Eastern Winds - Minorities in the former Communist World
Alain Keler
On 24 September 1997, in Independence Square in the very heart of Kiev, capital of Ukraine, I took photographs of a man selling copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ along with other nationalist and fascist books.
Four days later the same city commemorated the 33,000 people massacred by the Nazis on 29 and 30 September 1941 in the Babi Yar district of Kiev.
My grandparents and their youngest daughter aged 11 were arrested in Clermont-Ferrand on 18 November 1943. Thus began their journey into the night.
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Being Jewish was what the 33,000 murdered people and my grandparents had in common. For the Nazis and the French collaborators that was reason enough to send them to an appalling death. They were part of what was at that time Europe's largest minority.
The leaden cover under which tension and conflict had been simmering for decades exploded with the collapse of communism. Peoples, national or religious minorities were suddenly able to proclaim their own identity. Today the resurgence of these aspirations has taken on the form of an eruption of nationalist fervour that is difficult to control .
After a century or more of humiliation and suppression, even if the political system in these countries is no longer totalitarian, democracy is only in its infancy. A new enemy within has taken the place of the class enemy once pinpointed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today the enemy is the one who speaks a different language, embraces another religion, belongs to another culture. Albanians in Kosovo; Chechens and Kalmuks in Russia; Jews in the Ukraine; Tatars in Crimea; Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. These groups find themselves in a minority.
This work won the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography in 1997.
