Kyiv Post | 06May2011 | Marco Levytsky
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/103827/
Open letter villifies freedom
fighters, minimizes Holodomor
The “Open Letter: The UCCLA, the
UCC and
the Canadian Museum for Human Rights", signed by
78 international
scholars and other individuals, which was first posted online by the
Ukraine List [#452 of Dominique Arel] on April 11, 2011
distorts the positions of the Ukrainian
Canadian Congress (UCC) and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties
Association (UCCLA), while at the same time vilifying those who gave
their lives in the struggle for Ukraine’s freedom, and deliberately
minimizing the horror of the Holodomor.
The letter begins by stating: “The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties
Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress have been campaigning
against the plans of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg
to mount a permanent Holocaust gallery.” Not true. The Ukrainian
Canadian Congress has called for an inclusive and equitable Museum that
would include both Holocaust and Holodomor galleries. UCCLA says all 12
zones in the CMHR should be thematic, comparative and inclusive. It
says both the Holodomor and Holocaust should have permanent displays in
a thematic gallery dealing with genocide as a crime against humanity.
The letter continues with a completely irrelevant and grossly
misleading digression regarding the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA in its Ukrainian
acronym) and the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’
(1st Ukrainian), which was renamed the First Division of the National
Army of Ukraine. The authors attempt to bridge this digression with the
incredible statement: “What we object to is the dishonest manner in
which the UCCLA and UCC have distorted historical accounts of the
Holodomor while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the Ukrainian
nationalist movement’s role in the Holocaust.”
But, seriously, who’s being dishonest here?
They describe the Division as “a military unit that was primarily
involved in counterinsurgency activities”, when the largest action the
Division was involved in was the 1944 Battle of Brody where the Germans
used them as human shields against the Soviet Red Army killing machine.
Only 3,000 of the 11,000 original members survived and the unit had to
be reconstituted.
The authors also cite: “the political responsibility of the OUN in
anti-Jewish violence in the summer of 1941”, and research that
“demonstrates that many former policemen who aided the Nazis in
genocidal operations subsequently joined the UPA, created in early
1943”.
The first charge is based primarily on unsubstantiated accounts that
the OUN participated in anti-Jewish pogroms in Lviv when the Nazis
invaded that city in 1941. That has been disproved by a document, found
by the Soviet NKVD when they raided an UPA bunker and buried deep in
their archives until the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) declassified
it in 2008. It states that on July 4–7, 1941, representatives of
Gestapo, who arrived in Lviv, turned to the Ukrainian population
inciting them to carry out an anti-Jewish pogrom to which: “The OUN
leadership, having got to know about that, informed its members that it
was a German provocation in order to compromise Ukrainians with
massacres.” That document has been verified as genuine by all objective
analysts. However, it’s authenticity has been publicly disputed by one
of the signatories of this letter (and perhaps the author or co-author,
with Pers Rudling being a pretty safe educated guess as the
collaborator), John Paul Himka, who in a Feb. 14, 2010, letter to the
Edmonton Journal stated that the document in question “was already
exposed as a deception in Kyiv Post and other venues”. When asked by
this writer to provide a link to the Kyiv Post article that exposed the
memorandum as a deception, Himka did better than that -- he sent the
original MS Word file of the March 27, 2008 Op-Ed he himself had
submitted to The Kyiv Post. So much for any independent corroboration
of his claim.
The argument that many former policemen may have joined the UPA is
totally ridiculous. As if an underground movement fighting the two most
brutal totalitarian regimes in history would have the time or resources
to vet their recruits, or the luxury of picking and choosing anyone who
wanted to fight alongside them? But since the authors have decided to
open up the issue of who did join the UPA, let me quote from “The
Jewish Card in Russian Special Operations Against Ukraine”, a paper
delivered at the 26th Conference on Ukrainian Subjects at the
University of Illinois in June 2009 by Moses Fishbein, a distinguished
Jewish-Ukrainian poet and translator:
“The claim that ‘the UPA engaged in anti-Jewish actions’ is a
provocation engineered by Moscow. It is a provocation. It is a lie that
the UPA destroyed Jews. Tell me: how could the UPA have destroyed Jews
when Jews were serving members of the UPA? I knew a Jew who served in
the UPA. I also knew Dr. Abraham Shtertser, who settled in Israel after
the war. There was Samuel Noiman whose [UPA] codename was Maksymovych.
There was Shai Varma (codename Skrypal/Violinist). There was Roman
Vynnytsky whose codename was Sam.
“There was another distinguished figure in the UPA, a woman by the name
of Stella Krenzbach, who later wrote her memoirs. She was born in
Bolekhiv, in the Lviv region. She was the daughter of a rabbi, she was
a Zionist, and in Bolekhiv she was friends with Olia, the daughter of a
[Ukrainian] Greek-Catholic priest. In 1939 Stella Krenzbach graduated
from Lviv University’s Faculty of Philosophy. From 1943 she served in
the UPA as a nurse and intelligence agent. In the spring of 1945 she
was captured by the NKVD while meeting a courier in Rozhniativ. She was
imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death. Later, this Jewish woman
was sprung from prison by UPA soldiers. In the summer of 1945 she
crossed into the Carpathian Mountains together with a group of
Ukrainian insurgents, and on 1 October 1946 she reached the British
Zone of Occupation in Austria. Eventually, she reached Israel. In her
memoirs Stella Krenzbach writes:
‘I attribute the fact that I am alive today and devoting all the
strength of my thirty-eight years to a free Israel only to God and the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army. I became a member of the heroic UPA on 7
November 1943. In our group I counted twelve Jews, eight of whom were
doctors.’”
