War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora (original) (raw)
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Scholars of Ukrainian history do not have the option of doing nothing, but I am not sure if they know where they should go. Reading some of the reviews of the Bandera study and also observing reactions to other publications about the 'unpatriotic' aspects of Ukrainian history, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, scholars of Ukrainian history realize that all aspects of Ukrainian history including the Holocaust and fascism should be explored and the methods of examining the past standardized and professionalized. On the other hand, they invent concepts like 'integral nationalism' or 'ustashism' that may be important to write a specific version of Ukrainian history but are neither compatible with European history nor help us to understand the past in transnational context. Thus, I think that the process of rethinking the Ukrainian history of the Second World War and the coming to terms with the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence conducted by Ukrainian nationalists and ordinary Ukrainians will be difficult in Ukraine, if it will happen at all. Nevertheless, there are some good examples of how it can work including Poland, where in 2001 Jan Tomasz Gross’s study of the events in Jedwabne in the summer of 1941 and later the publications of scholars from the Center for Holocaust Research (Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, CBZZ) brought forward a discourse on the Polish perpetrators and the Holocaust in general and made Poles more aware of the ‘unpatriotic’ elements of their history. The CBZZ can serve as an example for scholars of Ukrainian history who are interested in a critical and comprehensive investigation of the murder of the Jews and the Second World War because this institution developed ground-breaking methods and has published several important studies with limited financial resources. Unlike Yuri Radchenko, they did not try to prove that they know everything better than ‘foreign scholars’ but concentrated on more basic and pragmatic activities such as the exploration of the Holocaust. Doing so, they made the history of the Second World War in Poland more transparent, less political, and in the end compatible with European and transnational history. I hope that something similar will happen in Ukraine.
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2020
This study examines the German-sponsored Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense (Ukrains'kyi Legion Samooborony, ULS), both its rank and file and its Ukrainian and German officers. Drawing upon sources in German, Ukrainian, American, and Israeli archives, the authors analyze the Legion's command structure, its relationship to the Third Reich, and its relationship to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists branch led by Andriy Atansovich Mel'nyk. The presentation of the political and military careers of lower-, mid-, and upper-level Legionnaires reveals their participation in killings of Jews, Poles, and other Ukrainians. The authors also identify the motivations of many of the actors. A close analysis of one case of German and Ukrainian "cooperation" in the Holocaust and other mass murders, this article relates to the debate over whether Holocaust perpetrators were "Ordinary Men."
Yad Vashem Studies, 2022
, marked the eightieth anniversary of the Lviv (Lwów) pogrom, but the memory of what transpired on that day in 1941 remains sharply disparate. In Lviv, on June 30, 2021, the far-right Natsional'nyi korpus held a torchlight parade in which more than 1,000 far-right activists pledged their allegiance to Roman Shukhevych (1907-1950), an Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) leader and commanding officer of the Nachtigall battalion, a Ukrainian nationalist formation complicit in the Holocaust (pp. 234-235). 1 On the eve of the annual celebrations of the June 30 declaration, Oleh Romanyshyn (born in 1941), a long-term leader of the OUN-B in Canada, operating in that country as a front organization called the League of Ukrainian Canadians (Liga Ukraintsiv Kanady, LUC), delivered an address from its Toronto headquarters. Romanyshyn lamented that, The Lviv Act of declaration of the renewal of the Ukrainian State of June 30, 1941 [has] become a subject of disinformation and provocation launched by Moscow against the Ukrainian liberation movement OUN-UPA. These activities, of course, included the participation of a fifth column and various enemies of Ukraine and 1 "Bohnina misteriia pam'iaty holovnokomundvacha UPA Romana Shukhevycha u L'vovi: video," Natsional'nyi korpus, July 1, 2021, https://nationalcorps.org/vognyanamisteriya-pamyati-golovnokomanduvacha-upa-romana-shuhevicha-u-lvovi-video/ (accessed August 6, 2021). On Nachtigall's participation in the murder of Jews, see
Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews
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.
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 2020
The question, if and to what extent the Ukrainian nationalists murdered Jews in Volhynia and eastern galicia during the Holocaust, has haunted Jewish and Ukrainian communities in various countries of the Western world during the entire Cold War. It also puzzled german historians of eastern europe and Nazi germany. Historians, although in theory responsible for investigating and clarifying such difficult aspects of the past, have for various reasons not investigated them or they investigated only other aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This article briefly explains how factions of the Ukrainian diaspora invented a narrative that portrayed Ukrainian nationalists as antigerman and anti-Soviet freedom fighters who did not kill or harm any Jews during the german occupation of Ukraine. In the next step, it shows how testimonies and other sorts of documents left by survivors from Volhynia and eastern galicia can help historians understand the role that ordinary Ukrainians and the OUN and UPa played in the Shoah in western Ukraine. Finally, it asks why it took Ukrainian, german, Polish, Russian, and other historians so many years to investigate and comprehend the anti-Jewish violence of the Ukrainian nationalists, if relevant documents were collected and made accessible as early as in the middle 1940s.
Between Genocide and War Crime – Legal-Cultural Analysis of the Russian Aggression in Ukraine
Review of European and Comparative Law, 2023
The cultural context, where two neighboring Slavic nations are in a state of war and the Russian imperialistic approach has never gone away for good, must be taken seriously into consideration. The international legal analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian war is not enough to truly understand the essencerationale-of this armed conflict and then to find a solution to how to solve it and punish the perpetrator-the Russian Federation. The arguments gathered here by the author come from her own experience during trips to Russia and Ukraine, as well as military courses facilitation where students are taught that in modern warfighting it becomes more and more valid to change the (Western) lens and begin thinking as the perpetrator does. Only then we are objectively able to see and understand if the atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine bear the hallmarks of a war crime or an act of genocide.
RUSSIAN CRIMES IN UKRAINE: BETWEEN GUILT AND RESPONSIBILITY
Polish Yearbook of International Law, 2022
Is the confrontation in Ukraine Putin’s war, or also that of the Russian nation? Can the crimes of the Russian state be hidden in the shadows of Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky? This article distinguishes between the guilt or responsibility of individuals (criminal, political, moral); the international legal responsibility of states; and finally the political, moral, and historical responsibility of nations. In the legal or moral sense, guilt must be individualized. However, the extralegal (political, moral and historical) responsibility (not regulated by law) affects the whole nation and concerns responsibility both for the past and for the future. Nevertheless, if the nation is deemed entirely responsible for the actions of the state or of some national groups, it is not about attributing guilt to the whole nation, but about the collective recovery of the sense of humanity. Thus, suggesting the guilt of the entire nation is based on a misunderstanding. But if the responsibility does not imply guilt, neither does the lack of guilt imply the lack of responsibility. By definition, the moral and political responsibility of the nation does not take a legal (judicial) form. Other forms and instruments are applicable here. In this context such terms as regrets, forgiveness, shame, apologies, or reconciliation appear. Such actions, based on fundamental values, require political courage, wisdom, and far-sightedness. The passivity of the social environment favours the perpetrators of crimes. but does not release the other members of the nation from moral responsibility, and in particular from the obligation to distinguish good from evil. Not all Russians are guilty of crimes, but they all (whether guilty or innocent) bear some moral and political responsibility.