Bernard-Henri Lévy
Tablet, Mar. 13, 2022
Among the most disgraceful words Vladimir Putin has uttered since he began this war are his calls to “denazify” Ukraine.
Because this story is far from finished, and because we can always count on the Kremlin’s media outlets and networks to promote any piece of fake news, I want to clear some things up here.
Yes, Ukraine has pogroms in its past, just as Poland and Russia do.
Yes, some extreme nationalists in Ukraine allied themselves with Hitler against Stalin in 1941.
And I am too familiar with the works of Father Patrick Desbois, the French priest and founder of Yahad-In Unum, an organization that locates the sites of mass graves of Jews in Ukraine and surrounding countries, to underestimate the scale, from Kyiv to Lviv and beyond, of the pinnacle of abomination that was the Holocaust by bullets.
But the truth is that this land of crimes and blood was also home to one of the world’s largest cohorts of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Translated from the French by Steven B. Kennedy.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and author of more than 30 books including The Genius of Judaism, American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and The Empire and the Five Kings. His new book, The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope, was published on October 25, 2021 by Yale University Press.
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