Late Bystander Testimonies in East Galicia: Between Memory,Identity,and Loyalties

Introduction

Over the last few decades, as this special issue also testifies, witness testimonies have become a widely used and fully fledged source in Holocaust research, appropriated by historians as well as literary and cultural scholars. However, for many years historians privileged Jewish testimonies of various kinds, leaving behind non-Jewish voices, especially late ones, which are usually oral. It would be exaggeration to state that non-Jewish testimonies have so far been absent in Holocaust research; nevertheless, scholarly attention has mostly been limited to diaries and early postwar memoirs; sources which are extremely valuable albeit also rare. ¹ Omer Bartov, in his article “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies,” passionately advocates for considering testimonies a rightful historical source, but devotes only a small paragraph to interviews with non-Jews ² ; in Dalej jest noc, a two-volume edited work on the Holocaust in occupied Poland, definitely the most important recent piece of Holocaust scholarship in and on Poland, oral history with non-Jews is used only incidentally and not by all authors. ³ Late non-Jewish testimonies have not been totally overlooked by scholars, but they have mainly been approached by researchers working on memory and analyzed as narratives and cultural products, and not as historical sources. ⁴

At the same time, a new research trend focusing on local complicity and collaboration during the Holocaust has emerged, and significant attention has been paid to Jewish–gentile relations in the context of genocide. In Poland, this was inspired mainly by Jan T. Gross’s already classic Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. ⁵ At the center of this research stands the category of the neighbor, non-Jewish witness or bystander. Michael Meng, for instance, convincingly argued that it was in fact impossible to be an indifferent bystander, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, because of the proximity of death and destruction during World War II. In his later writing, Gross even challenged the very concept of a bystander, as someone not involved, claiming that the third element of Raul Hilberg’s triad, next to perpetrators and victims, should be instead facilitators and beneficiaries—terms used by Mary Fulbrook in her A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. ⁶ Omer Bartov introduced the concept of a communal genocide, a mass death spectacle that indirectly involved all neighbors, and Elżbieta Janicka, to name another scholar out of a growing field, introduced the concept of a participative observer. ⁷

Having in mind these trends in Holocaust studies, which have nevertheless to a large extent overlooked late non-Jewish testimonies so far, this article aims for a twofold contribution. As a methodological study, it examines the advantages and limits of late non-Jewish witness testimonies in Holocaust research and introduces guidelines for using this type of source when investigating the category of neighbors or bystanders. Using examples from my own fieldwork, I argue for its significance, and analytical value, in studying Jewish–gentile relations in Eastern Galicia, as in other ethnically mixed borderland regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Close reading of these sources enables us to see how intimate were in fact the spaces of small Galician communities during the Holocaust and how non-Jews defined their communities then and define them today, changing and negotiating the terms of belonging and exclusion of their Jewish neighbors. My argument rests on the conviction that some non-Jews, assuming various roles of beneficiaries, facilitators, traitors, helpers, onlookers, ⁸ and being the most “implicated subjects” ⁹ during World War II, assumed for themselves the role of the witness toward the end of their lives.

Defining Late Non-Jewish Witness Testimonies

Whereas written non-Jewish witness testimonies should not be ignored, the truth is that most late non-Jewish testimonies are oral. They were typically recorded decades after the events (most oral history projects began their work in the early 1990s). While there are now multiple collections with late non-Jewish witness testimonies available, including the French Yahad-In Unum project led by Patrick Desbois, which constitutes the largest source of interviews from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Lithuania, ¹⁰ this article rests on accounts gathered during my own research. Carried out by a Polish–Ukrainian team of researchers, the project entitled “Social Anthropology of Filling the Void: Poland and Ukraine after Second World War” covered both Polish and Ukrainian Galicia. Between 2017 and 2019, we conducted 220 interviews in total, 150 of them in Ukraine. These 150 recordings constitute the main source base for this article.

All interviews were conducted in small communities, villages, and towns of up to 10,000 inhabitants (Zolochiv being an exception since it was used as a pilot study). This focus on small communities allowed for in-depth analysis on micro-historical level and brought our attention to the issue of space. In the East, Holocaust happened on the spot, locally, right in front of the non-Jews. Our research aimed also at reconstructing the spatial dimension of what happened and contemporary attitudes to living in a post-violence space. On average, we recorded about 20 interviews in each town and about 10 in each village. All interviews were recorded using a biographical approach, ¹¹ which means that a witness was asked to give an account of her or his entire life, with a particular focus on World War II and its immediate aftermath, as well as on local history. In Galicia, this meant that the interviews in question included a lot of information on Polish–Ukrainian relations, such as ethnic cleansing and the resettlement of Poles during the war, the Soviet occupation of 1939–1941, Sovietization of Galicia after 1944, and the activities of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The Holocaust of the Galician Jews was “just” one of the many topics discussed, and usually not the most important one for the interviewees. ¹² When it comes to the interviewees, the oldest interviewees were born in the early 1920s; the youngest were born in the late 1930s. Women and those with primary education were overrepresented in our sample. Most of the interviewees were children or teenagers during the German occupation. Whereas children’s testimonies are not to be neglected, they also have to be treated with caution. ¹³

First Layer in Narrative Structures

While analyzing the content of late non-Jewish witness interviews, one has to keep in mind two issues. Firstly, many of the late non-Jewish witness interviews, and certainly all interviews in my sample, were not conducted as Holocaust testimonies. Secondly, witnesses in these collections were very young during the events in question. For these and other reasons, valuable information on the local Holocaust trajectory is usually buried under fragmentariness, nonlinearity, and vagueness. Even if the first layer of a narration appears to be meaningless and superficial, I argue that it is of significance when approached correctly. In what follows, I would like to introduce four models of first layers in narrative structures—picturelike memories, “I don’t remember” narratives, defensive and denial strategies, and gossip or overheard stories—and highlight their analytical value.

