Ukrainians in French Holocaust Literature: Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

1 Blood from the Sky

In Blood from the Sky the representation of Ukrainians is complicated by the novel’s mentioned universalising ambition and its consequent avoidance of precise spatiotemporal references. This ambition is announced as of the opening of Boris’s story which the extradiegetic narrator situates in “Ukraine, une ville d’importance moyenne. Le douze juillet mille neuf cent quarante …” [“[a]n average-sized town in the Ukraine. July, 12^, 194–.”] (Rawicz 2004, 15, 2014, 18).^[8] Readers familiar with Rawicz’s trajectory easily guess that the “average-sized town” is Lwów where “Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians had lived together nonviolently, if not always harmoniously” (Beorn 2020, 160).^[9] Indeed, Antony Rudolf states that Lwów is the “main geo-spiritual source” of Rawicz’s novel (2007, 64). At the same time, however, he admits that the Ukraine of Blood from the Sky “is no Ukraine of the earth. It is a legendary Ukraine, a Jewish Ukraine of Hasidism and the shtetl” (2007, 22). Rawicz’s narrator further blurs his story’s historical specificity by systematically referring to the ghetto as “la ville interdite” [“the walled-up town”]. And, even if he models the head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Leon L., on one of the actual four chairmen of the Lwów ghetto, Dr Henryk Landesberg, he also lends him features of the notorious, corrupt, and megalomaniac leader of the Łódź Juderat, Chaim Rumkowski.^[10] Similarly, the character of Senator Gordon, the director of the orphanage, seems to have been inspired by Janusz Korczak (penname of Henryk Goldszmit), an educator and children’s author who accompanied the Jewish orphans of Warsaw to the gas chambers of Treblinka (Rudolf 2007, 35). The narrator’s decision to withhold exact spatiotemporal locations is matched by his avoidance of markers of national identity, including his own. And so the Jews are referred to as “les nôtres” [“our people”], the Poles as “les seigneurs” [“the gentry”], the Ukrainians as “les paysans d’alentour” [“local peasants”], and the Germans as “l’ennemi” [he enemy”], “les anges de la mort” [“the angels of death”], or “l’occupant” [“the invader”]. In addition, as exemplified by Boris himself who, despite being a Polish Jew, bears a first name that common among Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, but not Poles, the novel often misleads the reader with names belonging to a culture different to that of the characters.^[11] As examples of this practice serve two Polish characters, the resister, Andrei, and the szmalcownik, Gerard, whose names have a Russian and a German consonance respectively.^[12]

This narrative strategy is maintained throughout Part II where Warsaw is referred to as “la capitale” [“the capital”] and the mountain resort in which informed readers recognise Zakopane, “O.” Likewise, the novel’s epilogue anticipates the continuation of Boris’s story beyond his release from prison in “la grande Plaine des Bouleaux” [“the great Plain of the Birches”] (Rawicz 2004, 273, 2014, 331) which the editor of the novel’s English edition, Antony Rudolf, decodes as an allusion to the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Rawicz 2004, 273).^[13] The spatiotemporal obliqueness marking Blood from the Sky tallies with its metafictional postscript which informs the reader that “C’est livre n’est pas un document historique” [“This book is not a historical record”] and that “Les événements relatés pourraient surgir en tout lieu et en tout temps dans l’âme de n’importe quel homme, planète, minéral …” [“The events that [the author] describes could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man, planet, mineral …”] (Rawicz 2004, 276, 2014, 335). Rawicz’s intention to undermine the historical specificity of the Holocaust and instead offer his readers “[une] fable cosmique” [“a cosmic fable”] (Coquio 2015, 232) is also manifest in the analogy that Leon L. establishes between the ghetto and the universe with God figuring as “Capo suprême, comme doyen des nôtres” [“head Kapo, as Chief Elder of our own race”] (Rawicz 2004, 45, 2014, 53). In a 1973 interview, Rawicz endorsed his character’s position by claiming that “the fate and the condition of the Jewish people are the very essence of the human condition—the farthest borders of human destiny. And the fate of the ‘Holocaust Jew,’ the Jew of the ghetto and concentration camp, is […] the ontological essence of that ontological essence” (Fackenheim 1975, 25).

