ГУЛаг Палестины

and, exhausted and unable to continue walking, asked for

transportation. The officers in charge promised to send them

trucks. Instead of trucks, a detachment of the Russian political

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

towns and settlements. The fact of the matter is that, justifiably

or not, some Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of

the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. For instance, it was

pointed out to me by a resident of Western Ukraine that a high NKVD

official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was Jewish, despite his

Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological Problems and

Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations

During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter

J. Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical

Perspective, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton,

1990, footnotes deleted)

(22) From 15,000 to 40,000 prisoners were killed

In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet

authorities were not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners

they had arrested, mostly during their last months of rule in

western Ukraine. Their solution, implemented at the end of June

and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates regardless of

whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being held

for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to

40,000 prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern

Galicia and western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of

Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)

However, the Membership of this NKVD was

Predominantly Jewish

What was the membership of this NKVD that we see above being so repeatedly blamed

for the massacre of Ukrainians in the days before occupation by German forces? In

my analysis of data presented by Yuri Shapoval, I arrive at the conclusion that the

senior membership in Ukraine of the organization one of whose names became the NKVD

was as follows:

Out of every 10 senior members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine:

6 were Jewish,

2 were Russian,

1 was Ukrainian, and

1 was other.

Statements made by others support the conclusion that the NKVD was predominantly a

Jewish organization. For example, Yoram Sheftel, Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense

attorney, reports that in co

headquarters in 1990, a plaque memorializing the "KGB" dead of the war showed that

all thirty of the thirty names were Jewish:

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, Victor Gollancz, London, 1994, p. 301)

Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative

of the entire NKVD in Ukraine; 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

ca

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)

But if in the pre-German interval Ukrainians were being killed by the NKVD, and if