sheviks and Jews need no longer be feared and that they could be attacked with impunity; and (3) they were taking a first step toward dragging a handful of Ukrainians into complicitous guilt. Bodies on the Ground One photograph inserted into the middle of these "remnants of a film" was of bodies lying in rows on the ground. Of course Morley Safer does not identify the photograph - he does not attribute it to a source, he mentions no date or place. As the photograph is being shown, Mr. Safer is saying that Simon Wiesenthal "remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian police went on a three-day killing spree." The impression left in the viewer's mind, therefore, is that these must be some of the 5,000 to 6,000 victims of that killing spree. Three details of this photograph, however, suggest otherwise: (1) The bodies are shown lying in snow, whereas the killing spree was supposed to have taken place in the three days before the German occupation of Lviv on June 30, 1941. (2) The legs of one of the bodies are visible, and these legs are skeletally thin, which suggests a famine victim and not the victim of a pogrom, or else suggests that this is an exhumed corpse. If these are in reality famine victims, then they are more likely to be Ukrainians than Jews. (3) Most of the shapes on the ground resemble small heaps rather than bodies, which suggests that the photograph is one of exhumed remains from some old mass grave - and we may reflect that in June 1941 (if that was when this photograph was taken), the inhabitants of Ukraine's many mass graves were predominantly Ukrainians and not Jews. Thus, there is a very real possibility that Morley Safer is using a photograph of Ukrainians killed by Jews as evidence of Jews killed by Ukrainians. The Wallowing Photograph The last scene of this Nazi propaganda footage that was presented by Morley Safer has a notorious history of being presented in various publications with wildly different interpretations - of which Time Magazine's "Wallowing Photograph" fiasco of 22Feb93 is but one instance. In fact, this photograph is taken from the wallowing-in-the-gutter German propaganda film that we have been discussing above. Whereas Time magazine editors did not go so far as to concede this, they were able to muster enough integrity to express ignorance and confusion, and also to retract and to apologize: Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to pin down exactly what situation the photograph portrays. But there is enough confusion about it for us to regret that our caption, in addition to misdating the picture, may well have conveyed a false impression. (Time, April 19, 1993) And yet this same notorious photograph has been recycled yet again by 60 Minutes and broadcast as if it had unequivocal significance. Time admitted that it was wrong, Morley Safer cannot escape having to do the same. It is a curious incongruity that while professing to oppose Naziism, Morley Safer nevertheless broadcasts a Nazi propaganda film and invites 60 Minutes' viewers to take it at face value. The propaganda of one era is, half a century later, dredged up to become the propaganda of another era, but with a switch from approval to disapproval - the Germans used the film to portray Ukrainians as good anti-Semites, and so why shouldn't Mr. Safer use the same film to portray Ukrainians as bad anti-Semites? CONTENTS: Preface The Galicia Division Quality of Translation Ukrainian Homogeneity Were Ukrainians Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal What Happened in Lviv? Nazi Propaganda Film Collective Guilt Paralysis of the Comparative Function 60 Minutes' Cheap Shots Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Jewish Ukrainophobia Mailbag A Sense of Responsibility What 60 Minutes Should Do PostScript Collective Guilt What was the rate of Ukrainian criminal collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War? I do not ask here for the rate of perfunctory and non-culpable collaboration - not, for example, for a count which includes Ukrainian prisoners of war who, to save their lives, donned German uniforms and then found themselves serving out the war as reluctant camp guards, which have been more accurately referred to as "prisoner guards" because even while serving as guards, such Ukrainians continued to be themselves prisoners. No, not that low level of culpability, but rather an active collaboration palpably greater than would have been necessary for survival, well beyond the minimum that would be offered by all but the few saints and martyrs among us - in short, collaboration of a magnitude that could plausibly lead to criminal prosecution. Let us imagine several possibilities. As the population of Ukraine at the time was 36 million, different collaboration rates give us a different number of collaborators: Rate of Criminal Collaboration Number of Criminal Collaborators 1/100,000 1/ 10,000 1/ 1,000 360 3,600 36,000 Were there 360 Ukrainians known to have criminally collaborated with the Nazis during World War II? Perhaps there were, though I do not know of any such definitive list, and wonder if one exists. However, 360 criminal collaborators only makes for one criminal collaborator out of every 100,000 Ukrainians. Could there have been 3,600 criminal collaborators? I doubt it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a credible list this long. Note that I do not challenge someone to pull a number out of the air equal to or exceeding 3,600 - likely there is more than one researcher at 60 Minutes who would find such a task not difficult - but rather, I challenge someone to come up with a documented list of names of Ukrainians who criminally participated in Nazi war crimes, where the list includes a description of the crimes, their locations, their dates, and credible supportive evidence. I repeat - this has not been done and cannot be done. And yet 3,600 certified criminal