Bitter War of Memory

"Babyn Yar—the name goes down in infamy. During two days in the fall of 1941, the Nazis shot over 33,000 Kyivan Jews. The story hardly ends there, and Victoria Khiterer knows it all, including the people who lived and died in Kyiv—community leaders, rabbis, lawyers, business elite, and those lower on the social ladder, especially mothers, children, the elderly, and the infirm. She knows the identities of the Nazi perpetrators, those who helped Jews and those who did not. But she also knows the site's afterlife and exposes the politics of memory, describing the meetings of those who refused to forget and the persecution by those who demanded forgetfulness. In this way Khiterer tells us about power, society, and memory—who makes the rules, who places the monuments, and who forbids other voices. To understand Ukraine of yore and today, Bitter War of Memory is a necessary read." —Brian Horowitz, Sizeler Family Chair of Jewish Studies, Tulane University

"Babyn Yar was one of the largest killing grounds of Jews in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It has been estimated that the Nazis, with the support of their local collaborators, murdered from 70,000 to 80,000 Jews there, as well as many prisoners of war, Roma, members of the Soviet underground movement, and Ukrainian nationalists. In all, about 100,000 people were killed in the ravine. Victoria Khiterer examines in a clear and dispassionate way why it took so long for a monument to be built on the site and how it can be made a center for Holocaust research and commemoration in Ukraine. This major path-breaking monograph will transform our understanding both of the way the Holocaust was carried out in Ukraine and how it has been remembered in the nearly eighty years since the end of the war." —Antony Polonsky, emeritus professor of Holocaust studies, Brandeis University, and chief historian, Global Educational Outreach Program, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw

"Victoria Khiterer has written an important addition to the growing scholarship on Babyn Yar, the largest Holocaust site in the Soviet Union. On the backdrop of the history of Kyivan Jewry during the Soviet and post-Soviet years, she offers a thoroughly researched and insightful exploration of Babyn Yar’s contested memory. Drawing on new archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, she chronicles the memory wars that erupted over this site of massacres from Stalin’s Black Years, through Khrushchev’s Thaw, into the Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, until the present day with Russia’s war against Ukraine. This monograph raises key questions in the study of the politics of memory in the aftermath of genocide." —Elissa Bemporad, Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust, professor of history, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center; and author of Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets