ГУЛаг Палестины - Лев Гунин

them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469)

If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis,

then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when

the Kiev soccer team - Dynamo - beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the

German reward:

Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are

not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired

the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich,

World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he

should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being

starved:

Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that

Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis

intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short

run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a

result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to

move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population.

Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw

120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed

and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History,

1994, p. 469)

Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its

intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow - if we are to

believe Morley Safer - being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for

Naziism:

Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical

research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books

were shipped out to Germany.

We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of

Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and

Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first

printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan

Franko.

Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of

Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko

Museum.

As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team

leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries,

exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and

expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster,

November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew

Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23)

Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could

have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they

were being treated as Untermenschen:

Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian

intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade

school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as

to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the

Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were

established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial

inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A

History, 1994, p. 469)

There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population

of the east than four years of primary school.

This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple

arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command

that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and

obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school,

no other kind of school must be allowed in the east....

The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people

without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and

workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture,

they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the

German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and

monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short

History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263)

The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis - or if we are to

believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves - is a colossal fiction based on colossal

prejudice:

A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine

was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in

France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a

fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480)

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

Simon Wiesenthal

Discovered Under the Floorboards

In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take

this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards:

In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief

inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish

companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied

himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944,

when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end.

As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled,

leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't

even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53)

To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday - how impressive!

And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory:

He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone

numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before.

He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what

colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and

receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from

them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A

man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent

mentioned by someone - all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And,

just like a computer, he can call them up at any time.

This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated,

as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote

recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of

consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic

memory: he is a man who cannot forget. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon

Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.)

But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less one expects just such

exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of

detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of

accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be

expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events

were traumatic and seared into his memory.

As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a

difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the

demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of

the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards:

One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The

alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched

the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He

was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution.

(Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p.

11)

But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr.

Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has

turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the

street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the

"SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly

defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo

alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS

remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps

a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived

through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember

than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function.

And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether

Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The

more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all.

As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times

over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but

rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case

of the Rusinek slap.

The Rusinek Slap

Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet

Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get

a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face - just

as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more

than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over,

and the Jews are still being beaten."

... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter

Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12)

That is one version, but here is another:

A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and

knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to

his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked.

"I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive."

(Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69)

These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the

first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second

Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been

pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to

your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe

that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in

fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic - so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken

a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his

training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a

knock-out.

Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still

another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only

Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves

Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which

office they spend the entire night cleaning.

And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For

example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly

gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller - and yet, as noted above,

that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too,

Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were

being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he

was shot - where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr.

Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift

coffin.

And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal

himself? - According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious,