Abstract
This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová.
This article argues for using personal accounts in reconstructing the inner lives of interethnic communities in Eastern Europe in times of crisis. Focusing on the Eastern Galician town of Buczacz as representative of numerous other such communities, it also suggests that the events of the Holocaust must be seen within the larger context of coexistence and violence since 1914. After briefly examining the relevant historiography, the article turns to a close analysis of the diary of a Polish headmaster, written in 1914–1922; the World War II diary of a Ukrainian gymnasium teacher, and recollections of the Holocaust by a Jewish radio technician, composed in 1947. All three men lived in Buczacz; all three wanted their accounts to be read by others, but they are only now being made available to the public by the author. Each provides a strikingly different perspective: that of a Polish nationalist educator whose sons were fighting to create an independent Poland; that of a Ukrainian activist who resented Polish rule and Jewish influence but felt ambivalent about wartime and genocide profiteering by fellow Ukrainians; and that of a young Jew who meticulously recorded both collaboration and rescue by his gentile neighbors and ended up fighting in a local Polish partisan unit. And yet, seen together, these personal narratives shed light on aspects of mass violence in that region largely missing from more general or nationally oriented histories.
Keywords
Historiographical Context
The importance of Eastern Europe as the site of genocide in World War II has only come into focus in the last few decades, especially following the collapse of the communist system. 1 In the intervening years, many scholarly works have appeared on various aspects of violence in what has been described as “the lands between,” “the bloodlands,” or the “shatterzone of empires.” 2 Some studies took the long view, examining the formation of states, nations, and ideologies in a region that had been ruled for extended periods by vast multiethnic and multi-religious empires, before breaking down into often belligerent and unstable nation states with significant ethnic and religious minorities. 3 Other scholars concentrated on national histories, whether of majority or minority nations, and their struggles for self-assertion or survival in a century marked by unprecedented violence. 4 Still other scholars chose to undertake local studies, examining coexistence and violence in specific regions or towns, and highlighting the extraordinary demographic, cultural, social, and political transformations that occurred there, invariably to the detriment of their previous rich diversity. 5 Looking at the more recent past and our own time, a number of studies have examined the politics of memory in a region whose heavy reliance on history as an anchor of identity was matched by a remarkable facility to erase vast chunks of the past from its practices of education, commemoration, and political discourse. 6 Finally, and occasionally reaching into their own personal recollections and family traumas, some authors have delved into the lost and at times regained memories of a vanished world. 7
My own recent contributions to this rich scholarship have been in two areas. In 2007, while conducting research for a monograph on the town of Buczacz—now located in West Ukraine and made up almost entirely of Ukrainian residents but previously the site of a multiethnic and multi-religious population of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in interwar Poland and pre-1914 Austro-Hungary—I published a study on the politics of memory in the region. Surveying the history of several cities and towns in what was known before World War I as Eastern Galicia, I briefly described their thriving, if increasingly fraught, interethnic communities prior to 1939; the violence, both external and internal, that eradicated these towns’ Jewish populations and subjected their Polish inhabitants to ethnic cleansing during World War II; the silence over that rich past and its violent termination that descended over the region, whose population had become by then almost exclusively Ukrainian, following its absorption into the Soviet Union; and, finally, the post-Soviet politics of memory in independent Ukraine’s western regions, which both glorified the freedom fighters previously vilified by the Soviet authorities, and denied or ignored these same resurrected national heroes’ collaboration with the Nazis in the mass murder of the Jews and, in accordance with their own agenda, their concerted efforts to expel the Polish population from what they hoped to remake into an independent, Jew- and Pole-free Ukraine. 8
As I traveled in West Ukraine/Eastern Galicia in the 2000s, I was struck by the abandonment and neglect of the remnants of a Jewish civilization that had existed and thrived in the region for four centuries. Ruined synagogues, some of them empty shells in which little forests had grown or local garbage was dumped; Jewish cemeteries, many of whose more useable tombstones had been carted off and where cows and goats led by local children were grazing; unmarked mass graves that surrounded each of these towns, where vast numbers of their previous Jewish inhabitants had been dumped after being brutally murdered during the German occupation; and an almost total absence of commemoration or any kind of local memory of these communities and their destruction, let alone of their neighbors’ participation in the genocide, compounded by newly erected local memorials, at times built directly on or near Jewish cemeteries and sites of mass shootings, to the martyrs of the Ukrainian struggle for liberation. 9
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, the book I wrote on the region’s politics of memory, was largely about a void: it spoke of emptied spaces, forgetting of the past, and covering up misdeeds; in other words, it was literally about Galicia’s depopulation and West Ukraine’s amnesia. But as noted above, Erased was conceived while I was researching a very different study, whose very goal was in fact to repopulate one Galician site, the town of Buczacz, in order to understand the dynamics of relations in a single interethnic community. 10 The case of Buczacz, I argued, was representative not only of the reality of life in Galicia as a whole but also in many ways of hundreds of towns throughout the vast swath of Europe’s eastern borderlands, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans. Specifically, the recently published Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz was an attempt to reconstruct, on the local level, how a community of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, who had lived side-by-side since the 1500s, ended up turning against its own members, whereby neighbors, colleagues, and friends took part in denouncing, rounding up, deporting, and massacring each other, in actions both orchestrated by foreign Soviet and German invaders and locally initiated.
