Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

"the Bolsheviks deporting Ukrainians," but he does not furnish any

overall figures. But on the basis of a German document (RSHA

IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR no. 28, 20 July 1941, No-2943),

which I was unable to verify, he recounts one particularly horrible

episode:

In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the

Soviets. When some of the exhumed corpses were found

without skin, rumors circulated that the Ukrainians

had been thrown into kettles of boiling water. The

Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews

and beating them to death with clubs.

He also quotes the French collaborator Dr. Frederic as saying that

the Bolsheviks killed eighteen thousand Ukrainian political

prisoners in Lviv and its outskirts alone.

Basing his remarks on an anonymous article entitled "The

Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR," in the dissident journal

Ukrainian Herald, Issue 7-8, the Ukrainian-American publicist Lew

Shankowsky gives the following number of victims of Bolshevik

terror in Galicia and Volhynia: as many as forty thousand killed in

the prisons of Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Dubno, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv

(now Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi, Drohobych, Sambir, Zolochiv and other

towns and settlements. The fact of the matter is that, justifiably

or not, some Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of

the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. For instance, it was

pointed out to me by a resident of Western Ukraine that a high NKVD

official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was Jewish, despite his

Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological Problems and

Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations

During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter

J. Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical

Perspective, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton,

1990, footnotes deleted)

(22) From 15,000 to 40,000 prisoners were killed

In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet

authorities were not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners

they had arrested, mostly during their last months of rule in

western Ukraine. Their solution, implemented at the end of June

and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates regardless of

whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being held

for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to

40,000 prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern

Galicia and western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of

Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)

However, the Membership of this NKVD was

Predominantly Jewish

What was the membership of this NKVD that we see above being so repeatedly blamed

for the massacre of Ukrainians in the days before occupation by German forces? In

my analysis of data presented by Yuri Shapoval, I arrive at the conclusion that the

senior membership in Ukraine of the organization one of whose names became the NKVD

was as follows:

Out of every 10 senior members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine:

6 were Jewish,

2 were Russian,

1 was Ukrainian, and

1 was other.

Statements made by others support the conclusion that the NKVD was predominantly a

Jewish organization. For example, Yoram Sheftel, Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense

attorney, reports that in connection with his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB

headquarters in 1990, a plaque memorializing the "KGB" dead of the war showed that

all thirty of the thirty names were Jewish:

On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with

the names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in

the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was

shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and

the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like

Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth

in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to

the Red Devil. (The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a

Show-Trial, Victor Gollancz, London, 1994, p. 301)

Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative

of the entire NKVD in Ukraine; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is

not a rare or dubious hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than

one direction:

As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were

there so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including

many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I

cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The

KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147)

Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery

especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and

the NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for

the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having

suffered at the hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted

to seize the reins of real power in the new state for themselves.

(Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary

Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165)

But if in the pre-German interval Ukrainians were being killed by the NKVD, and if

the NKVD was disproportionately, or even overwhelmingly, Jewish, then one might

summarize by saying that in the pre-German interval, Ukrainians were being killed by

Jews.

I Expand My Summary Table Once Again

The table which I have been developing in my letters to you of 30Jun99 and 01Jul99

can now be elaborated with the uppermost entry:

Date of my letter

Subject of my letter

Date of Attack

Violence that you should have reported in your 23Oct94 The Ugly Face of Freedom

04Jul99

The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny

Summer 1941

15May99

Who murdered Volodymyr Ivasiuk?

April 1979

30Jun99

Who murdered Vadim Boyko?

February 14, 1992

Violence that you might have caused by your 23Oct94 The Ugly Face of Freedom

09Apr99

Who blew the hands off Maksym Tsarenko?

Summer 1995

17May99

Who murdered Volodymyr Katelnytsky?

July 7-8, 1997

01Jul99

Who murdered Borys Derevyanko?

