Family Ties How A Ukrainian Nazi And A Living Witness Link Canada To Ukraine Today

Download or read book Family Ties: How a Ukrainian Nazi and a living witness link Canada to Ukraine today written by PETER MCFARLANE and published by James Lorimer & Company. This book was released on 2024-09-16 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standing ovation accorded in 2023 to a Second World War Ukrainian Nazi unit veteran in Canada’s House of Commons shocked Canadians – and the world. Author Peter McFarlane was not surprised. He had already spent three years learning about two people, Mikael Chomiak and Ann Charney, whose parallel lives during and after that war highlight the complex and disturbing story of Ukraine and Canada’s post-war Ukrainian Canadian community. Ann Charney was two years old when she and her Jewish mother evaded their certain death by hiding out in a hayloft in the Ukrainian countryside. Ann spent two long years in that attic. She and her mother survived the war, and ultimately made their way to Montreal. There, Ann has had a brilliant career as a novelist and journalist. Mikael Chomiak spent the war working for the German SS as the editor of an influential Ukrainian newspaper celebrating Hitler and promoting antisemitism. He and his family were easily accepted as postwar immigrants to Canada, settling in Alberta. There he continued his work as a writer and editor, avoiding public expressions of his antisemitic views or his wartime record. In this book Peter McFarlane tells the stories of these two during the war, and afterwards. He brings their stories up to date through research in Ukraine today. When he visits Chomiak’s relatives in Ukraine, he finds the themes of ethnic hatred and antisemitism strongly in play today in public support for the war with Russia. Canadian descendants of pro-Nazi Ukrainians often do not acknowledge this connection of past to present. Mikael Chomiak’s granddaughter Chrystia Freeland has a lead role in government as a senior federal cabinet minister. Like many others, she remains in denial about her grandfather’s role promoting the Nazis’ policies and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Visiting Ann Charney’s home town of Brody, Peter McFarlane finds that the local history museum celebrating Ukrainian Nazi soldiers while saying nothing about their Holocaust role, executing the town’s 10,000 Jewish residents, including all of Ann’s family and relatives. This book provides context and background for understanding the complex dynamics behind the war between Ukraine and Russia, and Canada’s role in that conflict.

Download or read book The Voices of Babyn Yar written by Marianna Kiyanovska and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.

Download or read book Red Famine written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Download or read book Sephardi Voices written by Henry Green and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold. Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time.

Download or read book Hitler's Shadow written by Richard Breitman and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is based on findings from newly-declassified decades-old Army and CIA records released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. These records were processed and reviewed by the National Archives-led Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. The report highlights materials opened under the Act, in addition to records that were previously opened but had not been mined by historians and researchers, including records from the Office of Strategic Services (a CIA predecessor), dossiers of the Army Staff's Intelligence Records of the Investigative Records Repository, State Dept. records, and files of the Navy Judge Advocate General. This is a print on demand report.

Download or read book Heroes and Villains written by David R. Marples and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain to engender debate in the media, especially in Ukraine itself, as well as the academic community. Using a wide selection of newspapers, journals, monographs, and school textbooks from different regions of the country, the book examines the sensitive issue of the changing perspectives ? often shifting 180 degrees ? on several events discussed in the new narratives of the Stalin years published in the Ukraine since the late Gorbachev period until 2005. These events were pivotal to Ukrainian history in the 20th century, including the Famine of 1932?33 and Ukrainian insurgency during the war years. This latter period is particularly disputed, and analyzed with regard to the roles of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) during and after the war. Were these organizations "freedom fighters" or "collaborators"? To what extent are they the architects of the modern independent state? "This excellent book fills a longstanding void in literature on the politics of memory in Eastern Europe. Professor Marples has produced an innovative and courageous study of how postcommunist Ukraine is rewriting its Stalinist and wartime past by gradually but inconsistently substituting Soviet models with nationalist interpretations. Grounded in an attentive reading of Ukrainian scholarship and journalism from the last two decades, this book offers a balanced take on such sensitive issues as the Great Famine of 1932-33 and the role of the Ukrainian nationalist insurgents during World War II. Instead of taking sides in the passionate debates on these subjects, Marples analyzes the debates themselves as discursive sites where a new national history is being forged. Clearly written and well argued, this study will make a major impact both within and beyond academia." - Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria

Download or read book Essays in Modern Ukrainian History written by Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky and published by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. This book was released on 1987 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pp. 283-297, "Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations", discuss the views of the Russian nationalist as expressed in two articles. In the first (1875) he opposed legal discrimination against Jews, as it was based on medieval prejudice and did not achieve its aim of safeguarding the peasants' interests. The second was a response to the pogroms of 1881-82. He blamed the Russian policy of concentrating the Jews in the Pale of Settlement for Ukrainian-Jewish tensions. He also criticized the Jews as a parasitic class which felt no solidarity with the Ukraine. He saw the solution in a Jewish socialist movement and a federation of Russia and Austro-Hungary, in which Jews would enjoy equal rights. Pp. 299-313, "The Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Thought, " discuss the approaches of three Ukrainian thinkers to the "Jewish question": Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Ivan Franko. Kostomarov published an article in 1862 in "Osnova" to counter accusations in the Jewish journal "Sion" against the Ukrainian cultural movement. He supported Jewish emancipation, but accused the Jews of clannishness, indifference to the fate of their country, and acting as instruments of Polish oppression and exploiters of the peasants. Franko was a disciple of Drahomanov; he adopted the idea of Ukrainian independence and advocated Jewish-Ukrainian cooperation.