collaborators would make for only one criminal collaborator out of every 10,000 Ukrainians. And what about 36,000 criminal collaborators? The notion is preposterous. No documentation exists to support such a fantastic claim. And yet 36,000 criminal collaborators would make for only one criminal collaborator out of every 1,000 Ukrainians. The middle figure - one criminal collaborator for every 10,000 Ukrainians - is possibly a wild exaggeration, and would give us 3,600 criminal collaborators - more than enough to account for all the stories of Ukrainian savagery, brutality, and sadism, even the ones that aren't true. Such speculations as the above happen to coincide approximately with published estimates. For example Professor Stefan Possony reports that "The records of Israel's War Crimes Investigations Office indicate that throughout occupied Europe some 95,000 nazis and nazi collaborators were directly connected with anti-Jewish measures, massacres, and deportations...." (The Ukrainian-Jewish Problem, Plural Societies, Winter 1974). The middle column below contains the rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated - we may wonder when Russians together with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of Russians found themselves under German occupation. Balts Austrians Russians and Byelorussians Germans Poles Ukrainians Western Europeans 20 10 8 6 4 3 0.5 11,000 8,500 9,000 45,000 7,500 11,000 3,000 ______ 95,000 The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of 3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below. And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer, it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally useful, it is never shelved. Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face of Freedom." Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews: they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death, collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction: The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called, furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310) Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also excelled? But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos: The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew - whether for life or death - be exclusively left up to the decisions of the "councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 119-120, emphasis added) In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the administrative tasks and policing required by the Nazis was placed in Jewish hands, that Jewish collaborators were ubiquitous, and that it was Jewish collaborators who rendered the Jewish Holocaust feasible and who stood as obstacles in the path of Jewish resistance: Falsification of the Holocaust Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir, Jerusalem. Available online at: http://www.kaiwan.com/codoh/newsdesk/890519.HTML I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system has managed to instil a 'Holocaust awareness' in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir 12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that 'a half-truth is worse than a lie') which has been instilled here. As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was taught, and this saved the lives of some them "if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew". One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943, I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary. It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work for them. But does anybody now know about this? This, and not what is 'instilled' was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust museum in Jerusalem - Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt. Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime. Kind regards, [Israel Shahak] To bring closer to home and closer to the present day the inadvisability of attributing collective guilt, we may note that more than one out of every hundred Americans is presently sitting in jail, and yet we do not from this condemn Americans as a nation of criminals. And so if we extract from this the conclusion that a participation rate as high as one out of every hundred is insufficient to depict the entire population as participants, then Ukrainians should be allowed a total of 360,000 criminal collaborators - a number never yet broached - without Ukrainians being collectively condemned as Nazis. The plea to avoid ascribing collective guilt is not new to Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and has been put forward by both sides. It is time that the plea was heeded: Even as we Jews justly disclaim responsibility for the acts of the Jewish Bolshevist commissars and for the disgraceful actions of those Jews who participated in the work of the Bolshevist chekas (Secret Police), the Ukrainian people has a full right to disclaim any responsibility for those who have besmirched themselves by pogrom activities. (Arnold Margolin, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1926, p. 124, in Andrew Gregorovich, Jews and Ukrainians, Forum No. 91, Fall-Winter, 1994, p. 30) Additional material on Jewish collaboration with the Nazis can be found in my discussion of the Jewish Ghetto Police in my Letter 17 to Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Justice. CONTENTS: Preface The Galicia Division Quality of Translation Ukrainian Homogeneity Were Ukrainians Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal What Happened in Lviv? Nazi Propaganda Film Collective Guilt Paralysis of the Comparative Function 60 Minutes' Cheap Shots Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Jewish Ukrainophobia Mailbag A Sense of Responsibility What 60 Minutes Should Do PostScript Paralysis of the Comparative Function Positions taken by Morley Safer acquire meaning - can only be evaluated - following relevant