« The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance celebrates Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.

On June 30, 1941, the Nachtigall Battalion — which entered Lviv alongside the German Wehrmacht and was commanded by Roman Shukhevych (after whom a unit of today’s Ukrainian Armed Forces is named) — marched into the city. At the same time, the political leadership of the OUN, headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, also arrived.

That very day, they proclaimed the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State — a state explicitly envisioned as politically and militarily loyal to Nazi Germany. The document declared :

“The newly emerging Ukrainian State will work closely with National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Führer Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world...

The Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army, which is being formed on Ukrainian soil, will continue to fight alongside the allied German Army against the Muscovite occupation and for the new order throughout the world.”

In other words, this planned Ukrainian puppet state was conceived as an ally and participant in the Third Reich’s criminal project.

Yet today, Ukraine’s principal state memory institution — the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, funded in part by European taxpayers — celebrates this act of collaboration with Nazi Germany as a landmark achievement in Ukrainian nation-building.

At times, it seems that under Zelenskyy’s presidency, Ukraine’s memory politics has begun to resemble Kvartal 95 — except that this is no comedy.
It is a tragic farce. » Marta Havryshko [1], 30 juin 2026

« Today, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, along with other state memory actors, politicians, and much of the media, is commemorating the proclamation of the Ukrainian puppet state on 30 June 1941.

In other words, they are commemorating collaboration with the Nazi regime and willingness to participate in its crimes.

Not a word is being said about what else began that very day : the anti-Jewish pogrom in Lviv.

Members of the OUN-controlled Lviv auxiliary police, together with local residents — including Ukrainians — took part in the violence.

They drove their Jewish neighbors through the streets, beat them, forced Jewish women to scrub the pavement with their dresses, stripped them naked, punched pregnant women in the stomach, raped them, and ultimately murdered them. According to various estimates, up to a thousand Jews were killed, while thousands more were brutalized and maimed.

“I had a friend in school, who became a communist, very active communist. A young girl. As a matter of fact beautiful red-head girl. A gang of Polish people [by this she meant local residents of Lviv, citizens of the Second Polish Republic] caught her. Cut all her hair off and naked run her down the streets, screaming. The girl went home and killed herself.”

This is how Rosa Moskowitz remembered those days.

Today, Ukraine’s political elites remain silent about the victims of those they have elevated to the status of national heroes. They remain silent about their Jewish neighbors. Just as they remain silent about their Polish neighbors.

A national memory built on silence is a fragile one. A nation that refuses to confront the crimes committed in its own name does not strengthen itself — it drifts back into the shadows from which democratic societies are meant to emerge. » Marta Havryshko, 30 juin 2026

« The Lviv Regional Council is also doing its part to commemorate collaboration with the Nazis.

Every year, it reenacts the proclamation of the so-called Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State of June 30, 1941 — a state that was meant to help Hitler build his “New Order” and contribute to the “Final Solution” of the Jewish question.

The ceremony has all the festive essentials : the red-and-black UPA flag, a portrait of the antisemite Yaroslav Stetsko, an orchestra, soldiers, priests, politicians, and, of course, children — because it’s never too early to teach that 🇺🇦collaborating with the Nazis is... “complicated.” » Marta Havryshko, 30 juin 2026

« Women Perpetrators of the 1941 Lviv Pogrom

A few years ago, I published an article on the anti-Jewish pogroms in Galicia in 1941. One section examined Ukrainian women as perpetrators. It earned me my superiors’ disapproval at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a closed-door lecture from my boss about “patriotism” and the historian’s “responsibility” in a “difficult time for the nation”. The article was published nonetheless.

It tells the story of Ukrainian women who urged their husbands to beat, murder, and rob Jews.

Women who joined the carnival-like crowds in the streets of Lviv, celebrating the violence inflicted on their Jewish neighbors.

Women who shoved Jewish women, looted their ransacked homes for the last pillows and plates, and pointed pogromists toward Jewish houses.

“There were many women among the criminals—young Ukrainian peasant women no less cruel than the men,” recalled the Lviv Jewish survivor Wilek Markiewicz.

