by Omer Bartov
In the three days preceding the Russian offensive, the weather was foggy and Austrian reconnaissance aircraft could not take off. But on June 7, as the weather cleared, aerial observers reported that in the area of Dżuryn (Ukrainian: Dzhuryn), ten miles to the east, “a vast army was heading toward Buczacz.” That same morning a visiting school inspector awarded Siewiński a medal for reopening the school. “At 5 p.m. we sent the children home from school. But the city was no longer protected as the soldiers were rapidly leaving it.” Panic set in; Siewiński found his “entire apartment building in turmoil,” and the city’s “streets were jammed with wagons and automobiles, all fully packed with items from the field hospital and all ready to evacuate.” The principal and his wife made a snap decision: “Under no circumstances did we want to stay with the Muscovites, since three of our sons were fighting against them, and the fourth was at the gymnasium in Stanisławów.” Within ten minutes they set out for the train station, where they encountered “uncontrollable chaos.” As “the fleeing and wailing Jews were pushing into the train cars,” the “Germans were striking them with rods and batons and shouting, ‘Go away, you damned Jews!’ ” According to Siewiński, the Jews protested their love for the emperor, but the Germans shouted back, “To hell with you and your love!” No Jews were allowed on the train. But Siewiński and several other fleeing dignitaries boarded one of the cars, where they were all served tea. At 11:00 p.m. the train finally left the station: “Through the windows we already saw the glow of the fires over Jazłowiec (Ukrainian: Yazlovets) and the surrounding villages, and even as the train was moving we could hear the roar of the artillery.”32
The capture of Buczacz was part of General Aleksei Brusilov’s massive offensive, launched on June 4, 1916, along the entire three hundred miles of the Eastern Front’s southern sector. This attempt to break the stalemate initially scored major gains in Galicia and Volhynia. But it came at a horrendous price, costing the Russians close to 2 million men while inflicting over 600,000 casualties on the Austrians. No wonder that within the larger historical context the Brusilov offensive is viewed as a Pyrrhic victory that hastened the end of the tsarist regime.33
The two Austrian infantry divisions defending Buczacz came under attack on June 8, and the next day the Russians streamed across the Strypa and captured Potok Złoty (Ukrainian: Zolotyi Potik). With Buczacz under a heavy-artillery barrage and in danger of being encircled, that night one of the Austrian divisions retreated west of the city. As dawn broke on June 10 the first Russian units entered Buczacz and took control of the bridges over the Strypa; later that morning the second Austrian division was pushed out of its positions on the eastern bank of the Strypa just north of the city. Buczacz was back in Russian hands, where it remained for over a year.34
A Russian position near Buczacz, 1916. Source: Central State CinePhotoFono Archive of Ukraine, Kiev (hereafter TsDKFFA), O-184874.
The fate of the Jews of Buczacz who could not flee once the Russians marched in was described by Aba Lev, a Jewish Russian soldier who followed the frontline units shortly after they had occupied the city. Lev kept a diary, written in Yiddish, throughout the war, a fragment of which, devoted largely to his experience in Buczacz, was published in a Russian translation in 1924. Returning from a mission in St. Petersburg to his unit in Czortków just after the start of the Brusilov offensive, Lev quickly learned from the local Jews “about the great calamity that had befallen Buczacz when our army entered it.” He then “hastened to Buczacz,” at whose outskirts he saw “a Jewish orphanage that the soldiers had set on fire in search of vodka.” Several Jews were trying to put out the flames, but then “a drunken officer arrived and poured a bucket of water over the heads of the Jews and started beating them with the bucket.” Lev went on to the town center. “When I entered the synagogue courtyard,” he wrote, “I was stunned by the terrifying picture of destruction, vandalism, and cruelty.” Once they recognized him as a fellow Jew, the traumatized survivors led him to a neighboring house, where he saw “a boy of ten, his hands broken; next to him lay his mother, her skull smashed and her legs cut off.” In the next house was “a dead woman, who had been raped and then beaten so badly that she died the same day in terrible agony.” Other houses were filled with “raped Jewish women” as well as “men with smashed heads and gouged eyes.” In the hospice he “found five murdered people who had to be buried,” while the man in charge recounted to him “the endless series of horrors which the human beasts had committed there.” Lev was taken to see many other “Jewish houses with dead people who had been strangled, burned, and so on,” while on the street he encountered numerous “injured people who had been beaten and raped.”35