Longue Durée and First-Person Histories
Several insights I gained from researching the monograph on Buczacz are especially pertinent to this essay. First, it quickly became clear to me that one cannot grasp the dynamic of interethnic relations by beginning at the end, that is, when the killing actually starts. Rather, one has to go back in time in order to find when interethnic relations began to deteriorate and living together, which had been seen for centuries as the only possible way of life, appeared to increasing numbers of people as unbearable and unacceptable, thereby facilitating, first rhetorically and then through violent action, the transformation of a community of coexistence into a community of genocide. As I argue, this process began with the rise of nationalism in Galicia in the latter part of the nineteenth century, whereby Polish nationalists presented themselves as carrying out a civilizing mission geared to transform Ruthenians (as they preferred to call Galician Ukrainians in order to differentiate them from their brethren in Russian-ruled Ukraine) into Poles; Ukrainians presented themselves as the indigenous population colonized, enserfed, exploited, and brutalized by the Poles and their Jewish lackeys, and both groups agreed that in the distinct future nation states they aspired to create, there would be no room for Jews. 11
This increasingly violent rhetoric did not translate into physical violence until the outbreak of World War I. But as the second relevant insight of Anatomy of a Genocide demonstrates, the extraordinary violence of the war, both in terms of remarkably bloody battles between multiethnic armies, and as expressed in widespread brutality against civilian populations, and especially against Jews by the invading Russian armies, transformed people’s perceptions of each other and of what they perceived as the boundaries of ethics, morality, and law. Moreover, the Great War in this region did not end in 1918 but transmuted into a brutal civil war between Poles and Ukrainians over control of Eastern Galicia, accompanied by many massacres of local Christian civilians as well as anti-Jewish pogroms by both sides. 12 Hence the central point to be made here is that we cannot comprehend events two decades later under Soviet and German rule without taking into account that the license for internecine bloodshed and brutality had already been given in World War I and its aftermath and that the experience of living through those years of mayhem had a profound impact on the youngsters of the time, those who became the activists of the 1930s and 1940s. 13
Perhaps the most important and pertinent insight I gained from researching Anatomy of a Genocide was that in trying to understand the changing dynamics of an interethnic local community, one must literally listen to the voices of its members and strive to see as well as present reality through their own eyes. What these eyes saw was in large part ethnically determined, in that Galician Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews perceived the same reality very differently (and have continued to do many decades after the demise of that world); at the same time, each individual also had his or her own unique perception of events and twist on reality. In writing the book, I tried to eschew imposing my understanding of the logic of events and then merely illustrate it through selective citations from personal accounts; instead, I wanted to let those first-person accounts, especially in the latter parts of the period, speak for themselves, even if admittedly I could not avoid ultimately orchestrating them in order to fit this cacophony of voices into the framework of a readable text of reasonable proportions.
To some extent, as I wrote elsewhere, 14 this methodology rejected the convention practiced by many historians of the Holocaust in particular, namely, that eyewitness testimonies and other personal accounts had to be treated with great circumspection because of their alleged “subjective” nature, and that consequently, archival documents, albeit usually produced by the perpetrators, must be preferred thanks to their supposed greater “objectivity” and accuracy, certainly as far as dates and geographical locations were concerned. 15 My own view, which has been further strengthened since writing the book, was that in reconstructing events in a small community or region, especially at times of crisis, it was essential to listen to all protagonists, both because that enables us to gain a richer, three-dimensional picture of events that are seen radically differently by particular groups and individuals and because so much of what actually occurred, as well as how such occurrences were experienced, was entirely missing from the official documentation favored in conventional historiography.
And yet, as I hinted above, it remained very difficult to give personal accounts their due place in a monograph that encompassed a long historical period and relied on hundreds of first-person accounts, be they letters, diaries, postwar testimonies, courtroom depositions, interviews, or memoirs. 16 Indeed, I was torn between wanting to let these witnesses tell the reader more about their experience as a whole, thereby making them into complete individuals rather than illustrative and often disembodied voices, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to produce an accessible text that would respond especially to the Jewish witnesses’ demand that we historians tell their often chaotic and seemingly unbelievable stories, juxtaposed with their neighbors’ no less traumatized and at times contradictory accounts, rather than preferring the orderly, bureaucratic, and essentially deceptive reports of the organizers of genocide.
Three Accounts
It is for this reason that I was glad to have the opportunity to publish three extensive and previously unknown accounts from Buczacz covering events there in both world wars. 17 In what follows, I will sketch out some of the most important features of these accounts. Readers who wish to test my assertion that such detailed first-person texts shed crucial light on the inner workings of communities in times of crisis are encouraged to read them in their entirety. It should be emphasized that these are particularly rare and, therefore, to my mind, highly valuable accounts, providing a personal glimpse into the daily life of a Galician town subjected to external and fraternal war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from three very distinct perspectives. Although the recently published versions of these accounts have been somewhat abridged, leaving out sections of lesser interest to the reader, they remain substantial, detailed, and insightful. Each author recounts a very personal narrative of the events he experienced and provides sufficient information for readers to familiarize themselves with his character and personal circumstances. As we get to know these writers, we therefore not only follow the events they describe but also empathize with their fate and acquire an intimate knowledge of their opinions, prejudices, hopes, and disillusionments. In other words, these three witnesses allow us to observe a world far removed and very different from our own through a unique personal prism, thereby enabling us to understand how people not much unlike ourselves responded to mass violence and destruction. 18
Although I cite a few lines from these accounts in Anatomy of a Genocide, when reading them in full it soon becomes clear that there is a vast difference between limited selections from such narratives and taking them in as a whole. All three writers intended their accounts to be read by others, and took care to compose them as records of what they had seen, as articulate ruminations on their personal experiences, emotions, and views, and as accusations of those they perceived as the makers, facilitators, and beneficiaries of the catastrophes that befell their town and communities. These three voices, therefore, are both distinctly personal and representative of larger communities of fate and experience; they tell us much that we would otherwise not know and provide us with very different views and perspectives on those events we thought we knew. The authors wanted us to read their accounts, yet for many decades their meticulously written narratives remained unknown and unread. To my mind they remain valuable today not only because they shed light on a murky past but also because they highlight the importance of first-person history and enlighten us as to the experience of individual human beings in times of crisis. These voices from a forgotten past speak to us directly, pull us into their world, and help us see our own circumstances through different eyes. In that sense, as lower-case histories, they perform for us what History was always intended to do.
Antoni Siewiński
The first account is by the teacher and school principal Antoni Siewiński. Born in Lwów in 1858, Siewiński was a Polish patriot and nationalist, a dedicated teacher, a keen observer, proud and loving father to his four sons, a faithful Roman Catholic, and an anti-Semite. As he explains in the opening of his diary, he began writing it when World War I broke out, by which time he was fifty-six years old. Both the original manuscript and the one that followed it were lost or destroyed, but Siewiński did not give up, and the final manuscript, parts of which were reconstructions of the original and other parts written in real time, provides an unparalleled picture of a Galician town under the Russian occupation of 1914–1915 and under Ukrainian rule in 1918–1919. Deposited in a Polish manuscript collection, presumably by Siewiński’s sons following his death on the eve of World War II, the account remained unread, collecting dust for many decades. 19 If we know far less about events on the eastern front than on the western front of the Great War, we similarly know much less about what happened in these parts of Eastern Europe in World War I than during World War II. Most especially, what we lack are detailed accounts of how things transpired on the local level of the kind composed by Siewiński.
Possibly the only competitor, which has only recently been translated into English, albeit in a much-abridged version, is the extensive account of the fate of the Jews in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina (a province just south of Galicia) under the Russian occupation by the author, playwright, and ethnographer S. Ansky. Remembered today mostly for his play “The Dybbuk,” Ansky recorded his experiences as he followed the Russian armies occupying these regions and tried to help the devastated Jewish communities there in a Russian-language diary. After the war, he rewrote and expanded the diary into a multivolume account in Yiddish, which was soon thereafter translated into Hebrew. But while his account remains of great value, it largely provides a bird’s-eye view by an outsider coming from Russia, rather than an insider’s account of events as they unfolded in a single town, which is precisely what Siewiński gives us. 20 Indeed, reading Siewiński’s account of events in Buczacz, we cannot but conclude that the manner in which World War I and the Polish–Ukrainian War that followed it were experienced by the local population constituted a crucial precondition to people’s subsequent conduct in Buczacz, as in many other towns in the region, in the decades that followed, not least under the Soviet and German occupations of 1939–1941 and 1941–1944, and most specifically during the genocide of the Jews and the ethnic cleansing of the Poles.
Siewiński had very clear opinions about his Buczacz, the role that Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians played in it, as well as about its place in Polish history and its necessary and inevitable future. For him, the Jews were always a malign influence. As he saw it, the Jews came to control the town’s economy and politics by skimming the Poles and asserting their own victimhood. As he writes at the opening of his diary: Before the war there were many watering holes here, in which people drank in the evenings and on holidays, so that eventually the Catholics drank away the entire inner city, while the Jews became the owners of the most beautiful houses in town. . . . The city officials were all Jews. . . . In the gymnasium too there were Jewish teachers, as well as in the general-education schools. Now everyone makes mistakes, but whenever a Jew did something wrong, and a Catholic pointed this out to him, the Catholic would immediately be accused of antisemitism and come into many difficulties. That is to say that the Jews, even the most honest among them, could always take revenge, and then hide behind the claim that the Catholic was at fault and say, “we are innocent,” although anyone could see that the Jews were behind it. Well, nothing could be done about that, since Jewish religion postulates: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
The Jews, he believed, were also disloyal to the Polish nation that hosted them and were always subservient to those in power, and they lacked the martial qualities that he admired about young Polish patriots. Thus, Siewiński approvingly quotes a speech made at the outbreak of war in 1914 by a local Polish gymnasium teacher, “who remarked that the Jews had never had it badly in Poland, as can best be seen from the fact that when they fled persecution [in the Middle Ages] throughout Europe the Jews found refuge, protection, and a living in Poland, so that today the Jews are the richest group in Poland. Since they are in Poland, they should also think like Poles and feel like Poles despite their Mosaic faith.” Yet when the local Jews mobilized their own militia, Siewiński derided those “kikes marching. . . . Each and every one of them was as fat as a well-nourished ox, their snouts lit up like lacquered lamps,” concluding, The stupid Jews thought that they could accomplish in one day what Polish youth had worked its heart out to achieve for many years. The courage of these fat, pigheaded Jewish cowards was demonstrated already the following day. As the Jews heard the first shots from the direction of Dżuryn [17 km east of Buczacz], the entire crew fled in all directions of the wind and further to the west all the way to Vienna, where they finally stopped to take a breath.
