The author is a professor of European history at Brown. The book is a travelogue through the towns of Jewish Galicia in what is now the Western Ukraine, prompted or inspired by the author's Mother's hometown, Buchach. He shows us around these relatively impoverished small towns with the purpose of indicating what remains of the Jews who lived there, how they have been forgotten, and how the local history has been written to emphasize Ukrainian nationalism. This is, of course, what most folk-history is - ask one of my neighbors who the Lenape were, where they lived and what happened to them. That aside, I enjoyed his travelogue and pictures from my ancestors' world that has vanished.

(To summarize the "true" history - the towns were Jewish, Ukrainian and Polish. The inhabitants probably got along to some degree unless there were external destabilizing circumstances. These circumstances were common in the 19th and 20th centuries. So, when the Soviets came, the Ukrainian nationalists were tortured and killed; then the Nazis came and the Poles and Ukrainians helped them torture and kill the Jews; when the Jews were gone the Ukrainians tortured and killed the Poles; then the Soviets came back and the Ukrainians were tortured and killed again. Now they are free Ukrainians and they skip the parts where they don't look so good.) ( )

In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother’s hometown of Buchach — in former Eastern Galicia — carries him on a journey across the region and back through history. This poignant travelogue reveals the complete erasure of the Jews and their removal from public memory, a blatant act of forgetting done in the service of a fiercely aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.

Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar, discovers that to make sense of the heartbreaking events of the war, he must first grapple with the complex interethnic relationships and conflicts that have existed there for centuries. Visiting twenty Ukrainian towns, he recreates the histories of the vibrant Jewish and Polish communities who once lived there-and describes what is left today following their brutal and complete destruction. Bartov encounters Jewish cemeteries turned into marketplaces, synagogues made into garbage dumps, and unmarked burial pits from the mass killings. He bears witness to the hastily erected monuments following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, memorials that glorify leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews. He finds that the newly independent Ukraine-with its ethnically cleansed and deeply anti-Semitic population — has recreated its past by suppressing all memory of its victims.

Illustrated with dozens of hauntingly beautiful photographs from Bartov’s travels, Erased forces us to recognize the shocking intimacy of genocide.

Source: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691131214/erased ( )