Ukrainian Holocaust survivor: Hitler wanted to kill me as a Jew. Putin is trying to kill me because I’m Ukrainian

A new ‘Military history of Russia’ school textbook presents Russia as “defending peace throughout the world” and claims that its war of aggression against Ukraine was forced upon it by a western-backed “neo-Nazi coup” in Kyiv.  The textbook, which tries to compare Russia’s war against Ukraine with the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany in World War II,  was presented in Moscow on 27 January, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz   Russia had not been invited because of its aggression against Ukraine, but that aggression was very much the theme of one of the most moving addresses, given by Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivor Roman Schwarzman. 

Addressing Germany’s Bundestag, 88-year-old Schwarzman called upon the MPs to do more to help Ukraine fight this “new war of extermination.”   “Back then Hitler wanted to kill me because I am Jewish.  Now Putin wants to kill me because I am a Ukrainian.”   He had escaped extermination once, he said. “Now I am an old man and must again live with the fear that my children and grandchildren could fall victim to a war of extermination.”

Roman Schwarzman had miraculously survived the “Russian terror” of a missile on his home in Odesa in December 2023.  96-year-old Boris Romantschenko, who had survived four Nazi concentration camps, did not.  He was killed on 18 March 2022, when Russia bombed his apartment block in Kharkiv.  Vanda Obiedkova had been ten years old in 1941, when the Nazis invaded Mariupol and came for the Jews, including her mother.  Vanda escaped, initially by hiding in a basement.  She died 81 years later, on 4 April 2022, in a bitterly cold Mariupol basement, where she and her family were forced to seek shelter from Russian bombs. 

Roman Schwarzman, as Head of the Odesa Regional Association of Former Jewish Ghetto and Concentration Camp Prisoners and other Ukrainian and world Jewish figures came out with strong statements in 2022 condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia’s aggression was aimed at the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine.  Those who have survived Russian bombing would doubtless be as angered by the lies and “hallucinations” in the new ‘Military history of Russia’, especially the third volume for senior grades at school.  

It is this third volume that gives children an entirely distorted view of all contemporary events, including Russia’s war against Georgia.  Some sections may well prove embarrassing for the current Russian regime, such as the pages trying to justify its military aggression on the side of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 

With respect to the claims about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, stubbornly referred to as ‘the special military operation’, there is little that is truly new.  Moscow has long tried to claim that it was ‘forced’ to invade and that it was all the fault of NATO and the West supporting what it refers to as “a fascist coup in Kyiv”.  

The ‘textbook’ does, however, reflect a further, very dangerous, trend, namely Russia’s increasingly aggressive militarization of childhood and glorification of its army.  The section leading into Russia’s claims about its war against Ukraine is entitled “to defend peace throughout the world” [sic] and asserts that Russia’s so-called ‘special military operation’ was designed to “defend the population of Donbas and Novorossiya”, with this, it is asserted, demonstrating the importance of a strong and military ready army. 

There are other adaptations to the earlier fiction, such as the addition of ‘Novorossiya’.  Although Russian leader Vladimir Putin first used this term in April 2014, the claim earlier was always that Russia needed ‘to protect’ the Russian or Russian-speaking population of Crimea and Donbas.  That changed with its territorial encroachments and seizure of territory, especially in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

The three-volume ‘textbook’ was presented by its editor Vladimir Medinsky, a close aide to Putin and head of the Russian Military History Society.  The latter, whose ‘historians’ have written this book, was created by President Putin in December 2012, in order to “consolidate the forces of state and society in the study of Russia’s military-historical past and counter efforts to distort it”. 

All three books have been developed to closely follow the school curriculum, however the books themselves are supplementary reading, as opposed to the ‘history textbook’ rushed into print in 2023.  The latter also effectively claims that Ukraine began the war against Russia.

It is tempting to quote entire paragraphs where, literally, nothing is true.  Where, for example, it is claimed, without It has always been asserted, without a shred of evidence, that there were “mass killings by Ukrainian nationalists of people who disagreed with the policies of the Kyiv authorities”.  The problems, however, are manyfold.  From 2014, , Russia was spending vast amounts of money on a propaganda machine aimed at pushing its particular narrative and distorting the facts.  It is likely, for example, that the plan in Odesa on 2 May 2014 was to provoke riots which could then be used to trigger the kind of military seizures as in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.  When Odesa did not fall like the next domino, the propaganda machine leapt into action, claiming that a tragic fire that killed 42 people, most of them pro-Russian activists, had been a ‘massacre’.   

Worth noting also that the speakers on Russian state propaganda channels often use such propaganda stamps and the arguments about Russia being ‘forced’ to invade Ukraine, while adding a chilling Nazi level of argumentation.  On one such program, after Russia had bombed the centre of Odesa, Igor Markov claimed that they had “had no choice”. The territory which modern Ukraine occupies, from the point of view of security, is territory that is critically needed for the security of the Russian Federation.

If the lies and manipulation are dangerous with respect to adults, how much more so in the case of schoolkids. Children who have never received any other information, will not have any way of understanding that they are being fed lies. And, like in Soviet times, even if they do understand, they will at very least, fail their matriculation exams unless they repeat the lies.  At worst, they could end up imprisoned, accused of ‘spreading military fakes’ or ‘discrediting the Russian armed forces.’