Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Especially in the early 1930s there were still some issues over which Poles and Jews could unite. On July 6, 1932, for instance, the Jewish Economic Bloc and the Craftsmen’s Union (Yad Charutzim) called an assembly in the Great Synagogue to protest “the violence against Jews residing in the German Reich.” Among the five hundred who attended were Deputy Mayor Emanuel Meerengel and Count Artur Potocki, scion of the clan that had owned the city in the early modern era. Afterward the prefect reported, “All speeches expressed opposition to Germany, which was seeking revenge for its defeat in the world war, and therefore lashing out violently at other nations, especially the Jews.” The assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning “the barbaric acts against the Jews by the German parties with Hitler at their head,” called upon the Polish government to “stand on the side of international law and justice,” and solemnly declared, “In case of violence and aggression by Germany, the Jewish population vows to stand by the Polish nation, willing to sacrifice blood and treasure for the threatened Fatherland.”21 But soon after Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor it became clear that Polish and Jewish priorities no longer coincided even on this issue.

  Similarly, in the early 1930s many of the teachers, civil servants, and religious leaders listed by the Polish authorities as being “of Jewish nationality” were still labeled as “loyal to the government and the state” and largely “uninvolved in politics.” But growing poverty and political isolation gradually took their toll both on attitudes toward the state and on commitment to, or at least support for, Jewish causes. By 1935 fundraising for the Jewish National Fund in Buczacz had dropped significantly, not least, it appears, because fewer than a third of Jewish households could pay taxes. Two years later a third of the Jewish households were listed as indigent. Impoverishment obviously set limits on such private institutions as the six-grade Tarbut School, for instance, which could afford a staff of only three teachers and just 130 students, since it relied on donations and tuition. The enterprising principal, Israel Fernhof, sought to gain support for his school by opening the premises to the local branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), where he would also deliver lectures on topics of cultural and political interest. While WIZO filled an important gap especially in middle-class Jewish women’s lives in the increasingly bleak atmosphere of the time, the hundred-odd members did their best to help Jewish education, support poor pregnant women, and raise funds for training women in handicrafts. Chaja Roll, one of the few members who survived the war, recalled that “on Saturday afternoons one could see women streaming from all corners of the city” to the WIZO home, where they attended lectures, public readings, and other events. “I believe it was the first time in the history of Buczacz,” she wrote, “that women gathered on their own and lived their own lives. Not only young girls but also mothers and grandmothers got together and would attentively listen to an interesting lecture.” But this was a small minority; most women had no time for such activities, and most families chose to send their children to the Polish public school, which was free.22

  The second-grade Tarbut School certificate of the eight-year-old Jewish girl Mina Cohen, Buczacz, 1930. Source: BH, 38870.

  One symbol of the community’s decline was the deterioration of the Jewish hospital, a proud accomplishment prior to 1914. Restored and modernized after the war with assistance from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and local fundraising, during the economic crisis of the 1930s the hospital fell into a growing state of disrepair. Similarly, while the General Zionists claimed in 1935 to have become “the strongest group in our town,” and the major Zionist sports associations Makabi (Maccabi) and Hapoel (the Worker) established branches in Buczacz, the reality on the ground for most Jews was of increasing desperation and hopelessness. The double bind of the last years before the outbreak of war presented diminishing economic opportunities in Poland, on the one hand, and increasingly restrictive policies on emigration to Palestine and the rest of the world, on the other.23

