The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization

III • Shades of Grey: Reflections on Jewish-Ukrainian and German-Ukrainian Relations in Galicia

114 • Frank Golczewski III Shades of Grey: Reflections on Jewish-Ukrainian and GermanUkrainian Relations in Galicia Frank Golczewski “The Ukrainians were the worst!” This sentiment or something similar is often mentioned by Holocaust survivors when they reflect on their tormentors in concentration camps and ghettos during the Second World War. Latvian and Lithuanian police and guards sometimes rank equally in terms of brutality, but as a rule, Ukrainians in such positions are singled out as uncommonly cruel. In many cases, the atrocities committed by the Nazis’ eastern European accomplices even overshadow those carried out by the Germans. As one survivor put it, “The Ukrainians were indeed much worse than the Germans. When they met a Jew on the street, they killed him.”1 The stereotype indeed has some basis in fact, but it remains as distorted as it is widely held. This display of selective memory to some extent answers one part of the question of how something like the Holocaust could have happened. After all, whatever else one can say about “the Ukrainians” in general, the behavior of Ukrainian guards in the camps and policeman outside the ghettos cannot be generalized to all Ukrainians. Likewise, one cannot deduce anything about “the Jews” based on the crimes committed by Bolsheviks of Jewish origin in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, perceptions of reality can seem to matter more to per- Shades of Grey • 115 petrators, victims, and bystanders than historical reality. Stereotypes and prejudices often shape the actions of individuals and historical events as much as facts. And a steady stream of narratives concerning harrowing experiences at the hands of Ukrainians during the Holocaust —no matter how important and necessary the repeated testimonies are for posterity—can easily end up perpetuating distortions and resuscitating stereotypes, lending them a dimension and vibrancy that is larger than life. That the sample of Ukrainians in question is quite limited is quickly forgotten. No matter how widespread some popular generalizations, no matter how morally repulsive the behavior of Ukrainian guards in the German camps, historians have to address something as complicated as Ukrainian-Jewish relations from a different point of view than survivors and their audiences. Historians have to consider the preconditions that helped create such impressions, and how representative such impressions were in fact. They must consider, as John-Paul Himka has suggested, whether the preconditions for Ukrainian collaboration were rooted in “long-term factors,” i.e., historical experience over the centuries , or “conjunctural factors,” i.e., contemporary events within the recent memory of the actors.2 Historians have to sift through the evidence as provided by all sides and explain the cultural, material, and political frames of reference in which these activities occurred. There are plenty of examples of false impressions in Ukrainian-Jewish relations: Practically every faction involved in the Russian Civil War, which broke out after the Bolsheviks took power, carried out pogroms between 1917 and 1921. Yet popular history in the east and the west has seized on the violence committed by forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) during the rule of Symon Petliura. These forces were indeed guilty of most pogroms, but the Bolsheviks carried out scores of pogroms as well. The collaboration of militant Ukrainian nationalist groups with certain German political circles and intelligence services has left such an impression that it is largely forgotten that a good part of Ukrainian nationalist leaders in the 1920s embraced the Soviet Union’s policy of Ukrainization and returned to Ukraine after a short exile. And while thousands of Ukrainians from Galicia and occupied Poland rallied to German-sponsored paramilitary and military formations, millions of Ukrainians from prewar Soviet Ukraine—the very Ukrainians who experienced the worst of Soviet rule during the 1930s—fought for the Soviets. Postwar surveys of Ukraine during the Second World War have tended to generalize the experience of Ukrainians under Nazi rule as one all-Ukrainian disaster that inflicted an equal amount of damage throughout the Ukrainian lands. Reality, however, was much different . German rule varied in style of administration from region to region : military administration, civil administration, Reich Commissariat Ukraine, and General Government. Seen in their entirety, all these occupation regimes were without a doubt destructive, but Nazi designs 116 • Frank Golczewski on certain lands meant rule in some parts of Ukraine was less severe than in others as far as Ukrainians were concerned. This was the case in the General Government...