Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  All this meant that by the 1930s even the diminishing numbers of Zionist activists could expect ever fewer certificates, which further dampened their spirits. A cursory look may give the impression that interwar Buczacz was swarming with Zionist associations, but memberships often overlapped, and the total number of people engaged remained relatively small. One measure of commitment to Zionism was regular payment of the “shekel,” a symbolic currency worth 1.5 Złoty at the time. In 1933, for instance, only 769 people paid their dues to the local shekel committee in Buczacz, about a tenth of the Jewish population, although admittedly this was also an indication of the community’s poverty.7

  Many older and more prominent Zionist activists in Buczacz did not emigrate; they obviously had much more to lose. The community leader Mendel Reich and the industrialist Baruch Kramer had donated to the Zionist Federation as early as 1925, while the attorney Dr. Ludwik (Leyzer) Engelberg served as president of the Federation’s Buczacz branch in the 1930s. They were still there when the Germans marched in. But the comments made by Engelberg in January 1939 are telling. Conceding a noticeable “passivity in the ranks of the Zionists in our town,” he ascribed the local difficulties to a general “crisis of Zionism,” a “depressed mood among the Jewish masses” in Galicia, and “the uncertain political situation in Eretz Israel,” which had become “a cause for emigration” from Palestine. Most troubling, perhaps, to this veteran Zionist leader was “the lamentable fact that a large part of the Zionists turn out to be no longer deeply permeated with our ideas of [national] rebirth, and have in fact not even a shred of inner attachment to our movement and flag.”8 This general state of demoralization did not bode well for the future, as the community came under pressures of an entirely unprecedented nature.

  The majority of the Jews in Buczacz—as in Eastern Galicia as a whole—were not politically active; for them the interwar period was largely about recovering from the devastation of World War I and then making ends meet at a time of unremitting economic hardship and growing local and government hostility. The community’s impoverishment was reflected in persistent requests for help from former residents now living overseas, which focused largely on caring for the dead and ensuring the future of the young. One of the postwar community’s first appeals concerned the cemetery, a symbol of its centuries-long existence in Buczacz; as the author and diarist Ansky was told during his brief visit to Buczacz in winter 1917, the Russian occupiers had smashed many of the ancient tombstones. In asking for help to restore the site in 1921, community leaders expressed their confidence that “our landsleute [fellow countrymen] who live far away from Buczacz,” would “have surely not forgotten their deceased parents and close relatives, who rest in our local graveyard.” Repairing the damage was therefore a matter of both communal responsibility and filial respect; it would also preserve the historical record of continuous Jewish life in Buczacz since its early beginnings.9

  More important than preserving the memory of the dead was educating the young. In 1920 the Talmud Torah Association in Buczacz, charged with the restoration and maintenance of this Jewish elementary school, appealed to a Jewish banker and philanthropist in New York for assistance. The school, which had “burned down during the invasion,” had originally catered to the children of the poor, but now that “many middle class families have been ruined by the war,” they too could no longer “afford to educate their children at home.” Because of lack of funds, the association’s ambitious plan for a modern Talmud Torah building that would accommodate up to 1,500 children was never realized; instead the old building was repaired, and elementary education, especially for underprivileged Jewish children, was resumed and maintained until the Soviet occupation in 1939.10

  Many of the poor children were orphans, another tragic consequence of the war. In late 1919 the community established a shelter for children in a small house with two rooms, a kitchen, and an adjacent playground. As many as 130 orphans lived at the shelter in the early postwar years; just over half of them attended public schools, while the younger ones were educated at the shelter, which also provided them with food and, “if possible, clothing.” Many of the children would sleep over at their remaining relatives’ homes or with foster families. Two years later the shelter began a process of “transformation into an orphanage that would provide children with permanent accommodation and care.” The importance placed on nurturing and educating children as a warranty for future Jewish life is indicated by the membership of the orphanage’s executive board, which included some of the most prominent representatives of the community—many of them women of means and influence dedicated to improving the lot of the orphans.11

  Malka Frenkel, born in Buczacz in 1913, lost her mother in the cholera epidemic toward the end of World War I and was among the first children admitted to the orphanage. She recalled that conditions were harsh. The children had to walk far every day to school, and the food was “neither varied nor particularly filling.” Some of the children would bring food packages after spending the Sabbath at home, which they shared with those who had no homes to go to. Malka was fortunate because the director of the orphanage, Mrs. Pohorille, took a liking to her, and her elderly father visited often, at times waiting “for hours in the snow and the rain,” always with a package of bread and fruit. The young girl naturally came under the influence of the mostly Zionist Jewish students who volunteered at the orphanage, “taught the wards, took them on excursions, and helped them overcome obstacles.” She later joined the Chalutz movement and went to a training camp in Kraków, where she met her future husband, a member of another Zionist youth movement; in 1935 they married and emigrated to Palestine.12

  The orphanage accommodated approximately fifty boys and girls between the ages of five and nineteen. The board tried to find positions or scholarships for orphan school graduates. Some clearly internalized the values they had been taught. One was killed fighting for the republic in the Spanish Civil War; another, remembered as an unruly child who had grown up among the villagers and “did not look at all like a Jew,” chose to help fellow Jews during the German occupation, and “by saving the lives of others lost his own.”13

  The orphanage in Buczacz, early 1920s. Source: Sprawozdanie Centralnego Komitetu Opieki nad Żydowskimi Sierotami w Lwowie, za lata 1923–1926 (Lwów, n.d.), 24.

