Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  In fact Ruthenians had struggled to assert and maintain their national identity not only before but also during World War I, when they were subjected to concerted efforts to assimilate by the occupying tsarist regime. In May 1915 the president of the Ukraine parliamentary delegation in Austria strongly protested against the Russian assertion that Ukrainians were merely “Little Russians,” and thus part of the “Great Russian” nation. Indeed, he contended, the Russians had been waging “a war of extermination against the language, customs, literature and culture of the Ukraine” since the seventeenth century. Portraying themselves as liberators, the Russians condemned Ukrainians “to national death,” having “destroyed at one blow” the Ukrainian national renaissance: “The Ruthenian language has been forbidden,” and “all the Ruthenian newspapers in Galicia have been suppressed, the libraries destroyed.”57

  By the time Whitehead reached the region, the Russians were long gone and Ukrainians were bitterly complaining about the new government’s Polonization policies. Like the American representatives, Whitehead too heard that the numbers of Ruthenian public officials, state gymnasium teachers, and university professors and students had been starkly reduced despite Ukrainian demographic preponderance. Whitehead conceded, “The question of Ruthenian students continuing their studies is an important one and admits no delay in coming to an arrangement.” It was from the ranks of a frustrated young generation of Ukrainians that a new, radical, and increasingly violent nationalist organization soon emerged.58

  The official ownership of Eastern Galicia was not determined quickly. On June 25, 1919, the Supreme Council of the League of Nations empowered Poland to occupy the territory up to the Zbrucz River, but stressed that this did not determine its final status. Five months later, on November 21, the Supreme Council drafted a treaty giving Poland a mandate over Eastern Galicia for a period of twenty-five years, after which a plebiscite would be held. Vehement Polish objections led to the withdrawal of the mandate idea, and Galicia remained formally in the possession of the Entente Powers. Finally, on March 15, 1923, the Conference of Ambassadors, which had replaced the Supreme Council, handed Eastern Galicia to Poland, albeit with the proviso that “ethnographic conditions necessitate an autonomous regime in the Eastern part of Galicia.” No such autonomy was ever granted.59

  The conflict over Eastern Galicia was conducted on the ground and also by means of a propaganda campaign intended to expose the brutality and inhumanity of the other side and thereby to undermine its claim to the territory. There was no dearth of atrocities to draw on; looking through these materials one soon grasps the ferocity of this fraternal conflict, largely forgotten because of the even greater subsequent horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide in World War II. It is also impossible to tell which group exceeded the other in the number of their victims and the heinousness of their crimes.

  On July 29, 1919, representatives of the ZUNR wrote to Georges Clemenceau, president of the peace conference, in protest against the Supreme Council’s decision to authorize the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia. Besides claiming that this step “abolishes the principle of self-determination of peoples,” the note asserted that the decision delivered Ukrainians “to the mercies of an unbridled Polish imperialism, to the horrors of a regime by Polish authorities, and to the brutalities of the Polish soldiery,” which had already “committed innumerable acts of violence and terror.” Providing a “long list of these abominable outrages” perpetrated by the Poles, the note dismissed as “wholly false or greatly exaggerated tales of cruelties practiced on the Poles by the Ukrainians.” This was the start of a competition of atrocities in which there could only be losers. Polish crimes cited included mass arrests of “Ukrainian ‘intelligentsia,’ peasants, and artisans” and the internment of thousands in conditions of inhuman overcrowding and lack of food; numerous cases of shooting, hanging, beating, and flogging to death of captured soldiers and civilians, even children; gouging out eyes, public gang rape, and wanton destruction of villages, as well as torching or desecration of Greek Catholic churches and mass arrests and abuse of priests. Even “Jewish pogroms” were cited—clearly with the intention of drawing on sympathy for the fate of Jews and conveniently aligning it with Ukrainian claims of victimhood—along with the destruction of cultural treasures by pillaging and burning down libraries and archives and banning the Ukrainian language. The writers asserted, “The Ukrainian people in East Galicia find themselves in a hell, so to speak, and the persecutions to which they are subjected find no parallel in history.” Elsewhere they argued that these atrocities were “on par with the barbarous cruelties perpetrated in the Balkans and Armenia.”60

  Only days after the Ukrainian report was sent, the Polish Foreign Office issued its own “Report on Ukrainian Cruelties Committed on the Polish Population of Eastern Galicia.” The two documents were largely mirror images of each other. But the Polish report also deprived Ruthenians of both intelligence and control over their own actions. Asserting that these crimes manifested “the brutalization and demoralization” of Ukrainians, described as “uninstructed and uncultured masses,” the report presented them at the same time as victims of “provocative agitation carried out by foreigners,” whose goal was to “preclude all understanding between the Poles and the Ukrainians.” In other words, while Ukrainian nationalists condemned what they saw as Polish oppression, Polish nationalists argued that their Ruthenian brethren were merely manipulated by enemies of Poland, such as Russians, communists, and Jews. Although the report stressed that it was “not holding the whole Ukrainian population responsible,” it accused the ZUNR of trying to excise the Polish presence from Eastern Galicia, not least by inciting popular resentment against Polish landowners and priests. This was followed by the same litany of murder, plunder, desecration, torture, and internment under deplorable and at times lethal conditions. In one camp alone over 2,600 deaths from typhus were claimed.61

  From “Report on Ukrainian Cruelties Committed on the Polish Population of Eastern Galicia,” August 1919, Department of Information. Source: Archiwum akt nowych, Warsaw (hereafter AAN), Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych (hereafter MSZ), zesp. 322, sygn. 9412a, end of booklet.

