Читать книгу Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust - John-Paul Himka - Страница 11

A central figure in the early development of the historiography of the entire Jewish catastrophe survived the war in Western Ukraine, in Lviv (P Lwów). This was Philip Friedman, who had already made a name for himself in the interwar period as a historian of the Jewish population of Galicia. His doctoral dissertation from the University of Vienna, which was published in 1929, concerned the emancipation of Galicia’s Jews in 1848-68.1 He was an impeccably professional historian, who began to gather information on the Holocaust during the Holocaust itself. He survived the mass murder by hiding outside the ghetto, i.e., on the Aryan side, but his wife and daughter both perished. After the war, Friedman played a major role in collecting survivor testimony for the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland and was later active in many of the early projects to gather sources for writing Holocaust history. He spent the last years of his life in the United States, mainly associated with Jewish scholarly institutions such as YIVO in New York and Yad Vashem in Israel, but he also lectured at Columbia University.2

Friedman wrote two short studies of particular relevance to this monograph. One was an account of the destruction of the Jews of his native Lviv; the first edition came out in 1945 and several expanded editions appeared later, the last in 1956.3 He also wrote a survey, very careful and balanced, of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the period of German rule, focusing almost exclusively on Galicia and Volhynia. Friedman was attuned to the problem of OUN-UPA participation in the mass murder of the Jews in the latter regions, but he was unable to arrive at the clarity made possible by later developments and later research. He usually did not make a distinction, which we shall see is important, between the Ukrainian National Militia and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.4 He never realized the connection between the militia and the OUN, writing that the Ukrainian militia was “organized by the Germans in a hurry”5 and consisted “of local volunteers.”6 He wrote about the UPA murder of Jews, but felt uncertain as to what had happened and wanted to learn more about it.7 Like many historians of his era, he considered “authentic, official documents” to be the gold standard for Holocaust research;8 yet so few of such documents had been collected that he perforce relied heavily on testimonies and memoirs. Although Friedman was one of the first professional historians to engage with the Holocaust, his work was situated in the field of Jewish studies rather than within the scholarly discourse of modern European history.

The scholar who found study of the Holocaust at the margins of the historical discipline and, through the publication of his book The Destruction of the European Jews, pushed it almost to the center was Raul Hilberg. When Hilberg began to work on the murder of the Jews, he received some encouragement from his doctoral supervisor Franz Neumann, but there were also many nay-sayers. “During those days,” he wrote a few decades later, “the academic world was oblivious to the subject, and publishers found it unwelcome. In fact, I was advised much more often not to pursue this topic than to persist in it.”9 His work had a tremendous impact on the way that scholars who came after him researched and wrote about the Holocaust. He is one of those rare figures of whom it is no cliché to say that he shaped a field. Some of his ideas were resisted almost immediately. He, like Hannah Arendt, whose essays in the New Yorker on the Eichmann trial appeared at the same time as Hilberg’s Destruction (1961),10 emphasized the passivity of the Jews during their slaughter and indicted the Jewish councils (Judenräte) for collaborationism. Their views provoked new research and publication on Jewish resistance11 as well as a more nuanced investigation into the difficult situation of Jewish leaders in the Judenräte.12

Hilberg’s great achievement was a cog-by-cog analysis of the machinery of destruction. While Friedman had lamented a lack of the official documentary sources he so highly prized, Hilberg had plenty of them, all emanating from the Germans themselves. The influential 1961 edition of his book could not yet make use of German sources in Soviet archives, but the third edition of 2003 was able to incorporate some of that source material. Hilberg’s reliance almost exclusively on sources generated by the German perpetrators themselves established the methodology that dominated American and European scholarship on the Holocaust for decades thereafter. German sources became the main informants about what happened. The testimonies and memoirs of victims and eyewitnesses were relegated to the background if consulted at all. This produced a distorted picture. A one-sided source base was largely responsible for the exaggeration of Jewish passivity and for a one-sided emphasis on the complicity of the Judenräte. I believe it also resulted in an underestimation of help and rescue efforts on the part of non-Jews, to whom Hilberg also ascribed passivity.13 The documents the Germans had produced tended to emphasize the successes of their extermination program and public cooperation with it. Also, the German documents noted instances of Jewish resistance and non-Jewish aid to Jews only when they were or threatened to be effective. But in the concrete circumstances of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, neither resistance nor aid could be very effective, even if impulses and actions in these directions were more widespread than the German documents indicate. Both resistance and aid are much more evident in the documents and oral testimonies left by survivors.

Israeli scholars had objections to Hilberg’s approach right from the start. Friedman, who had served on Hilberg’s examining committee at Columbia, suggested to him that Yad Vashem in Jerusalem might co-publish his dissertation, but it refused: “Your book rests almost entirely on the authority of German sources and does not utilize primary sources in the languages of the occupied states, or in Yiddish and Hebrew....The Jewish historians here make reservations...in respect of your appraisal of the Jewish resistance (active and passive during the Nazi occupation).”14 Hilberg’s work would always have a larger impact on scholarship in North America and in Western Europe than in Israel, except for provoking Israeli scholars to polemicize with his views on the lack of Jewish resistance and the complicity of the Judenräte.

