Byline: Jacques Adler

Jacques Adler, a historian and a veteran of the French resistance, adds his voice to criticism of the Miles Franklin Award winner, The Hand that Signed the Paper. FICTION and history treat truth very differently. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Miles Franklin Prize awarded to Helen Demidenko for The Hand that Signed the Paper. This "novel" argues that an unholy Judaeo-Bolshevik alliance forced famine and devastation on the Ukrainian people. For Ms Demidenko, that tragedy justifies the participation, later, by some Ukrainians in the Nazis' Final Solution. This thesis is so far from the historical truth that the book serves as an apologia for genocide. This "novel" might have referred to historical precedents such as the 17th-century rebellion led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky when tens of thousands of innocent Jews were murdered. This "novel" might also have mentioned the 100,000 Jews killed during the 1918 civil war. These crimes were committed by Ukrainian nationalists well before the forced collectivisation of the 1930s. But then the past is only as meaningful as one's willingness to understand it. One might have hoped to find references to Archbishop Andrei Szpeticki, of Lvov's Greek Catholic Church. One might have hoped for mention of this archbishop's protest in 1941 to the Germans for having permitted the overnight murder of 2000 Jews by the Ukrainian "auxillary"...