Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Most of those who left never came back. But some did. They brought with them a hint of the outside world and the possibilities of a different existence, as well as books, newspaper subscriptions, ideas, and opinions. But they also found themselves irretrievably trapped in the drudgery and tedium of provincial life. Their children, growing up among those books and magazines, ideas and disillusionments, at times decided to act where the fathers had not: to transform not just their hometown but the entire world. Some became adventurous, reckless, and tragic figures: their high hopes were irreparably dashed, their firm beliefs betrayed, the world of their youth wiped out, and the one that replaced it turned out to be infinitely more cruel and cynical.

  Fabius Nacht and his sons are a good example. Born in 1848 in a well-to-do religious family that had already come under the influence of the Haskalah, Fabius spoke German at home and attended the state gymnasium in Stanisławów (Ukrainian: Stanyslaviv), where the language of instruction was Polish. He had hoped to study mathematics at the University of Vienna, but since Jews were barred from teaching that subject, he chose medicine instead. Returning to Buczacz in 1879 as one of a handful of locals with a university degree, he established a private medical practice, dedicated himself wholeheartedly to his profession, and for a long time was the most prominent medical authority in Buczacz. His expertise was sorely needed: in 1894 the dismal hygienic conditions caused a cholera epidemic that claimed a thousand lives in the Buczacz district; twelve years later the local Yiddish-language weekly, Der jüdische Wecker (The Jewish Awakener), again warned that “typhus, German measles, diphtheria, and whooping cough” were “showing signs of becoming epidemics” in the city, and proposed “to clean the streets every morning, and not just once a week.”

  In 1891 Fabius was appointed medical director of a newly built, modern hospital, a position he held until his retirement in 1925. Even after his retirement he maintained his private practice until his death in 1937. An obituary published in the Polish Socialist Party’s weekly the following year hailed Dr. Nacht for having “retained his passionate enthusiasm for the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity throughout his life”; it also noted that his “desk was overflowing with piles of socialist newspapers and magazines of all shades and languages.” As his son Max explained decades later, in response to his encounter with “the reactionary, church-ridden Vienna regime,” Fabius had became a socialist.26

  Nacht’s sons, Max and Siegfried, were raised as members of the first activist socialist generation in Buczacz. Agnon, who belonged to the same age group, recalled those heady early days of social mobilization. “An explosive new word is making the rounds in Buczacz and it is ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote. Suddenly people’s servants were declaring that “every person is his own master and does not belong to anyone else”; previously they “used to work from daybreak to midnight,” but now they “stop working after eight hours.” In the countryside “the socialists incited” the agricultural laborers to strike to demand “wages instead of being treated as beasts of burden.” In response “the government sent in soldiers to bring the workers back to the fields, but the socialists came and talked to the army until the government began to fear that the poison of socialism would also penetrate the soldiers’ hearts.” Many of these socialists, commented Agnon, were Jewish “sons of the wealthy who appeared not to lack for anything,” yet now every father feared that his son’s activism “would land him in prison or that he would marry the daughter of a worker.” Those who had thought that “Zionism is the worst of all upheavals in the world,” quipped Agnon, now “discovered that there are even greater upheavals” since Buczacz had become “a city of socialists.”27

  The Jewish hospital before World War I. Source: Postcard in author’s possession.

  Of course Buczacz never actually became “a city of socialists.” But for a while the Nacht home was a hub of political ferment, “the meeting point for socialist youths of all nationalities,” as the doctor’s obituary put it. Siegfried Nacht, a volatile, restless youth, had been expelled in quick succession from the gymnasium in Buczacz and then from its equivalent in nearby Brzeżany (Ukrainian: Berezhany) for underground political activities, finally matriculating at his father’s alma mater in Stanisławów in 1895. With a degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University in Vienna, Siegfried’s Jewish background, socialist politics, and hot temper stood in the way of his finding a position. By the end of the century he had denounced Zionism, renounced his membership in the Jewish community of Vienna, turned against Austrian Social Democracy as nationalist and anti-Semitic, embraced anarchism, and moved to Berlin. But he did not stay there for long; he appears to have spent the next few years traveling, mostly on foot, from one revolutionary cell to another. In April 1903 Siegfried crossed into Gibraltar and was promptly arrested on suspicion of plotting to assassinate King Edward VII during his visit to the British territory. The fact that he carried a pistol did not help matters.

  Siegfried Nacht, 1903. Source: Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv BAR, Bern, E21#1000/131#9249.

