Talking of Genocide

Yesterday I had the privilege of talking to 25 Year 12 students of St Oran's College. They are studying 'Genocide', any topic to do with Genocide, for their NCEA assignment. They were not particularly focussed on the Holocaust, but their teacher was one of the teachers who advised the Holocaust Centre on how to teach the Holocaust within the New Zealand school curriculum. The term 'Genocide' and the whole question of understanding genocide within a Holocaust context bothers me. Where do I start? How do I start? I began by showing the short film we have about Holocaust survivors in which I make a cameo appearance. This gave the girls a chance to settle down, get their breath back after walking from the new War Memorial park to our Centre. It also gave us the opportunity to prompt some questions. These questions enabled me to get to know the students better, explore ideas, and help them to think about their assessments. The girls were studying a wide range of genocides: the Ukranian famine, Rwanda, the Armenian genocidal, Pol Pot, perhaps Serbia and Kosovo, and interestingly, the slaughter of Tasmanian Aborigines. One of the girls asked me about medical experiments in Auschwitz, not a nice subject. This lead the discussion on to the topic of inferior races that can be treated as less than human. Inevitably, because I was taking the session, and because they came to the Holocaust Centre, I touched on racial theory and the corruption of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, but I also pointed out the difference between the Holocaust and other so called genocides. Genocides happened between neighbours, and the killing takes place where the conflict occurs, whereas the murder of Jews was not, by and large, executed by neighbours, but by outside authorities. There were certainly exceptions, Romanian fascists killed their Jewish neighbours in the centre of Bucharest, Hungarian Arrow Cross shot some Jews in the streets of Budapest, Polish villagers killed their Jewish neighbours in their local village even before the German troops arrived, but compared with the vast numbers killed, these were exceptions. The norm was that people in Amsterdam, Thessalonika, Byalistok, Berlin and all parts of German occupied Europe were put on trains, delivered to camps purposely designed to murder people and were killed there. We had the opportunity to explore the nature of genocide, and found that differences of race, genes, hardly came into it. Ukrainians died not because they were Ukrainians, but because they were peasants attached to their land and were not prepared to join collectives as demanded by Stalin's Five Year Plan and forced collectivisation, The Hutus murdered Tutsis not because they were a different race, but because of perceived different tribal traditions. Pol Pot murdered people to purify society, get rid of colonial and capitalist strains, Yugoslavs, South Slavs murdered each other for religious differences and different historical memories. One of the issues, I suggested, that the girls had to do in addressing the question of genocide is to unscramble the meaning of the term. Perhaps the only true genocide we talked about was the hunting of Tasmanian Aborigines. It was a source of great satisfaction that at my age I had the opportunity of sharing thoughts with a roomful of 16 – 17 year olds. They thanked me for sharing my life with them, I said that sharing is a two sided affair and thanked them for listening to me.