Ukrainian Jews protested the attendance at an international symposium on the Holocaust by a state historian who praised a Nazi collaborator whose troops killed Jews.
Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, last week condemned the planned attendance of Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of Ukrainian National Memory Institute, at a conference planned for Paris this week under the title: “Holocaust in Ukraine – New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century”
Vyatrovych, who has been running his state-controlled institution since 2014, “is a falsifier and manipulator of historical facts who has not only blamed Jews for the Great Famine, but denies the antisemitic ideology and practices” of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Dolinsky said in a statement.
Known as OUN and UPA respectively, the two groups fought during the first half of the 20th century against Soviet domination and briefly collaborated with Nazi occupation forces before turning against them. Encouraged by the antisemitic vituperations of many of their leaders, UPA troops killed thousands of Jews during the 1940s.
In an interview published in January in the magazine Novoy Vremya, Vyatrovych named Roman Shukhevych, a former leader of the UPA, as one of five “eminent personalities who have changed the course of history,” along with Winston Churchill, Johannes Gutenberg, Vaclav Havel and Elon Musk. According to some historians, Shukhevych’s wife rescued a Jewish woman during the Holocaust.
Today, Shukhevych and other Holocaust-era nationalists are revered in Ukraine as heroes for their opposition to the Soviets. This sentiment became more pronounced following the overthrow in 2014 of former President Viktor Yanukovych in a revolution lead by nationalists who opposed his corruption and subservience to Russia.
