by Omer Bartov
The fires were finally extinguished only when they threatened to spread to the outskirts and after it was realized that munitions could no longer be safely taken on the main road through Buczacz. About 125 of the largest houses had been destroyed, including many public buildings, mills, stores, workshops, pharmacies, food storage facilities, breweries, and other economic enterprises. The local economy was in ruins, and the prewar social order had crumbled. On the streets of Buczacz Russian soldiers were selling pricy cigars and cigarettes, plundered from the tobacco factory in Monasterzyska, for a few kopeks. Now schoolchildren, “both Catholics and Jews . . . smoked thick cigars on the streets” and “laughed right in the faces of their old teachers, because they knew that in this environment they could tell them nothing.” The youth, exclaimed Siewiński, “had no shame any longer and [was] out of control, stealing whatever they could lay their hands on.” While the Jews “bought the tobacco and cigarettes for rock-bottom prices and soon made golden business out of them,” other “town residents flocked to the fields to collect potatoes,” regardless of “whose fields these were.” After all, “since all the distilleries had burned down,” no vodka could be produced, and once winter came the potatoes would in any case freeze in the ground. In this atmosphere of want and chaos, lamented the principal, “every Muscovite had a woman in the city and the outskirts” because “women whose husbands were at the front” now “threw themselves at the Muscovites with such zeal that even they spat at them.”17
Burned-out houses in Buczacz city center during World War I; Basilian monastery and Fedor Hill in background. Source: AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5841.
By mid-September, with the fires finally out, the city “looked terrible; everywhere blankets and pillows were scattered on the streets and in the gutters and one could take as many as one wanted. From several houses smoke was still rising; the whole city had been covered for weeks with a thick, black cloud of smoke which made your eyes tear up, and jackals in human form were roaming the streets in search of loot.” A kind of order was eventually established by the commandant of the gendarmerie and district commissioner Captain Medyński; a Russified Pole married to a Polish woman, he made no effort to conceal his local mistress, whose own husband was serving at the front. Medyński’s idea of order was to walk around “with a whip, and not a day went by without him punishing at least two Jews with it.” Toward the end of September, Medyński paid a visit to the Petlikowce estate. Kofler remembered him as a “middle-aged Pole, graying, very good looking and tall.” He greeted the family “very cordially, speaking all the time in Polish.” It appeared that the Russian authorities wanted “to convey a feeling of security and safety” to estate owners so as to rebuild the local economy. Precisely because Medyński “knew that we were Jews,” observed Kofler, “he wanted all the more to assure us of safeguarding our stability on the same level we had enjoyed heretofore.” But moments later Kofler witnessed how this “graceful and well mannered gentleman became a wild beast,” brutally lashing out in Russian at the village headman and the deacon of the church, whom he accused of redistributing land to the peasants. “This first acquaintance with the real face of Russian reality,” wrote Kofler, “forever remained carved into my memory.”18
The Russian district governor, a certain Szeptyłycz, whom Siewiński portrayed as a “very genial” and “fleshy man of considerable size, with a truly pleasant and agreeable face, always closely shaven,” reigned over a deeply corrupt and often violent local occupational regime. Using various pretexts, the Russians imposed heavy fines on wealthy Jews, and whoever refused to pay “was immediately jailed and maltreated so badly” that he swiftly relented. Outright hooliganism was not uncommon: when the Jewish post office superintendent prepared his home for his daughter’s wedding, the Russians plundered and wrecked it completely, bringing the best loot to the governor’s wife and their three daughters. Indeed the wives of Russian officials made it a habit to pick out choice fabrics for dresses from local merchants without ever bothering to pay. “The Muscovites,” concluded Siewiński, “had a good life in Buczacz.”19
Some attempts were made to care for the most needy. For instance, the Russians set up a soup kitchen in the building of the Sokół, demanding that the estate owners of the region deliver the supplies. The official opening, to which the city’s intelligentsia was invited, included eloquent speeches by the police chief and the governor’s wife. But what most “pained the hearts” of the Polish dignitaries was that a “huge red-blue-white flag” of Russia was hoisted over the Sokół where previously the Polish flag had flown.
As for Russian attitudes toward Jews, they acquired a certain ambiguity over time. On the one hand, during the harsh first wartime winter, as Siewiński reported, “the Russians put up a large samovar in the marketplace, where hot tea and a piece of bread were served day and night for the Jews.” On the other hand, there were occasional outbursts of organized violence. One of the worst occurred in November 1914, when “the Muscovites drove the Jews out of their houses, and they fled to the Jewish cemetery, where they remained day and night. . . . The Cossacks came to the cemetery on horseback with their leather whips and ordered the Jews to leave the cemetery and cross the river to the left bank.” The Strypa was on the other side of the cemetery hill overlooking Buczacz, where it flowed “in a wide but shallow stream,” which could just be crossed on foot. “One can imagine the noise,” recalled Siewiński, “as 4,000 people, mostly women and children, walked into the cold water, behind them the Cossacks shouting from their mounts and holding their leather whips.” But “just as they crossed the stream, a Russian officer on the left bank ordered [the soldiers] to push them back to where they had come from.” Since the Jews “could not change their clothes and were wet and cold, and as they could not warm themselves, many of them became ill, and many died.”20
Anti-Jewish policies may have contributed to the cholera and typhus epidemics that struck the city. The authorities forced the Jews of Buczacz and other townships into a ghetto restricted to a couple of streets in the town center; wrote Siewiński, “These people were herded together like sardines in a can.” Flight could be lethal; when fifty-three Jews were caught trying to get back to their hometown, “each of them was immediately given 59 strokes with the whip. Six Jews died on the spot during this action, the rest were driven back to Buczacz.” By spring 1915 an epidemic was also raging in the field hospitals, “not to speak of the Jews, who lived in extremely filthy and crowded conditions. Every day numerous corpses were carried to the Jewish cemetery and buried there.”21
Other measures targeting Jews included restrictions on movement, requiring special permission to travel from one village to another, which in turn called for bribes that only generated further extortion by local policemen. In contrast, fraternization between local Christian women and Russian soldiers was common, although frowned upon by Polish priests and patriots alike. Perhaps even more tellingly, men of Siewiński’s status could enjoy enlightening conversations with educated Russian officers. One such encounter, he believed, was with none other than Grand Duke Nikolai Romanov, supreme commander of the Russian armies in the West, who was visiting Buczacz. Apocryphal or true, Siewiński’s depiction of this conversation reflected one area of agreement between Poles and Russians, namely, that the latter “always made short shrift of dealing with” Jews. Those caught selling on the black market would be “brought right away to the district office and given fifteen strokes with a truncheon on the naked flesh, so that blood was drawn,” a measure whose salutary consequence, in Siewiński’s view, was that Jews “did their best to be at least a little honest.” Another, less convenient result was that in their attempt to please the occupiers, the Jews “gave the entire city a Russian look” by hanging “over their stores huge signs and plaques in Russian script.” Of course the Russians were not fooled and kept extorting money from wealthy Jews, not least by first arresting them and then demanding ransom for their release, a practice that
became common throughout the territories occupied by Russia.22
Hooliganism was not directed only against Jews. In February 1915 Siewiński’s school was taken over by a Russian unit returning from heavy fighting in the Carpathians: “Within a few days the beautiful school was unrecognizable, because the soldiers destroyed everything, plundered the bookcases and bookshelves, burned the school files in the oven, threw the school benches out to the yard, where they were taken apart and burnt in the oven,” and “answered nature’s call straight out of the windows.” But after Siewiński’s own home was also vandalized by a group of soldiers, they profusely apologized, saying they had thought it belonged to a Jew. In fact the Christian population of Buczacz, well aware of Russian attitudes “even before the Muscovites marched into the city,” had “made every effort to distinguish themselves from the Jews by putting up icons in their homes.” During the occupation, “every woman regularly wore a cross on her neck, not at all for religious reasons but in order to protect herself from violation by the Cossacks.”23
In summer 1915, as the front drew close again, Buczacz was visited for the first time in its history by an airplane. It “circled the city like a huge eagle” and dropped a few bombs on nearby Russian troop concentrations. Soon Buczacz became the site of “daily visits by Austrian airplanes.” By then a daily stream of “thousands of automobiles and vehicles with ammunition drove through Buczacz,” along with “thousands of cattle, horses, sheep and swine,” as well as “entire caravans of trucks filled with furniture and various goods.” It was, wrote Siewiński, akin to “a migration of nations from west to east.”
