Six small white angels standing in a row, shivering in the crisp early evening wind, grasping glass candle holders in memory of the hundreds of children once shot on the spot where they now stood.  In their midst, a young boy holds up an impressive painting he created with his grandfather of a mother and child in a fetal position. The row of white robed children is framed by two teenagers displaying posters they made about the once vibrant Jewish community life in Ostrozhets.

“Since I became mayor, I have waited for 17 years for this moment,” said Oleh Parhomei, Mayor of Ostrozhets, to the project partners of “Protecting Memory:  Preserving and Memorializing the Holocaust Mass Graves in Eastern Europe.” Hundreds of townspeople young and old congregated at the foot of the hillside gravesite, waiting patiently for hours for the delegation of dignitaries and visitors to arrive and dedicate the Holocaust memorial site, where approximately 800 people were shot and murdered.  “We knew it was not right to leave this mass grave untended but what could we do?  We were waiting for someone to come and create a proper burial site.  What took you so long?”

In fact, there is no easy answer to this question.   In the reams of books, lectures and exhibitions that have been created about the Holocaust, indeed, relatively little has been said or written about the horrific mass shootings by Nazi killing squads of Jews throughout much of Eastern Europe.  The mayor is right to ask, why?  What has kept us from visiting these sites, protecting the gravesites without disturbing the remains (Jewish ritual does not allow for reburial), and erecting memorial stones to honor those whose lives were so cruelly extinguished because they were Jewish?

The western Ukraine, formerly eastern Poland, was part of the region where the systematic and exterminatory murder of Jews by German occupiers, with help from local auxiliary forces, began.  Following two years of harsh Soviet occupation, German forces marched in June 1941 into this heavily Jewish populated area, accompanied by Nazi mobile killing squads sent to murder alleged regime opponents, chiefly Jews, Roma, Communists, and Soviet prisoners of war. 

Anti-Jewish regulations were enacted immediately.  Jews were banned from their jobs, forced to give up property, moved into ghettos and put to forced labor.  Many died under the harsh conditions.  Random killings by the Nazi occupiers to terrorize the Jewish community began almost immediately.  Some Jews were deported to nearby death camps such as Belzec.  In the course of the following three years, entire Jewish communities were murdered successively, shot chiefly at shallow mass grave sites on the edges of villages and towns, in fields, ravines and in forests, their bodies hastily covered with layers of dirt.  Historians estimate that from 1941 to 1944, Nazi mobile killing squads, supported by local police units, murdered up to one and half million Jews in the area of today’s Ukraine.

Today in Ukraine, there are far more than a thousand such mass grave sites, where hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of victims suffered agonizing deaths.  The majority of these sites are unmarked, largely forgotten and unrecognizable as mass killing sites.   Information about the existence of the sites is scanty and scattered, with no central register indicating where such sites are located.  Forced resettlements, random shootings and attempted escapes by Jews to evade Nazi forces means that information about victims gleaned from town registers is faulty and incomplete.  The Soviet WWII narrative emphasized common national heritage, purposefully excluding information and education about the Holocaust.  The few existing memorial markers erected in the Soviet time generally contain no specific reference to Jews or the Holocaust. There was limited archival access in the former Soviet Union and access remains difficult. 

For the past decade, Father Patrick Desbois and his Paris-based organization Yahad-In Unum have been racing against time to compile as much information as possible about each site.  They interview local witnesses and conduct archival research, creating a central data bank and rescuing long-repressed memories of the horrific persecution and murder of the local Jewish communities. 

The issue of grave protection, however, remained unaddressed, until AJC brought together a coalition of organizations in 2010 to launch the “Protecting Memory” project.  With funding from the German Foreign Ministry, the coalition members (AJC, Yahad-In Unum, Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Conference of European Rabbis, and the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe) created a pilot project to protect and memorialize five Holocaust mass grave sites – Rava-Ruska, Kysylyn, Ostrozhets, Prokhid, Bakhiv - in the region of Galicia and Volhynia in western Ukraine.

The initial site inspections were discouraging.  The sites were large and often difficult to reach.  All were in an advanced stage of neglect.  Some were used as sand quarries and even garbage dumps.  There were signs of grave digging, with sites ravaged as well by wild animals and climatic conditions.  As the dimensions of the project seemed larger than anything similar previously undertaken, project coordinators were faced with largely unanswered questions about techniques for surveying, scanning, and construction at the sites so that human remains would be left undisturbed.  Issues of property ownership and building construction permission also needed to be addressed.  