comparisons, but Mr. Safer fails to make these comparisons. For example, Ukrainian assistance to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust acquires significance - indeed, may be thrown into a wholly new light - when compared to Jewish assistance to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust, but Mr. Safer does not make such a comparison. Ukrainian cruelty on behalf of the Nazis acquires significance when compared to Jewish cruelty on behalf of the Nazis, but Mr. Safer does not make this comparison. Ukrainians saving Jews (a possibility totally ignored by Mr. Safer) is given a new significance when compared with Jews saving Ukrainians at times when such aid was possible - and of course Mr. Safer never reaches a point where he could make such a comparison. Comparison 1: Ukrainians Helping Jews Compared to Jews Helping Jews We have seen above that countless Ukrainians risked their lives and gave their lives to save Jews. And what, let us now ask, were those who today level accusations of genetic anti-Semitism against Ukrainians doing at the same time? What, for example, were American Jews doing? The generous view is that they were doing little: No American Jew appeared to have altered his life style once news of the Holocaust was revealed. Even at the time, some observers were repelled by the often festive atmosphere of Jewish social life in a period of wartime prosperity. (Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, 1992, p. 550) Over the centuries the dispersion of the Jews had a functional utility: whenever some part of the Jewish community was under attack, it depended on help from the other Jews. In the period of the Nazi regime, this help did not come. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1052) This question has haunted me ever since the war: Why did the Jews of the free world act as they did? Hadn't our people survived persecution and exile throughout the centuries because of its spirit of solidarity? ... When one community suffered, the others supported it, throughout the Diaspora. Why was it different this time? (Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea, 1995, p. 63) A less indulgent view, however, is that Jews not under Nazi occupation - particularly American and British Jews - knowingly, willfully, calculatedly sacrificed their trapped European coreligionists: In his book, "In Days of Holocaust and Destruction," Yitzchak Greenbaum writes, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again, 'NO!' ... one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance." In January, 1943, the leadership of the absorption and enlisting fund decided to bar all appeals on behalf of rescuing Jews. It is explicitly stated in the "Sefer Hamagbis" (Book of Appeals) that the reasons for this prohibition were because of other obligations in Eretz Yisroel. In the beginning of February, 1943, Yitzchak Greenbaum addressed a meeting in Tel Aviv on the subject, "the Diaspora and the Redemption," in which he stated: "For the rescue of the Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have. When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land [in Palestine] - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraization of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food [for Jews in Nazi captivity] with the money of the "Keren Hayesod" (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! And once again No!" (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 26, emphasis added) Mr. Schwalb expressed the complete Zionist ideology and stated clearly and openly the politics of the Zionist leaders in the area of rescue: the shedding of Jewish blood in the Diaspora is necessary in order for us to demand the establishment of a "Jewish" state before a peace commission. Money will be sent to save a group of "chalutzim" (pioneers), while the remainder of Czech Jewry must resign itself to annihilation in the Auschwitz crematoria. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 28, emphasis added) We have previously quoted the words of Yitzchak Greenbaum, chairman of the "rescue committee" of the Jewish Agency in Eretz Yosroel, who refused to allocate even one dollar of United Jewish Appeal funds for food to those who were fighting off the pangs of hunger. This approach was totally in consonance with his famous slogan, to the effect that, "one goat in Eretz Yisroel is more important than an entire community in the Diaspora." How could he thus withhold a package of straw from a Holy Land goat in order to send food to a starving infant? But if that is not enough, the Zionists acted like the fiend who declared that he not only would not give, but he also would not let others give (whom our Sages called a "rosho" - a wicked person). The Zionist leaders weren't satisfied merely with the crime of sitting idly by and doing nothing. They labored with all their might to forcefully prevent others from helping the sufferers in the ghetto. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 44-45) One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland. (Yitzchak Greenbaum in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 116) The Antonescu Offer. Reb Moshe Shonfeld's book documents several instances of offers being made, sometimes by the Nazis, to release Jews for a fixed price, and of the offers being declined by Zionist leaders. The Romanian government, for example, offered 70,000 Jews at $50 apiece. These Jews could have been transported to Palestine via Turkey - a few days' ride by truck. The Romanian offer was confirmed by the U.S. State Department. The offer would become void once Romania was occupied by the Germans - an occupation that was imminent. Ben Hecht in his book Perfidy relates placing the following ad in New York newspapers: FOR SALE 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS Zionist leaders, however, denied the existence of such an offer and