I came across this old NY Times article and thought of the common
Soviet stereotype of UPA being antisemites, that you also endorse:
A Life as Prisoner of Europe's Hatreds
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: October 11, 1992
EUROPE echoes with anguish about the revival of old demons: of
xenophobia and internment camps; of national chauvinism and religious
warfare; of "ethnic cleansing" and the passivity of neighboring
countries and ordinary neighbors, who manage to shut some inner eye to
the atrocities in front of their faces.
Darya K. Detsik has been here before, and so has her homeland, Western
Ukraine. In her life is the whole recent history of this land, fought
over many times in this atrocious century. She has absorbed horror and
tragedy like a Ukrainian Lear.
She is 66, her lined face framed by thinning white hair and many of
her teeth capped with steel, a sign of the labor camps. What she's
endured, and what she's witnessed, has left her both heroic and
marred, full of ambivalences. As a young girl, she saw the Jews of
Ivano-Frankivsk moved into the ghetto and later executed; she fought
both the Nazis and the Soviets and spent many years in the Gulag. Now,
as an elected local legislator for Rukh, the Ukrainian movement that
campaigned for independence from the Soviet Union, and a member of
Memorial, a society devoted to honest history, she is trying to bring
the reality of Soviet crimes against Ukraine to the knowledge of its
newly sovereign citizens.
"When I recall these horrors," she said, "sometimes I cannot believe
that I survived at all and came back. It's another person walking in
my shoes."
But with her soul, she resists the idea that Ukrainians were also
complicit in history's crimes. In this denial, too, she stands at the
cusp between past horrors and present ones in a Europe where neo-Nazis
rampage in Germany and the Balkans burn.
Mrs. Detsik says firmly: "In Memorial, we don't distinguish between
those who are ours and those who are not ours." But in the statement
there is distinction, perhaps understandable, from Ukrainian
nationalists who feel that their own dead have been ignored by the
world, while the dead of others, Jews in particular, have been widely
mourned.
Western Europe and America watch the post-Communist states emerge with
every buried hatred seemingly as vivid as the day the Iron Curtain
slammed down. Yet Western Ukraine, having survived both Nazism and
Stalinism, is trying to acknowledge and make amends for the past.
Still, there is in the fierce Ukrainian nationalism a whiff of
vindictiveness.
An industrial city of some 240,000 people and the capital of Galicia,
Ivano-Frankivsk is layered with monuments to the dead. These stones
and crosses and stars lie on a thin cover of ground over cemeteries
and mass graves, sometimes huge ditches in which a bewildering variety
of corpses have been thrown, and it can seem that there is no square
mile that does not bear a memorial, new or ancient, tem****ary or under
construction, to the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish dead. The
only corpses left unmemorialized are the Nazis.
There is the town cemetery, leveled by the Soviets but partly
restored; it contains memorials to the Polish dead of two world wars,
to Ukrainians who died fighting Poles and to all the victims of
fascism. There is the Kosmos Cinema, built by the Soviets after
leveling the Jewish cemetery; the gravestones were used for sidewalks
and a monument to Stalin's secret police that was later dismantled by
Memorial. There is the plaque at the place that was a ghetto under the
Nazis, and there is the monument in a barren field where many of the
city's 220,000 Jews were killed. There is the plaque to 39 Ukrainian
nationalists shot by the Nazis in a public execution in a lane that is
now the Street of the Executed; the street runs past the former
synagogue, which houses the Medical Institute's social club.
And there is the new monument in Demyanov Laz (the Black Forest) on
the graves of 532 Ukrainians executed by the Soviets in 1939. The site
was excavated in 1989 by Mrs. Detsik and her formidable colleague,
Ramon N. Krutsyk, after the regional party secretary told them: "You
better find something there, or you'll find yourself in prison."
What they found was horrible enough to keep them out of jail, but the
discovery also became a kind of mental prison, feeding their tribal
sense of injustice. Three pits contained the remains of 415 men, 116
women and one child, most with receipts in their wallets for their
valuables issued by the N.K.V.D. in October 1939, a month after the
Soviets marched in to this area, then part of Poland. Reminders
The soil, mostly clay, preserved much. Many bodies had cloth still
bound in their jaws; their hands were bound with wire; many had three
or four bullet holes in their skulls. Some of the women's skulls still
had long braids. Bones had flesh; fingers had nails.
Memorial held a formal reburial, under the then-banned Ukrainian flag.
Today the site is stark: three mounds of earth, an iron fence, a large
cross.
Mr. Krutsyk made two films, then took them to 600 villages, to show
Ukrainians what the Soviets had done. From 1939 to 1941, he said, 1.2
million people were de****ted and 50,000 imprisoned or killed. Then
came the Nazis; afterward, the Soviets de****ted, jailed or killed
another 200,000. Memorial has excavated 27 more sites, uncovering
1,500 corpses. Twenty-one more excavations are under way.
Mrs. Detsik was born here, and her story emerges slowly. At 17, two
years into the German occupation, she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army, or U.P.A., as a nurse. Her unit fought the Germans, then the
Soviets. She was captured in May 1945, five days before the European
war ended, and was sentenced to the infamous prison camps at Vorkhuta,
above the polar circle in northernmost Russia.
