It is with great pleasure that I write this introduction to my Ukrainian readers. Authors are always glad to see their work translated into other languages and made available to readers who have no access to the original. But in this case, a Ukrainian edition of Erased is of much greater importance. For this book is not only about Ukraine, but also, and perhaps most important, it discusses an issue that receives very little attention in Ukraine. Indeed, the book was written precisely with the goal of raising awareness of a much-neglected historical episode and the present-day repercussions of this lacuna in historical memory and commemoration. And, while it was written in English, its main intended audience was Ukrainian. I am therefore especially thankful to those who facilitated the translation of Erased – most crucially, Anatoly Podolsky – and thereby made it available to Ukrainian readers.
This book does not make for comfortable reading. Its focus is the erasure of the material remains and the historical memory of Jewish life in the region of Western Ukraine that was known in the past as Eastern Galicia. In order to highlight the significance of this erasure as well as to suggest some of the reasons for it, the book provides a brief history of Jewish life in many towns and cities of Galicia before World War II, and then goes on to describe the manner in which Jews were eradicated during the German occupation. The book suggests that while the mass murder of the Jews was a German-planned and German-led undertaking, it was carried out with the significant collaboration of local Ukrainians. Moreover, it points out that for a substantial period of time there was an overlap of interests, and therefore a will for cooperation, between Ukrainian nationalists, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and subsequently of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), on the one hand, and this region’s German occupiers, on the other. Crucially, both the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists wanted to destroy Soviet rule and to ensure that the Bolsheviks would never return. They also wanted to be rid of those who were seen as having supported the Soviets as well as having exploited the Ukrainian population. While the Poles were the region’s former rulers and colonizers, the Jews were perceived both as Poland’s previous lackeys and as the leaders and tools of communist occupation. Ukrainian nationalists may not have shared the Germans’ genocidal intent, but they did promote a Jew-free and Pole-free Ukraine. This shared goal provided sufficient grounds for collaboration between the Germans, who were thin on the ground, Ukrainian nationalists, who strove for an independent Ukraine, and large numbers of Ukrainian militiamen and policemen, who constituted the bulk of the manpower in the mass murder of the Jews in Galicia.
What complicates the history and memory of this event is the fact that all sides involved played multiple and changing roles. Ukrainians suffered terribly under both Soviet and German rule, and paid an extremely high price in World War II. Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia and Volhynia who had initially worked with the German occupiers and participated in the ethnic cleansing of the Poles and the genocide of the Jews, later fought both against the Germans and against the Soviets. Especially in the western areas of present-day Ukraine that had comprised Galicia in the past, they are often lauded as national heroes. Their glorification is all the more vehement because during the decades of postwar communist rule these nationalists were portrayed as pro-fascist collaborators, a view that is still held by substantial numbers of Ukrainians in the eastern parts of the country. Conversely, while the Holocaust would not have taken place in Ukraine without the German occupation and Nazi policies aimed at eradicating all Jews from Europe, wartime and postwar Jewish accounts of these events stress the participation of their Ukrainian friends, colleagues, and neighbors in the killing and subsequent profiteering. Moreover, while Jews see themselves as innocent victims of Ukrainian nationalists, denouncers, looters, and bandits, Ukrainian accounts at the time and subsequently – indeed, in some cases to this very day – insist that the Jews were to blame for their own victimization because of their support for Soviet rule.
This discourse strives at creating a balance of victimhood and complicity. According to one view, some Ukrainians may have collaborated in the Holocaust, but others saved Jews, many were gallant liberation fighters, and all were innocent victims of Nazi and especially Soviet rule, in which the Jews were deeply complicit. According to the opposite view, while some Jews were communists or NKVD operators, and even though some Ukrainians behaved heroically and rescued Jews, the majority of the Ukrainian population and especially its nationalist leaders professed antisemitic sentiments, cooperated in the mass murder of their Jewish neighbors, and enriched themselves on stolen Jewish goods and property. These two discourses are represented in much of the historical literature, and are evident in the recent debate over Erased published in the journal Ukraina Moderna, as well as in some other reviews of the book.^[1]
Let me say at the outset that despite what some of my critics have asserted, and as Ukrainian readers will now be able to see for themselves when they read Erased, I neither write nor believe that all Ukrainians were or are antisemitic (a useless generalization deprived of any historical basis); I do not wish in any way to undermine the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationalism or of the newly independent Ukrainian state, which I believe has every moral and historical right to exist (no less so, for instance, than the State of Israel, where I was born); and I do not deny, indeed, I explicitly refer to and document, the mass suffering of non-Jewish Ukrainians throughout the twentieth century. The point of Erased is not to deny Ukrainian victimhood or the right to independence; it is rather to show the malign effects of distorted historical accounts and politics of memory, and to plead for a mutual recognition of a shared Jewish and Ukrainian past, and mutual respect for the victims of history – even, and especially, if they were victims of those who, in another context, can be seen as national heroes.
