An exhibition dedicated to the Auschwitz liberation 70th anniversary opened in the Kyiv Memorial Museum of World War II in Kyiv on Jan. 26. The exhibition that presents documents and items that illustrate the Ukrainians’ role in the history of the Nazi death camp arrived at the time when Russian government has been denying the role of Ukrainian soldiers in the camp’s liberation.
The subject of dispute has been the ethnical composition of the First Ukrainian Front, the formation of the Red Army that freed the Auschwitz prisoners on Jan. 27, 1945. The argument sparked on Jan. 21, a week before the liberation anniversary celebrations, when Poland Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said on the Polish Radio that Auschwitz was freed by Ukrainians. Schetyna was responding to the criticism about not inviting Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to the celebration of the liberation anniversary.
Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry reacted at once, saying that the formation in dispute, the First Ukrainian Front, had been named so not by ethnicity, but for the region of action. In his statement on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko addressed the issue.
“In the battle for the liberation of Auschwitz and the surrounding area 231 Soviet soldiers were killed, of whom one in five was Ukrainian,” Poroshenko said in his commentary. Russia has been trying to diminish Ukraine’s role in the WWII since 2010, when Russian President Vladimir Putin said on TV that Russia “would have won the war even without Ukraine.”
But on Jan. 27, the Auschwitz liberation day, Russian Ministry of Defense published a declassified document dated by 1945, which can be viewed as a compromise in the ethnicity argument. The document lists ethnicities of the First Ukrainian Front. According to it, the personnel of the front’s 60th Army was represented by people of 39 nationalities, among whom there were 42 percent Ukrainians, and 47 percent Russians.
The same document claims that the Auschwitz gate was opened by the soldiers of Battalion of Poltava, which was part of 100th Lviv Division. Soldiers of the 107th Kremenetsky Division, formed in Russian city of Tambov, advanced on the camp under commandment of Poltava-born Maj. Vasyl Petrenko. Eventually Chernigov Maj. Anatoliy Kovalevsky led the 152th tank brigade to the camp.
Poroshenko expressed the intention to establish a constant Ukrainian exposition in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which already includes similar exhibitions by 41 countries. The fact that there isn’t a Ukrainian exposition in the museum can be credited to the “anti-Ukrainian policy of (former President Viktor) Yanukovych,” according to the History Institute of Ukraine fellow Tetiana Pastushenko, who said so in an interview to Radio Liberty Ukraine.
As the international argument disputes the credit for Auschwitz liberation, the anniversary exhibition “Auschwitz Concentration Camp – Ukrainian Dimension” that opened on Jan. 26 in the Kyiv-based National Memorial Museum of WWII presents unique exhibits related to the death camp, its prisoners, and their liberation.
Preparing the exhibition took four years of work. The museum has sent out more than a thousand application forms to the relatives of probable Ukrainian Auschwitz prisoners to collect and review their life stories. Only around 100 of the inquiries were responded. Prisoners` families provided the museum with photos, index numbers, documents, and personal belongings of their once incarcerated relatives.
To find the families, the museum used the listings of Ukrainians who had received compensations as victims of Nazism, contributed by the International Foundation “Mutual Understanding and Tolerance.”
Among the exhibits there are unique documentary drawings of Auschwitz, made by a Ukrainian Jew soldier and donated to the museum especially for the exhibition.
“It was a Jew soldier Zinovy Tolkachev from Kyiv who recorded the horrors of Auschwitz in his drawings. He entered the gate of the ‘death factory’ along with the First Ukrainian Front, which liberated the concentration camp. These works show the Ukrainian dimension of Auschwitz,” said Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance that partnered with the WWII Museum to work on the exhibition.
Kyiv Post staff writer Kostiantyn Yanchenko can be reached at [email protected].