sabotaged fund-raising efforts. As a result, the 70,000 Romanian Jews perished. Ben Hecht's indignation is unrestrained: But in 1943, we, who called out the plight of the Romanian Jews to the world, were discredited by the Zionist unions, the established Zionist leadership and their associated philanthropies, as scandalmongers. Our attempt to get the Jews out of Romania before the Germans came was scotched. The 70,000 Jews who might have been saved were herded into barns by the Germanized Romanians under General Antonescu, hosed with gasoline, ignited, and shot down when they came blazing and screaming out of their cauldrons. Was it for this the conspirators of Silence had been holding their high-level meetings, fraternizing with presidents and prime ministers and keeping intact Weizmann's ... policy of an 'exclusive' ... Palestine? This Silence, this wretched business of Jewish leaders lying about the slaughter of Europe's Jewry - trying to hide it, soft-pedal it - for what? These organizations, these philanthropists, these timorous Jewish lodge members in Zion, in London and America - these Zionist leaders who let their six million kinsmen burn, choke, hang, without protest, with indifference, and even with a glint of anti-Semitic cunning in their political plannings - I sum up against them. These factotums, these policy-makers, the custodians of the Jewish future in Palestine ... these Zionist men and women - I haul into the prisoner's dock of this book. (Ben Hecht, Perfidy, in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 102) The Eichmann Offer. The war afforded more than one opportunity to save Jews. Here is another significant opportunity, the offer this time coming directly from Adolph Eichmann: So I am ready to sell you - a million Jews. ... What do you want to save? Virile men? Grown women? Old people? Children? Sit down - and talk. ... Now I am going to prove to you that I trust you more than you trust me. When you ... tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will [as an initial demonstration of good faith, even before you make any payment] dissolve Auschwitz and move 10 percent of the promised million to the border. You take over the 100,000 Jews and deliver for them afterwards one thousand trucks. And then the deal will proceed step by step. (Adolph Eichmann, quoted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1133-1134) Eichmann's initiative, according to his testimony in Jerusalem, had been influenced largely by the propensity of rival SS factions to negotiate with the Jews. He was going to confine the offer to freeing 100,000 Jews, but then thought that only a major gesture, involving a million, was going to have any impact. When Himmler approved the scheme, Eichmann was actually surprised. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1134) However, Joel Brand, attempting to negotiate this exchange, met with no support, either from representatives of the Allied nations, or from Jewish representatives. When he realized that the offer would not be accepted, he burst out with: Do you know what you are doing? That is simply murder! That is mass murder. ... [O]ur best people will be slaughtered! My wife! My mother! My children will be first! (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1137) Among the objections was not that the deal would fail, but rather that it was undesirable that the deal succeed: "But Mr. Brand," the British host exclaimed, "what shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?" (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, P. 1140) The plain fact was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews, not even this one million. (Adolph Eichmann in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1140) A similar comment was made with respect to the above-mentioned Antonescu Plan: The British Foreign Office ... was concerned with the "difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews" in the event of their release from Axis Europe. ... [W]ithin the Foreign Office there was fear of large-scale success.... (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, P. 1140) And a similar reaction with respect to discussions concerning the rescue of Bulgarian Jews: Hull raised the question of the 60 or 70 thousand Jews that are in Bulgaria and are threatened with extermination unless we could get them out and, very urgently, pressed Eden for an answer to the problem. Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and that we should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them. (Harry Hopkins in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, P. 1122) The role played by Jews in the Allied indifference was, to repeat, one of support of inaction: There is considerable difference of opinion among the Jewish people as to the policies which should be pursued in rescuing and assisting these unfortunate people, and no one course of action would be agreeable to all persons interested in this problem. (American Secretary of State Hull in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1125) The Rudolph Vrba Accusation. The reports above of American Jews and world Jews doing little to save their coreligionists under Nazi occupation, or of even obstructing efforts to save them, or reports of the Antonescu Offer, or of the Eichmann offer - these do not exhaust the accounts leading to the conclusion that the Jewish role in saving Jewish lives during World War II fell short of heroic, and perhaps was typically complicitous or collaborative, and sometimes even becoming criminally so. Rather, other such accounts can be found, among them the one offered by Dr. Rudolph Vrba in the Oshawa Times account below. Vrba's accusation standing by itself falls short of totally convincing, and would need to be bolstered by substantive detail before it was given full credit. Nevertheless, Vrba's accusation is reproduced below to demonstrate that the