The Holocaust in Ukraine: Literary Representations

As the special dossier dedicated to the portrayals of Ukraine in Holocaust literature is nearing completion, the Russian war on Ukraine enters its tenth month. Or, if we consider Russia’s unlawful annexation of Crimea in March 2014 as the true beginning of the hostilities, we are now almost nine years into the conflict.^[1] Despite the numerous setbacks suffered by the Russian offensive, the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian army and civilians, and the mounting diplomatic and economic pressure put on Moscow by the international community, there seems to be no real hope for an immediate end to the war. To the disbelief that Russia’s attack on Ukraine has caused in both those immediately concerned and those watching from afar have added the uncannily familiar mass graves filled with mutilated corpses of civilians, including women and children, and the euphemistic language Russia deploys to mask its territorial expansionism. What Russian propaganda calls “a special military operation” designed to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine has resulted in horrific war crimes such as those committed in Bucha near Kyiv and, more recently, in and around Kherson.

The past reality that is most strikingly conjured up by Russia’s war against Ukraine is the genocide that the Nazis and their local collaborators perpetrated on the same territory 80 years ago. Having launched the Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Wehrmacht progressed through Soviet-occupied territories with four mobile killing squads, euphemistically called Einsatzgruppen, following in its wake. The Einsatzgruppen systematically murdered Jews, Romanies, communists, and anyone else whom the German security forces considered a potential threat to the invading troops. In the provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia, which form part of today’s Ukraine, operated the Einsatzgruppe C and Waffen-SS Division Wiking. Its shooters killed men and later also women and children, frequently using forests as execution and burial sites. Other places of carnage were, however, less concealed from public sight; indeed, the most horrific of the so-called Aktionen took place by a ravine on the western outskirts of Kyiv, where, over two days—29th and 30th September 1941—33,771 people, mainly Jews, were shot dead. At Babi Yar, as the ravine is called, shootings continued afterwards, the total number of victims nearing 150,000 (Rapson 2015, 83).

While in today’s conflict, it is the Ukrainian nation that bears the brunt of senseless violence, between 1941 and 1944 it was Jews who were the main target of the Nazis’ exterminatory policies. In the realisation of these policies, the Nazis were supported by a Ukrainian militia who murdered Jews on their orders, spontaneously, or on incitement by German propaganda which mobilised the concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism” to assimilate Jews with the Soviet power apparatus. This form of ani-Semitic violence is best exemplified by the pogroms that swept through the multicultural city of Lwów (Yiddish/German: Lemberg, Ukrainian: Lviv) in June and July 1941, during which Ukrainians arrested Jews in order to subject them to forced labour, humiliation, and murder (Himka 2021, 13). The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police was another form of Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. Created by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) who, by aligning themselves with Hitler, hoped to earn the much longed-for sovereignty for their people, the Police “provided the indispensable manpower for the Holocaust.” In 1942 and 1943, its members helped in deporting Jews to the death camp of Bełżec and took part in mass shootings (Himka 2021, 13). In 1943 many of these policemen deserted and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which conducted an ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews in eastern Galicia and Volhynia (McBride 2017). It is estimated that on the eve of the German invasion of the USSR 2.45 million Jews were living in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and that between 1941 and 1944 between 1.25 and 2 million Jews were murdered (Brandon and Lower 2008, 1). The extent of the slaughter meant that Father Patrick Debois who first drew the attention of a wider western public to the mass killings of Jews in the “bloodlands,” stated that “The landscape of Ukraine, village after village, east to west, was transforming under my eyes into an ocean of exterminations.”^[2] (Desbois 2008, 178) These facts tend to overshadow both the suffering of the Ukrainians themselves under Stalin and Hitler, and the Ukrainian rescue efforts during the Holocaust. If, by comparison with the neighbouring Poland, the number of the Ukrainian Righteous may be considerably lower, there are over two thousand documented examples of charity and courage (Brandon and Lower 2008, 15).