Lev quickly mobilized his Russian Jewish comrades and that very night brought a wagon full of food to the devastated community. Under cover of darkness, the Jews “came out of their cellars to cry over their dead, who were soon taken to the cemetery.” But the terror was not over. When Lev returned to the synagogue, he found the courtyard “full of half-naked women with infants in their arms; children in bundles and men with grim and lifeless eyes.” Well into the second week of the occupation, he wrote, “the results of the Cossacks’ exploits were felt everywhere.” Lev and his comrades also collected 250 destroyed Torah scrolls and brought them to the Great Synagogue, “whose walls are as thick as those of a fortress.” But all night “scores of strong Cossack arms were trying to break down the doors,” hoping to loot the building. The following morning Lev reported to his unit’s chief of staff “about what was happening in the city, where the defenseless Jews were at the disposal of drunken Cossacks.” But the officer suggested that he “avoid getting mixed in this business,” since only “two days earlier a Jew was caught making signals to the enemy from the high chimney of the brewery.” Precisely because the city commandant and the general had “a good opinion about Jews, they were very concerned with this event,” he said.36 Thus yet another pogrom was justified by reference to imaginary espionage.
Sick Russian soldiers in the hospital for infectious disease in Buczacz, 1917. Dr. Etel Zeigermacher, a Russian Jew, is on the right; she immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, after the war. Photo courtesy of her son. Hereafter: Zeigermacher photo collection.
As it turned out, the real reason for the reluctance to enforce order was the zeal for loot. “Since most of the city dwellers had fled and abandoned their houses and shops,” wrote Lev, the Russian “Seventh Army issued an order to requisition the goods that were left there,” and the soldiers naturally “started looting on their own initiative.” Within a few days, the city was flooded with Jewish refugees fleeing Russian Army violence in nearby towns. “They looked dreadful, and their stories about the calamities they had undergone were just as dreadful.” The author S. Ansky, who visited the region the following winter, reported that “signs of war” could still “be seen at every step: parapets, torn fences, bullet holes, burned villages and ruins, endless ruins. The farther you travel the greater the devastation: destroyed, burned down, and erased cities and towns,” remnants of “a terrible storm of destruction and devastation, of blood and madness.” This illustrated “the very essence of the war’s spirit, which swept through this place with blind fury.” Finally reaching Buczacz late at night, Ansky drove through “scores of wide streets,” all “destroyed and burned.” The large electric lamps of the military hospitals “further magnified the tragic picture of this city.” Many Jewish families were dwelling in cellars. Nor did the occupiers show any respect for the dead. An old man told Ansky the Russians also “destroyed the cemetery, broke and scattered the tombstones that had been there for six hundred years, and burned down the vaults of the greatest sages.”37
Officers of the Russian 7th Army in Buczacz, 1916. Source: TsDKFFA, O-184864.
Yet the Russian Army never managed to gain a firm hold in Galicia and Volhynia, and while sporadic fighting continued along the entire front, neither side made any major gains. Following the forced abdication of T
sar Nikolai II on March 15, 1917, the provisional government under Alexander Kerensky of the Socialist Revolutionary Party made one last effort to end the war on favorable terms. But the Kerensky offensive, launched on July 1 some forty miles northwest of Buczacz, quickly petered out, with Austrian-German formations driving the Russians all the way back to the old Austrian-Russian border along the Zbrucz (Ukrainian: Zbruch) River. On July 26, after fierce fighting along the Strypa, the Russians abandoned Buczacz and the Austrians marched in unopposed. They were to remain there for a little over a year.