  Under these circumstances, in 1936 Mendel Reich, president of the Talmud Torah School and an activist in the local Mizrahi party, appealed for help from Abraham Sommer, the financial secretary of the United Buczaczer Ladies Auxiliary in New York. The Jews of Buczacz, he wrote, were “condemned to wait as if on death row for an execution, without hope for better days to come,” while “everyone around us, even the air we breathe, is conspiring to find a way to destroy us, to crush our existence, to make the lives of the Jews unbearable, and all we can think is ‘from whence cometh my help?’ ” Where could they run? “The lands of immigration have shut their gates, and the Jews have no land of their own. Should we rise up to heaven and live there on air?” Trapped in their city, the Jews of Buczacz were “embittered and depressed”; having been “deprived of rights,” they found themselves “defenseless, abandoned to the whims of the lowliest hooligan.” At a time “when ‘in the streets the sword will make them childless; in their homes terror will reign,’ ” stressed Reich, the Talmud Torah afterschool program had become “our last redoubt, when everything else has already burned to the ground.” And yet, he added, “now we face the threat that the building, which we had built in better times, might be sold because we cannot even pay the interest on the loans to our lenders.” If Jewish education were to be demolished, what hope would there be for the future?24

  The paltry fifty dollars sent from America to help the Talmud Torah School sufficed for no more than some new clothes for the children. But the school hastened to assure the donors, “Our students are striving to progress with God’s help in their studies and we can only hope that they will become scholars and good decent Jews. Many are already in Palestine, working as farmers, craftsmen, teachers and in other professions.” The remaining 175 students were “being instructed spiritually and morally in the ancient and modern Jewish sense.” But as Reich wrote privately to Sommer at the end of 1937, “the air” was “full of anti-Semitic sentiments.” The Jews were being accused, first, of having “sent their God to heaven” and, second, of “not going themselves to heaven, to Mars, or at least to Madagascar, so long as one is rid of them.” Having “lived together on the land for over a thousand years,” Reich wrote in despair, the Poles perceived the Jews as “just an alien hump on their backs” and “each and every one of us as superfluous and an ‘enemy.’ ” For all the “nice slogans” of fascism and socialism, Reich believed that “when translated into action,” they both had “the scent of overt or covert anti-Semitism,” whose “guiding principle is: everything that is Jewish means destruction. Jewish wisdom, Jewish art, culture, morals, even the Divine—if it only comes from a Jewish mind, a Jewish brain, it must be seen as a Jewish conspiracy.” And because “anti-Semitism demands the annihilation of everything Jewish” at any price, it also empowers its adherents, since “in relationship to the Jew, every illiterate is a philosopher.”25

  It was for this reason that until the last moment many people did all they could to leave. Months and weeks before the war, some found themselves caught in limbo between the land of promise and their ancestral home, between hope and despair. Jacob Shapira had been frantically trying to join his child in the United States; his wife had died, and the boy was under the care of Abraham Sommer. In March 1939 Shapira was informed that his “slot in the quota” for an entry visa “would come up no sooner than July or August,” although he had already booked passage on a ship sailing from Amsterdam to New York in early June. He begged Sommer to send him an affidavit to accelerate the process. “I will not be a burden to anyone,” he promised. “I am a diligent and industrious man, have provided for myself until now with dignity and will make an honest living there for myself and my dearest child.”26 It is unlikely that Shapira was ever reunited with his son. No other information on him or his fate is available. All that is left of him is this letter, filed away for decades among Sommer’s papers.

  Some members of the younger generation found it impossi
ble to come to terms with the insufferable reality of political intolerance and economic distress. Portrayed as treasonous by the Polish authorities, they believed in their own heroic narrative at a time when idealism had become a worthless state-generated commodity. Their response was categorized by some as typically Jewish, seeking to erase religious and national differences by subverting the state. Eventually the best they could accomplish was to influence the manner and perhaps the subsequent meaning of their own destruction.

