Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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      The Book of Facts

In 2008 the SBU released with great fanfare a document, The Book of Facts,122 that it said exonerated OUN, and specifically its battalion Nachtigall, from participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the summer of 1941. As presented at that time, the Book of Facts was “essentially a chronicle of the activities of OUN during March-September 1941.”123 The relevant passage on the pogroms is interesting and short enough to present in full:

      4-7 July 1941

      Representatives of Gestapo units, who came to Lviv in great number, by various paths approached Ukrainian circles that the Ukrainians should organize a three-day pogrom of the Jews. “Instead of organizing demonstrative funerals for political prisoners murdered by the Bolsheviks,” they said, “it is better to execute a major revenge action against the Jews. Neither German police nor military authorities will interfere in this.”

      The leading personnel of OUN, when they learned of this, informed all members that this was a German provocation in order to compromise the Ukrainians by pogroms, in order to provide a pretext for the German police to intervene and “restore order,” and—most important—to divert the attention and energy of the Ukrainians in general from political problems and the struggle for independent statehood towards the slippery road of anarchy, crimes, and plunder.

Already the Second Great Assembly of OUN expressed itself decisively against any Jewish pogroms,124 condemning such tendencies as the attempts of occupiers to divert attention of the popular masses from the root problems of the liberation struggle. Now, in the first days of the German occupation, these decisions were realized in practice, prohibiting participation in the pogroms of Jews and counteracting German provocations. Only thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities, in spite of the tremendous wave of indignation called forth by the Bolsheviks’ murder of 80 thousand Ukrainian political prisoners and in spite of the numerous provocations of the German Gestapo to incite Ukrainians to slaughter Jews.

After the publication of the text, both Marco Carynnyk and I raised questions about the status of the document. Both of us pointed out that it was no contemporary chronicle of 1941 but was in fact a chronological compilation put together some time after World War II was over.125 We did not claim that The Book of Facts was a falsification, but rather that its presentation as a chronicle proving that OUN did not participate in the pogroms of July 1941 was a deception. Since our initial articles, the entire text of The Book of Facts has become available, and a well-researched study confirms that the book was compiled after the war, namely by OUN-UPA in Poland (Zakerzonnia) in 1946-47.126

      Thus The Book of Facts was prepared after the Germans lost the war and after the crimes of the Holocaust had come to public attention throughout the world as a result of the Nuremberg trials. It belongs in the same category as the postwar OUN publications of the diaspora: it proves nothing about 1941, only about the postwar self-presentation of OUN. A good indication of how factual The Book of Facts is its assertion that “thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities....”

Although patently unreliable, The Book of Facts served as a primary source for an exhibition on the Shoah in Lviv at the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv in 2013.127

      The Stella Krenzbach Memoirs

      In 1954 Ukrainian publications in Toronto and Buenos Aires published the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach (Krentsbakh), who had served as a nurse in UPA, both near the end of World War II and after the war, during the anti-Soviet insurgency. Her memoir said she was brought up in a small Galician town, in a family that spoke only perfect Hebrew among themselves, and her closest girlfriends were Ukrainian. She did not look like a typical Jewish girl of the region: in fact, she was a natural blond with cornflower blue eyes. Later she moved to Lviv to study. She hoped to go to medical school, but her application, along with the applications of thirty-eight Ukrainians, was rejected; she was the only Jewish girl not accepted. She studied philosophy instead, earning a doctorate. But that was in 1939, when war broke out.

Her experiences with the Bolsheviks were negative. She was arrested by the Soviet militia, who, she said, had orders to send all Jews to Siberia, but she managed to escape from them through a bathroom window. She claimed to be the only Jew who welcomed the Germans, since she thought they would build Ukraine. She was quickly disabused, obtained false papers with a Ukrainian last name, and worked in Ukrainian homes as a seamstress. She hated the passivity with which other Jews marched to their death. Having finished with the Jews, the Germans began to arrest the Ukrainians, shooting some, sending others to concentration camps. “But the Ukrainians were not meek, like the Jews: they repaid blood with blood, death with death.” She heard rumors about UPA in Volhynia and suspected that one of her friends had connections with them. Her friend arranged for her to join the insurgent army. She said not to worry about her Jewishness, since the soldiers of UPA “do not divide people by races but by whether they are honest or not.” She was given a six-month nursing course and served in an UPA hospital. Eventually the Bolsheviks decimated her unit, and the remainder fought their way into the American zone of Austria in the fall of 1946. From there she went to Israel.128

Only a few years passed СКАЧАТЬ