Beech Tree News Network

One night last week, I watched with the world as Russia invaded Ukraine.  In the capital city of Kyiv, a Jewish Rabbi told the cameras he was not evacuating because one of his parishioners had asked him to stay behind with her.  The woman was 101 years old and had experienced the invasion of the Nazis during WWII.  “Can you stay with me?” she had asked the Rabbi.  “I don’t know what they will do.”

               That interview nearly broke me in half.  I am a student of history, and the atrocities of the Holocaust have affected me greatly.  I do not have a Jewish history.  I, do however, have relatives who fought in WWII.  My mother’s brother, Thomas, was killed in France during the conflict.  My stepsister’s father marched with Patton across Europe.  He survived only to drown while running a trot line two weeks before Lorrie was born.  I mention Lorrie’s father, because it is due to him that I first learned of the Holocaust.

               My stepmother kept items her first husband collected about the war in a chest.  One day she opened that chest, and just like Pandora’s box, out came all the atrocities the Jewish people experienced, and the Allied forces witnessed.  The time was 1966, I was twelve years old, just twenty-five years removed from the bombing at Pearl Harbor.  It was the book that held my attention.  Black and white pictures of the death camps.  Living skeletons staring back at the cameras documenting their stories. 

I don’t know what happened to that book.  The pictures are still, and will forever be, part of my memory.  In recent years, there have been those who have made the push to discredit the Holocaust as fake history.  I will continue to make sure the young people in my life know the truth of its existence.  When my granddaughter is old enough, we will watch “Schindler’s List” together, like my daughters and I did before her.

The ironic thing about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Russia itself experienced the invasion of Nazi troops during WWII.  The Germans surrounded Leningrad (currently known as Saint Petersburg) “initiating a siege that would last 900 days and claim the lives of 800,000 civilians.”  That siege is classified as a genocide by some historians, because of the systematic starvation of the city’s civilian population (history.com). 

(If you want to get a sense of the scope of that siege, read David Benioff’s “City of Thieves.”  The book is historical fiction and is a partial recounting of his grandfather’s experience of the event.  I must warn you, it is not for the faint of heart.)

                For dictators, freedom equals choice and choice equals chaos.  For dictators, control equals stability.  If you are a parent, you have had times when you have had to be a dictator of sorts in order to maintain control over children who “don’t know any better.”  Ukrainians, however, are not children who “don’t know any better.”  They have managed to live as free citizens without descending into chaos, and maybe that’s the problem.

Ukraine is referred to as Russia’s little brother.  Freedom has worked for Ukraine, democracy has worked for Ukraine, and Putin has decided he will have none of it, lest Russia’s citizens decide freedom will work for them, as well.