Word: ukrainians
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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...
...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, or able, to stop it. That provokes profound questions about culpability and powerlessness, and the possibility of future genocides, which resonate far beyond 1940s Europe, say researchers like Shapiro. Explaining why it has taken so long to uncover such testimony, Shapiro says: "Frankly, no one ever...
Unearthing the Truth Unlike the industrial-scale, anonymous genocide in death camps such as Auschwitz - the world's iconic images of the Holocaust - Ukraine's killings were often terrifyingly intimate. While 400,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in concentration camps, about 1.1 million were shot dead at close range. The murders were often in full view of neighbors and acquaintances, many of whom the Nazis deployed to dig and cover the graves, then to distribute the belongings of the dead. The fact that locals sometimes received these possessions, or were ordered to help in the executions, may partly...
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...
...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...