On Jan. 27, as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ukrainian leaders and civic activists also joined in the commemorations.
The memorial holiday, created in 2005 by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, commemorates the victims of Nazi Germany’s campaign of mass murder, which took the lives of over 6 million Jews and millions of others.
From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi forces murdered roughly 1.5 million people in Ukraine, according to the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine.
In commemoration of the Holocaust’s victims, numerous state officials joined what was effectively an online flashmob marking the day — a sign of greater public recognition of the Holocaust. But some politicians expressed unease with the lack of recognition for Ukraine’s own experience of genocide: the mass famine known as the Holodomor.
“Today, Ukraine together with all the civilized world honors the memory of the victims of the Holocaust — a horrible crime by the Nazis, which has become one of the biggest catastrophes in the history of humanity,” President Petro Poroshenko wrote on Facebook.
The painful memory of the Holocaust is “warning for us and for future generations about what a policy of intolerance and hatred can lead to.”
The statement was published alongside a photo of Poroshenko at the Yad Vashem memorial complex in Israel, which he visited on Jan. 21, during a trip to Jerusalem to sign a free trade agreement between the two countries.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who is Jewish, also issued a statement.
“Human life is the highest value,” he wrote. “No one has the power to control another’s fate. And those regimes that endowed themselves with such power, sooner or later, always met destruction.”
Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European integration, joined the online flashmob. Her office posted a photo of her holding a sign with the hashtag #WeRemember.
Lawmaker Refat Chubarov, a leader of the Muslim Crimean Tatar minority, published a similar photograph.
#WeRemember on #HolocaustMemorialDay pic.twitter.com/fGqE3iBDEM
— Boris Lozhkin (@lozhkin_boris) January 27, 2019
Boris Lozhkin, President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, shares a table of
statistics about the Holocaust in Ukraine and Europe over Twitter.
Despite the many high-profile figures marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ukraine’s relation to the tragedy is complicated.
The country’s capital is the site of one of the worst single massacres during the Holocaust. On Sept. 29 – 30, 1941, Nazi forces and local Ukrainian collaborators killed over 33,000 Jews at the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv. More than 100,000 people may have been killed at the site during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The Nazis also built the Syrets concentration camp in Kyiv’s western neighborhood of the same name, close to the ravine.
The roles of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi occupants and their involvement in massacres and other violence against Jews have remained a controversial issue in Ukraine to this day. Several Ukrainian nationalist figures who the Ukrainian government considers heroes have been implicated by historians in violence against Jews.
At the same time, Ukraine has also faced mass murder at the hands of a totalitarian state. Roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians lost their lives in the Holodomor, a man-made mass famine in 1932-33 that the Ukrainian government calls as a Soviet genocide against the Ukrainian people.
During his recent visit to Jerusalem, Poroshenko called upon the Israel parliament, the Knesset, to recognize the Holodomor as genocide.
The theme of the Holodomor permeated several statements by politicians and public figures.
Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the current frontrunner in Ukraine’s upcoming presidential election, said on Facebook that the Holocaust reminds people “what misfortune and catastrophe can strike humanity at, it seems, the peak of its development and progress.”
“We Ukrainians know this like no one else,” she added. “We, a nation that survived genocide, our own Holodomor, and the destruction of our people, our language, our culture, and our essence.”
Other statements were more politicized. Oleh Lyashko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and presidential candidate from the Radical Party, published a lengthy post that, beyond commemorating the Holocaust, also criticized the Israeli Knesset for failing to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide of Ukrainians 11 years after the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada recognized the Holocaust as a genocide of Jews.
“Do the Jewish lawmakers think that the Holocaust happened, but the Holodomor didn’t?” he wrote.
Lyashko also complained that Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and foreign minister have not raised the issue with Israel — a statement that contradicts Poroshenko’s description of his state visit to Jerusalem.
“There are many Jews among authoritative and influential people of our country,” he continued. “I call on them not to be silent and to constantly appeal to the Knesset to recognize the Holodomor as the genocide of Ukrainians. And this will demonstrate that Ukraine for (these Jewish Ukrainians) is a fatherland, not a place of residence and self-realization.”
Others were even less diplomatic. Yevhen Karas, leader of the radical nationalist group C14, expressed surprise that “Israel is not ashamed to ignore the Holodomor.”
“Today, many Ukrainians sympathize with Jews. Ukraine has done a lot for them,” he wrote.
Members of C14 have expressed neo-Nazi views and taken part in violence against Ukraine’s Roma minority, according to RFE/RL. However, Karas has repeatedly denied that he is a Nazi.
There were also widespread commemorations of the Holocaust across Ukraine — in cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro, Rivne, Chernivtsi, Uzhgorod, and Konotop, says Marla Raucher Osborn, the Lviv-based project lead of Rohatyn Jewish Heritage. The volunteer-driven organization works to preserve the Jewish heritage of Rohatyn, a city of nearly 8,000 people more than 500 kilometers east of Kyiv in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast.
Osborn and her husband took part in a roundtable discussion in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day hosted at the Honorary Consulate of Israel in Lviv. The event — which featured numerous historians, academics, diplomats, and others — focused on people in and around western Ukraine who helped Jews during World War II.
Commemorations of the Holocaust are “certainly more widespread since I first lived here in 2011 and there are many more locally initiated and student sponsored programs and events,” she told the Kyiv Post in a message.
Most recently, Osborn found out that Holos Opillya, Rohatyn’s local paper, plans to run a feature article focused on the Holocaust in the city.
“So you see, things are changing here, and for the better,” she says. “As I like to say these days, sharing the painful memories of other communities is a way towards healing divisions and building a strong multicultural and tolerant nation — which is today’s Ukraine.”
