ГУЛаг Палестины

(Harold Troper Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds, 1988, pp. 17-18)

He [Sheptytsky] dispatched a lengthy handwritten letter dated August

29-31, 1942 to the Pope, in which he referred to the government of the

German occupants as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical

than that of the Bolsheviks. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims,

Bystanders, 1992, p. 267)

One of those saved by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was Lviv's Rabbi

Kahane whose son is currently the marshal commander of the Israeli Air

Force. (Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9)

Sheptitsky himself hid fifteen Jews, including Rabbi Kahane, in his own

residence in Lvov, a building frequently visited by German officials.

(Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 410)

However, despite the widespread agreement that the Catholic church headed by

Sheptytsky was outspoken and courageous in its defense of Jews, you have consistently

portrayed Christianity in general, and the Catholic church in Lviv in 1941 in

particular, as being virulently anti-Semitic. I refer, for example, to your fable of

the alcoholic priest in Western Ukraine who incites a pogrom (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal

File, 1993, p. 24), which fable I have already brought to your attention in my letter

to you of December 8, 1994; and I refer as well to your story of the Ukrainians who you

say almost executed you:

As the shots and shouts of the boisterous Ukrainians drew closer to

Wiesenthal, he heard a new sound: church bells. The Ukrainians heard

it, too. Good Orthodox Catholics all, they laid down their arms for

evening mass.

Wiesenthal and his friend had stood five or six bullets away from

extinction. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, Constable, London, 1993,

p. 36)

Now if it is the case as we have just seen above that the Catholic church

unambiguously and unequivocally stood for the defense of Jews, then we would expect

devout Catholics to not be among the executioners of Jews. Conversely, given that

someone is among the executioners of Jews, we would expect him not to be a devout

Catholic. Your portrayal of sadistic executioners as being simultaneously devout

Catholics is incongruous and elicits incredulity.

But your story goes beyond the incongruous to the grotesque. You portray a team

of executioners who have been repeatedly drinking vodka - and may therefore be depicted

as drunk. You say that they have also just been shooting prisoners in the back of the

neck, and then lifting the bodies from the floor and placing them into makeshift

coffins - therefore, the executioners are also covered with blood. Assuming that these

executioners did not have a place to shower and had not brought with them a change of

clothing, and assuming that the church bells are signaling the imminent commencement of

mass so as not to leave time for showering and changing, then I have trouble conjuring

up a credible image of these executioners arriving at the church for mass. To accept

your image requires us to accept that the appearance of drunk and blood-spattered

executioners at a mass would not attract notice and repugnance - a supposition which is

erroneous and offensive. And it requires us also to accept that the mind set of

executioners engaged in genocide is so similar to Christians engaged in devotion, that

they make the transition instantaneously and seamlessly - another supposition which is

erroneous and offensive.

Mr. Wiesenthal, I entreat you to either explain and defend your bizarre story, or

else to withdraw it.

Yours truly,

Lubomyr Prytulak

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 3285 hits since 18Jan98

Wiesenthal Letter 24 Jan 18/98 Reversing victim and victimizer

The caption at the top of the photographs shown below is from LIFE magazine, 11Jun45, p. 50. The caption in German

and Latin at the bottom of the Simon Wiesenthal drawing below was, of course, included with the drawing in Simon

Wiesenthal's KZ Mauthausen, 1946, p. 64. This caption says:

The Gallows

The Marquis de Sade would have been in ecstasy if he could have seen the gallows in a

KZ [concentration camp]. His faithful successors the SS-hangmen had daily execution

fever. It provided some variety, beyond the eternal, monotonous shootings and

beatings. Something one could photograph with pleasure. They placed bets for rounds

of beer on how long the offender could hold out. He must not die too quickly. When

he threatened that, he was bound, and when he had somewhat recovered, it continued

... to the greater glory of the devil!

I refer to Simon Wiesenthal's drawing as a "1946" drawing because that was the date of publication of the book in

which the drawing appeared. A reader using a recent version of a NetScape browser can click here to be taken to a

discussion of the Lviv pogrom referred to in the letter below. A reader using an Internet Explorer browser can go to

the top of the page which contains that discussion by clicking here, and once on that page, can click "What happened

in Lviv?" to arrive at the same discussion of the Lviv pogrom.

January 18, 1998

Simon Wiesenthal

Jewish Documentation Center