Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: John-Paul Himka
Издательство: Автор
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9783838275482
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      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.

      Ukrainian Accounts

      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: