BY
The problem with history, certainly when it
comes to numbers, is often visualising the horrific loss of human life certain
events cause – particularly those events that are “man-made”.
Most people can visualise a dead person, perhaps
several. Some can, and have seen, dozens at a time, occasionally
hundreds. Very few may have witnessed thousands of dead bodies in one
place, but beyond that?
Be it any large war, the Holocaust, or the
Holodomor, visualising millions and millions of dead is simply beyond
comprehension.
The monuments we erect to commemorate such hideous
outcomes are often simple and understated, and deliberately so out of
somberness, respect and humility – but are therefore mostly forgotten until
specific State appointed days of remembrance fall upon the societal calendar.
For how can there be a a monument of suitable
scale that is commensurate to the sacrifices, or sacrificed? How also to
bring about remembrance in a more continuous subconsciousness within today’s society
outside of the alloted day or hour?
There are museums of course, and libraries and
the Internet – all accessible to many, but generally they too fail to
adequately impress the sheer number of deaths involved in a manner that makes
it digestible and comprehensible with any sense of lasting mental impression.
As these events travel further back in time with
each and every passing hour, clearly justice becomes more and more symbolic –
as perpetrators and survivors alike reach the natural ending of their days
without their day in court. Justice it seems, is that those who died
and/or survived be not forgotten – at least for one day in the year.
It is of course possible to begin belated
investigations and perhaps even reach judicial outcomes to cover the events of
the past to some degree, and thus to provide some sense of finding of guilt.
If with regard to the Holodomor, Ukraine was to follow the lead of
Germany in its ruling against Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor, who was found
guilty not of any specific act himself, but being part of the “extermination
machinery“, then it follows perhaps that there be room to find guilt of
Joseph Stalin, the leadership of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the
time etc. The question that arises is how far throughout that murderous and
repressive apparatus does one go, and/or what parts of the institutions are
targeted (apart from the obvious like the political leadership and the NKVD)?
Thus far, with regard to the Holodomor about
800,000 victims have been positively identified amongst figures that range from
3 to 7 million. No doubt yet more will eventually be identified, and
eventually there will be a far more accurate, although never precise, figure
reached regarding the actual death toll.
If the names of these known Holodomor victims
were individually placed on the average sized cobble stone that makes up
Deribasovskaya, the main pedestrian street in central Odessa, it would more
than re-cobble the entire street – which thus returns the reader back to the
issue of visualising the horrendous and horrific loss of life.
Initially in Germany, and then latterly across
Europe, there is something called the Stolpersteine. It is a
project where commemorative stones are laid outside the last known addresses of
Jewish victims prior to their deportation (and in most cases extermination).
There are tens of thousands of such stones laid across Europe, outside
tens of thousands of addresses throughout Europe. They are a daily
reminder to those now living at the address and/or walking along that street of
the dark past it once witnessed – rather than a statue in a pleasantly
manicured public space seldom visited.
Imagine, however, all those Stolpersteine laid
together along a single public street.
If it is not the graphic images of WWI and WWII
in museums or on TV that seem to leave the greatest impact, but when visiting,
it is the sight of miles upon miles of headstones in cemeteries across
Flanders, Artois and beyond that do, what societal impact would a major
Ukrainian street cobbled/paved with individual names of those victims of the
Holodomor have on an every day, rather than annual, basis?
Perhaps one day Ukraine will embark upon its own
Stolpersteine project and place individual stones outside the addresses of all
those known victims of the Holodomor as a daily reminder for those that walk
there – or perhaps it will make a bold statement of remembrance where the name
of each victim literally stretches from one end of the street to the other.
With 800,000 identified victims from millions, it will have to be a very
long street, and rather than being a street with no name, it would be a street
of a million names (and more). Perhaps the boldest act is more
appropriate for the victims who will never see justice? A matter for the
authorities (if they ever think of it).
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