police (NKVD) arrived, and shot the children in cold blood with
machine guns. This ravine, filled with hundreds of bodies of slain
children, moved even the soldiers, accustomed as they were to the
sight of death. (Andriy Vodopyan, A Ravine Filled With the Bodies
of Children, in S. O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the
Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian
Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, p. 529)
(20) Throwing hand-grenades into the crowded cells.
Rev. J. Chyrva was imprisoned in 1941 when the Russian Communist armies were withdrawing from the city of Riwne. He happened to be
cast into one of those jails in which the communists, fleeing from
advancing German armies, attempted to rid themselves of as many
prisoners as possible by throwing hand-grenades into the crowded
cells. When the first grenade was thrown into the cell where Rev.
J. Chyrva was kept, he was the first to fall - his foot shattered.
On him fell many mutilated bodies, covering him, thus saving his
life. Later, when people came into the cell, they found all the
prisoners dead with the exception of Rev. J. Chyrva. He is alive
today, a witness of that horrible manslaughter. (Rev. Lev Buchak,
Persecution of Ukrainian Protestants under the Soviet Rule, in S.
O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book,
Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror,
Toronto, 1953, p. 529)
(21) Exhumed corpses were found without skin.
The Bolsheviks had arrested thousands of Ukrainian patriots, and
prior to their retreat, they killed them savagely. For some reason
even highly regarded Jewish authors understate the number of
Ukrainian victims of Bolshevik terror. Gerald Reitlinger gives a
figure of three to four thousand in Lviv alone. Hilberg speaks of
"the Bolsheviks deporting Ukrainians," but he does not furnish any
overall figures. But on the basis of a German document (RSHA
IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR no. 28, 20 July 1941, No-2943),
which I was unable to verify, he recounts one particularly horrible
episode:
In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the
Soviets. When some of the exhumed corpses were found
without skin, rumors circulated that the Ukrainians
had been thrown into kettles of boiling water. The
Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews
and beating them to death with clubs.
He also quotes the French collaborator Dr. Frederic as saying that
the Bolsheviks killed eighteen thousand Ukrainian political
prisoners in Lviv and its outskirts alone.
Basing his remarks on an anonymous article entitled "The
Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR," in the dissident journal
Ukrainian Herald, Issue 7-8, the Ukrainian-American publicist Lew
Shankowsky gives the following number of victims of Bolshevik
terror in Galicia and Volhynia: as many as forty thousand killed in
the prisons of Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Dubno, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv
(now Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi, Drohobych, Sambir, Zolochiv and other