Picturelike memories are extremely vivid memories based on first-hand personal experience. The content of these memories is usually associated with witnessing violence and death. The younger the interviewee, the more picturelike memories they have (picturelike memories typically include stories of Jews being walked along the main village road towards the mass shooting site, memories of Jews being shot seen from a distance, recollections of the death of an individual Jew, or of dead bodies seen on the street). I will demonstrate my point with a few examples: Evheniia Sadivs’ka (born 1937, from Koropets in Ternopil oblast, Koropiec before 1939) ¹⁴ lived on the main street and hence saw her Jewish neighbors being walked to the nearby quarry in 1942, where they were shot dead. ¹⁵ In the interview, Sadivs’ka still remembered her neighbors’ screams and wailing. Sadivs’ka’s peer from Pidhaitsi in Ternopil oblast (Podhajce before 1939), Liubov Shelvakh, saw the same scene fully, because her mother sat her high and comfortably on the wall of the Jewish cemetery so that she could observe the mass shooting of Podhajce’s Jews in the summer of 1942. ¹⁶ Both women were very eager to share their memories with me, and it was obvious that they had shared them many times before; several people in Pidhatisi even referred to Shelvakh as a “decent Holocaust witness” when we were searching for potential interviewees. Sadivs’ka’s daughter, present during the interview, also reminded her mother of some details missing from her account of the scene. Given their age, neither had anything more to add that was distinct, except this one important picturelike recollection. The status of a “delegated witness” can result in loss of emotional attachment to the subject of the story retold so many times; however, in the case of Shelvakh, it did not. She cried several times when describing the shooting.

What is the added value of such a testimony? One could certainly argue that the contribution of picturelike memories for determining the local trajectory of the Holocaust is relatively small, and that another description of the Koropiec Jews marched to their death pits does not significantly enrich our knowledge. Given the fact that even small children watched the mass murder of the Galician Jews, I believe that the prevalence of picturelike memories proves that the genocide of small communities’ Jews was a public event. ¹⁷ Jews and non-Jews lived close to each other before the war, both in terms of space and in terms of social interaction, but this also meant that the genocide happened in tiny and crowded spaces. It was not possible to overlook it. These testimonies also allow us to get a sense of the emotions during the time in question and today. While non-Jewish children and adolescents could have indirectly benefited from the social and economic change in the aftermath of the genocide, they were also the most vulnerable onlookers and observers, and as such experienced nightmares long after the Jews were murdered. ¹⁸

Another model consists of the “I don’t remember” narratives. These might be connected with the interviewees’ age; they might have been simply too young during the war to notice or understand, or they might be too old during the interview to remember the details, or they do not want to remember the events in question. Ol’ha Geros (born 1930, from Hlibiv in Ternopil oblast, Hlebów before 1939) claimed not to remember the names of local young men who joined the self-proclaimed Ukrainian militia in summer 1941. When asked about particular people known to us from written sources, however, she unwillingly confirmed their complicity in the events that took place during the interregnum period. ¹⁹ Ol’ha Liakhovych (born 1930, from Utikhovychi, L’viv oblast, Wojciechowice before 1939) was a retired teacher when we interviewed her. ²⁰ Like many others from the village, she told us the story of local Jewish landowners Lipa and Moshe Strickers. Moshe was killed in the village, while Lipa Stricker survived, hidden by a peasant family in the vicinity of her village. In the interview, Liakhovych claimed she did not know who hid Lipa Stricker. By the end of the day, however, Liakhovych’s neighbors told me that it was actually her own parents who had hidden him. When I re-interviewed her off the record, I received a reluctant and circuitous acknowledgement (I will come back to the possible explanation later in my text). Thus, her “I don’t remember” was in fact superficial and needed only to be overcome.

What is more, various defense and denial structures such as these two categories conceal an invaluable content. Typically, the interviews attribute responsibility for what happened to individuals not considered full members of a community. This strategy can be illustrated by the discussion of the plunder of Jewish property. Hardly anyone interviewed by us denied that looting took place, but almost everyone blamed individuals who could be easily excused for their behavior: children, “village idiots,” and paupers. A man born in 1925 in Rydwanówka near Rohatyn in Stanisławów voivodeship (now Rydvanivka, Ivano-Frankivs’k oblast) remembered how a neighbor, who was a village pauper, dug in a fresh mass grave where Jews had just been buried, searching for valuables. ²¹ Sofiia Semyhen (born 1930, from Kuriany in Ternopil oblast, Kurzany before 1939) discussed the fact that some not very respectable people from the neighborhood plundered an abandoned grocery store that used to belong to a Jew called Hershko. ²² An interviewee from Rohatyn claimed that his mother did not join the robbers, despite being persuaded to do so by her neighbors, and that the neighbor who had dug in the mass grave did not enrich himself “with Jewish gold” but remains “dirty, unkempt and drunk” to this day. Semyhen claimed that her father forbade her from participating in the looting (“I don’t need what is not mine,” he told her). As seen from the excerpts, these kinds of narratives are very unlikely to include information on precisely who was involved in the looting, let alone provide us with their names. However, these fragments confirm that the looting took place and give an insight into social norms of the past and the present. Looting was morally condemned when it happened, and today people are willing to state that their families did not participate because they obeyed moral norms. At the same time, the very same witnesses admit that surprisingly wide circles of their neighbors were involved, and this questions the prevailing obedience of the moral norms during the Holocaust.

Another scheme allowing witnesses to describe ethically dubious or condemned activity is emphasizing immediately that it was performed under constraint. This is the case of Nataliia Kulchytska (born 1933, from Dobropole, Ternopil oblast), who saw local Jews being marched to the nearby village of Wiśniowczyk (Vyshnivchyk) to be shot dead in the summer of 1941. Immediately after giving this information, she added a comment about a local man she identified by his last name: “He escorted them. Because [Germans] made him do it, of course they made him, he didn’t just go on his own.” ²³

First-hand accounts are frequently buried under a vast number of stories repeated after someone else, hearsay and “urban myths” (or rather “village myths”). Every second interviewee repeated a recollection of a scene that was common during Action “Reinhardt” in the region—a mass shooting, with Jews forced to undress, walk on a small footbridge and killed by (machine) gunfire. Yet not many had actually seen the scene, and the shootings had had many variants in the interviews. When asked whether she saw the shooting in the village of Wołowe (Volove, three kilometers from Bibrka), which she had just described, with her own eyes, Daria Kysil’ (born 1933, from Bibrka in L’viv oblast, Bóbrka before 1939), answered: “Oh no, no! [So, your mom had seen it?] No, absolutely not, Wołowe is so far away from us! My mom heard about it from others.” ²⁴ Yulia Fil’ (born 1932, from Utikhovychi) did not see anything herself, but she very vividly retells what her father saw in nearby Przemyślany (Peremyshliany):

