They are all set in Poland and Ukraine for the European Football Championship. Our boys play the first group matches in Kharkov. The training camp is in Krakow. Our great rivals Germany and Portugal play against each other in Lvov. Many of these host cities have a bloody, but not always well known history in the West. Both the Nazis and the Communists have ruthlessly wreaked havoc there.
In the coming days, the streets and squares of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv will be brightly colored orange. There will be partying, drinking and singing. Of course, because it will be three wonderful weeks.
However, observant orange fans can come across a bronze statue just outside the city. It represents a Ukrainian family. The man and woman stand with their backs to each other. The man looks northwards, in the direction of the Russian capital Moscow. He clenches his fist and tries to protect his children from something. The woman desperately raises her hands toward the sky. The children seem emaciated, their eyes wide with fear. A bleak contrast to the cheerful orange madness in the city.
The statue, erected in 2008, is a reminder of one of Ukraine's greatest national disasters, the Holodomor , or 'killing by hunger'. In 1932-33, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin staged an artificial famine in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union. He wanted to teach the free Ukrainian peasants, who often owned large fertile tracts of land, a lesson because they resisted his plan to collectivize agriculture. About four million people were killed in Ukraine. The area around Kharkov was the hardest hit. During the European Championship it is a great Orange party here, in 1933 the body carts drove back and forth.
Like fellow European Championship organizer Poland, the country was alternately hit by Soviet and Nazi terror. “Bloodlands,” historian Timothy Snyder called them in his book of the same name (2011). The Holodomor was only the beginning of a terror for Ukraine that would last well into the twentieth century. In the years 1936-38, Stalin struck again. During mass show trials, the paranoid dictator had thousands of opponents of his policies arbitrarily executed. Especially in the cities of Kharkiv and the capital Kiev, where the Netherlands will hopefully play the European Championship final on July 1, masses of opponents of the Soviet regime were executed.
In 1941, the killing began a new chapter when the Nazi army attacked the Soviet Union. Hitler hated the communists ideologically and moreover saw it as his task to create 'Lebensraum' (living space) for the German people in the east. At the start of the German campaign against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht quickly drove the Red Army back. Behind the front, the dreaded Einsatzgruppen advanced. Their specific task was to make the conquered areas suitable for German colonization. In concrete terms, this meant that all inferior 'Untermenschen' (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc.) had to be removed.
Some 30,000 Jews were literally piled up in a ravine just outside Kiev and shot one by one. But as for Stalin, starvation was also a tried and tested means for the Nazis to get rid of unwanted elements. Some villages on the Ukrainian steppe were simply fenced and people waited until the inhabitants had died of starvation and exhaustion.
Ghetto of Lvov
Our rivals Portugal and Germany will play against each other in Lvov during the group stage. This city and the surrounding province were added to the General Government in July 1941. This was formally part of the Third Reich, but above all a testing ground for the most inhumane Nazi crimes. The extermination camps Sobibor, Bełżec, Treblinka and Majdanek were located in this area. During the European Championship, Orange will have its home base in the Polish city of Krakow, about 50 kilometers from the most famous extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. About 1.1 million mainly Western Jews perished there.
Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Lvov was already home to 120,000 Jews. When the Nazis conquered the city, they closed off a number of neighborhoods with fences and barbed wire from the outside world. Another 100,000 Jews from surrounding areas were deported to this ghetto. Soon it was overcrowded. The Nazis supplied only minimal rations of food. Hunger and disease were the order of the day. Sometimes the elderly and sick were taken out of the ghetto and executed in a field. In the course of 1942, as the gruesome "final solution to the Jewish question" was taking shape, the Lvov ghetto was evicted. Most of the residents were transported in cattle cars to the Belzec extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto, the Polish capital where one of the semifinals is played, has a similar history.
The end of the Second World War did not end the agony of Poland and Ukraine. Ukraine was soon restored as one of the Soviet republics. Stalin was in charge again. In 1944-46, some 150,000 Ukrainians were deported to the Gulag labor camps, which were generally comparable in conditions to the Nazi camps. Throughout the Soviet Union, deportations of Jews and other minorities continued to be the order of the day well into the twentieth century. Poland became a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union. Polish dissidents were also deported to the Gulag. The Russian secret service was watching everyone. Both countries remained penniless until the 1990s due to the inefficient communist economy.
The traces of this bloody recent history can be seen everywhere, especially in Ukraine, but also in Poland. Not only in the form of monuments, such as the Holodomor monument in Kharkov, but also in the corruption, in the malfunctioning democracy and in the still widespread poverty. In any case, the European Championship will be a party. The scars of the twentieth century will not have disappeared for the time being.
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