Editor’s Note: This is the final article in a five-part series that examines the Holocaust in Ukraine that nearly wiped out its 500,000-member Jewish community during Nazi Germany’s occupation in World War II. This segment looks at steps under way to reconcile the Ukrainian and Jewish communities.
LVIV – Nearly 70 years after western Ukraine witnessed the decimation of its Jewish community, relations between Ukrainians and Jews often remain uneasy.
Although Germans initiated the Final Solution – the Nazi plan to eliminate Jews in Europe – many Jews have been particularly angry at Ukrainians for their role in the Holocaust, at times even more so than at Germans themselves.
The reason, some Holocaust survivors say, is because Jews did not expect Ukrainians, people they had lived with side-by-side for generations, to participate in terror against them.
This is compounded, they say, by a failure of Ukrainians to examine their past in an unbiased way, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“When an outside danger comes from far away, it’s not the same as your own neighbor,” said Shimon Redlich, a retired university professor who survived the Holocaust in Berezhany, Ternopil Oblast, with the help of Ukrainians. “Germans have historical memory. They have confronted the past, something that Ukraine couldn’t have done during the Soviet period.”
For that reason, full reconciliation between the two communities may still be some time away. A number of Ukrainian historians have argued that it is impossible to come to terms with the Ukrainian role in the Holocaust until the country confronts its Soviet past.
While the Nazi period was frequently shameful, Soviet rule was marked by repressions, arrests, deportations and the annihilation not only of the nation’s intelligentsia, but those who disagreed with the ruling system.
Full reconciliaton between communities will take time.
Seeds of reconciliation, however, are being planted by people who hope to promote understanding between the two communities. An important part of that process is for each side to hear the other, whether through publications, conferences or meetings.
There has recently been a boom in work dealing with the country’s multifarious past that once would have been unimaginable. Ukrainians are now hearing the Jewish side of the story.
Several autobiographies by individuals who survived the Holocaust in Ukraine have been translated into Ukrainian, as well as critical assessments of how the nation approaches its Jewish past, including works by Redlich and Omer Bartov, a Brown University professor and leading expert on genocide.
“If we are to understand historical events, we have to put them in historical context. We have to rid ourselves of the habit of telling [stories] from one perspective,” Bartov said.
Ukrainians are also being given the chance to learn more about how outsiders assess the Soviet past, helping them better understand how the Holocaust fits into their nation’s history.
Recent books by leading Western scholars have assessed how Soviet and Nazi policies shaped Ukraine. “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” an internationally acclaimed volume by Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, is expected to be available in Ukrainian shortly.
In June, Snyder told a conference of leading international scholars in Berlin that when considering relations between Ukrainians and Jews on the local level during World War II, it is important to recognize how they were impacted by the larger policies of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany.
To fulfill their political and military agendas, both powers “counted on the local population when things weren’t going to plan,” he said.
“Ukraine is the very center,” Snyder said. “Ukraine was the deadliest place to be.”
Resurrecting historical memory has become a critical component of the reconciliation process. Lviv, which was once home to the third-largest Jewish community in pre-war Poland, is the backdrop for several initiatives.
Lviv’s city council is working with the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, a non-profit private foundation, to create memorials at three places of Jewish history and culture.
For the second year in a row, the center itself has sponsored a summer school in Jewish studies, which include courses in the history of western Ukrainian Jews, Jewish literature and Yiddish, the language spoken by Central and Eastern European Jews.
Sharing experiences with Ukrainians has taken on a particularly important role in promoting understanding. In May, Lviv hosted a conference to discuss the role of non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, known as The Righteous Among the Nations.
Among those present was Janina Altman, whose father was Henryk Hescheles, the long-time editor of the renowned Polish-language Zionist newspaper, Chwila, published in Lviv from 1919-1939.
Her diary, penned at the age of 12 and first published in Poland in 1946, is finally available in Ukrainian.
Altman, who said she never expected to return to Ukraine after she left, arrived in Lviv with her two sons and a granddaughter the same age she was when she wrote her heart-wrenching words.
“In order to be a normal person, I tried to be a normal person,” she described how she dealt with life after the Holocaust.
Her sentiment was echoed by other Holocaust survivors, also present at the conference.
Sharona Komem, a Lviv native, vividly remembers the day when the Nazis started pogroms against Jews after they entered the city in 1941.
Her life was saved in part because a Ukrainian man warned her parents while out on the street that the Nazis were looking for Jews and took Komem in.
She was returned to her parents several hours later because her mother was afraid she would never see her daughter again.
Over a period of several hours she patiently shared the contents of her Hebrew-language memoirs, displayed at Bergen-Belsen where she was interred with her family during the war.
Of the Ukrainian man who made a split-second decision and took her in, no matter how short a period, Komem said “now I can appreciate what those people” went through.
“It was spur of the moment,” she said.
UKRAINE’S VANISHED JEWS SERIES
Part 1 (June 24): Boris Orych and western Ukraine Jews
Part 2 (July 1): The killing grounds
Part 3 (July 8): Surviving The Holocaust In Lviv
Part 4 (July 15): Saving Jewish Heritage
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
