Due libri sulla <i>Shoah</i> in Ucraina

Abstract

Two Books about the Shoah in Ukraine

This review article is dedicated to two recent books on the Shoah in Ukraine: Omer Bartov’s Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2007 and Patrick Desbois, Porteur de mémoires. Sur le traces de la Shoah par balles, Lafon, Neuilly-sur-Seine 2007. The fi rst, an illustrated travelogue of Bartov’s two research trips in Western Ukraine, sketches a history of the genocide of Galician Jews based on victims’ sources rather than the ones produced by perpetrators, while discussing the sad state of the few remaining Jewish monuments in today’s Western Ukraine. The second retraces Fr. Desbois’ campaign to interview the witnesses of the Shoah in Ukraine and to locate the mass graves of murdered Jews thanks to a combination of archival, “archeological” and forensic research. The article discusses the two authors’ different motivations and especially their diverging takes on Ukrainian anti-Semitism and memory of the genocide of the Ukrainian Jews.