The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (review)

The Shoah in Ukraine looks at how the extermination of the Jews in Ukraine is retold, understood, and commemorated. The contributors demonstrate that more than one million Ukrainians of Jewish descent were, in fact, the victims of antisemitic acts committed by many non-Jewish Ukrainians themselves, especially between 1941 and 1944. Ghettoization, deportation, and the mass murder of 1.2 million Jews by ethnic Ukrainians occurred in brutal and arbitrary ways beginning in 1941. Reflecting on the concept of victimization, Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower conclude their Introduction with an observation that nicely summarizes the findings of the entire volume: “The perception of Ukraine’s ethnic Germans as ‘double victims’ of history—first as victims of Soviet rule before the war, then as targets of anti-German acts of revenge toward war’s end—has generally overshadowed the role they played in implementing Nazi killing policies” (11). Emphasizing the numerous links with Austria, especially in the nineteenth century, the editors argue that many Ukrainians would have felt highly receptive toward propaganda from German-speaking countries in the 1940s.

Brandon and Lower open the volume by presenting this lesser-known story of the Holocaust, and argue that because of the general focus on Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau, many events that occurred in the Ukraine have remained unknown, even to many Ukrainians. In this vein, many of the contributors investigate how historians have remembered (or forgotten) the tragic events that took place there. Omer Bartov’s chapter, for example, analyzes the ongoing cult of figures like Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who “was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews during the pogroms in western Ukraine in 1941” (142). A recent photograph included in the volume shows a monument and a public park in the city of Drohobych that still bear Bandera’s name today. Even though many thousands of Jews were killed each month between 1941 and 1944 in the city of Ternopil, there is still little public mention of the mass murder that took place there. In his chapter about the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Galicia, Frank Golczewski helps to overcome this memory gap by using the testimonies of survivors as well as various types of propaganda, such as a Ukrainian recruitment poster that invited patriots to join the SS Volunteer Rifle Division—which subtly linked the artificial famine of 1932–1933 (Holodomor) to the “Judeo-Bolshevik monster” (142).

This book is groundbreaking, but as the co-editors admit in their Introduction, “a comprehensive history of the Holocaust in the Ukraine as a whole still has not been written” (3). This reflects, in part, the great challenges involved in writing the history of the Holocaust there. Because the Ukraine’s borders changed dramatically over several decades, historians are required to conduct research in many languages, including Ukrainian, Russian, German, and Polish. In addition, the archives for some Ukrainian cities are now located in neighbouring countries. Thanks to its rich documentation and clearly written, nuanced contributions, The Shoah in Ukraine is an innovative and interdisciplinary contribution that serves as an essential step in that direction by drawing on history, memory studies, and political science.