Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

      Polish Accounts

      Many Poles had been living in Galicia and Volhynia when war broke out in September 1939. The Soviets deported some of them, particularly persons associated with the former government and the economic elite, to the interior of the Soviet Union. Then, in 1943, UPA began to kill Polish civilians in mass operations, at first throughout Volhynia, then later in Galicia. Most of the Poles who survived in Ukraine after the war were resettled to Poland over the next few years by the Soviet authorities. During the ethnic cleansing campaign, Poles formed self-defense units that fought UPA, sometimes independently, but sometimes in cooperation with the Germans and the Soviets. During the Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, many ethnic Poles were recruited for the destruction battalions that were engaged against UPA. (As noted in the previous chapter, the propagandist Edward Prus had served in such a battalion.) Within the territory of People’s Poland, campaigns against UPA were also conducted, and in 1947 the Ukrainian population of southeastern Poland was resettled to the west, to the former German territories annexed to the new Polish state (the Vistula Operation, Akcja Wisła). Thus many Poles were witnesses to what transpired in Galicia and Volhynia during the war, and they have preserved many written records and produced a large number of testimonies referring to the eastern borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie). As one would expect, these records and testimonies are hostile to OUN-UPA, but they are not particularly Judeophilic either. They constitute an additional body of sources relevant to Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, I was not able personally to work in the largest repository of these Polish materials, namely the Eastern Archive (Archiwum Wschodnie) of the Karta Center in Warsaw, with branches in Poznań, Wrocław, and abroad. So I have had to confine myself to secondary literature which does make use of these materials (e.g., works by Bogdan Musiał and Timothy Snyder). But I have carefully gone through the two-volume collection of summarized testimonies compiled by Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko on “the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists on the Polish population of Volhynia 1939-45.”76 There are many references in it to the fate of the Jews. I also had the opportunity to read the wartime diary of Tadeusz Zaderecki, a Pole who had published a number of short, popular books on Judaism in the 1930s and who lived in Lviv during the war years.77 Zaderecki’s diary was edited by David Kahane and Aharon Weiss and published in a Hebrew translation in 1982, but I have used the Polish original at Yad Vashem.78 Yad Vashem also recently published an English translation.79 The diary is permeated with an anti-Ukrainian animus, but it remains an important source on the Holocaust in Lviv.

      Ukrainian Accounts

I have made every effort to consult as many relevant accounts by Ukrainians as I could, but for the most part, Ukrainian memoirs avoid the topic of the Holocaust. Shmuel Spector wrote of them: “...quite a few of the Ukrainians who after the war fled to the countries of Western Europe had collaborated with the Nazis, including active participation in the murder of Jews, either as policemen or as officials of the Nazi administration. Their memoirs and articles written after the war ignore completely the Jewish issue. There are even individuals seeking to present the authors of these memoirs as those who had saved Jews or helped them in their predicament.”80 This is too all-encompassing a generalization, but it does represent the bulk of what the historian finds in Ukrainian memoirs.

      The Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest in 1947, which resulted in the submission of 64 memoirs. Not all are extant, but of those that are, 25 concerned the World-War-II period; of these, 14 mentioned, at least briefly, the Holocaust. As I wrote in the abstract to my published analysis of them:

This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behaviour towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The majority of the 1947 memoirs nonetheless indicated horror at and disapproval of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Perhaps characteristically, the account expressing the strongest such feelings was written by an older man from outside Western Ukraine. Conversely, the most outright expression of lack of sympathy with the Jews came from a man twelve years younger and from Galicia.81

I have examined carefully many of the memoirs of World War II collected by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (UCRDC) in Toronto.82 This is an institution with a generally nationalist perspective, emphasizing Ukrainian victimhood and Ukrainian rescue efforts during the Holocaust and maintaining silence about Ukrainian perpetration.83 Among items to be found here are the memoirs of a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police; they are several hundred pages long and do not once mention the Holocaust.84 Still, the memoirs provide information and context that have been useful for this study.

In May and June 2009 my daughter Eva Himka conducted interviews for me with twenty elderly nationalists in Lviv. They denied any Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust at all, saying that Ukrainians uniformly sympathized with the Jews and only Germans and Poles killed Jews. The Ukrainian police were harmless and patriotic. UPA did not kill Jews and only fought a defensive war against the Poles. In their view, their own suffering, personal and national, at the hands of the Soviets was a more important story than what happened to the Jews. They still viewed Jews as communists and exploiters who inflicted the famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, on the Ukrainian people.85

A major project of gathering Ukrainian testimonies has been undertaken by Father Patrick Desbois and his institution Yahad-In Unum founded in 2004. His team has been crisscrossing Ukraine to videotape eyewitnesses to the murder of the Jews. In Galicia the eyewitnesses they contacted were sometimes nationalists, e.g., one was a member of the Melnyk faction in Lviv,86 another was a member of the Bandera group and had been his village’s liaison with OUN,87 and another was a member of the village administration set up by OUN (he ran the post office).88 But there were also testimonies from Galicia and Volhynia that described events from a more neutral perspective and sometimes mentioned Ukrainian participation in killings. Testimonies from the territory of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine are much more forthcoming about how the local population was drawn into the killing process. The USC Shoah Foundation also took some testimony from Ukrainian rescuers.89

Interesting texts that described the Holocaust in Lviv were written by Mariia Strutynska during and just after the war. One was the diary she began on 10 August 1941 and continued until 22 December 1949,90 and another was a novel that she wrote in 1947 that was set during the first Soviet occupation of Galicia in 1939-41 and the first days of the German occupation.91

Unique among the Ukrainian ego-documents on the Holocaust is Yevhen Nakonechny’s memoir of the “Shoah in Lviv.”