By Berel Bein
Ukraine occupies a very tortured and bloody place in the history of Eastern Europe. Sandwiched between Poland, Austro-Hungary and Russia and being neither Polish nor Russian in language, faith and ethnic culture, it always found itself in a very bad neighborhood.
Stalin and Khruschev starved five million Ukrainians to death in the 1920s to enforce their agricultural collectivization program.
Much of Ukraine served as the battlefield between the German and Russian armies during World War II and its landscape remains scarred by those battles even today, seventy years later.
Unspeakable atrocities occurred daily in Ukraine in World War II with both German and Russian armies being guilty of inhuman behavior on a vast scale.
Ukrainian nationalism was squashed by the heavy hand of the Soviet Union until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Ukraine declared its independence then and has been searching for a way to build for itself a form of democratic government, a working economy and a better life for its citizenry.
Over the last twenty years it has had its ups and downs and never really achieved for itself the blessings that it hoped independence from the Soviet Union would achieve. The Russian bear has now reappeared on its eastern border and once again threatens Ukrainian independence and territory.
Putin, in his inimitable fashion, mocks the impotence of the United States and the West and things look fairly bleak for the future of Ukrainian independence. There is no one in the Ukraine, I believe, that thinks that the United States or the European Union is prepared to ride to Ukraine's rescue.
The history of Ukraine and the treatment of its Jewish population is also a sad and bloody one. The great pogroms of 1648 and 1649 that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews were led by the Ukrainian nationalist Bogdan Chmeilitzki. There is a statue in his honor in the main square of the city of Kiev. To Ukrainians he is a national hero. To the Jews he is recorded in our history as a villain first-class, a murderer of women and children and is listed together with Haman and Hitler in the unsavory pantheon of Jew haters and anti-Semites.
In World War II and the ensuing Holocaust, a substantial number of Ukrainians served in the SS, were camp guards in the concentration and killing camps and were willing collaborators with the Nazis in rounding up the local Jewish population for deportation and murder. Now naturally the Ukrainians were no different than most of the populations of Europe in the 1940s.
France and Holland, Belgium and Poland were also countries rife with collaborators who helped the Nazis eradicate their Jewish populations. Much of this has been smoothed over by the West, though to me it explains the almost knee-jerk reaction of enmity of the European Union to the State of Israel and to the Jewish people.
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