Yuriy Skira talks about Lviv's "life-saving factory" during the Holocaust

In 2024, Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize was awarded in the nonfiction category and went to Yuriy Skira for his book Solid. The Life-Saving Footwear Factory, recently published by the Lviv-based Choven publishing house. The book tells the story of an enterprise near Rynok Square in Lviv, which operated during the Holocaust and served as a hiding place for Jews. This happened with the blessing of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the efforts of the Studite Brethren of the Greek Catholic Church. Curiously, the factory was headed by hieromonk John (Josef Peters, 1905-1995), an ethnic German who came to Galicia as an adult and accepted the Eastern Rite. Thus, Solid has an exciting historical plot combining tragedy and heroism, compassion for one's neighbor, and opposition to an anti-human regime.

Yuriy Skira has discussed with Chytomo his work and the complex tangle of interactions and contradictions that defined Galicia in the first half of the 20th century.

You have a very specific field of interest as a historian. In 2018, you defended your PhD thesis on the role of Studite monks in rescuing Jews in the Lviv region under German occupation. This story is about the events during the Holocaust and interactions between Christians and Jews, Ukrainians and Jews. How did you come to the realization that you wanted to research this particular topic?

As a fresh graduate with a history degree from Lviv National University, I really wanted to go into research. I defended my master's thesis and was thinking about which PhD program to choose, but I didn't have a clue about the topic. It had to be something interesting for me. My supervisor, the now-late Dr. Modest Chorny of Lviv National University, said that choosing a topic for a dissertation was a crucial step. It's like marriage — you do it once and for life.

I went to various educational institutions but did not find their offers appealing. I then thought I was still interested in theology and enrolled in the master's program of ecumenical sciences at the Ukrainian Catholic University. After about a year, I found myself at an event talking to scholars, and one of them told me that it would be a good idea to research how Greek Catholic priests and monks rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Somehow, I was deeply moved by this suggestion and started studying this issue.

Initially, I wanted to limit myself to the figure of hieromartyr Klymentiy Sheptytsky, the brother of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, but quickly realized that this was too narrow of a focus. I then had an idea to research Studite monks, their community, their reactions to Holocaust events, the behavioral strategies they chose, and so on. Thus, I came to a point when I was ready to write a dissertation.

I took it up with great research enthusiasm, writing and defending my thesis ahead of schedule. A year later, my first monograph Beckoned: Studite Monks and the Holocaust (Dukh i Litera, 2019), was published.

This text was shortlisted for the Encounter prize in 2021, and your next award-winning book, Solid. The Life-Saving Footwear Factory, continues this topic.

After the monograph's publication, there was a crisis moment when I faced the question: What's next? The first thing that came to my mind was to study the reaction and behavioral strategies of the Greek Catholic nuns in Galicia. I even started collecting documents, going to archives, and grouping information, but it somehow didn't work out for me. After a short while, as I corresponded with my colleague Andrii Usach from UCU, we spoke about Rev. Peters and the Solid factory. This rekindled my research interest, and I started working on this topic.

When you start collecting materials, you reach a point after a while when you realize that this is no longer an article and not yet a book. This is where Yad Vashem played a crucial role in my case. I found out that the testimony of the Fink family, which hid in that shoe factory, was kept in this institution. I asked Yad Vashem to send me a copy, and they obliged. When I read the testimony, I realized we finally had concrete people with their stories. Before that, we had a lot of information about the rescuers but very little about the Jews hiding at the factory. So, with the Fink family's testimony, the book had two full-fledged lungs. It could breathe, so I continued writing and finished it after some time.

Let me emphasize once again that I found the process fascinating: you get to discover materials highlighting the story from various angles and meet very different people. I am happy to have met the descendants of the factory workers and people who helped the Studite monks there. They now live in the United States and Canada, but not all have left. Some live in Lviv, such as Dr. Oleksandr Kitsera, professor at the Lviv National Medical University.

I've seen quite a few reviews of Solid that compare the shoe factory plot to Schindler's factory, and we know how ingrained its image is in popular culture thanks to Steven Spielberg's wildly successful film Schindler's List. How do you feel about such parallels? Do these cases really have something in common?

