Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus: Public Debates and Historiography

Introduction

On the eve of the German invasion in the summer of 1941, the territories of what is today Ukraine and Belarus constituted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). The western parts of both republics were annexed by the Soviet Union from Poland in October 1939, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. In the first five decades of the twentieth century, these territories became “bloodlands” ¹ as they experienced unprecedented political violence starting with the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Stalin’s ruthless collectivization, industrialization, and brutal purges and repressions in the 1930s, followed by the genocidal onslaught of the Nazis in the 1940s.

When the Germans occupied Ukraine, there were about 2.5 million people whom the Nazis would have considered Jews, out of the total population of 41 million. The Jews were predominantly settled in the western, former Polish, territories, where they made up about 10 percent of the population. In Lviv, for example, Jews constituted more than a third of the population. It was estimated that about 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. ² The death rate among the Jews in Ukraine was more than 60 percent, but many more Jews were murdered in western Ukraine than in the central and eastern parts of the republic. While in western Ukraine (Galicia and Volhynia) about 90 percent of the Jewish population was annihilated, in Kharkiv more than 90 percent of the Jews survived the war. ³

Belarus proportionally had the largest Jewish population in Europe. The census of 1938 listed about 375,000 Jews living in BSSR. After the annexation of the western part from Poland in 1939, the Jewish population tripled. ⁴ After the unification of all Belarusian territories, the number of Jews in the republic was around 1 million out of the total population of 9.5 million. In the first postwar census, however, only 150,000 Jews were registered, which means that around 80 percent of the prewar Jewish population perished during the Shoah in Belarus. ⁵

During the Second World War, Belarusian and Ukrainian territories became a theatre of the Holocaust. The majority of Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews were shot by the Einzatsgruppen and buried in ravines and mass graves. In Ukraine, Jews were deported to the extermination camps only from Galicia, which was a part of the General Government (Polish territories occupied by Nazi Germany). Before annihilation, the Jews in Belarus and Ukraine were squeezed into ghettoes, or detained in concentration and labour camps. ⁶ Belarus and Ukraine became the graveyard not only of local Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews but also of Jews transported there from other parts of Europe—mainly from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia that was under German occupation), the Warthegau (western Polish territories annexed by the Third Reich), and the General Government. ⁷

Although the Nazis were the major perpetrators and instigators of the Holocaust, a certain percentage of the locals (ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Poles) supported Nazi Germany especially in the early years. There were some nationalistic organizations such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA) in Ukraine and the Belarusian People’s Self-Assistance and the Belarusian Regional Self-Defense in Belarus that assisted the Nazis in the implementation of their occupation policies, including the persecution of the Jews. Cooperation with the Holocaust on the occupied territories of Ukraine and Belarus took many forms and was expressed in different ways. These included pogroms, theft and misappropriation of Jewish property, silent approval and even justification of German policies against the Jews, refusal to assist Jewish neighbours with food and shelter, denunciations and disclosure of information to the German authorities about Jews in hiding, participation in the rounding up of Jews, and acting as guards of ghettos and concentration camps. What is more, there were cases when local policemen (the Schutzmannschaften) were involved in mass shootings. ⁸

Considering that an extremely high number of Jews perished on Belarusian and Ukrainian territories, it remains of crucial importance to investigate the Holocaust there. Similarly, it is crucial to analyze and be aware how the Shoah was presented, interpreted, and memorialized in Soviet and later in post-Soviet Belarusian and Ukrainian historiography and commemorative practices.

