The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization Paperback by RAY BRANDON (Editor), WENDY MORGAN LOWER (Editor) (Indiana University Press)

Ukraine once was home to the largest population of Jews in the Russian Empire, and on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 it was the largest Jewish community in Europe. As such, Ukraine was one of the most important centers of Jewish life destroyed during the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1944, some 1.4 million Jews were killed there. Yet, little is known about this chapter of Holocaust history. Drawing on new archival sources from the former Soviet Union, eyewitness accounts, postwar criminal investigations, and the extensive holdings of the United states Holocaust Memorial Museum, this book spans the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras and covers the terrain of almost all of modern Ukraine. The topics addressed – including Jewish-Ukrainian relations, forgotten ghettos and camps, interethnic violence, crimes of military and civil authorities, and the German-Romanian alliance – provide a detailed backdrop to the setting in which the Nazis realized their radically anti-Semitic agenda. This volume brings together researchers from Ukraine, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, and sheds new light on the critical themes of perpetration, collaboration, Jewish-Ukrainian relations, testimony, rescue, and Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine.

Contributors are Andrej Angrick, Omer Bartov, Karel C. Berkhoff, Ray Brandon, Martin Dean, Dennis Deletant, Frank Golczewski, Alexander Kruglov, Wendy Lower, Dieter Pohl, and Timothy Snyder.

The Shoah in Ukraine presents cutting-edge research from a stellar group of international experts. Neglected by scholars for too long, the Holocaust in Ukraine took particular – and bitterly painful -- forms. This remarkable book illuminates the intertwined lives and deaths of Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Romanians, Germans, and Gypsies, past and present, in this contested part of Europe.Bitter memories and the specter of the Holocaust continue to haunt Jewish-Ukrainian relations. .Only a full admission of the disturbing facts of the past and a full respect for the perpetuation of the memory of the former Jewish communities may at least partly exorcise the guilt and open a new page [in their] mutual relations. Perhaps this book may serve as one of the guiding lights in this direction.Deserving special note are Timothy Snyder’s chapter on Volhynian Jewry for its elegant and diligent use of both general and Jewish sources; and Karel C. Berkhoff ’s sensitive analysis of the various testimonies of Dina Pronicheva, who survived the nightmarish Babi Yar massacre. Omer Bar-Tov concludes the book with an overview of how the Jewish facets of Eastern Galicia’s history are systematically ignored and erased by Ukrainians in whose historical consciousness there is no room for how Jews lived and were murdered in a region that was a center of Jewish culture and religion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Maps vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower 1
1. The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine / Dieter Pohl 23
2. The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921-1945 / Timothy Snyder 77
3. Shades of Grey: Reflections on Jewish-Ukrainian and German-Ukrainian Relations in Galicia / Frank Golczewski 114
4. Transnistria and the Romanian Solution to the “Jewish Problem” / Dennis Deletant 156
5. Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine / Andrej Angrick 190
6. “In him lies the weight of the entire administration”: Nazi Civilian Rulers and the Holocaust in Zhytomyr / Wendy Lower 224
7. Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, 1941-1944 / Martin Dean 248
8. Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941-1944 / Alexander Kruglov 272
9. Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving the Babi Yar Massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian Records / Karel C. Berkhoff 291
10. White Spaces and Black Holes: Eastern Galicia’s Past and Present / Omer Bartov 318
Comparative Table of Ranks 355
Map Sources 357
Selected Supplemental Bibliography 359
Contributors 363
Index 367


Ray Brandon, a freelance editor, translator, and researcher based in Berlin, is a former editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, English edition.

Wendy Lower is Assistant Professor of History at Towson University in Maryland and Research Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany. She is author of Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine.