The story of Vitaly, Evheny and Kateryna Kovalenko growing during the 1930s famines in the Ukraine and their involvement with the Nazis during WWII was always going to be a controversial book. That Vitaly was a guard at the Treblinka death camp and that Evheny was involved in the massacre at Babii-Yar was going to make it even more so.
The author, a 22 year old young woman called Helen Demidenko said that her novel was based on the oral history that she heard from her Ukrainian family particularly her father, an illiterate taxi driver. Her father had experienced the terrible privations visited on the Ukrainians during the artificially induced famines in the Ukraine during the 1930s by the Russians. The Ukrainian characters of the book blamed this on "Jewish Bolsheviks".
The main character of the novel is Fiona Kovalenko, the Australian born daughter of Evheny Kovalenko and his Irish-Australian wife. Fiona discovers by accident that her father, uncle and aunt were involved with the murders of Jews in the Ukraine and Poland. Her uncle, Vitaly, is to be charged under the Australian War Crimes Act but dies before this happens.
The book is not a comfortable read. The characters are at times very unpleasant and a lot of the events described in the book are horrible as would you expect in a book about the Holocaust. But the characters are not all bad, they are presented as ordinary people who do the ordinary things like fall in love and get married, have children. But they have been formed and deformed by the terrible experiences of their early lives.
It is true that until recent times very little was known about the artificial famines in the Ukraine that killed many millions of people. I knew about this because of growing up with Ukrainian friends, but it was not generally known.
Why do ordinary people become monsters and do the most dreadful things? Is it because of dreadful things that were done to them? The book says "The brothers Kovalenko and their comrades - Nikolai and Shura - did not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better. They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages".
Was it really Jewish Bolsheviks who were responsible for what happened in the Ukraine? Certainly some Ukrainians thought so and the characters in the book think so. There were Jewish communists in the Ukraine and Russian at that time, this is known, but they were only a minority, but the anti-semitism that already existed in the Ukraine made sure that those few were blamed for everything.
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