(Jewish Group) Zelensky offers new details about his family's Holocaust history, igniting debate...

[Behind the Aegis]

Zelensky offers new details about his family’s Holocaust history, igniting debate over Ukrainian Holocaust memory

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s great-grandparents died when the Nazis burned their village, he said in an interview on CNN Monday.

Speaking through a translator with Fareed Zakaria, Zelensky said, as he has many times before, that his grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers all entered the Soviet Red Army, and only his grandfather survived.

He also offered details about what happened to his grandfather’s parents that have not previously been reported in English.

“His father and his mother were killed in a terrible fire. The Nazis set ablaze the entire village where they lived and where my grandfather was born,” he said.

Zelensky did not name the village. But massacres by fire were part of the Nazi army’s playbook in Ukrainian territory and elsewhere. In one well known case, the village of Koryukovka was burned in 1943 after its residents were shot in retaliation for partisan activity based there; the Jews of Koryukovka had largely been deported and murdered already.

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