Читать книгу Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust - John-Paul Himka - Страница 24

Before the outbreak of the Second World War amateur photographers in Germany owned seven million cameras, and when the war broke out many German soldiers brought their cameras with them. It has been estimated that they took several million pictures in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.94 Like many soldiers, they were interested in atrocity photos; often, they made multiple copies to share, sell, or trade. In addition, official film crews, attached to particular military units or working for the propaganda ministry, made stills and movies of what they saw. One result of this is that historians have access to many photos and films that document the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, including on Ukrainian territories. Major repositories of photos and films related to the Holocaust are the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) and the USHMM. A famous series of photos documenting the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941 is held by the Wiener Library in London. The prominent Philadelphia journalist David Lee Preston is a collector of materials, including photos, relating to Lviv during the Holocaust. Preston’s mother survived the war in the sewers of Lviv;95 and he has been very generous in allowing me to peruse and use his collection. A former master’s student of mine, Arianna Selecky, discovered previously unknown footage of the Lviv pogrom in 2008 at the UCRDC in Toronto; it was taken by a photographer attached to the First Alpine Division (1. Gebirgs-Division). The original celluloid film has disappeared, but a digital copy is available at USHMM.96

Although these films and photos are of historical importance, they have to be used carefully and respectfully. As Georgii Shepelev has noted: “Practically speaking, every photograph is not only a document but the photographer’s choice of subject, point of view, and often—staging.” And: “taking a photograph often turns out to be an act of demonstrating domination.”97 This is very much the case with pogrom photos. The prurient interests of some photographers come through clearly in images of sexual assault and forced nakedness, especially during the Lviv pogrom. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “one might well argue that pedagogy demands that the worst be shown, one might also worry about the violation inherent in such displays: these women are doomed in perpetuity to be displayed in the most humiliating, demeaning, dehumanizing position.”98 In my opinion, the act of photographing sexual violence constituted participation in the violence. This view resonates with the testimony of one of the victims of the violence, Róża Wagner: The Germans “walked around with the faces of rulers and photographed the tormented naked women: ‘This will be in Der Stürmer’; they were happy that their compatriots would have the opportunity to look at the feats of their husbands and sons.”99 So in using these photographs—and this applies to photographs also of humiliation, physical assault, and murder—we must be cognizant of the tainted circumstances of their production and of the perspective that they convey to the viewer.

The photographs discussed above are useful for establishing and interpreting the role of OUN militiamen in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941. It is important to note that all these photographs were taken by the Germans, not by members of OUN themselves; later, when relations between OUN and the Germans became strained, there were no German photographers to record atrocities committed by the nationalists. This may well be one of the reasons why I have been unable to find photographs of OUN’s activities in 1943-44 of direct utility to this study. Hundreds of photos of UPA are available for viewing online, but almost all of them are posed individual and mostly collective portraits, souvenirs for comrades-in-arms. There are also photographs of Polish victims of UPA, but I know of no photographic evidence of any Jewish actions undertaken by UPA.