Ukrainians and the Holocaust

If you do not know the work of John Paul Himka, you should, not least for such books as Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians. Himka has been a well respected historian of Galician realities for decades now, as seen in such important books as Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine and then The Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian Society in Austrian Galicia.

He has a new book published this fall on a topic whose controversies and debates have raged for some time now, and are regular features in anti-Ukrainian propaganda coming out of Russia: Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Ibidem/Columbia University Press, 2021). About this book the publisher tells us this:

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941–44. The extent of OUN’s and UPA’s culpability in the Holocaust has been a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish communities and Israel. Occasionally, the controversy has broken into the press of North America, the EU, and Israel.

Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

Jewish Philosophers and the Jewish Jesus

Sometimes it's the books one picks up casually, with initially only very moderate interest, that end up staying with one, shaping one's thinking in a permanent manner, and being so often returned to in one's mind and quoted over and over again.

So it was with me when, at a used bookstore in Ottawa in the mid-1990s, when I was an undergraduate student, I picked up The Levinas Reader. It seemed only moderately interesting at the time, but it was wonderfully discounted so that was sufficient to tempt me to buy it. That was my introduction to the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, some of whose other works I would later attempt to read.

One in particular is Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, where he writes so memorably about the "ethics of the face" and the face-to-face encounter, noting that the dangers of abstraction and reduction, by which a person is dehumanized, are much harder to sustain when I am confronted by the ethical obligation posed by the mere existence of the person facing me.

From him I have ever after returned to, and lectured about, the "ethics of the face." I thought of him again in writing this piece at Our Sunday Visitor. And in particular in my mind's eye as I was writing, my friend mentioned in the piece was front and centre. As we approach the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is astonishing to me that anti-Semitic attacks continue and seem to be increasing in one of the last places on earth one would expect them. Kyrie eleison.

The Romanian Church and the Holocaust

Just released last month is a book that is sure to revive controversy over questions of collusion and assistance on the part of the Romanian Orthodox Church during World War II: Ion Popa, The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), 226pp.

About this book we are told:

In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, have details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania come to light. Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that concealed the Church's role in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the Church's relationship with the Jewish community in Romania and Judaism in general, as well as with the state of Israel, and discusses the extent to which the Church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa's highly original analysis illuminates how the Church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today.

On the Uses of Historical Memory

As I have often noted on here over the past two years especially, the questions of the uses to which the past is often put are very important ones that often reveal abuse, nostalgia, and romanticism all bound up together, thereby underscoring Adam Phillips' observation that “memories always have a future in mind.”

Three new books will shed further light on all these questions after their publication later this fall:  Judith Pullman, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Oxford UP, 2017), 256pp.

About this book we are told:

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

Memory in Early Modern Europe offers a lively and accessible introduction to the many ways in which Europeans engaged with the past and 'practised' memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. From childhood memories and local customs to war traumas and peacekeeping , it analyses how Europeans tried to control, mobilize and reconfigure memories of the past. Challenging the long-standing view that memory cultures transformed around 1800, it argues for the continued relevance of early modern memory practices in modern societies.

The second book is an edited collection: How the Past was Used: Historical cultures, c. 750-2000, eds. Peter Lambert and Bjorn Weiler (OUP, 2017), 450pp. About this collection we are told:

This book explores how societies put the past to use and how, in the process, they represented it: in short, their historical culture. It brings together anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars to address the means by which societies, groups, and individuals have engaged with the past and expressed their understanding of it.

The utility of the past has proven almost as infinitely variable as the modes of its representation. It might be a matter of learning lessons from experience, or about the legitimacy of a cause or regime, or the reputation of an individual. Rival versions and interpretations reflected, but also helped to create and sustain, divergent communities and world views. With so much at stake, manipulations, distortions, and myths proliferated. But given also that evidence of past societies was fragmentary, fragile, and fraught with difficulties for those who sought to make sense of it, imaginative leaps and creativity necessarily came into the equation. Paradoxically, the very idea that the past was indeed useful was generally bound up with an image of history as inherently truthful. But then notions of truth proved malleable, even within one society, culture, or period.

Concerned with what engagements with the past can reveal about the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks they took place within, this book is of relevance to anyone interested in how societies, communities, and individuals have acted on their historical consciousness.

The third will perhaps be the most controversial: Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge UP, 2017).
About this book the publisher tells us:

Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

Heroic and Holy Ukrainian Churchmen of the 20th Century

The news that the Vatican dicastery responsible for such matters has been ordered by the pope of Rome to publish a decree recognizing the heroic virtues of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky is good news indeed, as the Ottawa institute bearing his name explains.

Would it be churlish to remark that such news is grossly overdue, and should never have been held up for decades in Rome in the first place? There are important ecclesiological issues here. More than a decade ago now I asked those involved with the process why the synod of the supposedly sui iuris Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) did not simply go ahead with its own process of declaring Sheptytsky a saint (of which I am not in doubt). The argument in favor of handling matters locally only gained strength under the papacy of Benedict XVI, who returned beatifications to the home church of the candidate in question, and was, moreover, on record going back decades in calling for far greater decentralization (of many issues and practices) out of Rome and back to the local and regional structures of the Church. Canonizations were once, of course, very local affairs, and only gradually centralized in Rome for reasons that make rather limited sense today.

