Dear Madam, - I suspect that some readers found the informative article in the Impartial Reporter, March 27, on Auschwitz both disturbing and difficult to comprehend; however, it is a good that what occurred should be not forgotten and the Impartial Reporter is to be commended. Vasily Grossman, a Russian Jewish writer whose mother was murdered, for being a Jew, at Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1941, has written a classic and moving eye witness account of extermination camps in “The Hell Called Treblinka”.

The Auschwitz death camp, along with other such extermination camps, was the culmination of a racist and sectarian hate policy practiced on a grand scale. If I can tie in this policy with the Ukraine which is much in the news. When the Germans attacked and overran parts of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they carried out a systematic, but scattered, extermination policy.

For instance, when the Germans and their various European allies, including Ukrainian collaborators, attacked and overran the Ukraine, wholesale, close quarter, massacres were perpetrated against the Jews, Russians and other Soviet peoples. For instance on 29 - 30 September 1941, at a place called Babi Yar outside Kiev, 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were herded together and shot and buried dead and alive in a mass grave. More than 100,000 Russian and other Soviet prisoners of war were similarly dispatched.

An even greater Jewish massacre was carried out in Odessa in the Ukraine on 22 - 24 October 1941, though mainly by Germany’s ally, the Romanians.

Vasily Grossman visited Soviet Armenia (the Ottoman Armenians had also suffered genocide in 1915 - 18) in the early 1960s; he attended an Armenian country wedding and wrote the following account of his experience in An Armenian Sketchbook: “Never in my life have I bowed to the ground; I have never prostrated myself before anyone. Now, however, I bow to the ground before the Armenian peasants who, during the merriment of a village wedding, spoke publicly about the agony of the Jewish nation under Hitler, about the death camps where Nazis murdered Jewish women and children. I bow to everyone who, silently, sadly and solemnly, listened to these speeches. Their eyes and faces told me a great deal. - - - “ Yours faithfully, Micheal O’Cathail, Co Fermanagh