In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  Edmund Kessler was a Lviv Jewish lawyer who, with his wife, was hidden by Poles during the war and wrote an account of this period, including these few days at the end of June and beginning of July. “The Ukrainian mob,” he wrote, “encouraged by the behaviour of the Germans is…prodded by rumours spread about the bestial tortures Jews supposedly inflicted on arrested political prisoners.” Pogroms and murders began.

  Beaten, whipped, and tortured, the inhabitants are dragged into the streets. Hiding in the cellar or attic does not help. Gangs of Ukrainian children inspect the nooks and crannies of houses and apartments and point out hidden Jews. The violence and fury of the attackers grow. No one is spared…Tattered masses of tortured Jews arrayed in military formation under the supervision of German soldiers, police and Ukrainian militia are led to the prisons in sight of crowds.

  At Lonskoho “the wall is lined by German guards and on both sides of the gate stand rows of Ukrainians wearing the uniforms of Soviet militiamen.” Quite possibly these were former Soviet policemen quickly adapting to the new reality. The crowd threw rocks at the Jews who then retrieved the corpses. Several were shot.

  The Ukrainian servants of the Germans dishonor these corpses, kick them, and spit on them, but not before searching them thoroughly for anything of any value. Despite the duration of the executions, the public’s enthusiasm does not wane. The onlookers encourage them with shouts to become even more brutal. What ensues is competition of hitting the victims and kicking the corpses. Their crescendo of curses and shots silence the death rattle of the dying on this devilish day of slaughter.

  The pogrom of those days is recorded in many photos and films. Several show women stripped naked or in their underclothes being abused or chased by locals. These pictures are now being used as part of Russian propaganda, to demonstrate that “the fascists are back.” Some 4,000 are believed to have died then, killed by both the Germans and Ukrainian thugs.

  At the end of July another pogrom was organized which was given the name of the “Petliura Days,” for Symon Petliura, the exiled head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Another 1,000 or so died in this massacre. In 1926 Petliura was assassinated in Paris by a Jewish anarchist in revenge for pogroms carried out by Petliura’s forces during the civil war. Many Jews, but not all, regarded the assassin as an avenging angel and hero. Others argued that Petliura was not anti-Semitic and had tried to stop the pogroms committed by his men who were out of control. The Paris trial of the assassin Sholom Schwartzbard (1886–1938) was a cause célèbre, not least because he was acquitted although he confessed to the murder. The affair did much to deepen the gulf between Jews and Ukrainians and fuel the belief in “Judeo-Bolshevism,” because Ukrainians claimed he was a Soviet agent. In 1967, Schwartzbard’s remains were reinterred in Israel.

  Ruslan Zabilyi, in a padded cell in the Lonskoho Street jail museum of which he is director. Lviv, November 2014.

  The pogrom, in the wake of the NKVD massacre, is not the only part of the history of Lonskoho that is not commemorated. For example, members of the Polish resistance against the Nazis are also forgotten. Ruslan Zabilyi, the young historian and director of the museum, who walked me around, showing me everything from the Polish-era drinking fountain to the Soviet padded cells, is defensive about charges that he has created a shrine to the UPA. Those who have attacked him, he argued, sometimes want to blacken the name of Ukraine or are pro-Russian. He said “it is partially true” that the whole story is not here, but accusations against him are unjust. “We try to speak about everybody but we lack information and this is exactly what I am doing—looking for information.” With regard to Polish prisoners, “all the files were taken to Moscow and I doubt we will ever see them.”

  One of Zabilyi’s critics is Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian at Columbia University, who has argued that the modern “glorification of Ukraine’s, especially western Ukraine’s and Lviv’s, Second World War ethnic nationalists,” means the

  suppression of the experiences of Lviv’s two other major war-time ethnic groups of Poles and Jews, in particular where remembering them would disturb the glorification of Ukrainian nationalism or implicate ethnic Ukrainians in morally reprehensible behavior, such as collaboration with the German occupiers, participation in the Shoah or the ethnic cleansing of Poles. The essence of this defensive striving for retrospective innocence has been summarized concisely by a former aide of Roman Shukhevych [one of the UPA leaders]: “Our Ukrainian nationalism is pure (chystyi) and self-sacrificing (zhertovnyi).”

