The Great Debate UK
Belene: the forgotten death camp
– Anna Mudeva is a Reuters senior correspondent based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her special report “In eastern Europe, people pine for socialism” looks at widespread disenchantment with capitalism in the region. -
Driving through the dense willow and poplar forests of Bulgaria’s biggest Danube island of Persin on a sunny October afternoon, my throat grappled with a lump of horror and disbelief.
What twisted mind had once picked this idyllic place with its painfully beautiful white herons and pelicans to set up a communist death camp?
Actually, it was so typical for those 45 years of communist rule.
Deliberately or not, the old regime would always choose the most beautiful places to build an ugly, polluting factory or open a prison.
Near my hometown in south-western Bulgaria, the communists erected a chemical plant which gave jobs to thousands but shrouded the entire valley — surrounded by magnificent mountains — in dense fog each morning and left many with asthma and lung diseases.
I heard much about the Belene concentration camp in the first years after the regime fell in 1989 but never before that autumn visit 20 years later I had truly realised what actually happened there.
This article brings into question ‘why we cannot question’. We have the official history of World War2 holocaust that is in effect enshrined in law or the moral law and cannot be questioned yet the holocaust of the genocide in Ireland where an estimated 1.4 million starved to death at the hands of the English ruling classes hardly gets a mention. The illegal war in Iraq with estimates as high as 1.03 million dead and a country, its infrastructure and people broken cannot be prosecuted and those that should be brought to international justice walk free with their heads held high.
Why it is that the holocaust of Communism where estimates of 60 million perished is so shrouded in secrecy by the so called free world is a mystery of all mysteries.
I remember in my early teens news of mass graves unearthed in the forests just outside the Communist block (from memory either just inside Germany or Poland) and when there was mention of evidence that would point towards executions by the Communists and made to look like German executions there were shouts to ‘let the dead rest in peace’.
We will never be at peace unless the truth and nothing but the truth is known and the horrors used as a means to stop the murderous acts of the unknown puppet masters of death and destruction. Who is pulling the strings and what is being hidden?
The population of the world seems like an expendable play thing by those we have no control over, probably do not elect and perhaps have never seen?