Soviet Historiography of the Holocaust

In the first post-war decades, the issue of the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War as it was officially called in the Soviet Union) attracted much attention from Soviet historians and publicists, often themselves active participants or witnesses of the events. Soviet official multi-volume monographs represented the war as a genuine popular resistance and defensive struggle, where all Soviet citizens, regardless of nationality and social background, fought side by side for the liberation of the motherland against the Nazi invaders. They emphasized such issues as the heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet people as a whole, the Red Army operations, the importance of the Soviet partisan resistance, and the leading role of the Communist party and never forgot the Nazi systematic execution of Soviet commissars by the Einsatzgruppen, the sufferings of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in concentration camps and brutalities, and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Soviet civilians. ⁹ Among the subjects usually avoided by Soviet historians were nationalist insurgencies in the western republics such as Ukraine, Lithuania, or Belarus; activities of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), disaffection of some social groups with Soviet pre-war policies, Soviet citizens’ collaboration with the German occupation authorities, banditry and pillage of the local civilian population by Soviet partisans, anti-Semitism among the civilian population and in the armed forces, and facts of the participation and extent of involvement of local Soviet citizens in the persecution of the Jews as well as the Jewish origins of many victims and Soviet resistance fighters.

Although Soviet historiography extensively emphasized the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Soviet citizens, it rarely focused specifically on the murder of the Jewish population under the occupation. According to most estimates, about 2.5 million Soviet Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and about two hundred thousand more died in combat. ¹⁰ It was about 10 percent of all Soviet deaths, ¹¹ at a time when Jews comprised only 2.5 percent of the total prewar Soviet population. However, despite the fact that of all the peoples inhabiting the western borderlands of the Soviet Union the heaviest losses were borne by the Jews, emphasizing the Jewish origin of the victims was discouraged. ¹²

American Jewish scholar and activist William Korey (director of the Anti-Defamation League who fought for the interests and rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and wrote extensively on anti-Semitism in Russia) argued that the Soviet authorities suppressed any public discussion of the Holocaust and attempted to obliterate the Holocaust in the memories of Soviet Jews as well as non-Jews. ¹³ According to Korey, while in the West, especially in the United States, the Holocaust was emphasized in curricula for children and adults, Soviet elementary and secondary school textbooks carried no references to Jews or anti-Semitism at all. Polish Jewish historian Lukasz Hirszowicz who analyzed the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet commemoration policies, exhibitions dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, textbooks, academic publications, literature and films, wrote that the Holocaust in the Soviet Union was a kind of non-event. ¹⁴ This phenomenon is sometimes explained as a deliberate policy by the Soviet regime to conceal the murder of the Jews, because of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, its legacy, and traditional hostility toward Jewish culture.

Soviet accounts about the war in general played down or universalized the murder of the Jews, however the event as such was not completely erased from Soviet history books. It was rather adapted and rewritten conforming to the confines of a specific ideological narrative. Within this general framework there were also some exceptions and variations in narratives in national republics. Zvi Gitelman, the American Jewish political scientist, has mentioned that the word Holocaust itself was unknown to Soviet historians; it did not enter Russian usage until the 1990s and was transliterated from English. ¹⁵ However, Gitelman acknowledged that this does not mean that Soviet scholars did not know about or denied the Holocaust. In discussions of the destruction of the Jews, they used other terms like “extermination,” “annihilation” (unichtozhenie), or “catastrophe” (katastrofa). ¹⁶ The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, for example, admitted that the “Nazis carried out a policy of mass extermination of the Jews and about six million Jews were murdered in the Second World War, among them many Soviet ones.” ¹⁷ A survey of Soviet literature reveals that there was no uniform treatment of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Some works do admit and describe the Shoah, others discuss only some aspects of it, while others prefer to refrain from mentioning the national and ethnic origin of the victims. Therefore Gitelman concludes that even if there was any official Soviet policy with regard to the treatment of the Holocaust, it was not applied universally and diligently. ¹⁸