"Vorkhuta, Vorkhuta, great planet," runs the camp song. "Twelve months
winter, the rest is summer." She spent 11 years there before being
freed in the thaw of 1956. "When I left the camp, I had nothing," she
said. She met Mikhail M. Detsik, a U.P.A. doctor who spent 20 years in
the camps. They married, living another 13 years in Vorkhuta, having
two children, before returning here.
But her history was well known, and her family's house had been
confiscated. She was not allowed to register for an apartment. At her
husband's funeral, on Oct. 29, 1989, she says proudly, "the first
Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag was raised here in Ivano-Frankivsk."
She was rehabilitated only a year ago, as the Soviet Union crumbled.
Walking through the city, she pointed out a plaque to Stepan Bandera,
U.P.A.'s leader, on a street now named after him -- a first in
Ukraine. Under Soviet power, Bandera was considered an embodiment of
evil ranking only with Trotsky. The Soviets ****trayed his fighters as
Nazi agents, and thousands of Soviet troops fought to exterminate
U.P.A. until its last bunkers in the Carpathians were taken in 1955.
Renaming the street caused a huge battle. In fact, U.P.A.'s history is
checkered. It fought the Nazis and the Soviets and tried to protect
the Greek Catholic Church, but it also killed many Poles who had
settled in Ukrainian territory, in an increasing cycle of revenge that
also found Jewish victims. Mrs. Detsik says many atrocities were
committed by Soviet agents posing as U.P.A. soldiers; such units did
exist. Heroes and Victims
Unsurprisingly, she regards U.P.A. fighters as the prime heroes of
Ukrainian independence. "In all those dark years," she said, "we never
stopped believing in an independent Ukraine. But we didn't know when
it would happen."
Asked what she remembered of the city's Jews, Mrs. Detsik's face
changed, going into reverie. When her father died in 1933, she said,
her mother rented half the house to a Jewish family and their children
became her friends.
When the Nazis organized the ghetto, she said, the family -- "Haas, I
think they were called" -- were ordered there. She remembered walking
with her mother near a field, "and I saw them gathering the Jews and
marching them along a street parallel to ours." On the way, she said,
some were killed.
"Then I remember seeing little figures standing atop a dirt wall,
removing their clothes, and they fell. I heard shots and I asked my
mother, and she said: 'They're executing the Jews.' Small children
were thrown in and died in the ditch, or crawled out and were found
dead, nearby. It was July 1941, and I remember the heat was
terrible."
In 1943 there was hunger, and she remembered her mother taking some
potatoes to the ghetto fence and giving them to a little boy her
brother's age. "They were all killed," she said. "From this Haas
family, only the wife lived. Her brother worked in the Jewish police
and was killed later, but told her, 'You're the last; try to save
yourself.' She came to us and stayed in our house two months. If our
neighbors had said anything, we all would have been killed. An Escape
"But she didn't look Jewish and spoke good Ukrainian, and I remember
being so happy finding a German I.D. for a woman her age in the name
of Katerina Siroka, I still remember the name. And I remember my
mother getting up at 4 A.M. and taking her to a village, Yamnitsa, and
my mother put her on the train for Lvov and said: 'You have an I.D.
and you don't look Jewish. Go to a labor exchange and work in Germany.
It will be a better place to try to save yourself.' "
While in Vorkhuta, Mrs. Detsik got a letter from her mother. Mrs. Haas
had written. She'd made it to Berlin and survived the war.
"I don't know her fate," Mrs. Detsik said simply. "I was arrested, and
then my mother was arrested, and we lost everything."
Her own tragedies have opened her heart to others, but only to a
point. She feels grievances, too, and her nationalism, hard-won, does
not allow her to concede the brutality of other Ukrainians.
Walking in the old ghetto, indistinguishable now, she said: "I don't
understand why there is such a strong anti-Ukrainian feeling among
Jews. We democrats made these memorials."
A visitor tried to explain, but she interrupted: "Ukrainians were
prison guards and police, but Nazis did all the killing." She
criticized the United States and Israel for continuing to imprison
John Demjanjuk, convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible," a murderous
guard in Treblinka. New evidence indicates that another Ukrainian may
have been Ivan; Mr. Demjanjuk has appealed.
"We forgive everyone," said Mrs. Detsik bitterly. "But nobody forgives
us, even for things we've never done."
But she bought some flowers and took a visitor to the barren field
where the Jews of Ivano-Frankivsk had been executed. "This is as
tragic a place as the Black Forest," she said. An official memorial
cites only "the 100,000 Soviet citizens and P.O.W.'s of other
countries" killed here.
"This was another absurdity of Soviet power," she said. "It was
forbidden to say that here, Jews died."
She pointed out a shabbier memorial erected by a few survivors, which
in Hebrew and Russian commemorates "the Jewish victims of fascism."
On the way to the air****t, Mrs. Detsik suddenly remembered the
flowers. Ignoring the time and her Jewish visitor's impatience, she
ordered a return to the field. There she pushed the flowers at him.
Eyes moist, she said: "It's you who must do it." And then she gave him
a kiss.
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(and yes, I noticed the author's mix-up of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk)
BM
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