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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