To be sure, Siewiński repeatedly asserts that he knows “some honest and honorable Jews,” but to his mind “the exception only proves the rule.” And while he similarly believes that the Jews could and would be transformed, were they to take up the Roman Catholic faith and become part of the Polish nation, he does not expect that to happen.
As for the Ruthenians, or pseudo-Ukrainians, as he calls them especially during the civil war of 1918–1919, Siewiński firmly believes that they are a sister nation that belongs by ethnicity, religion, and history to the greater Poland of which he dreams, an imaginary reenactment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that had ceased to exist at the end of the eighteenth century. 21 For Siewiński, as for many other nationalist Poles of his generation and their sons, World War I was not at all about preserving the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to which he bitterly referred as one of the “ignominious partition powers.” Rather, it was about reestablishing Poland. For this reason, too, he detested the Jews, since they were in fact the only group in Galicia that hoped to preserve the empire, rightly fearing that it would be replaced by nation states much less tolerant of them as a stateless national minority. 22
Siewiński lived to see the success of Polish nationalism in resurrecting the Polish state and taking over Eastern Galicia despite the fact that its majority Ukrainian population vehemently opposed Polish rule. But he was also aware that the six years of mayhem in the region had brutalized people, not least the youth, and looked to the future with a fair amount of trepidation. Perhaps fortunately for him, he did not live to see the end of Polish rule in Buczacz and the destruction of Polish presence in Galicia during World War II.
Viktor Petrykevych
One of the men who fought for his own national cause rather than the survival of the empire in World War I, and then served in the ranks of the Ukrainian Galician Army that fought against the Poles, was Viktor Petrykevych, the author of the second account. 23 Born in Drohobycz (Ukrainian: Drohobych), 170 kilometers west of Buczacz, in 1883, Petrykevych spent most of his life as a teacher of Latin, German, and Ukrainian. After the war and a period of internment in Czechoslovakia, he served for a few years as the principal of a private Ukrainian gymnasium in Czortków (Ukrainian: Chortkiv), where he also married and had two children. In the late 1920s Petrykevych took up a teaching position in the state gymnasium of Buczacz (Ukrainian: Buchach), 36 kilometers west of Czortków. He bought a house and intended to spend the rest of his life there, but in 1938 the Polish authorities transferred him to a teaching position in the bigger city of Stanisławów (Ukrainian: Stanyslaviv, now Ivano-Frankivsk). It was there that he experienced the outbreak of World War II and decided to write a diary. Just like Siewiński, he was 56 years old at the time.
Similarly to his Polish counterpart, Petrykevych was a patriot and a nationalist; he perceived Poland as a colonizer of Ukrainian lands and had a poor opinion of Jews, whom he saw as enthusiastic facilitators of Bolshevik rule. Writing shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he commented: When I meet my [Ukrainian] friends, I am surprised by their optimism. Probably all of us feel Schadenfreude. During their rule, did our [Polish] vanquishers not do everything to arouse the hatred of both the intelligentsia and the peasantry? Do we need to recall all our martyrdom, especially during the last few years? Despite our politicians’ declarations of loyalty, each of us, whether educated or common men, has personally witnessed our annihilation; and this experience prods us to rejoice over their defeat.
Once the Soviets marched in, he observed their enthusiastic welcome by the Jewish working class of Stanisławów: I . . . saw masses of people, mainly Jews, who were standing on both sides of the street, forming a dense crowd as they waited for the Bolsheviks. . . . At the junction of Sapizhynskiy, next to the post office, the workers’ organizations were gathered, holding red flags with Polish inscriptions. . . . At 9:30 a.m. a car carrying soldiers arrived. The assembled people began applauding and threw flowers at them. . . . Behind the car came a tank. The assembled Judeo-communists were seized by a triumphal mood. The tank was covered with flowers and garlands; some people leaped onto the tank, which stopped for a moment, and began to ride with the soldiers and to kiss them [calling out]: “Long live the USSR, long live Voroshilov, long live Stalin; long live Soviet Ukraine!” . . . Altogether some two hundred tanks drove by, and they were all welcomed with cheers, applause, flowers, and garlands. All this was mostly the doing of the Jewish proletariat; here and there one could observe a Ukrainian or a Pole. The Jews quickly found their bearings and adapted to the situation. Today we saw the power of the Jewish element in the cities. The Jewish bourgeoisie and plutocracy strolled calmly on the sidewalks, rejoicing that Hitler had not come to the city
Yet he too was a keen and critical observer of the events he experienced during the war and in its aftermath. His diary, which remained in his son Bohdan’s possession following his death in 1956, is an especially valuable document, since such extensive accounts of Soviet and German rule in Galicia by members of the local Ukrainian intelligentsia are exceedingly rare. Petrykevych describes in detail the entry of the Red Army and the establishment of Soviet rule in Stanisławów in September 1939, as Poland was divided between the USSR and Nazi Germany according to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Delighted about the end of Polish rule, over time Petrykevych grew increasingly critical of the new Bolshevik masters, both for pedagogical-ideological and for material reasons, as is reflected in his entries on the organization of fake elections meant to legitimize Soviet rule as well as his frequent references to the growing impoverishment of the population.
Petrykevych’s presumably more critical comments on Soviet power were deemed too dangerous by his son when he came into possession of the diary and were torn out. Similarly, the entries covering the first months of German rule in the region were also seen as too compromising, likely because of Petrykevych’s enthusiasm about the end of Soviet rule as well as his initial participation in the local Ukrainian administration under the Germans. Hence, we are missing the parts of the diary describing events between early July 1940 and late June 1941, as well as between July 5 and the end of 1941. As Viktor’s son Bohdan recalled in 2006, Petrykevych was dismissed from his teaching position in Stanisławów in the second half of 1940. He then moved back with his family to their house in Buczacz but was unable to secure a position in the town and had to earn his living teaching in the nearby town of Jazłowiec (Ukrainian: Yazlovets), 17 kilometers south of Buczacz. In early July 1941 Buczacz was taken over by the invading German forces, and Petrykevych was appointed director of the district education department by the short-lived Ukrainian nationalist administration in Buczacz. By October, this self-rule apparatus was dissolved by the Germans and Petrykevych was relegated to the position of an ordinary schoolteacher in Buczacz without any further engagement in local politics. 24
The bulk of Petrykevych’s diary is devoted to the entire period of German rule in Buczacz, while the latter parts depict his rather wretched postwar life under the reinstalled Soviet administration in the town of Kołomyja (Ukrainian: Kolomyya), 75 kilometers south of Buczacz—to which his family evacuated in mid-March 1944—until his death at the age of seventy-three. What is remarkable about this diary is that it provides an almost day-by-day account of an older Ukrainian nationalist’s view of the extermination of the Jews, the lives of the Christian population of the town, and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict toward the end of German rule. Although Petrykevych does not devote a great deal of space to the mass murder of his Jewish neighbors, and does not express particular glee about their fate, he appears remarkably detached and hardly empathic. As he writes on 19 October 1942, Yesterday was a terrible day for the Jews. Up to now such actions as had happened with Jews in other cities had not occurred in Buchach [Polish: Buczacz], and people said that Buchach was a paradise for the Jews. But in the last few days the Jews did not feel safe. They begged to be let into Christian houses. The day before yesterday the Gestapo arrived. Yesterday morning they started assembling the Jews in the square by the river. Those who tried to escape were shot. They shot sixty people. They broke into houses and took everyone out (we live in a house with Jews and they took them too). The Jews—young, old, women, and children—stood in the square until evening. In the evening they were led to the railroad. Nobody knows where they were taken. Some say they were shot in Stanyslaviv; others say that were taken to Bełżec and killed them with electric current in Bolshevik [?] prison cells. What the truth is, nobody knows. It is said that 960 people had been assembled in the square. The rest of the Jews hid in the woods and fields. The Gestapo will stay here for another two days.
Petrykevych is also quite worried about the continued presence of Jews in the town and its vicinity even after it is declared “Judenrein” (clean of Jews) and wryly notes that the inhabitants expect “Jewish revenge” once the Soviets return, thereby reflecting the notion that Jews and communists are synonymous. On 29 July 1943, he writes: The fall of Mussolini has stirred people. The Poles rejoice, hoping that the British will come here soon; Jews who live somewhere in the woods, come in the evenings to the houses that are far from the bridge and threaten Ukrainians with revenge.
On 6 August, he adds: “The partisans . . . attack the farms and take the cattle and whatever else they need. Among them are Jews, Bolsheviks, and others of that ilk. They are dressed and armed in every possible way. . . . Their orientation is Bolshevik. The Germans attack them with airplanes, dropping bombs on them.” By late September he notes: “Officially the Jews no longer dominate the city. But every week, by chance or through denunciation, their bunkers are discovered; from there, they are taken to the police. Now the Germans kill even Jewish doctors. Jews are still hiding in the woods and in some villages. People say there are still up to two hundred of them in Yazlovets. During the day they hide, at night they go to fetch some food and so forth.” A month later he observes again: “When the sun goes down and darkness prevails, the fields also come to life. Jews and partisans appear in the fields. It is generally dangerous to venture out to a field or a wood at night. . . . When it gets dark, all civilian traffic and activities stop. Then those who cannot be seen during the day can come out.” On 31 October, he writes: “Yesterday some Jews attacked the house of Ch. . . . at 6 p.m. . . . [They] threatened all the people present in the house (including two guests) with revolvers and took away whatever they could carry with them (mainly cloths and linen).” And by 9 November, Petrykevych seemed increasingly alarmed: “The Jews,” he wrote, who are hiding in bunkers, are getting bolder. At night some of them, armed with weapons, go to families that other Jews had previously asked to store their belongings, and demand to hand them back. They bring with them lists of items of Jews who are already dead, and they take them away because these items are Jewish property. Anyone who refuses to hand over those goods is warned that the Jews would punish him later. During these encounters the Jews emphasize that in due course action will be taken against the Christians.