After Ukraine’s incorporation into the USSR at the end of the war, Soviet authorities did their best to minimise the scope of the Jewish tragedy, a fact that is well illustrated by the official Soviet policy regarding the memory of the Babi Yar massacre. As well as refusing to acknowledge the identity of its victims, the Soviet officialdom allowed for the ravine to be repurposed as an open-air rubbish dump and, in the late 1950s, planned to build on it a sports stadium. Eventually, with the help of a dam, the ravine was filled with masses of mud and water (Tumarkin 2010, 280–81). At the same time, Soviet authorities subjected to strict censorship any efforts by artists to commemorate the Jewish victims of Babi Yar.^[3] This is because Soviet memory politics regarding the Holocaust were intended to maintain the idea that the different nationalities and ethnic groups making up the USSR suffered equally during the war, and that the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called their involvement in the worldwide struggle against Hitler, was a conflict between the antagonistic forces of communism and fascism. It was only Ukraine’s independence, gained in 1991, that facilitated research into the Nazi crimes against Jews in Ukraine. Sovereignty, however, also occasioned a re-presentation of the war as a national liberation struggle and a linked glorification of OUN and UPA, regardless of their deeply entrenched anti-Semitism and extremely brutal treatment of not only Jews but also Poles. The new memory policy found its most powerful expression in the posthumous recognition by the then President of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko, of Stepan Bandera, the wartime head of OUN, as a “Hero of Ukraine.” In modern Ukraine, the Holocaust remains a sensitive and politically divisive issue, and Jewish memory, including that of the Holocaust, continues to be suppressed or at best marginalised, as well as “couched in euphemisms and distortions.” (Bartov 2008, 323). Furthermore, even though it inevitably stirs up memories of World War II and the genocide the Nazis perpetrated in its context, Moscow’s attack on Kyiv has done little to foster commemorative efforts. Instead, the current war has made a discussion of the “communal genocide,” as is called the participation in the Holocaust of local populations of the Nazi-occupied Eastern European countries (Beorn 2020, 155), seem insensitive and counterproductive. Ironically, the war has also put in jeopardy the creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre and in March 2022 the building of the Memorial was hit by a Russian missile, killing at least five people. Interestingly, in response to the bombing whose actual target was the nearby television tower, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted: “On September 29–30, 1941, Nazis killed over 33,000 Jews here. 80 years later, Russian Nazis strike this same land to exterminate Ukrainians.”

By being published during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the present collection of articles will inevitably invite reflection on the parallels between present and past violences, and, consequently, on the instability of subject positions. But, as well as pointing out that a certain community may find itself victimised under one set of circumstances, but perpetrate violence in a different historical context, the following articles show that communities are rarely homogenous, meaning that their members embody a range of responses to a given historical reality. The discussions of narratives of both murder and rescue found in the present dossier specifically question the blanket perception of Ukrainians as uniquely complicitous in the Holocaust and recast Ukrainian complicity in a wider historico-political context.

The dossier’s key ambition is to draw attention to a body of literature that thematises the “dispersed Holocaust,” as Roma Sendyka has termed persecution that took place beyond the emblematic Holocaust locales such as camps and ghettos (Sendyka). Among many different forms of suffering, Sendyka’s concept encompasses the systematic mass shootings of Jews in today’s Ukraine that Patrick Desbois referred to as the “Holocaust by bullets.” In the West, however, both historical discourse and public imagination have been affected by the “Auschwitz syndrome,” which means that “Auschwitz became the central symbol of modernity derailed, the nadir of Western civilisation.” Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower explain that “many historians, philosophers, and political scientists as well as the general public focused on the killing centres and methods used to deport Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as to Sobibór, Chełmno, Bełżec, Majdanek, and Treblinka. […] Almost inevitably, academic and public interest was bound to lead to neglect elsewhere.” (Brandon and Lower 2008, 6) This “elsewhere” includes Ukrainian forests, ravines, swamps, and streets of cities such as Lwów. These spaces all witnessed the murder of Jews, before, in order to spare shooters the anguish resulting from their murderous duties, the Nazis established more “remote” killing methods in the form of death camps equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. Beside the “Auschwitz syndrome,” there are other historical and political reasons for the relative absence of research into the Holocaust by bullets and other forms of violence suffered by Ukraine’s Jewry. These reasons include the secrecy of the mass executions, the extremely small number of their survivors, the reluctance of Ukrainian bystanders to testify to what they saw or heard, and the official repression of Holocaust memory in both Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. To this list, Brandon and Lower add the protracted lack of access to regional archives and the linguistically demanding nature of studying the Holocaust in Ukraine (Brandon and Lower 2008, 6).^[4] It is therefore only very recently that the extermination of Ukrainian Jews, which has been studied as part of the Nazi genocide in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania, has become subject of sustained historical analyses.^[5] What these analyses reveal, among other historical details, is the heterogeneity of the Holocaust experience across Ukrainian lands: while in Galicia “Jews were shot, gassed at Bałżec, or worked to death,” in other areas “Far more frequent […] was the kind of slaughter that took place at Babi Yar.” (Brandon and Lower 2008, 5)

