by Tim Judah
When I asked what had happened to the Jews, Mihailo said he was not there when the Germans “took care of them.” But his granddaughter Oxana Stasiv, who is thirty-four and sat at the table helping when he could not hear and laughing that she had heard all these stories a hundred times before, said that there was a monument nearby where they were buried. According to village lore, after the Jews had been shot, the earth that covered the pit they were thrown into moved, because they were not all dead. Today, this Soviet-era monument is unkempt and overgrown. In Soviet times ideology dictated that the fate of Jews could not be separated from that of others, so, as with other monuments from that era, it does not state that the victims buried were Jewish but rather that here lay more than 2,000 “Soviet people” who had been killed by the “German-Fascist invaders.” A modern metal plaque in Hebrew, English and Russian—affixed, it says, by the children of Nathan and Ida Mandel—recalls that the victims were Jewish. Some old and broken Jewish tombstones have been laid up against the monument.
After the war survivors of the Holocaust would compile Yizkor, books of remembrance of their communities. This extract, the testimony of one Pitciha Hochberg, comes from the Sefer Grayding or Book of Griding, which was published in Tel Aviv in 1981. Grayding and Griding are two transliterations of the Yiddish name for Horodok, which is also known by its Russian name of Gorodok or its Polish one of Grodek Jagiellonski. First Hochberg describes how the Germans arrived in June 1939 but then pulled back as the town had been allotted to the Soviets under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. At this time, says Hochberg, there were about 800 Jewish families in and around town. When the Germans returned at the end of June 1941, “they allowed local criminals to murder Jews and take away their possessions. Peasants started arriving from throughout the district, in order to murder and steal. Jews were killed and thrown in the lake.” However, she writes, a local Ukrainian priest called Rozdolsky appeared like an “angel” and attempted to stop the mob. “He forbade murdering and stealing from Jews,” and told the crowd: “In that fashion we cannot establish Ukraine.” It did not make any difference: locals helped the Gestapo hunt down Jews who were hiding. The Nazis demolished the cemetery, used the headstones to pave the road and blew up the synagogues. A ghetto was established, as elsewhere, and the Germans used the local Jews as a workforce.
In August of 1942, half the Jewish population of Griding was taken away. The Gestapo, aided by the Ukrainian militia, closed off the streets and started taking the elderly, sick, and children out of their houses. They put them in cars, and took them away. Previously, during the same summer, all men and women above fifty years of age were taken out of the town. They were forced to lie face down. Then the German commander ordered to shoot all of them. Hundreds of Jews were killed. One woman was not hit. After everyone left, she escaped back to the town, and told of what had happened. She was later caught and murdered.
Those who remained were killed in two bouts, in November 1942 and finally on February 3, 1943. The same story was repeated in thousands of places across Ukraine. Curiously, in those parts of Ukraine which had been Soviet before the war and suffered from the famine, there was less Ukrainian collaboration with regard to the murder of the Jews, despite propaganda about “Judeo-Bolshevism” and the fact that historically these regions had been more prone to pogroms than areas in the west. During the civil war, for example, which did not affect Galicia as it was at the time part of Poland, all sides, from the tsarist Whites to the anarchists of Nestor Makhno, to the Red Army and soldiers loyal to the Ukrainian People’s Republic led by Symon Petliura, committed pogroms.
In the church of Saint Lazarus in Lviv, I met Olha Voloshyna, who was pottering about arranging the flowers. She was eighty-nine years old. The church was originally built in the 1630s and had been part of a fortified hospital and a home and refuge for the poor and elderly up to the Second World War. Used for a variety of purposes after the war, the building had become a church once more when the Soviet Union collapsed. Like Mihailo, Olha was happy to talk about the past and what she remembered. She sat in a pew and pulled her coat over her shoulders to keep warm.
