Language:
English
Year of publication:
2015
Titel der Quelle:
Yad Vashem Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
43,2 (2015) 13-50
Keywords:
Orhanizat︠s︡ii︠a︡ ukraįnsʹkykh nat︠s︡ionalistiv
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Public opinion
;
Nationalism
;
Collective memory
;
World War, 1939-1945 Collaborationists
Abstract:
Notes that Jewish and Ukrainian individuals' memories of the Holocaust and World War II in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia have always differed profoundly. Examines diaries, testimonies, memoirs, and other personal accounts of the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, trying to ascertain how individuals from the two ethnic groups perceived the events of the Holocaust and how their memories have changed since the end of the war. Jewish survivors, who rendered great significance to their wartime sufferings, left behind many diaries. With rare exceptions, Ukrainians did not leave diaries, because those who were Nazi collaborators destroyed them before the end of the war, and the bystanders and rescuers never wrote them. In contrast with this, the postwar Ukrainian émigré communities left much memoir literature which greatly neglects the Holocaust and silences the Ukrainians' part in it, and which shows the Ukrainians as being a suffering party in the war. The Ukrainian nationalists have been lionized as heroic freedom fighters. The Jewish memoir literature has not changed substantially since the end of the war. Jewish narrators depict Ukrainians as accomplices of the genocide, although they admit that the initiators of it were Germans. The question of whether Ukrainians will begin to remember their involvement in the Holocaust seems to be dependent on the politics of memory, which during the last 70 years kept encouraging them to forget this aspect of Ukrainian history.
Note:
In English and Hebrew.
URL:
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