My father, Evhen Lozynskyj, was arrested by the Gestapo on September 21st, 1941 in the Western Ukrainian city of Stanislaviv, now Ivano Frankivsk.
He was charged with treason against the Reich for proclaiming Ukrainian independence. Five others were arrested with him including two brothers of the Leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera, Oleksandr and Vasyl.
They were all transported to the notorious Lonskoho prison in Lviv. In the early spring of 1942 they were then transported by the first transit from Ukraine to the German concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland. The camp was Auschwitz.
In the course of their confinement Bandera’s two brothers were killed at the camp by Polish capos. My father survived.
When the Germans learned at the end of January 1945 that the Soviets were near, they took reasonably able prisoners and conducted a march of death to nearby concentration camps. Anyone who fell during the march was executed. The march continued through camps at Ebensee and Mathausen. Finally the remaining prisoners were liberated by the American army. My father weighed 98 pounds at the time of his “liberation”.
Most of the survivors found themselves in displaced persons’ camps and subject to severe scrutiny by the allies. After all, the Soviets were allies.
My father came to America in 1951 with his young wife and baby daughter. He was in essence imprisoned at Ellis Island before America would allow him to enter. He was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, an organization found on a list of inimical organizations compiled by the Soviets and utilized by the Americans. Following the summit at Yalta Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt with his coterie of Soviet agents in both State and Treasury were buddies.
Auschwitz Concentration Camp was set up for Poles, and Poles were the first political prisoners there. The number of prisoners grew steadily as a result of the constant arrival of new transports. In 1940, nearly 8 thousand people were registered in the camp. Almost all of them were Poles.
There were also small numbers of Jews and Germans in the camp. At that time, the latter usually held supervisory functions as capos and block supervisors. In 1941, over 26 thousand people were registered in Auschwitz (about 15 thousand Poles, 10 thousand Soviet POWs, and more than 1 thousand Jews).
As a result of the inclusion of Auschwitz in the process of the mass extermination of the Jews, the number of deportees began to soar. About 197 thousand Jews were deported there in 1942, about 270 thousand the following year, and over 600 thousand in 1944, for a total of almost 1.1 million. Among them, about 200 thousand people were selected as capable of labor and registered as prisoners in the camp.
In this same period, from 1942 to 1944, about 160 thousand Poles, Roma and Sinti, Belorussians, Ukrainians, French, and others were registered as prisoners and given numbers. There were also more than 10 thousand people, mostly Poles, Soviet POWs, as well as Roma and Sinti, not entered into the camp records or given numbers.
The mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz that began in 1942 radically changed the makeup of the prisoner population.
After three months of deportation, in mid-1942, Jews already made up the most numerous ethnic group, and their share of the population rose steadily from about 46% in June 1942 to about 68% at the peak of the camp’s population, in August 1944. A total of about 400 thousand prisoners were registered: 195 thousand non-Jews and 205 thousand Jews.
Frankly, the anniversary of the so called liberation or liquidation is not about either. Those who remained and were “liberated” by the Soviets more often than not were executed by the Soviets on sight or transported to Soviet GULAG’s. It may surprise some readers but the Soviet GULAG was the predecessor of the Nazi concentration camp. The GULAG served as a model for the Nazis.
Even more surprising would be the fact that Auschwitz was not closed after the war. Nor did it become a museum immediately thereafter. Communist Poland used the facilities at Auschwitz long after the war and many Ukrainians, particularly of Lemko ethnicity, who found themselves on their native land, only to discover that it was now part of Poland, were interned at Auschwitz during the infamous ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians that was a state policy of Communist Poland in 1947.
I refer back to my own father. There were many like him who received similar treatment by America after liberation. They found themselves in Displaced Persons’ camps and ultimately emigrated to America and elsewhere but not without complexity and mistreatment.
Post World War 2 America was a paragon of appeasement towards the Soviets. When it became finally apparent to America that the Soviets were the next enemy, America failed to identify the Soviet Union as yet another manifestation of the Russian Empire. For the longest time the Russian nation was considered one of the nations captive within the USSR.
The significance of the 80thanniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp is two fold. First, that it was not a liberation, but merely a substitution of one tyranny for another. The second and perhaps, more important is that all the liberators were complicit in one of the greatest travesties of fairness and justice in human history.
We can and should start with the Jews who were certainly most affected and mistreated by the Nazi regime. The Nazis simply wanted to obliterate all Jews. They failed but not for numbers of victims. The world was accommodating or reticent, but not forever. Today the Holocaust is known worldwide as one of the most egregious attempts at genocide of a people.
On the other hand appeasement of murderous regimes goes on. The Nazis were certainly not the last. In the XXI century as for many centuries before the Russians have carried on as they had before. The Russian Federation constitutes eleven time zones all occupied through invasion. But even that is not enough for the brutal Russian imperialists.
Those Ukrainian political prisoners in Auschwitz were that precisely. They sought Ukrainian freedom. In February 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine. But that was not enough. Russia invaded full force eight years later. For three years the battle has gone on. It has been an attempt to “wipe Ukrainians off the face of the earth.” There has been much global support for Ukraine because there is no issue of right or wrong.
Ukraine is clearly the victim here and any attempt at moral equivalency is frankly amoral. Is this about to change however, because America has once again reverted to its shameless role as the betrayer.
Main Image: By Stanislaw Mucha — Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5337694