  In summer 1931 three working-class Jewish men in their early twenties established a cell of the Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Ukrainy (KPZU, Communist Party of Western Ukraine) in Buczacz. Although the state police liquidated the cell within a year, communist activity in Buczacz continued under different guises throughout the second half of the interwar period. The activists were mostly Jewish men and women from Buczacz and its environs. While Zvi Heller later described these early young communists as coming “from the academic youth, especially those who had acquired this disposition at the University in Prague,” contemporary Polish police reports stated that they were in fact “mostly Jewish working youth” of only rudimentary education. They were also singularly ineffective. Frequent police raids and arrests, facilitated in large part by a mole within the cell’s executive committee, rendered them more of a specter that could be employed by the authorities for their own propaganda purposes than an actual threat. Attempts by this cell to appeal to the anti-Polish sentiments of Ukrainian nationalists also made no headway in view of the latter’s vehement anticommunist and anti-Semitic ideology. As the regional state police office in Tarnopol pointed out in 1934, the fact that “communist activity in the entire region” had “declined considerably” was directly linked to “Ukrainian nationalist action in rural areas,” which “paralyzes the work of the communists and deprives them of the influence they had previously had among the rural population.” A couple of years later a senior Ukrainian communist from Stanisławów urged the cell to “focus on the workers” in town and to “prepare agricultural strikes” by the “agrarian laborers.” But this was well beyond the capacities of the few remaining Jewish communists in Buczacz, who reportedly were increasingly fearful of the police, short of funds, and generally dejected by the second half of the 1930s. Aware of this problem, the KPZU leadership tried to dilute Jewish membership in the hope of changing the party’s image. Ironically, by 1937 even the police in Buczacz distinguished between Polish communists, labeled loyal to the state, and Jewish party members considered hostile to it.27

  Looked at from a different perspective, the youthful communists of Buczacz shared some similarities with their Zionist counterparts, especially in their rejection of current conditions and quest for a radical solution to what appeared to be an increasingly impossible predicament. From a still wider perspective, they also had much in common with young Ukrainians and to some extent also Poles, who similarly believed in and worked for a radical change in existing conditions. But despite these similarities, or perhaps precisely because of them, these groups found themselves vehemently opposed to each other; any weakening of the social order, let alone external military intervention, could and did trigger untold violence between them, greater than any of these idealistic youths could have ever imagined.

  The real internal threat to Polish rule in Eastern Galicia was posed by the increasingly disgruntled majority Ukrainian population. Especially troubling for the authorities were the radicalized nationalists, who were gaining support among the urban intelligentsia and making inroads with the rural masses. In the long run this conflict, whose roots dated back several centuries, culminated in catastrophe for Poles in the region, although that did not mean a Ukrainian triumph. Caught in the middle between these two rival groups, the Jews were often perceived by both as helping the other side, betraying their neighbors, or simply looking only after their own interests.

  In 1931 two British members of Parliament, James Barr and Rhys Davies, reported to the House of Commons on their recent visit to Eastern Galicia. Seeking to verify reports “alleging harsh treatment of the population of this area by the Polish authorities” and to assess the condition of the Ukrainian population, “the largest minority now under alien rule in any country in Europe,” they also inquired into the origins of the conflict. As Davies saw it, “the cause of all the trouble” was the refusal of the Poles to implement the guarantee of local autonomy given to the Ukrainians with the establishment of independent Poland. Promises made in 1925 to establish self-government in the three provinces of Lwów, Tarnopol, and Stanisławów, which now made up Eastern Galicia, formally known in the interwar period as Eastern Lesser Poland (Małopolska Wschodnia), were also not kept. It was for that reason, argued Davies, that among Ukrainians “vigorous nationalism and resentment ran riot in 1930 to such an extent that arson was committed on a fairly extensive scale.” The violence, attributed largely to the underground and illegal nationalist Ukrainska Viiskova Orhanizatsiya (UVO, Ukrainian Military Organization), founded in 1920, and to its radical successor, the Orhanizatsiya Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), established in 1929, targeted mostly “the large landowners of Polish origin and descent living in eastern Galicia.” In response the Polish government “swooped down on the guilty and innocent Ukrainian peasants alike without much mercy.” In this “systematic attack,” troops, “armed in some cases with machine-guns,” surrounded “several hundred villages,” with “villagers being dragged from their homes, stripped and most brutally beaten, sometimes to death,” after which “heavy tribute was levied” and “hundreds if not thousands were imprisoned.” Additionally “Ukrainian schools were closed down, Ukrainian reading-rooms, libraries and co-operative stores destroyed and other brutalities committed.”

