In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of
the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the
Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins
as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother's hometown
of Buchach--in former Eastern Galicia--carries him on a journey across
the region and back through history. This poignant travelogue reveals
the complete erasure of the Jews and their removal from public memory, a
blatant act of forgetting done in the service of a fiercely aggressive
Ukrainian nationalism.
Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar, discovers that to make sense of the
heartbreaking events of the war, he must first grapple with the complex
interethnic relationships and conflicts that have existed there for
centuries. Visiting twenty Ukrainian towns, he recreates the histories
of the vibrant Jewish and Polish communities who once lived there-and
describes what is left today following their brutal and complete
destruction. Bartov encounters Jewish cemeteries turned into
marketplaces, synagogues made into garbage dumps, and unmarked burial
pits from the mass killings. He bears witness to the hastily erected
monuments following Ukraine's independence in 1991, memorials that
glorify leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews.
He finds that the newly independent Ukraine-with its ethnically cleansed
and deeply anti-Semitic population--has recreated its past by
suppressing all memory of its victims.
Illustrated with dozens of hauntingly beautiful photographs from
Bartov's travels, Erased forces us to recognize the shocking intimacy
of genocide.
