The personalities and the space of memory about the holocaust in a modern Ukrainian literature

The Holocaust theme was concealed and falsified for a long time because of non-literary reasons. Therefore, only when our country got its independence, a lot of aspects became clarified – especially the increasing of geographical markers of the Shoah, the aspect of memory and traumas of its victims and witnesses, the aspects of a woman history of the Holocaust etc. One of actual problems of nowadays is the problem of personalization of the Holocaust history with including the names of victims, saved and saviors for extending the space of memory about the tragedy of European Jews in the times of WWII. Literature, as well as historical science and commemorative practices, actively participates in this. The object of our attention in the following article is modern Ukrainian prose – novels “Sonya” (2013) by K. Babkina, “Me, You, And Our Drawn And Undrawn God” (2016) by T. Pakhomova, “A Story Worthy of a Whole Apple Orchard” (2017) by M. Dupeshko, “The Beech Land” (2019) by M. Matios. The aim of investigation is the characters of victims and saviors who have real prototypes: an icon of the Holocaust in Poland and Liublin, 9-years-old Henio (Henryk Zhytomirski), Righteous Among the Nations Maria and Stepan Vrublevski (Maria and Stepan Sichevliuk-Vrublevski), the Chernivtsi poet Selma Meerbaum- Eisinger, the mayor of Chernivtsi Traian Popovici, the diplomats Grzegorz Szymonowicz and Fritz Schellhorn. Implementation the life stories of real personalities into fictional form leads to expanding the memory about the Holocaust in Ukraine, and it’s also a way of creating a modern culture of memory, that is particularly important in a context of the international tendencies of finding the common understanding through awareness of a personal responsibility of others’ lives, and non-admission of repeating the tragic pages of the XX ct. history, one of those was the Holocaust. Since the long-term silence of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust victims didn’t create an intergenerational connection in the process of transmitting the memory of the Holocaust, modern literature, with its artistic construction of the past, becomes not only a tool for spreading knowledge about the Shoah, but also a way of creating the cultural memory about this tragedy. The prospect of further research of the following aspect is seen in a deep analysis of new examples of both Ukrainian and translated literature, including novels written by authors that are biographically related to Ukraine.