Finally, on 22 March 1944, just before the Soviets entered the city, Petrykevych wrote: Following the recent developments in the war, people, merchants, artisans, and so forth, who were living in houses that were formerly Jewish, but had since been nationalized, are moving out of these Jewish homes. They fear Jewish revenge.
Conversely, Petrykevych both increasingly bemoans the material circumstances of such civil servants as himself and the general privations entailed in living ever closer to the front, and, at the same time, harshly criticizes those who profit from the suffering of others, not least from the property of the Jews and the job and business opportunities created by their murder. At the same time, as a veteran nationalist fighter, Petrykevych is loath to criticize the massacres of Polish civilians in the ethnic cleansing operations conducted by Ukrainian militias in 1944, but eventually concedes that both sides have descended to barbarism, writing, for instance, on 23 January 1944: What is happening in the villages of our district and in the neighboring districts should be recorded in every single village, because by the time the news reaches Buchach one can no longer tell what is true and what is fantasy. The partisans come to the villages—sometimes they are Ukrainians, then Poles, and then again Soviets. The Polish partisans attack the Ukrainians; then when the Ukrainian partisans come, they punish the Poles for the Ukrainians who were murdered or beaten and robbed. What is happening in the remote villages of the district, close to the forests, can be described by one word only: anarchy. It is said that Ukrainian partisans attacked a village in the Monastyryska or Pidhaitsi districts and murdered or destroyed fifty Polish families. Is this true? Even the name of the village is uncertain.
Just as Petrykevych is ambivalent about the first period of Soviet rule in 1939–1941, because it liberated Ukrainians from Polish rule and united them with their brethren in Soviet Ukraine, on the one hand, but on the other hand imposed an ideologically rigid and economically inefficient system on the population, he remains similarly ambivalent about the benefits and failures of postwar Soviet rule. What his diary lacks entirely is any sense of regret, remorse, or grief about the murder of the Jews and the “removal” of the Poles from West Ukraine. Like many other Ukrainians of his generation, who recalled the injustices of Polish rule in the interwar period and the suppression of Ukrainian national aspirations, and who had internalized strong anti-Semitic sentiments, Petrykevych was glad to be finally living in an ethnically homogeneous land, even if his own postwar daily existence was quite miserable in this devastated region. He suffered from a severe lack of even the most elementary food items and was troubled by the imposition of the Russian language to the detriment of Ukrainian. Yet he could also look forward with some hope to the eventual recovery of Ukrainian culture and identity. From this perspective, while this diary is unique, the sentiments it expresses during and after the war can be said to reflect those of a significant proportion of Petrykevych’s generation, as well as younger cohorts of Ukrainian patriots.
Moshe Wizinger
The third account is similarly singular, even as it provides an entirely different picture of events in Buczacz under German rule. 25 Its author, the radio technician Mosze Wizinger, was twenty-one years old when the Germans marched into his hometown of Buczacz in 1941. At the time he was living with his mother and younger brother in a small house on the outskirts of the town, near the Christian cemetery on the slopes of Fedor Hill, which eventually became a main local killing site of Jews. Wizinger’s older brother and sister had immigrated to Palestine, and he too was inclined toward Zionism. A tough and resourceful young man, obviously also with some literary aspirations, but lacking the higher education of Siewiński and Petrykevych, Wizinger gives us a vivid and colorful description of Jewish life under German rule in Buczacz until the city was declared “Judenrein” in June 1943, following the mass murder of most of its Jewish inhabitants.
In the second, fascinating part of his account, Wizinger depicts a world that we rarely hear about in Jewish testimonies and memoirs from this region. After his mother and brother are murdered, Wizinger, along with a few other surviving young Jews, joins a local Polish resistance group, which fights both the Germans and Ukrainian collaborators and militias, and subsequently joins a Soviet partisan formation operating in the area. Eventually the leader of the Polish resistance group is killed (by a local ethnic German), and only Wizinger and a few other Jews survive to see the first liberation of Buczacz in March 1944. Buczacz was in fact reoccupied by the Germans a couple of weeks later, and only taken over again by the Red Army in July, by which time most of the original eight hundred Jewish survivors were murdered; but Wizinger retreated with the Soviets in April and later fought in a Polish formation attached to the Red Army during the last phases of the war. He sought to immigrate to Palestine in 1947, but the ship on which he was traveling was intercepted by the British Navy and he found himself incarcerated in an internment camp in Cyprus for several months before finally reaching his destination. It was during that period of enforced detention that he wrote his account, based on notes he had written and preserved during the war.
