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Ukraine has been independent country only since 1991. Before World War II, the bulk of modern-day Ukrainian territory—the centre, east and some of the south—fell into the USSR, while the remaining sections of western and southern Ukraine were part of Poland (Galicia, Volhynia), Czechoslovakia (Transcarpathian Ruthenia), and Romania (Bessarabia, Bukovina, "Transnistria"). As a result, the testimonies in which interviewees talk about Ukraine are in various languages and the experiences they describe differ considerably by geographic region.

Soviet Ukraine

Testimonies from witnesses growing up in USSR contain accounts of the Great Famine of 1932-33 (discussed in over 700 interviews), today often referred to as genocide, as well as the famine of 1946-47 (360 interviews).

Testimonies pertaining to central areas of Ukraine include witnesses to the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv. Many survivors of such actions went into hiding or assumed false identities. The largest ghetto of eastern Ukraine, in Kharkiv, is discussed in a number of interviews. Those who escaped the mass killings there generally fled to Soviet-controlled territory further east.

The parts of southern Ukraine that fell outside Transnistria, such as the Kherson area, are also represented in the archive. In these areas, there were many Jewish kolkhoz settlements established before the war. The Nazis operated numerous work camps during the occupation and the Organisation Todt, the German military labor contractor, was also active in the region. Most survivors from here hid or assumed false identities.

Galicia and Volhynia

The interviews relating to these regions of western and southern Ukraine - part of Poland until 1939 - include discussions of pogroms, the ghettos and camps of the region (especially Lviv), mass executions, escapes, hiding, help given by the local population, the role of the Greek Catholic Church, the Ukrainian nationalist movement and its military wing (OUN and UPA), and partisan activities.

Subcarpathian Ukraine

Around 2,400 of the archive's interviewees were born in Subcarpathian Ukraine, today part of western Ukraine (Zakarpats'ka Oblast) but before World War II part of eastern Czechoslovakia (Podkarpatská Rus province). After March 1939, the area was annexed by Hungary and was known in Hungarian as Kárpátalja. Hungarian authorities immediately enacted several anti-Jewish laws. The Hungarian army began to draft men of age into the forced labor service (Munkaszolgálat), a section of the army that performed menial and dangerous tasks on the front lines without weaponry (at least 1,700 interviews in total describe this experience). Conscripts to the forced labor battalions often avoided deportation to Auschwitz, instead being marched to camps in Germany and Austria in late 1944-early 1945.

The first deportations took place in summer 1941. Hungarian authorities expelled a large number of Jews without Hungarian citizenship to the Skala and Kolomyja area of southwestern Ukraine (prewar Poland), an event described in over 250 testimonies. In August, they handed over 23,000 of these so-called alien Jews to German and Ukrainian forces, who massacred them in Kamenets-Podol'skii.

The area experienced the full force of the Final Solution after the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944. Immediately, the Germans set about aggressively enacting the Final Solution, assisted by the Hungarian authorities and gendarmerie. Ghettos were established as early as the next month. In May 1944, Jews were being deported en masse to Auschwitz, and by that summer, the area was Judenrein.

Almost all of these interviews of witnesses born in Subcarpathian Ukraine were conducted in other parts of the world and in various languages, attesting to the widespread emigration of the surviving Jewish community from the area. The Shoah Foundation conducted 90 Russian-, Ukrainian-, and Rusyn-language testimonies with Jewish and Roma survivors remaining in what is today Zakarpats'ka oblast of Ukraine.

Transnistria

Over 3,500 of the archive's interviews are with witnesses from Transnistria, the area of Ukraine between the rivers Dnestr and Buh which was occupied by Romania during the war. Joined by Romanian Jews deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina, the local Jews were kept in often appalling conditions in ghettos, camps, and colonies, and were subject to mass execution, forced labor, and disease.

A total of 3,460 interviews were conducted in Ukraine by the Shoah Foundation; 304 interviews were conducted in the Ukrainian language and 43 in a combination of Russian and Ukrainian.

See also: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, USSR