When Olha was growing up her father died and she went to live with a well-off lady who looked after her in exchange for her help about the house. Before the war, the lady would send food parcels to young Ukrainian activists who had been imprisoned by the Poles, as many were in Bereza Kartuska jail. (The site is now in Belarus.) “They were young people, boys, who fought for Ukrainian independence.” She sent them salo (salted pork fat), garlic, cheese and dried bread.
In 1939 Olha had been living in the little town of Stryi, which is forty miles south of Lviv. After the Soviets came, she said, life had been terrible. “They took everything from us, but not immediately. They arrested everyone they just didn’t like the look of. Then they started to organize the kolkhoz and took houses from people.” Just as the Germans attacked, those prisoners were killed by the Soviets, who threw their bodies into a nearby lake. Some were not dead when they disposed of them. When they were shooting they turned on the engines of all their cars and trucks to mask the sound. By one estimate the number of those killed was 1,101. So, she recalls, “Yes, people were very happy when the Germans arrived, and when the Germans had to leave, those who could fled abroad.” When they came, “the Germans were very kind and shared food and chocolate with us…I have only positive memories of the Germans.” In this way history refracts: the same period is remembered differently by different people.
When I asked Olha if she could recall what happened to the Jews she replied that she remembered looking through the window with the lady she lived with and seeing a column of them being marched down the street on their way “somewhere.” People “said they were killed. People were worried.” In the marching column the lady spotted the local pediatrician and cried: “What will happen with the children? Who will look after them when they are sick?” The day after the Germans left Stryi, in 1944, she saw the dead bodies of a Jew and a child on the street. She said forcefully:
Many hid Jews. Some took Jewish children and brought them up. To do this was a big risk and there were cases where people were denounced, but just a few. The Germans were pitiless and killed [Ukrainians] for this. I know a family in Stryi who looked after a Jewish girl. The mother had been rounded up to send to a labor camp. She was with the girl, who was three or four, and somehow, from the vehicle she managed to push her out. The Ukrainian family found her crying in their garden and they took her in. She was very beautiful and had lovely, curly hair. At the end of the war, the mother, who had survived, remembered where she had left the girl and came to find her. The girl was hanging on to her second mother because she did not remember her real one. It was such a tragedy. The second mother was devastated, but let her go.
As the war ground on, the UPA, encouraged by the Germans, fought the Poles first in neighboring Volhynia in 1943 and then in Galicia. Some 300,000 Poles fled and 100,000 were killed. Up to 20,000 Ukrainians died in this war-within-the-war. “It was such a bloody page,” said Olha. Just after the war she remembers a woman coming to the house. “She had a baby in her arms and a small boy by her side.” Olha went to fetch the lady in whose house she lived. The woman on the street told them she was from Volyhnia and the wife of a priest and that she had escaped when Ukrainians, including her husband, had been forced into the church by Poles and burned alive. “Yes there was hate. How can we love people we suffered from? But we don’t remember evil done to us; this is the way we are.”
In 1949, Roman, her sixteen-year-old brother, who had joined the UPA, was caught in their home village near Stryi. He was arrested and interrogated in a nearby house.
They treated him terribly and my mom heard all of his screaming. They tortured him and tried to force him to tell them about the insurgents. On the third day there was no more screaming to be heard. He was then thrown, half dead, into a car and driven to Stryi. In Stryi the car stopped on the square, right near the house where my siste
r Maria lived. She heard shouts of pain, looked through the window and recognized our brother and began to shout “Roman! Roman!”
The neighbors quickly moved her away from the window, realizing the danger she was in. Olha does not know where he was buried. She and two sisters joined the UPA, carrying messages and equipment and doing intelligence work. About the troops who were deployed to fight the UPA in what was a major counterinsurgency operation, she said that they were mainly Russians “but there were also traitors among the villagers who helped them. We called the Russians ‘Moscali.’ ” The word is still very much a derogatory term for Russians. Her sisters were caught and sent to the Gulag in Karaganda in distant Kazakhstan, returning after the death of Stalin, when, she recalls, many from there and Siberia also returned.