Several aspects of this account stand out. First, even as he is hunted down as a Jew, Wizinger always relies on various Christian friends and helpers, both Polish and Ukrainian, whom he not only trusts but who at a number of points literally save his life. He appears to interact with local non-Jews freely, both in Polish and in Ukrainian; he has no dietary restrictions, and often describes himself eating pork; and he never shies away from a fight and other types of violence, be it against the Jewish police, which he despises (even as he is obviously connected to the Jewish council), local Christians, Ukrainian police or, when the occasion presents itself, Germans. Thus, for instance, he describes how, as “the terror in the city continued to spread,” the Jewish police, known as the Ordnungsdienst or OD, “were robbing, killing, worse than the Germans.” The OD commander, Mojżesz Albrecht, would walk down the streets in an OD uniform. Like the Germans, he was holding a whip in his hand and woe to whoever stood in his way. One day, my brother and I were standing on the sidewalk next to the synagogue where the resettled Jews were living. Albrecht passed by and something about me must have irritated him, because I suddenly felt the blow of his whip on the back of my head. I turned around and saw Albrecht. Of course, I did not just stand there. Soon, a few other OD-men came running. A genuine battle broke out. As a result of it, I and my brother were seriously bruised and found ourselves arrested by the Ordnungsdienst.
Conversely, he writes with the utmost gratitude and admiration for the Polish villagers who sheltered him after he was wounded in battle: There are many ways to describe someone’s heroism, but I would never have enough words to express the extent of “babcia,” Staszka, and Elżbieta’s bravery during those days. Every time the dog barked, or a person or cart appeared in the distance, their hearts filled with terrible fear. I would immediately be taken to my hiding spot and only after some time would Staszka come, still pale but already with laughing eyes, and announce that someone had merely passed by. Despite this, I never heard them utter a word of fear or complaint. I myself had to tell them over and over again that if the Germans or the police found me, they should explain that I had only arrived an hour before and had threatened them with my weapon or with the revenge of the partisans if they told anyone. But “babcia” would usually not let me finish, saying that everything was in God’s hands, and that the will of man amounted to very little.
Second, from the very beginning of the German occupation, Wizinger is engaged in various forms of resistance, together with his band of friends, most of whom are Zionists, and along with non-Jewish locals. Most importantly in this early phase, he builds a radio with which they can listen to news from the outside world, and which they then disseminate among the Jewish population to boost its morale.
Third, Wizinger consistently distinguishes between both Jews and Christians who can be trusted and are behaving as decently as they can under the circumstances, and those who collaborate with the Germans or act brutally and greedily of their own accord. In many ways, then, Wizinger represents a local social layer of young working-class Jews (including both Zionists and communists), not all completely secular (he celebrates the Sabbath with his mother and brother) but able to easily overcome religious restrictions for reasons of survival, who respond to the calamity of German occupation with energy and determination, and repeatedly find men and women, Jewish and Christian, who help them and at times participate in small acts of resistance and desperate attempts at survival.
This is not to say that Wizinger shies away from condemning the general indifference of the Christian population and the collaboration of some, especially Ukrainian policemen, in the mass murder of the Jews. He also eventually almost succumbs to despair when one of his Christian friends refuses to offer him shelter, just after his brother is murdered in the last roundup. But in what is perhaps the most remarkable part of this account, once Wizinger joins the Polish resistance group, the relations he depicts there between Jews and non-Jews, at the height of the Holocaust, in their forest hideout, and during perilous partisan operations, are not merely utilitarian or comradely, but nothing short of deep compassion and love for each other. He also presents the leader of the group, Edek, as providing the young Jews who join the resistance with the kind of motivation they might have expected from a militant Zionist. As he writes: We proceeded along the same road I had taken only two weeks earlier without knowing what my fate would be at the end of it. We passed by the row of willows, where I had found my first shelter when I reached the valley. We turned toward the train tracks. The pistols in Edek and Romek’s hands were shining. I looked at them with envy. If only I could hold such a pistol in my hand. On the way, Edek asked us about our life in the fields. We told him about the Poles to whom we owed our lives, about our fear of the Ukrainians, and how the ethnic German Nowak set the dogs on Sala. Edek was surprised that we let them do it. “We did not have a weapon,” said Nacio. “But you could have gotten matches, couldn’t you,” laughed Romek. “Had you burned down just one ethnic-German farm, you would have seen how the others change their behavior.” “And rest assured,” added Edek, “that if instead of four of ours, three Germans lay dead in the field, the Germans would not have dared bother you again for a while. But it’s not surprising,” Edek went on, “we too were like that once.”
In this small band of brothers and sisters, they are all dedicated to the cause of revenge, retribution, and liberation from German rule, and most of all, to each other. And in the process, not least thanks to the encouragement of his admired Polish leader, Wizinger is transformed from a desperate young man hunted down as one of the last survivors of his community into a fierce, long-bearded, merciless partisan. As he proudly recounts, “I had become notorious in the area. I had heard that mothers, when they wanted to make their children behave, scared them by mentioning the ‘bearded demon’ from the forest.”
