This is not a book I ever expected to write. I ended up writing it because no one else has, and because a book like mine is overdue—by several decades. It’s a byproduct of Hiding in the Spotlight, my account of my Ukrainian mother’s escape from the Holocaust, published in 2009, but it’s not exactly a sequel.
In the course of making public appearances for Hiding in the Spotlight, now close to 150, I was startled to find that most people in these interested audiences knew virtually nothing about the Holocaust in Ukraine—as little as I had before doing research for my mother’s memoir.
Like me, they were not aware that what we think of as the Holocaust—the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis—did not begin in Germany or Poland, but in Ukraine after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Nor did they know that at least 750,000 Jews—mostly Ukrainian—were murdered by gunfire before the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau began operation, the majority even before the tenets of the Final Solution had been formally laid down by Hitler and Himmler.
While I had encountered a few people here and there during my travels who knew about those events, I have yet to find a single person out of the many hundreds I have addressed, from university professors to families of survivors, who could answer this question correctly: When and where was the first trial of Nazis for their crimes during the war?
Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 is a good guess. But it is wrong. The correct answer is Kharkov, Ukraine, December 1943.
I happened on this startling fact at the Holocaust museum in Kharkov in 2006 while doing research for Hiding in the Spotlight. I mentioned it in the epilogue of that book and did not expect to return to it—until my book-tour experience revealed a gaping black hole in public knowledge of the Holocaust that cried out to be filled.
I said a book “like mine” is overdue because although there are many books about the Holocaust in Ukraine on library shelves, few even touch on the Kharkov trial. Nearly all were written by historians and scholars and, sadly, it seems that nearly all of them have been read only by other historians and scholars, not general readers, resulting in this rather disturbing gap in popular understanding of the Holocaust.
I am neither historian nor scholar. I am a newspaper reporter of more than four decades, accustomed to writing stories that assume the reader may not know anything about my subject, be it a basketball game, oil spill, or city zoning law. I am used to writing for the intellectually curious but under-informed, something that could be a byword when it comes to Ukrainian Holocaust scholarship.
Ukraine is the final frontier of Holocaust scholarship and literature. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a mother lode of secret and suppressed material about the Holocaust in Ukraine has been made available to academics and journalists, and the flow continues nearly two decades later. In early 2011 the archives of the Ukrainian KGB agreed to open its wartime files to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial after more than fifty years of secrecy. All this promises to keep historians busy for decades doing the grueling work of real scholarship.
Judgment Before Nuremberg is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, a very personal journey through one small corner of history. If casual readers learn as much reading the book as I did writing it, I will have accomplished one of my goals—and the credit will belong to the master historians: Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Richard Rhodes, Deborah Lipstadt, Yitzhak Arad, Alexander Prusin, and many others, without whose work this book could not have been written.
And if Judgment Before Nuremberg moves readers to seek out those sources of my own illumination and inspiration, and to discover the full breadth of their majestic work, I will have accomplished both my goals.