Rawicz’s universalising approach extends to the flashbacks that insert the Holocaust into the long history of persecution suffered by Jews in the territories of modern Ukraine. The novel mentions Bogdan Chmielnicki’s seventeenth-century pogrom and the more recent massacres of Jews perpetrated by political leader, Symon Petliura, and by anarchist revolutionary, Nestor Makhno. Yet, Blood from the Sky stops short of explicitly identifying these historical figures as Ukrainians. In the same vein, when describing the destruction of the Lwów ghetto, the narrator never speaks of Ukrainians. He thus glosses over the fact that the ghetto was guarded by Ukrainian police units (as well as by German and Jewish police) and that Ukrainian auxiliaries played a significant part in the Aktionen and in the liquidation of the Julag (the ghetto remnant) in June 1943 (Kessler 1985, 33–57). The soldiers who carry out the deportations and the murders of Jews in Rawicz’s novel are in any case scantly characterised; forming a homogenous mass, they are at times metonymically reduced to elements of their uniforms (e.g. well-polished helmets) or to their physiognomic features (e.g. blue eyes). As for the individual non-Jews who are present on the margins of Boris’s story and who embody a range of responses to the Jewish tragedy, they could be either Polish or Ukrainian, although the former is more likely. Among these Gentiles is a prostitute called Olga who, for a large sum of money, shelters Boris and Naomi during an Aktion; a young psychiatrist who selflessly offers Boris to take up his place in the ghetto; and a caretaker’s son with artistic aspirations, who first gives refuge to the hospital stoker and talented avant-garde writer, David, but then murders him and steals his manuscript.^[14]

The dependence of Boris’s survival on his persistent denial of his Jewishness and linked espousal of a Ukrainian identity does not prevent Rawicz from continuing to elude direct references to national identities even when narrating the protagonist’s arrest and imprisonment in Part III. Because of being circumcised, Boris is initially placed in a cell with other Jews. To maintain his persona of a farm hand whose birth certificate he found in the street in Lwów, he pretends not to understand Yiddish which the extradiegetic narrator describes in a circumlocutory manner as “[la langue du] peuple de Boris” [“[the language] of Boris’s people”] (Rawicz 2004, 217, 2014, 261). At the same time, for fear of being connected with the Germans or the Poles, Boris refrains from speaking the language of “[les] assassins” [“the murderers”] or of “ceux qui ne devraient pas être assassinés” [“those who were not marked for extinction.”] (Rawicz 2004, 222, 2014, 267). Boris briefly relinquishes his survival strategy only when faced with a killing of two Jewish girls in front of their father. At the risk of his life, he wordlessly establishes a community of faith with the bereaved man by stroking the hair of one of the dead girls and planting a kiss on the other’s forehead.

Because of his suborn denial of his Jewishness, Boris is transferred to a cell described as “peuplée […] de gens qui n’étaient pas tous voués à l’extermination immédiate” [“inhabited by people who were not doomed to immediate extermination”] (Rawicz 2004, 228, 2014, 274). However, the Polish prisoners, who have been jailed for either petty or serious crimes, not only refuse to accept Boris as their fellow countryman, but also, callous as they are, share stories about anti-Jewish violence that they have either witnessed or perpetrated themselves. They justify their semitism with prejudices, such as the medieval belief that Jews used the blood of Gentile children in their rituals, and with stereotypes of Jews as “des sangsues” [“bloodsuckers”] and “pécheurs immondes” [“filthy sinners.”] (Rawicz 2004, 229, 2014, 274). The Poles’ antisemitism quickly finds embodiment in their discrimination against Boris when it comes to the distribution of food and work tasks, in their efforts to make him confess his ethnicity to his captors, and, ultimately, in their denunciation of him to the prison authorities as a Jew.

