Historian Anatoly Podolsky: The Stalinist dictatorship is also accountable for the Holocaust orchestrated by the Nazis.

The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is observed annually on January 27, the day the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz were liberated in the Polish city of Oświęcim in 1945. On this day, millions of Jews and other victims of Nazi terror are honored to preserve the memory of the tragedy and to prevent such horrors from recurring in the future. Historian Anatoly Podolsky spoke to RBC-Ukraine about the tragedy of the Holocaust, Soviet censorship, and the modern war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.

During World War II, the Nazis, along with their allies and collaborators, carried out mass shootings and inhumane murders of Jews in many locations across occupied Eastern Europe. Approximately 6 million Jews perished in ghettos, labor camps, concentration camps, and during mass executions on-site.

The history of the Holocaust tragedy was suppressed in the USSR: anti-Semitism prevailed, causing Jews to change their surnames, abandon their culture and language, and fear discussing their origins.

The study of the Holocaust in Ukraine began only after independence was gained. Over the years of research, it has been revealed that during the Nazi occupation in World War II, within the modern borders of Ukraine – from Lviv to Luhansk, from Chernihiv to Simferopol – about 1.5 million Jewish men, women, and children were killed.

During the Holocaust, people were murdered solely for being born Jewish, for writing from right to left, and for wearing a hat in places where Christians removed theirs, says historian and director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies Anatoly Podolsky.

In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, he recalled the family history of tragedy at Babyn Yar, where his relatives perished, and discussed the new context that Nazi crimes acquire during the current war between Ukraine and the Russian occupiers.

– Anatoly, how well is the history of the Holocaust researched in terms of numbers? Are there significant discrepancies in estimates of how many Jews were killed by the Nazi regime?

– The Holocaust, like the Holodomor, Stalin's crimes, and the crimes of the communist and Nazi regimes against Ukraine and the European community, including the Jewish community – these crimes have truly begun to be studied in Ukraine only after our country became sovereign and independent. The fate of Ukrainian Jews is part of Ukraine's history. It cannot be viewed in isolation.

To understand the horror that occurred, we study the fates of prisoners of war, forced laborers, and people who were under occupation, including Ukrainians, Jews, and representatives of other nationalities. This is a painful history of Ukraine in the last century, a story of a people at that time without a state. We were a stateless people fighting under both the Soviet dictatorship and the Nazi regime. Therefore, this is part of Ukraine's history during World War II.

The open study of this history began in Ukrainian historiography after 1991. During this period, we have made progress: there are regional studies about memorial sites and mass burial sites, research on the Righteous Among the Nations, and individual stories.

Dissertation research is being written, collections of documents are being published, and there are institutions and professional journals that focus on this topic as part of Ukraine's history, which is not foreign to us. Ukrainian Jews, like other people, are also part of our culture. These people lived here for thousands of years, and many generations are buried in the cemeteries.

Regarding the numbers – so many people were killed during the Holocaust, Holodomor, and in the Gulag. So many people were killed by dictatorial regimes, and unfortunately, we cannot restore the names of all of them.

As a result of more than 30 years of research in Ukrainian and foreign historiography, we can cautiously say that approximately one and a half million Jewish women, children, and men perished during the years of Nazi occupation of Ukraine during World War II – the occupation from 1941-1944 in the modern borders of Ukraine: from Lviv to Luhansk, from Chernihiv to Simferopol.

Jewish communities were destroyed, and people were killed not for resisting the regime or for differing political views. People were killed solely for being born Jews. Only for writing from right to left and for wearing a hat where Christians removed theirs. This was the horrific anti-Semitic policy of the Third Reich, which became state policy.

In Nazi Germany and then in the countries it occupied, those who persecuted Jews received dividends and support. Meanwhile, those who saved Jews faced persecution and extermination by the Nazi dictatorship.

– Which Jewish communities in Ukraine suffered the most?

– The largest Jewish communities and populations were in Lviv, Odesa, the then Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. Most of these communities were annihilated. Babyn Yar is also a symbolic name for sites of executions throughout the country.

Today, researchers say that about 2,000 mass burial sites of Ukrainian Jews killed during the Nazi occupation are known. This means that mass murder sites of Jews, "Babyn Yars," exist all over Ukraine. Jews from Western Ukraine were deported to death camps established by the German occupiers in Poland. Many perished there, which is why we are currently discussing such a high number.

Due to the murders of Jews by the Nazis across Ukraine, many towns were left without Jewish communities. Because in all communities, when the Wehrmacht and SS arrived in Ukraine, people who remained there were killed.

However, thanks to Ukrainians who saved Jews, their neighbors and fellow citizens survived during the Nazi occupation – thanks to the Righteous Among the Nations. They survived because of non-Jews living in Ukraine – Ukrainians, Poles, and others who risked their own lives to save them.

Jews managed to survive thanks to the Righteous Among the Nations, who saved them at the risk of their own lives, –

In Eastern Galicia, in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and in Drohobych, there were large Jewish communities. Some were killed on-site in ghettos, while others were deported to death camps in Bełżec and Sobibor. Approximately 400,000 Jews from Eastern Galicia perished. In Volhynia – in Lutsk, Rivne, and all the towns in the region, about 120,000 people were killed. Plus, in large cities.

In general, it is difficult for a person to comprehend such enormous numbers. It is not difficult for us in Ukraine because we have been in the midst of a war for the eleventh year, the third year of full-scale conflict, during which the cursed Russian enemy is destroying Ukrainian citizens simply for being Ukrainian. And we know what that feels like. We now see the same hatred from the Russian political regime towards Ukrainian statehood and culture as the Nazis had towards the Jewish ethnic community.

People are structured in such a way that they better feel tragedies not through numbers, but through personal stories. Unfortunately, we rarely visit the graves of our loved ones in cemeteries, let alone those of people we never knew. And when we hear huge numbers, we want to hide from it. But when we hear a specific story of people and families, then empathy becomes deeper, and personal stories are perceived more emotionally and closely.

– You once mentioned historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, who said that after World War II, the face of Lviv changed because the Nazis killed the local Jews.

– Yes, both I and Yaroslav, along with other historians, have written about this. The Polish and Jewish communities lived alongside the Ukrainian community for centuries, but Hitler and Stalin "resolved" this issue. Poles were deported, Jews were deported, and Ukrainians were also affected. From 1939, when the "Soviets" occupied Eastern Galicia, from 1939 to 1941, all communities faced repression from the Soviet regime.

And from 1941, after the killings and deportations to death camps of the Jews of Galicia, they were virtually non-existent in this region. The NKVD then brutally persecuted Ukrainian insurgents in these lands for another 10 years after the war. After that, these territories were populated by so-called "Soviet people."

Thus, the face of Galicia, including Lviv, changed after World War II. The Jewish face of Galicia virtually disappeared. Today, the challenge is to preserve the cultural and material heritage, literature, and cultural objects as part of our own history, which the Jewish community contributed to significantly. In particular, if we talk about this region, the Yiddish language coexisted alongside Ukrainian and Polish. It was the language in which poems were written, love was confessed, and many people spoke.

Soviet prisoners of war forced to bury a mass grave after the mass execution at Babyn Yar, October 1, 1941