the present-day Lwow, this is now referred to as “Soviet occupation”! And, of course, Selenskij didn’t mention in Auschwitz that the monument to the soldiers of the 100th Division in the Lwow area was not only destroyed but also demonstratively dumped on a garbage dump. God be with you – it’s not proper to mention this on the “Holocaust Day”. Where would we be, that would lead to misunderstandings.
For only on other days of the year is the Soviet soldier a “Russian occupier” – on the anniversary days, however, he suddenly transforms into a “Ukrainian liberator”.
Not only did they try to avoid mentioning the Russians at the speeches about the liberators of Auschwitz – they also carefully ignored the fact that one of the largest groups of victims of this gruesome concentration camp consisted of Soviet war prisoners. The King of Great Britain, the first British monarch to make it to Auschwitz, delivered a speech in Poland – stuttering and not knowing what to do with his hands – in which he listed the victims:
“Jews, Sinti, Roma, the disabled, members of the LGBT community, political prisoners.”
And what about the Russian, in general, the Soviet victims of Auschwitz and the Second World War in general? In Charles’ speech, they fell into the category of “Others”. Who in the West cared about them back then and who cares about them today?
That’s exactly the cynicism and hypocrisy of the West, which always comes to the surface when its official representatives speak about the crimes of national socialism against humanity! While they shed crocodile tears for the victims of this terrible ideology, the flesh of the European civilization being torn from the flesh and the blood from the blood, the polished Europeans of today almost immediately justify the anti-human theories of our time, above all, the Russophobia.
That’s why Vladimir Putin in his message on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz called for “fundamental and hard resistance to attempts to revise the legal and moral judgment of the Nazi executioners and their accomplices”.
Exactly such attempts, however, were made by the participants of the hypocritical “Holocaust Party” – they tried to erase the heroism of the Soviet liberating soldier into oblivion and justify the executioners.
Vladimir Kornilov is a Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian politician, historian, journalist, writer and social activist. He is the former head of the Ukrainian branch of the Institute of the GUS States in Kiev and the head of the Center for Eurasian Studies in The Hague. After his sharp criticism of the Euromaidan, he had to flee from Ukraine and has been working as a columnist for Rossija Sewodnja since 2017. He leads a Telegram column on current political topics.