The Other History of the Holocaust

[Nevilledog]

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Alex
@JewishWonk
I wrote about the Soviet Union's treatment of Holocaust memory and the role that this deliberately incomplete memory is playing in Russia's assault on Ukraine, and Ukraine's response for @TheAtlantic.

theatlantic.com
The Other History of the Holocaust
Like many Jews from the former Soviet Union, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky grew up in a world that suppressed the truth about the Nazi genocide.
5:13 AM · Apr 4, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/ukraine-soviet-union-holocaust-jewish-history/629421/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/Q7Ttg

*snip*

I knew when the lessons were serious, because my mother would deliver them in a hushed tone. One time while she was preparing a meal, she quietly told me the importance of knowing which of my neighbors to trust on the basis of how they felt about Jews. I learned this in New Jersey in the ’90s. That understanding of Eastern European history and the attitudes that formed with it have been, surprisingly, showing up in international headlines quite a bit recently; Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that “de-Nazification" is the objective of his country’s “special operation” in Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has invoked the Holocaust in his appeals to Western audiences, particularly the Israeli government, for support in Ukraine’s struggle.

I have not put the worldview my parents taught me to much use in the United States in the decades since. It did, however, teach me that I had a different understanding of things than those around me, even other Jewish communities. American films about the Holocaust and World War II felt like a portal into a different dimension’s history. Nobody in my family who survived the war had numbers tattooed on their arm. Nobody in my family, as far as I was told, died in a labor or death camp. The stories were always about young men who bravely fought and died in the Red Army, and about women, children, and the elderly who, after being evacuated from their homes, came back to rubble and the reality of never seeing their loved ones again. What happened to the people who were not in the army and did not evacuate? I was vaguely told that they had died during the course of the war, with dark hints that Nazi collaborators among their neighbors had helped make that happen. The Nazis were not understood by postwar generations of Soviets to be motivated by hatred of Jews; they were understood to be anti-Soviet and specifically anti-Russian. The vocabulary of Holocaust and genocide to describe what happened to Jews specifically would come later for me, with exposure to Western media and ideas.

When I talked with American Jews whose parents or grandparents had survived the Holocaust, or with survivors themselves, what they described was similar, yet different. They would call it a genocide. They would describe Jews specifically being targeted for destruction. They would talk about camps and the strategies that the Jews in them used to get an extra ration of food to survive. They would tell the stories of their loved ones who died in horrific ways in these labor and death camps. Until I studied it in an academic environment, I did not understand that my family members perished in the same Holocaust as theirs. The Soviet Jews in my family who survived the Holocaust never once referred to themselves as Holocaust survivors—when we were exposed to Western films about this in the ’90s, my family would say the Holocaust was something that the Jews who went through the camps survived.

How could our understandings be so different? An estimated 2 million of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Soviet Jews. I was able to reconcile the two narratives only when I learned of what Western scholars refer to as the Holocaust by bullets—the version of the Holocaust that played out in the Soviet Union (which includes present-day Ukraine), where mass shootings, not death camps, were the predominant means of extermination. I also studied how the Soviet Union memorialized the war in the years and decades after—downplaying in formal education and the media the reasons Jews had been murdered. The truth was not just that Jews happened to have been killed by Nazis and Jew-hating collaborators; what they experienced was a deliberate and state-sponsored form of genocide. The 33,771 human beings who were massacred over two days at a ravine outside Kyiv were not simply “victims of fascism,” as the Soviet government taught its people to think of civilians who died during the war; they were murdered because they were Jews, in the same campaign of extermination that spanned the entire continent. Though years would pass before it became doctrine, the Soviet policy of obscuring the fact that the Nazis were targeting Jews began before the war was even over.

*snip*

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