three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.
And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by
something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three
Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be
brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this
primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One
individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,
it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How
refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many
generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of
course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no
more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally
useful, it is never shelved.
Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal
collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish
people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today
bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why
stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a
Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face
of Freedom."
Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand
people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews:
they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi
policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary
police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death,
collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:
The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called,
furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone
the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men
strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310)
Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of
Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to
find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving
one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also
excelled?
But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate
the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish
police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos:
The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew
whether for life or death - be exclusively left up to the decisions of the
"councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a
general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the
individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the
enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish
police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in
accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through
moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims
Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 119-120,
emphasis added)
In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the
administrative tasks and policing required by the Nazis was placed in Jewish hands, that Jewish
collaborators were ubiquitous, and that it was Jewish collaborators who rendered the Jewish
Holocaust feasible and who stood as obstacles in the path of Jewish resistance:
Falsification of the Holocaust
Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir,
Jerusalem.
Available online at:
http://www.kaiwan.com/codoh/newsdesk/890519.HTML
I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system
has managed to instil a 'Holocaust awareness' in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir
12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the
Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that 'a
half-truth is worse than a lie') which has been instilled here.
As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in
Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily
life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the
first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German
soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of
transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by
Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the
planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews
in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every
Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising
could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated
the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was
taught, and this saved the lives of some them "if you enter a square from which
there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and
one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and
then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew".
One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground
killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943,
I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other
children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary.
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire
Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from
the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work
for them. But does anybody now know about this? This, and not what is
'instilled' was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem - Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak at all. It, and its
vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis
are truly beneath contempt.
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would
at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now
eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish
to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime.
Kind regards,
[Israel Shahak]
To bring closer to home and closer to the present day the inadvisability of attributing
collective guilt, we may note that more than one out of every hundred Americans is presently
sitting in jail, and yet we do not from this condemn Americans as a nation of criminals. And so
if we extract from this the conclusion that a participation rate as high as one out of every
hundred is insufficient to depict the entire population as participants, then Ukrainians should
be allowed a total of 360,000 criminal collaborators - a number never yet broached - without
Ukrainians being collectively condemned as Nazis.
The plea to avoid ascribing collective guilt is not new to Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and has
been put forward by both sides. It is time that the plea was heeded:
Even as we Jews justly disclaim responsibility for the acts of the Jewish
Bolshevist commissars and for the disgraceful actions of those Jews who
participated in the work of the Bolshevist chekas (Secret Police), the
Ukrainian people has a full right to disclaim any responsibility for those who
have besmirched themselves by pogrom activities. (Arnold Margolin, The Jews of
Eastern Europe, 1926, p. 124, in Andrew Gregorovich, Jews and Ukrainians, Forum
No. 91, Fall-Winter, 1994, p. 30)
Additional material on Jewish collaboration with the Nazis can be found in my discussion of the
Jewish Ghetto Police in my Letter 17 to Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Justice.
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
Paralysis of the Comparative Function
Positions taken by Morley Safer acquire meaning - can only be evaluated - following relevant
comparisons, but Mr. Safer fails to make these comparisons. For example, Ukrainian assistance
to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust acquires significance - indeed, may be thrown into a wholly
new light - when compared to Jewish assistance to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust, but Mr.
Safer does not make such a comparison. Ukrainian cruelty on behalf of the Nazis acquires
significance when compared to Jewish cruelty on behalf of the Nazis, but Mr. Safer does not make
this comparison. Ukrainians saving Jews (a possibility totally ignored by Mr. Safer) is given a
new significance when compared with Jews saving Ukrainians at times when such aid was possible
and of course Mr. Safer never reaches a point where he could make such a comparison.
Comparison 1: Ukrainians Helping Jews Compared to Jews Helping Jews
We have seen above that countless Ukrainians risked their lives and gave their lives to save
Jews. And what, let us now ask, were those who today level accusations of genetic anti-Semitism