  What is significant, though, is that while this was definitely the trend in the 1990s and especially between 2005 and 2010 during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, the position changed when Viktor Yanukovych became president in 2010. He began putting the brakes on this interpretation of history because—being Russian-oriented and from the east—none of this sat well with his constituents or worldview. Yushchenko’s awards of posthumous honors to Shukhevych and Bandera were revoked and the place of the Holodomor in Ukrainian history and outlook was downgraded, which is to say it was not denied but placed in the context of a famine that stretched well beyond the borders of modern-day Ukraine.

  A signal that the policy had changed was Ruslan’s arrest by the SBU in September 2010, which under Yushchenko had opened its archives to him. He was interrogated for fourteen and a half hours and a case against him was instituted, he told me, “for collecting information that was a state secret with the aim of passing it on to third parties. So, I was accused of spying.” The case was closed in 2012 for “lack of a crime.” According to him, colleagues were threatened and scared. The fact that a historian investigating Soviet crimes first had the archives opened to him and, when the policy changed, was arrested, only goes to show just how sensitive these issues are to this day. Indeed, now the pendulum has swung again. In May 2015 President Poroshenko signed into law two acts passed in April by the Verkhovna Rada. One banned communist and Nazi propaganda, meaning it would be illegal to deny, “including in the media, the criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917–91 in Ukraine.” The second criminalized denying the legitimacy of “the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century,” including the role of the OUN and UPA.

  Before signing the law some seventy scholars of Ukraine, mostly but not only in the West, signed an open letter to Poroshenko asking him to veto the acts. They had been passed with little or no debate. “The potential consequences of both these laws are disturbing,” they argued:

  Not only would it be a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization [UPA] that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in western Ukraine between the wars, and one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the Soviet invasion in 1941. It also took part in anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and, in the case of the Melnyk faction, remained allied with the occupation regime throughout the war.

  The scholars went on to argue that over the past fifteen years Vladimir Putin’s Russia had invested “enormous resources in the politicization of history,” and it would be “ruinous if Ukraine went down the same road.” The 1.5 million Ukrainians in the Red Army who died fighting the Nazis “are entitled to respect, as are those who fought the Red Army and NKVD.” If Poroshenko signed the laws it would be “a gift to those who wish to turn Ukraine against itself.”

  They will alienate many Ukrainians who now find themselves under de facto occupation. They will divide and dishearten Ukraine’s friends. In short they will damage Ukraine’s national security, and for this reason above all, we urge you to reject them.

  As soon as the laws were passed, pro-Russians were able to say that this was yet further proof that Ukraine was now run by neo-Nazis who had come to power as a result of an American- and European-sponsored coup. Headlines appeared in Western publications usually sympathetic to Uk
raine reporting, for example, in the words of Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View columnist, that it was “goodbye Lenin, hello Nazi collaborators in Ukraine these days.” It was a baffling own goal by the president and the Verkhovna Rada.

  In Lviv, the murders at the Lonskoho prison and the pogroms that followed were only the prologue. A ghetto was established to the north of the city and then a slave labor camp called Janowska in the northeast. Those Jews who did not die there were mostly sent to the Belzec death camp. Some managed to hide or were given refuge by non-Jewish friends. One of the most famous survival stories, recalled in a 2011 Polish film called In Darkness, tells the tale of a small group of Jews who survived in the sewers, where they were fed by Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer worker, his wife and a colleague. Ask people in Lviv about this story and you are almost certain to draw a blank. It is one that is remembered by Jews and maybe Poles, but more or less unknown to Ukrainians.