August 11, 1997

The new "The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny" entry in the table above is of particular

importance not only because of the large number of victims involved, but also

because it demonstrates your going beyond the fault of overlooking Ukrainians being

victimized, to the greater fault of replacing the real killing of a large number of

Ukrainians by Jews with an imaginary killing of a large number of Jews by

Ukrainians.

And I Find My Earlier Conclusions

Strengthened

What a convincing broadcast your The Ugly Face of Freedom would have been if all the

instances in the above table had been ones of Jews or Russians being tortured and

mutilated and murdered by Ukrainians, instead of the other way around! However, in

your broadcast you documented not a single such story featuring Ukrainians

victimizing Jews or Russians. Evidence of Ukrainians being victimized was

plentiful, but you ignored it. Much worse, in the case of the pre-German violence,

you reversed it.

Unless you are able to offer some credible defense, Mr. Safer, two conclusions that

have already gained a foothold threaten to climb to wide acceptance:

(1) that your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes demonstrated

your lack of competence and integrity; and

(2) that your broadcast served to demonstrate to Ukraine's assassins not only that

violence against Ukrainians goes unreported in the world press, but also that it is

even buried under fabricated reports of violence committed by Ukrainians. By means

of this demonstration, you informed Ukraine's assassins that they might expect

impunity for their work against Ukrainians, and in this way you encouraged them to

violence that they might otherwise have feared to commit. Thus, it is possible that

you contributed to Maksym Tsarenko losing his hands, and to Volodymyr Katelnytsky

together with his mother, and Borys Derevyanko, losing their lives.

Lubomyr Prytulak

cc: Yaakov Bleich, Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney,

Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace, Simon Wiesenthal.

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 569 hits since 25Jul99

Morley Safer Letter 14 25Jul99 Who did Israel Roitman murder?

"By the time the Banderite's face was turned into a bloody-hairy pulp, we were

exhausted. The Banderite slumped to his knees, then fell flat on his face. We shot him."

- Israel Roitman

July 25, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I bring to your attention the following boastful confession of

former SMERSH agent, Israel Roitman

The translation of Isreal Roitman's autobiographical account below, originally published

in the Russian-language periodical Our View in Thornhill, Ontario in 1998, recounts the

experience of a Jew participating in the torture and murder of a Ukrainian during the

Second World War, and boasts that this one crime was only the first of many:

MUSIC

by Israel Roitman

Our View

05May98

[...]

Once, on the occasion of a talk with students, I was asked: "Did you also kill

people?"

What could I answer? It remained only to smile sadly, and my memory recalled the

first cruelty. Afterward, there were many more, but the first is unforgettable.

It happened, if memory serves, in the Zolochiv region which lies along the

Ternopil-Lviv highway (Western Ukraine). The military SMERSH ("Death to Spies", as

military counter-intelligence was named during the war) instructed us intelligence

officers to investigate the cause of death of one of our sabotage units. On the

second or third day, we came upon the tracks of the perpetrators who were responsible

for the death of our comrades, and caught them relaxing in broad daylight in a large

house on a forest farmstead. There were three men sitting around a table with

moonshine and snacks: a thin, tall German, a heavily-armed policeman, and a

fat-faced, unshaven Banderite [Ukrainian fighting for Ukrainian independence] wearing

a service cap with a yellow-light blue [colors of the Ukrainian flag] cockade and

some kind of stripes sewn on his sleeve. It goes without saying: a merry band.

We had to shoot the policeman right there in the house, his abundance of weapons not

helping him a bit. We took the German and the Banderite out into the yard. The

Banderite, a huge man with long hands large as shovels, just stood there with a

crooked smile. On his unshaven face, his eyes darted nervously about like gimlets.

Evidently, the worsening situation was completely unexpected by him and he didn't

know what to do, and couldn't hit upon any course of action. Of course, under

different circumstances, he could have tossed us boys around like puppies, but this

time the inveterate beast could not do so: we were the ones with the weapons.

Oh, yes! By that time, we had seen a lot of these nationalists, as they were