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When I visited Kraków for some dental treatment in late January 2022 just before Putin sent his peace-keeping forces into Ukraine, I made a point of not visiting either Auschwitz or Schindler’s factory for the same reason I did not visit Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum on the two occasions I visited Zion. Quite frankly, not only have I a gut full of hearing about Anne Frank, the boy in the striped pyjamas and Holocaust survivors who, like the old soldiers that they are, refuse to die, but I hate having propaganda of any sort rammed down my neck.

That said, I am not a politician or social influencer like King Charles, and so I am not expected to show up, like Megan Markle, to give hugs and kisses at jamborees like that which Auschwitz will host on the 80^th anniversary of its 27^th January 1945 liberation by Russia’s 322nd Rifle Division.

I say Russia and not the Red Army or the Soviet Union because, as the Red Army’s 322^nd Division was raised in Gorky in Moscow, it was overwhelmingly Russian, a not inconsequential point that Russian President Putin probably knew when he accompanied 322^nd veteran Ivan Martynushkin and Auschwitz survivor Irina Kharina to Auschwitz some years ago.

Although Martynushkin will, if he is still alive, probably be a no show at Auschwitz this year, so too will Russian President Putin, Belarusian President Lukashenko and Venezuelan President Maduro, who has a $25 million bounty on his head because he refused to cede power to American puppet Juan Guaidó, whom former Irish MEP Mick Wallace accurately described as an unelected gobshite. And, though the hard line Times of Israel has predictably castigated Maduro, who was raised in the one, holy and apostolic Catholic faith, as an anti-Semite, even they are forced to admit that his grandparents “were Jewish, from a [Sephardic] Moorish background” and that, in short, Maduro’s family are as much Holocaust survivors, as are those of Dubliner, John Boyne, who wrote the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and who spent his childhood amidst Dublin’s Jews, who spent their entire time building exclusive golf clubs when Hungary’s Jews were going up the chimney at Auschwitz.

Although both the world and his mother have heard of Boyne’s fictional boy in his striped pyjamas, the publicity attending that is as nothing to what Anne Frank, a young Dutch Jew who perished at Auschwitz, has posthumously had bestowed on her. And, though I have no intention of reading her juvenile jottings, poignant though they may be, I am more interested in the fate of those 22,000 Dutch citizens who perished in their 1944/5 famine unless, as seems to be the case, they are children of a lesser God than the equally unfortunate Ms Frank. Or how about this excellent article by Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the few Irish historians and authors worth his salt, which tells us of the Soviet famine (9 million dead), Churchill’s deliberately concocted 1943 Bengal famine (2 million dead), China’s Henan famine (2 million dead), the Dutch East Indies’ Java famine (2.5 million dead), Vietnam’s famine (1 million dead), Greece’s Great Famine (300,000 dead) or Austria’s famine (100,000 dead)? Are they all too children of that same lesser God, or are they too worthy of remembrance?

Before returning to Lukashenko and Putin, let me say that, having read MI6 officer Norman Lewis’ Naples ‘44, I quickly travelled to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, such was the effect of his powerful writing on me. Although I could not praise Lewis’ haunting writings on Southern Italy or French Indo China highly enough, anybody who even thinks that the Neapolitans and the Vietnamese got off lightly deserves very much more than a Mike Tyson punch in the mouth.

Which is the very least any Belarusian of Lukashenko’s vintage would give you, were you to run your mouth off there, in what was the very epicentre of World War Two, the Great Patriotic War as they called it.

Not that Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg, Leningrad as it was then called, got off lightly and members of Putin’s own family were among the over 1,000,000 St Petersburg residents who perished as a direct consequence of Finland’s Final Solution to their very existence.

Although Putin’s Presidential role dictates he must play the diplomat and, although NATO’s wags like to believe he is hamming it up in clips like this where he braves torrential rains to salute Russia’s own unknown fallen, that is to negate his formative years in St Petersburg where the savagery of the Finns and their German and Italian allies must never be forgotten.

Although Putin’’s own formative experiences probably partially explains why he accompanied 322^nd veteran Ivan Martynushkin to Auschwitz some years ago, it is also indicative of why we should read this Taipei Times interview with Martynushkin to get not only a deeper and fuller appreciation of what the 322^nd and the entire Red Army and Russian people suffered but to more fully understand whatever relevant lessons Auschwitz has to offer us as well.

Although I will never visit the propaganda museums of Auschwitz and Zion, I must say I enjoyed my visit to their equivalent in Saigon, where the young Vietnamese children there with me enthusiastically lapped it all up like ducks to water and good on every last one of them for that and for the curators for helping to instil national pride in those future Ho Chi Minhs and Võ Nguyên Giáps.

But, quite apart from some minor point scoring of the sort that now typifies Auschwitz and the plethora of Holocaust museums in the Western world, my hope is that Russia, India, China, Indonesia and the rest of the civilised world would take a leaf out of Vietnam’s playbook, scale it up and make worthwhile museums and memorial libraries in Kazan. Mongolia, Henan or some similar venues to all the victims of imperialism, not only in Auschwitz but also in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola and countless other places like Bengal and Vietnam that deserve to have their stories told as repeatedly and as forcefully as has the story of Anne Frank and John Boyne’s fictional boy in his fictional pyjamas.