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In 1954 Ukrainian publications in Toronto and Buenos Aires published the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach (Krentsbakh), who had served as a nurse in UPA, both near the end of World War II and after the war, during the anti-Soviet insurgency. Her memoir said she was brought up in a small Galician town, in a family that spoke only perfect Hebrew among themselves, and her closest girlfriends were Ukrainian. She did not look like a typical Jewish girl of the region: in fact, she was a natural blond with cornflower blue eyes. Later she moved to Lviv to study. She hoped to go to medical school, but her application, along with the applications of thirty-eight Ukrainians, was rejected; she was the only Jewish girl not accepted. She studied philosophy instead, earning a doctorate. But that was in 1939, when war broke out.

Her experiences with the Bolsheviks were negative. She was arrested by the Soviet militia, who, she said, had orders to send all Jews to Siberia, but she managed to escape from them through a bathroom window. She claimed to be the only Jew who welcomed the Germans, since she thought they would build Ukraine. She was quickly disabused, obtained false papers with a Ukrainian last name, and worked in Ukrainian homes as a seamstress. She hated the passivity with which other Jews marched to their death. Having finished with the Jews, the Germans began to arrest the Ukrainians, shooting some, sending others to concentration camps. “But the Ukrainians were not meek, like the Jews: they repaid blood with blood, death with death.” She heard rumors about UPA in Volhynia and suspected that one of her friends had connections with them. Her friend arranged for her to join the insurgent army. She said not to worry about her Jewishness, since the soldiers of UPA “do not divide people by races but by whether they are honest or not.” She was given a six-month nursing course and served in an UPA hospital. Eventually the Bolsheviks decimated her unit, and the remainder fought their way into the American zone of Austria in the fall of 1946. From there she went to Israel.128

Only a few years passed before this beautiful tale was exposed as a fabrication. Friedman made an investigation into the memoir. When it was republished in Buenos Aires in 1957, a prominent Melnykite, Dmytro Andriievsky, filled in a bit more of Stella Krenzbach’s life story. In Israel, he wrote, she went to work as a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs.129 She first published her memoirs in the Washington Post, and a few weeks later she was murdered. Here is what Friedman discovered: “I checked the Washington Post of that period and did not find the memoirs. At my request, Dr. N.M. Gelber of Jerusalem made inquiry in the foreign ministry there; the reply was that the ministry had never had an employee by that name and that such a case of homicide was entirely unknown. Moreover, a careful analysis of the text of the ‘memoirs’ has led me to the conclusion that the entire story is a hoax.”130 One of the dviikari, Bohdan Kordiuk, also looked into the Stella Krenzbach question. His conclusion was very similar. He asked the UPA veterans he knew if they had known or heard of her; none had. In his opinion, “the tale of Dr. Stella Krenzbach has to be considered a mystification.”131

But decades passed, Ukraine became independent, connections with the Ukrainian diaspora intensified, and some Western Ukrainians were calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA. Not surprisingly, then, in 1993, a periodical connected with the Vasyl Stus Memorial Society in Lviv, Poklyk sumlinnia, reanimated Stella Krenzbach by republishing her memoir. The memoir fit perfectly with Zhanna Kovba’s goal to give the lie to stereotypes of antisemitic Ukrainians and communist Jews, and she accepted it as good coin.132 Volodymyr Viatrovych also cited her memoir in his 2006 book on OUN and the Jews to demonstrate the presence and acceptance of Jews in UPA.133 Then as the controversies around OUN and UPA heated up near the end of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, the Ukrainian-language Jewish poet Moishe Fishbein did a great deal to publicize the Krenzbach story. He gave a conference paper, frequently reprinted/reposted at the time, entitled “The Jewish Card in Russian Operations against Ukraine,” which used the Krenzbach memoir to counter Russian claims that UPA was antisemitic. He also put the Krenzbach memoirs on his website in Ukrainian and in English translation.134 Fishbein’s efforts took in many people.135

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The controversies over the legitimacy of sources reaffirm the need to treat sources with care. In our survey, we saw the limitations and problems with every kind of source we looked at. The German documents do not constitute, as earlier Holocaust scholars believed, the touchstone of truth; instead they are marred by deep biases. Soviet documents are formulated using an ideological vocabulary and, more important, sometimes tailored information to serve the needs of the state. Internal OUN documents are much more reliable than documents produced for external consumption. Moreover, the researcher has to be careful about deliberate misrepresentation and even falsifications by OUN. Crucially, official documents of every provenance need to be triangulated, whenever possible, with other evidence, primarily eyewitness testimony, but also when relevant with photographs, films, and the periodical press. Jewish testimony is often marked by trauma and Ukrainian testimony by evasion. All sources need to be treated with care. Some sources, moreover, have imbedded problems as products of criminal practices: German documents and photographs are components of the atrocities they report on, and Soviet interrogations have their origins in torture. Questions around sources are not simple, but it is hoped that this survey has armed the reader with sufficient understanding to make reasonable judgments about the utility and reliability of the various sources and about the historical processes which they reflect.

1 There is actually a wonderful finding aid prepared along these lines: Berkhoff, “Ukraine under Nazi Rule.”

2 Ilnytzkyj, Deutschland und die Ukraine 1934-1945.

3 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 39 n. 29.

4 Friedman, Philip. “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181, 196 n. 15. EM, no. 126, 27 October 1941; translation from Einsatzgruppen Reports, 210.

5 OUN v svitli postanov.

6 See below, 163, 165, 170-71, 225-26.

7 Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 177 n. 30.

8 Zlochyny komunistychnoi Moskvy.

9 Yevhen Stakhiv has related that in December 1941 he passed on a letter from the leader of one faction of OUN, Stepan Bandera, who was then imprisoned by the Gestapo in Berlin, to the underground head of OUN-B in the Homeland, Mykola Lebed, instructing OUN not to antagonize the Germans and to try to repair relations with Germany. About forty years later, Stakhiv reminded Lebed, who was then the leader of the dviikari, of Bandera’s instructions, but Lebed claimed not to remember them. Again about five years later Stakhiv raised the subject with Lebed, and this time he allegedly answered: “Yes, I remember. But I didn’t want you to tell people about it. It is not necessary for history to know the truth.” Stakhiv, Kriz’ tiurmy, 99-100. Although this story does seem to characterize the dviikari’s attitude to history, I lack faith in Stakhiv’s reliability as a memoirist. The incident has been accepted as genuine, however, by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” 106; Stepan Bandera, 41.

10 Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv,” 259.

11 http://resource.history.org.ua/cgi-bin/eiu/history.exe?&I21DBN=ELIB&P21DBN=ELIB&S21STN=1&S21REF=10&S21FMT=elib_all&C21COM=S&S21CNR=20&S21P01=0&S21P02=0&S21P03=ID=&S21STR=0013098, accessed 23 October 2018.

12 Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 287 and 428 n. 63.

13 See above, 31-38.

14 See above, 52.

15 Serhiichuk, OUN-UPA v roky viiny, 311-12.

16 Artizov, Ukrainskie natsionalisticheskie organizatsii.

17 There is a very interesting book on the RHSA: Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation.

18 Headland, Messages of Murder.

19 DALO, fond R12, op. 1.

20 For more context on this, see Himka, “Legislating Historical Truth.”

21 USHMM, Acc. 1995.A.1086, RG-31.001M.

22 I am grateful to David Alan Rich for sharing a copy of the militia files with me.

23 There are also regional SBU archives that I have not consulted, but the younger generation of Ukrainian historians (e.g., Marta Havryshko, Roman Shliakhtych, and Andrii Usach) has been making good use of them in their publications.

24 This problem is fleshed out more fully in Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.

25 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 247-48. We now have an excellent account of the methods used by the NKVD during the late 1930s in Soviet Ukraine based on NKVD interrogators’ own admissions of “violations of socialist legality”: Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. See also a wrenching study of Stalinist interrogations in postwar Poland that was able to explore the issue more from prisoners’ perspectives: Chodakiewicz, “The Dialectics of Pain.”

