I listened to @ZelenskyyUa's interview with @FareedZakaria on CNN. Fareed asked Zelensky about his family's history during the Holocaust, and it's so very clear to me that he has a Soviet understanding of that period. Which is to say, incomplete.

I don't know how well understood this is in the West, but there's a reason why nearly all your media depictions of the Holocaust are what they are. It was the stories of people who survived and made it West of the Iron Curtain after the war.

Soviet policy after the war was one narrative: the Soviet people suffered greatly. The government would not acknowledge that the Nazis targeted the Jews specifically for extermination. They punished Soviet Jews who did not toe the party line.

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had raised funds in the West on behalf of the Soviet government during the war, spent the last years of the war documenting Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews. They were executed by Stalin. Here's a good intro:
yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/jewish_anti-fascist_committee

Soviet state policy did not permit depictions of the Holocaust. The Jews who survived it lacked the framework to discuss it, and were punished even for trying to honor their loved ones who were murdered by the Nazis.

As a result of Soviet persecution and limiting the distribution of information about the Holocaust, later generations of Soviet Jews came to understand their family history as part of the war, even if it didn't sound like other experiences.

(e.g., why did Jews have to hide?)

I can tell you in my own family that people who survived the Nazis did not think of themselves as Holocaust survivors... They began to see western depictions of the Holocaust in the 90s. None of them ever saw a camp. They survived the Holocaust by bullets
www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/VEFBBABIYAR0921

Zelensky in this interview on CNN talks about his family members who died during the Holocaust, but he talks about them in the context of the war!

He doesn't talk about genocide.

He talks about his father being the only one to survive *the war.*

I bring this all up because yesterday Zelensky made an appeal to Israel and invoked that era in a way that does not comport with Israeli or Western Jewish understanding of the Holocaust, which is to say, an educated one.

I learned this history in college in the United States. I learned the mechanics of the Holocaust. The logistics. The intellectual framework driving the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Most people, even Jews, don't learn it that way. Zelensky expressed what he knew.

I'm not surprised, but I continue to be disappointed, by people who do not know the history of Soviet Jews getting angry at Soviet Jews for not knowing history the way they do. All most of us had were family stories told quietly in private.

So if you're a Jew reading this and you're getting uncomfortable with how Zelensky invokes the history of the Holocaust - please cut him some slack. He's fighting a war, he can get a Jewish studies degree when they beat back the fascist invaders.

One correction to the thread. Zelensky's *grandfather* fought in WW2 and it was his grandfather whose family died in the Holocaust. My apologies for the mistake! This is why writers rely on editors at publications.