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