Abstract: Boris Zabarko. Holocaust in the Ukraine. The Library of Holocaust Testimonies. London and Portland, OR: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2005. xxxii, 394 pp. Bibliography. Index. £45.00 / $67.50, cloth. £17.50 / $27.50, paper.This volume contains eighty-six short testimonies from Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. Some of the accounts have appeared in Ukrainian publications, while others were recorded in the context of a project collecting audio and video testimonies for the Documentation Center of Yale University. The editor, Boris Zabarko, is himself a survivor of the Shargorod ghetto and director of the Institute for Social and Communal Workers and a senior researcher of the National Academy of Sciences in the Ukraine. The edition first appeared in German in 2004.The testimonies themselves offer harrowing accounts of the impact of Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Some families seem to have expected the worst from the beginning; others remembered the German behaviour in the First World War and anticipated a reasonably civilized occupation. In contrast to the parts of Poland occupied by Germany since 1939, the transition from initial encounters, through brutal and haphazard ghettoization, to mass murder took place in a matter of weeks. Most of the witnesses in this volume were teenagers or children when the Nazis arrived. They tended to be spared the worst of the initial days and weeks of occupation, though they observed extraordinary brutality on the streets, and the disappearance of relatives and neighbours. When the mass killings started, their routes to survival varied. Some were caught up in the shootings themselves and survived through extraordinary luck-falling into a mass grave without being shot, or being pulled out at the last minute by a sympathetic guard and sent running into a corn field. Some managed to be taken in, at least for a while, by other relatives away from the affected location, or by non-Jewish acquaintances. Such moves were usually just the beginning of extraordinary odysseys of hardship, improvisation and luck.Even more than the introduction makes clear, the testimonies themselves reveal the degree to which Jews' lives were endangered by local collaborators, be it brutal police and guards, or simply neighbours who turned them in. At the same time, almost every survivor in this account owed his or her life to greater or lesser gestures by non-Jewish Ukrainians, who offered shelter and food or who vouched for their non-Jewish status with the Germans. There were some good Germans in this story too. The volume editor himself remembers a German soldier stationed in his apartment who left food and money behind when he moved on. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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