In contrast to the description of Boris’s incarceration, where nationalities are only hinted at, in the scene of the protagonist’s interrogation by Lieutenant Lesch the narrator speaks directly of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. As well as being necessitated by the diegetic development of Boris’s story, such a change of narrative strategy may be designed to indicate the sharpening under the Nazi rule of antagonisms among the different nationalities that coexisted relatively peacefully in pre-war Poland. In the scene that Rudolf describes as “one of the greater scenes in modern European literature, and one of the most powerful confrontations in a novel since the Grand Inquisitor scene in Brothers Karamazov” (Rudolf 2007, 43), Boris, in response to the threat of immediate death, breaks his silence and declares that he is neither a Jew nor a Pole, but a proud Ukrainian. Lesch, who is eager to close Boris’s case before his Christmas leave and to uphold his reputation as a “dépisteur professionnel [qui] a fait des études poussées en typologie, en caractérologie” [“professional Jew-detector [who] ha[s] made extensive studies in typology and character reading”] (Rawicz 2004, 248, 2014, 301), complies with Boris’s request and summons a Ukrainian intellectual so that he may verify the prisoner’s identity. Adopting Lesch’s point of view with recourse to free indirect speech, Rawicz describes Ukrainians as the Germans’ allies on whom the Germans rely to control the defeated Poles, but adds that their lives are of little consequence. Switching to a focalisation through Boris, the extradiegetic narrator senses Lesch’s congenital superiority to Vassili Humeniuk, regardless of the fact that the Ukrainian holds a doctorate in philosophy and that, as well as in intellectual prowess, he outstrips the German in physical stature. In preparation for being interrogated, Boris reminds himself of the affinity between himself and Humeniuk, which is grounded in their having been nourished and moulded by the same landscape, by the sounds of the same folk songs, and by the scent of the same haystacks and stables. Boris also pictures Humeniuk’s thorny path from a peasant to an intellectual whose social progress must have been marred by alienation from the country’s educated Polish elites. Another point of overlap are the interactions—both direct and indirect—between Jews and Ukrainians in their multicultural homeland: “les arrière-grands-pères de Houmeniouk n’ont-ils pas par hasard travaillé les terres des princes auxquels mes arrière-grands-parents prêtaient de l’or? […] [Q]and l’occasion s’en présentait, n’égorgeaient-ils pas mes aïeux dont ils caressaient tendrement les enfants, aux bons vieux siècles où les pogromes, pour être cruels, n’étaient pourtant pas définitifs?” [“[M]ay not Humeniuk’s forefathers have worked on the estates of the princes to whom my forefathers lent money? […] [W]hen the opportunity presented itself, did they not slaughter my ancestors, whose children they fondled, in the good old days when pogroms, cruel though they were, were not final and conclusive?”] (Rawicz 2004, 250, 2014, 303). During the interrogation, Boris not only proves to have an intimate and intricate knowledge of the Ukrainian language and customs, but also challenges Humeniuk’s both conservative taste in literature and political conformism. Contrary to Humeniuk who firmly believes that “les fils d’une nation opprimée, empêchée depuis des siècles de se constituer en État se devaient de revêtir l’uniforme du vainqueur” [“the sons of an oppressed nation, which was prevented for hundreds of years from becoming a state, to don the uniform of the conquering power”] (Rawicz 2004, 253, 2014, 307), Boris, acting to perfection the part of a true Ukrainian patriot, predicts that the Germans will betray their Ukrainian allies once victory has been achieved. He reminds Humeniuk that the Nazis have failed to recognise Kiev as the capital of independent Ukraine or to instate the Ukrainian government, instead persecuting its members.^[15] Worse still, should the Germans lose the war, the Ukrainians will remain forever associated with Hitler’s murderous regime. In reply, Humeniuk identifies collaboration as the only possible path, uncertain as it may be, to political sovereignty, praises the Nazis for ridding Ukraine of Jews, and expresses hope for a similar ethnic cleansing in relation to Poles, Russians, and Gypsies. While pretending to share Humeniuk’s antisemitism, Boris ends up attacking him directly as a servant of disloyal masters: “vous vous pavanez dans leur uniforme et vous vous sentez heureux lorsqu’ils vous confient leurs sales petites besognes …” [“you strut about in their uniform and feel happy when they entrust their dirty little jobs to you …”] (Rawicz 2004, 257, 2014, 311). Despite his challenge to Humeniuk’s set of beliefs, Boris’s ruse works and, even if the Ukrainian considers him politically untrustworthy, he certifies his non-Jewishness. As for Lesch, the narrators feels that he now extends the contempt he has had for Boris to Humeniuk, which only confirms the Germans’ perception of Ukrainians as intrinsically inferior to the “master race.”