  Some memorials were built in the 1990s but now more are planned—for example, one at the Janowska site and one at the rubbish-strewn and boarded-up site of the Golden Rose synagogue, built in 1582 and destroyed in 1943. Around it, in an area that was once Jewish, cafés and restaurants vie for the custom of tourists and locals alike. At the nearby Lviv Handmade Chocolate shop and café you can buy chocolate Putins, one version complete with devil’s horns.

  There are few Jews left in Lviv, as many of those who lived here when the USSR collapsed subsequently emigrated. The community is looked after by Rabbi Mordechai Bald, whose wife, Sara, runs the small Jewish school. Twenty years ago, she told me, it had 180 children; now it has a stable sixty. On Shabbat, the Hassidic Rabbi Bald, who is American but has lived here since 1993, dons his big fur shtreimel hat and walks briskly home from synagogue. He told me that now there is not a single Jew left in Lviv whose origins are in the city. Once thousands would have been walking home on a Friday night in their shtreimels. Mostly he and his family have no problems, although there have been ugly incidents in the past.

  In the meantime Ukraine’s tortuous relations with its Jews are changing. Close to the Golden Rose synagogue site a small exhibition has opened, purporting to be about Jewish life here in general. In fact it has a specific purpose, which is to highlight the number of Ukrainians who saved Jews, foremost among them the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky (1865–1944). Two things have happened. The first is that some Ukrainians have woken up to the issue that—especially now that Ukraine needs all the friends it can get—courting Jews, particularly abroad, might be a good idea. Since they might well have been brought up on tales of how “the Ukrainians were the worst,” it might be a good idea to look for positive stories to tell. Secondly, those Jews that remain have become Ukrainian Jews rather than, for example, thinking of themselves as Russian Jews who live in Ukraine. Ukrainians and some Ukrainian Jews are at present campaigning hard to have Metropolitan Archbishop Sheptytsky included among the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where his brother Kliment has already been recognized, along with more than 2,000 other Ukrainians.

  Sheptytsky is a fascinating and controversial figure. He was a staunch Ukrainian patriot and welcomed the Nazis because he thought they would be better than the Soviets and that their invasion would lead to an independent Ukrainian state. But Sheptytsky had been friendly to the Jews and was soon horrified by what began to unfold. So he ducked and weaved. He protested to Himmler about Ukrainians being used to kill Jews, and in November 1942 wrote his famous pastoral letter, “Thou Shall Not Kill,” which, although it does not mention the murder of Jews as such, is extremely clear by virtue of its time and context. Then he blessed the foundation of the SS Galicia Division, but at the same time was harboring some 150 Jews in monasteries and other buildings, including famously Rabbi David Kahane in his own palace in Lviv. Rabbi Kahane later became the chaplain of the Israeli Air Force and a staunch defender of Sheptytsky. So the issue of the Metropolitan Archbishop is a live one in the info-war and in the battle to win friends and influence people. As to the issue of the numbers of people rescued, the historian Frank Golczewski writes: “It suffices to realize that there were too many acts to make them irrelevant, yet too few to change the overall picture.”

  Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky, painting by Oleksa Novakivsky. Museum of Ethnography and Crafts. Lviv, November 2014.

  If the relationship between Jews and Ukrainians has slowly been changing, the same is true of the relationship with Poles. Today Poland is Ukraine’s staunchest defender, but getting to this position—above and beyond one of a simple calculation of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” (the main foe being Russia of course)—has been hard. Today the Polish consulate in Lviv is a huge and imposing modern stone-and-glass building in a residential part of town. One of its main tasks is issuing visas, and it issues an absolutely enormous number of them. According to Marcin Zieniewicz, the deputy consul, in 2013 they issued 335,000 and in 2014 they were on course to issue 338,000. Today, tens of thousands of Ukrainians go to work in Poland. Some are unskilled and going to do jobs, in construction for example, that Poles now do in places like London, which are easy and legal for them to get as EU citizens. But people with skills are going to Poland too. Ukrainian English teachers are in high demand, says Marcin, because so many Polish English teachers have also gone to Britain. The same is true of medical staff. Lviv is even close enough to the Polish border town of Przemysl, from which so many Polish doctors, nurses and medical technicians have left, that they can replace them by commuting from Lviv.

