Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

UPA veterans—were confronting one another, especially on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of UPA celebrated in 1992. In 1993 the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) again decided that there was a need to investigate the legacy of OUN-UPA, but the efforts of a parliamentary committee proved insufficient to the task. Finally, in 1997 a working group of historians, under the leadership of Stanislav Kulchytsky, was charged with unearthing the true history of OUN-UPA and evaluating its heritage. The task proved more complicated than anyone expected, and the commission made no concrete progress until the early 2000s.

A few studies related to our topic did appear in Ukraine in the 1990s. Yakov Khonigsman’s short book on the Catastrophe of Lviv Jewry, which came out in 1993, built on earlier studies, especially on the works of Philip Friedman and Tatiana Berenstein (the latter unavailable to me), as well as on a modest selection of documentation from Lviv archives. It made little use of memoirs and testimonies. In fact, in the foreword to the book, Bogdan Semenov stated that the volume “is not written from the words of eyewitnesses, where in the main the element of subjectivity or emotionality figures,” but “according to the materials of archival documents.”93 Khonigsman avoided the topic of any OUN involvement in the events he described. Later, in 1998, Khonigsman published a book that looked at the Holocaust across Western Ukraine, encompassing the Ukrainian historical regions of Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia, but primarily concentrating on Galicia. This book made more use of survivor testimonies and was more deeply researched in archives, principally in the Lviv archives, but also in those of Kyiv and elsewhere. In this book Khonigsman pointed out how antisemitic OUN was.94 Like many other historians before him, he did not differentiate the militia established by OUN from the Ukrainian auxiliary police established later by the Germans; hence he ascribed crimes of the militia to the auxiliary police.95 Khonigsman had nothing to say about UPA and the Jews.

More interesting was a book on “the behavior of the local population of Eastern Galicia in the years of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’“—Zhanna Kovba’s Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla (Humaneness in the Abyss of Hell) published in 1998 by the Judaica Institute in Kyiv. Kovba conducted extensive archival research, consulting in particular the records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in the State Archive of Lviv Oblast (DALO) and OUN documents in the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO). She consulted Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian memoirs and also interviewed many people from throughout Galicia who had lived through the events of World War II. It was a book with an openly declared agenda: to destroy “the two fundamental deceitful myths which impede objective perception of the relations among peoples in these difficult times: that Ukrainians were almost the instigators of German crimes against the Jews...; that Jews were guilty of annihilating Ukrainians under Soviet rule.”96 And although Kovba had a tendency to make generalizations and prefer evidence that showed both Ukrainians and Jews in a favorable light,97 she also included information that went against the grain of her overall interpretation. She was unwilling to hazard an evaluation of OUN’s stance and actions during the Jewish tragedy because she found the evidence too contradictory; more research was required in order to make sense of things.98 What comes through most clearly in Kovba’s book is the mixed feelings of the 1990s: with the collapse of communism, both Jewish suffering and Ukrainian suffering were being articulated, and it was difficult to afford recognition to and reconcile them both.99

The emergence of a cult of OUN and UPA in Ukraine provoked a reaction from a maverick within the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, Viktor Polishchuk. Polishchuk had been born into an Orthodox family in Volhynia, but in 1940, during the first period of Soviet rule in the region, he and his mother and siblings were deported to Kazakhstan. (His father had been arrested by the Soviets in 1939 and was never seen again.) They were allowed to return to Ukraine after the Soviet reconquest in 1944, but to Dnipro oblast rather than Volhynia. In 1946 the family moved to Poland (Polishchuk’s mother was Polish). Polishchuk studied law there and worked as a lawyer and a prosecutor; but after he openly declared his Ukrainian nationality in 1956 he was fired from the prosecutor’s office and endured other instances of discrimination. In 1981 he emigrated to Canada, where, being very particular about proper Ukrainian usage, he worked as an editor in Ukrainian-language media. Based in Toronto and well informed through the circumstances of his employment about Ukrainian diaspora life, he came into contact with nationalist circles; he had not been acquainted with nationalists in Ukraine or Poland. Although he had no personal experience of what OUN-UPA had done in Volhynia during the war, he knew from friends and relatives that the nationalists had slaughtered many of its former Polish inhabitants, including members of his own extended family.100

A follower of the debates in Ukraine after the fall of communism, he was upset by prominent political and cultural figures calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA and blamed the Ukrainian diaspora for reintroducing nationalism to Ukraine.101 This is what provoked him to write Hirka pravda (Bitter Truth), published at his own cost in 1995. (The book appeared in Polish in the same year and later in an English translation.) The text was an indictment of OUN and UPA for the mass murder of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia. At this time, by his own admission, Polishchuk did not have enough material to write about UPA’s murder of Jews and others.102 Later on he found plenty of relevant documentation,103 but his documentary publications remained focused primarily on the murder of Poles.104 His 1995 text did not yet use archival material, although he hoped that soon such material would become available.105 Later Polishchuk did gain access to the relevant archival documents and cited and reproduced them in his publications. But the 1995 text was based entirely on published sources as well as some personal communications.

Polishchuk’s book was not well received by Western, Ukrainian, or Polish historians, even though Polishchuk wrote from an anti-Soviet perspective and was careful to make a distinction between Ukrainians as such and OUN.106 The prolific Canadian historian of modern Ukraine David Marples categorized the book as differing little from the Soviet perspective “in terms of the one-sidedness of the outline.”107 Volodymyr Serhiichuk, a pro-nationalist Ukrainian scholar best known for numerous documentary compilations on modern Ukrainian history, devoted a short book to a refutation of Polishchuk’s Hirka pravda.108 Polishchuk himself he called a “supposed Ukrainian” (nibyto ukrainets’). Yurii Shapoval, one of the first Ukrainian historians to work with NKVD documents, rejected Polishchuk’s work as anti-Ukrainian.109 The dean of Lviv’s Ukrainian historians, the late Yaroslav Isaievych, labeled Polishchuk “a ‘professional’ of anti-Ukrainian hysteria.”110 Polish specialists in modern Ukrainian history were of a similar opinion. Ryszard Torzecki called him a former prosecutor for the NKVD (which he was not) and felt that he “was not worth talking about.”111 His views were also criticized by Rafał Wnuk, although not as vehemently: “W. Poliszczuk holds a special place among the non-scientists. As a Ukrainian political scientist who deals, so to speak, ‘scientifically’