PERSPECTIVES: Of history, and news, and image (04/06/97)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Of history, and news, and image

World War II, it seems, is not history - it's news. More than 50 years after the fighting ended, people are still trying to come to terms with that horrible conflict.

Most recently, President Arnold Koller of Switzerland exhorted his countrymen to "publicly admit self-criticism and admit the dark sides of that difficult period." He was referring, of course, to Switzerland's ambiguous role as banker to the Nazis and the question of dormant accounts of Holocaust victims.

As Switzerland reluctantly comes to terms with these issues, you have to admire the wisdom and decency of Ukraine's President Leonid Kravchuk. In October 1991, less than two months after Ukraine declared independence, he conducted a solemn commemoration at Babyn Yar, the infamous gorge where 200,000 Kyivans, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.

President Kravchuk used that occasion to apologize to the Jewish people "against which so many injustices occurred in our [Ukrainian] history." The weeklong ceremonies showed Ukraine's maturity as a nation, in sharp contrast to the Soviets who had been silent about Babyn Yar for half a century. Now, that aspect of World War II is no longer news, it's history.

What is newsworthy is Ukraine's role in World War II in general. For half a century, censorship in the Soviet Union and Cold War sensitivities in the West made it impossible for a thorough, objective assessment of Ukraine's role in World War II. Everyone with an axe to grind - from Soviet propagandists to Western Cold Warriors - caricatured Ukraine's role, or more often ignored it altogether. But, the truth is, Ukraine played an absolutely central role in the war and, with the exception of European Jewry, its people suffered more than any other nation.

To Adolph Hitler, Jews and Ukrainians were key to his vision for the German nation. "Mein Kampf" states his objectives clearly: first, unite the German people who were scattered throughout a half dozen countries; second, eliminate all Jews from Germany; and third, colonize Ukraine to create "Lebensraum" (living space) for the growing German population. It all unfolded according to plan and very nearly succeeded.

Hitler first absorbed Austria in March 1938, then Czecho-Slovakia's Sudetenland a year later. In August of 1939, he and Joseph Stalin cut a deal dividing Europe between them. A month later, World War II began in earnest when Hitler invaded Poland from the West and Stalin invaded western Ukraine, Bessarabia and the Baltic states from the East.

For western Ukrainians - hitherto part of Poland - this was bitter medicine. Only six years earlier Stalin had murdered more than 7 million of their countrymen in the Great Famine. Now the two greatest despots in history shared a common border. This unstable situation could not last. The German nation was largely united; many Jews had already fled Germany and the machinery for the Holocaust was being assembled. The last piece of the puzzle was Lebensraum - the conquest of Ukraine and Russia.

Hitler invaded Ukraine on June 22, 1941. He met little resistance. The population and the Red Army, demoralized by Stalin's terror, had no interest in defending the regime that was massacring millions. Things changed. Ukrainians discovered that the Nazis were just as evil as the Communists. According to Hitler's right-hand man, Herman Goering, "the best thing would be to kill all men in Ukraine over the age of 15."

As for the man Hitler appointed Reichskommissar of Ukraine, Erich Koch, he was the quintessential Nazi. His job, he said, was "to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration for the feeling or property of Ukrainians." They were Untermenschen (subhuman), "a colonial people that, like the Negroes, should be handled with a whip."

Before Koch was done, more than 2 million young men and women were sent to Germany to work as slaves, usually in the most brutal of conditions. Those who remained continued to work the collective farms - which Hitler refused to dismantle - providing grain for a hungry Germany.

Tragically, the worst elements of Ukrainian society were recruited to help in the extermination of Ukrainian Jews (crimes for which President Kravchuk apologized on behalf of Ukraine.) On the other hand, the best elements of society, led by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, risked their lives to shelter Jews. Still others reached for their guns. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men (and women) fled for the forests to join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army to wage guerrilla war against the Nazis and later against the Soviets. Of course, millions of Ukrainians - 4.5 million in all - served in the Red Army.

The war took a terrible toll. The first German units entered Ukrainian soil in June 1941. As the Red Army retreated, it conducted a scorched-earth policy throughout Ukraine. When the Nazis retreated three years later, they did the same. In all, 7 million Ukrainians died in World War II; 600,000 of them were Jews; 5 million were civilians. More than 2 million citizens were sent to Germany as slaves; 28,000 villages were destroyed, as were 700 cities and towns.

The journalist Edgar Snow, who toured Ukraine in 1945, wrote that "the second world war ... has, in all truth and in many costly ways, been first of all a Ukrainian war ... no single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industries, its farmlands and its humanity."

As Ukrainians restructure their society, economy and political system, they have a great deal to address - some of it unsavory, even shameful. Still, having confronted with remorse and sorrow "the dark side of that difficult period" (World War II), the nation can also look back with pride on the way it survived and ultimately prevailed in an impossible situation - caught between Hitler and Stalin. The full story has yet to be told. In the years to come, historians and artists will inevitably turn to Ukraine's complex and fascinating past to craft a new image for an independent people. Ukraine and World War II is a worthy topic for further study.

We participate here when young people ask their grandparents to record their memories of the war and the immediate years thereafter. Those in high school or college writing a term paper on the war might want to reach for Alexander Dallin's "German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945." Still others might want to make a donation to the "Ukraine in World War II" film project at the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center, 620 Spadina Ave., Toronto, Ontario M5S 2H4.

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