Ukrainians in French Holocaust Literature: Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the representational strategies used by Piotr Rawicz and Jonathan Littell in their Holocaust novels. Separated by 40 years, Le Sang du ciel (1961) (Blood from the Sky) and Les Bienveillantes (2006) (The Kindly Ones) differ in terms of structure, style, and point of view. The article examines the import of these strategies for the way Rawicz’s and Littell’s narratives portray Ukrainians. Its main contention is that, while casting Ukrainians primarily as complicitous in the Holocaust, the two novels frame their complicity with Ukraine’s wartime hopes for sovereignty which it hoped to achieve through collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. By foregrounding Ukraine’s protracted statelessness, oppression by Russia (and later the Soviet Union), and exploitation by Polish landowning gentry, the two novels succeed at offering a nuanced view of Ukrainians without, however, redeeming them.

Keywords

• jonathan littell
• piotr rawicz
• ukrainians
• ukraine
• holocaust by bullets
• communal genocide