Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

Ukrainian auxiliary police units, as was Simon Wiesenthal, 60 Minutes should have mentioned that

in the city of Lviv, just such a Ukrainian police auxiliary by the name of Bodnar risked his

life - possibly sacrificed his life - to save the life of Simon Wiesenthal himself.

Let us consider each of these points in turn.

Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky

There is little doubt as to the almost saintly role of Ukrainian (Greek)

Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. Sheptytsky, Archbishop of L'viv and

head of the church, was widely known as being sympathetic to the Jews. ...

The elderly metropolitan wrote directly to SS commander Heinrich Himmler in the

winter of 1942 demanding an end to the final solution and, equally important to

him, an end to the use of Ukrainian militia and police in anti-Jewish action.

His letter elicited a sharp rebuke, but Sheptytsky persisted even though the

death penalty was threatened to those who gave comfort to Jews. In November

1942 he issued a pastoral letter to be read in all churches under his

authority. It condemned murder. Although Jews were not specifically

mentioned, his intent was crystal clear.

We can never know how many Ukrainians were moved by Sheptytsky's appeal.

Certainly the church set an example. With Sheptytsky's tacit approval, his

church hid a number of Jews throughout western Ukraine, 150 Jews alone in and

around his L'viv headquarters. Perhaps some of his parishioners were among

those brave and precious few "righteous gentiles" who risked an automatic death

penalty for themselves and their families by harbouring a Jew under their roof.

The towering humanity of Sheptytsky remains an inspiration today. (Harold

Troper Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds, 1988, pp. 17-18)

Raul Hilberg adds concerning Sheptytsky:

He dispatched a lengthy handwritten letter dated August 29-31, 1942 to the

Pope, in which he referred to the government of the German occupants as a

regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks.

(Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 267)

Unbiased reporting might have mentioned such details as the following:

One of those saved by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was Lviv's Rabbi Kahane

whose son is currently the marshal commander of the Israeli Air Force.

(Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9)

Sheptitsky himself hid fifteen Jews, including Rabbi Kahane, in his own

residence in Lvov, a building frequently visited by German officials. (Martin

Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 410)

Vast Ukrainian Sacrifices to Save Jews

And Sheptytsky's actions are not unique - Ukrainians risking their lives and giving their lives

to save Jews was not a rare occurrence. In the first Jewish Congress of Ukraine held in Kiev in

1992, "48 awards were handed out to Ukrainians and people of other nationalities who had rescued

Jews during the second world war" (Ukrainian Weekly, November 8, 1992, p. 2). References to

specific cases are not hard to find:

Prof. Weiss [head of the Israeli Knesset] reminisced about Ukraine, the country

of his childhood, and gratefully acknowledged he owed his life to two Ukrainian

women who hid him from the Nazis during World War II. (Ukrainian Weekly,

December 13, 1992, p. 8)

In the Volhynian town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a

Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter

and their daughter's young friend, for seventeen months, refusing to deny them

refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was

endangering a Christian household. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p.

403)

Help was given even though the probability of detection was substantial and the penalties were

severe:

Sonderkommando 4b reported that it had shot the mayor of Kremenchug, Senitsa

Vershovsky, because he had "tried to protect the Jews." (Raul Hilberg, The

Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308)

Consulting the original Einsatzgruppe report reveals that a Catholic priest, Protyorey Romansky,

was involved in the above plot to save Jews, though Romansky's punishment is not specified:

The fact that Senitsa, the mayor of Kremenchug, was arrested for sabotaging

orders, demonstrates that responsible officials are not always selected with

the necessary care and attention. Only after the Einsatzkommandos had

interrogated the official could it be established that he had purposely

sabotaged the handling of the Jewish problem. He used false data and

authorized the chief priest Protyorey Romansky to baptize the Jews whom he

himself had selected, giving them Christian or Russian first names. His

immediate arrest prevented a larger number of Jews from evading German

control. Senitsa was executed. (Einsatzgruppe C, Kiev, Operational Situation

Report USSR No. 177, March 6, 1942, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and

Shmuel Spector, editors, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections From the

Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July

1941-January 1943, 1989, p. 304)

Similarly illustrative of help being given despite severe penalties is the following:

A German police company in the village of Samary, Volhynia, shot an entire

Ukrainian family, including a man, two women, and three children, for harboring

a Jewish woman. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p.

