Ukrainian

On 22 November 2004, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 8 and 9 May as Days of Remembrance and Reconciliation. Since 2015, 8 May has been an official commemorative date in Ukraine — the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, dedicated to honoring the victims of the Second World War.

Seventy-five years ago, this day in May became the de jure end of one of the largest stages of the Second World War — the war against Nazi Germany. The complete end of the global war, in which almost 80 percent of the world’s population was involved, was still a little less than four months away.

According to estimates by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Ukraine — where active fighting had taken place from 1 September 1939, beginning with the first German air raid on peaceful Lviv — lost between 3 and 4 million servicemen and underground fighters, more than 5 million civilians, including around 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, while about 5 million people were subjected to various forms of forced displacement such as deportation, evacuation, and resettlement. Overall, Ukraine’s irrecoverable losses amounted to between 8 and 10 million people.

Statistics make historical phenomena visible, help us grasp their scale and satisfy the natural human urge to compare. But numbers also set a trap: they level out, and therefore dehumanize, an endless multitude of personal tragedies. When dealing with figures — large or small — we often fail to ask what happened to a particular individual. What became of that person’s parents, wife or husband, or children?

When the author of these lines was still at school, he was struck by a scene from a feature film devoted to what, against the background of Soviet memoirs and films, then seemed a “secondary” episode: the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. What was shocking was not so much the story of the search and sacrifices made to save at least one of three sons of an American mother, but one detail of soldiers’ everyday life: individual identification tags, intended above all to identify the dead.

An excerpt from Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg’s works also include perhaps the best-known film about the Holocaust, Schindler’s List (1993, USA).

What was especially striking was the idea that even after death a soldier’s memory could be — and ultimately would be — preserved thanks to one seemingly insignificant detail. Even today, seventy-six years after the deaths of 9,837 American servicemen, we can learn their names, engraved on individual gravestones and recorded in biographical registers at the American military cemetery in Normandy at Colleville-sur-Mer.

In the permanent exhibition of the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine,” among other artifacts from the Second World War, there is a symbol and witness of those dramatic years little known to the general public: a small plastic capsule, the so-called Red Army identification medallion, sometimes referred to as a “death medallion.” It was a case containing a slip of paper with the soldier’s personal information.

Such capsules were used as a form of record-keeping that allowed a dead serviceman to be identified and his memory preserved. The practice, however, existed only briefly. It was discontinued in November 1942, at the height of the fierce fighting around Stalingrad.

The owner of this plastic capsule was Isaak Davidovich Tomashuv, born in 1923 and a native of Dnipro. He lived on Dzerzhinsky Street, now Volodymyr Vernadsky Street, was a musician, and was mobilized into the Red Army in February 1941. Isaak Tomashuv survived the inferno of war, received state decorations and witnessed the defeat of Nazi Germany. Fortunately, his capsule never had to fulfill its direct purpose. Millions of other military and civilian victims were less fortunate: their names remain unknown, and we will probably never hear their stories. Those stories may have differed radically from the ceremonial, polished “reality” that began to take shape in public consciousness from the mid-1960s onward.

This artificially constructed memory of the war has little in common with the reality in which Vladimir Gelfand (1923–1983) lived. A schoolboy from Dnipropetrovsk, he was drafted into the Red Army at the age of nineteen. He endured encirclement near Kharkiv in 1942, wounds and antisemitic abuse from some officers. Despite this, he continued to serve and completed the entire war honorably, ending it in Germany with the rank of lieutenant.

His Diary is a moving and at times naive picture of reality seen through the eyes of a young man brought up in the communist spirit who encounters the brutal reality of war, complicated human relationships, betrayal, friendship and love.

Did Israel (Igor) Belousov (1908–1989), a signalman who crossed the cold waters of the Dnipro to the right bank at the end of September 1943 to maintain communications with an assault group, think of himself as a hero? Despite fierce enemy fire and the questionable nature of the command plan, these men tried not merely to survive but to carry out their combat order. Why was Belousov, twice awarded the Medal “For Courage,” first forced to abandon his Jewish name and keep silent about his childhood in a cheder, and then, after the war, to justify himself for this before a Party commission? Did he, or his comrades, deserve popular sneers about the so-called “Tashkent Front,” when more than 500,000 Jews, alongside representatives of other peoples, fought to save the world from Nazism?

Lines from wartime and evacuation letters, dry questionnaire entries in official documents and photographs continue to tell us stories that are different yet somehow elusively similar. Through them, those who are no longer with us speak of their dreams, pain, joys and hardships. One would like to believe that their greatest Victory — and our greatest expression of respect — will be the preservation of the memory of this terrible war and of the people who managed to survive it.

Identity page: “Valid without a photograph.” Surname: Belousov. First name: Igor. Patronymic: Leontievich. “Signature of the booklet holder.”

Awards page: “Awarded” — handwritten entries record medals/orders including the Medal “For Courage” and the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd Class, with their serial numbers. A stamped note states that the holder is entitled, from November 1947, to receive the monetary payments and other benefits and privileges provided by the General Regulations on Orders of the USSR.

The facing page is headed: “EXTRACTS from the ‘General Regulations on Orders of the USSR’ (approved by decree of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of 7 May 1936).” The legible provisions state: “1. An Order of the USSR is the highest award for special services in the field of socialist construction and the defense of the USSR.” “3. Orders of the USSR may be awarded both to individual citizens and to military formations and military units of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, as well as to enterprises, institutions and organizations.” “4. Persons awarded an Order of the USSR may, for new merits, be awarded the same or another Order of the USSR a second time.” Paragraph 10 begins by stating that holders of an Order of the USSR personally enjoy a right to free…; the remainder is cut off in the photographed page.