Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_5f1d54aa-184d-5c5c-bef0-2382baadb545">83 Among items to be found here are the memoirs of a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police; they are several hundred pages long and do not once mention the Holocaust.84 Still, the memoirs provide information and context that have been useful for this study.

In May and June 2009 my daughter Eva Himka conducted interviews for me with twenty elderly nationalists in Lviv. They denied any Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust at all, saying that Ukrainians uniformly sympathized with the Jews and only Germans and Poles killed Jews. The Ukrainian police were harmless and patriotic. UPA did not kill Jews and only fought a defensive war against the Poles. In their view, their own suffering, personal and national, at the hands of the Soviets was a more important story than what happened to the Jews. They still viewed Jews as communists and exploiters who inflicted the famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, on the Ukrainian people.85

A major project of gathering Ukrainian testimonies has been undertaken by Father Patrick Desbois and his institution Yahad-In Unum founded in 2004. His team has been crisscrossing Ukraine to videotape eyewitnesses to the murder of the Jews. In Galicia the eyewitnesses they contacted were sometimes nationalists, e.g., one was a member of the Melnyk faction in Lviv,86 another was a member of the Bandera group and had been his village’s liaison with OUN,87 and another was a member of the village administration set up by OUN (he ran the post office).88 But there were also testimonies from Galicia and Volhynia that described events from a more neutral perspective and sometimes mentioned Ukrainian participation in killings. Testimonies from the territory of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine are much more forthcoming about how the local population was drawn into the killing process. The USC Shoah Foundation also took some testimony from Ukrainian rescuers.89

Interesting texts that described the Holocaust in Lviv were written by Mariia Strutynska during and just after the war. One was the diary she began on 10 August 1941 and continued until 22 December 1949,90 and another was a novel that she wrote in 1947 that was set during the first Soviet occupation of Galicia in 1939-41 and the first days of the German occupation.91

Unique among the Ukrainian ego-documents on the Holocaust is Yevhen Nakonechny’s memoir of the “Shoah in Lviv.”92 Beautifully written, it described the destruction of Lviv’s Jews from the point of view of a child, which Nakonechny had been at the time. His childhood friends and neighbors, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust. He wrote with great sympathy for the victims. At the same time, he denied Ukrainian participation in these murders and excoriated “Ukrainophobes,” such as the historian Eliyahu Yones, who thought otherwise. Nakonechny himself had been arrested as a member of an OUN youth group in 1949, at the age of seventeen, and he spent the next six years in the gulag. In his memoir he defended the innocence of OUN, even denying its antisemitism. It is a strange, but captivating book.93

      Photographs and Films

Before the outbreak of the Second World War amateur photographers in Germany owned seven million cameras, and when the war broke out many German soldiers brought their cameras with them. It has been estimated that they took several million pictures in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.94 Like many soldiers, they were interested in atrocity photos; often, they made multiple copies to share, sell, or trade. In addition, official film crews, attached to particular military units or working for the propaganda ministry, made stills and movies of what they saw. One result of this is that historians have access to many photos and films that document the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, including on Ukrainian territories. Major repositories of photos and films related to the Holocaust are the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) and the USHMM. A famous series of photos documenting the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941 is held by the Wiener Library in London. The prominent Philadelphia journalist David Lee Preston is a collector of materials, including photos, relating to Lviv during the Holocaust. Preston’s mother survived the war in the sewers of Lviv;95 and he has been very generous in allowing me to peruse and use his collection. A former master’s student of mine, Arianna Selecky, discovered previously unknown footage of the Lviv pogrom in 2008 at the UCRDC in Toronto; it was taken by a photographer attached to the First Alpine Division (1. Gebirgs-Division). The original celluloid film has disappeared, but a digital copy is available at USHMM.96

Although these films and photos are of historical importance, they have to be used carefully and respectfully. As Georgii Shepelev has noted: “Practically speaking, every photograph is not only a document but the photographer’s choice of subject, point of view, and often—staging.” And: “taking a photograph often turns out to be an act of demonstrating domination.”97 This is very much the case with pogrom photos. The prurient interests of some photographers come through clearly in images of sexual assault and forced nakedness, especially during the Lviv pogrom. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “one might well argue that pedagogy demands that the worst be shown, one might also worry about the violation inherent in such displays: these women are doomed in perpetuity to be displayed in the most humiliating, demeaning, dehumanizing position.”98 In my opinion, the act of photographing sexual violence constituted participation in the violence. This view resonates with the testimony of one of the victims of the violence, Róża Wagner: The Germans “walked around with the faces of rulers and photographed the tormented naked women: ‘This will be in Der Stürmer’; they were happy that their compatriots would have the opportunity to look at the feats of their husbands and sons.”99 So in using these photographs—and this applies to photographs also of humiliation, physical assault, and murder—we must be cognizant of the tainted circumstances of their production and of the perspective that they convey to the viewer.

      The photographs discussed above are useful for establishing and interpreting the role of OUN militiamen in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941. It is important to note that all these photographs were taken by the Germans, not by members of OUN themselves; later, when relations between OUN and the Germans became strained, there were no German photographers to record atrocities committed by the nationalists. This may well be one of the reasons why I have been unable to find photographs of OUN’s activities in 1943-44 of direct utility to this study. Hundreds of photos of UPA are available for viewing online, but almost all of them are posed individual and mostly collective portraits, souvenirs for comrades-in-arms. There are also photographs of Polish victims of UPA, but I know of no photographic evidence of any Jewish actions undertaken by UPA.

      Periodical Press

      I have consulted many newspapers and periodicals of the 1930s and 1940s: OUN publications from the entire period, the legal Ukrainian press under Nazi occupation, and postwar periodicals from displaced persons’ camps in Germany and the POW camp in Rimini (where soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien were interned). Much of this research was conducted in the Stefanyk library in Lviv and at Oseredok in Winnipeg. Many Ukrainian periodicals are available online at libraria.ua.

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