Word: sovietizers
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...stories from Desbois' witnesses have been eye-opening for younger Ukrainians too. Under the Soviet Union, the official line was that World War II was a battle between communists and fascists. The Nazis' "Final Solution" program to exterminate Jews was rarely mentioned. And although Holocaust teaching is now officially on the syllabus of Ukrainian schools, many of the nation's youth remain ignorant of what their grandparents lived through...
...than 750 killing sites, some of which contain several mass graves, and he now suspects there may be another 1,800 graves scattered across the country. Ukraine's graves - many of them just depressions in the ground, suggesting the weight of hundreds of bodies - were neglected through decades of Soviet rule. Now, with many of the Holocaust's witnesses in their 70s and 80s, Desbois feels he is running out of time. "In five years," he says, "there will be no more witnesses...
...years, Holocaust researchers have relied heavily on accounts from Jewish survivors, and on official German and Soviet archives; about 16 million pages of Soviet reports are now housed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. But Desbois has taken Holocaust research in a new direction. As he sees it, his work is more like "a police investigation," in which he tracks down eye witnesses, cross-checks their stories, and hunts for graves and bullet shells. The resulting voices of hundreds of witnesses provide a window into how a well-organized genocide could occur in these Ukrainian communities with no one choosing...
Tapping into the country's nationalistic animosity toward its Soviet rulers, the Nazis found plenty of helpers among Ukrainians. According to the 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, many Ukrainians participated in the Nazi killings of Jews during pogroms in Ukraine's villages. Some Ukrainians also helped to run Nazi concentration camps. This persecution by their own countrymen left deep bitterness among Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, says Lee Schein, 77, who fled Rava-Ruska during the war as a 12-year-old girl, and now lives in Glen Ellen, California. "The Nazis offered the Ukrainians their...
...spoke to Desbois, two boys squatted on the ground nearby, listening intently, and afterward told TIME that they had known nothing of the killings until then. Although Jews were overwhelmingly the largest group of victims, the Nazis also shot tens of thousands of Gypsies, as well as Polish and Soviet citizens and Italian soldiers. A 26-year-old Ukrainian translator for Desbois said she knew of those deaths, but was astonished to learn about the mass killing of Jews when she met the priest last year...