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)
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)
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)
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
