Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
White Russians and Ukrainians of any possibility of advancement: physically, materially or spiritually.
Initially, people from those occupied territories were deported to Germany, to work in slave labour
camps.
According to historians:
The worst treatment was meted out to Russians, Poles and Greeks as racial inferiors fit
only for slave labour; of the 4,795,000 foreign workers in Germany at the end of the
war nearly two millions were Russians living in frightful conditions, brutally treated
and systematically worked to death in the interests of the German war-economy (Carr,
1979:348).
The Slavs were classified by the Nazis according to their racial characteristics. The ones who appeared
Aryan were deported for further racial examination. More than 200,000 Polish children who possessed
Aryan-characteristics were forcibly taken from their Polish parents and placed in German homes to be
raised as Germans. Another approximately 2,000,000 Polish people were sent to Germany to work in
slave labour camps.
Deportation to Germany was just one way for Hitler to realize his ruthless plans: “it was on his express
orders that mass executions of members of the Polish ruling class took place in 1939 in a cold-blooded
attempt to deprive the Poles of their natural leaders” (Carr, 1979:349).
On August 22, 1939, a few days before the official start of World War II, Hitler authorized
his commanders with these infamous words, to kill “without pity or mercy, all men,
women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain
the living space [lebensraum] we need” … Heinrich Himmler echoed Hitler’s decree:
“All Poles will disappear from the world.... It is essential that the great German people
should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles” … By October 8, 1939, Polish
Jews and non-Jews were stripped of all rights (Pencak Schwartz, 2003:1).
As in other countries that were brutally attacked by the Nazis, young Polish men were forced to join the
German army where German was the only language allowed. All secondary schools and colleges were
closed. Germany then went to great lengths to destroy all that is Polish (i.e., art, history, culture).
There were hundreds of public executions of community leaders and professionals (i.e., government
officials, clergy, doctors, journalists). The remaining majority of the leading class was sent to concentration
camps where they later died (Lukas and Davies, 2001). During the period of the Holocaust, Poland
lost the majority of its professionals, as three million Polish people were killed (Pencak Schwartz, 2003).
In many European countries, the Nazis committed this same and carefully planned act of genocide.
This was the known genocide, the known evil that, at least in retrospect, is easily identifiable by its
tyrannical tendencies and moral decadence; the evil that everyone dreads. Not many remember, or
even know, that it all happened before; the same aggression to bend dependent others to an oppressor’s
will was once before exercised to doom millions to death with the same zeal, same ambition and same
dedication.
57