ГУЛаг Палестины
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most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it.
(Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The 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)
The question that I would be interested in hearing your views on, then, Mr.
Wiesenthal, is whether the assertion you made on the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face
of Freedom of October 23, 1994 may have been diametrically opposite to the truth
specifically, that whereas you held out that during the interval prior to the
occupation of Lviv by German forces Ukrainians were slaughtering Jews by the thousands,
in reality during this same interval it may have been closer to the truth to say that
Jews were slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands.
Sincerely yours,
Lubomyr Prytulak
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 826 hits since 18Jan98
Wiesenthal Letter 21 Sep 14/97 Altered dates of death
September 14, 1997
Simon Wiesenthal
Jewish Documentation Center
Salztorgasse 6
1010 Vienna
Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthal:
In connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, Morley
Safer (in his 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of October 23, 1994)
inserted into the pre-German interval two events which gave the viewer the impression
that the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being
doubted: (1) the arrest of your mother, and (2) the shooting of your mother-in-law:
SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia,
the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.
LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true!
SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal - like thousands of Lvov
Jews, his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police.
These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian
brutality. The German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as
'praiseworthy.'
WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go
so fast.
SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners.
WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman
because she couldn't walk fast.
SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out
the guilty, to bring justice.
The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it
ends with a reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine
that the events bracketed in Mr. Safer's discourse by these two references happened
during that same pre-German interval. Specifically, Mr. Safer gives the distinct and
unmistakable impression that the pre-German anti-Jewish activities on the part of
Ukrainians cannot be doubted because among the events that occurred during these
activities were the arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law.
However, examining your biographies for confirmation of these two events - the
arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law - turns up the following
(it will help at this point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June
30, 1941):
In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods
truck at Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then
sixty-three. ... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead
by a Ukrainian police auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter
Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p.
8)
"My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon
says, lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold.
... Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife]
learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a
Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. (Alan
Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41)
We see, therefore, that Morley Safer seems to have advanced the date of arrest of your
mother as well as the shooting of your mother-in-law by more than a year in order to
lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the
German occupation of Lviv.
As this error appears to be Mr. Safer's and not your own, I do not ask you to
account for it. However, I do ask if you at any time subsequent to the 60 Minutes