specific cases are not hard to find:

Prof. Weiss [head of the Israeli Knesset] reminisced about Ukraine, the country

of his childhood, and gratefully acknowledged he owed his life to two Ukrainian

women who hid him from the Nazis during World War II. (Ukrainian Weekly,

December 13, 1992, p. 8)

In the Volhynian town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a

Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter

and their daughter's young friend, for seventeen months, refusing to deny them

refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was

endangering a Christian household. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p.

403)

Help was given even though the probability of detection was substantial and the penalties were

severe:

Sonderkommando 4b reported that it had shot the mayor of Kremenchug, Senitsa

Vershovsky, because he had "tried to protect the Jews." (Raul Hilberg, The

Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308)

Consulting the original Einsatzgruppe report reveals that a Catholic priest, Protyorey Romansky,

was involved in the above plot to save Jews, though Romansky's punishment is not specified:

The fact that Senitsa, the mayor of Kremenchug, was arrested for sabotaging

orders, demonstrates that responsible officials are not always selected with

the necessary care and attention. Only after the Einsatzkommandos had

interrogated the official could it be established that he had purposely

sabotaged the handling of the Jewish problem. He used false data and

authorized the chief priest Protyorey Romansky to baptize the Jews whom he

himself had selected, giving them Christian or Russian first names. His

immediate arrest prevented a larger number of Jews from evading German

control. Senitsa was executed. (Einsatzgruppe C, Kiev, Operational Situation

Report USSR No. 177, March 6, 1942, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and

Shmuel Spector, editors, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections From the

Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July

1941-January 1943, 1989, p. 304)

Similarly illustrative of help being given despite severe penalties is the following:

A German police company in the village of Samary, Volhynia, shot an entire

Ukrainian family, including a man, two women, and three children, for harboring

a Jewish woman. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p.

201)

This is not to say that all or most Jews found refuge with Ukrainians, nor that all or most

Ukrainians offered refuge to Jews. Far from it. Many stories can be found of Jews being

refused refuge or even being betrayed - but what else could anyone expect? To expect more from

Ukrainians would be to expect them to be saints and martyrs, which would be setting a very high

standard:

Whoever attempted to help Jews acted alone and exposed himself as well as his

family to the possibility of a death sentence from a German Kommando. (Raul

Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308)

But despite the severity of the punishment, Ukrainians did help. Andrew Gregorovich (Forum, No.

92, Spring 1995, p. 24) reproduces a public announcement issued by the "SS and Head of Police

for the District of Galicia" in Sambir, Ukraine, March 1, 1944. The announcement lists ten

Ukrainians who have been sentenced to death by the Germans. Number 7 is Stefan Zubovych,

Ukrainian, married - for the crime of helping Jews. One wonders what Stefan Zubovych might have

thought had he been told just prior to his execution that in decades to come, some among the

people that he was giving his life for would attempt to obliterate his memory and the memory of

other Ukrainians like him, and would attempt instead to depict Ukrainians as irredeemable

anti-Semites. One wonders what the surviving family of Stefan Zubovych, if any did survive,