Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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 the woman who wrote it experienced. I did note, however, that she was unable to learn much about the pogromists who attacked her.59 Similarly, Alexander Prusin, writing of witnesses in Soviet war crimes trials, recorded that “only a few were able to identify the defendants or the units that carried out the murders.”60

One result of this lack of knowledge about specific perpetrators was a tendency in testimony and memoirs to generalize. In the cases Prusin examined, a number of witnesses “identified the perpetrators merely as ‘Germans,’ or ‘the Gestapo.’“61 Many of the testimonies describing events in Ukrainian-inhabited territories refer to the perpetrators simply as “Ukrainians.” Part of the task of this study is to sort out the actions of a particular group of perpetrators, OUN and its armed forces, from that of the general population of Ukrainians. Frank Golczewski, who wrote an important study of collaboration in the Holocaust on the territory of Ukraine, has emphasized the need for scholars to avoid generalization: “Who were these Ukrainians? If we here, as if it were something so apparently obvious, write about the behavior of an entire ethnic group, then it is from the outset problematic.”62 But for some survivors, such distinctions have been difficult to make, and there is concern on the part of some Holocaust scholars that testimony “may be affected by antipathy toward members of other groups.”63 As a result of traumatic experience, some survivors even have a physical aversion to the German, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian language. The cognitive psychologist Robert Kraft explained this phenomenon as follows:

These responses are not the result of thoughtful resentment. They arise from implicit connections in core memory between the survivors’ specific memories of trauma and the language of their tormentors. Prolonged trauma splits the self-concept, creating two separate selves, each supported by different memories that remain irreconcilable. When events in the world bring together these two sets of memories—Holocaust and post-Holocaust—this connection threatens the survivor’s current self-concept, creating a powerful emotional response.64

There is also the issue of accuracy. In another publication I compared three testimonies about the same incident, the mass execution of Jews in Tovste (P Tłuste), north of Zalishchyky in Ternopil oblast. These were two testimonies from Jewish survivors a few years after the war and an interview I had taken myself in 2008 with a Ukrainian