The Destruction Of The Ukrainian Jewry During World War Ii

This study concentrates on the Holocaust in Ukraine and Romania. It discusses Jewish participation in the resistance and opposition, collaboration among local inhabitants, and the interrelations of Jewish and non-Jewish populations. It recognizes that extermination strategies varied from place to place and gives detailed attention to these differences.

The history of Ukraine during World War II.

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 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.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

"More than 2,000,000 Jews were killed by shooting during the Holocaust at several thousand mass killing sites across Europe. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) aims to raise awareness of this centrally important aspect of the Holocaust by bringing together organizations and individuals dealing with the subject. This publication is the first relatively comprehensive and up-to-date anthology on the topic that reflects both the research and the fieldwork on the killing sites."--Back cover.

The Lemberg Mosaic by Jakob Weiss brings to light the little-known story of the total and tragic destruction of Jewish Lemberg. In pre-war days, the city once known as Lwów was the third largest in Poland with the third largest Jewish population (after Warsaw and Lódz). While some call it the "Holocaust by Bullets," or the "Shoah of Jewish Galicia" or even the "Ukrainian Holocaust," what we now know for certain is that over one million Jews were systematically murdered during World War II in the eastern-most area of Poland, also known as Galicia, today's west Ukraine. Lemberg, dubbed the "Soul of Galicia," was a vibrant Jewish cultural center for hundreds of towns, villages, and "shtetls" in the surrounding region; south to the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary and Rumania, east to the Soviet Union, west as far as Kraków, and north to areas populated by the Lithuanian Jews. In the wake of Hitler's "final solution," all eastern Galicia was rendered Judenrein. The late Simon Wiesenthal, who had escaped from Lemberg's Janowska - a death and transit camp, now the mass grave of over 200,000 Jewish martyrs and in 1942 the re-routing point for another 500,000 sent to Belzec, the Nazi's infamous death factory - lamented that so little had been written about this important aspect of the Holocaust. He stated, "[t]here are only about a dozen accounts of the Janowska concentration camp," and concluded, "my heart bleeds when I read them, but I also feel a certain satisfaction, because after all, there are some lucky ones who survived." In fact, only 200 did, and only about 500 others survived the demise of Lemberg's Jewish community. Today, Lemberg is called L'viv and Janowska is a lonely patch of woods in Ukraine. The Lemberg Mosaic is the story of four families with deep roots and strong ties to Galicia. It details their struggle for survival - against all odds. It is one part history book, one part genealogy & forensic research, one part adventure story, and all true.