MARCH 31 • 2022 | 11
ence. “The ones that did the
shooting, and the ones that
did the arresting, and the
ones that carried out these
atrocities were not Germans;
this was the local Ukrainian
police,” recalled Simon
Feldman of Boremel.
As the Germans moved
further east into Ukraine,
they intensified their massa-
cres. In hundreds of locales
with the assistance of local
Ukrainian collaborators, they
gathered Jewish men, women
and children, marched them
to the outskirts of town,
stripped them naked, and shot
them in ravines or trenches.
Locals were then permitted to
scavenge the clothing of the
dead. The organization Yahad
in Unum, which has been
mapping Holocaust-era mass
graves, has identified nearly
1,000 such sites in Ukraine.
The largest is Babyn Yar,
in the suburbs of Kyiv, where
over 33,000 Jews were killed
on Sept. 29-30, 1941. Weeks
before Babyn Yar, 23,600 Jews
were executed in the fortress
town of Kamianets-Podilskyy.
By January 1942, some 500,000
Jews had been killed in Ukraine.
After an initial wave of killing
during the German advance,
the German military established
some 250 ghettos in Ukraine
and required Jews to wear
armbands with stars. Ukrainian
police enforced the regulations.
In contrast to the walled ghet-
tos established in Poland, in
Ukraine ghettos tended to be
more porous, marked by barbed
wire and sometimes only with
signs. They were never intend-
ed to be permanent. By spring
1942, most of the ghettos were
liquidated, and another 500,000
Jews were murdered.
Because so many Jews were
killed at close range, near their
homes, by conventional weap-
ons, historians have termed
German atrocities in Ukraine
the “Holocaust by Bullets.”
Indeed, by the spring of 1942,
before most of the death camps
in German-occupied Poland
began operating, nearly two-
thirds of Jews in territories
now part of Ukraine had been
exterminated.
Addressing lawmakers
around the world, Zelensky
has repeatedly sought to
invoke traumatic moments in
each country’s history — the
London Blitz in his speech to
the British parliament, 9-11
and Pearl Harbor in his address
to the U.S. Congress and the
Berlin Wall in his address to
the German Bundestag.
It’s understandable that
Zelensky is making use of
whatever reference points he
think will help his country.
It’s also true that Jews like
Zelensky who grew up behind
the Iron Curtain didn’t learn
this history in the same way
or on the same timeline as
Jews living in the rest of the
world. And I’m sympathetic to
the idea, expressed by Israeli
leaders to rebuff criticism of
Zelensky after his speech, that
we can all cut some slack to a
world leader in a situation of
life and death.
Still, Zelensky’s voice mat-
ters. And when he utters
untruths about the Holocaust,
it’s important not to let them
stand.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky
Collegiate Professor of History at the
University of Michigan and the author
of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The
Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of
the Holocaust.
WHAT ZELENSKY GETS WRONG
continued from page 8
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