2 The Kindly Ones

Maximilien Aue’s story begins with Germany’s invasion of the territories annexed in 1939 by the Soviet Union from Poland, in the Volhynian town of Łuck (Ukrainian: Lutsk, Yiddish: Lutzk). As his colleagues are preparing a large Aktion, Aue is dispatched to Lwów (Ukrainian: Lviv, Yiddish: Lemberg) where he witnesses an outburst of antisemitic violence known as the “Lviv pogrom” (Himka 2011) which accompanied the proclamation of independence by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The city is bathed in a festive atmosphere; cars and trucks are flowing blue and yellow flags, musical instruments are being played in the streets, and merry crowds are drinking champagne and singing.^[16] Aue watches Ukrainians pull Jews out of their homes and at one point narrowly escapes being hit by a Jew being thrown out of a window. To the carnivalesque ambiance contribute the theatre costumes that, as Aue speculates, have been looted from a theatre or a museum. Dressed up, a group of Ukrainians humiliate Jews by making them lick the pavement, to the enjoyment of spectating crowds. They also beat the Jews even though some men are already bleeding profusely. As if to dispel the protagonist’s (and the reader’s) doubts as to the identity of the victims, one of the jubilant onlookers explains to Aue: “Yid, yid, kaputt!” (Littell 2006, 50, 2010, 46). This is how Aue, who passively watches the violence, recalls the scene:

Les gens s’époumonaient, applaudissaient; certains avaient sorti des chaises d’un café ou des caisses et s’étaient hissés dessus pour mieux voir; d’autres tenaient des enfants sur leurs épaules. […] Derrière moi, quelqu’un attaqua un air entraînant à l’accordéon; aussitôt des dizaines de voix entonnèrent les paroles, tandis que l’homme en kilt faisait apparaître un violon dont […] il grattait les cordes comme une guitare.

[The people were yelling at the top of their lungs and applauding; some had taken chairs from a café or some crates and were standing on top of them to get a better look; others were carrying their children on their shoulders. […] Behind me, someone had started a lively tune on an accordion; immediately dozens of voices had struck up the words, while a man in the kilt whipped out a violin on which […] he scrapped out cords as on a guitar.] (Littell 2006, 49–50, 2010, 45–46)

Read through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, a reading encouraged by John-Paul Himka’s description of the pogrom as having “important elements of carnival,” (Himka 2011, 237) the scene points to a temporary suspension of the hierarchies that for centuries structured the society of western Ukraine. Correspondingly, social roles are confused, as communicated by a random combination of elements of different costumes.^[17] According to Bakhtin, marked by Dionysian confusion, the medieval carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileged, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1965, 10). To map the Bakhtinian paradigm on to Ukrainian reality, those who are now triumphant were traditionally at the bottom of the social ladder. In Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s words, the Ukrainians were “a non-historical nation, predominantly peasant, powerless, and bereft of statehood” (Petrovsky-Shtern 2009, 6). As well as being oppressed by the tsarist regime and exploited by Polish landowners, Ukrainians believed themselves to be outranked by Jews who were predominantly urban, involved in trade, and aspiring to liberal professions. Although the majority of Ukrainian Jews were in fact poor, political thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century, Mikhailo Drahomanov, claimed that

All Jews in the Ukraine look upon themselves as a class superior to the Ukrainian peasants. I have heard myself extremely poor Jews say: “The peasant is a dumbhead, a reptile, a pig.” I have heard expressions which indicate that the Jews consider themselves as belonging to the ruling class, together with the gentry as distinct from the peasantry. (Drahomanov 1905–1906, 539)

The detail of the theatre costumes thus anticipates the short-lived nature of Ukrainian independence. At the same time, since the costumes belong to different historical contexts, it inserts the violence Aue observes into the continuum of European antisemitism:

une perruque Régence avec une veste de hussard de 1812, une toge de magistrat bordée d’hermine, des armures mongoles et des tartans écossais, un vêtement d’opérette mi-Romain, mi-Renaissance, avec une fraise; un homme portait un uniforme de la cavalerie rouge de Budienny, mais avec un haut-de-forme et un col de fourrure.

