The Holocaust by bullets, shooting in Ukraine - Shoah Memorial

The Jews in Ukraine

On the eve of the 20th century, the vast majority of the 5,400,000 Jews of the Russian Empire were confined in a region known as the "Residence Zone" (essentially Ukraine but also Belarus, Lithuania and part of Poland). It was there, according to the expression of the writer Vassili Grossman, that the body of the Jewish people was found...

These populations spoke Russian, German, Polish and especially Yiddish. They were united by the same culture, even though many of their members had turned away from religion to engage in political and social combat.

Despite the changes in sovereignty, the Jews felt more like they belonged to a region, a city, or a shtetel rather than a country.

The consequences of the First World War (non-Soviet Ukraine).

At the end of the First World War, the disappearance of the central empires (German Reich, Austria-Hungary) and the upheavals resulting from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia led to the dislocation of Ukraine, bursting

its territory and its populations, notably Jewish, between the different countries resulting from peace treaties. Jews experienced different situations (depending on the political circumstances and the territories in which they were settled).

If the brief People’s Republic of Ukraine (January 1918-November 1920) gave the right to the Jewish community to manage its religious, cultural, and educational institutions, pogroms were nevertheless perpetrated, in which all the national and political forces participated. The situation was not better in the Ukrainian regions attached to Poland where the situation of the Jews began

to deteriorate from 1926 (year of the coup d'état by S.Pilsudski): boycotts of companies and shops, unofficial quota system in schools...

In Romania, the rise of anti-Semitism and the growing influence of racist and totalitarian theories resulted in the formation of far-right nationalist movements in Romania and the fascisation of Ukrainian separatist parties.

On the other hand, the Jewish population of Transcarpathian Ukraine attached to Czechoslovakia enjoyed a peaceful existence between the two wars. Following the Munich crisis in 1938, the region was finally annexed by Hungary. Jews then began to be the object of a policy of discrimination and persecution.

Soviet Ukraine before the Holocaust

During the first years of the establishment of the Soviet regime, the main decisions suggested that the Jews had finally found a homeland in the USSR and, more particularly, in Soviet Ukraine. However, the 1920s and 1930s were marked, in the economic and public spheres, by a terrible disillusionment and by a succession of measures that announced the disintegration of the Jewish world. It is hardly in the cultural field that the 1920s and 1930s corresponded to a golden age. Raised to the rank of official language, Yiddish developed on a large scale: use in certain regions by administrations, teaching in Yiddish in state schools, proliferation of newspapers, magazines, theatres and concert halls.

The year 1939

In 1939, the Jewish population in Ukraine was estimated at 2,500,000 (5 million in the USSR). That same year, the USSR annexed eastern Poland in application of the German-Soviet pact, then, in June 1940, northern Bukovina. Nearly 300,000 Jews fleeing the western territories of Poland annexed by Germany tried to find refuge in the USSR. Considered as "activists", the refugees were sent by thousands to prisons or labour camps. They could nevertheless escape the fate of 3 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis on Soviet territory...

Buczacz-Buchach-Bukach (Galicia): hometown of Simon Wiesenthal. The market place.
© Coll. CDJC/Memorial de la Shoah

Stanislawow, Stanislau, Stanislav (Galicia). On the sign is indicated in Hebrew and in Polish: Jewish farm. Sale of vegetables every day. © USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives

Kolomyja-Kolomyya-Kolomea in Galicia (1935). The inscriptions on the shop signs are in German, Ukrainian, and in Polish in Yiddish. © Coll. USHMM, courtesy of Sueddeutscher verlag Bilderdienst

Jews from the region of Mukachevo (Mukachuk), Carpathic Ruthenia. The legend in Czech indicates: father leading his son to the synagogue. © Coll. CDJC/Mémorial de la Shoah