“The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century” is the name of the event held in Paris on March 9-11. As the website of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance writes, the conference aims to promote updated knowledge and open discussions of the tragic events of Holocaust. “The history of the Holocaust is still not really well-known, which complicates relations between Jews and Ukrainians both in Ukraine and abroad, especially in France, where the black myth of Ukrainian anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in the trial of Symon Petliura’s assassin (1926),” reads the message on the site.
Among the renowned participants were Yosef Zissels, chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations of Ukraine; Taras Vozniak, editor-in-chief at journal Yi; Galia Ackerman, Paris-based head of the Russia department at the Politique Internationale journal; Volodymyr Viatrovych, director at the Institute of National Remembrance, to name just a few.
The Day asked the participants of the conference to share about the issues raised there and explain its significance.
“A STEP FORWARD ON THE LONG AND HARD PATH OF RECONCILIATION”
Yosef ZISSELS, chairman, the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations of Ukraine:
“The conference was organized by Philippe de Lara (Paris II) and Galia Ackerman (European Forum for Ukraine). I suggested to hold a roundtable on international reconciliation problems simultaneously with the conference. The other participants, besides me, included Leonid Finberg, Kostiantyn Sihov, Taras Vozniak, and Volodymyr Viatrovych. The aim of the conference was to bring together the researchers of the Holocaust in Ukraine, in particular, young scholars whose works on the Holocaust are not very well known yet. I proposed a complicated theme: developing the concept of reconciliation process through decreasing the international conflict component and channeling the discourse from mutual accusation into inner cultural process inside ethnic communities. Moreover, I also suggested to emphasize the self-critical component in this inner discourse. In my opinion, reconciliation is a matter of two nations moving towards each other, covering a certain distance, losing delusions about own history and stereotypes of other nations’ history along the way. This conference is but one step on the long and hard path of reconciliation.”
KYIV. BABYN YAR / Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day
“CREATION OF THE MEMORIAL AT BABYN YAR MUST BECOME AN ELEMENT OF UKRAINIAN OFFICIAL REMEMBRANCE POLICY”
Volodymyr VIATROVYCH, director, Institute of National Remembrance of Ukraine:
“This conference was dedicated to a major issue which requires further exploration. The site, Paris, is important as France is one of the countries which still see Ukraine through the prism of Russian propaganda. We realize that one of the elements of this Russian propaganda is presenting Ukrainians, the Ukrainian national movement, and Ukraine’s past as something anti-Semitic. Thus, disproving such myths should be extremely important for France.
“The participating scholars came from Ukraine, the US, Israel, and France. I believe the conference was a success and would love to see similar events also in Ukraine and elsewhere.
“The most controversial moment was before the start of the conference, when some would-be historians launched a hectic campaign. They addressed the universities which hosted the conference (in particular, the Sorbonne University), insisting that this conference must never be allowed because of such participants as, for one, historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, who should be a revisionist and who denies the Holocaust. The information campaign against the conference and against me personally was very powerful, indeed. I am grateful to the organizers, Galia Ackerman and Philippe de Lara, who nevertheless held the conference and showed how important it is to keep to a scholarly format in such difficult discussions and not be affected by political factors.
“The conference itself produced a very engaging, lively, and rather scholarly discussion, which was useful as it revealed new layers of information.
“First of all, I would like to note that various studies show that Ukraine does not belong to leading anti-Semitic nations. Often the level of anti-Semitism in Ukraine is lower than in some Western European countries. But the conference was focused on the past, on the 20th century. We were discussing the tragic events related to the Holocaust.
“As for the exposition at Yad Vashem, portraying Ukrainians as initiators of Jewish pogroms during the Second World War, I believe that one should be cautious with national generalizations, which unfortunately exist. One has no right to accuse the entire nation, in this case I mean Ukrainians. One must name those concrete individuals who took part in the Holocaust, as well as concrete organizations, but may never stigmatize all Ukrainians as perpetrators of the Holocaust.
“By the way, my presentation was focused on the ideological program of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists on the Jewish issue, and in my report I remarked that this issue was not particularly prominent in the ideological agenda of the OUN. This, by the by, underlines the difference between the OUN and Nazis, where the Jewish problem was one of the major ones. Consequently, any attempts at describing the OUN members as principled anti-Semites who saw the Holocaust as their goal, are absolute bigotry, far from historical truth.
“It would be naive to believe that one conference could dispel prejudice that has been out there for decades. Nevertheless, even one conference is a step towards truth and gradual deconstruction of myths.
“We at the Institute of National Remembrance addressed Yad Vashem with the proposal to create a special task force made up of historians, like the one we made jointly with our Polish counterparts, for exploring the complicated issues of the Ukrainian-Jewish relations. We have not received an answer yet, but we hope it will be positive. I am convinced that such a task force is absolutely necessary.
“I also believe that the creation of a memorial at Babyn Yar must be an element of Ukraine’s official remembrance policy. Obviously, Ukraine has to participate on the state level. Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko spoke about it past September, remembering the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre.”
“WE ATTEMPTED TO GIVE AN INTELLECTUAL ANSWER TO FALSE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST UKRAINIANS OF EXTERMINATING JEWS”
Galia ACKERMAN, head, Russia department at the Politique Internationale journal:
“These were actually two related events. Firstly, a roundtable on national reconciliation and in particular, reconciliation between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Jews, who are divided by years of misunderstanding and problems stemming mostly from the Soviet propaganda about the Shoah-Holocaust. This propaganda strived to create the impression that a significant number of Ukrainians took part in the extermination of Jews.
