From its first pages, Himka's book is as concise, straightforward, and ambitious as its goal stated in the introduction: to shed new light on the participation of the OUN and the UPA in the Holocaust in Ukraine. It opens with four introductory chapters and continues with three main ones, capturing the topic chronologically.
In-depth contextualization is one of the main advantages of this monograph. Its detailed examination of historiography is a passionately compiled account of the behind-the-scenes of history writing, whether it concerns communist Poland and its censorship, books written in the Ukrainian diaspora, or in independent Ukraine. Himka's analysis remains equally critical towards Philip Friedmann (1901–1960), who confuses the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police with the Ukrainian National Militia and UPA veterans, writing an apologetic history of the national movement they had been part of.
The next chapter presents sources used in the book. The author consulted virtually every category of essential sources, starting from documents of the German administration through internal reports of the OUN and UPA themselves, Soviet trials and investigations, to testimonies of Jewish survivors and gentile bystanders. My only regret is that the author did not consult the originals of the most important collection of Polish testimonies describing the history of the former eastern borderlands, Archiwum Wschodnie. It contains several interesting accounts mentioning OUN and UPA participation in the Holocaust of the Jews. The second overlooked source are documents from trials held in communist Poland from 1944 onwards, so-called “sierpniówki,” covering many instances of anti-Jewish violence committed by the OUN and UPA in western Ukraine.
Himka skillfully engages in the discussion on the credibility of various types of sources; this happens when he addresses the trustworthiness of Soviet trial materials and the issue of late testimonies that he claims (and so do I) can be trusted as much as testimonies gathered immediately after the war. A fascinating subchapter is devoted solely to the analysis of three particularly disputed sources: the autobiography of Yaroslav Stetsko (1941), “The Book of Facts,” released in 2008 by the SBU, and Stella Krenzbach's Memoirs.
Chapters 3 and 4 provide a general overview of the OUN's history since the 1930s and the first Soviet occupation of western Ukraine in 1939–41. The first one gives a detailed account of how the OUN radicalized itself and how the very idea of elimination of unwanted national minorities (mostly Poles and Russians, but also Jews) through their physical extermination became acceptable for most of the movement's members. The next one shows how the Soviet takeover of western Ukraine influenced both the Jews and the OUN. As Himka points out, even though OUN members were repressed by the Soviets, the OUN managed to survive the occupation and, as the only Ukrainian political organization, even attract new members. The chapter ends with a description of the prison massacres of June 1941 (the starting point for many pogroms).
The chapter on the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941 opens the main part of the book. Its great advantage is a wider geographical approach, covering not only Galicia and Volhynia, but also Bukovina, a much less researched region. Himka provides the reader with both a general overview and detailed case studies, describing in detail how militias were formed in Krakovets region in Galicia and in Rafalivka in Volhynia. He wisely chooses not to preach to the converted and broadly refers to Kai Struve's work when he describes pogroms in Galicia, while drawing on his strength and focusing on the pogrom in L΄viv that he specializes in. He is also not shying away from challenging the existing literature when he questions Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg's decisions on terms and methods. Last but not least, he remains precise all along, pointing out that “The Ukrainian National Militia was organized by the OUN, but not all militiamen were actual members of the OUN” (221).
Chapter 6 concerns the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Galicia and the Schutzmanschaften in Volhynia. Himka methodically lists all types of activities the Police undertook in the Holocaust, from guarding of the ghetto, through walking the Jews to the death pits, to taking part in the actual process of killing. He shows why the Police was useful to the OUN, who infiltrated it to a great degree, and why later the policemen, many of them OUN members, abandoned the force. He strives to give voice not only to Jewish victims but also to policemen, most strikingly when he provides rare examples of repentance expressed during postwar trials.
The book's last chapter ends with the conclusion that “For the UPA, killing the Jews was standard procedure” (436). It leaves no space for doubts or questioning that what happened in western Ukraine after Action Reinhardt ended was, in fact, a multiplicated variety of the “hunting for the Jews.” Himka juxtaposes the OUN's policy statements from this period with actual deeds of UPA partisans, showing how groundless and opportunistic the former were, and how focused the murderers were on murdering. What is invaluable here is that while concentrating on the Jews, the author does not overlook the primary ethnic cleansing that the UPA carried out at that time, namely the killings of Poles, showing that both were outcomes of the same murderous idea. The only limitation of this chapter is the structure of the subchapters on the killing process, both when it concerns Jews and Poles. The author chose to meticulously list the examples of murders one by one—which in a way increases the impact on the reader—and to purge this listing of synthesis. While he warns the reader that this part of the text is “hardly an exhaustive account,” it would benefit from a more systematic approach.
One more thing needs to be said. This book, besides its academic excellence in providing the most comprehensive account of the OUN's and the UPA's complicity in murdering Ukrainian Jewry, is an outstanding example of methodological consideration, consciousness, and honesty. Himka has been working in the field for decades, and this monograph sums up his work. Many of his previous texts were ground-breaking, but he was also wrong a few times. Now, with new sources available and an accumulation of knowledge and experience, he does not hesitate to admit his mistakes, as in the case of his claim that the OUN was not antisemitic by nature until 1941, and that this feature made it different from Polish, Romanian, or Hungarian nationalistic and fascist movements of this period. In a way, he not only wrote an outstanding book but also showed how academic works of this magnitude should be written.
