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them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469)
If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis,
then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when
the Kiev soccer team - Dynamo - beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the
German reward:
Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are
not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired
the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich,
World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he
should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being
starved:
Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that
Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis
intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short
run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a
result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to
move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population.
Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw
120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed
and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History,
1994, p. 469)
Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its
intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow - if we are to
believe Morley Safer - being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for
Naziism:
Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical
research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books
were shipped out to Germany.
We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and
Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first
printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan
Franko.
Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of
Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko
Museum.
As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team
leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries,
exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and
expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster,
November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew
Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23)
Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could
have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they
were being treated as Untermenschen:
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian
intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade
school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as
to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the
Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were
established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial
inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A
History, 1994, p. 469)
There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population
of the east than four years of primary school.
This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple
arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command
that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and
obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school,
no other kind of school must be allowed in the east....
The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people
without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and
workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture,
they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the
German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and
monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short
History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263)
The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis - or if we are to
believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves - is a colossal fiction based on colossal
prejudice:
A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine
was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in
France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a
fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480)
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
Simon Wiesenthal
Discovered Under the Floorboards
In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take
this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards:
In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief
inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish
companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied
himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944,
when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end.
As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled,
leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't
even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53)
To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday - how impressive!
And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory:
He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone
numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before.
He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what
colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and
receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from
them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A
man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent
mentioned by someone - all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And,
just like a computer, he can call them up at any time.
This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated,
as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote
recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of
consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic
memory: he is a man who cannot forget. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon
Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.)
But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less one expects just such
exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of
detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of
accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be
expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events
were traumatic and seared into his memory.
As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a
difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the
demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of
the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards:
One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The
alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched
the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He
was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution.
(Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p.
11)
But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr.
Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has
turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the
street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the
"SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly
defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo
alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS
remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps
a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived
through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember
than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function.
And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether
Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The
more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all.
As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times
over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but
rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case
of the Rusinek slap.
The Rusinek Slap
Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet
Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get
a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face - just
as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more
than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over,
and the Jews are still being beaten."
... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter
Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12)
That is one version, but here is another:
A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and
knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to
his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked.
"I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive."
(Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69)
These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the
first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second
Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been
pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to
your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe
that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in
fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic - so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken
a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his
training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a
knock-out.
Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still
another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only
Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves
Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which
office they spend the entire night cleaning.
And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For
example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly
gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller - and yet, as noted above,
that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too,
Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were
being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he
was shot - where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr.
Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift
coffin.
And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal
himself? - According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious,
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