Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s comparison between the Holocaust and the Ukraine war led to Israeli politicians and Jewish leaders speaking about the distortion of the Holocaust.
Israel National News spoke to Dr. David Silberklang, Senior Historian in the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, to gain an expert opinion on this issue.
“Certainly what President Zelenskyy said is a distortion of the Holocaust,” Silberklang says. “You don't need to call up the Holocaust and the Nazis every time something terrible happens. You can use other kinds of comparisons with other wars in history. There might be war crimes being committed, crimes against humanity. Not everything is the Holocaust.”
Speaking of how much the Ukrainians were involved in the Holocaust, Silberklang explains that while Ukrainians in western Ukraine, in the nationalist movement, saw the Nazis as liberators from the Soviets, there were also Righteous Among the Nations in Ukraine.
“The Ukrainians during World War II in western Ukraine, the part that had been inter-war Poland, there was a powerful nationalist movement of Ukrainians [that] saw the Germans as liberators from the Soviets, from the Poles, from the Jews, and quite a few of them were party to the murder of the Jews,” he says. “But I would also argue that that's not all the Ukrainians. There were other Ukrainians who behaved differently. What happened in history 80 years ago is important and we need to remind them that they need to face up to that, but by the same token that shouldn't impact on how we react to innocent people being bombed today.”
Silberklang comments that “there were certainly Righteous Among the Nations in Ukraine. Yad Vashem, the State of Israel, has to date honored more than 2,600 Righteous Among the Nations from Ukraine. There are probably more that we'll still find in the future. Unfortunately, there were many more of the other who were either indifferent or even participated in the murders.”
Silberklang explains that Zelenskyy shouldn’t get a free pass about his quotes on the Holocaust simply due to his family history – in which much of his family and his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust and his grandfather fought the Nazis in the Red Army. That fact does not mean he is free to distort history, Silberklang stresses.
“The fact that he has a real Holocaust history in his family and relates to that seriously does not absolve him from having committed or spoken distortions of the Holocaust. What's happening in Ukraine is not the Holocaust as bad as it is.”
Holocaust distortion is never justified, he notes.
“There are many in the world who try to call everything the Holocaust and call everyone that they don't like or who's doing something they don't like Nazis,” he says. “Not everyone who does something you don't like or something evil is a Nazi. Not every event is the Holocaust. If everything is the Holocaust and everyone is a Nazi then those terms have no meaning whatsoever, and if those terms have no meaning whatsoever and we don't understand the history, then ultimately if G-d forbid there will be some other government or organization that wants to commit a Holocaust copy – the Nazis to commit a Holocaust against the Jews or against anyone else – we won't know how to identify it. Because basically the words Holocaust [and] Nazi in the end will have no meaning. It's extremely important to be precise in the history and to understand so that we can understand for the future.”