Byline: Alan Dershowitz

Helen Demidenko's book is a pernicious distortion of the history of the Ukraine, argues Alan Dershowitz. ONE OF the most pernicious and mean-spirited works of fiction has just been awarded the highest literary prize in Australia. It may be a sign of the times. The novel, The Hand That Signed The Paper, was written by a young Australian of Ukrainian descent who seeks to explain and even justify the widespread Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust. Her central characters are the hands-on genocidal murderers of Treblinka, Babi Yar and the bloody streets of the Ukrainian cities through which rampaging Ukrainians ran slaughtering Jewish babies, women and men. Though the work purports to be fiction, its author acknowledges that "it would be ridiculous to pretend that this book is unhistorical". It is, however, precisely that unhistorical in that it totally distorts the history of the Ukraine. Worse, it is a cowardly book. The author, afraid to write a non-fiction apologia for the Ukrainian genocide, lest she be rightly ostracised, smuggles her views into the mouths of her characters. These views include the most primitive manifestations of classic Ukrainian anti-Semitism: all Jews are communists, cheats, smelly animals and otherwise sub-human. "The Jews" are responsible for all the problems in the Ukraine. "The Jews" killed Ukrainian babies. All of the Jewish characters in the book are stereotypes stick figures. They are described by reference to the size of their "big" noses or their membership in the Communist Party. Even when...