Cemetery Desecration Not AntiJewish Hochschild

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, by Adam Hochschild. 2003

The Especial Horrors of the Gulag in Kolyma. And Not Only the Remains of Jewish Dead Are Disrespected!

Nowadays, in common Holocaust materials, Poles are blamed for looting the cremains of Jews and of insufficiently respecting the sites of Jewish dead in Poland. However, grave robbery is as old as human history, and disrespect to the dead is likewise.

For example, author Hochschild describes how the remains of Soviet dead can be treated. He writes, “There are so many bones still lying about, said one account I read, that today in the summer Kolyma children use human skulls to gather blueberries.(p. xxv). We never hear about THAT.

KOLYMA: MUCH LIKE A NAZI GERMAN DEATH CAMP–ONLY SLOWER DEATHS

The gold-mining camps in Kolyma had an annual death rate of 20%. (pp. xxiv). Historians’ estimates, of the total death toll at Kolyma alone range from 250,000 to over 1,000,000. (p. 237).

Some parts of Kolyma rivalled the death rate of the Nazi German death camps. Hochschild compared the fate of prisoners, depending exactly upon where they were sent, to the decisions made by Mengele at Auschwitz. He asks, “Or to a place like Camp Expeditsiony, near the Arctic Circle, where from one group of six hundred prisoners sent there in 1939, one hundred survived the first winter, and only one was still alive six years later?”