Archives and Collections in Jeopardy: Saving Ukraine’s Historical Record
Three days before war broke out, Museum contractor Kyrylo Vyslobokov had finished a two-year project to digitize archival documents from Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine that is currently occupied by the Russian army.
He brought the material to his office in Kyiv, but on the day he intended to mail it to Vadim Altskan at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Russia invaded Ukraine. Vyslobokov went to his office to collect irreplaceable items, including the hard drives containing digital copies of Kherson archival documents.
He called Altskan that day, while sirens blared in the background. “He told me ‘I’m running to the shelter. Don’t worry, I’m taking with me the hard drives,’” said Altskan, who is a senior project director in International Archival Programs and was born in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).
Altskan told Vyslobokov he could leave the hard drives behind, but he wouldn’t, saying, “You never know.” As soon as he is able, Vyslobokov will mail the hard drives to Washington, DC. Depending on whether the original materials survive the war, the digital files could contain the only copy of historical records and archival collections related to the history of Kherson’s Jewish communities before, during, and immediately after World War II.
At the Museum, they will be added to a large collection of items from Ukraine, including approximately 14 million pages of documents, as well as photographs, historical film footage, survivor and eyewitness testimony, and more.
“All this material is available to scholars, a general audience, or to anyone searching for any information,” Altskan explained. “People can see what was happening … in Ukraine in 1941. You would be surprised by similarities of what is happening on the ground today. Havoc on the roads, explosions, suffering of civilians.”
During the Holocaust, at least 1.5 million Jews were killed in Ukraine. Like many of his Jewish Ukrainian peers, Altskan learned about the Holocaust and his family members who were killed by looking at family albums and noticing people he’d never met. “I’d point them out and ask my parents, and my grandparents who at that time were still alive, to explain what happened.”
Speaking about World War II was not taboo, but the Holocaust didn’t exist as a subject in the Soviet Union, because all victims — Jewish and non-Jewish — were considered “victims of fascism.”
A Three-Decade Effort
In 1992, Altskan, who trained as a historian and researcher in Ukraine and Russia, immigrated to the United States and joined the Museum’s staff shortly thereafter. He began traveling on behalf of the Museum in 1994 to former Soviet Union countries to seek access to archives.
“After the war, for many years Soviet archives weren’t available to Western scholars. The opening of these archives opened another chapter in the history of the Holocaust. It was a missing link between German documents and documents from other countries.”
Altskan and his Museum colleagues found an openness in Ukraine greater than that of most former Soviet countries. Since 1991 in Ukraine, the Museum has copied 14 million pages of documents from more than 20 archives and built a collection of 246 oral history interviews, which are part of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, one of the largest and most diverse collections of Holocaust testimonies in the world.
After the destruction wrecked by Russia’s invasion, parts of Ukraine’s Holocaust and Jewish history might only exist in the Museum’s collection.
While the war continues, the Museum has put on hold its projects to digitize or survey selected records and collections in the state archives of the Zaporizhzhia region and the Kharkiv region. Altskan is in touch daily with friends, colleagues, and contractors in the country.
