Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe by Uilleam Blacker

Author:Uilleam Blacker [Blacker, Uilleam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317428381
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Kuznetsov, like Vynnychuk, shows the destruction of a mixed pre-war city and urban society by the devastating forces of the war and occupation. Like Vynnychuk, he engages explicitly with the Holocaust and the destruction of the city’s Jewish community. Like Vynnychuk, Kuznetsov also objects to the Soviet policy of oblivion in general, and with regard to the fate of Ukraine’s Jews under the Nazis in particular, and underlines the physical erasure of the traces of this fate under Soviet rule. He also condemns the brutal and destructive actions of the USSR during the war with regard to its own population: his descriptions of the NKVD’s devastating mining of central Kyiv, for example, are damning, and were censored from the initial published version of the work. But Kuznetsov does not use the destruction of the city and its intermixed community, or the deaths of the autobiographical narrator’s friends and neighbours, to criticize, or demonize the Soviet regime as such. Instead, the focus of the novel is the destruction of the city in and of itself by all forces that contributed to it, including Ukrainians who participated in the Holocaust (something that is not discussed at length in the book, but is acknowledged). The author’s primary aim is to bear meticulous witness to the process of destruction of an urban community and its physical environment in its own right, avoiding making a spectacle of the massacres and the destruction in favour of a deeply involved yet objective ‘documentary’ approach. This approach is summed up in the chilling yet undramatic description of the aftermath of the massacres, where Kuznetsov describes finding human remains in the ravine at Babyn Iar: ‘These were the ashes of many people, and it had all gotten mixed up – international ashes, so to speak’.117 These ashes cannot and should not, for Kuznetsov, be sifted through and separated according to national categories.

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.