Today is International Children’s Day. And the slaughter continues in Ukraine.

Сhildren of war. Hundreds killed and injured. Thousands forcefully deported, deprived of their home, their family, and years of their care-free childhood.

Those crimes have no excuse but have an explanation: an attempt to destroy Ukrainians and its identity. The most disturbing to me are the illegally deported Ukrainian children ending up in Russia. Their names and dates of birth changed in the Russian Federation. Yes, they change their identities, change their names, surnames, dates of birth, do everything to assimilate them, and in fact – commit an act of genocide against Ukraine children, forcefully “Russify” them, give them so-called passports, do everything so the children forgot about their native land, forgot the language, forgot the culture and accepted, as they say, a new reality.

This image of the grandfather above is the definition of heartbreak, of infinite pain, leaving a gaping hole in my chest. I will never get used to it, and I get angry and think about justice and retribution. A young, beautiful life that is forever gone. And all the people who knew and loved her.

And nothing can be said that will alleviate the grief of a person who loses loved ones to war, more so when they are not involved directly in the war but as civilians. Wishing him condolences is futile and it is very difficult for use in overcoming the grief. This is the end result of extremists – be they terrorists, power hungry politicians or religious zealots, and even criminals.

It’s heartbreaking to see the essence of our purpose, nurturing the life of the next generations, to be destroyed every day in Ukraine and elsewhere. It is impossible to discount what has happened/is happening in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and scores of other places – millions of people slaughtered, starved, displaced, left homeless, threatened with torture, destroyed.

The world was supposed to be safe for this little girl. And this grandfather was supposed to spend many happy days together with her. It reminded me of the photo of the Ukrainian dad who sat next to his dead son, holding his cold, lifeless hand. 

And if we just accept this state of things and say we are unable to protect her, your children may be next. We all are responsible that this world has been turned into a nightmare for peaceful cities and peaceful people. Feeling this responsibility we have to act. Everybody has its own instruments to act, and you just have to think and go out of your own comfort zone.

I keep receiving messages from my friends in Ukraine like “Today we were shelled again, had to sleep in a bath”. With some of them I will be able to talk only in my heart from now. I stopped even feeling angry when reading such news; it has become “normal” for me. It only adds more determination: to work more, donate more, and help more. And after every news bit like this, I just send more money to the “Come Back Alive” fund and continue talking about and writing about Ukraine. It is the least that I can do.

This might be new to my recent subscribers (201 “newbies” over the last month), but my long-time readers know that over the last 5 years I have been involved in a film project that has been the most challenging of my career. It has been a deep dive into the political uses of dehumanisation, genocide and massacre, with a primary focus on the life of Jacques Semelin, one of the world’s leading authorities on these subjects.

As I have noted before, like many of my generation, I have continued to be attentive to the Ho­locaust, reading the better-publicised scholarly contributions and wit­ness testimonies as they appeared in translation, watching the better­ publicised films and television documentaries. I did this for much the same reasons that I read the memoirs and poems which came out of the trenches of World War I – as a matter of moral and social duty. Attention must be paid to extreme human suffering and we must do what we can to make some human sense out of it.

But now, writing and film producing as a reader and not as a scholar, I have read but a fraction of the Holocaust literature available in English, which is itself only a fraction of the literature available in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, and many other languages. The books I have collected in my library proved their value by providing me with the system of ladders I needed to scramble out over the Holocaust abyss. And I have sampled current scholarly opinion by way of several primary source collections I obtained via the library at the Auschwitz death camp and memorial in Poland, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Almost 80 years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated stu­dents as morally and intellectually baffling, as “unthinkable”, as they were at their first rumoring.

But they have also been informative in scrambling out over the abyss of Ukraine war – and our new world order.

The Holocaust was the most terrible atrocity of the 20th century. In many ways, it was also unprecedented in the history of atrocities: for its comprehensiveness and systematic nature; for the fanaticism with which its perpetrators scoured an entire continent in their pursuit of Jews; for the awful potency of the Nazis’ insinuation that the victims represented a pernicious and existential threat. Collectively, we have spent decades – and published millions of words – trying to understand what happened and why.

And that leads us to the challenge and dilemma today, especially in Ukraine. Morris Edward Opler is believed to be one of the first observers to detail the social basis of racist thought in Nazi ideology, who wrote in September 1945:

“Hitler has been vanquished rather than repudiated, most of those who opposed him reacted against the application of his concepts to them. They have still to disavow his conception. This idea must die.”

Those words ring so very true in today’s world. Today we again face Russia’s Nazism head on – the notions of racial supremacy, of the right to territorial expansion, of the dismissal of minorities’ rights to hospitality and membership in the polity riding across Europe state-by-state.

The Holocaust remains relevant and important because it is a terrifying example of what people can and will do (and are doing today) in given circumstances.

The twentieth century left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, and collective/individual guilt syndromes that needed to be deconstructed. More often than not, the past appears as a devastated landscape full of corpses, dashed illusions, failed myths, betrayed promises, and unprocessed memories. Now over two decades into the twenty-first century, the century repeats. Not just in Ukraine but in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, Yemen – the list seems endless.

Children have always been the most vulnerable part of society during wars. It’s their childhood that’s stolen by the enemy, it’s their future that is under threat, it’s their psychological health that is affected, it’s their minds that are traumatized.

But the use of Ukrainian women and children as weapons of war still comes as a bone-chilling shock to so many of the naive due to their lack of knowledge of and expertise on the true nature of Russia and its society. The spirit of Nazism, imperialism and tyranny is still roaming around the European continent, ruining lives and spreading death.