[a Regency wig with a hussar’s jacket from 1812, a magistrate gown bordered with ermine, Mongolian armour and Scottish tartans, a half-Roman, half-Renaissance operetta costume, with a ruff; one man was carrying Budyenny’s red cavalry uniform, but with a top hat and fur collar.]ą (Littell 2006, 50, 2010, 46)

The reference to Semyon Budyenny whose Cossack troops carried out massacres of Jews during the Russo-Polish war of 1920 (Steinberg 2017, 217) not only inscribes the pogrom into a wider historical context, but also reframes it as part of specifically Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence.^[18] As Aue learns from his fellow SD officers, this violence was provoked by the Jews’ traditional loyalty to the Polish gentry and has now been exacerbated by the widespread association between the Jews and the Soviets. During his stroll through Lwów, Aue notices a poster featuring a photograph of the Polish and Ukrainians victims of NKVD. From the two words that he manages to decode without knowing the Cyrillic alphabet and that are “Ukraine” and “Jews” (Littell 2006, 51, 2010, 47), Littell’s protagonist deduces that the blame for the massacre is being pinned on the Jews. He subsequently comes across other semitic posters printed by the Germans and the OUN, one of which he quotes in French translation: “Vous avez accueilli Staline avec des fleurs, nous offrirons vos têtes à Hitler en guise de bienvenue” [“You welcomed Stalin with flowers, we will hand your heads to Hitler as a welcome.”] (Littell 2006, 63, 2010, 61). That the Ukrainians have indeed succumbed to the propagandist notion of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and are taking revenge on the Jews for their allegiance to the Soviet occupier is confirmed during Aue’s visit to the Armenian cathedral. As a way of explaining to the protagonist the violent scene he has stumbled upon, one of the Ukrainians responsible for the carnage in the cathedral’s courtyard utters the words “Staline,” [“Stalin”] “Galicie” [“Galicia”], and “Juifs” [“Jews”] (Littell 2006, 52, 2010, 48). Littell’s protagonist is then summoned by a priest to help him carry the wounded men to safety; he obliges, but, as if he were a Jewish priest (kohen) who, like Rawicz’s protagonist, is forbidden from defilement by contact with a dead body, he resolutely refuses to touch the corpses.

The friendliness with which Aue is treated in Lwów—he is offered a glass of champagne by a random passer-by, a café does not charge him for his order, and his entry fee to the museum of religions is waived—makes him understand that Ukrainians perceive the Germans as liberators from the Soviets and as their allies. He also gradually realises that, since Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Jews, and Armenians coexisted in Ukraine relatively harmoniously for centuries, it must be the German invasion and propaganda that have unleashed this horrific antisemitic violence.^[19] While officially assuming the position of neutrality, the Germans incite attacks against Jews, as exemplified by the Aktion Petliura which was carried out by Ukrainians on German instigation. For Aue’s (and the reader’s) benefit, a fellow officer explains that Petliura was a Ukrainian leader assassinated in 1926 by a Jew. It is worth adding that Petliura was associated—fairly or not—with the pogroms orchestrated during the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic (1918–1921) and that his assassin, Sholom Schwartzbard, killed him to avenge his people, including 14 members of his own family.^[20]

Even if Aue’s both tourist-like posture and initial ignorance of the history of the region and of German policy in relation to Ukraine seem implausible, they enable Littell to contextualise and narrate the “communal genocide,” as historians have called the participation of the populations of Nazi-occupied Eastern European countries in the Holocaust. Distinguishing it from the pogroms that had targeted Ukrainian Jewry over the centuries and that are epitomised by the 1648 slaughter of Jews by Chmielnicki’s troops, Waitman Beorn explains that communal genocide “supports a larger genocidal project” (2020, 155) which has “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Curthoys and Docker 2001, 12). He stresses that, in the case of western Ukraine, communal genocide happened in the context of “the presence of the Nazis and their clearly communicated desire for the annihilation of the Jews. This spoken and unspoken sanction often allowed for the escalation of violence beyond historical forms of localized anti-Jewish violence” (Beorn 2020, 159). While acknowledging that in Western European countries such as France the Holocaust would not have occurred on the same scale without the assistance of the collaborating governments and of the local population, Beorn states that “nowhere was the local participation in the genocide more prevalent than in the occupied Soviet Union and Poland” (Beorn 2020). This is evidenced by the massacre of Jews by the local militia carried out near Kovno in June 1941, by the murder of some 1600 Jews in the Polish village of Jedwabne, or indeed by the “Petliura Days” (also known as “July Days”) in Lwów. The three-day pogrom which, encouraged by the Germans but carried out by Ukrainian militia, claimed some two thousand Jewish lives, serves Beorn as an illustration of the phenomenon of communal genocide which he defines as “extreme physical violence that furthered the goals of the Nazi genocidal project and that was anchored at the local level” (Beorn 2020, 155). The spontaneous and very public attacks on the Jews that Aue witnesses are therefore a prelude to more organised violence. As Beorn elucidates, “Local Ukrainian collaborators and militia continued to support the Nazi regime throughout its occupation of Lwów, hunting Jews in hiding and rounding them up for deportation to the extermination centres” (Beorn 2020, 163).

