Judgment Before Nuremberg: The Holocaust in the Ukraine and the First Nazi War Crimes Trial

Начало книги

This is not a book I ever expected to write. I ended up writing it because no one else has, and because a book like mine is overdue—by several decades. It’s a byproduct of Hiding in the Spotlight, my account of my Ukrainian mother’s escape from the Holocaust, published in 2009, but it’s not exactly a sequel.

In the course of making public appearances for Hiding in the Spotlight, now close to 150, I was startled to find that most people in these interested audiences knew virtually nothing about the Holocaust in Ukraine—as little as I had before doing research for my mother’s memoir.

Like me, they were not aware that what we think of as the Holocaust—the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis—did not begin in Germany or Poland, but in Ukraine after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Nor did they know that at least 750,000 Jews—mostly Ukrainian—were murdered by gunfire before the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau began operation, the majority even before the tenets of the Final Solution had been formally laid down by Hitler and Himmler.

Читать дальше →