In some cases, women proved even more relentless than their male counterparts. On July 1, 1941, on what was then Legionów Street, a mob seized the prominent Lviv lawyer Dr. Herman Allergand, his wife Zinaida, and their nine-year-old son Leon, intending to drag them to Brygidki Prison.

Along the way, Allergand — a former officer in the Polish Army — appealed to a German officer for help. The officer ordered the mob to release the family, and they obeyed.

But one Ukrainian woman refused to let them go.

She continued chasing the family through the streets. When they reached No. 20 Jagiellońska Street, where Allergand’s father lived, Zinaida begged the German guard at the entrance to let them inside. He admitted her and the child but barred her husband. The mob immediately descended on Allergand, beating and robbing him of his silver watch, hat, and money before handing him over to the Germans, who marched him to Brygidki.

The testimony does not reveal whether the woman who had pursued the family was among those who attacked him. What it makes unmistakably clear is that she was still there.

This story, like so many others, demonstrates that Ukrainian women were willing perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence during the 1941 Lviv Pogrom. Their brutality fits the heroic national narrative even less comfortably than that of their male counterparts.

Yet these stories must be told — for the sake of their victims and for the sake of the democratic future of Ukraine’s multicultural nation. A society that refuses to confront the crimes committed in its name cannot build an honest or inclusive future.

More on women in pogroms in my article in the comments. » Marta Havryshko, 1er juillet 2026

« The Brutalization of Jewish Women and Girls during the Lviv Pogrom, 1941

As Ukrainian memory actors remain silent about the 1941 Lviv Pogrom—choosing instead to celebrate the OUN and its collaboration with Nazi Germany—I will speak.

The 1941 Lviv Pogrom was saturated with public sexual violence against Jewish women and girls. In some photographs, women are completely naked ; in others, their clothes hang in tatters.

One of the iconic images of the pogrom captures a young woman wearing nothing but her underwear and stockings. Terrified, she sprints down the street, desperately trying to escape the mob. Among her pursuers are even young boys armed with sticks and stones.

Other photographs show pogromists forcing women to undress—or tearing off their clothes themselves.

The stripping of Jewish women was not a fleeting act of humiliation. For hours, groups of local non-Jewish men and boys, under the silent gaze and tacit approval of their women, kept naked Jewish girls and women captive in public spaces. They groped their bodies, beat them with their fists and improvised weapons, showering them with jeers and abuse. Some blows were so severe that the bruises are clearly visible in surviving photographs.

The attackers mocked their victims, pulled grotesque faces, pressed the women against their bodies, yanked their hair, and shoved them from one assailant to another.

The perpetrators deliberately marched their captives through the streets. Public humiliation was the point. The more witnesses, the greater the spectacle of domination.

The Polish writer Tadeusz Zaderecki, then living in Lviv, recalled seeing a gang seize an "elegant" and "exceptionally beautiful" Jewish woman of about twenty on Sixtuska Street. They tore off her dress and underwear, inserted a whip into her vagina, and, laughing as they beat her, forced her to march past the Main Post Office, likely toward Brygidki prison on Łąckiego Street. Zaderecki stressed that this was far from an isolated atrocity : there were "many" such cases.

Pregnant Jewish women constituted another particularly vulnerable group during the 1941 Lviv Pogrom. They, too, were stripped naked, driven through the streets, beaten, and forced into brutal physical labor as a form of punishment and sadistic abuse. Ludwika Barb, a survivor of the pogrom, recalled :

"There was a prison on Łąckiego Street. It was full of corpses. The Germans seized Jews to clear away the bodies. They pulled Jews out of the queues. Before my eyes they dragged out a pregnant woman and began trampling her on the cobblestones. She miscarried and died."

In the eyes of many Ukrainians—and of the OUN members among the local perpetrators—this carnival of sexualized violence was meant not only to humiliate Jewish women but to punish the entire Jewish community for its alleged "crimes" against the Ukrainian nation. These women and girls became targets of hatred and militant ethnonationalism.

That same ethnonationalism is once again flourishing in Ukraine today. It proclaims its own innocence while claiming the right to determine the fate of its neighbors—even through the most brutal forms of violence. » Marta Havryshko, 1er juillet 2026

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