In 1957, the war memoir of a Jewish woman, Stella Krentsbach, circulated in a collection edited by Ukrainian writer Petro Mirchuk. The text began with the words, "The reason that I'm alive today and can devote all of my energy to the state of Israel is thanks only to God and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army." The memoir author writes that she was born in Bolekhiv, near Lvov, the daughter of a rabbi, and she was a childhood friend of Olya, the daughter of a Greek Catholic priest. In 1939, according to the memoir, Stella Krentsbakh graduated from the Philosophy department of the University of Lviv. When the war broke out, she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, where she served as a nurse and an intelligence officer. In the spring of 1945, with the Soviet forces having recaptured the whole of the Ukraine, the NKVD arrested Stella Krentsbach during a meeting she had with a contact in Rozhniativ. She was jailed and sentenced to death, but UPA fighters managed to free her. In the summer of 1945, she crossed the Carpathians with other Ukrainian insurgents and, on 1 October, she reached the English zone of occupation in Austria, from where she traveled to Israel. In her new country, according to the memoir, she worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Resonance
The story of Stella Krentsbakh received significant attention in the Ukrainian diaspora press. Journalists attempted to locate her in Israel, but she could not be found. Stories and rumors started circulating in émigré circles that the woman had been murdered in Israel, supposedly for telling the truth about the UPA's attitude to the Jews. Historian Philip Friedman, a survivor of the Holocaust from Western Ukraine, remarked that "the only data about her was published in an Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists paper." He searched through the Washington Post of that period and could not find the memoirs, as he wrote. After making an inquiry to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he received the reply, as he reported, that they never had an employee there by that name and also that a case of a homicide in Israel with a victim by that name was "entirely unknown." Friedman stated he undertook a "careful analysis of the text" of the memoir and the examination led him to the conclusion that "the entire story is a hoax." As American-Canadian historian John-Paul Himka wrote, Bohdan Kordiuk, one-time leader of the Home Executive of UPA, repudiated the memoirs as fake, soon after their original publication. Kordiuk wrote that "none of the UPA men known to the author of these lines knows the legendary Stella Krenzbach or have heard of her. The Jews do not know her either. It is unlikely that anyone of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees after the war met Stella Krenzbach" and concluded: “It seems to us that until there are proper proofs, the story of Dr. Stella Krenzbach has to be regarded as a mystification.”
Accusations of propaganda
Both supporters and deniers of the veracity of the Stella Krenzbach life story have accused the other side of propaganda. Jewish-Ukrainian poet Moysey Fishbein attributed the disputes of the Krenzbach memoir to "Russia's special services" that "are seeking to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, undermine its sovereignty and independence, create a negative image of this country, block its integration into European and Euro-Atlantic structures, and turn Ukraine into a dependent and manipulated satellite." Fishbein claimed that the Russians "attribute exceptional importance" to the so-called "Jewish card," by seeking to "set Ukrainians and Jews against each other." Fishbein's viewpoint was supported by American political analyst Paul A. Goble. Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Viatrovych has repeatedly proclaimed the veracity and accuracy of the Krenzbach life story, as related in the published text, attributing the denials to those who "accuse the OUN" of having been "anti-Semitic." Historian and researcher Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe denoted the 1957 memoir as "fake," and as being part of the "memory narrative in which Ukrainians appeared as heroes and victims, but not as perpetrators," a narrative that, as he stated, was "from a political perspective, advantageous to the nationalist factions of the Ukrainian diaspora during the Cold War." John-Paul Himka stated that the "Stella Krentsbakh/Kreutzbach forged biography" shows that the OUN, the UPA, and their "promoters" have to "resort to falsifications to defend their innocence vis-à-vis the Holocaust," which "indicates that they lack real evidence their possession ," and concluded that "no one grabs for fig leaves when they are wearing clothes."
