by PATRICK COCKBURN
Corpses of Jewish men in the courtyard of Brygidki prison. The reverse of the photo carries the inscription “Bluthof Lemberg,” i.e., blood courtyard Lviv. PHOTO/David Lee Preston in The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd by John-Paul Himka
Of course, it does not follow that the present generation of Ukrainian nationalists are ideological descendants of pro-Nazi Ukrainians. But the Lviv pogrom and Ukraine’s grim history of sectarian and ethnic slaughter does explain why many in Ukraine fear an ultra-nationalist resurgence. A rabbi in Kiev, Moshe Reuven Azman, last month called on Jews to leave the city and possibly even the country. “I don’t want to tempt fate,” he told the Israeli daily Maariv, “but there are constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions.”
What really happened in Lviv in July 1941 has been meticulously researched – drawing on a wealth of eyewitness information – by Professor John-Paul Himka, a Canadian-Ukrainian historian at the University of Alberta. In a study entitled The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Carnival Crowd he concludes that the murderous assault on the Jewish community in Lviv – swelled by Jews fleeing the advance of fascism and anti-Semitism in other parts of central Europe – was primarily carried out by the militia of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) acting under German auspices. It happened quickly after the German occupation because the OUN wanted to show “the Germans that it shared their anti-Jewish perspectives and that it was worthy to be entrusted with the formation of a Ukrainian state”.
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The German army captured Lviv on 30 June 1941, the Soviet NKVD secret police massacred several thousand political prisoners in the jails when they realised that the Germans could not be stopped. The next day, the pogrom started with Jews being compelled to dig up the rotting bodies of the dead prisoners. Others were ritually humiliated by being forced to clean the streets with tooth brushes or remove horse manure by putting it in their hats. “Judging by the photographs, gentiles in Lviv found the cleaners amusing,” writes Professor Himka. “To some extent, the pogrom was a carnival.” Women were stripped naked and beaten and hundreds of Jews were forced to crawl for miles to the prisons.
Kurt Lewin, a survivor, left a detailed account of what happened to him in one prison and he described “savage beatings by both Germans and Ukrainians”, said Simka. “One Ukrainian particularly carved himself into Lewin’s memory. Elegantly dressed in a beautifully embroidered shirt, he beat the Jews with an ironclad cane. Strips of skin flew with every blow, sometimes an ear or an eye.” When his cane broke the man chose a heavier piece of wood with which to beat a man to death.
Edward Spicer, 22 at the time, recalled being caught by a group of Ukrainians near his home and taken to a nearby railway station: “First they were beating us all the way, then they pushed us down the staircase, until we were piled up one on top of another five-six high.” Later, the Jews were made to lie on the ground and anybody who moved was killed with a rifle butt. Many were later taken away in trucks by the Germans to be shot. Professor Himka says the Ukrainians co-operating with the Germans and spearheading the pogrom were members of a militia formed the previous day who often had no uniform and were identifiable only by blue and yellow armbands, worn on the left arm. The Jews were later forced into a ghetto and by the time the Red Army recaptured Lviv in 1944 only 200 to 300 of those Jews were still alive.
The OUN militia did not confine itself to killing Jews. Later in the war, it murdered tens of thousands of Poles in western Ukraine. I was in Lviv in 2001 when Poland’s National Remembrance Institute was investigating the massacre of 35,000 Polish villagers in 1943.
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