  Most of the graduates, even after further professional training, were unable to find jobs. Indeed young Jews in Poland were generally facing increasing difficulties in gaining entry into secondary schools and universities or finding employment. This was one reason for the establishment in 1927 of a Jewish gymnasium with Polish-language instruction in Buczacz, the first of its kind in the district. The director, Professor Izaak Palek, hoped to expand the first class of twenty-five mostly female students, but the few boys who came from impoverished families had to be subsidized by the school, which itself was funded by “people of good will” in the community, making the prospects for growth quite dim.14

  The state gymnasium fared much better. By 1931 the school had been fully restored as a gymnasium for seven grade levels. But the numbers of minority teachers and students were progressively declining. In 1933 the school director, Tadeusz Pożniak, had a staff of fifteen teachers, of whom only two or three were Jewish and three Ukrainian. That year half of the 227 graduating students were Roman Catholic, well above their share in the local population; Jews and Ukrainians each made up only a quarter of the student body. Three years later, by now directed by Jan Szajter, the faculty had grown to seventeen, but the number of Jewish and Ukrainian teachers remained the same. As for the students, Jews and Ukrainians now each constituted only a fifth of the total. During that time, the gymnasium was also in the process of transitioning to a coed system, a topic of much discussion and debate in pedagogical circles, including in the school’s annual report for 1932–33. But there was no discussion over the declining representation of ethnic minorities in the gymnasium; from the Polish national perspective, this issue,
which had greatly exercised the school prior to World War I, seemed to be well on the way to a happy resolution.15

  Polish students retained fond memories of the gymnasium in the interwar years. Stanisław Kowalski, born in 1921, described it in his postwar memoir as the town’s “warm heart, pulsating with young lives eager for education, knowledge and the mysteries of the past, within which every young human being was to find his place among the people of his nation.” For him this was literally the school of the nation, “where a new generation acquired the basics for development and the spiritual strength to overcome all possible future travails.” Many of Kowalski’s schoolmates ended up on the “endless Siberian routes, from the Urals to icy Kolyma,” in “the Holy Land in the Middle East, the countryside of hospitable England,” or “the battlefields of Monte Cassino, Falaise and Bredy.” But all that time the “memories and feelings” of their youth still “stirred their Buczacz soul,” and their vivid recollections of the gymnasium played an especially “great and important role.” For Kowalski the gymnasium was the culmination of “efforts by the people of Buczacz to establish a school for all the town’s ethnic groups, for the mutual benefit of future generations in the entire district.” But that was more nostalgia than fact.

  In reality the school had been conceived as the incubator of Polish nationalism. The teacher Julian Erdstein, who wrote an essay on the origins of the gymnasium for the last prewar issue of its annual report and was subsequently murdered by the Nazis as a Jew, proudly asserted, “From the very beginning of its existence up to this day the gymnasium was animated by Polish life and culture.” Teofil Ostapowicz, who attended the gymnasium before 1914, recalled that the “youngsters’ patriotic spirit was sustained by soirées enthusiastically organized at school” and often “patronized by one of the Polish teachers.” They were all steeped in Polish Romantic poetry and fiction, reading and writing for nationalist magazines that “united young people and gave them hope for regaining Poland’s independence.” They also trained in the ranks of the Polish Scouts, which prepared them “for the struggle for independence.”16

  Kowalski recognized the continuity between that “image of student life in the first years of the Buczacz gymnasium’s existence” and the “postwar period of independent Poland,” which had “witnessed similar activities with perhaps even more intensive cultivation of Polish education and culture, instilling strong patriotic feelings in the youth.” After so many school graduates had “sacrificed their lives for the great national cause” in World War I, the next generation strove “to reconstruct the homeland” and “build the sound and durable moral and material foundations that would ensure the nation’s liberty.” It was at that point, Kowalski conceded, that the gymnasium became explicitly “a Polish school with a Polish curriculum,” even if he believed that it still maintained “the full rights of the Jewish and Ukrainian minority.”

  That was a matter of perspective; Kowalski remembered that after the war “classes were again filled with Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian youths” and that everyone had “equal opportunities to acquire an education and to create better living conditions for themselves and for the community at large.” Yet the declining figures of minority students, the school’s primary language of instruction, as well as its national-political orientation in general, all pointed in a very different direction. Still, the fact that Kowalski, who was entirely free of the anti-Jewish and anti-Ukrainian prejudices that motivated many of his colleagues, saw things in this manner testifies to the inability of members of one group, however well meaning, to understand the predicament of another, even at a great distance of time. For most Ukrainian and Jewish students, what seemed to Kowalski to be a unifying patriotic spirit merely meant that their own national identity was denied or dismissed and that they could either join the Polish nation by adopting its culture and religion or remain outsiders and aliens. And in the case of the Jews, even wholehearted adoption of Polishness did not always suffice.17