Above all, the question of protection for the sites loomed large.  How is it possible to protect effectively a memorial site in the middle of a forest, a remote field or on the edge of a town?  What barriers would keep visitors from walking on the site and using it as a recreation area?  How would it be possible to encourage town authorities to maintain the site?   How can vandalism be prevented? 

There were a number of architectural designs that included physical and/or optical barriers to the sites.  However, the notion of creating obstacles to the site seemed counterintuitive to the goal of rescuing the memories of those buried there.  Barriers can even have a reverse effect, radiating a value that in fact encourages, instead of discourages, further investigation.

After months of deliberation, it became clear that physical protection of the sites alone provides little guarantee of their inviolability. The support of local residents, engendering a sense of local ownership of the sites, seemed a far more important factor for the protection of the sites than concrete bulwarks and metal fences. 

The best way to accomplish this goal, the project partners agreed, was to design an accompanying educational program.  The Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies launched a year of Holocaust education training for teachers from all five sites where memorials were being constructed.  They took the teachers to the sites themselves as well as to Kiev to give them additional exposure to historical discourse.  The training created a regional network of teachers interested in the Holocaust and former Jewish life in Ukraine, strengthening individual teachers’ resolve to address the subject because of the support of the larger network in which they were involved.  A curricula was developed that included testimony from survivors in the five cities.  The year following training, the teachers created working groups with students, who began investigating local Jewish history and the Holocaust in their towns.    

Something extraordinary then happened:  Teachers and pupils began documenting former Jewish life in their regions, researching the stories of families and of their communities that were eradicated in the Holocaust.   The work was documented in posters, essays, and art projects.  The research work even took one teacher as far afield as Israel, to interview surviving family members.  In Rava-Ruska, pupils participated in an essay contest, with the winning contribution printed in the local newspaper. Teachers and students prepared a large-scale outdoor exhibition about the town’s former Jewish community that is now on permanent display in the town’s central park, on the edge of the old Jewish cemetery.

From an outside perspective, we can only begin to imagine how much civil courage it took to engage in such research, particularly as it challenges many of the existing historical narratives.   Virtually overnight, communities in eastern Poland and Ukraine lost a third or more of their neighbors.   Both memories of individuals as well as the collective memory of the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews were largely repressed by the Soviet government, which banned discussion about the Holocaust.  Neighbors moved into Jewish homes and seized Jewish property without public acknowledgement of the murder of the former inhabitants.  The highly sensitive issue of collaboration with Nazi occupation forces regarding the genocide of the Jews was politically taboo.  Equally frozen was discussion of resistance against the Nazis, including secret assistance to Jewish neighbors.  A growing tendency since the Orange Revolution to lend legitimacy to Stephen Bandera and fascist Ukrainian nationalist units – including the unsuccessful attempt to rename the Lviv airport in his name - is another facet of the complexity of confronting WWII history today in Ukraine.

After more than seventy years of virtual silence about the mass killings, to what degree is it possible to raise awareness and conduct discussions of the nearly unimaginable events that took place during the last century? To what degree is Ukrainian democracy possible today without revising still-prevalent Soviet historical narratives?  Is it possible to engender engagement for Ukrainian Jewish history in a region whose Jewish community was so decimated that it no longer exists?

These were questions facing the members of the “Protecting Memory” coalition who attended the dedication ceremonies from June 28 to 30 at the five sites of the newly created Holocaust mass grave memorials.   At the opening event on June 28th in Lviv, dignitaries from France, Germany, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the U.S. made clear that the creation of these memorials link Ukrainian history, Ukrainian Jewish history and Ukraine’s current struggle for democracy, helping Ukrainians understand their history as they seek to shape their future.   

Father Patrick Desbois also noted the importance of ensuring that mass graves are protected and memorialized, pointing out that the project serves a model against the oblivion of crimes such as the massacres in Syria and Iraq today.

The atmosphere of the evening was hushed and expectant about the impact of the project.  Project partners emphasized repeatedly the value of the project in promoting more understanding for Holocaust education in Ukraine.  AJC Director of International Jewish Affairs Andrew Baker noted as well that greater local knowledge about the Holocaust and Jewish history will provide the best physical protection for the memorial sites. 

