Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: John-Paul Himka
Издательство: Автор
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9783838275482
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has also worked on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust. What had occurred as a result of Gross’s intervention was that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe had begun to be treated as a part of East European history. One could no longer just parachute intellectually into an East European locality and follow what the Germans did there—one had to have deeper contextual knowledge. In 1992 Christopher Browning published his pathbreaking study of Holocaust perpetrators, Ordinary Men. It followed a German reserve police battalion as it murdered its way through Poland but did not cite any sources in Polish. No scholar in the West in the 1990s thought this unusual. But when, at the end of the 1990s, Omer Bartov decided to write a history of interethnic relations and the Holocaust in the small Galician town of Buchach, the demands of scholarship were different. The immersion in the languages and cultures and physical space of Galicia required a large investment of time. In the end, it took this prolific author two decades to write his microhistory, Anatomy of a Genocide.

      Close to the group described above are other Western historians who have made important contributions to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Wendy Lower has written on German perpetrators, co-edited a collective monograph on the Shoah in Ukraine as well as edited an English translation of one of the few diaries of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Galicia; she has also written on the bloody summer of 1941 in Ukraine. Vladimir Melamed, originally from Lviv and the author of a Russian-language history of Lviv’s Jewish community, has written an original study of Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust based on the oral histories collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. Frank Golczewski has published a number of important studies that relate to OUN and to the Holocaust in Ukraine.

      In the past few decades Polish historiography on OUN and UPA has been extensive and has been mainly concerned, of course, with the nationalists’ slaughter of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. One of the most important Polish historians working in this area is Grzegorz Motyka. His major study Ukraińska partyzantka (The Ukrainian Partisan Movement) contains a chapter on UPA and the Holocaust, but like Dieter Pohl a decade earlier he was unable to arrive at clear conclusions.

      The Rehabilitation of OUN and UPA in Ukraine

      An even more important division has been created by the recrudescence of a pro-OUN historiography, this time in Ukraine rather than in the diaspora. It is a historiography that takes little notice of Western scholarship, except occasionally as an irritant. It also neglects or rejects the use of contemporary testimony by persons of non-Ukrainian ethnicity, particularly Poles and Jews. It does not conceal its political purpose, the exposition of a heroic national myth. Although it is not without genuine achievements, from the point of view of historical scholarship it is a historiographical silo.