  Kowalski’s role model in the gymnasium as the shaper of Polish patriotism was his mathematics and physics teacher Edward Pelc, who belonged to a postwar generation of educators engaged, as Kowalski described it, in “transforming the old Austrian system into a new Polish and more progressive one.” Soon after arriving in Buczacz in 1929, Pelc’s “name became synonymous with scouting,” which he proceeded to make into “the center of the Polish youths’ lives” to such an extent that “the patriotism of the borderlands became” their “leading theme.” Another “patriot of the Polish borderlands” was the gymnasium chaplain, “whose moral and ethical rules and love for his homeland were a model to be followed by the young generation.” For the chaplain “Poland was the central theme, and young people” served merely as “the human material that would consolidate and maintain its independence.”18

  Jewish gymnasium students could only interpret this Polish nationalism as aggressively exclusive, all the more so as their numbers continued to diminish. By 1936 there were only twelve Jews out of a total of eighty-two students in the two third-grade classes. One of them was thirteen-year-old Yitzhak (Izak Emanuel) Bauer, who recalled that he was one of only six Jews admitted to the school two years earlier. Among the students themselves, ethnic boundaries were not always rigid: Bauer’s best friend in school was Roman Szajter, the director’s son. But the Szajters had come from Silesia and were possibly of ethnic German origin. When Bauer was falsely accused of having shown disrespect to a photo of Marshal Piłsudski, Roman bravely took the blame on himself. During the German invasion in 1941 his friend tried to return home from Lwów, where he was studying; however, Bauer recalled, “the Ukrainians killed him on the way.”

  “Away with the Jews, Poland for the Poles! Poles! If you care about Poland being Poland rather than Judeo-Polonia . . . fight the Jews at every step, at every opportunity. Don’t buy in Jewish shops, promote the idea of antisemitism, because that is what the future of Poland and Poles depends upon!!” Polish anti-Semitic pamphlet, interwar Buczacz. Source: Maurice Wolfthal private collection, Phoenix, Arizona.

  Bauer’s childhood memories were filled with instances of anti-Semitism. In the afternoon Jewish children went to cheder, but on the streets they had to fend for themselves. Bauer remembered going to bathe in the Strypa: “I would put rocks in my pockets, because the gentile kids would lie in wait for me.” In public elementary school “the Christian teacher did not allow” Jewish children “to wear their yarmulkes”; one of his classmates “would run out as soon as the bell rang and put on a hat.” This teacher was “an Endek,” a supporter of the anti-Semitic National Democrats. Yet “whenever he met Grandmother or Mother,” this old-fashioned gentleman “would take off his hat and greet them politely.” In fact, Bauer pointed out, the teacher’s “son and daughter would come to our house.” But even seven decades later he could “never forget standing by the blackboard trying to solve some problem, with him facing me . . . our neighbor, and he says to me, ‘Żydku ci nie ma pożytku,’ meaning, ‘Jew-boy, you are of no use to me.’ To this day I am haunted by this phrase.”19

  Most Jewish youths in Buczacz had no hope of attending the gymnasium and were condemned to eking out a wretched existence as a marginalized minority in a far-off corner of an aggressively nationalist and economically backward new state. The Great Depression and subsequent economic stagnation had a particularly detrimental effect on the Jews of Eastern Galicia, who had never quite recovered from the devastation of World War I and were increasingly impacted by Ukrainian economic boycotts and anti-Jewish government policies. In 1933 the prefect (starosta) of the Buczacz district noted that Jewish “economic activity” had come “to an almost complete standstill” because of “the general economic crisis and the resulting impoverishment of the population.” The main engine of the local economy, “the Jewish merchants and industrialists,” were “struck especially hard by the crisis” because “the fall in the prices of agricultural products and the consequent deterioration of the farmers’ economi
c situation meant that commerce and trade, which are largely in the hands of the Jews, [had] lost their main customer, the peasant, who also found himself in a catastrophic situation.” As the prefect pointed out, this led to “the bankruptcy of several substantial firms, and often the liquidation of entire enterprises,” mostly Jewish owned and previously major providers of jobs in the area. These setbacks resulted in significantly “diminished activity” in Jewish “social life” and “cultural associations.” Only organizations concerned with the welfare of the elderly, children, and adolescents were kept busy by “the enormous number of needy Jews in the district,” but “because of the general impoverishment” in the region, they too were “able to provide only partial assistance.”

  Another consequence was that, apart from the Orthodox, only two major Jewish political organizations were still active: the Non-Party Jewish Economic Bloc, established in 1931 to represent middle-class professionals and artisans, and the Zionists. While the prefect believed the Economic Bloc had “a positive attitude toward the government,” he predicted that even after uniting with the Orthodox it would lose the local community elections to the Zionists, which is indeed what happened, not least thanks to the increasingly anti-Jewish attitude of the government, while the Orthodox came to be represented by the Zionist religious Mizrahi party. The government’s attitude also played a role in what the prefect described as “a rise in radical, indeed communist tendencies among the Jewish youth.”20