8 | MARCH 31 • 2022
opinion
What Zelensky Gets Wrong
About the Holocaust in Ukraine
I
n his March 20 speech
to Israeli lawmakers,
Ukrainian president
Volodomyr Zelensky invoked
the Holocaust as analogous to
what his country is currently
experiencing.
“I have the
right to this par-
allel and to this
comparison,” he
said in his video
address.
But as a his-
torian of the
Holocaust in Ukraine, I know
how problematic this compar-
ison is. Zelensky, who played a
history teacher on TV, should
know better, too.
The war is horrific, and
Russia’s apparent deliber-
ate targeting of civilians is
abominable. But like most
wars, this war is being fought
over the political control of
a territory and the sover-
eignty of a people; unlike the
Holocaust, it is not an attempt
to murder every single mem-
ber of an ethnic, racial or
national group. In contrast to
Zelensky’s assertion, the threat
is not the same.
For example, Zelensky
could, theoretically, turn over
the power of government to
a Russian appointed puppet
and allow his people to live as
a Ukrainian minority within
an oppressive Russian state.
It’s not a good choice, but it is
a choice. The Nazis provided
no such option for the Jews of
Europe. There was no choice
that led to physical survival,
no offer to surrender.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin, too, has invoked the
Holocaust when justifying his
invasion of Ukraine, claiming
that it was his intention to
“denazify” the country. That,
too, is disingenuous. Ukraine
is a free and democratic state,
with a government that was
popularly elected and that has,
for the most part, protected
the rights of all its citizens.
It is little wonder, though,
that the Holocaust has such
resonance in Ukraine. Over
one-quarter of the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust,
approximately 1.5 million
people, were killed within
the territory of what is now
Ukraine. Millions of non-Jew-
ish Ukrainians also perished
under German occupation
as prisoners of war, slave
laborers, soldiers, partisans,
and ordinary townsfolk and
peasants. Zelensky is right
that the war was “a tragedy
for Ukrainians, for Jews, for
Europe, for the world.”
Urging Israel to pro-
vide more military aid to
Ukraine, Zelensky asked the
“people of Israel” to make
a choice, just as Ukrainians
made their choice 80 years
ago. With 2,673 Ukrainians
recognized by Yad Vashem for
their efforts to save Jews,
Zelensky can legitimately
boast that “Righteous Among
the Nations are among us,”
as he did in his speech. But
this claim obscures the role
that far more Ukrainians
played in collaborating with
the Germans and facilitating
the murder of their Jewish
neighbors.
The Germans knew that
Ukraine would be fertile
ground for their extermina-
tionist plan. As I show in my
recently published book, In
the Midst of Civilized Europe:
The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and
the Onset of the Holocaust, only
20 years earlier, Ukrainians
opposing Bolshevik rule had
murdered tens of thousands
of their Jewish neighbors. The
Jews and the Bolsheviks, they
had falsely claimed, were one
and the same.
The Nazis purposeful-
ly revived this myth. They
enticed Ukrainians to assist
in murder as revenge for the
crimes the Bolsheviks had
inflicted in Ukraine — mass
arrests and executions, and,
most notably, forced grain
requisitions that had resulted
in a famine killing 3.5 million
people in 1932-1933.
A QUICK HISTORY
In Lviv, the first major city
the Germans captured in
Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers
recruited from abroad with
the false promise of German
support for Ukrainian state-
hood, rounded up Jews and
threw them to the crowds.
“They were beating up Jews,
killing Jews, beating them to
death on the street,” recalled
one witness. German special
units with the collaboration of
Ukrainian auxiliary police and
militia killed between 2,000
and 5,000 Jews in the city in
July 1941.
Similar scenes were repeat-
ed elsewhere. During the
first month of the German
invasion, between 12,000 and
35,000 Jews were killed in
eastern Galicia and western
Volhynia — two regions that
the Soviet Union had taken
from Poland in 1939. Many
of these massacres were per-
petrated by locals, and some
without even a German pres-
Jeffrey
Veidlinger
JTA
A photo of one of the German army mobile killing units, or
Einsatzgruppen, shooting Jews near Ivangorod, Ukraine, in 1942
was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a
Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting
documentation on Nazi war crimes.
HISTORICAL ARCHIVES/WARSAW
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