  This list of horrors, accompanied by a set of horrifying photographs, ultimately demonstrated not the greater bestiality of one side or the other but the cumulative effect of violence and dehumanization over several years of war, vicious propaganda, and fraternal conflict, which combined to unravel the moral fabric of society. We read of a Ukrainian ataman who established “a house of prostitution for the use of his soldiers, of young Polish girls,” whom they “afterwards murdered”; women’s “breasts having been cut off which the soldiers playfully threw from one to another”; a legionnaire “beaten with ‘nahajki’ (leaded whip), bastinadoed and thrown into a pond where he was shot at like a duck”; a priest “buried alive with his head downward”; a countess and her daughter who, “after cruel violation,” were “literally torn in pieces by the teeth of the savage Ukrainian mob”; women and children “stripped naked” and forced into a pond, “then tied to the trees on the bank, so that they all froze”; a hospital where the “stomachs of wounded legionnaires were slit with scythes”; the inhabitants of an entire village locked inside a manor house and burned alive; strange tortures such as “tearing the skin off people’s hands” and “winding the body from head to toe in barbed wire”; people being crucified and impaled.62

  “The army nursing-sister Josephine Mroczkowska, who was wounded by a rifle-shot in the stomach and had the wound dressed by her colleagues, was taken prisoner by the Ukrainians and after seven hours of torture was murdered.” Source: “Report on Ukrainian Cruelties Committed on the Polish Population of Eastern Galicia,” August 1919, Department of Information, AAN-MSZ, zesp. 322, sygn. 9412a, end of booklet.

  The report magnanimously concluded that despite “the immense total disaster which has been inflicted upon the Polish population by the savage Ukrainian hordes,” the Poles were wi
lling “to come to conciliatory settlement,” based on “the greatest tolerance and moderation,” so that “a complete understanding might be arrived at and the two nations live together in peace.” But that was merely another way of demanding Polish hegemony over a subservient Ukrainian population, rooted in the deeply entrenched notion of overall Polish superiority.63 By then neither assertions of superiority nor offers of tolerance could undo the effects of fraternal violence: too much blood had been shed, and too many people were adopting extremism and intolerance. As for the Jews of Eastern Galicia, objectively they had little to do with this conflict. But both Poles and Ukrainians increasingly felt that the Jews were their enemy’s friends, and since in reality this meant that the Jews had ever fewer friends, they grew increasingly vulnerable to a conflict in which most of them had no part. For the next twenty years, it was the Poles who dictated the terms of coexistence; once war broke out, the ghosts of the past returned with a vengeance.

  Chapter 3

  TOGETHER AND APART

  Beis Yaakov students performing the play Joseph and His Brothers, Buczacz, 1934. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter USHMM), photo 4959. Esther Rivka Wagner, second row, fifth from the right, b. 1924, daughter of Buczacz rabbi Shraga Feivel Willig, only survivor of her family, was interviewed by the author in December 2009. On Rabbi Feivel, see also S. Y. Agnon, The City Whole (Tel Aviv, 1973, in Hebrew), 650–52. Sarah Halpern, first row, first on the right, Mordechai Halpern’s sister, was murdered aged seventeen. M. Halpern, Family and Town (Tel Aviv, 2003, in Hebrew), 71.

  After six years of almost incessant violence and bloodshed, the killing finally came to an end with the liberation of the city from Bolshevik rule in Sepetember 1920. But even before that, following the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, some of the Jews who had fled Buczacz during the fighting began trickling back. Jewish soldiers released from military service or POW camps were also returning. Many were exhausted, disoriented, impoverished, and traumatized. There was an acute need for new hope: perhaps no longer a Messiah, but at least a goal and a vision to lift the wretched out of their misery. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British government promised to support the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was still reverberating throughout Eastern Europe. After the war, the young Zionist Zvi Heller called a meeting of Buczaczers in Vienna, urging the hundreds who attended to go to Palestine.

  The Jews of Buczacz and the Tarnopol province (voivodeship) grew increasingly focused on Zionism and immigration to Palestine. Aliya, literally “ascent,” to Eretz Israel was the very heart of the Zionist undertaking; its primary facilitator was the hachshara, or training camp, which provided, in Heller’s words, the “mental preparation and agricultural training” viewed as essential for the transition from small-town life in Galicia to collective farms, called kibbutzim, in Palestine.1 There young men and women were expected to turn the Jewish occupational pyramid on its head and thereby transform the Jewish people from a nation of “wheelers and dealers” into a strong and proud race of farmers and warriors by conquering and settling the “wasteland” of Palestine and resurrecting the Promised Land of their biblical forefathers. This was a complex social, psychological, and political undertaking: its rhetoric of “normalizing Jewish existence” and forging “new Jews” borrowed generously from Polish and Ukrainian nationalist discourse. But it also had to be adapted both to the Judaic tradition of longing for Zion and to the unique socioeconomic circumstances of the Jews, by asserting the need to uproot the newly proclaimed nation from the foreign soil it had inhabited for centuries in order to recolonize a mythical and yet already populated ancestral homeland. Zionism has been grappling with the moral issues involved ever since. But at the time its sheer audacity was attractive to growing numbers of young men and women.

