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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Beautifully written, it described the destruction of Lviv’s Jews from the point of view of a child, which Nakonechny had been at the time. His childhood friends and neighbors, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust. He wrote with great sympathy for the victims. At the same time, he denied Ukrainian participation in these murders and excoriated “Ukrainophobes,” such as the historian Eliyahu Yones, who thought otherwise. Nakonechny himself had been arrested as a member of an OUN youth group in 1949, at the age of seventeen, and he spent the next six years in the gulag. In his memoir he defended the innocence of OUN, even denying its antisemitism. It is a strange, but captivating book.93

      Photographs and Films

      The photographs discussed above are useful for establishing and interpreting the role of OUN militiamen in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941. It is important to note that all these photographs were taken by the Germans, not by members of OUN themselves; later, when relations between OUN and the Germans became strained, there were no German photographers to record atrocities committed by the nationalists. This may well be one of the reasons why I have been unable to find photographs of OUN’s activities in 1943-44 of direct utility to this study. Hundreds of photos of UPA are available for viewing online, but almost all of them are posed individual and mostly collective portraits, souvenirs for comrades-in-arms. There are also photographs of Polish victims of UPA, but I know of no photographic evidence of any Jewish actions undertaken by UPA.

      Periodical Press

      I have consulted many newspapers and periodicals of the 1930s and 1940s: OUN publications from the entire period, the legal Ukrainian press under Nazi occupation, and postwar periodicals from displaced persons’ camps in Germany and the POW camp in Rimini (where soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien were interned). Much of this research was conducted in the Stefanyk library in Lviv and at Oseredok in Winnipeg. Many Ukrainian periodicals are available online at libraria.ua.

      Most useful for this study was the OUN press. The party organ Rozbudova natsii came out legally in Prague in 1928-34 and was smuggled into Ukrainian territories in Poland and Romania. It was a venue for open debate and fresh ideas, within, of course, the limits of nationalist discourse. Though it provides many insights into the evolution of OUN thinking, it represented the émigré leadership more than the activists and militants in Galicia and Volhynia. I think one gets a better feel for the latter reading the OUN popular press that came out of Galicia. Nove Selo was a weekly newspaper that came out in Lviv in 1930-39; aimed at the peasantry, it contained much practical advice related to agriculture but also carried articles of a more ideological nature. OUN also briefly managed to publish a fortnightly newspaper aimed at workers. Homin baseinu, intended for workers in the Boryslav oil basin, came out in Drohobych (P Drohobycz) in 1937 and was renamed Homin kraiu in December of that year; it lasted until the beginning of June 1938. The workers’ paper featured many articles aimed against communism and the Soviet Union. Analysis of the Soviet Union was the specialty of the monthly Het’ z bol’shevyzmom edited by Ivan Mitrynga. Only three issues of the journal came out, but it shows how seriously the Mitrynga group followed events in Soviet Ukraine and in the Soviet Union as a whole; Het’ z bol’shevyzmom published academic Sovietology from a nationalist perspective. In 1942-46 OUN-B published an illegal, underground periodical, Ideia i chyn. It contained ideological articles, nationalist propaganda, and news.

      I examined numerous Ukrainian newspapers and periodicals published in displaced