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The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization

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This anthology is made up of chapters written by a variety of authors/specialists on either the Holocaust or Ukraine. Some of these chapters are most likely taken straight from books that these authors have previously published (i.e. Bartov's chapter is pretty much from his lastest book entitled "Erased"), which detail various aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine before, during, and after the Second World War. Today, most of the attention has been focused on either the Holocaust in Poland or the Soviet Union in general, not so much on specifically Ukraine. This book aims to correct that missing page in western historiography on the Holocaust.

Being from Ukraine I found much of the information within the pages of this book engrossing to read about. Specifically, the history of Jews and Ukrainians in Galicia was very intriguing. I found it interesting that the Ukrainians in this area were affected by German/Austrian anti-Semitism which differed from that of other areas within Ukraine which was more affected by Polish and Russian anti-Semitism. There is an entire chapter which chronicles the destruction of Ukrainian Jewry village/town/city by village/town/city and year by year, an excellent reference. One of the chapters also notes how much more research is needed in regards to the role of Police Battalions, which in Ukraine actually killed more Jews than Einsatzgruppen C and D combined! Something that undoubtedly few know about. As with any book worth its salt this one raises as many questions as it answers, questions which hopefully will be answered in the near future as our knowledge and understanding of this event within the borders of Ukraine grows. Highly recommended for those with an interest in either the Holocaust or Ukrainian history during this time period.

This is the most outstanding compilation of articles on a historical topic I have ever come across. This is all the more noteworthy in that works in English on the Holocaust of the Ukraine are relatively new. Every chapter is finely detailed, thoroughly researched and referenced, yet amazingly readable. Scholars and interested persons will find this volume packed with information on the subject, and is definitely recommended as the first book of choice to the new reader unfamiliar with the Ukrainian subject. Because considerable data is taken from Soviet sources in addition to Nazi and Jewish sources, it is also possibly the best single-volume refutation of the argument of those individuals who have again started to question the occurence or extent of the Holocaust. This book leaves no question whatsoever, the Ukraine accounting for at least 1.4 million of the 6 million murdered Jews. Several tables detail the numbers within each administrative district in the Ukraine.

This volume consists of ten extended essays (plus an editor's Introduction of similar length) by specialists in East European history, Holocaust Studies and the like. They present the fullest knowledge available at the 2008 point of publication on key aspects of the Holocaust as it affected the geographic areas that make up modern day Ukraine. All contributors are of high standing in their field. Following the bestseller success of his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, one of them, Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University, is now firmly established as outstanding.

Different parts of Ukraine had differing Holocaust experiences. That was for reasons connected with their various pre-1941 histories, and the time element in the progress of Axis forces across Ukraine in 1941-42, and back again in 1942-44. The numbers of Jews resident in certain areas of Ukraine, and the balance of the Jewish population relative to Ukrainians, Poles and others, also tended to make a difference. Contributions in this book focusing on specific areas of Ukraine are therefore especially instructive; the differences between Galicia and Bukovina, for instance, and between those areas and Volhynia, Transcarpathia and Bessarabia, and central and eastern Ukraine being of prime importance to understanding, and indeed to Jewish survival rates. Then there is the matter of Romania's invasion of southern Ukraine as far east as the River Buh, the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu's deportation of many Jews to the newly-created Transnistria, and finally his at least partial change of heart on the "100 per cent solution".

Separate studies on the German project to create all-weather West-East highways and the related forced labour camps, and on the development in the Zhitomir area of a model for future organization and government in the conquered territories, tie-in with the understanding already gleaned from earlier contributions. Omer Bartov's concluding piece lamenting the general lack of memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust in modern Galicia (the same might be said of Ukraine as a whole) is also better understood in light of all that has gone before. The disinclination of the Soviet state to recognise Jewish victims as such -as distinct from "peaceful citizens" - is now history, but the conflicting objectives and priorities of Ukrainian nationalists and Jews - historically, and to some extent to the present day - are a continuing source of unease, and some international tension. Karel C Berkhoff's careful and highly enlightening comparison of the various testimonies over more than 20 years of the Babi Yar survivor Dina Pronicheva must also be mentioned. For some, that alone would be worth the price of this valuable book.

This comprehensive work touches on many subjects, a few of which I discuss.

Are Polish complaints about pre-WWII Jews (as a foreign--even disloyal--element, and pre-occupier of economic niches) factual? Snyder writes: "By the middle of the nineteenth century, some three-quarters of merchants in Volhynia were Jews...After five generations of Russian rule, almost all Jews had lost contact with Polish traditions and the Polish language. The communities remained, impotent and quiet, representing a Jewish-Russian rather than a Jewish-Polish tradition...Volhynian Jews were indifferent, or sometimes hostile, to the Polish state established in 1918." (p. 79). "In trade and commerce, Jews continued to dominate in Volhynia. Jews were about a tenth of the population in 1937, while two of three traders in the province were Jewish, and Jews owned as many industrial enterprises as the rest of the population combined." (p. 84).

Was the Zydokomuna, believed by many Ukrainians and Poles, simply anti-Semitic imagination, or was it based on reality? Recall the fact that the hated NKVD was the very instrument of raw Communist terror. Snyder, based partly on Soviet sources, comments: "As late as 1936, 60 of 90 ranking officers (captain and above) of the NKVD in Soviet Ukraine had declared themselves to be of Jewish nationality. As late as March 1937, Jews outnumbered Russians (38 percent and 32 percent, respectively) in the highest positions of the Soviet NKVD as a whole." (p. 88). Stalin's subsequent purges and "de-Judaization" of the CP reduced the self-declared Jewish share of the entire NKVD to 4% by July 1939. Disregarding additional (undeclared) Jews, even 4% was still greater than the 1-2% Jewish share of the USSR's population.

The first systematic (as opposed to episodic) mass murders of Jews by Nazis anywhere in Europe took place in the form of Einsatzgruppen units operating on the heels of the advancing Wehrmacht in mid-1941. Using documents, Pohl demonstrates how, over a few-month period, the targets were expanded from Jewish Communists, to all Jewish military-age men, and finally to all Jews. (pp. 27-28, 32). (This tends to support the functionalist interpretation of the origins of the Holocaust over the intentionalist one. The Nazi extermination of the Jews clearly developed gradually and incrementally during 1941, not all at once in pre-planned form before the war.)

Some 12,000--24,000 (p. 150) Jews were initially murdered by Ukrainian bands, often even before the arrival of the Germans (or Hungarians). Thus, rather than being German-sponsored, or spontaneous pogroms, or retaliatory acts for the retreating-NKVD murders of 10,000 Ukrainian-including political prisoners (p. 130), they were of an independent, genocidal nature. It was the Ukrainian fascist OUN which, desirous of copying "German methods" (pp. 131-132; see also p. 303, 316) had organized and incited this network of murderous bands. (p. 132).

Later, the Germans organized the indigenous Ukrainian collaborationist police (Schutzmannschaften). It played a major indirect and direct role in the extermination of the local Jews, and had 100,000 members. (pp. 54-55). Later, as Pohl points out, "Many UPA units consisted of deserters from the indigenous police who had persecuted and killed Jews before defecting." (p. 53). They put their experience with "German methods" to use against the Poles. (e. g., p. 56).