Researchers open ‘neglected chapter’ of Ukraine’s Holocaust history

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.