western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, University of
Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)
Was the Ukrainian perception of disproportionate Jewish participation in the Soviet secret
police accurate? Observations such as the following suggest that perhaps it was: Yoram Sheftel,
Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, reports the following in connection with his visit to
the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990:
On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of
about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War,
as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names:
the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones
like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in
Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil.
(The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994, p. 301)
Curious wording, incidentally. In the eyes of Sheftel, this plaque does not list torturers and
butchers, it lists "youth." These torturers and butchers are not chosen from the "worst" of
Jews, but from the "best." And whereas a Ukrainian might tend to the view that the members of
the NKVD were the Red Devil, Sheftel views them as merely having sold their souls to some
hypothetical Red Devil residing elsewhere. Sheftel, it seems, extends his sympathy not to the
victims of the torturers and butchers, but to the torturers and butchers themselves, who after
all are merely "the best of Jewish youth" led astray by some "Red Devil" - in other words, to be
viewed not as falling among the victimizers, but among the victims. I suppose that there exist
even today apologists who might speak of Adolf Eichmann as an instance of the best of German
youth who had sold his soul to the Nazi Devil.
Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the
entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious
hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction:
As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many
Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the most terrible?
It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The
State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future,
1994, p. 147)
Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery especially in
the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD.... It is
difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the
Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hand of the former Russian
authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for
themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary
Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165)
More recently, I have compiled statistics from data presented by Shapoval which suggests that
out of every ten leading members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine, 6 were Jewish, 2 Russian, 1
Ukrainian, and 1 other.
Now within this historical context - the Ukrainian Holocaust eight years previously, the
21-month Communist reign of terror, and the recent slaughter of Ukrainians by the retreating
Communists - would it be surprising if upon the arrival of the Germans, these Western Ukrainians
had felt liberated by the Germans and at the same time vengeful toward the Communists, and would
it be surprising if among their first actions was the seeking out and punishment of any
perpetrators and collaborators who had not been able to flee with the retreating Communists?
No, it would not be surprising - and yet that is not what happened.
Zero Retribution