After the war Olha made a career for herself as a teacher of deaf and mute children. She was religious but after the war the local Greek Catholic Church, which had nurtured western Ukrainian nationalism, was banned by the Soviets. Priests were arrested and sent to the Gulag and its churches were handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church. Many priests who remained continued to serve their flocks, though in private. “We had an underground priest.” When you wanted to say confession or fix a baptism or any other such event, you would go to his house and ask him to come and visit on such and such a day. When he arrived at the block where you lived, someone would keep a watch out for “tails” to check if anyone was following him. In 1989, as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Church was legalized again.
Olha is a woman of strong views. The young people who went to the Maidan in 2014 and were the backbone of the revolution were the new generation that she had been waiting for. She thought nothing could be expected from generations who had known Soviet rule because, she said, she could see in herself how deep Soviet “slavishness” had “entered our souls.” Sometimes “I can spot Soviet thoughts in my head.” To explain herself and her idea of how oppressed and craven Ukraine had been, especially that part which had been Soviet since the revolution and civil war, she told an anecdote about Stalin. One day he gathered all his top men. “He took a chicken and it ran around. He caught it and began to pluck it until it was naked. Then it did not run around but leaned in on his leg, and he said: ‘Now you can do whatever you want with him.’ ” When the Holodomor started, “Stalin plucked all the feathers from Ukraine and those that remained alive were ready to do anything to stay alive.”
I asked her about the war and people in the east. “I don’t blame those people so much,” she said in a thoughtful tone. “They were brought up as animals. Their goal is just to eat and dress and they never saw God. They never had a thought of helping anyone and would be ready to sell their own mother for bread or a few coins.”
The UPA was a brutal organization, infused with anti-Semitism and hatred of Poles, though of course there were also instances of people saved by the UPA or those connected to it. The UPA wanted to create a Ukrainian state for Ukrainians and was a product of its time. Ironically, what its partisans had started—i.e., fighting Poles, who responded where they could with equal brutality—was a job finished by Stalin when he sent the Poles to Poland and brought Ukrainians to Ukraine. In the minds of many ordinary people in the west of Ukraine and indeed elsewhere, what is remembered is that the UPA wanted an independent state, nobly fought the communists when they returned in 1944 and defended Ukrainian villages from the Poles. The Nazis recruited police and militia forces and guards for Nazi death camps and egged on local anti-Semitism. Today, the evil is forgotten and the noble is played up. A prominent monument in the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv commemorates the fallen of the Galicia Division which, seven weeks before it surrendered to the Allies in 1945, was renamed the Ukrainian National Army. Although some other nationalities served within its ranks, the Galicia Division was an overwhelmingly Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS. After the war thousands of its men ended up in Britain, Canada and elsewhere. Some were volunteers, some were mobilized and some of those who fought alongside the Nazis were men who, like tens of thousands of Russians, joined them to escape their POW camps, where men were starving to death. Failing to untangle this poisonous legacy has proved to be a Ukrainian Achilles’ heel.
When Ukrainians waved the red and black flag of the UPA on the Maidan, what it represented was seldom explored by Western journalists. But for the Kremlin it proved a godsend—“proof” that Ukrainians are fascists and Nazis. Andreas Umland, a German academic who teaches in Kiev and is an expert on the far right in the post-Soviet space, says most Ukrainians regard it simply as a flag of freedom. They don’t know that the red and black stand for the concept of Blut und Boden—“blood and soil”—adopted by the Nazis. Granny Olha and Grandpa Mihailo have their memories, their prejudices and their understanding of what happened according to their own experiences, but younger Ukrainians have only the selective filterings of a confused post-Soviet history, which also varies across the country. In the east, one set of memories is propagated and in the west another, and in between there are regional variations. But there is a history war and one full of bitterness and prejudice. As Mihailo Romaniuk, the Lviv historian and admirer of the UPA, explained:
In the east of Ukraine they continue the Soviet historical tradition and in the west and center we began to study the documents on issues which were forbidden before, for example the UPA, the Greek Catholic Church and the Holodomor. People in the east literally don’t read. They don’t look for information, and don’t look for sources. So they don’t know the other version of history…they don’t recognize the Holodomor but parts of their family could have died in that famine!