Indeed, the following two days of memorial dedications were deeply moving, with the visiting international delegation encountering an outpouring of interest and hospitality on the part of local residents to an unexpected degree.  At all sites, hundreds of local residents took part in the ceremonies, from young to old, often waiting hours for the delegation to arrive.  Each memorial ceremony was locally organized, with town officials acting as moderators for the event.  Speakers included local and regional officials, clergy, and teachers and pupils who were involved with the “Protecting Memory” project. 

The openness, sincerity and profound interest of local residents in learning more about the Jewish past of their towns left a deep and lasting impression on the visiting delegation, as did the eagerness of the teachers to share their newly gained knowledge of Ukrainian Jewish history with both the visitors and with their neighbors and friends.   In addition to the memorial ceremonies, where time permitted, teachers met with the visitors separately to explain their work in more detail and took the visitors through their towns, describing surviving traces of Jewish history.  Some of the teachers engaged in co-planning the curricula also travelled with the delegation to all five sites, stressing the overriding importance of a regional network of Holocaust memorials. 

What touched visitors, among many other elements of the dedication events, was the enthusiasm and engagement of young pupils learning about the nearly forgotten Jewish history and culture in their cities.  In Prokhid, a ninth-grade student asked, “How can we talk about the Jews separately when they were our neighbors?”  In Kysylyn, the master of ceremonies for the hour-long event were a ten-year-old and an eleven-year-old, dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing, who said afterwards that they were proud they could make a contribution.  In Rava-Ruska, the fifteen-year-old winner of the essay competition, Vlada Kovalchuk, said that “when opening the books, I was deeply impressed by the rich history of the Jewish people.  Every page of the book felt like living together with these people.  The pages were full of happy and tragic moments…I had plenty of different emotions in my head.  I felt hatred towards calloused and heartless executioners and sympathy towards innocent people who became the prisoners of fate, and a wish to help them.  That is why I started to participate actively in this project.”

Pupils in Ostrozhets underlined the importance of overcoming hatred, on which nothing positive can be built. Elina Fisyuk and Svitlana Apanovych made remarkably clear-sighted remarks about the role of history in helping build democracy:  “We clearly understand that in any case, we should not avoid painful and controversial questions of our historical past.  At the same time, we also realize that only open discussion about these issues will help us to overcome our painful pages of the past for the sake of our common future.”

In Prokhid, an open dispute broke out over Anatoly Podolsky’s comments about the necessity to confront widespread Ukrainian collaboration.  The memorial stones at each site identify the murderers as Nazi occupiers with help from local subordinate authorities.  A retired teacher shouted that it was a lie that in his town, the Ukrainians helped the Nazis murder Jews, pointing out that his grandfather endangered his life to help save Jewish neighbors.  Indeed, Ukrainians are the fourth largest number of righteous gentiles listed in Yad Vashem, despite the extremely harsh punishment that awaited them if they were found to have been helping Jews.  Nonetheless, the issue of collaboration is understandably sensitive and little researched. There are many facets to a better understanding of the historical truth; what is important is that through the “Protecting Memory” project, the discussion could begin.

What developed during the dedication of the memorial sites was a strong sense of emerging civil society, of new generations who are investigating and demanding different approaches to dealing with history and Ukraine’s struggle for democracy.  At each site, local officials and clergy pledged to honor the sanctity of the sites and take responsibility for maintaining them.

On the way back to the buses, at each location, we received the same questions:  When are you returning?  Can we have an annual ceremony to honor the dead and bring us together again to discuss issues of the present and future?  As Joe Shik, the representative for the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, remarked in conclusion: “We have succeeded in shifting a memory of pain and sorrow to the prospect of a better future together.”

There is enormous work to be done to ensure the sustainability of the work of “Protecting Memory.”  The project serves as a model for paths to shift historical perception and reclaim Jewish history in Ukraine.  However, it also does much more.  The strong sense of local ownership, the cooperation with international partners, the emergence of civil leadership and the engagement of younger generations are hopeful signs of Ukrainian determination to take the necessary steps on the path to democracy and a common European future. 

 

This article originally appeared in Berlin Policy Journal.

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