organized." He went on to add, however, that "because of the shortage
of transport, most of the prisoners were evacuated on foot, over
distances that sometimes exceeded 600 miles." One can well imagine the
condition in which the prisoners arrived at their destinations. When
there was not enough time for a camp to be evacuated, as was often the
case in the opening weeks of the war, the prisoners were simply
executed. This was particularly the case in western Ukraine, where at
the end of June 1941 the NKVD massacred 10,000 prisoners in Lviv, 1,200
in the prison at Lutsk, 1,500 in Stanislwow, and 500 in Dubno. When
the Germans arrived, they discovered dozens of mass graves in the
regions of Lviv, Zhytomyr, and Vynnytsa. Using these "Judeo-Bolshevik
atrocities" as a pretext, the Nazi Sonderkommandos in their turn
immediately massacred tens of thousands of Jews.
Nicolas Werth in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts and London England, 1999, pp. 225-226.
The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny is a lie of Orwellian
proportions
Of course my reason for bringing these two additional accounts to your attention is to
underline the admission that journalistic ethics demands that you make - that your
23Oct94 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom got things exactly backwards. In the
days prior to German occupation, it was Jews who were killing Ukrainians by the
thousands. This is attested to by many. The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny that in the
days prior to German occupation, Lviv Ukrainians killed some five to six thousand Jews
is attested to only by Simon Wiesenthal and yourself.
CBS attempts to re-write history
One motive for CBS Jews to broadcast the Ugly Face of Freedom appears to be to re-write
a history that they find unflattering. The historical record shows that Communist rule
over Ukraine was largely a Jewish-inflicted oppression and carnage of which the Lviv
massacre constituted a single incident. The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny, then, gives the
impression of being, in part, an attempt to replace the accurate perception of Jews
killing Ukrainians - or more generally, Jews killing Slavs - with the false image of
Ukrainians killing Jews. However, the CBS effort was insufficient to erase from the
historical record that the essence of Ukrainian-Jewish relations is captured not by the
Ugly Face of Freedom, but by scenes such as the one below.
Vynnytsa, Ukraine, June 1943. Here trenches dating from 1937-38 were opened and hundreds of bodies exhumed.
The authorities had built a park and summer theater on the site. Similar trenches were discovered in Zhytomyr,
Kamenets-Podolski, and other areas. Such macabre discoveries continue even today. In 1997, 1,100 bodies were
exhumed in St. Petersburg, and another 9,000 were found in a mass grave in the forests of Karelia.
Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts and London England, 1999, between pp. 202 and 203.
It's time for CBS to produce its evidence.
If you have evidence which demonstrates that the Wiesenthal-Safer accusation is true, I
invite you to break your five-year silence by placing it beside the evidence that I have
adduced so that comparisons can be made and the truth can be discovered. Send me your
evidence, and I will publish it on the Ukrainian Archive web site the same day, and web
visitors will be able to judge for themselves who is right. If you have no evidence on
your side, I invite you to break your five-year silence by withdrawing the
Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny.