When German troops occupied the city of Zvenigorodka (Cherkasy Oblast) on July 29, 1941, approximately 1,300 local Jews and refugees from the west lived there, which was just over ten percent of the total population. There were no spontaneous pogroms here; instead, Nazi occupiers forced all Jews to register and sent them to forced labor Read More
Category: The Holocaust in Ukraine
Exploring Lived Experience: Pinus Rubinstein’s Diary of the War and the Holocaust in Cernăuți
On February 16, 1947, Pinus Rubinstein a Holocaust survivor from Cernăuți (Ukr. Chernivtsi), then living in Romania, was preparing to leave for Palestine. He wrote in his diary: Today is probably the hardest day of my life. Put my files and documents in order. With a bleeding heart, I must sacrifice and destroy dear, expensive Read More
From Urban Legend to Documented Fact: The History and Memory of the Jewish Ghetto and the Holocaust in Kherson
Kherson is a large city in southern Ukraine and the regional center of the Kherson region. After the Germans occupied the city in August 1941, they established a Jewish ghetto in the city. Yet, eighty years later this very real story has become an urban legend of sorts. Even a few years ago, when I Read More
The “Tombstones Affair”: On the Fate of Jewish Cemeteries in Odessa under the Romanian Occupation (1941-1944)
The newspaper article, entitled “Looting of Jewish cemeteries in Odessa,” was probably published in spring 1945. According to it, “the transportation to Bucharest, in several wagons, of tombstones taken from the graves of Jewish cemeteries in Odessa” took place. The Odessa city hall sold the tombstones to various individuals and the mayor Gherman Pântea approved Read More
The Town of Mizoch on the Map of the Holocaust
I was born in Soviet Ukraine. According to the memory politics of this state, we were not told anything about the Holocaust as children, and for a long time this topic was terra incognita for me. During school lessons about World War II, which was then called the “Great Fatherland War,” we heard about the Read More
Wartime Paperwork: How Citizens Navigated Soviet Bureaucracy During and After World War II
Scraps of Paper Among the innumerous sources to be found in the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) are a great many personal collections of Jews from the Soviet Union. Most of them spent World War II in the Soviet rear or in the ranks of the Red Army, a minority survived the Holocaust under German or Read More
The Rescue of Jews by Monks and Nuns of the Greek Catholic Church: the State and Prospects of Research
First of all, let me start with a historical digression, by way of introduction. At the start of the German-Soviet war, Galicia was occupied by Nazi Germany. In the first days of the occupation, a wave of anti-Jewish violence took place in the cities, shortly after which all anti-Jewish laws entered into force on the Read More
‘More Terrifying Than the Germans’: Information About the Holocaust from Investigation Files of Local Policemen (the Case of Kryvyi Rih)
Archive files of criminal cases are a rather specific type of historical sources. In Ukraine, they can be found either in the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kyiv1 or in regional SBU archives in the oblast capitals. A small number of these materials have been transferred to the state Read More
“Everyone Had to Do With It, Either Through Family or Some Other Means”: Testimonies of Ukrainian Witnesses About the Holocaust in Volhynia
The Holocaust in Ukraine: contemporary historiographical trends and the need for new sources Ever since the publication of Jan T. Gross’ monograph Neighbors,1 research on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe has increasingly shifted towards the use of eyewitness accounts. This became a logical consequence of the bigger shift of the “era of the witness” since Read More
The NS-Policy of “Endlösung der Judenfrage” and the Soviet Medical Staff among the Jewish Prisoners of War in Central Ukraine
Introduction In August 2016, I took part in the 10-day seminar “Documents on the Holocaust”, held by the Federal Archive in Berlin and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). This seminar as well as my participation in the Holocaust Summer Program in Kyiv between 1 and 12 July 2019, and the EHRI fellowships I held Read More