Nevertheless, what is important about Soviet historiography, especially in the first post-war decades, is that it did not treat the Holocaust as a separate, uniquely Jewish, phenomenon and fate. When Soviet historians did discuss Nazi atrocities against the Jews, they usually viewed that catastrophe as an integral part of a larger phenomenon—Nazi genocide and the tragedy of all Soviet citizens (Jews, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Roma) who became targets of the Nazi racial policies of enslavement and extermination directed not only at Jews but also at Slavs and Roma. In other words, Soviet historians acknowledged that many Jews were killed by the Nazis and that Jews were often treated in a most brutal way, but they asserted that similar things happened also to other national groups in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. As Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer argued, the Jewish Holocaust is unique since the Germans never systematically killed Slavs (Belarusian or Ukrainian civilians) solely on ethnic grounds—usually they were executed on suspicion of resistance activities or of supporting partisans—while for the Jews the very fact of being of Jewish heritage was enough to be murdered. ¹⁹ Nevertheless, accounts of Jewish suffering were included as an indistinguishable part of the martyrdom and death of all Soviet citizens, and consequently there was no special Jewish Holocaust. As Gitelman ironically noted, “if the Nazis gave the Jews ‘special treatment,’ the Soviets did not.” ²⁰

It is, therefore, important to understand the political-ideological reasons for such a peculiar treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet history writings about the Second World War.

Stalin’s anti-Semitism definitely played an important role in this attitude. It is well known that Stalin fostered several anti-Semitic campaigns and show trials in the Soviet Union, including the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of many Jews in 1948 (some of them leaders of the Jewish anti-fascist committee created during the war), the execution of Jewish writers in 1952, and the “doctor’s plot,” when six Jewish doctors were imprisoned for allegedly conspiring to murder Stalin. Although the worst excesses subsided after the death of Stalin in 1953, the inhibitions, taboos, and distortions regarding “Jewish matters” lingered for decades in the Soviet Union. ²¹ However, Stalinist anti-Semitism alone does not suffice to explain why the Jewish origin of many Nazi victims was largely ignored in many works of the Soviet period; there were other political, ideological explanations for this.

Martyrdom is a powerful stimulus to a group’s sense of identity. Soviet authorities used the narrative about the Great Patriotic War as a basis for the legitimization of the Soviet regime and as a unifying experience that was supposed to reinforce the feeling of community among all Soviet people. Therefore, speaking separately of the tragedy of Jewry and emphasizing the Jewish role and fate was discouraged since it could diminish all-Soviet effort and suffering, reinforce individual Jewish national consciousness, and retard assimilation of the Soviet Jews. Moreover, it was considered to be mistaken to distinguish and emphasize the victimhood of the ethnic Jews to the prejudice of the victimhood of other nations and ethnic groups of the Soviet Union who also suffered and bore huge losses under the Nazi occupation. The Jews, in fact, were not the only victims of the Nazi genocidal policies in the Soviet Union. About 1.5 million ethnic Belarusians and 2 million ethnic Ukrainians were killed during the Nazi occupation. “No country in the world lost as many of its non-Jewish citizens in the war against Nazism as did the Soviet Union, so that the fate of the Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, or any other country in the West stands in sharp contrast to that of their co-nationals than it does in the East.” ²² In the Soviet Union, Jewish losses constituted about 10 percent of the entire losses during the war, while in other countries the percentage of Jewish victims in comparison to non-Jews was much higher. Therefore, to give the war to the Jews could erode the legitimating power of the experience and could arouse great resentment among other nationalities.

Another reason was the unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to mention and to discuss the role played by local Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians in the persecution of the Jews.

The Soviet treatment of the Black Book is very revealing. Soviet Jewish novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and writer, journalist, and war-reporter Vasilii Grossman collected important material that included official documents and a large number of written and oral testimonies, diaries, and letters of Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish wartime residents about the fate of Soviet Jews during the Second World War. The book had 1,200 typescript pages and was intended to be published in Russian and Yiddish. In 1945 a review commission concluded that “too much is recounted in the sketches about the vile activity of collaborators among the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, et al.” ²³ In 1947, the head of the Agitprop (propaganda) department Georgii Alexandrov wrote that “in reading the book . . . one gets a false picture of the true nature of fascism. . . . Running through the whole book is the idea that the Germans murdered and plundered the Jews only. The reader unwittingly gets the impression that the Germans fought against the USSR for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews . . . whereas Hitler’s ruthless slaughters were carried out equally against Russians, Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and other peoples of the Soviet Union. . . . As a result of these considerations ‘the Black Book in the USSR may not be published.’” ²⁴ Finally, all copies were sent to storage warehouses where they were destroyed in 1948. Thus because it singled out Jewish suffering, the major and probably the only post-war work that treated the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as sui generis, has never been published in the USSR. However, manuscript copies survived and were sent abroad, where they were published in English, Hebrew, and even in Russian. ²⁵