And then, during the German occupation, they say there was a kind of ghetto, that these Jews were marched into a ghetto, and killed and burned there. I also remember when my dad came home and said: “I can’t bear to look at it.” . . . “They brought them together—he said—and threw them into the fire, all moaning and wailing. I—said my dad—couldn’t bear to look at the Germans tormenting them. They are living human beings, wouldn’t it be better to just kill them, instead of burning them alive.” I still remember when dad came [from Przemyślany] and told me that. ²⁵

Interviewees also retell the stories about individual Jews being saved, helped, found, and killed (not necessarily in this order), and about those who survived and were later seen alive. In some cases, hearsay becomes an impulse or a starting point for further research, as in the case of an interview with Bohdana Kohut from Utikhovychi (born 1935) who claimed that her neighbors hid a small Jewish girl known in the village by the name Romka. ²⁶ Kohut never saw the girl and the entire story sounded very unconvincing; however, several other elderly inhabitants of Utikhovychi later confirmed the information. Second-hand stories and gossip provide significant information about the functioning of the Holocaust in the social communication and imagination at the local level. Although neither recognized nor commemorated officially, ²⁷ in these small communities, the Holocaust was a constant subject of discussion, recollection, and reminiscence after the war. One of the reasons was the intimate space of the village and shtetl’s genocide: the spaces of mass violence, including mass shooting and mass burial, remained part of everyday life for people who remained in Galicia after the Jews were murdered, provoking and maintaining recollection. Clearly, parents told children about it, neighbors told neighbors, and colleagues told acquaintances. Despite being tabooed in a number of ways, the mass annihilation of Galician Jews locally was rather an open secret and common knowledge after the war, just as much as it was a communal genocide during the war. ²⁸

Beyond the Surface: Unexpected Facts and Unexpected Honesty

What is uncovered as a result of piercing through the first superficial layer of sometimes banal (if witnessing death could be banal), sometimes burdensome and vague memories? Provided we understand both the historical context and the specificity of the source, late non-Jewish witness testimonies constitute an immense source base—whose analytical value, like that of any other source, relies on many factors. Late witness testimonies offer a full array of factual information, a great deal of both childish and senile honesty, and can provide insights into a microcosm of provincial interethnic relations, including issues pertaining to a sense of loyalty, belonging, help, and betrayal.

Given the vagueness of late testimonies, it seems illegitimate to consider them a reliable source of factual information. However, the facts are there when listening closely, and proceeding with care. In most cases, one has to put together several interviews from one locality to obtain a more complete picture of what had actually happened there in the past. In Dobropole, interviews with elderly village inhabitants provided us, for instance, with a list of young Ukrainians who had joined the Ukrainian militia in the summer of 1941 and who had marched local Jews to Wiśniowczyk, where Jewish men, women, and children were murdered. Some of these local young men were later tried and convicted by Soviet courts, some avoided responsibility and continued living in their hometowns and villages, some retreated to the West together with the German army, and some simply disappeared. In addition to the names, these interviews allowed us to confirm the fact that the local Jews were marched to Wiśniowczyk, and not to Buczacz, and that the events took place in 1941, not 1942, as was then assumed. ²⁹ Moreover, through interviews conducted in Vyshnivchyk from a year earlier, we were able to obtain pictures of Jews “from elsewhere” who had been marched into the village in the summer, that is, “after the Germans came.” ³⁰

Sometimes, while a piece of important information is common knowledge in the village, it waits to be uncovered by an outsider. An example of this is the identity of the peasants who hid Lipa Stricker in Wojciechowice, mentioned earlier. In other cases, a piece of information appears in the interview very unexpectedly: inhabitants of Utikhovychi pointed to Kateryna Skorokhoda (born 1937) as a person with a vast knowledge of local history. At first, I was reluctant to interview her because of her relatively young age during the Holocaust. However, the interview with Skorokhoda proved to be one of the most fruitful in Utikhovychi: she lived across the Strickers’ orchard during the war and had heard Moshe Stricker begging for his life followed by his execution moments later. ³¹ Skorokhoda also revealed the identity of the Ukrainian policeman who participated in the murder, enabling us to begin searching for his records in the Security Service of Ukraine Archive (Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy) in L’viv.

While the interviews conducted in Dobropole and Utikhovychi complement other available sources—Jewish witness testimonies in the case of Utikhovychi, and a diary (in Polish) by Józef Anczarski in Dobropole—quite often late non-Jewish testimonies are the only available source of information at our disposal. This is especially the case in numerous village communities in which not a single Jew survived the war, or where no Jewish testimonies were uncovered. In Stratyn (Ivano-Frankivs’k oblast, before the war Stanisławów voivodeship), for instance, we conducted only two interviews. As both interviewees were teenagers when the war broke out (born 1921 and 1923), and as they were perfectly lucid and extremely talkative, we recorded as much as seven hours altogether. With the help of these two interviews we were able not only to understand the local history of the Holocaust but also to reconstruct at least fragments of the pre-1939 world of Jewish Stratyn. Obviously, these two late non-Jewish testimonies cannot give us an insight into Jewish cultural, religious, and spiritual life. ³² They are nevertheless all that seems to be left and available to us today. ³³ The two interviewees remember the genocide of the Stratyn Jews clearly and accurately. Based on their accounts, it is possible to reconstruct the chronology and other details of the destruction, as observed by members of the local majority community. One of the most vividly remembered aspects was the humiliation of the Jewish inhabitants of the village before their death. Women were forced to strip naked, men had their beards cut off, all Jews were forced to dance and sing:

They dragged them out from homes, women locked the doors, didn’t want to open, they took the men. They lined them up in two rows and told them to sing and walk in a circle, and hold their hands in the air. . . . There was Hychko and Froil, Froil had a beard, so they cut his beard in half, and left a half. ³⁴

