Wednesday, 18. January 2023, 18:00 - 20:00

Institute for Eastern European History, Spitalgasse 2/Court 3, Seminarraum des IOG, 1090 Vienna

VWI goes to University of Vienna – Institute for Eastern European History

This talk explores the history of atrocities committed during the Second World War in the Polish-Ukrainian borderland from local and personal perspectives of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. The research is focused on the events during the Second World War in the former powiat trembowelski in the territory of the Ternopil region in today's Ukraine. Yulia Abibok aims to reconstruct the general picture of life from 1917 to 1945 in towns and villages of the powiat by researching and analysing several personal stories of people of Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish origin from this area to demonstrate the entire complicity of inter-ethnic relations, as well as ideas and reasons behind the behavioral choices being made in 1939-1945. The general idea of the research is to follow and explain individual choices of perpetrators, lifesavers as well as bystanders, that were made in extreme circumstances, which stimulated identity-based groupings and divisions. Started in 2016 as a series of reporting trips to the area, the research is based on a variety of sources, from gravestones, memorial plaque inscriptions to oral interviews, newspaper articles, unpublished family memoirs, criminal records of kaleidoscopically changing powers and eyewitness accounts in Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish.

Commented by Christoph Augustynowicz

Yulia Abibok, VWI Junior Fellow, researcher (Media Studies, 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.

Christoph Augustynowicz is an Associate Professor and head of the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna. His research interests include Galician-Polish borderland studies, social history of Poland(-Lithuania) with special reference to Jews, and images and stereotypes of Eastern Europe.

Illustration: memorial site for the murdered Jews who were held in Trembowla/Terebovlya ghetto © Yulia Abibok

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