The controversy over the construction of a monument at Babi Yar—the site close to Kiev where more than one hundred thousand of the city’s inhabitants including almost thirty-four thousand Jews were shot in September of 1941—is also quite telling. For many years, no monument was placed there to commemorate this tragic event, and there were plans to turn this site into a park and a stadium. Public support for the erection of a monument began to mount after the protest by Soviet writer Viktor Nekrasov in 1959 and a famous poem Babi Yar by Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published in 1961. Finally, public pressure resulted in a memorial placed at Babi Yar, but the inscription says that here in 1941–1943, the German fascist invaders executed more than one hundred thousand citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war. ²⁶ Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of those killed by the Nazis in Babi Yar were Jews, there was no separate reference to the Jewish tragedy during the Soviet era. ²⁷

Although the Black Book has not appeared in the USSR and there was no inscription mentioning the Jewish victims on the monument in Babi Yar, a considerable amount of documentary material about the Holocaust appeared during the war and its immediate aftermath. For example, the Soviet report of January 6, 1942, emphasized the Nazi treatment of the Jewish population: It mentioned the killing of Jews in Lviv, the mass execution of Jews in Kiev, and murders especially directed against unarmed and defenseless Jews. ²⁸ In 1945–1946, the reports of the Extraordinary State Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Crimes of the German Fascist Occupiers that mentioned Nazi atrocities against Jews were published. Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko in his declaration at the United Nations linked the Soviet support for Jewish aims in Palestine with the special sufferings of the Jewish people under the Nazis. Many references to the events of the Holocaust did appear in the Soviet mass media and were included in reports on war criminals and war crime trials. The Soviet media reported the Nuremberg trials, and many journalists made Jewish references in their articles. In the reports on the Manstein’s trial, the murder of Jews and Roma was quoted in official Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia of September 11, 1949. Newspaper Novoe vremia, issue 13 of 1952 and issue 2 of 1953, mentioned the destruction of more than 5 million Jews and put the Jews at the head of the list of nations who suffered from Nazi extermination policies. Later, in 1960–1962, the Soviet media gave much space to the Eichmann case and his execution in Israel and wrote a lot about the hunt for major Nazi criminals such as Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele, Franz Stangl, and others, and in this context found good words for Simon Wiesenthal. ²⁹ According to Hirszowicz, this was not because of the Soviet will to commemorate Jewish victims but because of the Soviet interest in connection with the policies of the Western powers vis-à-vis Germany and former Nazi cadres as well as the Soviets’ own post-war persecution of “collaborators,” anti-Soviet elements, and nationalists, especially from Ukraine and the Baltic States. ³⁰

During the Soviet times, Belarus became known as a “partisan republic.” The emphasis on heroic partisan resistance and sacrifices by all citizens of the republic became especially pronounced after Piotr Masherov became the head of the Belarusian Communist Party in 1965. Being a veteran of the partisan movement himself, Masherov used this narrative to consolidate and legitimize his power. ³¹ Following the common Soviet tendency, the Holocaust was marginalized and presented as equal to other ethnic groups. However, there were also some exceptions. For example, a documentary collection on Belarus titled Prestupleniia nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov v Belorussii, 1941–1944 (The Crimes of the German-Fascist Occupiers in Belorussia, 1941–1944) published in Minsk in 1965 made more references to fate of the Jews: it included, among others, the order establishing the ghetto in Minsk, descriptions of Germans killing Jews wantonly, mass murders of Jews in the Brest-Litovsk area, and the extermination of the Jews in Pinsk, a German report on the resistance of one of the condemned man and a photograph of Jews being herded into the Grodno ghetto. The origins and purpose of the ghettos were explained, concluding that the Nazi “revived ghettos in occupied territories, turning them into camps for the mass annihilation of the Jewish population.” ³²

