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By Root 1405 0

of suffering. Ruth Maier, a young Austrian Jewish refugee living in Oslo, wrote on 25 April 1941 about her quest for a U.S. visa: “I’ve been to the American Consulate about it. I’m sure to get a visa after the war. But not before then … So we need to be patient.” The hapless girl did not yet understand that her inability to secure a visa was no mere inconvenience, but a matter of life and death—her own: five months afterwards, she was deported and murdered. As late as 1944 Edith Gabor, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Budapest diamond merchant, heard reports of the fate of Europe’s Jewish communities. “But we thought: ‘Oh, this is something that happens to other people, in other countries.’ ” She herself was frightened, but not frightened enough. Later that year she was transported to the first of a succession of concentration camps where she narrowly survived unspeakable horrors. All the rest of her family save one brother were gassed.

Many people met death far from any battlefield. The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians—Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians—were extinguished by wilful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation. Their deaths were no less terrible because they took place in circumstances of obscurity, in some ruined village rather than at Auschwitz or Majdanek, and unaccompanied by any redemptive opportunity to offer resistance or win medals. Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr was appalled to learn of mass hostage shootings in occupied territories, writing to his wife on 21 October 1941:

In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes, 1,700 men and 240 women have been executed. This is the “punishment” for an attack on three German soldiers. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. The village was burnt down, women and children were left there to weep for their husbands and fathers and homes. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. All this is child’s play compared with what is happening in Poland and Russia. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty too? What shall I say when I am asked: “And what did you do during that time?” Since Saturday, the Berlin Jews are being rounded up.

The Holocaust is today often discussed in isolation. In one sense, this is logical, because the Jews were singled out for genocide, but the records of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camp complexes, emphasise the numbers from other racial groups who shared the fate of Jewish deportees. The best available statistics show that a total of 1.1 million Jews arrived at the camp, of whom 100,000 survived; among 140,000 non-Jewish Poles, half survived; of 23,000 gypsies, all but 2,000 perished; all of the 15,000 Soviet POWs died; about half of 25,000 others—mostly political prisoners—were killed. In addition to almost 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, over 3 million Russians died in German captivity, while huge numbers of non-Jewish civilians were massacred in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries.

It thus seems important to assess the Holocaust against the background of Hitler’s governance of his empire. One of the most moving and enlightened advocates of pursuing such context was Ruth Maier. As a twenty-two-year-old refugee in Oslo, barely a month before her own deportation and murder in Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary: “If you shut yourself away and look at this persecution and torture of Jews only from the viewpoint of a Jew, then you’ll develop some sort of complex which is bound to lead to a slow but certain psychological collapse. The only solution is to see the Jewish question from a broader perspective … within the framework of the oppressed Czechs and Norwegians, the oppressed workers … We’ll only be rich when we understand that it’s not just we who are a race