Frank M. Weeks: Focus should be on real war, not on politics

To The Daily Sun, 

Sadly, real conflict in the Ukraine has broken out and the pathetic rationalization by some conservatives that President Joe Biden is to blame takes away from the fact that this is a real war. People are bleeding. People are dying. Property is being destroyed. Lifestyles are being disrupted. Individual freedom is being hampered. A country is being erased. Yet in this country, some narrow-minded people were upset by mask mandates usurping their freedom. They don't realize that a loss of freedom is more than a play on words. How trite can some people be? Focus on the real war, not the politics.

Ironically a sacred monument at Kyiv in the Ukraine was apparently damaged/destroyed on March 1. Few Americans have heard of it. On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, Babi Yar ("Womens' Cliff") was the site of a large-scale massacre of 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children. In those two days, the victims were forced to strip, lie down on dead bodies, and shot in the head by their Nazi executioners. Miraculously, 27 survived to relate the horror. Further killings raised the death total to over an estimated 70,000. "Systemic" antisemitism had raised its ugly head.

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko composed a poem "Babi Yar" that eulogized this despicable event. I can identify with "Babi Yar." In 1963 my Russian language class had the honor of a meet and greet with "Gospodin" Yevtushenko, and he read his poem to the class (in Russian).

"No monument stands over Babi Yar,

A drop shear as a crude gravestone,

I am afraid,

today I am as old in years as all the Jewish people.

No, I seem to be a Jew..."

(Go online and please read the rest of the poem.)

Better yet, try to understand it and realize the "absurdity of the long based ill-founded hatred that many people feel towards the Jewish people." Still better, extrapolate that to "systemic bigotry" — racial, religious, gender, social, economic, political, physical, mental, you name it.

"Babi Yar" should be taught. The meaning of "Babi Yar" should never be forgotten. When I learned the news, it was not a name, it was men, women and children.

Frank M. Weeks

Gilmanton Iron Works