The Solid factory is interesting because the stories of people involved include various experiences, different behavioral strategies, and reactions to the atrocities happening at the time. If you compare it with Schindler's enterprise in Kraków, the first thing that stands out is a difference in scale. Solid was a tiny enterprise. When I take people on a tour to Shevska Street in Lviv and come to the building that housed it, they are shocked by its small size. It is a three-story stone building (very nicely depicted on the cover of my book), so typical of Lviv in the 17th and 18th centuries. Still, a shoe factory operated there until the end of the German occupation.

As far as commonalities are concerned, both enterprises were run by Germans. However, our Rev. John (Peters) had a very different life from that of Schindler. Peters symbolizes Western Europe's interest in the Christian East and its culture, traditions, and rituals at the turn of the century. He developed this kind of interest from a young age, which is why he became a Studite monk and later a Greek Catholic priest.

It had to be difficult for non-Germans to run companies under Nazi occupation in the 1940s. Meanwhile, a German converting to the Eastern Rite was quite an uncommon phenomenon, especially if he was not born locally.

Peters was unique in that he came from a Roman Catholic family in Western Germany and actually had a very deep priestly vocation. Even in his youth, he dreamed of being a priest — in the Eastern Church rather than the Roman Catholic one.

In the 1930s, Peters met Ukrainian seminarians who studied in Munich. They introduced him to the Ukrainian culture and the Greek Catholic Church, headed by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. He became deeply interested and immediately decided to go to Galicia. When Peters met with the metropolitan, he was impressed by the latter's figure — the head of an entire church received him, a student he was unfamiliar with, to discuss complex theological and church issues. Peters was so shocked (in the positive sense of the word) that he confided in Sheptytsky that he wanted to be a priest in the Eastern Church. Peters then met with the Studite monks in Univ. He was given a warm welcome, after which he decided to take some time to think and returned to Munich.

After a short while, Peters made the final decision to become a Studite monk. He returned to Lviv, stayed with Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky for a week, and then went to the Univ Holy Dormition Lavra, where he became a novice and got to know the people who would be his closest friends for the rest of his life.

In 1937, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky ordained him a priest, and he took John as his monastic name. The following year, he became the abbot of the Josaphat monastery in Lviv, a major intellectual center of our Greek Catholic Church. It housed a vast library on Byzantine studies, attracting researchers from different countries.

A Greek-Catholic priest who is an ethnic German and heads an enterprise in Lviv used to rescue Jews — this wording alone points to an intersection of cultures, ethnicities, and religions. And where there is an encounter, there will always be interaction. The Solid factory showcased solidarity in extreme conditions, but what was this coexistence like in peacetime?

For centuries, different peoples — Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Armenians, etc. — lived side by side in Galicia. It was quite a multiethnic region. First, Ukrainian-Polish relations were extremely difficult. After all, Galicia was the cradle of national revival for both Ukrainians and Poles. On the other hand, looking at the ecclesiastical field, we see that the Austrian period provided many opportunities for normal coexistence. For example, Lviv University had a robust theological faculty that employed both Ukrainian and Polish professors, and they found a common language within this faculty. Of course, these were difficult to defend, but it was possible to coexist, which was crucial. The situation worsened in interwar Poland. Tellingly, all Ukrainian departments at Lviv University were closed in 1919. There were also tensions between the Roman and Greek Catholic churches, and their relations were strained during the interwar period.

I am often asked whether Polish and Ukrainian monks or nuns jointly rescued Jews or helped each other during the Second World War. I reply that I haven't found any evidence of this so far. For example, there were Polish and Ukrainian nuns in Berezhany, and there was practically no contact between them. They didn't know what the others did or what happened in their lives, even though their cloisters were in a small town.

Lviv is an interesting case study regarding relations between Greek Catholic Church members and the Galician Jews are concerned. They became closer between Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the Jewish intelligentsia in the first half of the 20th century. Sheptytsky donated to the Jewish hospital, Beth Holim, and was open to Jews who approached him with various requests. In one vivid case, Léopold Kretz, who eventually became an outstanding artist and sculptor, applied to Sheptytsky for a scholarship and received one. In the 1930s, members of the Progressive Synagogue, which stood in what is now Old Market Square in downtown Lviv, came to Metropolitan Sheptytsky to convey their greetings on anniversaries and memorable dates. Those were essential moments in building connections and dialogue.

