In 1941 many Ukrainian nationalists welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators. There they are in the archive footage, cheering the Panzers’ arrival. As Ukraine suffers another invasion, there was plenty of complexity and nuance to get through in Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero (Channel 4).
This was a succinct but detailed summary of Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews. It explained how genocide, overwhelmingly associated with the death camps in occupied Poland, first became a galloping reality in or near cities we now see referred to on the news as Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv.
The decision to target Ukrainian Jews was a brutally improvised policy in which first they killed men of military age, then moved on to the women as otherwise they’d have to feed them. Finally, with a load of orphaned children on their hands, they took 90 of them into the forest at Bila Tserkva. Ghostly modern footage of haunted pines implied that this was the place.
It’s clear why Soviet propagandists filmed the first war crimes trial, held as early as 1943 without any mention that the victims were Jewish. What remains extraordinary – and makes such stories possible to illustrate but almost impossible to watch – is the wealth of film and stills captured by the perpetrators. The beatings, the shootings, the lootings, the naked corpses packed like sardines into the ravine at Babyn Yar where nearly 34,000 were killed in two days: they got the lot on camera. “They’re on the right side of history,” said Wendy Lower, an American historian, as she parsed photographs of Jews with German rifles pointed at their necks, “and they’re going to document this.”
She was one of a jostling crowd of historians who far outnumbered the two elderly witnesses. Bella Chernovets remembered the cattle car in which she fled east being shot at by a German plane. Janine Webber heard the Gestapo on the staircase, and later saw her little brother buried alive. Soon such voices will fall silent, and this history – bigger and knottier than could be fully encapsulated here – will have to be told by other means.
That retelling is necessary, and truth contested, was hinted at by Natalya Lazar of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “As humans,” she soberly concluded, “we are very bad at learning lessons. Ukrainian history has many violent pages. Holocaust is one of them. I just hope that there’s going to be a time where we can discuss these issues openly, where we can remember them.”
