A single pair of shoes might have prevented the thousands of deaths that occurred in Ukraine during the Holocaust, said Wendy Lower of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A German soldier who was interrogated after World War II said that the only reason he volunteered to take part in the mass killings of Jews in Berdychiv, Ukraine, was to find a cobbler who had been sent to a Jewish ghetto.
“The soldier said that he wanted to get his shoes back (from) a Jewish cobbler,” Lower, director of Visiting Scholars Program at the museum, said.
Lower shared this story as part of “Days of Remembrance: Commemoration of the Holocaust” held April 6 in the Social Work Auditorium.
Ronald Smelser, professor in history at the U, said that although the murders of Jews in Ukraine have been well documented, the specific reason of why they were killed has remained under researched.
“Lower’s contribution shows that the Nazis targeted Jews in this country besides the fact that they saw the people there as an inferior colony that should be exploited and killed,” Smelser said.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, new information has become available to researchers from the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses.
For example, not many people know that most of the Jews killed in Ukraine were murdered in or around their hometowns, Lower said.
“Also, as it turns out, the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust occurred in Babi Yar, which is just outside of Ukraine’s capital,” Lower said.
David Crofts, a senior in history, said he was fascinated to hear that genocide could happen in Ukraine, which deemed itself as a modernized country.
“It’s kind of shocking that human nature would do that to another human being-whether it was for a racial reason or a simple reason like shoes,” Crofts said.