And yet, after all the power and the glory of the resistance, Wizinger ends his account on a mixed note of hope and despair. During the weeks preceding the return of the Soviets, he and the few other starving Jewish comrades were hiding in a cave next to their murdered town. He recalls how he “looked at the others. The last of a dying nation. And if within an hour we were to die, would anyone know about our last moments?” But then, “faraway on the horizon . . . a few tanks appeared. . . . Someone shouted: ‘Our boys! Our boys!’” For Wizinger, this moment of redemption is inextricably mixed with the recognition of everything he had lost: I prepared my automatic. My hands were trembling. . . . I even forgot my hunger. Our automatic weapons were blazing, their clatter mingling with the sounds of other guns. . . . Pure hell was unleashed on the road. The Germans . . . were running around in a frenzy. . . . Some of them waved white handkerchiefs in our direction. “No,” I yelled knowing full well that they could not hear my voice. “No! It’s the murdered from the Fedor who have arisen. It’s the ten thousand you murdered that are shooting now. Fire, boys, fire! Today, we do not have to save our bullets. Watch how they wriggle. Take this and this. For the first roundup, the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth. Fire boys, for the hunger, the grief, and the tears. Fire for the crushed heads of the babies. Fire, for my mother, my brother, Janek, Nacio, and Ducio. Fire, for all of Israel.” . . . The first tank drove onto the bridge. Its massive body pushed its way through the remnants of trucks and wagons. We could clearly see the red star on its side. We jumped up and started running, slipping and tumbling down the ice-covered slope. The little hatch on top of the tank opened and a face covered with a black headgear appeared, looking curiously in our direction. “Comrades, comrades!” someone shouted to us. The tankman, lieutenant Podgarlitsky, leaped out of the tank and ran to us. Behind him came more men from the other tanks. “Hail the eagles!” I heard the first one call. I couldn’t utter a word. Tears ran down my cheeks and my throat was choking. Just like the day I had dreamed of, I thought. I kept going, hopping on one leg, stumbling, falling, rising and running again, through a thousand deaths, until I fell into life’s open arms.
Conclusion
I believe that these three extended accounts of the violent events in one Eastern European town during the first half of the twentieth century provide us with a greater understanding of the complexity and nuances of communal relations at times of war and genocide. 26 They are rare in terms of their lucidity, length, and perspective. But there are, of course, thousands of other accounts, especially of World War II and the Holocaust, stored in archives and audio and video collections, that can similarly enrich our knowledge and understanding of these extreme, allegedly unrepresentable, indescribable, or ineffable events. First-person narratives suffer from the limitations of subjectivity: they tell us how specific individuals saw and experienced the tiny segment of a historical event in which they played a role. But this is also their strength, since they draw us in and help us empathize with contemporary actors in a manner that historical studies often fail to accomplish. They also extract us from the clichés of condemnation and vacuous exclamations of horror, the distancing of bureaucratic and administrative analyses, and the obfuscation of theory and metaphysics. What these three men saw and experienced was real, visceral, and personal; they depict and explain their experiences in simple, clear language, and in doing so, they compel us to understand the normalization of horror and the ease with which normal people can act abnormally, for better or for worse, in dark times.
To be sure, these three men also saw the same world and each other through different eyes, and those who read their accounts may well have more sympathy with one view than with another. For contemporary readers it is important to understand that for each of these writers and the communities that they represent Buczacz was their home, even if in one sense or another, and with varying intensity, that sense of “being at home” excluded the other two historical ethno-religious groups. For Siewiński there was no doubt that Buczacz was a Polish town since its foundation; this also implied that the Ruthenians were largely misguided locals who ought to accept Polonization, and that the Jews were usurpers who deprived the town of its true Polish essence. For Petrykevych, there was similarly no doubt that Buczacz was part of a historical Ukrainian patrimony, which implied that the Poles had come as arrogant colonizers and exploiters and that the Jews were both tools and beneficiaries of this exploitation of the indigenous population and the land’s resources. And for Wizinger, not unlike Agnon, Buczacz was largely a Jewish town, where generations of Jews had established their own culture and traditions; for him, the destruction of the Jewish presence in Buczacz meant both the disappearance of a way of life and the emptying of the city of its historical essence, indeed, its takeover by people who knew nothing of its soul and spirit. In this sense, each man’s notion of Buczacz as his home, and by extension the home of his ethno-religious group, was both very intimate, related to family, friends, traditions, and history, and largely exclusive of the other groups. And yet, the multiethnic town they had known and loved no longer existed in the aftermath of World War II, and none of them would be able to recognize it any longer as their home.
From this perspective, the study of history is not merely about establishing what happened or taking sides as to who was right and who was wrong, who tells the truth and who lies. It is, ultimately, about understanding human motivation: why people acted as they did in another time and under different circumstances. Such understanding also helps us decipher the world in which we live and may dispel the fog of prejudice, opinion, media representations, and political bias that clouds our vision today. Just as we might have all found ourselves in a little town like Buczacz had we been born at another time and place, so too our own neighborhoods, towns, cities, and countries may at some point, perhaps not so far from today, be transformed into sites of violence and social disintegration. Reading the accounts of Siewiński, Petrykevych, and Wizinger about their own struggles with chaos and mayhem should help prepare us for what may be in store for our own communities sooner than we would like to believe. This is, I would say, one of the unrecognized or at least under-appreciated strengths of first-person accounts: that they not only bring us closer to the protagonists of the past, but that they also help us see our contemporary circumstances through different, if at times also horror-stricken eyes, lifting the veil of daily concerns and piercing the fog of empty rhetoric and noise to gaze directly into the face of our own, present-day gorgons.