26 This comes out very clearly in Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial.

27 Bohunov, Mytropolyt Andrei Sheptyts’kyi.

28 Dumitru, “Analysis.”

29 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.

30 Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’” 18.

31 Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial,” 21. See also Penter, “Collaboration on Trial.”

32 Comments of Tanja Penter in Coleman, “Roundtable,” 235-37.

33 This is the same period in which the Soviets published the English-language tracts that appeared under the name Valerii Styrkul. See above, 42.

34 Himka, “‘Skazhite, mnogo liudei vy rasstreliali?’”

35 Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 118, 121.

36 YVA, r.g. M.52, file 245.1 (6412889), frames 86-88; originally from DALO, 3/1/278. Extraordinary Commission documents.

37 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.

38 The Commission’s investigation of Hrymailiv is found in GARF, fond 7021, opis 75, delo 94, ff. 1-4, 14-34v; USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 17.

39 Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Lfd. Nr. 698, Lübeck 2 Ks 1/67 (vol. 31 of the printed edition), 483.

40 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.

41 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 213. A photocopy of the complete testimony is online: https://training.ehri-project.eu/a10-1946-philip-friedman-recalls-pogrom-lviv (accessed 15 January 2019). Kovba gives a different archival location and says the testimony was to the Extraordinary Commission. But the online testimony, which seems to be an identical text, was to the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War. I assume the same testimony was used for both commissions. I want to thank Alexander Melnyk for first turning my attention to this and providing me with information on the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War.

42 Philip Friedman, “The Destruction of the Jews of Lwów,” 246. Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 183, 198 n. 24.

43 On the Vinnytsia mass murders, see Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror.”

44 Korzen, “The Extermination of Two Ukrainian Jewish Communities,” 311 (quote). Yad Vashem Studies, which published Bingle’s testimony in 1959, apparently accepted this as good coin. Unfortunately, the publication of the testimony did not specify to which Soviet body the testimony was given.

45 The title of the collection is “Selected Records from Former Archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine, 1919-1937; 1941-1962; and 1965.” USHMM RG-31.026 Acc. 2003.260; the documents are originally from TsDAHO. I would like to thank Vadim Altskan at USHMM for directing me to this collection.

46 For example, in 2017 an aluminum milk can full of well preserved OUN-UPA documents was found in the Yaniv woods near Lviv. The can had been buried in mid-1951. “Vidkopaly arkhiv UPA.” Even more recently, in autumn 2019, OUN-UPA documents from 1945-46 were found in woods near Rohatyn in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. Prystans’ka, “U lisakh Ivano-Frankivshchyny.”

47 The OUN periodical press is discussed below, 101-02.

48 Cited in Patryliak, Viis’kova diial’nist OUN (B), 322.

49 Translation by Marco Carynnyk. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 345 (translation), 346 (photoreproduction of the original document).

50 USHMM RG-06.029.

51 Adamczyk, Ziemie Wschodnie.

52 Cited in Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” 386.

53 Emphases in original.

54 Gross, Neighbors, 92.

55 Browning, Collected Memories, 43.

56 Bartov, “Wartime Lies,” 487; more generally on the importance of testimony as a source for the Holocaust, see 487-90 and 506-08.

57 See above, 49.

58 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1.

59 Himka, “Dostovirnist’ svidchennia.”

60 Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’” 20.

61 Ibid., 20.

62 Golczewski, “Die Kollaboration in der Ukraine,” 156.

63 Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence, 44. I have explored the problem of antipathy and ethnic stereotypes in survivor memory in Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust, and Himka, “How to Think about Difficult Things.”

64 Kraft, “Archival Memory,” 321.

65 Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust, 12-21.

66 This estimate is taken from Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence, 145 n. 2.

67 See Aleksiun, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission.”

68 Relacje z czasów Zagłady.

69 Welzer, ”Opa war kein Nazi.”

70 Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” 392.

