The issue of the Holocaust concerns not only historians studying the events of the WWII. In general, there are the problems of preserving and transferring historical memory in the broader public dimension, including family upbringing, educational programs and the media's stand,’’ the analyst of Vestnik Kavkaza, Nikita Vlasov, said in the National Question program on Vesti FM.
Today’s program was dedicated to the problems of falsifying the history of the WWII and, in particular, the Holocaust events, the need to preserve the memory of which was stressed during the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Jewish Tolerance Center in Moscow, but was questioned by Poland after the adoption by the Polish Sejm of a law prohibiting the recognition of the presence of the Nazi collaborators and Holocaust survivors among Poles on the Polish territory.
"If people forget the lessons of history, if we reduce the Holocaust to a particular event in the history of the mid-twentieth century, then, on my opinion, there is a high probability that this horror, humanitarian catastrophe, which has no analogues in the world history, can repeat itself sooner or later. The same happened when more than a million people were killed in 1994 without any camps and gas chambers in Rwanda. This is an evidence that the lessons of the Holocaust have not been adopted, "Nikita Vlasov pointed out.
The ‘Holocaust Law’ adopted by Poland is very alarming. ‘’We see the acute political debate unfolding around the bill initiated by the Polish Sejm. The Polish lawmakers approved the law on the Holocaust, which provides the prison sentences for public statements about the involvement of Poles in the mass extermination of Jews during the WWII. This document caused an extremely contradictory reaction, both in Israel and in a number of other countries, in particular, in Ukraine. The reasons for this discontent vary significantly. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Poland must abandon this law since the fact of the Holocaust entirety can not be denied, " the analyst said.
"I can say that in modern Russia the memory of these tragic events is not only preserved but also fixed at the level of the criminal responsibility. For example, there is the criminal responsibility for denying the facts established by the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal. In 2012, President Vladimir Putin put an end to the issue of the attitude of the Russian society and state to the Holocaust when he said that denying the Holocaust is not just a cynical and unprincipled lie, but is an oblivion of the history lessons that could lead to a new tragedy. I think that this assessment reflects the essence and meaning of this issue,’’ Nikita Vlasov concluded.
