Slaves
by Nick Gromicko
Although the word "slav" didn't originally mean slave, the English word "slave" comes from the word slav as in Slavic people (like my wife and Melania Trump). The English took the word from the Old French word "esclave" (captive) which can be traced back to Roman times when German tribes supplied the slave markets of the Roman Empire with captured Slavs. Otto the Great was such a prolific enslaver of Slavic peoples that the two words became synonymous.
Olena Gromicko
Melania Trump
Slavic people are Belarusians, Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Czechs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Serbs, and Slovenes.
The slave trade really got going after the Muslim conquests of North Africa. The Islamic world became a huge importer of Slavic slaves from Central and Eastern Europe that they often purchased from Jewish slave merchants.
The slave trade really got going after the Muslim conquests of North Africa. The Islamic world became a huge importer of Slavic slaves from Central and Eastern Europe that they often purchased from Jewish slave merchants.
3.5 million Slavs were sold into slavery by North Africans.
My wife is Ukrainian. In 1575, 100,000 Ukrainians were captured and enslaved. In 1676, one raid took almost 80,000 Ukrainians. Another in 1688 captured 60,000 Ukrainians. From the 1440s into the 18th century, more than 3.5 million Slavs were sold into slavery by North Africans.
During World War II, the Germans put 6 million Slavs into forced labor camps, 2.2 million of them being Ukrainian. The Soviet Union had about 14 million Slavic people working in the Gulags. This happened recently, in my parents' lifetimes!
Slavic people were legally declared to be subhuman.
Germany eventually declared Slavs to be subhuman and began exterminating them. So many millions of Ukrainians were killed that the number of victims (8 to 10 million) is virtually unequaled in human history. Ukraine lost more people than the combined losses of Great Britain, Canada, Poland, France, and the USA in WWII. Those Ukrainians would have considered themselves fortunate to be merely enslaved.
So the next time you meet a Slavic person, remember.... they are the direct descendants of a tough people who have survived as slaves both recently, and for centuries.
So the next time you meet a Slavic person, remember.... they are the direct descendants of a tough people who have survived as slaves both recently, and for centuries.