Now Bandera Avenue leads to Babi Yar … and a monument stands there … to the performers … look! there are 1-2 ssovets in the frame, the bulk of them are palitsai …
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Anna Stepanova-Zalevskaya

Today I corresponded with a friend, originally from Western Ukraine. She complained that all her relatives unanimously said that they did not have any Nazis. And Bender is a hero, the Russians did it all in Babi Yar, and they blamed him 🤦‍♀. What a short human memory. But the archives remember everything!

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KIEV. SEPTEMBER 1941. BABIY YAR.
FORGET HOW IT WAS???
LEAVE ON YOUR WALL: REMIND THE “BLIND”…In this terrible frame (No. 1) – Kiev, September 1941. Babi Yar. The mother, a second before death, presses the child to her. The man in the SS uniform who will kill her and the child in a second or two is not a German. He is Ukrainian, more precisely, a native of Western Ukraine, from Zhytomyr. He served in the division “Galicia”, and since 1943 he participated in the work of the Einsatz groups.Where do these details come from? Almost from himself. This photograph was confiscated by partisans along with documents and an army dog ​​tag. They seized it when they searched his body. The monstrous photograph will become one of the most eloquent witnesses of the victims of Nazism at the Nuremberg trials.But most of all, it is striking that this photograph was kept among the personal belongings of the murdered Bandera. Together with family cards, letters home lay THIS. Carefully stored – a photo for memory. Maybe even for a family album. To show with pride to children and grandchildren in old age: here, they say, how I “valiantly fought” for independent Ukraine once …The Germans killed Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews. And Ukrainians killed Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews. Only the first did it indifferently or sometimes even with disgust (but not out of pity for the victims, but because it was “dirty”, not worthy of the Aryan superman), and the Ukrainians from Galicia and a number of regions of the West. Ukrainians did it fun, with pleasure and with a twinkle.Neither one nor the other such “nuances” do not justify. But this difference says a lot about Ukrainians.

A few years ago, I happened to read a book about the Volhynia massacre and about the Bandera movement in a good translation from Polish (for just a few years, such books were sometimes published in Poland. We didn’t publish them at all – based on the idiotic “friendship of peoples”).

One of the chapters – for all the unimaginable cruelties of this book – struck me the most. These are excerpts or full versions of letters from Bandera to their relatives, friends, fellow soldiers. And now such a “person” writes about the wonderful future of Ukraine (without Jews and Muscovites) and about intimate disputes and dreams about it with fellow soldiers, recalls a favorite verse of some Ukrainian poet about nature and home, and then, without transition, describes in the same words, how he raped and killed a ten-year-old girl – with the same emotions, almost sincerely. He writes how he later lay on the troupe, smoked and thought about free Ukraine. And then again – about gatherings at a halt, about a hut and an old mother.

There were even more terrible letters, sometimes there were “almost” no atrocities. More important is something else. The Germans, though not all of them, understood that they were doing evil. But they justified themselves with an idea, a necessity, a war, an order. Even die-hard Nazis subconsciously, subconsciously, searched for excuses for themselves.

These never. “Evil” as a concept did not exist for them. To kill a Jew, a Pole and a Russian is always good. Killing a Ukrainian is evil, but if the Ukrainian is “wrong” (for example, he speaks bad language or with the wrong accent, helps and pities the same Jews, Russians, Poles) – again, good.

Sometimes it’s good to kill even a good Ukrainian – if for the sake of the will and Ukraine (of all the armies that fought in that brutal war, only Bandera massively killed their own wounded during retreats or even offensives – so as not to delay the advance of the detachments).

Stepan Bandera in 1941, entering Lviv and preparing the “lads” for “work”, admonished them with these words: “Only Ukraine, its will and image of the most pure matter to us. If you ask me how many Ukrainians can and should be killed for the sake of the will and Ukraine, then I will only answer – how many of them can and should be left. ”

All this is most directly related to today. People burning alive in Odessa. Slavyansk, turned into a ghost town, murdered women and children, shot journalists, a passenger plane blown up over Luhansk, speaks of one thing – they have returned.

Direct and ideological descendants of those who then followed Bandera, Shukhevych, Konovalets…and others like them. And we got into a lousy situation, because we did not understand the main thing – they are DIFFERENT.

Yesterday I watched the correspondence of two users (not on my page). Both desperately wrote to the third that NOBODY would blow up a passenger liner on purpose. That this cannot be because it can never be!

That the Ukrainians blew up the plane by mistake. They COULD NOT do this on purpose, deliberately, on purpose.

We do not want to believe that there are people who are ready to voluntarily kill themselves, their people, neighboring people, the whole world for the sake of not even an idea, but a feeling. Feelings of hatred for everything non-Ukrainian.

But German soldiers and even SS officers who saw the concentration camps wrote about “inhuman hatred” in the eyes of those Ukrainians. Today we again observe these eyes, and what their owners are doing. We look, but we do not want to see.

Poor, they were deceived! – we are crushed. – Winter will come and how the poor will jump and jump, run and kill ?!

Believe me, they will be great. Hatred will warm much better than our gas. And if it doesn’t warm, you can go and set a fire at a neighbor’s house and warm yourself by the fire from his burning hut, raping his woman and having fun killing his children.

You can demand this gas with hatred, and perhaps they will give it to you. And then, taking the gas, still kill. Out of hate.

We have made a terrible mistake. And now we will pay the highest price for this mistake. The Jews, faced with Nazism, cherish, cherish and keep the memory of this evil. They take their children to museums, concentration camps and show EVERYTHING. They do not spare the child’s psyche. To pain, to tears imprinted in memory, in every cell of your body, what Nazism is and why it needs to be destroyed.

And at our side, a more terrible evil was born – the Ukrainians-Bandera. More stubborn, cruel, inhuman. And more durable.

But we preferred to forget, to erase it from memory. In order not to “spoil relations” we did not open museums and memorials; we didn’t write books, we didn’t release films, we didn’t give the floor to old people who still remembered.

I remember how one day my grandfather came home on the eve of the May holidays in tears. It was strong and unusual. Even on Victory Day, he only stealthily shed a tear, and then at once a man who had grown old and shed tears …

Already later he said that at the school line, where he was invited as a military hero, veteran and big party man, instead of ceremonial stories about fellow soldiers tried to tell schoolchildren about what he had seen in Ukraine – in Kiev, Lvov, Volhynia… He was not allowed to speak even for ten minutes. The teacher and the head teacher literally pushed him off the line.

– How dare you! There could also be Ukrainians, Ukrainian children! – shouted to him already in the corridor.

And the grandfather, sobbing, says later that we are OBLIGED to remember. Remember not only about the crimes committed. Remember that these were OTHER people. “They are not like us,” my grandfather told me and said that God forbid for Russia and Russians if they “return”.

Today, Ukraine is under the rule of Bandera. Before our eyes, they are building a society and a state of their savage dreams.

But we do not understand, we do not want to understand that these people are capable of any crime, any violence. For any meanness.

When people were burned in the Odessa House of Trade Unions, it seemed that nothing could be worse! When Slavyansk was razed to the ground from Mount Karachun, it seemed that nothing could be more inhumane! When a Malaysian plane crashed from 10 kilometers on Thursday, it seemed that nothing could be meaner! But logic, reason, words and memories of my grandfather tell me that it can… And it will!!!

My grandfather, long gone with the crane wedge, was right. And I and we were all wrong.

We’ll all understand this soon. The main thing is not to be late!

Alexander Petrakov.