It seemed, as Europe moved toward the Second World War, that Ukrainians had little to lose from the radical changes that it promised to bring.

Still traumatized by Stalinist excesses and the increasing Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian repression in the western regions, Ukrainians had reason to believe that any change – even that brought on by war – would favorably alter the conditions under which they lived.

But those who thought so would be sadly mistaken, for although the war radically transformed the situation of Ukrainians, their plight changed from bad to worse. The collapse of Poland at the outset of the war led to the imposition in Western Ukraine of the even-more-repressive Soviet regime. But when the German invaders swept away the Soviets, they brought with them a Nazi regime that in Ukraine reached the heights of brutality and inhumanity. Caught between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and lacking, for all practical purposes, a state to protect their interests, Ukrainians were especially vulnerable to the devastation of the war and the ruthless policies of its totalitarian protagonists.

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