A Russian battlefield position in the Strypa Valley near Buczacz, 1916. Source: TsDKFFA, album 34, photo 54.
The Russians leaving Buczacz, 1917. Source: Zeigermacher photo collection.
Things had changed in the course of the war and could no longer be reversed. As the official Austrian history conceded, “The longer the war lasted, the greater became the internal national tensions within the lands inhabited by Slavs, which constituted almost half of the Danube Empire.” Within a month of the overthrow of the Russian provisional government in Petrograd by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, an armistice agreement was signed with the Central Powers, leading to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, in which the Bolshevik government recognized the independence of Ukraine.38 Half a year later the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist and Galicia was once more up for grabs.
The Austrians had reoccupied a devastated and depopulated land. In early 1918 an Austrian inspector reported from Buczacz that in view of “the plight of the population and the penury of the returning refugees,” Mayor Stern had requested “the allocation of refugee support over the winter, at least until May 1919.” For the moment, noted the official, the municipal administration had no income and was therefore unable to maintain even such “indispensable services” as public security and lavatories. Additionally the extensive damage to real estate during the fighting had caused a severe “shortage of housing and a rise in rental rates,” which “hurts most immediately those who have a regular income,” such as the civil servants, who urgently needed the restoration of municipal services. Indeed no fewer than 569 houses, a substantial share of the real estate in Buczacz, had been either totally or partially destroyed in the fighting.39
Siewiński returned to Buczacz in April 1918 and was immediately appointed director of the secondary school for girls, housed in the so-called barracks. The condition of the building was utterly lamentable: “Smashed windows and window frames, broken doors, everywhere filth and chaos, a few broken school desks.” Even worse, to his mind, was the extent to which “the youth had been demoralized by the war.” The girls “stole whatever they could put their hands on, even what passed for desks were not safe from them.”40 The state of the school and its students reflected the condition of the region as a whole. But the chaos was far from over.
On October 31, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was officially dissolved, and Polish nationalists perceived the defeat of the imperial army, in whose ranks many of them had fought, as an opportunity to resurrect Poland after well over a century of partition and foreign rule. For Galician Poles it seemed only natural that the former Austrian province would revert to its rightful place in the new Polish republic. But the very next day the West Ukrainian National Republic (Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, ZUNR) was proclaimed and Buczacz again came under what Poles saw as foreign, or rather, rebellious peasant and bandit rule. Conversely, vast numbers of Ruthenians, who had increasingly come to think of themselves as members of the much larger Ukrainian nation, felt that for the first time since the fall of the Cossack state in the seventeenth century they were in control of their own land and destiny. The Great War was over. But the inhabitants of Galicia faced two more years of bitter fighting and bloody massacres, in which ideological conflict was often experienced as fraternal and communal violence.
Polish attitudes toward Jews in Galicia had also worsened, not least because of the widespread and not entirely vacuous belief that the Jews had preferred Austrian rule to the establishment of an independent Polish state. Popular rumors about Jewish wealth, allegedly accumulated through war profiteering, added fuel to anti-Jewish sentiments among Poles who refused to acknowledge the reality of Galician Jewry’s utter destitution, even as they flaunted Polish heroism in fighting against Russia and for national independence. The ample evidence of Jewish participation in the fighting was either dismissed or presented as proof of Jewish support for the empire and opposition to Polish nationhood.
For Siewiński the Ukrainian takeover of Buczacz on November 2, 1918, just half a year after his return to the city, had all the trappings of a dispute between old and well-acquainted, not always friendly neighbors. “At 10 a.m. on All Souls Day,” he wrote, several local representatives of the newly declared West Ukrainian National Republic showed up at “the district offices and demanded that District Administrator Dniestrzański hand over the official documentation.” Dniestrzański, it appears, “saw no alternative, and did as he was ordered,” not least because “outside the window he could see many men with clubs and guns.” All other civil servants followed his example, with similar scenes taking place at the district court and the post office. By and large, according to Siewiński, “the takeover of the municipal offices proceeded relatively calmly.” But when the Polish railroad officials and operators refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the ZUNR, they were removed from their posts and replaced by people who, Siewiński contemptuously remarked, “lacked higher professional training and had hardly a clue about operating the railroad.” Similarly when “a crowd of people converged on the gendarmerie office and demanded to be given weapons,” the policeman who tried to block them was “painfully thrashed.”