Besides the role of ordinary Ukrainians in the communal genocide, Littell’s novel mentions the Ukrainian military units used by the Nazis in, among other settings, the Aktionen. Aue explains that the “Askaris,” as he calls the auxiliaries using a term originally designating local soldiers serving in the armies of the European colonial powers in Africa, came from the OUN after the Germans had disbanded it and, ironically, were financed by local municipalities from the funds confiscated from the Jews. To thematise this form of collaboration, Littell describes the first Aktion at which Aue is present. The Ukrainian auxiliaries who have been deployed to spare German soldiers the distress caused by executing civilians, yell at the Jews and beat them. Then, acting on German orders, they execute the victims with a bullet into the back of the neck. The narrator recalls that on other occasions the Askaris stole from the Jews and raped the women about to be murdered. Yet, as he is watching the preparations for the shooting, Aue spares a thought not only for the Jews who are being indiscriminately murdered, but also for the Ukrainians whose alliance with the Nazis has turned them into assassins of their neighbours:

[C]omment étaient-ils arrivés là? La plupart d’entre eux se sont battus contre les Polonais, puis contre les Soviétiques, ils devaient avoir rêvé d’un avenir meilleur, pour eux et pour leurs enfants, et voilà que maintenant ils se retrouvaient dans une forêt, portant un uniforme étranger et tuant des gens qui ne leur avaient rien fait, sans raison qu’ils puissent comprendre. […] Pourtant, lorsqu’on leur en donnait l’ordre, ils tiraient, ils poussaient les corps dans la fosse et en amenaient d’autres, ils ne protestaient pas.

[How had they got to this point? Most of them had fought against the Poles, and then against the Soviets, they must have dreamed of a better future, for themselves and for their children, and now they found themselves in a forest, wearing a strange uniform and killing people who had done nothing to them, without any reason they could understand. […] Still, when they were given the order, they shot, they pushed the bodies into the ditch and brought other ones, they didn’t protest.] (Littell 2006, 86, 2010, 86)

That said, the rest of the scene does provide some evidence of Ukrainian resistance. When the Askaris are told to descend into the ditch to deliver “mercy shots,” they initially refuse and argue with the Germans before two of them reluctantly agree to fire at the wounded Jews. On a different occasion, when they are asked to shoot Jewish orphans, the Askaris simply desert.

During his time on the Eastern Front, Aue also witnesses other forms of collaboration, including by Ukrainian women. One evening, when resting in his quarters, Littell’s protagonist watches his fellow officers flirt with local peasant girls. When invited to join in, Aue, appalled by the lack of self-reflection on the part of his colleagues and repulsed by the flabby bodies of the women, turns down the offer. Then, as if his eyes were equipped with X-rays, he looks through the flesh of the copulating men and women, and imagines their skeletons buried under cold earth as are the bodies of the Jews killed earlier that day. This morbid hallucination connects the murderousness of the Germans with their lust, which, in Aue’s mind, are both underpinned by one’s inability to reflect upon the meaning of one’s actions and, more generally, of one’s existence.

