New postings on the historical blog "Munye's World" delve deeply into events in the "big forest" outside Skala in west Ukraine during the fall and winter of 1943-44, when scores of desperate Jews in hiding were hunted and killed and a few survived until the area was liberated in late March. The articles address discrepancies in two published accounts of the events and propose how the conflicts can be resolved.
The authoritative version of the events is given in the yizkor book chapter "Surviving In the Forest" by Skala survivor and chronicler Max Mermelstein. His chapter was first published in Yiddish in 1978 and then in English translation in 2010.
Mermelstein, who passed away in 2017, is introduced and remembered in the first post. The textual analysis of his chapter and that of a fellow forest survivor, Michael Edelstein, is the subject of the second post.
Edelstein's memoir Live Another Day: How I Survived the Holocaust and Realized the American Dream will be published this summer by Ruby Brothers Media. A promotional website is live at http://LiveAnotherDayBook.com.
Edelstein's description of his forest experience in Chapter 6 of the forthcoming book is mostly consistent with Mermelstein's account, but conflicts with it in several respects. Most significantly, Edelstein writes of witnessing the brutal murder of Israel Blutstein by a Ukrainian police captain while Mermelstein lists Blutstein among a group of 12-15 Jews who were killed in a "smoke out" operation.
Edelstein's chapter places the Ukrainian smoke-out operation before a separate forest sweep perpetrated by German army forces that is also described by Mermelstein, who gives a specific date for it—the last week of September 1943. However, Mermelstein writes that the smoke out occurred one month after the sweep.
In his analysis of the discrepancies in the two accounts, blog author Dan Ruby concludes that Munye's bunker group was in fact the same colony that Mermelstein says was smoked out and destroyed. However, Mermelstein is wrong that Israel Blutstein was among them, because he had actually been killed days earlier during his night mission with Munye.
Edelstein's vivid memory of witnessing Blutstein's murder makes a convincing case for its veracity. However, his second-hand knowledge of the smoke-out, which he was told of but did not directly experience, might have been misremembered. The likely truth can be teased out by factoring in the points of view of the narrators, Ruby writes.
The Munye's World blog, titled with Edelstein's childhood name, is a regularly updated feature of the Live Another Day website. Co-written by Walter and Dan Ruby, Its mission is to set Edelstein's survival experience within the context of the known history of the Holocaust in west Ukraine.
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