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President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Pope, protests from several

governments, including the U.S., British and Swedish governments, forced the

Hungarian head of government, Admiral Horthy, to stop the deporting of more

Jews from the country.

Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg but changed his name after escaping from

Auschwitz. (Oshawa Times, December 30, 1968)

Jewish help compared to Ukrainian help. And so here we are faced with the following

incongruity. Ukrainians were dying at the hands of the Nazis, were dying fighting the Nazis,

were dying saving Jews - and yet Morley Safer now brands Ukrainians as Nazis. In contrast,

American Jews were not allowing the Jewish Holocaust to interfere with their lifestyles, were

vetoing proposals to assist and rescue European Jews, and yet they are now privileged to accuse

Ukrainians of being Nazis. People who did next to nothing to save the European Jews, people who

obstructed the rescue of European Jews, people who acted while not under threat of death now

turn around and judge those who while under threat of death did not live up to impossibly high

moral standards.

Appropriately did Reb Moshe Shonfeld place on the title page of his book The Holocaust Victims

Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals the quotations "Our enemies will

subjugate you" (Vayikra) - "Those enemies will be from within" (Chazal). Reading Reb Shonfeld's

book invites the conclusion that Morley Safer's searching for Nazi collaborators in Ukraine was

misplaced - perhaps it is the case that the largest repository of unprosecuted Nazi

collaborators today is to be found in the state of Israel; and invites consideration of the

further conclusion that Morley Safer's searching for enemies of Judaism in Ukraine is similarly

misplaced - he might instead have looked for the truly dangerous enemies within - for Jews like

Simon Wiesenthal, Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kosinski, and - yes - Morley Safer

himself. Their misstatements lower Jewish credibility; their hatred incites a reactionary

anti-Semitism.

In fact, Morley Safer's accusation of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis is not a cry for

justice nor an advancement of historical truth, but is, rather, a weapon sometimes brandished

under political motivation even when the facts do not justify its use, and at other times

sheathed, also for political reasons, even when the facts cry out for its use. Thus, a

Ukrainian may be prosecuted even though the evidence against him is patently fraudulent, as was

the case in the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk (Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall

of a Show-Trial, 1994). A Jewish Zionist, in contrast, may go unprosecuted for very real

collaboration with the Nazis, though he may be unable to avoid final justice imposed through

individual action:

Moldetsky, a leader of the Zionist Workers Party (Poalei Zion), who was

appointed head of the council of elders in Bedzin, and who, over the course of

years, chose thousands of Jews for forced labor and extermination, succeeded in

remaining alive. For the mass deportations, Moldetsky published a decree which

was completely fraudulent and deceiving, in which he said: "Jews, dress up in

your holiday clothes and march joyfully to the gathering places mentioned

above. No one is to remain at home. ..." The Jews, in their innocence,

obeyed him. The result was that people with large families - as well as the

elderly - a total of 8,000, were sent to Auschwitz. The babies were pushed

into sacks by the Nazis.

...

After the war, Moldetsky - by merit of Zionist activities - was

understandably one of the first to receive an immigration certificate to

Palestine. His collaboration in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews did

not make him unfit in the eyes of the officials of the Jewish Agency, who were

distributing the certificates. He went to Eretz Yisroel where, it has been

reported, the revengeful hand of the Jews of Bedzin killed him while he was

taking a trip in the mountains. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims

Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 122-123)

A related demonstration of how the accusation of Nazi collaboration is not levelled impartially,

but is used as a political weapon can be found in the case of Dr. Israel Kastner.

Comparison 2: Ukrainian Cruelty on Behalf of the Nazis Compared to Jewish Cruelty on Behalf of the

Nazis

Morley Safer states, addressing himself to Simon Wiesenthal: "I get the impression from people

that the actions of the Ukrainians, if anything, were worse than the Germans." What can Mr.

Safer possibly mean by such a statement? Does he mean that he knows of a Ukrainian whose

actions are worse than Hitler's, and another Ukrainian whose actions are worse than Himmler's,

and another whose actions are worse than Eichmann's, and so on down the line? Surely, this is

an impossibility, as Ukraine has never been accused either of starting the Second World War or

of engineering the Final Solution. Surely all that Mr. Safer means is that some Ukrainians can

be found who were worse than the average German, or the average Nazi, or even the average member

of the SS. Agreed - undoubtedly such Ukrainians exist, but what of it? Similar deviants exist