Survivors in Ukraine: unearthing the hidden stories of Holocaust survivors
“U
krainians are survivors,” writes Jane Kramer in her essay for photographer Stephen Shore’s new book, Survivors In Ukraine. “They have had to be. And arguably the most beleaguered of all are the country’s Jews.” Before the second world war, Ukraine had the third-largest Jewish population in Europe. By the end of the war, one and a half million had been killed by paramilitary units of the SS as they advanced though the country. In one infamous slaughter, 34,000 Jewish people and “undesirables” were killed over two days, and their bodies dumped in a ravine near Kiev called Babi Yar.
Shore’s paternal grandfather left Ukraine for America at the end of the 19th century. His wife, Ginger, having discovered the Survivor Mitzvah project encouraged Shore to travel there in search of the survivors of the horror. “She understood that my work needed to move into a more personal sphere,” he writes in his short afterword. For those familiar with Shore’s work through his two most influential series, Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, this book does indeed mark a late shift towards a more intimate style.
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Shore is known primarily as a determinedly detached chronicler of everyday American highways, motels, suburbs and signage, but Survivors In Ukraine merges landscape, observation and portraiture. Its evocation of a place and its people is made all the more powerful by the history – and the personal stories of survival – that haunt the images.
Shore has photographed 22 survivors and their surroundings. For all the weight of history that attends the project, it is a quiet book. It brims with telling details from old-fashioned household objects – stained pots and kettles, ancient family portraits, furniture and crockery – to the makeshift interiors and crumbling exteriors that speak both of endurance and of another time that is becoming history as the survivors approach the end of their lives. With his acute eye for landscape and its suggestions, he also photographs roadside market stalls, allotments, fields where goats and horses graze, and glimpses of a contemporary Ukraine where old, cobbled streets are daubed with anti-EU slogans.
Tchotchkes … memory objects invested with their own deeply personal meanings. Photograph: Stephen Shore
Throughout, the portraits of the survivors punctuate the narrative, grounding it in a deeper and more painful history. Veteran war hero Tzal Nusymovych stands in an allotment, bedecked by his military medals. Musya Moiseyevna sits on her summer-seat while around her, Shore has arranged images of her possessions: enamel portraits of her forebears, a battered metal tin, a teapot on a brightly coloured vinyl tablecloth. Many of these humble things are “tchotchkes” or memory objects invested with their own deeply personal meanings. Incredibly, a small number of Ukraine’s Jews did not flee the country during the Nazi killings, instead hiding in cellars or sheds or out in the woods, as Kramer puts it, “the way they had done through centuries of pogroms”. Most fled just ahead of the oncoming waves of slaughter.
One of the most unassuming portraits here is the first: Anna Gribun-Perlova, who stands on an anonymous road staring into Shore’s lens. She died, aged 95, before the book was completed. Kramer concentrates on her story, using the particular to illuminate the universal. She was 23 in August 1941, when her family fled the city of Kherson. A month later, the Jews who remained were shot by the Nazis, their bodies toppling into a huge pit that they had been forced to dig beforehand. Anna’s brothers joined the Russian army. Her 75-year-old father was killed when German planes bombed the road they were travelling down and she and her sisters fought off men who tried to steal their horses. They travelled on foot across the Steppes – “all yellow grass and nothing else” – to Kazakhstan, at one point drinking from a pool of red water to survive. When Gribun-Perlova returned to Ukraine after the war, she encountered people she had known who had collaborated with the Nazis and “they didn’t want us coming back”.
War hero … Tzal Nusymovych in Korsun, Cherkaska District. Photograph: Stephen Shore
Gribun-Perlova spoke to Kramer of the past and its horrors, whereas many other survivors would understandably only speak of their lives now. “But you see, we are still alive,” she told Kramer. “My son is in his seventies now and we have just celebrated his 45th wedding anniversary. It was important for me to live to see that.”
It is important, too, that Stephen Shore found and photographed Gribun-Perlova and the other Ukrainian Jewish survivors, their homes, their belongings and the landscapes in which they lived amid their often unvoiced memories. His quietly observational images speak not just of survival, but of an extraordinary individual and collective resilience. There is a sense throughout of ordinary lives lived in the shadow of great horror, of life asserting itself in the face of the abyss.
Stephen Shore: Survivors in Ukraine is published by Phaidon press