Grave Robbery Virtually Universal Tumarkin

The Living And The Dead: The Rise And Fall Of The Cult Of World War II In Russia, by Nina Tumarkin. 1995

Not Only By Poles and Not Only From the Jewish Dead: Systematic Grave Robbery in the USSR. Also: Katyn Was Genocide

A travelling display of a MATSEVA (macewa: Jewish tombstone) commonly insinuates the repurposing of MATSEVOT (e. g, as paving stones) as some king of unusual, barbaric Polish act aimed specifically at Jews. In addition, media attention, as from Jan T. Gross and his GOLDEN HARVEST, has focused on Poles robbing the cremains of Jews after the war and sometimes long afterwards. The Polish Catholic villain is alive and well.

In actuality, grave robbery and the repurposing of cemeteries is as old as human history! These ghoulish practices neither began nor ended with Polish perpetrators or the Jewish dead. As this book shows in considerable detail, it happened in the Soviet Union, and not only to Holocaust-murdered Jews, and at least as recently as the 1980s!

GRAVE ROBBERY IS CONDUCTED BY PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONALITIES AND ALL SOCIAL CLASSES, AND NOT ONLY UNDER DESPERATE OR WARTIME CIRCUMSTANCES

Author Nina Tumarkin, who identifies herself as a Soviet Jew (p. 49), describes the situation near the Crimean city of Simferopol, where the Germans (Nazis) had shot 12,000 Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, in 1941. (p. 158). The Germans did not have time to confiscate the valuables from the victims. So now the area, as recently as at least the 1980s, is frequented by grave looters.

Apropos to this, Tumarkin comments, “The robbers included a physician who had graduated from a Moscow institute affiliated with the prestigious Academy of Sciences. They ranged in age from twenty-eight to fifty. Their nationalities were Russian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, and Armenian.” (pp. 159-160).

WHY THE GRAVE ROBBERY?

Since the victims were not all Jews, the robbers must have realized that they may be robbing one of their own ancestors. Tumarkin rejects anti-Semitism as a primary explanation, and instead suggests that, “More likely, the robbers simply saw an opportunity to get money, a scam they saw as no worse than the countless scams that made up the notorious ‘second economy’ in the Soviet Union. Only in this case they were not stealing from the state. They were simply digging for gold.” (p. 161).

NOT ONLY THE JEWISH DEAD ARE ROBBED: SO ARE THE MOSTLY-SLAVIC RED ARMY DEAD NEAR MURMANSK

Author Nina Tumarkin discusses the Valley of Glory near Murmansk, “And to the Valley of Glory, where for many years people had in fact been stealing the stars off the tombstones and digging up graves and stealing military medals.” (p. 162).

NOT ONLY THE JEWISH DEAD ARE ROBBED: SO ARE THE MOSTLY-SLAVIC RED ARMY DEAD NEAR NOVGOROD

Kazan filmmaker Vladimir Yerkhov had made a television movie that depicted the finding and burial of the WWII Soviet dead. Let Tumarkin tell of his ghoulish experiences, “Yerkhov’s first narration describes a terrible sight he had witnessed in October 1989 in the environs of Novgorod. He had arrived with a search group at a locus of wartime fighting, only to find that marauders had gotten their first. Forty-seven human skulls and a thick layer of bones had been dug up and strewn about in search for valuables. Any teeth with metal that looked like gold or silver had been pulled out of the skulls that then had been tossed onto the ground.” (p. 163).

Obviously, it was not only the Jewish dead that had experienced a “golden harvest” (following Jan T. Gross) at their expense!

CONCLUSION ON GRAVE ROBBERY

We have seen enough of the MATSEVA on public display. It is high time that the MATZEVOT-related anti-Polish memes, in Holocaust circles, be laid to rest (pardon the pun).

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THE KATYN MASSACRE WAS A FORM OF GENOCIDE

Nina Tumarkin realizes the fact that the Katyn Massacre was not motivated solely by practical considerations. She writes, “The thousands of victims represented the cream of the Polish officer corps and the potential germ of a vigorous postwar administration. Stalin had his own designs on postwar Poland that did not include anything like independent governance. There is every reason to believe that the slayings had been a PROPHYLACTIC GENOCIDE.” (p. 176; Emphasis added).