Life's Atonement

It's human nature to try to forget, to make unpleasant memories recede. We'd like to expunge those issues, those events that portray us as basically inhumane when we'd far prefer to like ourselves for what we represent. So how can we, collectively, have pride in ourselves when many of us have proven, in the past, to be unable to pass the test of decency and compassion?

That many, albeit in far smaller numbers did meet the challenge, and did their utmost to aid and assist and protect those in duress, is another story altogether.

This is, of course, yet another tiresome, tedious story of Holocaust Remembrance. Not only that, but pre-Holocaust, a memory of a country where Jews had lived for a millennium at least, in relative calm and peace with their neighbours of different ethnic origin and religion.

But anti-Semitism has an unfortunate history of resuscitating itself, lying dormant, or near so for a period of time, then roaring back to life with a vengeance.

And its vengeance has always been morbidly miserable for Jews, through mass slaughter, pogroms, slander, discrimination within society, in the workplace, in the education system, until the Final Solution sought to put an end to all of that. No pussy-footing around with the German fascists, they knew how to solve an endemic problem.

Simply rid the world of the scourge of human trash that Jews represented to them and to so many others. They did a fairly good job.

In the Ukraine there were huge populations of Jews. There are still synagogues in towns, villages and cities that are ancient in origin, some dating from the 16th Century, and cemeteries as well, but they are becoming increasingly scarce, plowed down and under to make way for modern amenities like parking lots and hotels and sport arenas and other such manifestations of modern life.

Progress must go on, after all.

The city of Lviv, more commonly referred to prior WWII as Lvov, by the Jews who mostly inhabited it, was host to one such synagogue called the Golden Rose, reputed to be one of the most beautiful in Europe, dating from the 16th Century. The ruins of the synagogue were designated part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.

But not a peep out of the United Nations as the Government of Ukraine is razing it and building a hotel on the site to accommodate fans and players at the European soccer championships to take place there next year.

There is very little literature, much less anything in the way of memorials to the vast numbers of Ukrainian Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. Lvov was a majority-Jewish town. During the Holocaust, 420,000 Jews, among them over 100,000 children were murdered in Lvov and environs.

The undertaking was so efficient that Romanian and Hungarian Jews were brought to the site for extermination.

Some desperate Jews tried to maintain life in the sewers of the city, about 500, whom the Nazis eventually successfully flushed out and destroyed. A Polish man with a criminal record who was a sewer worker did his utmost to save a handful of Jews, risking his life to feed them while they continued to shelter in the sewers.

It was his "life's atonement".