Meanwhile, as more Ukrainians arrived from the surrounding villages and were armed by the new authorities, these “peasants and farm laborers” began roaming the streets and “looting Jewish shops and Polish citizens.” They were followed by “a dozen wagons filled with armed men,” which arrived in the city as reinforcements, led by a village official who knew and greeted Siewiński. Up to this point, and despite the occasional violence, the Ukrainian takeover still seemed a fraternal affair. But in the afternoon a train pulled into Buczacz with three cars full of armed soldiers and two machine guns. Siewiński described the scene: “The soldiers disembarked, heroically positioned the two machine guns right next to the rails, and commenced firing at the defenseless and tranquil city.” One of their targets was the gendarmerie building, “where there were only women and children. The bullets lodged into the window panes, tore up the roof, and sprayed all around the city, which was covered by a thick haze.” This wild shooting came to an end only when “a brave woman holding a broom came out of one of the nearby shacks” and shouted at the soldiers to stop. The men then marched in formation to the market square, led by a former Buczacz gymnasium student and a classmate of one of Siewiński’s sons. As darkness fell, the Ukrainians roamed the city, “shooting in the streets.” Over the next few days, soldiers randomly stopped and brutalized people: “Every evening one could hear the shrieks of those who were beaten.”
The men who took over the town were members of the local Ukrainian elite, including the new Buczacz district commissar, the attorney Ilarion Bochurkiv, and the engineer Viktor Luchkiv, appointed ataman (chief) of the district security forces. Not untypically for the region, both were married to Polish women. For Polish patriots such as Siewiński, it was bad enough that these “new rulers immediately introduced the Ukrainian language to all offices”; fortunately, in Buczacz “all Poles spoke that language perfectly.” Much worse was that “this new pseudo-Ukrainian power completely banned the use of Polish in all offices and schools.” The Poles, observed Siewiński, being “a cultivated people,” had never banned Ukrainian. He conceded that “the local gymnasium had used Polish as the language of instruction,” but that seemed natural, since Poles considered their language to be far more elevated. Now th
at Ukrainian was made the language of instruction, and all Poles refusing to sign a declaration of loyalty to the new state were ejected from the gymnasium, “only the Ukrainians and Jews remained” there. Siewiński was, of course, especially incensed with the Jews, who had all signed the required loyalty declaration in order to keep their jobs, save for one honorable professor, who “let it be known that although he belongs to the Mosaic faith he is a Pole.”41
Within a week of taking over the district, Commissar Bochurkiv reported to the Ukrainian National Council in Lwów that he had already removed many local Polish officials and had established a militia that “provided perfect order.” As a result of these measures, he asserted, “complete calm prevails in the district”; the Polish peasants even “display solidarity with the Ukrainian peasants,” while “the Jewish population is loyal to the Ukrainian authority.” Siewiński saw things rather differently, confiding to his diary that “all the grain stocks, as well as sugar, clothing, and money, were plundered from the district office and post office”; even a supply of new clothes for his teaching staff, which arrived from Lwów shortly before the Ukrainian takeover, had been requisitioned. Siewiński was especially scandalized when his own home was searched and plundered by a troop of Ukrainian soldiers headed by Ataman Luchkiv himself. The logic of separation between neighbors was already at work: when Siewiński’s son Józef asked Luchkiv to give back the family correspondence, the latter responded dismissively, “We are enemies now.” Siewiński, who had known Luchkiv as “an intelligent and cultivated man,” concluded that he had finally “shown his true face.” People who had been colleagues and acquaintances for many years suddenly “recognized” their essential difference; they no longer shared the same community, moral values, culture, or language.42