Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

person.”112 Both Shapoval and Torzecki equated Polishchuk with a much less credible writer, the propagandist Edward Prus.113

In my opinion, this was not a fair equation. There are one-sided authors, and there are unbalanced authors. Prus, unfortunately, belonged to the latter category. In communist Poland he specialized in propaganda against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and Ukrainian nationalists and continued in the same vein after communism’s collapse; in both eras he was closely associated with the Polish nationalist right. Prus had been born in and survived the war in Galicia. As a teenager he joined in the defence of Poles threatened by UPA and later fought UPA in the “destruction battalions” (istrebitel’nye batal’ony).114 He later emigrated to Poland, earned a doctorate at the University of Warsaw, held various academic posts—none of any prominence, and wrote prolifically.

The book most relevant to the concerns of this monograph is Prus’s Holocaust po banderowsku (Holocaust Banderite-Style), published in 1995. Among much else, the book included an account of a meeting Prus claimed he had in London with Karl Popper, whom he described as “undoubtedly one of the most outstanding Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.” According to Prus, Popper called him, i.e., Prus, “the most outstanding expert in this area [the history of UPA] in Poland, and not only in Poland.” Also, Popper supposedly expressed amazement that the president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kravchuk, had not condemned the murders perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles. “And he warned the Jews that they should stop playing together with Ukrainian nationalists at the expense of the Poles, because this fraternization with criminals under the flag of totalitarianism is a blind alley, a road to nowhere.”115 To me, this account sounds like a fantasy or at least a hearty embellishment. (Popper passed away shortly before Holocaust po banderowsku was published.)

I think there was also a strong dose of fantasy in the “evidence” he brought to bear. Much of what he had to say was based on personal communications in his possession and was therefore unverifiable. Sometimes he gave proper citations for material he quoted, but in other cases he offered no citations whatsoever. For example, Holocaust po banderowsku contained a long quotation very relevant to the theme of this study attributed to Mykhailo Stepaniak, a member of the central OUN leadership captured by the Soviets; the quotation concerned the Third Extraordinary Assembly of OUN (August 1943).116 Prus offered no citation, although presumably the text would have been taken from the record of one of Stepaniak’s interrogations. I have not, however, been able to find the passage Prus quoted in the archival record of Stepaniak’s interrogation of 25 August 1944117 nor in published versions of his interrogations.118 Moreover, the quoted passage refers to the presence of Ivan Mitrynga at the congress, which seems highly unlikely, given that Mitrynga had broken with the Banderites in September 1941 and had joined forces with their rival Taras Bulba-Borovets. I suspect that the passage was the product of a vivid imagination rather than an excerpt from a genuinely existing document.

Moreover, he wrote in a style that had more in common with biblical prophecy than with historical scholarship. Referring to Stella Krenzbach, an alleged Jewish veteran of UPA to whom is attributed a memoir praising the Ukrainian nationalists,119 Prus stated that she acted “undoubtedly from a whisper from Satan, because Satan directed the hand of the genocidaire of Polish and Jewish children,” and that she was guilty of “blaspheming against Yahweh.”120 He also speculated that the apocalypse predicted by St. John the Revelator was not a once and final confrontation between good and evil but would be arriving in installments, one of which was the era of UPA. It was a time “of three clearly apocalyptic figures, as Hitler, Stalin, and [UPA commander Roman] Shukhevych-’Chuprynka,’ and of three hells let loose in the cause of and with the active permission of those who supported them: Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Ukrainian chauvinists.”121 In sum, Prus’s texts are untrustworthy and will not be cited in the narrative that follows. To equate Polishchuk with him is, I feel, a serious error.

      A Conceptual Turn: Jan Gross’s Neighbors

The publication of Jan Gross’s short but explosive book Neighbors in 2000-01122 transformed the historiography of the Holocaust as it transpired in Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine. The book described vividly, graphically how Poles in Jedwabne murdered the town’s Jewish inhabitants in July 1941. It generated immense commentary and controversy, but the primary matters of contention (the number of victims and the presence or absence of Germans) have little bearing on how it affected historiography. There were three aspects of Neighbors that were revolutionary, even if they were not without some antecedents. The first was the focus on non-German participation in the extermination of the Jewish population. One might say that this turned the spotlight on the “microbiota” of the world war and the Holocaust, that is, on non-state actors following their own agendas, which sometimes involved the murder of Jews. In particular, Gross directed attention to the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union but before the German leadership made the decision to kill all of European Jewry. One result of Gross’s work was that in the early twenty-first century a large literature on the pogroms and related anti-Jewish violence in Western Ukraine appeared.123 Particularly noteworthy was Kai Struve’s detailed historical account of the violence across Galicia, which brought many new sources to bear and revealed the important role of German actors in the pogroms, especially the soldiers of Waffen-SS Wiking.124 The interest in the pogroms also led to renewed research on one of their contextual factors, the mass murder of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD, which occurred at different sites in western areas of Ukraine between the launch of the German invasion and the evacuation of Soviet forces.125

The second way in which Gross’s little volume was revolutionary was that it placed the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe firmly within East European studies. Gross was an East Europeanist. Until Neighbors he was best known for two studies of Polish territories under German and Soviet occupation. He knew the languages, historical context, social relations, and culture of Poland before he embarked on his studies of the Holocaust and postwar antisemitism. He had earned his doctorate at Yale in 1975, and his book on Polish society under German occupation appeared four years later. He had behind him a quarter century of publications on Polish sociology and modern history before he published Neighbors. He had not dealt with the Holocaust in his earlier work, and when he finally came to that theme he brought a wealth of training and scholarly experience to it. Until Neighbors, East European studies and Holocaust studies had been on separate tracks. Friedman and Spector were Holocaust specialists; they came from Eastern Europe and so knew the languages and cultures, but their scholarly interests did not extend beyond Jewish history. Armstrong was an East Europeanist, but he avoided dealing with the Holocaust. Hilberg wrote his great work without much knowledge of Eastern Europe and sometimes operated with stereotypes.126 After Neighbors a number of persons trained in East European studies undertook work on the Holocaust. Aside from myself, examples include Kai Struve, who wrote an excellent study of peasant and nation in late nineteenth-century Galicia before he turned to an examination of the pogroms of 1941, and Per Anders Rudling, whose doctoral dissertation concerned