The Russian retreat was accompanied by more destruction. A troop of Cossacks temporarily housed in the school library inflicted irreparable damage to its valuable collection, while a detachment from Kazan swiftly “liberated” the school “of all maps, pictures, clocks,” indeed “anything not firmly screwed and nailed to the walls.” Anyone traveling through the region, especially Jewish women, stood a good chance of being robbed “of their money, watches, rings, and furs” by the Cossacks, who did not desist from widespread armed robbery of private homes. In this “gigantic bedlam” there were no sanctions and “everything was allowed.”24
It was also at that point that the Koflers’ estate was finally destroyed. For several months they had survived “like an oasis in the desert,” protected toward the end by two Russian soldiers, who turned out to be Jews from Warsaw; the two also helped them sell their remaining livestock before it was seized by the army. A third soldier, a Jewish Russian Hussar and former actor, later teamed up with the other two and defended the Koflers from the growing number of marauders roaming the region. But eventually this Jewish “protective squad” had to leave the estate and the Koflers were left to fend for themselves. In late summer 1915 they “got wind of the orders for total destruction of all properties”; the family “took shelter in the forest” and “watched at night as a sea of flames engulfed all the buildings.” Shortly thereafter Oskar joined the Austro-Hungarian Army and his parents moved to Vienna. After the war, the new Polish authorities blocked the family from regaining their estate.25
By late August the fighting and killing in Buczacz and its environs were intensifying by the hour. Siewiński recalled that at one point eight hundred wounded soldiers were brought into his school: “There was not enough room, so they were placed in the school corridor, one next to the other, and as they were dying they called out ‘Mama! Mama!’ . . . This was a terrifying sight.” He calculated that between August 1914 and September 1915 over a thousand men had died in his school, most of them Russian: “They were all young men, at the peak of their lives, of which they were robbed in the war.” On Tuesday, August 24, the Russians confiscated all metal objects in Buczacz, mined its three bridges, and began evacuating the city. By Thursday they were gone, save for a few “marauding bands” that rode by, “certain that they could plunder without fear of punishment.” That night, August 26–27, the Russians blew up the railroad bridge and tunnel. A last army column crossed the remaining bridges, and as they marched through the town the soldiers went on “damaging the houses along the road, breaking the windows with stones and then fleeing as fast as they could. Occasionally one could hear a cry of lamentation from a Jewish woman, but they did not kill anyone.” The demolition squad charged with blowing up the bridge leading to Siewiński’s school only partially destroyed it, and then threw down their guns and called out, “We have carried out our orders and now we will give ourselves up.” Finally, on August 29, Siewiński ventured out and spotted several soldiers of the Polish 13th Infantry Company from Kraków on the street. After 372 days of Russian occupation, Buczacz had been liberated.26
For Siewiński this joyous event was mingled with resentment toward the city’s Jewish residents, who, “from one minute to the next,” ensured that Buczacz would once again assume “a black-and-yellow look” by hoisting Austrian flags and putting up store signs in German. His indignation about this perceived false and misdirected patriotism was accentuated by his conviction that “while the Poles and Ukrainians were conscripted into the war and not a few of them came back as cripples, or were never to see again the soil of their homeland, these fat Jews laughed over the dumb Goyim, since they never got around to serving in the army.”27
Facts rarely get in the way of prejudice. In reality, during World War I, 320,000 Jews, including 25,000 officers, served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. That the Jews of Galicia were generally Kaisertreu, or loyal to the Austrian emperor, was widely known and made perfect sense from their perspective, considering the alternatives. Jewish attempts to appease the Russians were in response to their abysmal maltreatment by the occupier, just as subsequent demonstrations of loyalty to Polish and Ukrainian rule were largely driven by fear of reprisals against an isolated and defenseless minority (although some Jews actively supported one national movement or another).28