71 For example, these two texts, in spite of the name change, are by the same person: Lejb Wieliczker, AŻIH 302/26; Wells, The Janowska Road. They provide substantially the same information. The same is true of Kurt Lewin’s memoir of 1946 and his testimony for the Shoah Foundation: Lewin, Przeżyłem; Shoah Foundation 25423 Kurt Lewin.

72 Browning, Collected Memories, 46-47.

73 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 2.

74 Kraft, “Archival Memory,” 316 n. 3.

75 Lower, The Diary of Samuel Golfard. I was not able to consult A. Klonicki-Klonymus, The Diary of Adam's Father (Jerusalem, 1973).

76 Siemaszko and Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo. I would like to thank Michal Mlynarz for his invaluable help with this.

77 Andrzej, “Tadeusz Zaderecki.” This article provides links to some of Zaderecki’s publications of the 1930s.

78 Zaderecki, “Gdy swastyka Lwowem władała.”

79 Tadeusz Zaderecki, Lwów under the Swastika: The Destruction of the Jewish Community through the Eyes of a Polish Writer (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018). I have been unable to consult this volume myself.

80 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 2-3.

81 Himka, “Ukrainian Memories of the Holocaust,” 427.

82 The memoir section is called “Spomyny.”

83 See my analysis of a documentary put out by the Centre on Ukraine during World War II: Himka, “Victim Cinema.”

84 UCRDC, “Spomyny,” no. 33 (Ivan P”iatka). In 2014 the Lviv historian Andrii Bolianovsky brought to my attention that there is another memoir of a Ukrainian policeman in the UCRDC: B., “Ukrains’ka politsiia. Spomyn. Burlington, Ontario, 1988.” When I made a request to see it in 2018, I was informed that access was “still restricted.” Emails Andrii Bolianovsky to John-Paul Himka, 1 October 2014, UCRDC Office to John-Paul Himka, 28 May 2018. Subsequently Bolianovsky sent me photos of pages from the memoir, which he had clearly had access to.

85 Himka and Himka, “Absence and Presence,” 19-20.

86 Yahad-in Unum Testimony no. 737.

87 Ibid. no. 802.

88 Ibid. no. 827.

89 E.g., Shoah Foundation 36160 Dmitrii Omelianiuk; see also the film based on Ukrainian interviews for the Shoah Foundation: Spell Your Name (Nazvy svoie im”ia) (2006) directed by Sergei Bukovsky and presented by Steven Spielberg and Viktor Pinchuk.

90 Strutyns’ka, Daleke zblyz’ka, 145-246.

91 Strutyns’ka, Buria nad L’vovom.

92 Nakonechnyi, “Shoa” u L’vovi.

93 For a more extended analysis, see Himka, “Debates in Ukraine,” 353-56.

94 Shepelev, “Fotografii,” 431 n. 12.

95 See his beautiful and moving remembrance of her: Preston, “A Bird in the Wind.”

96 It is in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, acc. no. 2013.himka, RG-60.1414, film ID 2983. I also have a copy in my possession.

97 Shepelev, “Fotografii,” 435, 441.

98 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 37 n. 32.

99 AŻIH, 301/442, Róża Wagner, 3-4.

100 See above, 36-37.

101 On the successes and repression of the Melnykites in Kyiv, see Kurylo, “Syla ta slabkist’.” On the antisemitism of the Melnykite milieus in light of contemporary Ukrainian historico-political controversies, see Radchenko, “‘I todi braty.’“ Myroslav Shkandrij wrote that after the repressions in Ukrains’ke Slovo, its replacement, Nove ukrains’ke slovo, was “anti-Ukrainian and antisemitic.” Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism, 176. This is true, but it implies that the Melnykite paper was not antisemitic beforehand, which was, as Radchenko shows, not the case.

102 Himka, “Krakivski visti and the Jews.” Himka, “Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder.”

103 Kogon was a Christian who opposed the Nazis and paid for this with six years in Buchenwald. After the war he wrote the first major analysis of the concentration camp system, Der SS Staat (1946), published in English as The Theory and Practice of Hell.