The two interviews tell us not only how Hychko and Froil died but also who they were. The stories are surprisingly honest and explicit. Certainly, people lie, hedge and deny what they remember, but at the same time they are very open with regard to the most unexpected issues. There is a particular kind of honesty to memories of what I call “disgraceful deeds of a lighter caliber”—behaviors that typically belong to the category of morally condemned activities, but that could be and were ignored and excused by the community as they involved, for example, children. A typical case of this involves looting and wandering around the mass killing sites, as described earlier. Late witness testimonies contain countless stories of going to the “vacant” ghetto, poking around houses of Jewish neighbors who were murdered minutes earlier, and climbing trees to see how Jews were being executed outside of the city. When asked how did she know about the murder of a particular Jew, one of the Stratyn interviewees answered, “Oh God, haven’t we all run to watch? Kids always run to see. I haven’t, but the younger have.” ³⁵

Evheniia Zalutska (born 1929) was young enough to climb the hill with other village kids to see the last Jews of Podhajce being shot in the middle of the fields belonging to the Stare Miasto village. ³⁶ Nataliia Havryshkevych (born 1932, in Bóbrka) told very vividly how she convinced her friend to go on an expedition to the synagogue that had just been burned down by the Germans, and how she brought some books from there she could not read, and how she was told by her mother to return them immediately when she arrived home. Interestingly, she provides a kind of explanation to what she did at that time: “Did I even understand what I was doing? How young I was, still a kid. Yes, I went there, I don’t even know why. I would have never gone today, I would have been scared. But children are stupid, that’s all.” ³⁷ Havryshkevych laughed while saying these words, but Helena Mazurs’ka (born 1932, from Bibrka) seemed embarrassed when telling her story: when the Jews of Bóbrka were shot and buried in mass graves in the nearby village of Wołowe during the second Aktion, the then eight-year-old Mazurs’ka went to see the pits, because “she was curious.” ³⁸

In some cases, honesty comes from a different place. After conducting hundreds of oral history interviews, I am convinced that some elderly people want to share what they saw, and what they have probably never told anyone before, certainly not their children and grandchildren, before dying. ³⁹ Meeting a stranger who is not part of the community and who will disappear from their lives after the interview brings about this “last chance” honesty. Yosifa Fedorovych (born 1927, from Vyshnivchyk) was one of the few we interviewed who stated quite openly that it was “our boys” who murdered the local Jews, and not the Germans:

[Tell me please, when the Germans came, did they start killing Jews right away, or a little later?] How they killed Jews. . . . Yes, Germans were already here. [But did they kill them right away . . . ?] No, when an order came, that’s when. They were supposed to kill them because they eat bread in vain, Germans said. But it wasn’t Germans who killed them, I don’t remember seeing Germans here. . . . It was our lackeys. [Do you mean boys from the village?] Of course, yes, villagers. [And who shot at the Jews?] Well, I don’t know if I saw the shooting or not. . . . But it was our boys, only our boys. ⁴⁰

Volodymyr Dobryns’kyi (born 1931, from Dobropole) insisted that it was the Germans who were in charge, and remembered local Ukrainians as “the helpers, who were marching the Jews to Vyshnivchyk.” He nevertheless confirmed that they were “our boys, from the village, one cannot deny.” ⁴¹ The “our boys” wording, repeatedly used in many testimonies, is quite meaningful here, because it shows narrowing circles of belonging during the war. Although small communities’ reaction to the situation of extreme threat can be very diverse, in that case it proved rather simple: loyalties get cut off and moral obligations get reduced. ⁴² While before the war local Jews might have been “ours” because of the spatial and everyday life proximity, during the war “ourness” limits itself to people from the core of the imagined and experienced community, from the same village, but also of the same nationality and faith. Both local Jews and local Poles moved outside of this core during the war. Yosifa Fedorovych did not reveal the names of the “cringers,” because, even when committing a crime, “our boys” apparently meant more than “our Jews” (Dobryns’kyi, on the other hand, did reveal all names). Most interviewees, when asked about Ukrainian police or people who joined nationalistic militia in 1941, shrugged their shoulders and stated that since they died a long time ago, it did not matter. In some cases, honesty was reluctant and difficult to obtain. Yosif Patetskyi (born 1927, from Bibrka) repeatedly argued there was no pogrom in Bóbrka in the summer of 1941, when neighborly violence by non-Jews against Jews spread through all of Galicia. While extensively describing the following Actions, including the mass shooting in the local brickworks, and how he was forced by the Germans to dig the pits, Patetskyi continually denied the pogrom took place. All of a sudden, as if he was tired of denying, and probably convinced that the interviewer knew anyway, Patetskyi said: “How did you learn about it? Someone has told you, haven’t they? Well, there you have it: there was a pogrom.” ⁴³

Help, Betrayal, and the Slippery Middle Ground: Factual Information in Testimonies

Late non-Jewish witness testimonies are also a valuable source when exploring relations between Jews and Gentiles during the Holocaust, spanning from help to betrayal and murder. Whereas the majority of Jews who lived through the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia outside the ghettos survived because of help provided by non-Jews, it was betrayal by non-Jews that led to the murder of those who did not survive. While narratives of help, betrayal and murder feature prominently in many Jewish testimonies, ⁴⁴ late non-Jewish witness testimonies offer a different perspective.

