Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

differently—the number of Jews that were shot at one time, whether they stood on a plank or walked directly into the pit, the total number of victims, and so on. But all agreed on the main points: at least a thousand Jews were marched in groups through the town to the cemetery and shot there by the Germans.65 I think that this is what we may expect of testimonies and memoirs—that they record the main points but cannot be relied upon for exact detail. Working with testimonies and memoirs, and not just Jewish ones or those related to the Holocaust, I have found that not infrequently specific dates and even years are incorrect.

      For this study, I have relied most of all on three sets of Jewish survivor testimonies, each with its own virtues: the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH), videotaped testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation, and published memoirs.

The Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH) has two fonds of relevance. Fond (Zespół) 301 has about seventy-two hundred testimonies in Polish, Yiddish, and other languages from Jews who survived the Holocaust on Polish or formerly Polish territory. Most of the testimonies I will be citing from this collection were taken within a few years of the end of the war, and this temporal proximity to the events described is one of the major strengths of this set of sources. The testimonies are short, averaging about ten pages.66 A noteworthy feature of them is that most were recorded by staff from the Central Jewish Historical Commission,67 who summarized what the survivors said and put their accounts into narrative form, sometimes endowing them with a genuine literary appeal. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has published a guide to these testimonies, with a most helpful geographical index.68 There is also another fond, 302, which comprises just over three hundred and thirty longer, essentially book-length memoirs.

      The testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (abbreviated as Shoah Foundation in footnotes) are quite different. If there is a certain distance between the survivor and his or her testimony in the AŻIH collection, this disappears in the Shoah Foundations testimonies, which take the form of videos of the survivors themselves telling their stories in their own words. These personally narrated accounts often make a powerful impact on viewers. This is a vast collection of over fifty thousand survivor testimonies that are generously indexed: one can search by name and place, of course, but also by keywords (e.g., Ukrainians, UPA). The testimonies are in many languages and come from all over the globe. Each Shoah Foundation interview has been divided into numbered segments, which I refer to in the notes. Almost all these interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1999, which has its disadvantages but also a certain advantage.

The advantage is that the 1990s was when the former Soviet Union was just opening up, and many survivors were telling their stories for the first time. Recording their experiences would simply not have been possible earlier. The disadvantage, of course, is the distance in time from the Holocaust, a half century or more. As we know, these old memories could have been influenced by subsequent experience, books written by other survivors, and by films about the Holocaust. Certainly these kinds of problems plagued German memory in the same period.69 Moreover, videotaping Holocaust testimony was intimately connected with television and film. Thus another major collection that began collecting earlier than the Shoah Foundation, namely the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, was inspired by the television miniseries The Holocaust, which was aired in 1978, a year before the inception of what became the Fortunoff Archive. And the sponsor of the Shoah Foundation was Steven Spielberg, the director of the blockbuster film Schindler’s List. Annette Wieviorka found this “troubling”: “Two fictional films dealing with the genocide, viewed by dozens, even hundreds, of millions throughout the world, were also at the origin of the two most important testimony archives.”70

My own experience has been that these later testimonies are generally as reliable as the early testimonies collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission. When I have had the opportunity to compare testimony from the same person over several decades, I have found much more consistency than discrepancy.71 Browning, when he began using testimonies for his project on the Starachowice slave labor camp, was surprised to discover that over time testimonies revealed “a firm core of shared memory” and that his expectations for greater change “were not realized.”72 Shmuel Spector has argued that later testimonies can be superior to their earlier versions: “A comparison of the different versions of the testimony given by the same witness, who related his or her story at different stages of evidence collection, reveals that the testimony given soon after the events it pertained to is not always the most reliable one. The main reason for this is that at that time some of the witnesses had not yet recovered from the horrors they had lived through; only later...they managed to leave them behind and their testimony became more objective and orderly.”73

Kraft, the cognitive psychologist who studied the videotaped testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive, stated that “those survivors who returned to the [Fortunoff] archive a second time—in most cases, eight years after their first extended recall—gave testimony that was remarkably consistent in structure and content with the earlier testimony.”74 He explained this consistency from the perspective of his discipline:

      In the study of Holocaust testimony, the most pervasive finding about memory for atrocity is its extraordinary persistence. Specific memories can remain vivid and powerful for more than fifty years, causing people to cry suddenly, to break down uncontrollably, to become angry. Core memories can remain unchanged over very long periods of time, and memories can intrude forcefully into the consciousness of the individual....One consensus among cognitive theorists is that “memory is always dual.” That is, the present self is aware of the past self experiencing the world....With survivors of atrocity, however, the subjective experience of memory is not always dual. Sometimes, when describing a scene, survivors may be drawn into core memory, losing contact with narrative memory and becoming immersed in visualizing the events of the past....When a person is fully visualizing, or ‘back there,’ as the survivors often say, the past self becomes the present self.

      The third body of testimonies used in this study consists of Jewish memoirs produced independently of AŻIH and the Shoah Foundation. I systematically examined the memoir collection in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I was able to also supplement with additional items. I found that these memoirs, emanating from different people in different countries for over half a century, told the same basic story. There are also many testimonies contained in the memorial, yizkor books, many of which are also cited in the pages that follow.

Survivors’ testimonies are somewhat unusual, since most Jews who remained on Ukrainian territory during World War II did not survive. We are fortunate that a few diaries of persons who perished in the Holocaust have been preserved and published.75

      Ukrainian historians with a nationalist perspective discount or deny the evidential value of Jewish, and also Polish, testimonies about OUN and UPA. This is not surprising, but it is necessary to note that these same historians give great weight to Ukrainian testimonies about the manmade famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, which took about four million lives in Ukraine. In fact, until the last days of communism and the opening of the archives, oral testimony was the only source that documented that terrible event. And even today, testimony remains a crucial source in understanding the famine. There exists then within Ukrainian studies a double stan-dard with regard to testimony for which there is no intellectual justification.