been tried yet; many of them had been accused of trivial offences. But at the end of June the prisoners were not segregated according to the seriousness of their offence: whether they were doing time for petty theft, profiteering, or hooliganism. All prisoners were eliminated. The German and Ukrainian propaganda portrayed the victims as exclusively Ukrainians. The victims were photographed and the pictures were sent to the domestic and foreign press. That was the origin of the Ukrainian hecatombs. Everybody forgot that in only four days the number of the hecatombs – the Ukrainian victims, that is, those murdered by the Ukrainians – increased twofold and then threefold in comparison to the original figure. The funerals were a political manifestation, obviously directed against the Jews and concluded with a pogrom and looting of the Jewish district. So far the Germans seem not to notice the Jews at all, as if they took absolutely no interest in them.
[25] 6 July. Off to work! A beginning of a dismal chapter of the Jewish martyrology in Lvov. So far the Germans have handed over the initiative to the hastily, incompetently, and primitively organised Ukrainian police. Its functionaries are the worst scum of society – people devoid of morality or any feeling of responsibility. Their only qualification is the bestial instinct to rob, beat, and torture the weak. These shady characters and dumb illiterates do not know whom they are beating, what for, or why. As long as they can rob they do not care if their victims are the bourgeois, Bolsheviks, Jews, or Poles. That element was sent to Jewish homes to drag women, men, the elderly, children, the healthy, and the sick out of bed and send them to perform particularly hard labour. A grim column of Jewish men and women captured for forced labour marches through the entire city, beaten, starved, tortured with carrying heavy weights, humiliated, and laughed at.
This sudden change of the situation, this radical shift from one extreme to another is too severe a blow. Say what you will, but so far we have been humans on a par with all other citizens of the Soviet Union. By contrast, now we suddenly have become degraded to the status of sub-humans or slaves, we are deprived of all our rights, and we have become outlaws in a day – a toy in the hand of a beast, which disposes of our freedom, health, life, and property as it pleases. One returns home tired, humiliated, and hungry only to find one’s family starving. There is not even a piece of bread. Bread coupons have already been introduced. The Jews are already starving because they are not allowed to shop in Aryan shops even though there are still no Jewish ones.
LVO V AN D SOUTH EASTERN REGIONS [ 31] 435
