aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] Holocaust Story Inspires Pride, Doubt

["Walter R Iwaskiw" <wiwa@loc.gov>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900723.html 

Holocaust Story Inspires Pride, Doubt

By NATASHA LISOVA, MARIA DANILOVA and RANDY HERSCHAFT
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 19, 2007; 4:38 PM

ISPAS, Ukraine -- It is a story of courage and kindness during the first tragic days of the Holocaust in Ukraine _ the tale of how a village rose up against an anti-Semitic gang of killers to save its Jewish neighbors.

A researcher stumbled on the inspiring story this year. Now some of Ukraine's Jewish leaders plan to raise a monument, host a delegation of students from Israel and stage a ceremony Wednesday honoring this small farming community in western Ukraine.

But 66 years later there are conflicting accounts of what happened in Ispas during that terrible summer of 1941, when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union triggered an outbreak of anti-Semitic violence.

(...)

More than 2,100 Ukrainians have been cited by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, but these were mostly individual acts of heroism. The Ispas story _ if it could be confirmed _ would be a unique case of an entire community in Ukraine defending its Jews.

(...)