Certainly, honesty in speaking about the complicity of one’s own group in mass murder is very limited, but is possible—resulting from the “last chance openness” described above, the good mood of the interviewee, a fruitful interaction between interviewee and the interviewer, skillful questions, an accident, or a mixture of many of these features. It provides factual information as well as insights into the complex world of mutual dependence, loyalties and belonging in the majority society—a problem almost completely absent in Jewish witness testimonies. Without any doubt, the wave of anti-Jewish violence in summer 1941 and pogroms in general are the most silenced issues in the interviews. They are the skeletons in the closet, the most shameful and hushed events. Since guilt cannot be externalized here, and participation spanned social, class, gender, and age structure, witnesses often avoid the subject of anti-Jewish violence. ⁴⁵ Anybody could have joined the mob; thus, everybody in the community is potentially guilty. Out of the thirteen localities in which we conducted our interviews, pogroms took place in two, Złoczów and Bóbrka, and individual Jews were murdered in an additional two villages (Wiśniowczyk and Hlebów). In all localities but one, the interviewees responded to questions about violence by claiming to not remember and not know—an answer that, in most cases, could in fact be honest given the young age of the interviewees. Only in Bibrka did two of our interviewees openly speak up. Upon finally admitting that the pogrom did take place, Yosif Patetskyi, whom I introduced earlier, described how, immediately after the funeral of the victims of murders committed by the NKVD (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del [The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]), ⁴⁶ the mob rushed to beat and kill Jews on the streets, and loot their homes: “They attacked them with knives from the beginning. I saw them lying there. There was a Jew, they told him to dig a pit for himself, I saw it with my own eyes. He dug the pit and then was hit on the head with a stick and thrown into the pit. I’m telling you the truth.” ⁴⁷ The second interviewee, Yosif Mykytiv (born 1923) remembered the following:

The story is that our people brought a few Jews. There were a few Jews who were communists. [Where did they bring them?] Well, to the prison. [So, people brought them themselves . . . ?] No, they were brought by those policemen, Ukrainians, they decided to do it. It was a kind of newly-formed police. They had rifles and they brought the Jews there. Not so many of them, those who served the Bolsheviks, and killed them. . . . I watched it and ran away, I ran to Łanky (the native village of the interviewer near Bibrka) and I was gone. [How many Jews were there?] I don’t know. I heard later that those Jews were beaten in the yard, but I haven’t seen it, I was gone then. I got scared and my mother shouted: “What good does it do? Stay at home! No one knows what’s going to happen.” [So, they were brought in by Ukrainian policemen.] They were brought by those who hated Jews, and there were many of them. ⁴⁸

Based on the interviews we conducted, it seems that sharing knowledge about the actions of the Ukrainian auxiliary police ⁴⁹ with an interviewer was less problematic than revealing the involvement of locals, adults, husbands, and fathers, and not only “stupid kids” and “village idiots.” Nonetheless, people did talk. They did so more willingly about the policemen tried by the Soviets after the war, perpetrators punished for their crimes (even though not necessarily for participating in anti-Jewish activities), policemen who managed to escape with Germans and left no relatives behind, or if the story involved Ukrainian policemen who also provided some help to the Jews. Ol’ha Tykha (born 1930, from Pidhaitsi), whose older brother Bohdan Tovpash had smuggled two Podhajce Jews out of the town, emphasized that it was possible to save them only thanks to his friends serving in the auxiliary police under the Germans:

because we had our people in the police. The head of the police, he . . . . They already died, they are gone. Now we can talk about them. They helped him (interviewee’s brother) a lot. [And were they tried after the war for being in the police?] No, they went to America. [Oh, so the policemen were not tried . . . ?] Why would they wait to be tried? [They ran away]. Of course they ran away. Who would have waited? They would be all shot. It was Ukraine, independent Ukraine for a short while. They were patriots. The patriots went to the police to keep order. ⁵⁰

At times, the names of policemen slipped out imperceptibly in a conversation on another subject, in other cases, interviewees brought them up consciously while condemning their actions. Sometimes, we as interviewers used “tricks” to confirm that the Ukrainian police were involved in finding, beating, and escorting the Jews to their place of execution. For instance, we asked about the language spoken by the police. When asked who forced the Jews to dance, a woman who witnessed the Stratyn Jews kicked out of their homes and humiliated in the village center, answered: “the Germans.” However, when the question about language followed, she said: “[They spoke] Ukrainian, exactly as I speak now with you. They wore uniforms, they were told to take the Jews and guard them.” ⁵¹

Individual betrayal, when acknowledged, was always condemned in the interviews. The names of traitors emerged only when they were no longer part of the community—for various reasons: because they left; because they died; or because they were legally and morally excluded, for example, as a result of being tried. When asked whether any of the village Jews survived, Sofiia Semyhen (born 1930, from Kuriany) responded,

One did hide. He [the Ukrainian helper] was hiding him, but eventually reported him to the Germans. And the Germans took them and executed them. . . . [Wait a moment, so he was hiding Moshko and the one who had kept the inn, correct?] Yes, two of them. [So two Jews were hiding with Jarema, and then he . . . ] He reported them to the Germans. [Reported?] Yes, and he took all their belongings. And that was it. Everybody knew about it. The entire village knew. ⁵²

The interviewee was very open about the denunciator’s identity, but only because none of Jarema’s relatives lived in the village any more (they moved to Berezhany shortly after the war). Similarly, a witness from Rohatyn told a detailed story, including the names of the Jews hiding in the nearby forest, deceived and turned in by the interviewee’s native village inhabitant, only to add that the boy moved out to L’viv (and that Jewish gold had not made him happy). ⁵³

Typically, people were more eager to reveal cases of betrayal when there was the possibility of blaming teenagers and kids. The same witness from Rohatyn who described the complicity of his fellow neighbor in the murder of the Jews hiding in the forest, remembered the case of the discovery of the hideout of some thirty Jews who had escaped from the Rohatyn ghetto during the second Aktion, and were reported by the

Rohatyn kids, youngsters. You know, rascals, little rascals. . . . They sneaked into the ghetto and ferreted through what the Jews had left behind. They noticed smoke by the river and noticed the Jews. And they reported them. [Who did they report to?] Who knows, probably to Ukrainian police, since there was Ukrainian police. [Hmm, was there Ukrainian police here?] But they didn’t work for the Germans so much, they just helped. And then the Germans came, found these hiding places, pulled out about thirty people from them, tired, starved, cold, and that’s it. ⁵⁴

The behavior of the “little rascals” was not approved, but they enjoyed merciful anonymity, while the interviewee reluctantly confirmed that even when reporting the Jews, the kids were still more “ours” than the Jews. When remembering the murder of the young Beler boy, her neighbor whose first name she did not remember, Daria Kysil’ (born 1933 in Bóbrka) stated, “Our kids, big boys, very sneaky, they saw him. There were holes in the shed, like in every shed, so they saw him. And they took him and they handed him over. Germans came right away, took him and executed him like everybody else.” ⁵⁵ Again, even if the semi-anonymous Jewish boy deserved empathy, it was not to the extent that led to an active counteraction and exposing the “big boys” from the neighborhood.