None of my critics has in fact denied that the politics of memory in present-day Galicia, and to a lesser yet significant extent also in other parts of the country, often excludes Jewish life in Ukraine before the Holocaust, marginalizes Jewish suffering during the German occupation, ignores or denies Ukrainian collaboration in the genocide, and seeks to create a collective memory cleansed of Jews through building monuments and memorials glorifying past Ukrainian heroes, as well as through almost complete neglect and at times destruction of Jewish sites that could serve as evidence of prewar economic, cultural, religious, and social presence and influence.
The book therefore has been attacked for other reasons, none of which, incidentally, are central to its argument. Such criticism can be divided into three main allegations. First, it has been claimed that I got some historical facts wrong. This argument is intended not only to undermine my scholarly credibility but also to serve as a response to my assertion that Ukrainian historiography has ignored or distorted the history of Jews in Ukraine. Second, I am said to have written about Ukrainians dismissively or spitefully, to have ignored Ukrainian suffering, and to have suppressed Jewish complicity in mass crimes. Since such allegations have nothing to do with what I have written in Erased, they obviously serve a different purpose, namely, they are meant to address my own assertion that Ukrainian politics of memory has ignored the Jews or presented them in a malicious manner, that Jewish suffering has been marginalized, and that Ukrainian complicity in genocide has been suppressed. Finally, I am said to be too pessimistic about the future prospects of greater sensitivity to the Jewish past and the potential of reconciliation between the two groups. This last argument of course already implies that my previous assertions are not incorrect. But it also clearly serves as a response to my prediction that soon no material traces of prewar Jewish life will be left in Galicia.
I cannot claim here that Erased is entirely free of errors or that its historical interpretations are entirely immune to criticism. But I have addressed many of these criticisms in my response to critics published in Ukraina Moderna, and see no need to reiterate this at any length in the present context. Instead, I will briefly comment on what I find to be the most important, and in part egregious, issues at stake. As regards historical facts, one of the most bewildering assertions by some of my critics has been that Galicia was not at all a borderland region. I can understand the political significance of this argument, for asserting that a certain territory is in the borderlands is akin to conceding its contested status. But historically there is simply no doubt that Red Rus’, Ruthenia, or Galicia, formed part of the Polish kingdom’s borderlands; with the creation of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the borders of that entity indeed stretched far to the east of Galicia, but during the Cossack, Tatar, and Turkish wars of the second half of the seventeenth century this area again became a borderland. With the annexation of Galicia in 1772, the province came to constitute the Habsburg Empire’s almost paradigmatic eastern borderland (as represented, for instance, in Joseph Roth’s writings); and when it reverted to Poland after World War I, “Eastern Little Poland” became once again that reconstituted country’s borderland (and remains so in Polish myth and lore). Finally, following World War II, this region was on the far western edge of the Soviet Union, and since 1991 is part of Ukraine’s westernmost territories, a land that, not surprisingly, exhibits a greater western orientation than other parts of the country, not least because of its very different history.
Regarding my alleged attitude to Ukrainians, their mentality, and their history, it should first be noted that this is not a book about Ukrainian history. Rather, it is an essay on the politics of memory in one Ukrainian region. In that region, but also in others, one still finds today manifestations of overt antisemitism that can simply not be denied;^[2] more commonly, one finds blatant neglect of or disrespect toward Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries, and mass graves; and one finds glorification of individuals who, among other elements of their biography, were associated with violent rhetoric and actions against Jews. While these facts are unpleasant, they do not reflect my attitude; they reflect the reality on the ground. There is nothing inevitable, essential, or unchangeable about this reality, and Erased is in fact a plea to bring about such a change. But denying this reality will only hamper progress toward this goal.
