Lance Morrow's article "Unspeakable" (Time, February 22, 1993) deals with the horror of rape as a policy of war. Why then illustrate this article with a photograph which, though striking and horrible, describes an act, repulsive to be sure, quite outside of Morrow's text? I find the photograph on page 28 an attempt to stir needlessly old animosities between Jews and Ukrainians. The governments of Israel and Ukraine have made strides toward forgiving and forgetting with intent to forge harmonious future relations. It seems that someone at Time is not too keen on Jewish-Ukrainian rapprochement. How else can you explain the apparently Ukrainophobic attitude of the person who selected a picture, tangentially, at best, relevant to the text, but full of reprehensible innuendo and inaccuracies? What we have in the caption is a Russian name for the city which is placed in Poland where Ukrainians commit the atrocities! In 1945 the city was part of Soviet Ukraine, not Poland; it is called Lviv in Ukrainian, Lvov in Russian, and Lwow in Polish. So perhaps it really was not 1945, nor Poland, nor Lvov, nor a Jewish girl, nor Ukrainians? How does one know which of the five facts in the caption are really true? And what does it have to do with rape as a policy of war? Or is the point more in the emotional impact than in the accuracy? Such shoddy research brings little credit to Morrow's excellent article and to Time.
D. H. Struk
Editor-in-Chief
Encyclopedia of Ukraine
Toronto