accusations of Jewish non-assistance focus on many events in many parts of the world, and because it heightens the probability that further investigation would credit some of these accusations: Jewish Council Blamed For Deaths of 400,000 FRANKFURT (AP) - A Canadian professor contends that 400,000 jews killed by the Nazis at the Auschwitz extermination camp could have been saved had the Budapest Jewish Council warned them in time instead of co-operating with the Nazis. Dr. Rudolph Vrba, 43, associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, in an interview gave an account of his escape from Auschwitz and his efforts to warn the world of the fate threatening more than 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews. Vrba testified last Friday at the trial here of two former SS (Elite Corps) colonels charged with the mass murder of Hungarian jews during the war. Vrba, a native of Czechoslovakia and a Jew by birth, said he was deported to Maidanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, in June, 1942, and two weeks later transferred to Auschwitz. In the spring of 1944, he heard that 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews were to die at the notorious camp and decided to flee and tell the world about the crime that was going to be committed. Together with another prisoner, he hid in early April, 1944, underneath a pile of construction wood within the outer security zone of the camp which usually was not closely guarded. After spending three days in their hideout with hardly any food the two family [sic] made their getaway and eventually crossed the Slovak border. In Cadca, Slovakia, he informed the Jewish Council which in turn passed on the information to the Bratislava and Budapest Jewish councils, Vrba said. But, he said "The Budapest Jewish Council were co-operating with the Nazi authorities who promised them that they would allow some 2,000 select Jews to travel to Switzerland if they hid from the Jewish community the truth about what was in store for them at Auschwitz." Thus, he added, Hungarian Jews did not put up any resistance when they were taken to the Auschwitz death camp, believing that they were merely being "resettled." Vrba continued that only after Swiss newspapers June 22, 1944, published his story about the Hungarian Jews and copies of his report were sent to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Pope, protests from several governments, including the U.S., British and Swedish governments, forced the Hungarian head of government, Admiral Horthy, to stop the deporting of more Jews from the country. Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg but changed his name after escaping from Auschwitz. (Oshawa Times, December 30, 1968) Jewish help compared to Ukrainian help. And so here we are faced with the following incongruity. Ukrainians were dying at the hands of the Nazis, were dying fighting the Nazis, were dying saving Jews - and yet Morley Safer now brands Ukrainians as Nazis. In contrast, American Jews were not allowing the Jewish Holocaust to interfere with their lifestyles, were vetoing proposals to assist and rescue European Jews, and yet they are now privileged to accuse Ukrainians of being Nazis. People who did next to nothing to save the European Jews, people who obstructed the rescue of European Jews, people who acted while not under threat of death now turn around and judge those who while under threat of death did not live up to impossibly high moral standards. Appropriately did Reb Moshe Shonfeld place on the title page of his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals the quotations "Our enemies will subjugate you" (Vayikra) - "Those enemies will be from within" (Chazal). Reading Reb Shonfeld's book invites the conclusion that Morley Safer's searching for Nazi collaborators in Ukraine was misplaced - perhaps it is the case that the largest repository of unprosecuted Nazi collaborators today is to be found in the state of Israel; and invites consideration of the further conclusion that Morley Safer's searching for enemies of Judaism in Ukraine is similarly misplaced - he might instead have looked for the truly dangerous enemies within - for Jews like Simon Wiesenthal, Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kosinski, and - yes - Morley Safer himself. Their misstatements lower Jewish credibility; their hatred incites a reactionary anti-Semitism. In fact, Morley Safer's accusation of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis is not a cry for justice nor an advancement of historical truth, but is, rather, a weapon sometimes brandished under political motivation even when the facts do not justify its use, and at other times sheathed, also for political reasons, even when the facts cry out for its use. Thus, a Ukrainian may be prosecuted even though the evidence against him is patently fraudulent, as was the case in the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk (Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994). A Jewish Zionist, in contrast, may go unprosecuted for very real collaboration with the Nazis, though he may be unable to avoid final justice imposed through individual action: Moldetsky, a leader of the Zionist Workers Party (Poalei Zion), who was appointed head of the council of elders in Bedzin, and who, over the course of years, chose thousands of Jews for forced labor and extermination, succeeded in remaining alive. For the mass deportations, Moldetsky published a decree which was completely fraudulent and deceiving, in which he said: "Jews, dress up in your holiday clothes and march joyfully to the gathering places mentioned above. No one is to remain at home. ..." The Jews, in their innocence, obeyed him. The result was that people with large families - as well as the elderly - a total of 8,000, were sent to Auschwitz. The babies were pushed into sacks by the Nazis. ... After the war, Mold