The discussed lacuna in historiography finds reflection in Holocaust literature. Canonical narratives such as Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen) (1946), Primo Levi’s essays I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) (1986), and Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz, et après (Auschwitz and After) (1965), all have concentration camps as their setting. And yet, as the present special dossier demonstrates, there exists a body of literature thematising specifically the wartime fate of Jews in the lands constituting today’s Ukraine. This literature includes the four novels examined by the contributions to the dossier: Piotr Rawicz’s Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) (1961), Friedrich Gorenstein’s Poputchki (Travelling Companions) (1989), Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) (2006), and Rachel Seiffert’s A Boy in Winter (2017). Among other narratives set in wartime Ukraine are Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel) (1966), Anatoly Rybakov’s Tyazhelyi piesok (Heavy Sand) (1978), D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Ida Fink’s “Pies” (“A Dog”) (1983), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million (2006), and Tara Lynn Masih’s My Real Name is Hanna (2019). Mendelsohn’s best-selling and award-winning family memoir is perhaps the best known of the above listed narratives. It retraces its author’s investigation into the death of his great uncle, Schmiel Jäger, and of Schmiel’s family: his wife, Ester, and his four daughters: Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia, who, before and during the war lived in the Polish province of Galicia. As part of his search, Mendelsohn, who is a classicist by training, consults archives and historical studies, interviews witnesses, and seeks explanation of the inexplicable in biblical hermeneutics. Mendelsohn also travels to Israel, Denmark, Australia and, of course, Ukraine. When interviewing the bystanders to the Jewish tragedy in Bolekhiv (Polish: Bolechów), Mendelsohn is being haunted by his grandfather’s words: “The Germans were bad […]. The Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were worst of all.” (Mendelsohn 2006, 100) And so during his two trips to Ukraine, he struggles to square his grandfather’s negative opinion of Ukrainians with the helpfulness of his local guide and translator, Alex, and with the hospitality of those who invite him into their homes and, as they treat him to Nescafé and Soviet sparkling wine, do their best to supply him with information. Mendelsohn’s narrative further nuances the dominant perception of Ukrainians by systematically interweaving stories of anti-Jewish violence with stories of rescue.^[6]

The ambiguity that marks Mendelsohn’s representation of Ukrainians is shared by the narratives scrutinised in this dossier. In the opening contribution, Anna Ronell analyses the Russian-language novel Travelling Companions by Gorenstein who has been hailed “the most significant yet understudied Russian-Jewish writer of the second half of the twentieth century.” (Grinberg 2020, 132) Travelling Companions, which is Gorenstein’s only novel so far translated into English, conveys its author’s conflicted attitude towards his native country. Ronell reads the novel through a geocritical lens which enables us to recognise that the writer, the reader, and the text are all part of a larger spatiotemporal ensemble and that this ensemble informs the literary experience. This approach helps Ronell to demonstrate the disparity between the pre-Holocaust Ukraine with its large and diverse Jewish diaspora, and the sovietised Ukraine of the 1980s, which is being viewed through the eyes of the novel’s narrator, Felix Zabrodsky, a Jewish writer and a stand-in for Gorenstein. From Zabrodsky’s conversations with his travelling companion, Alexander Chubinets, a Ukrainian bystander to the Holocaust and a playwright whose career was shattered by the Soviet regime, emerges a palimpsestic vision of Ukraine that is composed of the narrator’s childhood memories and other textualisations of Ukrainian reality. At the same time, the memory of Ukraine is a multidirectional one, where histories of the gulag, the Holodomor (the genocidal famine of 1932–1933), and the Holocaust intersect and interact with each other. Yet, as Ronell shows, even this literary and somewhat romanticised Ukraine is strongly stamped by the narrator’s ambivalence; the beloved Ukrainian landscape is furrowed by ravines filled with Jewish corpses, and Zabrodsky senses the presence of anti-Semites among those singing the Ukrainian folksongs he so cherishes.

