Чтение онлайн

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