On Holocaust Remembrance Day it is worth noting that a leading Soviet diplomat who tried to build a coalition against the Nazis had once lived in Belfast

There is a connection between Jewish genocide that was carried out in many parts of Europe during the Second World War ( including Auschwitz, Poland) and Belfast.

The Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov who tried, but sadly failed, to build a strong anti-Nazi coalition (between England, France, Poland and the Soviet Union) to contain Adolf Hitler’s expansion plans before WWII, lived in Belfast from 1907 to 1910; he was employed in the Jewish Jaffe Public Elementary School, Cliftonville Road, Belfast.

After his three years sojourn teaching in Belfast, he moved to England in 1910 where he married, in 1916, Ms Ivy Teresa Low, who was an Anglo-Jewess.

In 1930 Maxim Litvinov was appointed People’s Commissar for foreign affairs by Joseph Stalin. However, the latter fearing an invasion of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, by either Nazi-Germany and/or Japan, and despairing that an anti-Nazi coalition with the West to stop Nazi-Germany could be put together, as advocated by Maxim Litvinov, replaced the latter with Vyacheslav Molotov on May 3, 1939.

This change of Soviet foreign ministers paved the way for a different approach by the Soviet Union to dealing with the Nazi-German threat.

Micheal O’Cathail, Fermanagh