My own article examines two French-language novels, Blood from the Sky and The Kindly Ones, which have been published 40 years apart and which are both the work of non-native French authors, Rawicz being Polish and Littell American. As well as winning prestigious literary prizes, the two novels have caused controversy due to the narrative strategies that, in Holocaust literature, may seem morally inappropriate. My discussion centres precisely around the representational techniques deployed by the two authors and on how these techniques inflect their novels’ judgement of Ukrainian responses to the Holocaust. Adopting the untypical point of view of a Nazi, The Kindly Ones falls under the rubric of “traumatic metafiction” which, analogically to historiographic metafiction, represents the effects and processes of trauma, while offering a metafictional commentary on the articulation of this trauma (Duffy 2022, 111–50). In contrast, the generically hybrid Blood from the Sky is narrated from the more traditional perspective of a survivor, even if Boris D. hardly matches the idealised image of a Holocaust victim. To survive and bear witness to the tragedy of his people, Rawicz’s protagonist commits murder, fraternises with the Nazis, and poses as a Ukrainian anti-Semitic collaborator. Rawicz’s iconoclastic novel relies on techniques associated with the fable and magical realism, and, through its metafictionality, intense and parodic intertextuality, and fragmentariness, anticipates the co-opting of postmodern representational practices by many contemporary French Holocaust novelists, including Littell himself. As well as the two novels’ aesthetics, my article compares and contrasts their representation of Ukrainians whom they cast primarily as agents of anti-Semitic violence, including that perpetrated as part of the Holocaust. Without being redeemed, the Ukrainians are depicted as a stateless people victimised by, first, the tsarist and, then, the Soviet regime, not to mention their exploitation by Polish landowners. Both novels also frame Ukrainian alliance with Hitler’s Germany with their nationalist ambitions which, as both Littell and Rawicz show, were perfidiously taken advantage of by the Nazis. Consequently, irrespective of stylistic differences, Rawicz’s and Littell’s novels strive to offer a balanced judgement of the Ukrainian people and insist on the Nazis’ key role in the Holocaust.

Sue Vice’s study of Seiffert’s A Boy in Winter also addresses the narrative strategies and intertextual entanglements of the Young Adult novel. Vice pays particular attention to the ethical import of Seiffert’s borrowing from modernist literature, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), of the representation of external reality from the perspective of several characters who never meet, but find themselves sharing perception of the same sounds and images. Her article also examines the novel’s dialogue with its many intertexts and ponders how these intertextual allusions bear on the British novelist’s complex depiction of wartime Ukraine and its people. Inspired by the story of a real-life Wehrmacht officer, Willi Ahrem, whose acts of rescue earned him the status of a Righteous among the Nations, and who serves as a model for the highway engineer Pohl, A Boy in Winter draws on Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for its portrayal of enforced complicity and on Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March (1932) for its setting in Ukrainian marshes. As depicted by Seiffert, Ukraine’s landscape is made up of contrasting elements. Among these are the swamps that constitute a pre-modern haven for the novel’s two Jewish protagonists, even though, as Vice points out, it was in the Pripyat Marshes on the Belarus-Ukraine border that in 1941 the Nazis carried out a series of mass shootings. To the positively valorised marshlands A Boy in Winter opposes the anonymous town with its brick works where Jews are held prisoners before being murdered, and a thoroughfare that the German invaders are constructing in the hope of taming the inhospitable and swampy terrain. The ambiguity marking Ukraine’s geographical space is echoed, as Vice demonstrates, by the varied responses of Ukraine’s citizens to the Nazis’ anti-Semitic violence. Collaboration, which is shown to be circumstantial and reluctant, is embodied by Mykola, a Red Army deserter who joins the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. His fiancée Yasia may have enthusiastically welcomed the Germans and steered Mykola towards UPA, yet ends up risking her life to rescue two Jewish boys, Momik and Yankel. Although destined for a young audience, Seiffert’s novel does not stop short of thematising Jewish suffering and death, which were a more typical outcome than the survival of the two brothers. However, the horror of the mass execution in which the boys’ parents, Miryam and Ephraim, are murdered and in which Mykola takes part as a shooter, is somewhat mitigated thanks to the novel’s neo-modernist narrative technique.