Yulia Abibok

Junior Fellow (10/2022 – 08/2023)

Victims, Perpetrators and "Our Guys": Interethnic Relations and Mass Massacres in Eastern Galicia

The research is focused on Second World war events in the former powiat trembowelski (in the territory of Ternopil region in today's Ukraine). This is an attempt to look at the history of the Second World War from the perspective of members of a relatively small multicultural community. The project aims to establish the general picture of life in 1917-1945 in powiat trembowelski and then to look at the problem at the microlevel by researching and analysing several personal stories of people of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish origin from the area to demonstrate the entire complicity of relations during that period, as well as ideas and reasons behind those relations. The general idea of the research is to follow and explain individual choices of perpetrators, lifesavers as well as bystanders made in extreme circumstances which stimulated identity-based groupings and divisions. Bystanders are not regarded as an absolute and single category which is entirely opposite to both perpetrators and saviors.

Yulia Abibok, researcher (Jewish Studies) and journalist, studies Comparative History at the Central European University. Her research interests include territorial and interethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe and the (post-)Soviet space; group identity building and propaganda; social transformations, business relations and organised crime in the 1990s in post-Soviet countries.

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