Sheptytsky's plan to create a Judeo-Christian community in Lviv was the last of such cases. The community was nearly fully developed, but the Second World War ended this drive. Rev. Ivan Kotiv, a fluent Yiddish speaker, was to take care of this community. Remarkably, he was one of the main actors in Sheptytsky's initiative to rescue Jews, saving many lives.

I like such examples because they clearly highlight the problem of mythologized distortions of history. These are stories about real Ukrainians and Jews, which undermine Soviet propaganda narratives drilled into our heads that there was nothing but conflict between us. Do you feel that any changes of this kind are also taking place in the academic environment? Are the approaches to interpreting complex history pages changing?

The development of Holocaust research in Ukraine can be divided into three periods. The first two were in the 1990s, when layers of distortions built up during Soviet times were scraped away, and the first dissertations on the topic began to appear. We are now in the third period, marked by the publication of diverse regional studies, which is exciting as this topic is being researched in an extremely dynamic fashion in modern Ukraine. We already have an entire constellation of researchers from across the country who engage with Holocaust history. The spectrum of research is vast and will only grow in the future.

These researchers of Holocaust history in Ukraine are mostly very young, aged 30-35. They are involved in international research processes and have established contacts and cooperation partnerships with Western research programs and institutions. Their palpable openness and desire to work and write in our research community are extremely valuable.

In the coming years, I expect to see many translations from Ukrainian into English and other languages related to the Holocaust issues in Ukraine. There is great interest in what we have found in the archives here, how we look at these processes, and what stories we tell. This is all very promising.

What should be the starting point for changing social stereotypes regarding Ukrainian-Jewish relations? Should it begin with a public demand for such changes, or does it always start from academia? We already have the monographs but no movie about the Solid factory. But then, would any other order be possible?

I believe the academic community should set the tone first to provide the foundation, analysis, expertise, and an element of undistorted historical truth.

It works in an interesting way. Here, we hold the Solid book, a research publication, and a few months ago, people from the Lviv College of Printing told me that their second-year students produced a comic based on this book. I was pleasantly surprised. These girls went to Kyiv for the 24th contest, "History and Lessons of the Holocaust," administered by the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, and won first place in the creative section.

This indicates that such topics can be widely popularized because a comic is no longer a monograph. This diffusion of knowledge is very interesting and promising when it has a good foundation. Producing high-quality feature films about events described in research monographs and discussing complicated topics in a professional manner are also crucial aspects. This will generate more interest and encourage people to ask questions and adopt a certain vision.

At the same time, there are some intermediate formats between the monograph and the film. For example, a fictional novel or a work of nonfiction, which is easier for the uninitiated to digest. Do you have any plans in this area?

I am still in the grip of research. My mind is working on delving deeper into this subject, and I want to revisit the topic of Greek Catholic nuns. My dream now is to write a third book dealing with the purely female dimension.

Another big dream of mine is a film based on Solid. The book tells a touching story, as we have seen, offering its readers some experience, which makes me, as the author, happy. A good film based on the book would do a lot of good, particularly for Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

Interviewed by Oleksandr Mymruk.

Oleksandr Mymruk
Journalist, cultural critic, writer. Author of the poetry collection Tsukrovyk (Smoloskyp Publishers, 2017) and the nonfiction book Oleg Sentsov (Folio Publishers, 2017). Winner of the Smoloskyp Literary Prize and the Clay Cat Prize for the best poetic debut of 2017-2018. Winner of UrbaPerekhrestia, Haivoronnia, and a number of other literary contests.

Mymruk has been the editor of the electronic publication Independent News Bureau since 2016 and of the Chytomo cultural publishing project. He has contributed articles on urban planning and architecture to Espresso TV and founded the project "Constructivism in Kyiv" to popularize and systematize knowledge about Kyiv's interwar avant-garde architecture. In 2018, he helped conduct the Ukrainian Reading Publishing Data 2018 survey supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. In 2018–2019, as a representative of Chytomo, Mymruk provided information support for the Ukrainian delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He is the head of NGO "Chytomo" since 2019.

Originally appeared in Ukrainian @Chytomo

Translated from the Ukrainian by Vasyl Starko.

This material is part of a special project supported by Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize. The prize is sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a Canadian charitable non-profit organization, with the support of the NGO "Publishers Forum." UJE was founded in 2008 to strengthen and deepen relations between Ukrainians and Jews.