The most troubling criticism of Erased, I find, is the attempt to create an equality of victimhood and complicity: if Ukrainians killed Jews, Jews killed Ukrainians; if Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis, Jews collaborated with the Bolsheviks; if the Jews underwent genocide in the Holocaust, Ukrainians suffered from the Holodomor in the early 1930s, from Soviet repression in 1939–41 and after 1944, as well as from Nazi occupation policies. Hence, not only did both groups suffer terribly, each group was equally guilty of persecuting the other. Nonetheless, despite the obvious contradiction this creates, I am also accused of paying too little attention to periods of harmonious Jewish–Ukrainian coexistence.
This line of argumentation is insidious because it is based on misconstruing the facts with the goal of creating an apologetic narrative with malicious intent. It is not an argument worthy of historians, or of any open-minded and objective scholar or intellectual. To be sure, all nations have their black sheep, and Jews are hardly exempt of this. Some Jews were Bolsheviks, and some of them were in the NKVD; some were torturers and killers. Jews were attracted to communism because it promised to do away with ethnic and religious distinctions that had plagued Jewish existence in Europe for centuries. But Jews who served in the murderous branches of the Soviet secret police were not acting as Jews, or in the name of the Jewish people, or trying to realize some Jewish national dream. They had become Bolsheviks. They served as such alongside Ukrainians and Russians and Belarusians and others. A Ukrainian Bolshevik was no less Bolshevik than a Jewish one. Stalin was not acting as a representative of Georgia, just as Trotsky was not acting in the name of the Jews. Such arguments about Judeo-Bolshevism were used to lethal effect by the Nazis and their collaborators. They were murderous lies, and served to justify the genocide of millions of Jews who had nothing to do with Communism apart from being its victims. To make such arguments today only evokes Talleyrand’s famous quip about the old regime: “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.”
Conversely, Ukrainian nationalists did act as Ukrainians; they hardly represented all Ukrainians but they claimed to be acting in their name; they did not plan a genocide of the Jews but they became complicit in it; they did call for a cleansing of Ukraine and they made the work of the German perpetrators much easier; and they created an atmosphere in which those thousands of Ukrainians who did help Jews were presented as traitors to their neighbors and as betraying the national cause. It is crucial to recognize this distinction. Moreover, it is imperative to concede that both occupation and liberation had different meanings to different people depending on their objective situation. When the Germans marched into Galicia in 1941, many Ukrainians greeted them as liberators and most Jews perceived them as murderers. When the Soviets marched into Galicia in 1944, many Ukrainians saw them as occupiers while the few surviving Jews greeted them as liberators. For many local Ukrainians the sight of a Jewish Red Army officer confirmed their belief that Jews and Bolsheviks were synonymous; for the surviving Jews, these Jewish soldiers, who painfully uttered a few words of Yiddish, were nothing less than a miraculous apparition; for the Jewish officers, who were fighting to slaughter the Nazi beast, these remnants of Jewish populations symbolized the atrocity they were hoping to stop and gave meaning to their sacrifice. We should remember Vasily Grossman’s account of returning to Berdychev, where the entire Jewish community, including his mother, was slaughtered.^[3]
Finally a word on optimism. In October 2008, I participated in a conference at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in L’viv. The conference was a symbol of positive changes; it was devoted to urban Jewish heritage and history in East Central Europe, including Ukraine, and hosted an exhibition on L’viv as a (previously) multiethnic city. It was an international gathering, though unfortunately not many members of the local academic community took part in it. Nevertheless, the conference promised a hopeful beginning. I have since heard of and participated in several other initiatives aimed at learning about past Jewish–Ukrainian relations and promoting future dialogue. There have also been some attempts to preserve Jewish sites, however limited. Yet at the very same time, indications of accelerating and irreversible erasure are at least as evident. On my way to that conference I drove through the city of Brody, which I had visited before in 2004. It was a cold autumn afternoon, and the setting sun cast a red light on the walls surrounding the empty shell of the fortress synagogue. This was a structure of major historical significance, in a town that had been for a long time a major Jewish urban center. But at some point in the intervening four years between my two visits, the roof of the synagogue had caved in, and the entire magnificent edifice was in a state of rapid disintegration. Next to the building a small excavator was digging a trench for a water pipe. Rather than trying to save the synagogue, this work was possibly causing it even greater damage. I screened photos of the Brody synagogue the next day during my lecture in L’viv, and the audience gasped. But I fear that this combination of natural and man-made erasure is progressing at a faster rate than any local initiative and good intentions can reverse. Perhaps the appearance of this book in Ukrainian will play a small part in saving what can still be saved, and in pushing forward the slow process of learning and remembering what has long been repressed and forgotten.