As already indicated, in his account of the Holocaust in Ukraine, Aue is sensitive to the role of the Germans in enflaming Ukrainian antisemitism by, for instance, parading the condemned Jews before executing them. This practice is exemplified by Littell’s description of the historically documented execution of two People’s Judges, Wolf Kieper and Moishe Kogan, that took place in Zhitomir on August, 7 1941. That the public hanging of two Jews who supported the Soviet regime in Ukraine is meant to ingrain the idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism” is obvious from the sign stating that Kieper’s 1350 victims were Volksdeutschen and Ukrainians.^[21] Beorn explains that, unlike under the Polish rule, under the Soviet regime some Ukrainian Jews enjoyed political advancement. This meant that they became prominent in certain administrative positions without, however, being overrepresented in the Soviet government. He adds that “there was not the outpouring of support that would later be used to justify brutal attack upon the Jewish community” (2020, 161). Similarly, Himka observers that, although Jews did back Soviet power more than other nationalities in the USSR, “by the eve of the war the anti-Soviet sentiments were also widespread among the Jews” (Himka 2012, 435). To return to Littell’s novel, apart from Kieper and Kogan, four hundred other Jews are executed on the same occasion. Before these men are taken to the Pferdefriedhof (horse cemetery) to be shot there, a German officer incites the Ukrainian onlookers to settle scores with the condemned. In response, a Ukrainian man breaks the ranks to kick a Jew and others throw rotten fruit at the victims. As earlier in Lwów, in Zhitomir, locals cheer as they watch the demise of Jews, and the mass execution is followed by similarly carnivalesque festivities.

Aue comes into direct contact with Ukrainians for the last time during the siege of Stalingrad when he is provided with an Askari guide. Ivan Vassilievich is so devoted to Aue that he repeatedly risks his own life to escort him around the besieged city and, when Aue receives a head wound, breaks cover to pull his body to safety. Although appreciative of Ivan’s loyal services, Aue is fully aware that the Germans will not evacuate him or any other Ukrainian collaborator, which means that his guide is doomed. The fact that Littell’s narrator cares to mention this is consistent with his overall representation of Ukrainians. Namely, Aue contextualises Ukrainians’ alliance with Germany with their quest for statehood and, without condoning the antisemitic violence they perpetrate, frames this violence with the association between Jews and, first, the Polish gentry and, then, the Soviet rule. Conscious of the instrumentality of the Nazi antisemitic propaganda in the communal genocide, Aue sees the Ukrainians as puppets in German hands, who, hoping for political sovereignty, carried out the most odious tasks, such as the mass shootings of Jews, and will therefore go down in history as complicitious in the Holocaust.

3 Conclusions

Notwithstanding the different narrative perspectives and strategies co-opted by Blood from the Sky and The Kindly Ones, their representation of the Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust is in many ways similar. In both novels, Ukrainians are figured as ardent antisemites who have perpetrated anti-Jewish violence for centuries. They are also portrayed as keen collaborators of the Nazis, who perceive Hitler’s army as a liberating force and who naively hope that their loyalty to fascist Germany will be rewarded with the much longed-for independence. Littell’s novel additionally stages spontaneous anti-Jewish outbursts which coincided with and were fuelled by the German invasion, and which proceeded from the association of Jews—be it fair or not—with the two forces that traditionally opposed the creation of a Ukrainian state: Polish landowners and the Soviet regime. As The Kindly Ones shows, the Nazis perfidiously exploited the prominence of Jews in Stalin’s state agencies; by forcing Jews to bury the Polish and Ukrainian victims of NKVD and by publicly hanging the Jews involved in Soviet institutions, the Nazis blamed Soviet murders on the Jews.

At the same time, Blood from the Sky and The Kindly Ones cast Ukrainians as a proud yet stateless nation which, having fallen prey to Nazi treachery, let itself be instrumentalised in anti-Jewish violence. To protect the mental well-being of their own soldiers, the German enlisted Ukrainians to perform the most gruesome tasks, including the shooting of Jewish women and children. Rawicz’s and Littell’s novels also stage other forms of collaboration, including the sexual exploitation of Ukrainian women by German soldiers. However, in so doing, neither novel excuses Ukrainians, instead aiming at a fair representation of their part in the Nazi extermination programme. Indeed, it is the Nazis whom the two narratives identify as those truly responsible for the planned and organised annihilation of Europe’s Jews. In other words, Rawicz and Littell demonstrate that it was the German presence in Ukraine and the German propaganda that rekindled and sanctioned the Ukrainians’ enduring antisemitic sentiment. They also sensitise their readers to the fact that, as a consequence of their alliance with Hitler’s murderous regime, Ukrainians have become profoundly implicated in the Holocaust and continue to be identified as one of the nationalities embroiled in the communal genocide of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.