Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

surname "Bodnar." The story is that Mr. Wiesenthal is about to be executed, but:

The shooting stopped. Ten yards from Wiesenthal.

The next thing he remembers was a brilliant cone of light and behind it a

Polish voice: "But Mr. Wiesenthal, what are you doing here?" Wiesenthal

recognized a foreman he used to know, by the name of Bodnar. He was wearing

civilian clothes with the armband of a Ukrainian police auxiliary. "I've got

to get you out of here tonight."

Bodnar told the [other] Ukrainians that among the captured Jews he had

discovered a Soviet spy and that he was taking him to the district police

commissar. In actual fact he took Wiesenthal back to his own flat, on the

grounds that it was unlikely to be searched so soon again. This was the first

time Wiesenthal survived. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice

Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)

Bodnar must have known that the punishment for saving a Jew from execution and then helping him

escape would be death. And how could he get away with it? In fact, we might ask Mr. Wiesenthal

whether Bodnar did get away with it, or whether he paid for it with his life, for as the

escapees were tiptoeing out, they were stopped, they offered their fabricated story, and then:

The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar's face and said:

"Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like,

then later we'll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver

them [Wiesenthal along with a fellow prisoner]." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal

File, 1993, p. 37)

These passages invite several pertinent conclusions. First, we see a Ukrainian police auxiliary

having his face slapped by a German sergeant, which serves to remind us that Ukraine is under

occupation, to show us who is really in charge, to suggest that the German attitude toward

Ukrainians is one of contempt and that the expression of this contempt is unrestrained. We see

also that Bodnar's flat is subject to searches, indicating that although he is a participant in

the anti-Jewish actions, he is a distrusted participant, and a participant who might feel

intimidated by the hostile scrutiny of the occupying Nazis. But most important of all, we see

that the German sergeant is waiting for Bodnar to report back. Alan Levy writes that "Bodnar

was ... concerned ... that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners" (p.

37). If Bodnar reports back with the news that Wiesenthal and the other prisoner escaped, then

how might Bodnar expect the face-slapping German sergeant to respond? For Bodnar at this point

in the story to actually allow Wiesenthal and the other prisoner to escape is heroic, it is

self-sacrificing, it is suicidal. And yet Bodnar does go ahead and effect Wiesenthal's escape,

probably never imagining that to Wiesenthal in later years this will become an event unworthy of

notice during Wiesenthal's blanket condemnation of Ukrainians.

And so these three things - the heroic actions of Lviv's Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the

self-sacrificing intervention of the Ukrainian police official, Bodnar, in saving Mr.

Wiesenthal's own life, and the existence of numerous other instances of Ukrainians saving Jews

these are things that were highly pertinent to the 60 Minutes broadcast, and they are things

that would have begun to transform the broadcast from a twisted message of hate to balanced

reporting, but they are things that were deliberately omitted. It is difficult to imagine any

motive for this omission other than the preservation of the stereotype of uniform Ukrainian

brutishness.

Following the writing of the above section on the topic of Ukrainians saving Jews, a flood of

similar material - actually more striking than similar - has come to my attention, far too great

a volume to integrate into the present paper. Therefore, I merely take this opportunity to

present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is

evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest

number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like

Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr

Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans

of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the

Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are

not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the

present paper seems undesirable.

& CONTENTS:

Preface

The Galicia Division

Quality of Translation

Ukrainian Homogeneity

Were Ukrainians Nazis?

Simon Wiesenthal

What Happened in Lviv?

Nazi Propaganda Film

Collective Guilt

Paralysis of the Comparative

Function

60 Minutes' Cheap Shots

Ukrainian Anti-Semitism

Jewish Ukrainophobia

Mailbag

A Sense of Responsibility

What 60 Minutes Should Do

PostScript

Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?

Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those

mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told

the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of

the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to

eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it

is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.

Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the

artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the

deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western

Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the

Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:

The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.

The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In

the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were

annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS

special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially

during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy

which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a

consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.

At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian

nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the

Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including

Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...

Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and

several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a

group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of

Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In

Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of

the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several

dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local

administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the

All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43

there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,

Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.

When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the

population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to

apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass

shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in

the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even

minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.

The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers

began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by

arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.

(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)

Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941

announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev

and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been

shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941

again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This

should serve as a warning to the population."

The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,

or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.

If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone

who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed

for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio

program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three

women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were

executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with

its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,

Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of

which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the

acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society

has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.

The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army

(UPA):

The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of

the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine

and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian

guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan

"neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p.

884)

During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and

the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major

losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned:

Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in

May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091)

Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by

guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers

were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World