  The arrest made Siegfried a cause célèbre across the continent, igniting protests by the “Polish colony” in Paris and Ruthenian socialists in Vienna and prompting the establishment of a committee in London with such prominent members as the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the English philosopher Herbert Spencer. In Buczacz the news of Siegfried’s arrest and subsequent release for lack of evidence on May 5 transformed him, in the sarcastic words of his brother, from “the disgrace of the town” into “a national hero, the fame and pride of the place.” Depicted in the Polish press as “an engineer” and “an author” defended by “a former minister, a real countess,” and “an actual prince,” Siegfried was seen in Buczacz as a veritable “eighth wonder of the world, who had fortunately eluded the gallows.” Agnon also vividly recalled Siegfried’s triumphant, albeit ephemeral, return to his hometown, as he marched down the street “holding his head high like a prince, a black cape over his shoulders with its hem flowing down below his knees, a black hat on his head slightly tilted to one side, his moustache rolled upward and his beard descending in the shape of a half Star of David.” Accompanied by “beautiful maidens from the best families” and with “all the officials making way for him,” Siegfried “was walking as if” the whole city “belonged to him.” This must have been the best day of Siegfried’s life. In 1912 he emigrated to the United States, where his life does not seem to have amounted to much. But to this day he is remembered in anarchist circles as the author of the German-language pamphlet The Social General Strike, published under the pseudonym Arnold Roller in 1905.28

  By that time, such Jews as the Nacht brothers—active within the fold of radical politics, anarchism, and socialism—might no longer have been thought of as Jews, but as the cunning of history would have it, the very socialism that had facilitated their transformation came to be seen by other nationalists as a Jewish conspiracy. Nor did Jewish nationalism fare any better. Edward Dubanowicz’s study of the 1907 national parliamentary election campaign in Galicia sought to explain the troubling coalitions between Jews and Ukrainians against Polish candidates. In the past, he noted, “our traditional Polish attitude did not allow us to remind foreigners of their foreign origin”; now one had to concede that “Jewish separatism” had “acquired serious political significance.” As Dubanowicz saw it, in 1907 the Zionists had simply made “a cold and sly political calculation” intended “to inflame and feed the hatred of both allied parties,” namely the Jews and the Ukrainians, “for their alleged mutual oppressor, the Polish nation,” and to “wrest their co-religionist masses from Polish influence” in order “to gather their votes under the banner of Jewish identity.”

  From a Polish perspective, all this meant was that while the Zionists were “elected by Ruthenian votes,” their presence in Parliament “weakened the numerical strength of the Polish representation in Vienna” and “increased the number of those who are presently the Po
lish nation’s most implacable enemies,” the Ruthenian nationalists. The naïve belief, concluded Dubanowicz acerbically, “that since it owes so much to the Polish nation . . . the vast majority of the Jewish population would be a loyal and sympathetic element within national politics, can no longer be sustained.” Instead “the idea of a separate Jewish political identity” had won over “the Jewish masses” and “directly positioned” them “against the Polish political interest.”29 In other words, Poland had been betrayed by its Jews and would never again be able to trust them to defend its national cause.

  In fact the “Jewish masses” in Galicia had little reason to sympathize with Polish nationalism, which offered no solution to their main concern: the grinding poverty in which they were mired. Close to two-thirds of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Jews lived in Galicia, mostly in the eastern part, the vast majority of them in congested ghettos, with increasingly scarce economic resources. The tremendous obstacles faced by the Vienna-based Relief Association for the Destitute Jewish Population of Eastern Galicia, founded in 1901 and usually referred to as the Hilfsverein (Relief Association), in its attempts to alleviate this desperate economic situation, illustrate the sheer scale of the problem.

  Lacking sufficient resources to establish an industrial base in Galicia, the Hilfsverein focused on training Jewish craftsmen in modern industrial technology. But the relatively few graduates of such courses in Vienna tended to “emigrate to America or to remain in western countries.” An attempt to create a network of cottage industries in Galicia, many based on specialized training for women, faltered when it was realized that it was necessary to “enable the student after a short period of training to make a living” with her newly acquired skills, “since the main goal is to deal with the hunger of the poverty-stricken population.” The plan to set up agricultural training also had to be revised when a study commissioned by the association in 1904 concluded that directing “many Jews to land cultivation could stimulate anti-Semitism because of the existing land hunger among Galician peasants.”30

  The Ruthenian population in the Galician countryside was of course even poorer and, to the despair of Ukrainian nationalists, also suffered from an abysmally low literacy rate. In the Buczacz district in 1880, out of a total population of 50,000 people only 2,500 men and 1,400 women could read. In the villages, where the majority of Ruthenians as well as many Poles lived, things were far worse. Those seeking to gauge the sense of national identity among villagers therefore had to rely on parish priests as informants. This was especially the case with Ruthenians, since village teachers tended to be Polish. A questionnaire distributed in 1911 to several communities in the Buczacz district suggested that Polish cultural, political, and educational hegemony, as well as emigration by Ruthenians and colonization by Poles, had set off a process of Polonization at the turn of the century. At the same time, the very fact that such surveys were being conducted demonstrated that in a region where the majority still spoke Ruthenian (including many Roman Catholics possibly of Ruthenian ancestry), this dynamic was being reversed by Ukrainian nationalist activists.31

  With the exception of the peasant strikes of 1902, which had more to do with economic grievances, national mobilization in the Buczacz district was quite peaceful. Kofler found it was mostly in the larger cities that ethnic tensions occasionally erupted into open conflict, as happened, for instance, during a demonstration by Ruthenian students over the use of Ukrainian at the University of Lemberg (Polish: Lwów; Ukrainian: Lviv) in 1907.32 But the potential for massive Polish-Ukrainian violence, which eventually erupted in the wake of World War I, was still lurking under the surface, suspended between conflicting narratives of past massacres and schemes for future radical “solutions.”