The discussions about complicity and collaboration proceeded with more ease when the interviewees were given the possibility of not naming their own community members and of speaking about events that took place in nearby villages. Ol’ha Liakhovych (born 1930, from Utikhovychi) was very reluctant to name the Ukrainian policeman who participated in the murder of Moshe Stricker, but she eagerly instanced a story of four Jewish children walked by her house by an Ukrainian peasant from the nearby village of Rozsokhy: “And he took them to Dobrianychi [another village near by], to the gendarmes, to be killed. And the gendarme told him: ‘Why did you bring them to me?’ . . . . So cruel was he.” ⁵⁶

When compared to the participation in spontaneous violence, official collaboration, denunciation, and betrayal, the discussion of robbery and plunder appears to be almost innocent and easy. The usual strategies concerning handling responsibility and blaming kids and the mob apply, but there is a greater degree of honesty and openness than one would expect. Indirectly, it proves the universal nature of the practices of appropriation of Jewish belonging, and its approval. At each stage of the annihilation of the Jewish community, its property was gradually transferred not only to the Germans but also to their non-Jewish prewar neighbors: by means of semi-legal and semi-ethical trade, fraud, theft and plain robbery. ⁵⁷ Although the accounts rarely include names, late testimonies provide detailed descriptions of a full spectrum of these activities. An interviewee from Rohatyn remembers Ukrainian policemen who pocketed a great part of the contribution demanded from the Jews by the Germans and guarded in the synagogue. ⁵⁸ A woman born 1933 in Babińce near Rohatyn stated openly: “Everything was left in the houses, and it was our people who went in and, well, they robbed it all. They went in and took all these Jewish things. ‘I need this, and I need that. I’ll take this, I’ll take that.’ That’s how it was. Our people did it.” ⁵⁹

An interviewee born 1927 in Usznia (Ushnia) near Złoczów described how she went to her Jewish neighbors’ house and took a “red 3-litre churn” ⁶⁰ for herself; an interviewee from Stratyn enriched her family with a goat. ⁶¹ Countless instances of unspectacular, but undeniable and widespread, “property transfer” on the local level provide factual information on this aspect of the Holocaust. They also raise the important question about the moment in which observation turns into facilitation, facilitation turns into benefiting, benefiting turns into complicity, and finally, complicity turns into collaboration.

Narratives of aiding Jews in the late testimonies of the Eastern Galician neighbors were much less obvious and one-dimensional than expected. ⁶² Some general statements such as “all our people helped the poor Jews” could be found, but mostly in conversations with younger interviewees. Instead, there are two dominant threads of incidental help and denial of long-term aid. Evgeniia Zaplitna (born 1928) from Hlibiv remembers an elderly Jew from Grzymałów (Hrymailiv), once a family business acquaintance, who would come over and be stealthily fed; ⁶³ Mariia Tymus’ (born 1930 in Worwulińce near Tłuste) narrated:

We had a field further away from the village, by the forest, and when they killed them, my mom and my dad ran, weeping, and a Jewish girl [zhydivochka] was running away, and my mom came back from the field and said: “Mariika, a Jewish girl was running away, and we hid her, you see. [And she was hiding with you afterwards?] Well, she was somewhere. . . . But no, I don’t know what happened with this poor creature, I don’t know. ⁶⁴

The interviews show that short-term, incidental and spontaneous help was provided—Jews received water, food, and provisional shelter. ⁶⁵ Based on the interviews, it is very difficult to determine whether non-Jews received any compensation for the help, and what was the motivation behind it. However, there are first-hand stories of what was seen at home as well as secondary memories of what happened to the neighbors, family, or spouses that once again challenge the myth about the Holocaust being a taboo in the local community. The memory of incidental help was preserved as part of the memory culture that did not anticipate this kind of behavior as socially rewarded and recognized. At the same time, the same memory culture enabled preservation of sincere memories about denying help. “The poor creature” whi was temporarily hidden by Mariia Tymus’s parents was denied shelter to stay any longer. Teodora Kanak (born 1927, from Osivtsi) clearly remembered that nobody in the village (and this included her father) agreed to hide Kofler, a wealthy Jew and a well-respected member of the community before the war. ⁶⁶ Nataliia Kul’chyts’ka (born 1933, from Dobropole) recounted:

Dudzio the Jew had three sons and a girl. The girl kept coming to us; she was such a good girl, and she wanted to hide so much, so that they wouldn’t. . . . But well, my parents were so scared, because they would be killed or so, I don’t know what exactly they would’ve done to them. The Germans were so dogged about the Jews. [So, you are saying that she was coming because she wanted to get somehow . . .] She was coming because . . . She stayed for the night several times. ⁶⁷

While describing instances when assistance was denied to Jews made interviewees uncomfortable and uneasy, the narrative of actual help posed the real problem. I will illustrate this coming back to the case of Utikhovychi and the Kohuts family that hid Lipa Stricker. The story was well known in the village—“everybody knew” about helping the Jews, as much as “everybody knew” the identity of the Ukrainian policeman who participated in the murder of Lipa’s brother. However, at first, Kohut’s daughter ignored the issue entirely, and then, when asked directly, refused to speak on record about it, only finally to reluctantly confirm that her parents offered to help Lipa Stricker in return for money. The help was not taboo, nor it was silenced or concealed by the village inhabitants, at least after the war ⁶⁸ —however, it was not considered a topic safe and easy to discuss with a stranger.

Two aspects might shed light on the reasons for unease and discomfort in discussing help to the Jews. The immediate postwar period was in Utikhovychi characterized by particularly burdensome raids by the local UPA unit, and the village remained a dangerous place for a few years. The partisans, known from their earlier cruel treatment of Jews hiding in the forest, murdered not only every single Pole who dared to stay in the village after the culmination of the official “repatriation” but also several Ukrainians from mixed marriages and young women accused of “fraternizing” with the Soviets. The status of a former “Jew-keeper” must have been life-threatening then, and the fear of losing one’s life lasted much longer than the presence of the partisan unit.