Looking out of his window we could see a strange memorial to the Soviet past. At the end of the Soviet period a big new building was built for the local party. Now it is used by the local tax authority. In front of it a vast round redbrick edifice was constructed with an imposing helipad on top. Party officials had envisioned themselves coolly zipping in and out as they ran Lviv and the rest of the country. The building was never finished.
The bitterness of history in Lviv is nowhere better tasted than at the Lonskoho Street jail. On one side of the slightly run-down, classic late-Habsburg building is Stepan Bandera Street, which eventually leads to the huge memorial to him just outside the city center. Built in 1889–90, this was first an Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie barracks. Between the wars it became a Polish prison, then a Soviet one, then a Nazi one, then a Soviet one again. When Ukraine became independent it passed into the hands of its intelligence services, the SBU. Part of the building is now an ordinary police station, but the jail, empty since 1996, has been turned into a museum.
A casual visitor who did not read all the explanations in great detail would learn that this was a jail where the three totalitarian regimes—the Poles, the Nazis and the Soviets—imprisoned heroic Ukrainian nationalists. In the explanatory notes the Polish state is almost, but not quite, equated with the Nazis and the USSR. Most of the cells have been left as they were. Chicken wire remains in the stairwell, installed to stop prisoners throwing themselves over the bannisters and committing suicide. One cell has been reconstructed to show what a Soviet inspector’s office would look like. In another, arty portrait photos have been hung of elderly UPA veterans with captions in which they reminisce about things that happened to them. Another cell is set aside for Soviet memorabilia, with an emphasis on its barbed-wire frontiers, and yet another commemorates the Lviv heroes of the 2014 Maidan revolution.
From the prison building you can go outside into its large courtyard which, we can tell from photos, remains eerily as it was in 1941. It is a large space overlooked by middle-class apartment blocks in the surrounding streets and bounded on one side by the prison wall, punctured with its small windows. The central and most important part of the museum is devoted to what happened in the building and the courtyard between June 22 and 28, 1941. Lonskoho, also spelled Lontskoho and known as Lonski in Russian or Lackiego in Polish, was one of t
hree prisons in the city. As the Nazis and several hundred Ukrainian nationalists in the German Nachtigall Batallion approached, the Soviets evacuated a few prisoners and released a few more, but in an orgy of blood they went on to murder thousands across Galicia—as many as 100,000 in all of the areas they retreated from. A brief Ukrainian uprising halted the killings in Lviv, but the NKVD returned to finish the job before fleeing. According to the museum’s figures 1,681 were murdered in Lonskoho and up to 3,391 in total in the three Lviv prisons, though numbers vary quite dramatically, even in explanations given at the museum.
When the Soviets had arrived in Lviv in 1939 they concentrated on arresting Poles, intellectuals and anyone connected to the Polish military or security services. Large numbers of Jews, regarded as “class enemies,” were also arrested. By 1941 many of those prisoners had been dispatched eastward to the Gulag. No one knows the exact numbers but, according to the museum’s calculations, about half the dead of the June massacre in Lonskoho were Ukrainian, a quarter Polish and the rest Jews and others. For the Nazis the massacres were a godsend. For twenty-four hours no one was in charge, but as the Germans arrived they secured the buildings. Then Jews were rounded up to exhume corpses from the fresh mass graves and also to bring out bodies from the cells. The Jews were responsible, said the Nazis, because many of them had worked for the NKVD. An explanatory note acknowledges that Jews were used in this way, as it does that Poles and Jews were killed here too. But two things are clear. This is above all a shrine to the UPA and Ukrainian nationalists; everyone else, while not completely unacknowledged, is more or less forgotten. What is totally missing, however, is a full account of what happened when the Jews were brought here after the NKVD had gone.