In addition, the Jewish Holocaust was mentioned, discussed, and highlighted as a separate topic in the Soviet Yiddish-language journal Sovietisch Haimland published between 1961 and 1991. However, since not many people in the Soviet Union could read Yiddish, this journal had a very limited circulation and audience. ³³

Nevertheless, even if some Soviet works acknowledged that Jews were the main victims of Nazism, they completely avoided references to Jews as resistance fighters and Soviet heroes and generally played down their role in the armed resistance struggle against the German invaders. They even tried to reinforce stereotypes of Jews as cowards unable to carry arms. For example, Panteleimon Ponomarenko—Red Army general, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, and the leader of the Soviet partisan movement—complained to the centre that the Jewish population of Belarusian cities was thinking only to save its own skin and preferred to flee rather than to fight on the frontline. ³⁴ He noted that Jews constituted around 8–10 percent of the republic’s population, but among partisans they made up only 2.7 percent, which meant that the proportion of Jews in the partisan movement was three times smaller than their proportion in the republic’s population. ³⁵

Gitelman noticed that the same approach was applied in museum exhibitions. For example, the seventeen-year-old Jewish partisan Masha Bruskina, who was hanged by the Nazis in Minsk, was identified as an “unknown partisan” in the Minsk Museum of the Great Patriotic War, despite the fact that she was identified by her relatives and other testimonies. According to Gitelman, the refusal by the authorities to identify her by name and nationality was seen by some Jews as a deliberate refusal to acknowledge Jewish heroism. ³⁶

It is worth mentioning that at the same time, the issue of the Holocaust and the locals’ cooperation in the persecution of the Jews was equally a sensitive issue and a source of embarrassment for Diaspora historians. Ukrainian and Belarusian émigrés, often former supporters of the German cause, in their writings, for understandable reasons, preferred to play down the facts of the participation of their compatriots in German atrocities against the Jews, highlighting instead their work to secure national independence whilst stressing the limited alternatives that were available to them. Disappointed with Polish policies towards ethnic minorities and traumatized by the Soviet purges, they came to see Nazi Germany as a vehicle to achieve sovereignty. They tried to whitewash their wartime experience of collaboration and ignored or even denied their own complicity in the Holocaust. In 1960 Viktor Ostrowsky, son of Rodislav Ostrowsky, who was a head of the Belarusian Central Rada, a collaborationist body, published a book Anti-Semitism in Belorussia and Its Origins in London, where he argued that the predominant attitude of Belarusians toward Jews was empathy and sympathy and they did not participate in the Nazis’ genocide, but were equal victims. He also stated that Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians had anti-Semitic feelings, but not Belarusians, and that the Jews themselves were somehow responsible for their fate. ³⁷

Post-1991 Memory and Representation of the Holocaust

Conclusion

The Holocaust was not denied or completely erased from the publications of the Soviet period. There were some works that occasionally mentioned Jewish sufferings and the fact that the Jews were the main targets of the Nazi extermination policies. However the common pattern was to play down the Jewish origin of many Nazi victims and to avoid talking separately about the genocide against the Jews. The general claim was that all Soviet people, whether the Jews, Russians, Belarusians, or Ukrainians, suffered equally under the Nazi occupation and became subject to the Nazis’ ruthless policies of genocide. Therefore general phrases like “execution of Soviet civilians” were used in many Soviet works. Although some Soviet works acknowledged Jews as the main victims, they almost completely ignored Jewish participation in resistance activities, their heroism and contribution to the Soviet victory. Again the general claim was that all Soviet people, regardless of nationality and social background, were fighting together for the liberation of their motherland from the German-fascist invaders.

Diaspora historians, mainly Ukrainian and Belarusian émigrés, often former supporters of the German cause, were also not interested in discussing the Holocaust. In their writings, they tried to whitewash the wartime experience of collaboration, focusing instead on their activities to secure national sovereignty and describing nationalists as victims of totalitarian regimes. They also denied the participation of their compatriots in the persecution of the Jews and blamed others: The Germans, the Poles, or the Lithuanians had anti-Semitic attitudes and were responsible for the initial pogroms against the Jews and the Holocaust, but not the Belarusians and the Ukrainians, whose predominant attitude towards the Jews was empathy and who met with the same fate as the Jews, though on a smaller scale.

