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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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.

      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....”

      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.

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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