Historians are rewriting history again with the hope that it will be possible to really dig deeper and understand what really happened then. This was stated at the Kyiv Jewish Forum 2020 by the professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University Serhii Plokhiy.
On September 8-9, the Kyiv Jewish Forum 2020 is held online. The organizers are the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and the Jerusalem Post. The first Kyiv Jewish Forum was held in Kyiv last year and brought together over 500 participants from around the world.
“There are bad consequences that come from not rewriting history. And, in fact, this freezes the understanding of the war, turning it into a kind of mythology, that was formed immediately after the war to serve certain regimes, like the Soviet regime, in particular,” he said.
According to the historian, if rewriting the history, compared to what was known in 1945 or 1949, did not occur, then people would not have learned about the Holocaust as much as they know today.
“If you look at the number of the people who died on the territory of Ukraine, that number will vary – from six to seven million people. Up to 1 million of them were most likely Jews. If you look at the number of civilians, compared to the number of those who were in the Red Army, then more people died outside of the army. And this Jewish history is also part of the Ukrainian history. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is basically the history of the war that we do not know,” Plokhiy stressed.
As the President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine Boris Lozhkin noted on the eve of opening the Kyiv Jewish Forum 2020, Ukraine is not a random place for the consolidation of the global Jewry. By the beginning of the 20th century, a quarter of all Jews in the world lived in Ukraine, and today there are descendants of the Ukrainian Jews in all corners of the world, without exception.