Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ would be victorious, but this ceased to be the case by 1943. Earlier, OUN competed ideologically with the Germans; later it did so with the Soviets. After it became clear that Germany would lose the war and that OUN’s participation in the mass murder of Jews would blemish its reputation with the Western allies, OUN-B undertook to revise the historical record. On 27 October 1943, the OUN leadership in Ukraine issued an order to compile

      c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out executions, urged the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confirm with their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.

d. Material that would clearly confirm that Poles had initiated and taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms....49

      The order was sent “in strictest confidence” to “the oblast, circle, and county leaders” of OUN.

      Also, we know that not every order was written down, and sometimes we have to interpret the course and meanings of actions without documentation from OUN-UPA itself.

      Yet in spite of efforts to dissemble and to doctor history, OUN produced written documents that testify to antisemitism, the pursuit of ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Jews.

      Other Documentation

The USHMM has the stenographer’s minutes of denaturalization hearings conducted by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s of persons accused of having served as Ukrainian policemen under the Nazi occupation.50 Useful in these documents is the witness testimony. Among those who testified are former Ukrainian policemen, their relatives, and Jewish survivors. They provide information that helps us better understand not only the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in German service, but also the Ukrainian National Militia connected with OUN-B.

The Eastern Bureau of the Polish underground government reported on the situation in Galicia (“Eastern Little Poland” in its terminology) and Volhynia in 1943-44.51

      Documentation of armed forces and governments other than those of the Germans and the Soviets who were active on Ukrainian territory during World War II has not been consulted for this study. But other scholars have made use of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak documentation; where relevant I cite it from their work.

      Memoirs, Testimonies, Diaries

      Jewish Testimony

Before his demise in Majdanek death camp, the Jewish historian Ignacy Schiper stated: “What we know about murdered peoples is only what their murderers vaingloriously cared to say about them. Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of the war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders.”52 The defeat of Nazi Germany prevented the scenario that Schiper feared, but the decades-long hegemony of Nazi documentaton in Holocaust research in the West has occluded for too long the input of the targeted victims. The memoirs, testimonies, and diaries of Jews who experienced the Holocaust comprise a huge and informative body of source material that needs to be taken into consideration by historians. As is the case for all the other sources discussed so far, the understanding and use of these particular sources require an awareness of their specific biases and limitations.

      Jan Gross, as already explained, has been a champion of testimony, and his book Neighbors sparked a growing interest in the use of testimony in Holocaust studies in the West and in postcommunist Europe. In Neighbors he made a bold and controversial statement on the subject:

...I suggest that we should modify our approach to sources for this period. When considering survivors’ testimonies, we would be well advised to change the starting premise in appraisal of their evidentiary contribution from a priori critical to in principle affirmative. By accepting what we read in a particular account as fact until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary, we would avoid more mistakes than we are likely to commit by adopting the opposite approach, which calls for cautious skepticism toward any testimony until an independent confirmation of its content has been found.53 The greater the catastrophe, the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss....54

Clearly this passage was carefully formulated, and so it has to be as carefully read. I am not sure that critics have been doing that. Gross was writing about historical likelihood, not proof. I therefore would disagree with the way Christopher R. Browning has criticized it. He wrote that in cases in which “there is only a handful of survivors, this [Gross’s approach] is a tempting proposition. But however tempting, this default position still strikes me as too low an evidentiary threshold.”55 My own view is identical with that of Omer Bartov: “From the point of view of the historian, the single most important benefit of using testimonies is that they bring into history events that would otherwise remain completely unknown, since they are missing from more conventional documentation found in archives and mostly written by the perpetrators or organizers of genocide. Hence personal accounts can at times save events from oblivion.”56 In this book I will, as far as possible, triangulate sources, so that testimonies do not stand alone.

One persistent problem of victim narrative is how pervaded it is by trauma. Jewish testimony on the Holocaust expresses a traumatic subjectivity, reflecting deeply disturbing personal experience. The “subjectivity or emotionality” of eyewitness testimony has been one of the factors leading to the preference for putatively objective archival documents.57 The main concern about horror and anger influencing survivor accounts seems to be the possibility that they might embellish or exaggerate. In my view, these same possibilities affect all sources, and I cannot agree with the proposition that what a murderer had to say is automatically more reliable than what a victim said. In this study I will frequently cite victim testimony and will leave it to the reader to judge whether it makes sense or not.

Another problem with victim accounts is that they express perspectives from a limited field of vision. Raul Hilberg and his successors in Holocaust studies preferred to work with German sources, among other reasons because the Germans had an overall, bird’s-eye view of the operations that constituted their plan to kill all Jews. Such a viewpoint lent authority to the German documentation. Survivor testimony, by contrast, was fragmented into individual personal experiences in numerous localities. Moreover, victims occupied a particular perspectival niche in the Holocaust. As Shmuel Spector put it: “...testimonies, their proximity to the events notwithstanding, are grounded in subjective perceptions; regardless of how much the witnesses strain to adhere to the truth, their field of vision remains, by necessity, narrow and restricted. Confined in the ghettoes and isolated from the society at large, Jews were in no position to obtain information about the outside world in general and the backrooms of the decision makers in particular.”58 In an earlier publication I analyzed a testimony taken shortly after the war by comparing what it said about events in the Lviv pogrom to photographic evidence of these same events. I did not find any contradiction between the testimony and the pictures and films. The testimony, I concluded, accurately described what СКАЧАТЬ