201)

This is not to say that all or most Jews found refuge with Ukrainians, nor that all or most

Ukrainians offered refuge to Jews. Far from it. Many stories can be found of Jews being

refused refuge or even being betrayed - but what else could anyone expect? To expect more from

Ukrainians would be to expect them to be saints and martyrs, which would be setting a very high

standard:

Whoever attempted to help Jews acted alone and exposed himself as well as his

family to the possibility of a death sentence from a German Kommando. (Raul

Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308)

But despite the severity of the punishment, Ukrainians did help. Andrew Gregorovich (Forum, No.

92, Spring 1995, p. 24) reproduces a public announcement issued by the "SS and Head of Police

for the District of Galicia" in Sambir, Ukraine, March 1, 1944. The announcement lists ten

Ukrainians who have been sentenced to death by the Germans. Number 7 is Stefan Zubovych,

Ukrainian, married - for the crime of helping Jews. One wonders what Stefan Zubovych might have

thought had he been told just prior to his execution that in decades to come, some among the

people that he was giving his life for would attempt to obliterate his memory and the memory of

other Ukrainians like him, and would attempt instead to depict Ukrainians as irredeemable

anti-Semites. One wonders what the surviving family of Stefan Zubovych, if any did survive,

think today of the thanks that they receive from Morley Safer for the sacrifice that they have

borne.

Given the severity and the imminence of the punishment, it is a wonder that Ukrainians offered

any help at all. Jews who had been saved by Ukrainians have subsequently admitted that in view

of the extreme danger, had their roles been reversed they would not have extended the same help

to the Ukrainians.

Ukrainian help was not limited to a few isolated cases, but rather was widely given:

"It is unfortunate," declared a German proclamation issued in Lvov on April 11

[1942], "that the rural population continues - nowadays furtively - to assist

Jews, thus doing harm to the community, and hence to themselves, by this

disloyal attitude." (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 319)

[In 1943] tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General

Government, the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for

them were continuous. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 553)

It would be incorrect to imagine the Germans rounding up and executing all the Jews within a

region, with only a few of the Jews being saved; rather, in Ukrainian cities - which offered

more avenues of escape and concealment than did villages and towns the Jews repeatedly receded

before the advancing German killing units and then flowed back in again after the killing units

had passed - something that would have been possible only with the knowledge and the cooperation

of the indigenous Ukrainians:

Although we succeeded in particular, in smaller towns and also in villages in

accomplishing a complete liquidation of the Jewish problem, again and again it

is, however, observed in larger cities that, after such an execution, all Jews

have indeed disappeared. But, when, after a certain period of time, a Kommando

returns again, the number of Jews still found in the city always considerably

surpasses the number of the executed Jews. (Erwin Schulz, commander of

Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, Editor, The

Holocaust, Volume 18, 1982, p. 98)

Whenever the Einsatzgruppe had left a town, it returned to find more Jews than

had already been killed there. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European

Jews, 1985, p. 342)

Olena Melnyczuk in a Courage to Care Award ceremony (sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for

Christian Rescuers/Anti-Defamation League) in which she and other members of her family were

honored for having hidden a Jewish couple during World War II in Ukraine made the following

remarks, the concluding sentence of which bears a particular relevance to our present discussion

of 60 Minutes:

"At the time we were fully aware of consequences that might expect us. We were

aware that our family were doomed to perish together with the people we

sheltered if detected. But sometimes people ask 'would you do it again?' And

the answer is short. Yes. We tell them point blank that our Christian

religion taught us to love your neighbor as yourself, be your brother's

keeper," she stated.

"Sometimes," she continued, "we hear the people asking why so few did what

we did. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure there were many, many people like us

risking their lives while hiding Jews, but how many of those rescued had the

courage to report the names of their rescuers to Yad Vashem? Somehow being

free of danger they have forgotten what risk those people took." (Ukrainian

Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9, emphasis added)

The Forgotten Bodnar

Yes, how some of them do seem to have forgotten. Take Simon Wiesenthal, for example. The chief

focus of discussion between him and Morley Safer seems to have been whether Ukrainians are all

genetically programmed to be worse anti-Semites than the Nazis (Mr. Morley's position), or

whether it was just Ukrainian police units that deserve this description (Mr. Wiesenthal's

position). Now to balance this image of unrelieved Ukrainian anti-Semitism, Mr. Wiesenthal

could have mentioned that on numerous occasions Ukrainians risked their lives, perhaps even gave

their lives, to save his (Mr. Wiesenthal's) life - and not only civilians, but the very same

Ukrainian police auxiliaries whom both Mr. Safer and Mr. Wiesenthal agree were uniformly

sub-human brutes. Here, for example, is Mr. Wiesenthal's own story (as told to Peter Michael

Lingens) concerning a member of a Ukrainian police auxiliary who is identified by the Ukrainian