Ukrainian forces helping the Nazis with their “Final Solution” in Poland. Source: Yad Vashem. (Israel Holocaust Museum.)
By Paul Goldfinger, MD, Editor Blogfinger.net
During the German “Final Solution” actions in the 1930’s and 40’s, some of the most genocidal persecutions of Jews occurred in Poland. There were too many to round up and murder, so the Nazis elicited help from other sources.
It is ironic, but one group which helped in the persecution of Jews were Ukrainians, especially the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.
On then other hand, some Ukrainian partisans did oppose the Nazis. It depended on where one lived.
During the German occupation of Poland, a small number of Jews, men and women, escaped into the forests to join the “partisans.” One of these was a photographer named Edmund “Mundek” Lukawiecki. He had studied his craft in the 1930’s and he used a Leica* camera, as I do. “Mundek” took that camera into the forest, clutching it and a rifle.
In 2008 a movie with Daniel Craig called Defiance was about this era.
“Mundek” was part of an assault group, a “Jewish hit squad,” which harassed the Nazis and their helpers: Polish collaborators, Ukrainian Police, and German officers who were perpetrating atrocities on civilians.
Edmund Lukawiecki. Jewish partisan and photographer lived and fought in the Polish forest during WWII. Yad Vashem photo.
He took photographs of the fighting and atrocities whenever he could, and a Christian friend processed those forest images. In 2011 the Government of Israel recognized that man as “Righteous Among the Nations” for risking his live to save Jews. I don’t have his name.
The camera and the photographs eventually wound up at Yad Vashem for their Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
A woman whom Lukawiecki met in the forest was Chana Bern, and eventually they both escaped to Israel where they were wed.
Chana Bern in the forest with The Polish Resistance Army. Yad Vashem photo.The stories of WWII and the Holocaust can never be completely documented. Survivors often suffered from life-long post-traumatic stress syndromes.
A powerful movie about such survivors is Enemies a Love Story based on a novel by Simon Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author.
Some survivors of concentration camps eventually wound up in Israel only to die fighting as part of the Israeli Army during the War of Independence in 1948.
The Leica* Company, a German firm know for their optics, made supplies for Hitler, but they, like the Schindler story, helped Jewish employees escape death.
Today, about 45,000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in Israel since the Russians invaded their country. (2022). Interestingly, the history of warfare between Russia and Ukraine is not new.
Towards the end of WWII, the Russian Army liberated concentration camps in Germany and elsewhere as they moved westward . If you were a concentration camp survivor as the war began to wind down, your greatest wish was for the Russians to show up.
Many Russian Jews were members of the Russian army in both World Wars.
Hitler had ordered a vicious scorched earth policy as his military invaded Russia in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa.). His military was ordered to kill, terrorize, and destroy everything in its path and especially to kill Jews, and there were large numbers of them in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
The Soviet Union lost an estimated 25 million people, military and civilian, but that is probably an underestimation.
The American Army also freed camp inmates, and Eisenhower himself and Patton visited those sites and forced German civilians to see these sights and to help in the clean-up.
After the war, Stalin ordered the deaths of millions of people in his own country, including over 1 million Jews there who survived the war and thought the Russians would not be as horrid as the Nazis.
Israel has provided some military aid to Ukraine now, but certain weapon systems they refuse to offer. The Israelis must be conflicted over this decision.
Many displaced Jews came to the US in waves after WWII, including a large number in the 1970’s. My father, living in East Brunswick, sponsored a Jewish Russian family in the ’70’s and helped them come to the US. I used to give him clothes. A large number of Russian Jews settled in Chicago where their families still live.
My family on both sides came to freedom in America during a great wave of immigration in the early 20th century. We all remember that.