Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews

Abstract

Over one and a half million Ukrainian Jews fell victim to the Holocaust between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1944. The majority of them were shot near their homes or ghettos by German Kommandos and local collaborators. Many Ukrainians were witnesses to this genocide or participated in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors. Nonetheless, in the collective memory of the Ukrainian diaspora, which has produced an extensive body of literature, the Holocaust remained almost completely in the dark, unmentioned. Because of the inaccessibility of Soviet archives as well as a tendency among historians to concentrate on official records, this lapse in memory has not become a subject of historical research until recently. At the same time, Holocaust research focused mainly on German perpetrators and frequently refused to take notice of reports and memoirs left by survivors because of their allegedly disputed use within the historical discipline. The published works of historians such as Philip Friedman, Shmuel Spector, and Eliyahu Yones, who were themselves Holocaust survivors and who did not neglect non-German perpetrators, received little attention from German and North American specialists of Ukrainian history and scholars of National Socialism. Only in recent years has a scholarly debate turned its attention to this blind spot in the memory of the Ukrainian diaspora and to the narrative that was constructed by it.1