COMMENTARY: About remembering victims of the Holocaust (02/01/98)

COMMENTARY: About remembering victims of the Holocaust

by Steve Petylycky

I know all I need to know about the Holocaust.

I know that millions of Jews and others were exterminated by the Nazis.

I believe in bringing war criminals to justice. I don't know anyone who doesn't.

Philosophers and priests can deliberate whether it is better to forget, forgive, do both, or neither. What they decide probably doesn't matter. Canadians will never forget. We are not allowed to. Scarcely a week goes by in which I can not read, or hear, or see references to the Holocaust in the newspapers I buy, on my radio, or on TV.

I don't object. I am a Holocaust survivor. My Auschwitz number is 154922. Even if I wanted to forget, the tattoo the Nazis engraved on my arm won't let me.

That inked-in scar also empowers me. Those who were not in the Nazi death camps do not have the same right to speak about the Holocaust that I do. I welcome the scholars who try to memorialize what happened. Reliable accounts of the mechanics of this great murder have been written. But those who were not there can never understand the essence of the Holocaust. Worse, to my grief, I find that there are may posturers at work who batten themselves on the carcasses of the dead millions, selectively remembering what will be good for them, discarding the rest. That is why I have taken up my pen today.

I fought for Ukraine's independence. I was, and am, a Ukrainian nationalist. That is why the Nazis threw me into a hell on earth. I was betrayed by a Pole. I say Jews help the Nazis kill their own people. I witnessed bestial things, tens of thousands turned into ash. I saw many sinners but few, very few, saints.

We must include all of the survivors in our memory of the Holocaust, whether they were Ukrainians by birth, Jews by faith, Poles by citizenship, or German resisters. When I lay near death in a pile of corpses before a crematorium's door I did not care whether the body besides me was that of a Romanian or a Russian. I did not ask the nationality or faith or citizenship of my savior. I doubt he knew who I was. We were in hell together. And so he saved me from the flames. Later I learned he was a Pole. I wish I could thank him. The only way I can is by insisting that we must remember that there were many victims of the Nazis, from all of the countries of occupied Europe. No European nation was without its Judases, no people without its blessed martyrs.

Today this is not being remembered. Ukraine suffered more losses than any other European nation during World War II. Never forget, I'm told. Yet, rather conveniently, this fact is being forgotten. Will what happened to me and to Ukraine under the Nazi jackboot be remembered in the new Holocaust gallery of the Canadian War Museum? I hope so, but I doubt it. I suspect Ukrainians will be portrayed as victimizers, not victims. That is unfair and untrue. I know. I was there. A public exhibit in the nation's capital may well end up forgetting the other genocides of this century, those millions of other victims in China, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, as well a the many millions of victims of the Holocaust who were not Jews. I don't want that. This exhibit should be inclusive, not exclusive, for the sake of the victims - more importantly, for my children and my children's children.

I fear what will happen because just about all that I ever hear about when it comes to Ukraine and the second world war are allegations made by groups like the Canadian Jewish Congress, who flail Ottawa for allegedly allowing Nazi war criminals into this country. Whom are they talking about?

Usually not about the many Germans who supported Hitler, or the Italian fascists, or Vichy French collaborators. The organized German, Italian and French constituencies of Canada are too influential. Groups that aren't influential include those made up Canadians of Eastern European heritage - Latvians, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Belarusians and others.

They came here after the war as displaced persons. Many had fought against both the Nazis and the Soviets. They lost. They were left with no one to defend them or explain what they had suffered. A powerful Soviet Union and its puppet regimes throughout Eastern Europe mobilized enormous resources to defame these anti-Communist refugees - to say nothing about the bevy of fellow travellers in the West for whom a nationalist was the equivalent of a Nazi, for whom criticisms of communism constituted a politically incorrect crime.

And so, just after the war's end, the Canadian Jewish Congress and its allies alleged that Nazi SS men, war criminals all (they specifically meant the Ukrainian Division "Galicia") were sneaking into Canada. Official investigations dismissed these unsubstantiated claims. Undeterred, Jewish Canadian groups repeated essentially these same charges in the mid-1980s. A Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Mr. Justice Jules Deschenes, was set up.

What the good judge found that the supposed problem of alleged Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada had been "grossly exaggerated." The Galicia Division was specifically cleared, as a unit, of any complicity in war crimes. Do not take my word for it. Read the Deschenes Commission's public report. Nevertheless, a War Crimes Unit was set up by the Ministry of Justice.

For all their effort and expenditures over 10 years, Ottawa's men have not been able to successfully prosecute a single alleged Nazi war criminal in a Canadian criminal court. The evidence is not there.

Could this mean that there actually are no Nazi war criminals in Canada? Perhaps, but such a finding would be inconvenient, even embarrassing. How, then, to explain away the system's "failures"? Concoct a novel accusation. That was done.

Senior members of Canada's War Crimes Unit were allegedly "anti-Semitic," which explains the lack of convictions. Piled onto that canard were, predictably, all the usual allegations from the past, supposedly buttressed with "new evidence" (it wasn't), followed by a postured outpouring of outrage, sometimes by persons styling themselves as "second-generation Holocaust survivors." As a real survivor I find that self-description pitiful, conceited, even a bit obscene. Yet, for reasons I can't fathom, all of these oft-repeated yet never proven allegations were somehow deemed newsworthy. Contrary viewpoints, to say nothing of the facts, have been ignored.

I've had enough. I was tortured by the Nazis when most of those who today feign fits about alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada were in diapers or in their dads' dreams. If the Canadian Jewish Congress or any other Jewish organization has evidence to prove that there are Nazi war criminals in Canada let them produce it now, publicly, conclusively. Let's have the hard evidence instead of the usual hot air. Is that too much for a Holocaust survivor to ask?

Steve Petylycky, a Holocaust survivor, lives in British Columbia, where he is writing his memoirs, "Into Auschwitz For Ukraine." The article above was published also by The Toronto Star on December 29, 1997.

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