Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

the Ukrainians by pogroms, in order to provide a pretext for the German police to intervene and “restore order,” and—most important—to divert the attention and energy of the Ukrainians in general from political problems and the struggle for independent statehood towards the slippery road of anarchy, crimes, and plunder.

Already the Second Great Assembly of OUN expressed itself decisively against any Jewish pogroms,124 condemning such tendencies as the attempts of occupiers to divert attention of the popular masses from the root problems of the liberation struggle. Now, in the first days of the German occupation, these decisions were realized in practice, prohibiting participation in the pogroms of Jews and counteracting German provocations. Only thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities, in spite of the tremendous wave of indignation called forth by the Bolsheviks’ murder of 80 thousand Ukrainian political prisoners and in spite of the numerous provocations of the German Gestapo to incite Ukrainians to slaughter Jews.

After the publication of the text, both Marco Carynnyk and I raised questions about the status of the document. Both of us pointed out that it was no contemporary chronicle of 1941 but was in fact a chronological compilation put together some time after World War II was over.125 We did not claim that The Book of Facts was a falsification, but rather that its presentation as a chronicle proving that OUN did not participate in the pogroms of July 1941 was a deception. Since our initial articles, the entire text of The Book of Facts has become available, and a well-researched study confirms that the book was compiled after the war, namely by OUN-UPA in Poland (Zakerzonnia) in 1946-47.126

      Thus The Book of Facts was prepared after the Germans lost the war and after the crimes of the Holocaust had come to public attention throughout the world as a result of the Nuremberg trials. It belongs in the same category as the postwar OUN publications of the diaspora: it proves nothing about 1941, only about the postwar self-presentation of OUN. A good indication of how factual The Book of Facts is its assertion that “thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities....”

Although patently unreliable, The Book of Facts served as a primary source for an exhibition on the Shoah in Lviv at the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv in 2013.127

      The Stella Krenzbach Memoirs

      In 1954 Ukrainian publications in Toronto and Buenos Aires published the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach (Krentsbakh), who had served as a nurse in UPA, both near the end of World War II and after the war, during the anti-Soviet insurgency. Her memoir said she was brought up in a small Galician town, in a family that spoke only perfect Hebrew among themselves, and her closest girlfriends were Ukrainian. She did not look like a typical Jewish girl of the region: in fact, she was a natural blond with cornflower blue eyes. Later she moved to Lviv to study. She hoped to go to medical school, but her application, along with the applications of thirty-eight Ukrainians, was rejected; she was the only Jewish girl not accepted. She studied philosophy instead, earning a doctorate. But that was in 1939, when war broke out.

Her experiences with the Bolsheviks were negative. She was arrested by the Soviet militia, who, she said, had orders to send all Jews to Siberia, but she managed to escape from them through a bathroom window. She claimed to be the only Jew who welcomed the Germans, since she thought they would build Ukraine. She was quickly disabused, obtained false papers with a Ukrainian last name, and worked in Ukrainian homes as a seamstress. She hated the passivity with which other Jews marched to their death. Having finished with the Jews, the Germans began to arrest the Ukrainians, shooting some, sending others to concentration camps. “But the Ukrainians were not meek, like the Jews: they repaid blood with blood, death with death.” She heard rumors about UPA in Volhynia and suspected that one of her friends had connections with them. Her friend arranged for her to join the insurgent army. She said not to worry about her Jewishness, since the soldiers of UPA “do not divide people by races but by whether they are honest or not.” She was given a six-month nursing course and served in an UPA hospital. Eventually the Bolsheviks decimated her unit, and the remainder fought their way into the American zone of Austria in the fall of 1946. From there she went to Israel.128

Only a few years passed before this beautiful tale was exposed as a fabrication. Friedman made an investigation into the memoir. When it was republished in Buenos Aires in 1957, a prominent Melnykite, Dmytro Andriievsky, filled in a bit more of Stella Krenzbach’s life story. In Israel, he wrote, she went to work as a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs.129 She first published her memoirs in the Washington Post, and a few weeks later she was murdered. Here is what Friedman discovered: “I checked the Washington Post of that period and did not find the memoirs. At my request, Dr. N.M. Gelber of Jerusalem made inquiry in the foreign ministry there; the reply was that the ministry had never had an employee by that name and that such a case of homicide was entirely unknown. Moreover, a careful analysis of the text of the ‘memoirs’ has led me to the conclusion that the entire story is a hoax.”130 One of the dviikari, Bohdan Kordiuk, also looked into the Stella Krenzbach question. His conclusion was very similar. He asked the UPA veterans he knew if they had known or heard of her; none had. In his opinion, “the tale of Dr. Stella Krenzbach has to be considered a mystification.”131

But decades passed, Ukraine became independent, connections with the Ukrainian diaspora intensified, and some Western Ukrainians were calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA. Not surprisingly, then, in 1993, a periodical connected with the Vasyl Stus Memorial Society in Lviv, Poklyk sumlinnia, reanimated Stella Krenzbach by republishing her memoir. The memoir fit perfectly with Zhanna Kovba’s goal to give the lie to stereotypes of antisemitic Ukrainians and communist Jews, and she accepted it as good coin.132 Volodymyr Viatrovych also cited her memoir in his 2006 book on OUN and the Jews to demonstrate the presence and acceptance of Jews in UPA.133 Then as the controversies around OUN and UPA heated up near the end of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, the Ukrainian-language Jewish poet Moishe Fishbein did a great deal to publicize the Krenzbach story. He gave a conference paper, frequently reprinted/reposted at the time, entitled “The Jewish Card in Russian Operations against Ukraine,” which used the Krenzbach memoir to counter Russian claims that UPA was antisemitic. He also put the Krenzbach memoirs on his website in Ukrainian and in English translation.134 Fishbein’s efforts took in many people.135

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      The controversies over the legitimacy of sources reaffirm the need to treat sources with care. In our survey, we saw the limitations and problems with every kind of source we looked at. The German documents do not constitute, as earlier Holocaust scholars believed, the touchstone of truth; instead they are marred by deep biases. Soviet documents are formulated using an ideological vocabulary and, more important, sometimes tailored information to serve the needs of the state. Internal OUN documents are much more reliable than documents produced for external consumption. Moreover, the researcher has to be careful about deliberate misrepresentation and even falsifications by OUN. Crucially, official documents of every provenance need to be triangulated, whenever possible, with other evidence, primarily