There are, moreover, important geopolitical considerations, at least according to John Allen. I think Allen may be making more of this than meets the eye, but let that pass for now.

What of this towering man--both literally and figuratively (he was nearly 7 feet tall)? Who was this "lion of Halychyna"? For those unfamiliar with his life, this recent article, while suffering from the usual infelicities of English (and some confusion about Habsburg geography), is not a bad place to start. The historian Timothy Snyder--who, I recently discovered with some surprise, is apparently a fluent Ukrainian speaker--outlined Sheptytsky's role in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust in this 2009 piece from the New York Review of Books. Snyder is the author of such important and well-received studies as his recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and earlier works, including The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–-1999.

For those who want good studies on Sheptytsky, there are, fortunately, several in English by reputable scholars--though, alas, no good book-length biography that I know of, notwithstanding the fact his rich, long, productive life would certainly lend itself to one. Perhaps the estimable church historian and priest Athanasius McVay, author of several recent studies, and author also of this invaluable blog, can be thumb-screwed into writing one if he is not already doing so. I interviewed him here about one of his earlier books; but see here also for others.

Returning for a moment to the question of his role in the Holocaust, see this handsome and moving book recently published by the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa: Archbishop Andrei Sheptytsky and the Ukrainian Jewish Bond. But see even more the memoirs of one Jew whose survival he attributes to Sheptytsky: Kurt Lewin's  A Journey Through Illusions. (A Ukrainian version was apparently published in 2007.) This is a haunting, moving book deserving a wide audience.

For a study of Sheptytsky's liturgical theology, see Peter Galadza's The Theology and Liturgical Work of Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944).

For his sophiology, see Andriy Chirovsky's Pray for God's Wisdom: The Mystical Sophiology of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky.

For his moral theology, see Andrii Krawchuk's  Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytsky.

For an early and very short work about his ecumenical activity, see George Perejda's Apostle of Church Unity: The life of the servant of God, Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky. But there is in fact a much more recent, much more scholarly, and much more wide-ranging treatment of his ecumenical activity and much else besides in the collection Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts'kyi. Edited by Paul Robert Magocsi and Krawchuk, with an introduction by the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan, this collection is not to be missed.

After his death on 1 November 1944, Sheptytsky was succeeded as primate by the formidable Joseph Slipyj, who was arrested the next year along with the rest of the UGCC hierarchy and sent to the Gulag.

Many other Ukrainian Catholics were simply shot or murdered in other horrifying ways. Some of them were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001. Some of their stories are told in Blessed Bishop Nicholas Charnetsky, C.Ss.R., and Companions Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church: Modern Martyrs of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I also drew some lessons from this "church of martyrs" in a recent article here.

The story of another martyr is told by Athanasius McVay in God's Martyr, History's Witness.

Slipyj was not killed but spent a brutal 18 years in concentration camps. He would be released in 1963 and exiled to Rome (his "gilded cage" as I was told he called it) for the remaining 21 years of his life, dying just a scant 5 years before the legalization of the UGCC and its emergence from the underground.

Slipyj was the object of a study by the eminent Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan: Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. This, too, is an invaluable study and nobody with any interest in these matters can afford to be without this study written by Pelikan, who was regarded by many as the doyen of church historians until his death in 2006.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Slipyj's death last September, several publishers brought out English translations of some of his works. One such may be found here.

New Works on Galicia

Many Eastern Christians in North America, both Catholic and Orthodox, trace their roots to the Hapsburg province of Galicia. Several recent books have come out to look at the fascinating history of this area, and several more have appeared this year.

William Jay Risch has just authored The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Harvard UP, 2011), 374pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

Lviv’s borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city’s intellectuals—working through compromise rather than overt opposition—strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv’s post–Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared.

The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union’s postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.

The question of the Holocaust in Ukraine, as I noted previously, continues to merit scholarly attention, including in Wendy Lower's book, set for release in October: The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (Altamira, 2011), 198pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

This in-depth study of a Jewish man's diary from Nazi-occupied Poland provides an unfiltered view of the struggles of Samuel Golfard, who tried to make sense of and resist the Holocaust that ultimately destroyed him. The diary is complemented by an array of wartime and postwar photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and testimonies that create a fuller picture of Jewish resistance and the perpetration of mass murder in eastern Galicia.

The noted Ukrainian historian John-Paul Himka has said of this work:

It is a miracle that this diary survived and has now become an invaluable source on the Holocaust in a small town in western Ukraine. It provides a glimpse into the state of mind of those destined for annihilation on the very eve of their destruction. The diarist is insightful and thoughtful. The introduction and commentary provided by Wendy Lower are nuanced and intelligent. One will learn a lot about the Holocaust from reading this book.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

Indiana University Press, which specializes to some extent in Slavic realities, today tells me of a new paperback version just out:

Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (IUP, 2010), 392pp + maps + illustrations.


As the publisher notes, the Shoah in Ukraine has not been as well studied as in other areas. I remember reading a number of years ago the memoir of Kurt Lewin, A Journey Through Illusions, in which he recounts the role of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, primate of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, in saving many Jews in Ukraine from deportation and death. But there is still much study to be done and many issues to be considered here.