[In 1943] tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General
Government, the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for
them were continuous. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 553)
It would be incorrect to imagine the Germans rounding up and executing all the Jews within a
region, with only a few of the Jews being saved; rather, in Ukrainian cities - which offered
more avenues of escape and concealment than did villages and towns the Jews repeatedly receded
before the advancing German killing units and then flowed back in again after the killing units
had passed - something that would have been possible only with the knowledge and the cooperation
of the indigenous Ukrainians:
Although we succeeded in particular, in smaller towns and also in villages in
accomplishing a complete liquidation of the Jewish problem, again and again it
is, however, observed in larger cities that, after such an execution, all Jews
have indeed disappeared. But, when, after a certain period of time, a Kommando
returns again, the number of Jews still found in the city always considerably
surpasses the number of the executed Jews. (Erwin Schulz, commander of
Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, Editor, The
Holocaust, Volume 18, 1982, p. 98)
Whenever the Einsatzgruppe had left a town, it returned to find more Jews than
had already been killed there. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European
Jews, 1985, p. 342)
Olena Melnyczuk in a Courage to Care Award ceremony (sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for
Christian Rescuers/Anti-Defamation League) in which she and other members of her family were
honored for having hidden a Jewish couple during World War II in Ukraine made the following
remarks, the concluding sentence of which bears a particular relevance to our present discussion
of 60 Minutes:
"At the time we were fully aware of consequences that might expect us. We were
aware that our family were doomed to perish together with the people we
sheltered if detected. But sometimes people ask 'would you do it again?' And
the answer is short. Yes. We tell them point blank that our Christian
religion taught us to love your neighbor as yourself, be your brother's
keeper," she stated.
"Sometimes," she continued, "we hear the people asking why so few did what
we did. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure there were many, many people like us
risking their lives while hiding Jews, but how many of those rescued had the
courage to report the names of their rescuers to Yad Vashem? Somehow being
free of danger they have forgotten what risk those people took." (Ukrainian
Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9, emphasis added)
The Forgotten Bodnar
Yes, how some of them do seem to have forgotten. Take Simon Wiesenthal, for example. The chief
focus of discussion between him and Morley Safer seems to have been whether Ukrainians are all
genetically programmed to be worse anti-Semites than the Nazis (Mr. Morley's position), or
whether it was just Ukrainian police units that deserve this description (Mr. Wiesenthal's
position). Now to balance this image of unrelieved Ukrainian anti-Semitism, Mr. Wiesenthal
could have mentioned that on numerous occasions Ukrainians risked their lives, perhaps even gave
their lives, to save his (Mr. Wiesenthal's) life - and not only civilians, but the very same
Ukrainian police auxiliaries whom both Mr. Safer and Mr. Wiesenthal agree were uniformly
sub-human brutes. Here, for example, is Mr. Wiesenthal's own story (as told to Peter Michael
Lingens) concerning a member of a Ukrainian police auxiliary who is identified by the Ukrainian
surname "Bodnar." The story is that Mr. Wiesenthal is about to be executed, but:
The shooting stopped. Ten yards from Wiesenthal.
The next thing he remembers was a brilliant cone of light and behind it a
Polish voice: "But Mr. Wiesenthal, what are you doing here?" Wiesenthal
recognized a foreman he used to know, by the name of Bodnar. He was wearing
civilian clothes with the armband of a Ukrainian police auxiliary. "I've got
to get you out of here tonight."
Bodnar told the [other] Ukrainians that among the captured Jews he had
discovered a Soviet spy and that he was taking him to the district police
commissar. In actual fact he took Wiesenthal back to his own flat, on the
grounds that it was unlikely to be searched so soon again. This was the first
time Wiesenthal survived. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice
Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)
Bodnar must have known that the punishment for saving a Jew from execution and then helping him
escape would be death. And how could he get away with it? In fact, we might ask Mr. Wiesenthal
whether Bodnar did get away with it, or whether he paid for it with his life, for as the
escapees were tiptoeing out, they were stopped, they offered their fabricated story, and then:
The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar's face and said:
"Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like,
then later we'll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver
them [Wiesenthal along with a fellow prisoner]." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal
File, 1993, p. 37)
These passages invite several pertinent conclusions. First, we see a Ukrainian police auxiliary
having his face slapped by a German sergeant, which serves to remind us that Ukraine is under
occupation, to show us who is really in charge, to suggest that the German attitude toward
Ukrainians is one of contempt and that the expression of this contempt is unrestrained. We see
also that Bodnar's flat is subject to searches, indicating that although he is a participant in
the anti-Jewish actions, he is a distrusted participant, and a participant who might feel
intimidated by the hostile scrutiny of the occupying Nazis. But most important of all, we see
that the German sergeant is waiting for Bodnar to report back. Alan Levy writes that "Bodnar
was ... concerned ... that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners" (p.
37). If Bodnar reports back with the news that Wiesenthal and the other prisoner escaped, then
how might Bodnar expect the face-slapping German sergeant to respond? For Bodnar at this point
in the story to actually allow Wiesenthal and the other prisoner to escape is heroic, it is
self-sacrificing, it is suicidal. And yet Bodnar does go ahead and effect Wiesenthal's escape,
probably never imagining that to Wiesenthal in later years this will become an event unworthy of
notice during Wiesenthal's blanket condemnation of Ukrainians.
And so these three things - the heroic actions of Lviv's Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the
self-sacrificing intervention of the Ukrainian police official, Bodnar, in saving Mr.
Wiesenthal's own life, and the existence of numerous other instances of Ukrainians saving Jews
these are things that were highly pertinent to the 60 Minutes broadcast, and they are things
that would have begun to transform the broadcast from a twisted message of hate to balanced
reporting, but they are things that were deliberately omitted. It is difficult to imagine any
motive for this omission other than the preservation of the stereotype of uniform Ukrainian
brutishness.
Following the writing of the above section on the topic of Ukrainians saving Jews, a flood of
similar material - actually more striking than similar - has come to my attention, far too great
a volume to integrate into the present paper. Therefore, I merely take this opportunity to
present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is
evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest
number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like
Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr
Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans
of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the
Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are
not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the
present paper seems undesirable.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?
Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those
mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told
the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of
the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to
eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it
is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the
artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the
deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western
Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the
Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:
The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.
The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In
the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were
annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS
special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy