Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

The historian Bernard Wasserstein is admired as a rigorous academic. In his monumental work on the Holocaust and his perceptive study of barbarism vs civilisation in the West, he strove for objectivity and maintained a professorial tone, as if writing of the past from an Olympian height.

Not so in this extraordinarily moving book about Krakowiec, the shtetl 40 miles from Lviv where his forebears lived for generations, and the role his family played there. At various times part of Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Soviet Russia, it was, he says, ‘a small place you’ve never heard of’. Yet its complex history is relevant today, as war returns to Eastern Europe.  

Wasserstein’s grandparents, whom he never knew, lived and died in Krakowiec. Their fates were hardly ever mentioned while he was growing up in provincial England with his refugee parents – or, if they were, only in hushed tones.