Of particular interest is what Fishbein has to say about the wife of
UPA Commander Roman Shukhevych, who UPA detractors have often attempted
to unjustly link to anti-Jewish pogroms.
“In 1942-43 Natalia Shukhevych, the wife of UPA Commander in Chief
Roman Shukhevych, hid a young Jewish girl named Ira Reichenberg in her
home. General Shukhevych prepared a fake passport for the girl in the
name of Iryna Ryzhko. When the Gestapo arrested Mrs. Shukhevych, the
little girl was brought to an orphanage based at a convent located in
the village of Kulykiv in the Lviv region. There the little girl
survived the German occupation and the war. In 2007 Iryna Ryzhko died
in Kyiv, where her son Volodymyr lives.”
Having hurled their unsubstantiated accusations against those who gave
up their lives in the struggle for freedom, the authors of the Open
Letter proceed to minimize the scope of the Holodomor, using highly
selective and pseudo-scientific terminology, in order to deliberately
diminish its significance in terms of human tragedy.
They state: “All demographic studies place the number of famine deaths
in Soviet Ukraine in the range of 2.6 to 3.9 million,” adding
“nonetheless, the UCC has, at times, inflated the number of victims to
seven or even ten million”.
First, the 10-million figure came directly from the perpetrator of the
Holodomor himself -- Joseph Stalin -- in a private conversation with Sir
Winston Churchill, which the British statesman later recorded in his
memoirs. Second, it was echoed by Stalin‘s biggest apologist and most
notorious Holodomor denier, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, in
a secret briefing recorded by the British Embassy and later released
publicly.
Most important, however, is that the 7–10 million estimate (and I
stress that it remains an estimate) is an internationally accepted
number that was included in a Joint Statement on the Holodomor issued
at the United Nations on November 10, 2003, and signed by 26
delegations including those of Canada, the United States, Ukraine and
the Russian Federation.
At that time, the president of Ukraine was Leonid Kuchma, Viktor
Yanukovych was Ukraine’s Prime Minister, and Vladimir Putin was the
President of the Russian Federation.
It is worthwhile to note that, unlike the Open Letter, which
deliberately omits relevant facts to distort the truth, the UN
resolution does not set any boundaries for the Holodomor. The Wolowyna
study, which provided the 3.9 million figure for the Ukrainian SSR,
calculated over 7.6 million direct losses in the entire Soviet Union.
Aside from Kazakhstan, the greatest number was 2.5 million in Russia,
which was almost totally concentrated in the ethnic Ukrainian regions
of the Kuban and the Volga. In the Kuban and the ethnic Ukrainian
pockets of the Volga, where the famine was combined with the closure of
all Ukrainian newspapers and schools, an entire community of several
million was wiped out as an ethno cultural entity. Surely that fits the
definition of genocide.
Furthermore, every single demographic study depends upon comparisons
between the 1926 and 1939 Soviet census -- which was falsified. The true
situation was reflected in the 1937 Soviet census, but, because of
that, Stalin immediately ordered it destroyed and sent all its
organizers to the Gulag as saboteurs. The 1939 census was then adjusted
to deliberately lower the number of deaths resulting from the
Holodomor. Thus, any demographic study that depends upon the 1939
census immediately understates the extent of the Holodomor because
that’s what the original data it is based upon was intended to do.
Significantly, some respected scholars who once accepted these
demographic studies are now backtracking. As David R. Marples wrote in
a Nov. 23, 2010 op-ed piece in the Kyiv Post: “The scale of the
tragedy, in what had been the most productive grain-growing republic of
both the Russian Empire and the 1920s USSR, is hard to fathom. The
Italian Consul in Kharkiv (which remained Ukraine’s capital until 1934)
reported that some 40-50 percent of peasants had died and estimated the
death toll at around 9 million.
“But we do not know the death toll. No one was counting the bodies,
many of which lay unburied for days or were dumped into mass graves.”
We also do not know whether Marples has changed his opinion on some of
the matters related to the OUN that he has written about in the past,
but his absence from the list of signatories of this Open Letter is
quite conspicuous.
Nevertheless, we must distinguish between the some of the signatories,
who may not be sufficiently familiar with the true historical facts,
and the author or authors who penned this vitriolic piece. The authors
accuse the UCC of “a manipulative attempt to exploit human suffering,”
which “is reprehensible and should not be acceptable to the Canadian
public.”
Frankly, they should look themselves in the mirror.
Marco Levytsky is the editor and publisher of Ukrainian News,
an independent bi-weekly newspaper based in Edmonton and distributed
across Canada.
SELECTED COMMENTS:
Guest, Guest | Yesterday at 05:07
John-Paul Himka and Pers Rudling are at the centre of a nest of
vitriolic anti-Ukrainian bigots at the University of Alberta. It is
ironic that one of the leading Universities supporting Ukrainian
studies at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) also
houses the West's leading hub for anti-Ukrainian bigotry. The only key
fact missing in Levytsky's excellent account is the funding support for
these "scholars" -- the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Guest, Guest | Yesterday at 00:17
For the complete text of Moses Fishbein's address see
http://eng.maidanua.org/node/977
Guest, Guest | 2 days ago at 22:29
For UCCLA's reply to the 'open letter' calling for the censure and
silencing of two established Ukrainian Canadian organizations go to http://www.uccla.ca and look under Media Releases (19 April 2011).