opinion
Jews and Non-Jews Share a Bloody
History in Ukraine. But There Are
Reasons for Hope
BY SARA J. BLOOMFIELD
BojanMirkovic / DigitalVision Vectors
T he Russian invasion of Ukraine, justified
by Vladimir Putin as necessary to
“denazify” the country and stop “genocide,”
outraged me for its blatant assault on a
people, and on truth. But as I thought about
his previous misuses of history, I should not
have been so surprised.

In 2019, marking the 80th anniversary of
the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Putin sought to down-
play the significance of this agreement in
starting World War II and its secret protocols
that divided Poland between Hitler and Stalin
— two other masters at rewriting history.

This invasion also brought back the over-
whelming sense I had from various visits to
Ukraine, best summarized in a familiar adage
originally about the Balkans, that Ukraine
has had more history than it can consume.

As I traveled to big cities and small towns,
aspects of its many layers of complicated
history were on view everywhere.

In Kiev, I was greeted each morning out-
side my hotel by an enormous statue of
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the revered Cossack
leader who commanded a 17th-century
uprising to promote Ukrainian independence from
Poland. He was also a vicious antisemite respon-
sible for the killing of at least 40,000 Jews. I was
appalled that the statue existed and wished that
at the very least it might be accompanied by
information about the innocent victims of this
Ukrainian nationalist. Today, I find myself reflect-
ing on this symbol of an independent Ukraine that
also symbolizes its complex past.

As I would drive around the country, I would
encounter common themes. You had the impres-
sion that one could stop in almost any town or
village and ask, “Where were the Jews buried?”
Someone would take you to a forest or a piece of
land near a farmer’s field to see the mass grave.

Over one and a half million Jewish men, women
and children were murdered in Ukraine by the
Nazis and their local collaborators. Unlike other
European Jews, they were not deported to distant
killing centers like Auschwitz but shot, one by one,
in the places they had lived for centuries.

We now know so much more about “the Holocaust
by bullets” because, ironically, of the fall of the
Soviet Union and the opening of massive archives
as well as the important work of Fr. Patrick Desbois,
who identified many of the mass graves and inter-
Ukraine has suffered from extraordinary external
threats such as German Nazism and Soviet
Communism and serious internal problems like
extreme nationalism and antisemitism. But in recent
decades it has begun to face its past, confront
important truths and create a pluralistic democracy.

“Hope” hardly feels like the right word for this
moment. But given a chance, the Ukrainian people
have given us reason to believe that in the long
term, freedom and dignity might prevail.

viewed locals who saw these horrible crimes. On
one visit to Ukraine Fr. Desbois and I went to a
wooded area, now a mass grave, where we met
an elderly woman who shared her memories as a
young girl witnessing the killing of her neighbors.

Another stark recollection is walking around
towns and seeing on door after door an indenta-
tion that once held a mezuzah — the small case
that traditionally marks the entrance to Jewish
homes. The Jews were long gone, but the unin-
tended marker of where a people had once lived
remained, speaking to us across the decades.

I will also never forget that in practically every
town and village one would see the same memo-
rial: an angel, her head lowered, her face drenched
in sorrow, holding a stalk of wheat in one arm
and a dead baby in the other. No explanations
required. One only needs the most superficial
sense of Ukraine’s history to know the statue
mourns Stalin’s deliberate starvation of at least
3.5 million Ukrainians, both Christians and Jews,
in 1932-33, now known as the Holodomor.

In summer 2014 I visited in the aftermath of
Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the Dignity
Revolution that preceded it. The revolution had
overthrown Ukraine’s Russian-backed president,
Viktor Yanukovych. Makeshift memorials and
anti-Russian sentiments were everywhere. I met
government officials, public intellectuals, directors
of archives, Holocaust scholars, Jewish commu-
nity leaders and American diplomats. All of them
saw this as a moment to write a new chapter in
Ukrainian history. One described to me a burned-
out bus with this declaration written in the ash: “One
day spent fighting here is a life worth living.” The
people I met were filled with similar defiance and
resilience, although sometimes tinged by under-
standable anxiety or cynicism. But, overwhelmingly,
the word I kept hearing everywhere was “hope.”
Ukraine has suffered from extraordinary exter-
nal threats such as German Nazism and Soviet
Communism and serious internal problems like
extreme nationalism and antisemitism. But in
recent decades it has begun to face its past,
confront important truths and create a pluralistic
democracy. “Hope” hardly feels like the right word
for this moment. But given a chance, the Ukrainian
people have given us reason to believe that in the
long term, freedom and dignity might prevail. JE
Sara J. Bloomfield is the director of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 23