  The Polish elite still hoped to assimilate Ruthenians into a future greater Poland, whereas the Ruthenians were too weak to push their own national agenda. The “Jewish question” appeared more amenable to a “solution,” not least because it was the only issue on which nationalist Poles and Ukrainians could agree. In a sense, the Jews clarified matters where they remained murky as far as conflict between their neighbors was concerned: where it was difficult to distinguish between Poles and Ukrainians, both agreed that the Jews were clearly different, and while Poles and Ukrainians might struggle over ownership of the land, both agreed that the Jews had no business owning it. In this sense, the Jews served as a perfect foil against which one could easily identify oneself.

  Between 1848 and 1914 new opportunities for self-realization and collective liberation appeared to first open up and then to progressively close down again: the period began with the revolutions of 1848, known as “the spring of nations,” and ended up with mass death in World War I. History, as it subsequently happened, was not predetermined. The citizens of Buczacz, like those of many other towns in Galicia, had more choices than ever before or after. A new world was emerging, and the constraints of the old were falling away; tradition had weakened, religious faith was waning, authority was loosening its grip on family and society. Travel became easier, and people could go farther, change identities more easily, aspire to previously unthinkable goals, and embrace radical, exciting new worldviews. But as people began identifying themselves nationally and ideologically, they also looked at others through different eyes, distinguishing them not only by religion and ethnicity but also by whether their history gave them the right to continue living where they were. By the same token, those who bought into the nationalist discourse constrained their own horizons by determining who they were and where they belonged and what they could and should hope and struggle for. In this brave new world vast collectives were being transformed into communities of fate, whose history and future were determined by national affiliation; it was a fate from which others were excluded by definition, and yet one from whose repercussions there was no escape.

  And so, in the last years before the war, all three ethnoreligious groups were turning inward, not only as they had done before, by simply ignoring each other, but in a more aggressive, resentful, accusatory manner, by perceiving their own hardships as a consequence of the other groups’ conduct or success and by viewing the rights of others as necessarily restricting their own. This was not a viable recipe for continued coexistence. The trigger was finally pulled in 1914.

  Chapter 2

  ENEMIES AT THEIR PLEASURE

  Bridge over the Strypa in World War I. Source: AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 13936.

  In retrospect it was thought that such vast multiethnic empires as Austria-Hungary were doomed to be torn asunder from within by the competing forces of opposing nationalists. Yet precisely because of its heterogeneous nature, the empire found ways to negotiate with national movements and to diffuse the radical nationalism that emerged fully only after its demise. In towns such as Buczacz before 1914, nationalists were often preoccupied with such seemingly nonmilitant projects as the promotion of literacy and education, economic progress and folklore, hygiene and athletics. To be sure, a growing accumulation of resentment, fear, and hatred, born of socioeconomic, ideological, and religious differences, simmered behind the façade of a well-regulated society and a prodigious, albeit unwieldy, bureaucracy. In different circumstances, such tensions might have been channeled toward nonviolent accommodation and adjustment. It was World War I that completely changed the rules of the game.

  Most people know much more about the war on the Western Front than in the East. But the fighting between the Russian Empire and the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires was extraordinarily brutal and costly and devastated vast tracts of Eastern Europe. Following its declaration of war on Russia on August 6, 1914, Austria-Hungary tried to confront the numerically superior Russian Army by launching a preemptive offensive into Russian Poland. In return, the Russians invaded Galicia, pushing the Austrians all the way to the Carpathians by late September. For the next nine months the Russians occupied all of Eastern Galicia. These battles cost the Austrian Northern Army well over a t
hird of its original 900,000 men, with the Russians losing a fourth of the one million troops who had marched into battle on that sector of the front. Ethnic tensions and demoralization were prevalent in both imperial armies fighting in Galicia, while the heavy casualties made discipline another major concern. Much of the brutalization of the troops on both sides can be ascribed to the opposing armies’ weakened command systems, deficient training of recruits, and increasingly precarious logistics, quite apart from the horrendous bloodletting at the front.1

  Buczacz was swept into the carnage early on, when once again it found itself in the path of invading armies. Over the next six years it would be repeatedly conquered and occupied by one side or another, devastated by fighting, looting, wanton destruction, and ferocious violence. Eventually little was left of its former self but a memory of better times and mounting fear and rage, a lust for vengeance tempered only by the urge to return to an increasingly elusive normality.

  We know about events in Buczacz throughout much of the war and its aftermath from the unpublished diary of Antoni Siewiński, the Polish principal of the boys’ school in Buczacz prior to World War I. Siewiński, who was born in 1858, had set out to “note down everything that occurred in Buczacz and its surroundings” just “as soon as the world war began.” And even though he lost and rewrote his diary twice during the war, it is a remarkable account by a perceptive though nationalist and anti-Semitic observer that reveals much about events in the city and about how they were viewed by the town’s Polish intelligentsia at the time.2