  When it comes to discussing modern history, though, Marcin, who is both erudite and emotional, describes how historians have been meeting for years, and while relations are better, “we would like it to happen faster, but we try to understand the situation and hope they will hear us and our pain connected to this.” Then he warms to his theme: Polish soccer began in Lviv. Then modern law, novelists and filmmakers came from here and in fact, he says, Poles “cannot imagine” their “culture and science” without Lviv. He mentions what is called the Scottish Book. In this thick notebook, which was later published, prominent Lviv mathematicians wrote down problems, which they discussed in the Scottish Café after the weekly meetings of the Lviv branch of the Polish Mathematical Society between 1935 and 1941. “Almost everything began in Lviv,” says Marcin, “and this is why it was very difficult to cope with this city being part of the Soviet Union.” For Poles the problem is that, especially in the 1990s, Ukrainians tried to incorporate Lviv’s Polish history as theirs. So, a foreigner visiting the city might, for example, think the mathematicians were Ukrainians.

  Being in Lviv as a foreigner you might not notice that Lviv was part of Polish culture. For us this is painful but we also see a tendency that is more open than in the beginning of the 1990s. Before, if you mentioned Polish history, they said, “You are our enemy.” Now there are many common projects, which began in the 1990s, when we started to discover each other from zero.

  With regards to the Lonskoho prison, where the interwar Polish authorities had kept Ukrainian nationalists, this has been the source of much friction. Interwar Poland “was not a paradise for Ukrainians,” he says, but to equate the Poles, Soviets and Nazis is “unacceptable.”

  Marcin says that on some historical issues like this on which Ukrainians and Poles see things so differently, “it is difficult to remain calm” but doing so is “our mission here and it is not easy. We do everything from our side politely. We speak with our Ukrainian partners and we don’t want them to think we are trying to take Lviv back for Poland. That is a joke!” Only not quite. According to Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland in the government of Donald Tusk, between 2007 and 2014 Putin suggested to Tusk in 2008 that they partition Ukraine. “He went on to say Ukraine is an artificial country and that Lwów is a Polish city and why don’t we just sort it out together.” At the time it might have seemed like a lurid joke, but now the question arise
s as to whether Putin was testing the water to see what the Poles might say. “We made it very, very clear to them—we wanted nothing to do with this,” said Sikorski. When this interview was published in 2014, a Kremlin spokesman claimed it was “a fairy tale.” But maps of how extreme Russian nationalists see the future, with Russia taking all of the east and the south, leaving a small Ukrainian rump state around Kiev, do indeed give the west back to Poland. Perhaps we will see the Russian info-war move to inciting Poles to return to Lviv one day.

  Polish tomb at the Lychakiv cemetery. The word “Poland” on a piece of cloth has been tied to the grave. The tomb on its left has a ribbon in Polish colors also tied to it. Lviv, November 2014.

  Andriy Sadovyi, mayor of Lviv, in his office. November 2014.

  Andriy Sadovyi, a suave, blond 46-year-old, has been mayor of Lviv since 2006. Since the general election of October 2014 he has also been leader of the third-largest party in Parliament, which is Samopomich or “Self-Reliance.” But he has decided to remain in Lviv. The city has a lot to show for itself, he says, and much more can and will be done to recall its Jewish and Polish past, not least because “we want to see guests from all over the world in Lviv.” Sadovyi has worked hard to put his city on the tourist map and he has been very successful in doing so. Twenty years ago Prague reopened to the world, fifteen years ago it was Cracow, “and now it’s Lviv’s turn.” Pushed as to whether remembering the Jewish and Polish past is also important and healthy for Ukraine, he answers simply: “Yes.”