present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is
evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest
number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like
Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr
Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans
of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the
Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are
not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the
present paper seems undesirable.
& CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?
Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those
mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told
the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of
the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to
eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it
is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the
artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the
deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western
Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the
Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:
The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.
The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In
the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were
annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS
special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy
which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a
consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.
At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian