Balkan, Holocaust Parallels Scary
It is impossible to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and not think about the Balkans today.
Visceral hatred. Ethnic cleansing, before the phrase gained mass currency. Gross intolerance. Wanton violence. Some of the hallmarks of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror exist again in the fractured, bloody land that once was Yugoslavia.
There are other parallels: The museum bluntly proves that the American government knew about the Nazi concentration camps but refused to bomb the rail lines that brought Jews and others to certain death. Did such unforgivable inaction foreshadow the spineless Western leadership that has for years watched and muttered and promised to stop the carnage in Bosnia, but done little else?
Certainly the connection occurred to about 500 people who gathered recently in the museum’s Hall of Witness to listen as seven religious leaders joined in an ecumenical ceremony protesting the ethnic violence of the Balkan wars.
“Those of us who 50 years ago watched in anguish as the Jewish communities of Europe were rapidly disappearing from the surface of the Earth remember how deeply pained we were by the fact that the ‘good and decent’ world stood by idly and did nothing to stop the Nazi atrocities,” said Miles Lerman, the museum council chairman and a survivor of a Nazi slave labor camp.
“Today, as we watch the brutal carnage that is taking place … we cannot remain silent.”
This parallel cannot be taken too far. The contemporary version of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans defies basic human principles, but it is not genocide. It is not a Holocaust. Bosnian Serbs may not want to reside with, employ, marry or even accept the humanity of Bosnian Muslims, but they haven’t - so far, anyhow - systematically tried to wipe the objects of their hatred from the face of the Earth.
Out of sight, yes. “Judenfrei,” no.
The camps where men have been tortured and women raped are ghastly horrors, but they don’t measure up to the clinically organized, systematic extermination camps of the Nazis.
And although the tribal chieftains who have emerged in post-Tito Yugoslavia are all flawed - none, perhaps, so badly as Slobodan Milosevic - they have not exhibited the frightening ambition nor the ability to conquer Europe that enabled Hitler to temporarily turn much of the world inside out.
But here, too, there are lessons so compellingly presented in the Holocaust museum.
While Hitler’s views on Jews were never a secret, once in power he did not start out seeking their obliteration. He employed a gradual strangulation, beginning with the isolation of Jews in German society, then their banishment, ghettoization and deportation. At one point early on in his reign, he even boasted that if other nations would accept Germany’s Jews, he’d send them out in luxury ships.
Hitler obviously was clever enough to sense that he would not have to make good on that promise. And those responsible for the worst acts of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - primarily the Bosnian Serbs - were clever enough to sense that the world’s outraged protestations were little more than empty words.
Of course, leaders alone, no matter how charismatic, do not accomplish ethnic cleansing without the active engagement of a nation’s individuals and institutions. That’s another lesson from the past.
“The Holocaust didn’t start with the Germans picking up Jews and sending them to concentration camps and putting them in gas chambers,” Arie van Mansum, a Dutchman who risked his life to save Jews, says in the book “Rescuers.” “The Holocaust started in the hearts of the people.”
The hearts of the Balkan people have been turned against each other for centuries. The multiethnic, multireligious state of Yugoslavia formed after World War I never really gelled, and the Nazi invasion in 1941 broke open old hatreds. Ethnic cleansing, forced conversion and mass murder were rampant, especially as practiced by the Croatian ultranationalists. By the end of World War II, more than 1 million Yugoslavs had lost their lives, more than half of them as victims of genocide.
Those wounds are still fresh half a century later. See them live on in the faces of Bosnian refugees escaping Srebenica, or in the Serbs now fleeing Croatia. See the suspicion and antipathy undermine numerous attempts at negotiation.
But the picture of the past is not complete without reference to those who defied the prevailing notion that people of one ethnicity must automatically hate people of another. Story after story of the righteous line a wall of the Holocaust museum - stories of Jews hidden by Dutch families, by a whole French village, by Bosnian Muslims.
In “Rescuers” is the portrait of Ivan Vranetic, a Croatian Catholic who began hiding Jews when he was just 15 years old. The first was a young man from Sarajevo whose entire family had been killed.
“He had no shoes, nothing, and when he started to tell me his story I had to help him,” Vranetic told the book’s authors from the apartment in Israel he now shares with another person he rescued. “I think it must be in my upbringing because I had seen people who were homeless and I had feelings in my heart that I had to help.”
Can’t his story be a lesson, too? If ethnic hatred, violence and intolerance can persist in the life of a region, why cannot acts of human kindness?
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