  Announcement of festive prayer in Buczacz on the tenth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 1927. Source: Jewish National and University Library, Digitized Book Repository, JNUL/AMD – V 2001.

  The first group of Buczacz pioneers (chalutzim), made up of members of the socialist Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatza’ir (the Young Guard), went to Palestine as early as 1919. A second group, most of whose members were still gymnasium students, continued preparing for immigration by performing physical labor at a local stone quarry and cleaning barns on nearby farms. This made for friction with Polish nationalists disdainful of Zionists. On one occasion the Jewish pioneers were surrounded by young Polish Scouts (Harcerze) and a brawl ensued; as a consequence many of the Jewish students were expelled from the gymnasium and charged with treason. They were spared thanks to the brief Bolshevik occupation of Buczacz in 1920, during which Zionist activists destroyed the police records, so that once Polish rule was restored the charges were dismissed.

  The youngsters from Buczacz who went to Palestine at that time were not employed in agriculture as they had expected; rather, like many other members of the Third Aliya that brought an estimated thirty-five thousand immigrants to Eretz Israel over the next four years, they were used for backbreaking road building and other public works. Many succumbed to dysentery, rheumatism, malaria, and other diseases caused by the harsh labor conditions, poor nutrition and hygiene, and the rigors of the climate. Their ultimate fate reflected that of most other young pioneers from Russia and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Some found their place in the emerging new Jewish society, while others “lost their Zionist faith” and returned to Buczacz within a few years.2

  A chronic problem for the Zionists, whose accomplishments were measured by the number of members emigrating to Palestine, was that their very success deprived them periodically of their most enterprising and idealistic activists. They also suffered from lack of funds and so appealed to their communities to support their endeavor. One such group issued a pamphlet in Buczacz in 1924, demanding “the material means to go to Eretz Israel” from its fellow Jews: “We do not come to you as beggars and we do not stretch out our hand for charity.” Instead, asserted these youngsters, their hand held “the key to the history and the future of the Jewish people.” Zionism was a collective duty: “You too must take part in our national uprising and resurrection. Pay your debt!”3

  Much of the funding for the Zionist project depended on the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, KKL), which relied not only on donations from the wealthy but also on contributions from all sectors of Jewish society by means of the famous “blue box” in every household, in which family members were expected to deposit their spare change. The presence of the box in a home symbolized the family’s support for Jewish nationalism and the settlement of Palestine. In April 1930, for instance, the KKL Central Bureau in Lwów announced that since “the question of land now occupies the most important place in the work of Zionist realization and demands a quick solution,” the organization had decided to use the occasion of Passover “to distribute in Eastern Galicia 10,000 new boxes and to receive commitments from the box owners that they would make a regular monthly donation.”4

  Despite the hardship of preparation and emigration, for thousands of young Jewish men and women in Galicia this was a period of extraordinary ferment and hope, all the more keenly felt because of the surrounding misery and despair. David Cymand, a contemporary participant in these events and future Zionist activist, recalled many years later that during the mid-1920s educated Galician youths began veering increasingly toward Zionism and emigration. All this frantic “self-realization,” he said, was the cause of endless ideological splits and disputes, as well as of tremendous youthful energy and solidarity. It was a decade of great hopes and looming threats that remained etched in the memories of all those who survived its immediate aftermath; many did not.5

  Although these young pioneers could not know it at the time, the immigration certificates made the difference between life and death for many. But British concerns about Arab opposition to Jewish immigration, which culminate
d in the 1936 Arab uprising in Palestine, led to substantial restrictions on the number of available certificates. With growing pressure from those seeking Zionist “self-realization” and better job opportunities, squabbles over these increasingly scarce documents intensified and demoralization occasionally set in. In 1935 the Lwów center of Achwa (Fraternity), the youth movement of the moderate General Zionists established with the goal of attracting Jewish youths of modest means who might otherwise join more radical groups, reprimanded its Buczacz branch for poor fundraising. Expressing its “outrage and astonishment,” the center warned that “such treatment of the essential affairs of our organization” would “lead to its ruin.” However, the Buczacz branch felt that it had been sidelined in the matter of certificates and was not swayed by Lwów’s assertion that it viewed every branch “as an integral part of the organization” and that “one cannot think in terms of ‘us or them’ on the issues of hachshara and aliya.” The end result was that fewer young people joined the branch, which constrained its ability to demand more certificates. As the Lwów office bluntly stated in October 1936, “With such a small number of members we do not believe that you can be dominant in your town.” The incentive to distribute more certificates was obviously lacking.6