In the early 1990s, after the proclamation of independence by Ukraine and Belarus, they felt a need to construct national histories. Important changes took place in the historiography of the Second World War; at the same time, the continuities from the previous Cold War period and similar trends and patterns were noticeable in both countries. The main focus was on Stalin’s terror and there was a tendency to condemn Soviet crimes more roundly than Nazi atrocities, and some even stated that the famine of 1932–1933, ruthless Soviet pre-war policies, and Stalin’s repressions, especially in western Ukraine and Belarus in 1939–1940, could justify collaboration by some Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists with Nazi Germany, seen as a vehicle to achieve national independence. Some scholars especially from western Ukraine took the approach of Diaspora historiography of the Cold War period and sought to whitewash the wartime experience of collaboration by nationalists, including OUN and UPA fighters, presenting them as national heroes who were fighting for the freedom of their country, without considering the dark side of their legacy and even denying their participation in the Holocaust. These scholars do not deny the Holocaust as such, just the participation of their nation in the Nazi crimes against the Jews.

Despite the fact that taboos were lifted and archives were opened in the post-communist period, there was still limited interest in the Jewish Holocaust beyond the Jewish community. The Holocaust of the Jews was introduced as a theme in the academic curriculum and in textbooks, but often treated as a foreign affair, something that happened in Germany or Poland and not as a part of national history, while the Holocaust of Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews carried out by bullets and local participation in the persecution of the Jews remained largely marginalized topics.

There are some local bodies in Belarus and Ukraine that work to promote awareness about the Holocaust: They organize training sessions for teachers, educational seminars, study trips, they sponsor conferences and produce publications in the area of Holocaust studies. However, these bodies are nongovernmental organizations and in their activities they rely mainly on foreign grants, private funding, and cooperation with western partners and NGOs.

Holocaust monuments and memorials exist, but they rarely attract the attention of the authorities and media, and nothing like POLIN (the Museum of the History of Polish Jews) in Warsaw or the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest exists in Kiev or Minsk. The claims that the Jews were not the only victims of Nazism and thus it would be mistaken to focus exclusively on Jewish fates and to privatize certain places like Babi Yar in Kiev as Jewish memorials are quite frequent.

Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak argued that a reassessment of various issues of the Second World War, especially Holocaust recognition and acknowledgment of one’s own involvement in Nazi crimes in many European countries, has never resulted only from inner debates; outside factors were also at work. Often a decisive role was played by monographs written abroad and then “imported” into the country, like Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 or Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. The end of the Cold War and the prospect of membership in the EU for Central and Eastern European countries also played an important role in this process. British historian Tony Judt, in his famous book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, stated that “the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . opened the way to a more accurate perception of various issues of the war neglected or ignored after 1945.” Judt pushed the idea even further by saying that “Holocaust recognition became our contemporary European entry ticket.” ⁶³ However, for Ukraine, and especially for Belarus, there is no immediate prospect of becoming members of the EU, and, therefore, recognition of the Holocaust and one’s own complicity in Nazi crimes is not seen as a priority by the authorities in these countries. In addition, although some influential monographs on local Ukrainian and Belarusian collaboration in the Holocaust appeared in the West, ⁶⁴ they did not manage to spark intense public debates like the books by Jan T. Gross in Poland, and nothing similar to debates over Jedwabne and Kielce can be seen in present-day Ukraine and Belarus. Therefore, despite the fact that some changes in conceptualization of the Second World War took place in post-communist Ukraine and Belarus, the continuities and trends of the Cold War period are still very much present in contemporary Belarusian and Ukrainian narratives. Although it is true that the Holocaust has started to emerge from obscurity, there are still some limitations and inhibitions on its comprehensive and honest investigation.