One day during the Nazi occupation of western Ukraine in
the second world war, a young Jewish woman slipped out of the ghetto in the
town of Rava Ruska to buy some butter in the market.
On her way, she was spotted by a German officer, who
ordered her stripped naked, made the seller smear her body in butter, and then
had her beaten to death with sticks.
This story was one of thousands relayed to a team of
researchers led by Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who has spent
years investigating one of the most under-researched parts of the Holocaust.
Killings in western Ukraine were not carried out using
the industrialised methods of Auschwitz and other death camps. Instead Jews
were rounded up and shot, one by one. Sometimes they were kicked or beaten to
death.
No records were kept, so keeping track of numbers and locations is
difficult.
Now, for the first time, monuments have been erected in
Rava Ruska and four other towns in west Ukraine to properly commemorate the
killings. In four sites around Rava Ruska, around 15,000 Jews were killed in
total, Desbois said at the opening ceremony. Until four years ago, villagers
would regularly turn up bones when planting vegetables or simply walking in the
woods outside the town.
“Every crime was different. Jews were killed for their
belongings, they were killed for fun, they were killed to rape the girls, they
were killed out of anger, boredom, drunkenness,” said Desbois. “When we came
here, it was this silent taboo topic. Young people knew nothing about it, and
the old people had never spoken about it. But it soon became clear they really
wanted to talk.”
The killing of Jews in Ukraine is a neglected chapter of
the Holocaust, as the murders have been inconvenient truths in both the Soviet
and the modern Ukrainian narratives, Jewish leaders say.
According to the Soviet narrative, the Holocaust had no
special place in the conflict because the war is commemorated as the
overwhelming suffering of the whole Soviet people, rather than any specific
ethnic group. In the new western Ukrainian nationalist narrative, putting too
much focus on the crimes against Jews obscures the thwarted Ukrainian struggle
for independence against both Nazi and Soviet forces as the main tragedy of the
war.
A new set of controversial history laws, which insist
Ukrainian nationalist movements should be recognised as “independence
fighters”, has led some to worry that Holocaust memory could again be pushed to
one side.
Unmarked graves
There are around 1,000 sites where Jews were shot en masse in world war two in
Ukraine, estimated Mikhail Tyaglyy of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust
Studies, of which approximately only half are marked with any kind of memorial.
“Over 25 years of independence, our state has never come
up with a proper policy on the Holocaust, either because they were simply not
interested or because it did not fit in with their particular ideological
bent,” said Tyaglyy. “The young generation of Ukrainians, partly thanks to
Maidan [protests] and the new interest in Ukrainian nationalism, have no idea
that the history of Ukrainian nationalist movement is difficult and complicated
and not just about heroism.”
On the same day as the opening in Rava Ruska, another
monument was opened in the village of Bakhiv, at a spot where around 8,000 Jews
were shot. During the ceremony, two locals, including one local official,
shouted out in protest at the inscription, which blamed the Nazis and their
“subservient local forces” for the killings.
The inscription was chosen after months of haggling over
the exact wording with various groups. Some Ukrainian nationalist politicians
were against any monuments being built at all, said Irina Vereshchuk, the
former mayor of Rava Ruska, who supported the project. They thought it was
“inappropriate” to have a monument particularly dedicated to Jews, she said.
In these killings, the local Ukrainian police force was
usually not tasked with the actual shooting, but were frequently involved in
the process of rounding up Jews and aiding the German occupiers in other ways.
However, the role of locals in the crimes of the Nazis, as well as the massacres
of Polish civilians by Ukrainian nationalists, remains a controversial topic in
Ukraine.
Yuri Shukhevych, the son of one of the main Ukrainian
nationalist leaders, spent three decades in Soviet camps due to his family’s
political affiliations. Now, aged 82, he is an MP and the author of the new
history laws. Asked whether he was comfortable with the Holocaust monument
erected in Rava Ruska which blamed locals as well as Germans, Shukhevych
deflected the question.
“Of course it was a cruel battle and there were a lot of
bad things that happened on all sides. Let’s objectively investigate them. But
people like to say that our nationalists did things but the Polish didn’t. And
what about the Jewish police, the Judenrat, which selected and sorted the Jews?
I saw it with my own eyes. But the Jews don’t like to talk about that.”
However, there is a hope among the Jews of Ukraine that
the narrow narrative of a heroic struggle for independence by Ukrainian
nationalists will be broadened to allow proper study of the crimes committed
against them. In Rava Ruska, local teachers have organised a special
educational programme to teach children about the former Jewish heritage of the
town and the crimes of the Holocaust. In time, there is a hope that the
“atrocity competition” can be replaced with common mourning and commemoration.
Meylakh Sheykhet, a local Jewish researcher and
campaigner, said there is little anti-semitism among the population at large,
but merely a huge lack of education and knowledge about the events of the
second world war and the Holocaust. He also said that Russian portrayals of
Ukrainians as “fascists”, and Putin’s attempt to play the Jewish card in Crimea
– where Jewish leaders were invited to a major Holocaust memorial ceremony
shortly after Russia annexed the peninsula last year – have not convinced local
Jewish communities.
“We understand that there is no more anti-semitism here
than there is in Russia, and we don’t want to be used by Putin against
Ukraine,” said Sheykhet.
Source: Novorossia
Today 14-08-2015
