FACES AND PLACES: Canadian Holocaust Exhibit: Be Forewarned! (09/06/98)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Canadian Holocaust Exhibit: Be Forewarned!

The recent statement of Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association Chairman John B. Gregorovich welcoming the proposed Canadian-made Holocaust exhibit may turn out to be overly cheery!

"Few Canadians," Mr. Gregorovich noted in his statement, "realize that Ukraine lost more of its population during the Nazi occupation than any other European nation. We believe that having a Canadian-made exhibit that is inclusive, detailing the experiences of the many millions of non-Jews who were murdered or suffered under the Nazi regime, will have a very useful educational impact, particularly since so much of what one gets in the popular press and media tends to be one-sided and incomplete."

Ukrainian Canadians need to be aware of two enormous barriers in their quest for an inclusive Holocaust exhibit.

The first obstacle is the prevailing view among many Jews that the "holocaust" encompasses an exclusively Jewish cataclysm and remains a defining moment in the emergence of a modern Jewish identity. This view is a relatively recent phenomenon. In his book "Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum," Edward T. Linenthal notes that during a 1961 symposium titled "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals" (sponsored by Commentary, a journal published by the American Jewish Committee) only two of the thirty-one participants "placed any stress upon the impact of the Holocaust in their lives."

A number of events, especially the Eichmann Trial and the Six-Day War, led to a major transformation. Writes Mr. Linenthal: "When President Carter announced plans to create the President's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978, he signaled that the Holocaust had moved not only from the periphery to the center of American Jewish consciousness, but to the center of national consciousness ... worthy of inclusion in the official canon that shaped American's sense of themselves."

A second major barrier is the notion among many, if not most Jews that Ukrainians were not the victims of Nazi atrocities, but its perpetrators. Never mind that Ukraine lost millions of military and civilian dead fighting in the Soviet army and in the Ukrainian partisan army during World War II. It's irrelevant that thousands of Ukrainians perished in Nazi concentration camps and labor battalions. So what if hundreds of Ukrainians risked their own and their families' lives to save Jews from the Nazi murder machine: Ukrainians "welcomed" the Germans. It is apparently in the interest of some Jewish leaders to focus attention on the relative handful of Ukrainian butchers who assisted the Germans in their annihilation of Jews. (Unfortunately, the crimes of a few Ukrainians is often extrapolated to include all Ukrainians.)

As soon as President Carter's commission was established, Jewish members pushed for a permanent memorial in Washington, D.C. and a definition of the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish horror. Jews were Holocaust victims, others were victims of Nazi terror; Jews were exterminated, others were murdered.

Both the Polish and Ukrainian communities protested. The director of UNIS, for example, wrote to the president that Ukrainians also "met Hitler's criteria for extermination ... [and were] numerically the second largest group to be destroyed in ... Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau." Ukrainians, he added, had organized the "earliest and most effective resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe." Responding to the pressure, President Carter issued Executive Order 12169 creating a planning council and defining the Holocaust as the "systematic and state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews and some five million other peoples by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II." This directive opened the door for the inclusion of non-Jewish members on the newly established United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Commission chairman and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel resigned in protest to the proposed inclusion of Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Croatians, who, he argued, "gave comfort to the Nazis in their persecution and annihilation of Jews." Michael Berenbaum, deputy director of the commission was especially disturbed over Ukrainian participation. In a letter to presidential advisor Edward Sanders, Mr. Berenbaum quoted from Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the Jews": "Ukrainians were involved in the fate of the Polish Jewry as perpetrators. The S.S. and the Police [sic] employed Ukrainian units in ghetto clearing operations, not only in the Galicia district, but also in such places as the Warsaw ghetto and the Lublin ghetto." Mr. Sanders warned that including Ukrainians on the council would be highly offensive to Jews.

In the end, those who pushed for inclusiveness prevailed, thanks in large measure to President Carter and to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who took a personal interest in the matter. The council eventually included, among others, two Poles, a Czech, a Dane, a Hungarian, a Greek, an Armenian, and Julian Kulas, well-known Ukrainian activist.

There was friction on the council from the very beginning. By 1981, Aloysius Mazewski, council member and president of the Polish American Congress, criticized the emerging plans for the museum as "highly prejudicial" since they did not include "three million Poles and four million other Christians who suffered the same...death from the Germans."

Julian Kulas also objected, arguing that the non-Jewish advocates on the council were there to "make sure that the atrocities committed against that particular community are...depicted in this Holocaust memorial." While acknowledging the uniqueness of the "Jewish problem," he insisted that "those people who [also] carry that ugly number on their arms from Aushwitz and other camps, cannot be a post scriptum in the museum."

Though there was a plan to include the story of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainian and others on the second floor, it wasn't completed.

Ukrainian Canadians should know that not all American Jews favored exclusion. Arthur Davis, community relations chairman for the Jewish Federation in Des Moines, believed it was wrong for Jews "to encircle the Holocaust, as if we can capture it is our own some wondrous thing will happen." If the boundaries of the Holocaust are widened, he argued, others "will feel that the museum is partly theirs." Perhaps Ukrainian Canadians can accomplish something we were not able to achieve in America. In any case, the Ukrainian American experience should be instructive.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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