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(JTA) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s great-grandparents died when the Nazis burned their village, he mentioned in an interview on CNN Monday.
Talking by way of a translator with Fareed Zakaria, Zelensky mentioned, as he has many occasions earlier than, that his grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers all entered the Soviet Purple Military, and solely his grandfather survived.
He additionally supplied particulars about what occurred to his grandfather’s mother and father that haven’t beforehand been reported in English.
“His father and his mom had been killed in a horrible fireplace. The Nazis set ablaze your complete village the place they lived and the place my grandfather was born,” he mentioned.
Zelensky didn’t title the village. However massacres by fireplace had been a part of the Nazi military’s playbook in Ukrainian territory and elsewhere. In a single well-known case, the village of Koryukovka was burned in 1943 after its residents had been shot in retaliation for partisan exercise based mostly there; the Jews of Koryukovka had largely been deported and murdered already.
Zelensky additionally didn’t point out the Holocaust or the truth that his grandparents had been Jewish, at the same time as Zakaria requested him to touch upon Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “denazification” agenda as “any person who’s of Jewish descent.” As a substitute, he talked about “the struggle.”
“When Russians are telling about neo-Nazis they usually flip to me,” he mentioned, “I simply reply that I’ve misplaced my total household within the struggle as a result of all of them had been exterminated throughout World Conflict II.”
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Jews from the previous Soviet Union mentioned Zelensky’s method of talking about his household historical past was not stunning.
“Soviet coverage after the struggle was one narrative: the Soviet folks suffered tremendously. The federal government wouldn’t acknowledge that the Nazis focused the Jews particularly for extermination. They punished Soviet Jews who didn’t toe the get together line,” Alex Zeldin, who was born within the Soviet Union and goes by Jewish Wonk on-line, wrote in a Twitter thread that has been shared thousands of times.
“Because of Soviet persecution and limiting the distribution of details about the Holocaust, later generations of Soviet Jews got here to know their household historical past as a part of the struggle, even when it didn’t sound like different experiences (e.g., why did Jews have to cover?),” he added.
Zelensky’s interview with Zakaria — wherein he relayed that he has “distant family members” in the USA, Poland and Israel — got here a day after he addressed Israeli lawmakers, a few of whom had been rankled by Zelensky’s characterization of Ukrainians as having saved Jews throughout the Holocaust.
Whereas 2,673 Ukrainians have been acknowledged by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, for his or her efforts to avoid wasting Jews, Ukraine was additionally the location of notable collaboration between locals and their Nazi occupiers within the effort to homicide Jews.
Zelensky’s speech mirrored his technique of devising pleas for help which can be tailor-made to every of the international locations he addresses. Each Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Overseas Minister Yair Lapid indicated that whereas they didn’t agree with Zelensky’s characterization of Holocaust historical past, additionally they had been ready to chop him slack due to the determined state of affairs his nation faces.
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