“Thus we wanted to leave the debates on the past to history and concentrate on the fact that today Jews in Ukraine are living a free life. For instance, a well-known publisher and public figure Leonid Finberg told that after decades of Soviet rule, when all Jewish culture was effectively prohibited, enthusiasts explored Ukraine’s Jewish past, printed books which had never been printed before, spread photographs which had never seen the light, and published Jewish intellectual heritage in Ukrainian and Russian in the West.
“The roundtable was initiated by one of the leaders of Ukrainian Jews, Yosef Zissels, who has done an enormous job. For several years he has been organizing ‘camps of tolerance,’ where Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar, and Russian children learn to live together and, most importantly, learn about each other’s culture, customs, rituals, and history. This is a very important thing for the building of a united political Ukrainian nation. And this was the leitmotif of this roundtable.
“The conference self lasted two and a half days and focused not only on the Holocaust in Ukraine, but also on what preceded and followed it, namely, the systematic hushing up of the Shoah (Holocaust) in all Soviet media, textbooks and so on. We strived to provide an as full and objective picture as possible of what was happening in those years, and tried to understand who precisely was responsible for what. Because it turns out that accusations against Banderaites are still used as justification of anti-Ukrainian policies. This moment requires a thorough explanation. One can see who exactly, when and to what extent supported the Germans, and who did not. The very national liberation movement had evolved considerably since the 1920s, until it was totally defeated in the 1950s. That is why we tried to create a more complete picture of the developments that took place over those years.
“Unfortunately, we did not have any more time left for a general discussion and conclusions. We had guest scholars from the US, Israel, the UK, the Netherlands, and of course many Ukrainian scholars, so we simply were not able to keep to the schedule.
“The conference decided to publish these materials. In Ukraine this will be done by Dukh i Litera Publishers or by the Center for Jewish Studies at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. In France we are going to publish this collection of articles in French.
“I would like to note that we were denounced for having invited a Ukrainian historian, director at the Institute of National Remembrance Volodymyr Viatrovych. There is a real smear campaign launched against him, in particular, involving academic circles. I am convinced that this all is orchestrated by Russia. Of course, not everyone shares Viatrovych’s views, but I think that a pluralist approach to facts demands that various ideas be represented. Since all archives in Ukraine are declassified, everyone can get access to the necessary information. It seems to me that in this case forging history (and this is what Viatrovych is accused of) would be a tricky task, whereas assessments and interpretations could differ, of course.
“I hope that such a pluralistic collection of articles, which I hope to see published within a year following this conference, will clarify many contentious issues for many people.
“I am often extremely astonished at the often negative perception of Ukraine in the Jewish circles in the West. The only explanation I can think of is the old, deeply rooted Soviet propaganda. The same old myth is being repeated over and over again, the myth dating back to the mid-1940s when various groups of nationalists were fighting against the Soviet regime in Western Ukraine. For Ukrainians it meant a second occupation, and of course they did kill Soviet soldiers and officers, as well as party functionaries. I think that it is not the killing of Jews that some will never forgive, but the struggle against the Soviets in the 1940s.
“In those years there was a Jewish anti-fascist committee, led by a renowned actor Solomon Mikhoels (he was cleared away in 1948 on Stalin’s order, when an anti-Jewish campaign was launched known as ‘combating cosmopolitism’).
“Back then, during the war, Mikhoels and other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee established strong relations with the communities in America, Canada, England, and other countries where Jews lived and which were free from Hitler’s occupation. They raised money to help the Soviet Union. And they became the mouthpiece of that disinformation: that all who fight against the Soviet regime are former Ukrainian Auxiliary Police officers who had been involved in the extermination of Jews. However, a study of the make-up of national liberation movement and guerilla forces towards the end of the war would reveal that most of them were probably never and in no way linked to the persecutions and extermination of Jews.
“We attempted to give an intellectual answer to false accusations against Ukrainians of exterminating Jews, and tried to find out precisely who was responsible for what. This undermines the myth underlying the Soviet propaganda of today.
“As an expert, I must watch Russian television. What do I see? Anyone fighting for Ukrainian Donbas is dismissed as a Nazi, they simply do not have another term to refer to these people. The regime in Kyiv is a junta, and the events of Maidan – a coup. Thus it follows that those very nationalists who are in power today and who had committed the coup and are trying to fight with the people of Donbas (I am using Russian terminology), they are heirs of those very Banderaites and other nationalists who fought against the Soviet regime side by side with Germans. So with our purely academic event we touched a sore spot.
“As a result we were also dragged through the mud. One American scholar with an Arabic background (doubtlessly a major advocate of Jews) started some sort of a collective open letter. Tarik Amar, who at some point in time was a university professor in Lviv, wrote a book The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists. The title speaks volumes. Some retired lady wrote a book in support of Petliura’s assassin, and now is propagating Zakhar Prilepin. She translated his book on Donbas and also accuses us of all sins short of Nazism.
“A few days before the conference a certain Eduard Dolynskyi, who styled himself as the head of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, sent me a message via Facebook demanding to remove Viatrovych from the conference, ‘otherwise you will face an international scandal.’ Of course, I would not even bother to answer him. But a sort of scandal did take place. In a third-rate paper The Times of Israel Dolynskyi published an article ‘The Revisionist at the Sorbonne,’ focusing mostly on Viatrovych. Later the article was reprinted by Russia Today, and then was spread through all manners of complot theory circles in France.
“This campaign was supported by a few scholars who have very tight professional links to Russia. As a result, the university organizations which participated in hosting the conference were barraged by angry letters, proclamations, complaints and the like. Thanks goodness, no one gave in and nothing was canceled, the conference was held, and its materials will be published. I hope that our work has helped debunk the deeply rooted Soviet myths of the involvement of Ukrainians in mass murders of Jews during the Holocaust.”