Between 1914 and 1917 an estimated half a million to a million Jews were deported or expelled by the Russian authorities. These policies stimulated what one historian has called “the emergence of radical violence by Cossacks, soldiers, and local populations against Jews” throughout the Russian Empire. Up to a quarter of a million Jews fled to the West, with over seventy-seven thousand Jewish refugees counted in 1915 in Vienna alone. Buczacz itself remained too close to the front to take back any returning refugees following its first liberation. Many of its Jewish inhabitants had fled in August 1914, and some two thousand ended up in Vienna.29
However, far more people had stayed in Buczacz, some willingly, others for lack of an alternative. Mayor Stern, who was there throughout the Russian occupation, confirmed in a report to the Austrians shortly after their return that as soon as the Russians had occupied Buczacz, the city was subjected to widespread “plunder; women and girls were raped, even publicly on the street”; several factories “were set on fire,” and then the entire “city burned from all sides.” He claimed it was “only thanks to the urgent pleas and representations by the mayor to the city commandant” that “the fires and plunder were stopped and the city saved from total ruin.”30
But precisely because Stern had managed to retain his position during Russian rule, once the Austrians returned, questions were raised about his conduct under enemy occupation. An anonymous denunciation blamed “state officials in Buczacz” for having “delivered to the Russians Jewish girls, who were then dishonored by the Cossacks.” The investigation was apparently abandoned, likely because Stern still had sway with the Austrian authorities. When a Polish pastry shop owner was denounced by two Jewish residents for having “interacted with Russian officers and civil servants in a very friendly manner” and was indicted as an informant of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, Stern vouched for him as “a loyal and politically irreproachable citizen,” pointing out that “there was actually never an Okhrana office in Buczacz.” The charges were finally dropped in June 1918, around the same time that Stern, who would have be
en in his seventies by then, also disappears from the historical record.31 His time was up, and the world he represented was forever gone.
Main Street in Buczacz, September 1915. Source: AT-OeStA/KA IBS I WK Fronten Galizien, 13867.
Austrian-German rule in Eastern Galicia remained precarious. Siewiński recalled that throughout the months leading to the Russian offensive, “not a single night passed without a blaze” and “buildings were set on fire.” As increasing numbers of Russian aircraft began to appear, “every night the sky was lit up by searchlights” and “one could hear the ceaseless rattle of rifles and machine guns.” The first aerial bombing of Buczacz occurred in winter, killing “a destitute Jew carrying water across the market place.” Over the next few months many more civilians were killed, often in their own homes. But in early May 1916, as soon as the Austrian officials who had occupied his school building evacuated it, Siewiński reopened the school to an impressive group of 614 boys and 546 girls, despite the total lack of desks, chairs, and even an air raid trench. The classrooms were still filled with barrels of vodka and rum: “The stench of the spirits was bearable only by keeping the windows open, but outdoors the sound of the artillery and gunfire was getting ever louder, on top of which almost every day Russian airplanes flew overhead and dropped bombs.” Whenever the siren sounded, the entire school would run to hide in the nearby church of the Basilian monastery. Two anti-aircraft guns were positioned right next to the school, and some thirty bombs were dropped in its vicinity, but without causing major damage. Meanwhile increasing numbers of civilian air raid victims and soldiers wounded at the front only a few miles away were filling the town’s military hospitals.