Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

The historian Bernard Wasserstein is admired as a rigorous academic. In his monumental work on the Holocaust and his perceptive study of barbarism vs civilisation in the West, he strove for objectivity and maintained a professorial tone, as if writing of the past from an Olympian height.

Wasserstein’s grandparents and aunt were forced to dig their own graves, and were then shot

Not so in this extraordinarily moving book about Krakowiec, the shtetl 40 miles from Lviv where his forebears lived for generations, and the role his family played there. At various times part of Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Soviet Russia, it was, he says, ‘a small place you’ve never heard of’. Yet its complex history is relevant today, as war returns to Eastern Europe.

Wasserstein’s grandparents, whom he never knew, lived and died in Krakowiec. Their fates were hardly ever mentioned while he was growing up in provincial England with his refugee parents – or, if they were, only in hushed tones. Now 75, he did not set foot in the town until his mid-forties; ‘yet throughout my youth I dreamt of this almost unmentionable, and therefore all the more mysterious, ancestral hearth.’

Though he has been thinking about the story and researching it for decades, the writing feels immediate. The book is part memoir, part history lesson about ‘old Europe’ as a battleground between four empires, and part lament for the lost world of European Jewry. Perhaps the most valuable thing about it for British readers is its reminder of how lucky we are to have welcomed refugees to our shores and not to have exported them. Wasserstein has a deep understanding of places where borders have violently changed every couple of generations and whole populations have been massacred as a result of ideology, religion or whim.