We also need to take into account contemporary memory politics, which influenced witnesses of even small villages. Although the Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations are now being recognized more publicly, the heroic canon is still constructed around the myth of the glorious and blameless UPA who, according to the official narrative, fought against all enemies of the Ukrainian people. ⁶⁹ Recently, a Ukrainian NGO interested in public history recorded two interviews with elderly village inhabitants of Utikhovychi and published short extracts of these interviews on YouTube in 2016. The material soon became well known in the village. ⁷⁰ Not surprisingly, these clips portray either the Polish repressions against Ukrainians before 1939 or the heroic activities of the UPA partisans, who are still very much hated and feared by the elderly village inhabitants.

The impact of memory politics on biographical narratives is exemplified also in the case of Pidhaitsi. Like Utikhovychi, Pidhaitsi also has “its” Jewish survivor, Michał Klar, who survived thanks to the help of the local gentile Kateryna Sikorska. In contrast to Utikhovychi, however, the story of Klar and Sikorska (who was shot by the Germans in retaliation) was publicly acknowledged in Pidhaitsi. Sikorska’s granddaughter made a movie about the events, which was shown in the town hall, while Sikorska, who was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, was turned into a local hero. ⁷¹ Interviewees in Pidhaitsi were eager to speak about Klar and Sikorska precisely because it was an action socially accepted and promoted by the authorities.

Long Aftermath

The interviews allowed us also to determine whether there were any survivors at all in small communities with no Jewish testimonies available. Small village communities of Galician Jews that consisted of a few families were annihilated almost completely, and much was forgotten, as there was nobody left to remember those who were murdered and those who survived. Thus, the sketchy information we find in the neighbors’ narratives might remain the only data available. Ivan Yakymenko from Vyshnivchyk, for instance, remembered that a Jew called Shimon had a son who escaped the Germans with the Red Army in 1941: “after the liberation, the son came and asked ‘Who killed my dad?’” ⁷² Yustyna Deretska and Teodora Kanak from Osivtsi discussed two Jews from their home village who were seen in Buchach and Chernivtsi after the war:

There was one Jewish woman [zhydivka] and she, when we came back after the front was over, she was in the town, and she said to me: “Oh Yustyna, Yustyna, have you not recognized me?” Sosi was her name. And I turned back and answered: “I have recognized you, why not,” I told her, “Where did you hide?” And she was hiding in the priest’s house, he saved her. ⁷³

In Chernivtsi . . . one of our Jews met a man from our village and said: “Does anyone live in my house now?” The man answered: “Your neighbor Andrii and Parashka,” although Parashka lived with her daughter, and Andrii was dead by then. “I will pray for them then,” the Jew said. He was so glad that someone lived in his house. He was a good Jew, still a bachelor. And this man said: “Come back to the village with us, since you survived, come back to our Osivtsi.” But the Jew replied: “I’m afraid, I would like to return, but I’m afraid.” And he [the man] said: “There is nothing to be afraid of now, it’s over, no more killing of Jews, no more.” “I’m afraid,” this is what the Jew answered. ⁷⁴

These quotations concerning survivors are certainly incomplete and most likely also censored. Despite repeated attempts, we failed to learn the name of Shimon’s son from Vyshnivchyk. Except for the fact that his father did not survive the war, we also did not learn much about the aftermath. Also in the case of Sosi, a Jew from Osivtsi (her full first and last name remain unknown when relying only on late non-Jewish testimonies), ⁷⁵ a single testimony is insufficient to reconstruct her fate. Similarly, it is difficult to be certain that the other Jew from Osivtsi, met with after the war in Chernivtsi, actually declared he would pray for the Ukrainians who took over his house (what we know for sure is that he did not come back to his house because he was afraid). Nonetheless, as I believe, these interviews include scarce mentions that may open new research endeavors.

Another reason for using late non-Jewish testimonies is that they alone can demonstrate what happened to the once multiethnic Eastern Galician communities after the extermination of most of the Jews and the exodus of the few who survived. This aspect concerns, first and foremost, property transfer, but also the transformations taking place in the material and symbolic landscape of the former shtetls, and in the social, economic, and cultural life of these communities. The interviewees describe the fate of the Jewish material heritage, including private houses, community buildings, synagogues, and cemeteries, clearly and in detail.

The initially surprising honesty concerning the fact of living in formerly Jewish houses (“Everybody knows where the Jews lived,” said Evgeniia Sadivs’ka from Koropets ⁷⁶ ) and the use of facilities that belonged to the Jewish communities before the war becomes less striking if we take into account that this appropriation, unlike the appropriation of personal property, was fully controlled and authorized by the postwar Soviet administration. Anastasiia Ivantsiv (born 1923, from Barysh), then a young mother of three, moved into the vacated house of her former Jewish neighbor Usher, husband of Chaika and father of Edka, right after the execution of the local Jews at the cemetery. Usher and his family managed to escape and hide in the forest, and spent several nights in his house once Ivantsiv’s family had already occupied it. Whereas there is no information confirming whether Usher survived, we do know that the Ivantsivs had to formally apply for the house and buy it from the village council after the war. ⁷⁷

In Bibrka, Jewish houses located in the town center were given to the poor and homeless or, the better ones, to the Soviet officials, while the synagogue housed a factory producing soft drinks. ⁷⁸ In Dobropole, a former mikvah was used as one of the school buildings when the main building was destroyed during the war. ⁷⁹ The former farmhouse of the Stricker family in Utikhovychi met the same fate: inhabitants from the destroyed part of the village moved in there immediately after the war; later it served as a kolkhoz facility, and finally, until very recently, as a village school. Interviews provide information that Vyshnivchyk, a village that had a vibrant community of more than one hundred Jews, a prayer house, a separate house where Jewish children studied, a mikvah, and a large cemetery before the war, underwent a gradual process of degradation, transformation, and finally destruction of the last material traces of Jewish presence. An endless field of wheat has replaced a two-hectare Jewish cemetery. The fact that the knowledge about the former property structure persists is proven by a case of a woman who bought her house in the 1960s from another Ukrainian and insists on calling the house “Jewish,” as it used to belong to Jews before 1941. ⁸⁰

Property transfer is, however, just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to social, economic, and cultural changes. While the Holocaust was not the only disaster that took place in the borderland regions of Eastern Europe during the war, it had the most significant consequences. Many Jewish–Polish–Ukrainian communities—once vibrant—suffered from voids, shortages, and dysfunctions of various nature after being deprived of one-third or even one-half of its prewar population (considering the fact that Poles disappeared shortly after the extermination of Jews), a fact that is frequently evidenced in late non-Jewish witness testimonies.