104 Ianiv, “Za dobre im”ia ukrains’koho narodu.”

105 The last major review of the metropolitan’s thoughts and actions during the Holocaust was my own: Himka, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust.”

106 “Ukraintsi i zhydy.”

107 See, for example, Radchenko, “‘Niemcy znaleźli.’“

108 See below, 208-10.

109 Translation taken from Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 170-71; Ukrainian text: 153, 162. Underlining in the original.

110 Author’s translation. German text: Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 167. Underlining in the original.

111 See above, 42-44.

112 Hunczak, “Problems of Historiography,” 136-38.

113 Hunczak, “A Reappraisal.” See also the response: Szajkowski, “‘A Reappraisal.’“

114 Hunczak, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations.” The Deschênes Commission was active in 1985-86 investigating alleged war criminals among the Ukrainian and Baltic communities in Canada. Conflicts arose between these communities and some Jewish organizations over the use of Soviet evidence.

115 Grimsted, “‘Trophy’ Archives,” 6.

116 This is easily checkable in the searchable files of Dilo at libraria.ua.

117 There is a document from 1938 in which Stetsko added in his own hand the words “Pryntsypy ukrains’koi propahandy.” Reproduced in Carynnyk, “‘A Knife in the Back,’“ 7 (point 8a). This document has extensive additions in Stetsko’s handwriting, and they can be compared to the handwritten additions in the small photoreproduction of a passage from the autobiography in Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 153. To me the handwriting and method of making insertions look the same, but I am not a specialist in analyzing handwriting and I have seen too little of the original of the Ukrainian autobiography. Stetsko’s widow, Slava Stetsko, shown a copy of the autobiography by Zhanna Kovba, denied that it was her late husband’s writing. Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 225.

118 On a more abstruse point, Hunczak was exercised about the typewriter, which at first he thought had no g (some Ukrainian keyboards lack them), but then he found examples of g in the autobiography. Thus, he argued, there was no reason for a Western Ukrainian not to be using a g where expected in the ortho-graphy and in the transcription of foreign words and place names. But I myself have used different Ukrainian keyboards, and more than once it has taken me a long time to discover whether the keyboard had a g as well as an h, since the placement of g on the keyboard was not and still has not been standardized. Stetsko was using an unfamiliar typewriter in Berlin and may not have found the g until near the end of his typescript, where the g’s in fact appear.

119 Herasymenko, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv, 28.

120 Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 153-56.

121 The pro-OUN historian Volodymyr Kosyk also accepted the autobiography as genuine. See Berkhoff, “A Power Terrible for Its Opponents,” 199 n. 10.

122 Only three pages of The Book of Facts (Knyha faktiv) were made public at that time. But the whole 60-page text is available on line http://avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/3188/ (accessed 10 December 2018).

123 “U Sluzhbi bezpeky Ukrainy vidbulys’ Hromads’ki istorychni slukhannia.” “Iak tvorylasia lehenda pro Nachtigall” (source of quotation). “Dokumenty SBU.”

124 See below, 169-70.

125 Rybakov, “Marko Tsarynnyk.” Himka, “Be Wary.”

126 Riabenko, “‘Knyha faktiv,’“ 103-08. Riabenko’s study is well researched and at the same time a one-sided polemic.

127 Himka, “The Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum,” 146-52.

128 Krentsbakh, “Zhyvu shche zavdiaky UPA.”

129 This was also indicated in her published memoir: Ibid., 349.

130 Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 203-04 n. 57.

131 Kordiuk, “Pro liudei.” Kordiuk was one of the Banderites who was arrested and survived Auschwitz.

132 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 113-14. She mistakenly wrote that the memoirs had been first published in Israel.

133 V”iatrovych, Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv, 79.

134 http://mosesfishbein.blogspot.com/2009/10/memoirs-of-stella-krenzbach-i-am-alive.html (accessed 11 December 2018). The English translation was by Marta D. Olynyk. Apparently, Fishbein also had no luck in finding an original publication in the Washington Post.

135 Among those who fell for the Krenzbach fabrication was the well-known Sovietologist Paul Goble. Rudling, The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust, 31-32.