Concentrated too narrowly on the narrative of Germans and Jews, Hilberg paid little attention to the “microbiota” of the Holocaust, the other, smaller actors, neither Jews nor Germans, who played significant roles. Unlike Friedman, Hilberg was not curious about OUN or UPA and their role in the Holocaust. In fact, he only once mentioned OUN, which he defined simply as “a pro-German organization of Ukrainians.”15 Evidently, he did not even care to inquire what the letters OUN stood for, since it appears in the index only as OUN, not as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. So although Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews remains an indispensable orientation text for studying the Holocaust, it has blind spots; and these blind spots have long dogged Western historiography on the topic. Jewish historiography in Israel continued along a different path, more like Friedman’s.

A major contribution to the study of a territory where OUN and UPA were especially powerful was Shmuel Spector’s history of the Holocaust in Volhynia, eleven editions of which were published in English and Hebrew between 1982 and 1990. Spector himself was born in Volhynia in 1922, in Kostopil (P Kostopol), Rivne oblast. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, he fled to the Soviet interior. After the war he lived in Israel and worked at Yad Vashem. His book is interesting and very rich, with many details that make the wartime situation come alive. Spector possessed a deep knowledge of Volhynia’s Jewish communities as well as its geography and terrain. Readers of his text can actually feel how highly motivated he was to figure out what had transpired in his home region during his absence. He made use of some German documentation, particularly the Einsatzgruppen reports, but his main sources were Jewish survivor testimonies, primarily those collected by Yad Vashem and those published in memorial (yizkor) books. Since most of these testimonies were in Hebrew and Yiddish, his book is very useful to authors, such as me, who do not read Hebrew and have limited Yiddish. Spector’s foremost interest was in the Jewish communities themselves, and his perspective is naturally somewhat Judeocentric. He was not as interested in the Germans as Hilberg was. But he was interested in the Polish and, especially, Ukrainian populations and their relation to the Holocaust. He lamented that there were not enough studies of the Ukrainian nationalist movement,16 although he seems to have been unaware of John A. Armstrong’s influential monograph on the subject (to be discussed below). Nonetheless, Spector managed to piece together a decent sketch of the history of OUN and UPA.17 His book also frequently mentions UPA’s murder of Volhynian Jews.

There is a short but (considering the paucity of available sources) well executed study of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in Galicia during the war written by the Israeli scholar Aharon Weiss.18 Weiss had survived the war in Boryslav (P Borysław), where he was hidden by a Ukrainian woman whose son served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.19 Afterwards he emigrated to Israel and worked on Holocaust history at Yad Vashem. He understood in a general way that OUN was involved in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941 and mentioned explicitly the role of the “Ukrainian militia.”20 He was able to work with documents of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv but not able to connect OUN and the police.21 He noted that few Jews who had been hiding in the Volhynian forests managed to survive and linked this fact to the control of the forests by UPA units, but he was unable to be more specific. He misidentified the Babii partisans who saved Jews as connected with the Ukrainian nationalists, although in fact they were a pro-Soviet formation.22 The general thrust of his study is exemplified in its concluding sentence: “Full responsibility for these crimes falls on the Nazis, but if the attitude of the Ukrainian national movement and a great part of the Ukrainian population toward the Jews had been different, the number of survivors might well have been much larger.”23

A book that is somewhat transitional in the historiography is Eliyahu Yones’ study of “the Jews of Lviv in the years of the Second World War and the catastrophe of European Jewry, 1939-1944.” It is transitional in the sense that it made limited use of newly opened Soviet archival materials that had been copied by Yad Vashem, but the text primarily relied on testimonies and memoirs, particularly Hebrew-language testimonies collected also by Yad Vashem. The text was originally presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993, at which time Yones was already advanced in years. He had been born in 1915 in Vilnius, but during the war he found himself in a labor camp in Lviv, hence his interest in the Holocaust in that city. His book was published in Hebrew as well as in German, English, Polish, and Russian translations. I primarily used the Russian-language version.24 Although the primary focus of the book was Lviv, it also contained a great deal of material on the experience of Jews in other localities in Galicia. Yones devoted considerable attention to the persecution of Jews by the Bandera faction of OUN. His knowledge of OUN was incomplete; for example, he made the common error of conflating the militia and the police.25 But the issue of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust was very much on his mind, and his study provided much information on the topic.

Thus in this early stage of the historiography of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust, the relevant studies were produced by Jewish scholars who were intimately familiar, from personal experience, with the terrain, languages, and societies of the regions where OUN and UPA had been active. They also relied extensively on the accounts of Jews who survived the mass murder. Where they all came up short, in terms of the project undertaken by this book, is that, although keenly interested in OUN and UPA, they did not have access to the kind of sources that would have given them more insight into the workings of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. They needed more definite and more extensive information, which would only become accessible after the collapse of communism. As to studies of the Holocaust in North American and European scholarship, the historiographical protocols established by Hilberg effectively prevented any focus on the role of OUN and UPA. If Western studies strayed into occupied Eastern Europe, they relied on German sources, neglected eyewitness testimony, and concentrated exclusively on the actions of Germans.