Anatomy of a Genocide Quotes

“If the Poles described the Ukrainian insurgents as savages, and the Jews saw them as “worse than the Germans,” from their own point of view they were martyrs of a just and holy cause, the liberation of their land from foreign oppression: the goal justified the means, including massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Many of them died in battle, were executed by the NKVD, or spent long years in gulags. Others fled to the West, where they formed the nationalist hard core of the Ukrainian diaspora. Vilified by the communists as fascist collaborators, they emerged from obscurity and were celebrated as the harbingers of the nation after Ukrainian independence in 1991, especially in Western Ukraine. Two decades later, as a newly resurgent Russia sought to reassert its influence on Ukraine, the UPA again came to symbolize the country’s historical struggle against its mighty eastern neighbor: in 2016 the black-and-red banner of the insurgent army was again fluttering from the remnants of the medieval Polish castle overlooking Buczacz. History was back to its old tricks. UPA flag on top of the castle in Buczacz, 2016.”
― Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

“Edzia recalled being “very happy to get away from the Ukrainians” when they left for the West in late 1945, “because they had pogroms after the war. They were killing Jews.” To her mind, “they were worse than the Germans. . . . I think my family was mostly killed . . . by Ukrainians who were our friends.”16 Jacob Heiss, also born in 1930, remembered how the Germans arriving to carry out roundups would call out merrily, “Spielzeit für die Kameraden” (Playtime for the comrades), and the next day “you would get up in the morning and see hundreds of dead people every place you walked.”
― Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz