Mauthausen-Erinnerungen 6: Vasyl Radionovyč Bunelyk

Vasyl Radionovyč Bunelyk was born in eastern Ukraine in 1903. Following the invasion of Lviv (Lemberg) by the German Wehrmacht in June 1941, he fled with his family to Kyiv. As a member of the Communist Party, Bunelyk attempted to make contact with partisan groups in Kyiv. He was arrested during a nighttime raid.

In April 1943 he was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp and, just under a year later, was transferred to the Leibnitz subcamp, from which he managed to flee. Following two further arrests and another escape, he was in Hungarian Beled when it was taken by the Red Army.

Bunelyk’s memoir was first published in Ukrainian in Lviv in 1966 with the title ‘Soldaty ‚maloji vijny’ (‘Soldiers of the Small War’). In addition to the published text, there is also a typescript in Russian which describes his experiences after escaping from the Leibnitz subcamp in much more detail than in the Ukrainian original. For this first German edition of the work, both texts were translated and combined into a single narrative.

The memoir is characterised throughout by Soviet narratives, for example the exaggeration of resistance activities in the different Nazi detention sites. In an afterword, historian Matthias Kaltenbrunner contextualises Bunelyk’s memoir as a document of its time against the backdrop of the Soviet Union and the situation faced there by concentration camp survivors.

Available from the Mauthausen Memorial Book Shop or order the book online here.