When a Jewish bakery ceased to exist in Stratyn, village people were forced to bake bread at home. ⁸¹ In Vyshnivchyk, even vodka could not be bought after “Ditla the Jew” perished and other Jewish shops were closed. ⁸² In Tovste, there was shortage of doctors, since most of them were Jewish. ⁸³ The town of Bibrka resembled “a village with only Ukrainians in the center” when Mirosława Ostrowska arrived in the 1950s. ⁸⁴ Although all of the above did not matter to the few survivors who left Eastern Galicia in 1946 at the latest, it did matter to those who stayed. Moreover, I would like to argue that the social and cultural decline of the Eastern European provinces is a highly important long-term consequence of the Holocaust. It also remains one of the most under-researched aspects of the Holocaust, while late non-Jewish testimonies give a unique opportunity to study the anatomy of this collapse as seen from the inside.

Conclusions

As shown throughout my text, late non-Jewish witness testimonies offer a lot of content, although of varying character. In this text, first I have shown the four models of first layers in narrative structures—picturelike memories, “I don’t remember” narratives, defensive and denial strategies, and gossip or overheard stories. Each of these first-layer types, although apparently meaningless, can be meaningful when approached properly. Working with this type of source requires methodology that helps to recognize various layers of narratives and navigating between meanders of factual experiences and memories: this includes skillfully conducted interviews in the first place, but also knowledge about the psychological mechanisms of biographical memory, consciousness of the social and political context of collective remembrance, and, last but not least, the ability to read the sources against each other.

Missing facts is another thing that can be found in late non-Jewish testimonies: they can prove groundbreaking for reconstructing events in particular localities, even if multiple and detailed Jewish testimonies are available. The overall picture of what happened to the Jewish landowners of the local estate and the few other Jewish families in Utikhovychi appeared to be complete with Lipa Stricker’s two testimonies and the court testimony of Josif Grzimek, a German who took over the Stricker estate and was responsible for killing Lipa’s brother Moshe and his wife. ⁸⁵ However, interviews with the Strickers’ neighbors provided us with the names of those who hid Lipa and the policeman who participated in the murder of Moshe. Additionally, we learned that Lipa joined a Soviet unit after the war and, while in service, used his position to spare a Ukrainian from his home village. ⁸⁶ Finally, the late non-Jewish witness testimonies provided the exact location of the execution and burial site of Moshe and Róża Strickers, and information that, most probably, their remains are still buried there, in the place called “Moshe’s pit” by the locals. What is more, while the only survivor of Utikhovychi left multiple testimonies, there were none from many other Jewish communities, or survivors who produced no testimony. Scholarship on the Holocaust in Eastern Galician villages is really quite modest, since the German documents are scant and Jewish testimonies too scarce and scattered to allow a micro-historical approach.

This was the case of Dobropole. During our fieldtrip, we learned about at least two survivors who came back to the village after the war, ⁸⁷ but we have not been able to obtain any further data about their postwar fate. We decided to conduct interviews in Dobropole when we came across the diary of father Józef Anczarski who documented the life of his parish during much of World War II. While Anczarski mentioned the expulsion of local Jewish families in the summer of 1941 and other acts of violence against Jews in his diary, he omitted most of the names, of both the victims and perpetrators, from his written recollections. Nine interviews conducted in Dobropole in June 2019 provided us with information on the expelled Jews, the route they took, the village inhabitants who guarded them, and those who plundered their houses afterwards. The names of perpetrators are particularly important not only in terms of settling the accounts of local guilt and responsibility but also for any further research on the trajectories of individual victims. If information is revealed about a person who was later tried by Soviet courts, this information can be used for searching in the criminal files of the local branches of the Archive of the Ukrainian Secret Service. While rich in material, the archive has virtually no catalogue and researchers can only request archival material if they know the name of the sentenced individual.

Late non-Jewish witness testimonies can contribute significantly to new research on the relationships between Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust. They bring to the surface new factual material not only concerning the names of those who actually helped or betrayed, but also provide invaluable insights into the perception of the entire spectrum of behavior, from active help, through passive inaction, to the acts of reporting and direct violence in statu nascendi and into how it functioned in the collective memory later, influencing the local social world. Contemporary witnesses were usually too young to be involved in conscious help or conscious betrayal. But they could be and were adult enough to act as “young scalawags,” to witness death and cruelty (also by perpetrators belonging to their own group), and to experience fringe emotions. Changing notions of belonging and loyalty make up an important part of this knowledge about an intimate social world. Late non-Jewish interviews show precisely how, also on a very verbal level, local Jews become excluded from the local community as victims, also because their neighbors turned into perpetrators.

Finally, interviews with elderly Ukrainians who remained in the once multiethnic, crippled post-war and post-genocide space, show the gradual degradation of these communities, most poignant immediately after the war, but continuing for many decades after. Although many Jewish survivors testified about the horror of the empty shtetls they found after coming back to their home towns ⁸⁸ , almost all of them left soon after. It is non-Jews who can tell the story of how their life looked after half of their fellow neighbors (including both murdered Jews and deported Poles) had vanished.

This appeal to give late-non Jewish testimonies the status of equally valuable historical sources does not mean, of course, that they should be used instead of or more than other sources. Used as a sole source, they remain what they were so far—material for the analysis of biographical memory, with all of its imperfections, traps, and defensive mechanisms. All the examples assembled in this text, and in the conclusions in particular—the cases of the villages of Dobrople and Utikhovichi—show that contemporary interviews demonstrate their full value only when used together and in relation to other sources: Jewish testimonies, trial material, and administrative documents. Under these circumstances, they deserve the attention not only of sociologists and anthropologists but also of historians.