Erased by Bartov Omer;

Author:Bartov, Omer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Berezhany / Brzeżany/ Brizan

FIGURE 49. The Great Synagogue of Berezhany, 2004.

NOT FAR from Ternopil’, heading southwest, lies the town of Berezhany. In 2002 an Israeli historian published a book, part memoir and part history, that described his survival as a young boy in that town during the German occupation.134 The author, Shimon Redlich, was saved by Ukrainians and Poles, and in his book expresses thanks and admiration for his rescuers. He also points out that many of those who helped did so for reasons of greed, while others had more altruistic motivations. While he makes a heroic effort to be fair and balanced, Redlich cannot avoid but point out the collaboration of many Ukrainians in the murder of the Jewish population of his hometown: of approximately 10,000 Jews who lived there when the Germans marched in, less than 100 survived.135

Unlike the controversy in Poland over Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors, which reconstructed the murder of the Jewish population of the eastern Polish town of Jedwabne by its Polish inhabitants, the publication of Redlich’s book in Ukrainian did not cause much of a storm.136 This probably indicates that in Ukraine public discourse has not even reached the point of acknowledging the immense tragedy of the Holocaust, let alone openly discussing Ukrainian complicity in the mass murder of the Jews. Rather, these events are often distorted in ways meant to gain other political and ideological ends. This was nicely illustrated by an article published in the Ternopil’ newspaper Vil’ne zhyttia (Free Life), which expressed the historical perspective of Ukrainian nationalist ideology.137

The author of the essay, Dariya Shatna, claims that Redlich had not used objective archival documentation on events in Berezhany and instead relied on biased accounts and testimonies. The result is, she writes, that Redlich himself expresses bigoted opinions about Ukrainians. She is especially troubled because the book’s “racist characterization of Ukrainians and its hyperbolic falsifications regarding the ‘Jewish pogrom in Berezhany,’ [and] the actions of the ‘Ukrainian bandits,’” threaten to “create a universally negative image of Ukraine.” This is all the more disturbing to Shatna because the book “has appeared in English, Polish, and Ukrainian,” and is described on its cover as “going far beyond the local context and regional history.”138 A “refutation of this falsification” is necessary, she writes, since such unjust allegations against Ukrainians subject them to “moral discrimination,” by which she implies that Ukrainians are being blamed for the crimes of the Germans and for this reason are mistreated by the rest of the world.139

But Shatna is not only worried by the false image of Ukraine; she also wants to expose the real face of the Jews. Thus she asserts that the Jews have always collaborated with whichever regime or ethnic group was in power. Consequently, the Jews also dominated the NKVD, and therefore they collaborated with the Soviets in the genocide of the Ukrainians. For this reason Jews are hardly in a position to blame the Ukrainians for collaborating with the Nazis in the Holocaust.140 Concluding her

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.