  At the root of the violence were political aspirations but also widespread poverty. Davies was struck by “the abject conditions of the Ukrainian peasants,” while the “very small proportion of the population who may be described as big landowners” were mostly Poles. As for “the landless man,” commented Davies, he is “almost a beggar, and when he finds work his wages income is pitiful in the extreme.” Such families survived on entirely inadequate nutrition; their children often “had only one piece of clothing to cover their nakedness,” and “a large number of the population went bare-footed.” The two MPs simply could not believe that “it would be our lot to find white people in any part of the world compelled to exist under such conditions of poverty.” Things were further exacerbated by constant population growth, an almost total halt of emigration to North America, and state Polonization policies whereby “devious means are employed to sell all parcels of available land to Polish buyers in preference to Ukrainians.” As Barr elaborated in his separate report, following the largely failed Land Reform Bills of 1919 and 1925, the lands of the few large estates that were divided ended up being distributed only to Polish peasants. Although the Ukrainian Cooperative Movement had made gains in exporting produce and training peasants, Barr was appalled by police interventions and restrictions and the authorities’ handing over of Ukrainian monopolies to Polish cooperatives.

  Other causes of resentment included job discrimination, whereby, for instance, seven thousand Ukrainian railway men were replaced with Poles; blatant political manipulation, with voter suppression and falsification of voter lists in the general election of 1928 causing the number of Ukrainian members of Parliament to fall from forty to sixteen; and attempted Polonization through biased educational policies. The act of 1924 had established bilingual schools in areas of mixed population on the basis of local plebiscites, but those were heavily skewed by the authorities, resulting in the number of Ukrainian schools declining from three thousand to seven hundred. In the bilingual schools Polish teachers predominated, so that the language of instruction was actually Polish, whereas many of the surviving Ukrainian schools were shut down during the “pacification” campaign of 1930. At the University of Lwów Ukrainian pro
fessors were required to teach in Polish, which also became the only official language in the law courts, the post office, and the railways. Barr concluded that, “so far, it cannot be said that a very hopeful report of progress” toward reconciliation could be offered.28

  Ukrainian acts of sabotage in Galicia from August to October 1930. Source: AAN-MSZ, 2257, p. 245.

  The Ukrainian enlightenment society Prosvita was a main target of the Polish pacification campaign. In the Buczacz district, as throughout the region, World War I had taken a toll on the society, but by 1930 it had largely recovered, boasting forty-five reading clubs, thirty-two theater troupes, twelve choirs, and two orchestras. Intellectually its offerings remained limited, with just over a dozen lectures per year and a district library of merely 740 volumes. The pacification actions that year almost led to the society’s ruin: membership declined to only 141 people, many of them illiterate. But Polish repression also caused significant radicalization. A decade later, leading local Prosvita activists such as Tadei Kramarchuk ended up serving in the militias and police units that collaborated with the Germans.29

  Buczacz Prosvita members, 1938. Sitting third from the right: Greek Catholic priest Hnatyshyn, later killed as a member of the Ukrainska Povstanska Armiya (UPA, Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Source: Poshuk Archive, Lviv/Buczacz (hereafter PA).

  Prosvita closely monitored the senseless destruction of property and physical violence during the pacification campaign and over the following years leading to the war. Many of its members openly supported the political party Ukrainske natsionalno demokratychne obiednannia (UNDO, Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance), which advocated independence for Western Ukraine. They were also often suspected of being secret members of the OUN, which promoted the use of terrorist methods against the regime. On the eve of World War II, the Prosvita branch in Buczacz had grown to over four hundred members in close to sixty reading clubs throughout the district. Its leaders largely reflected the local Ukrainian elite and shared similar sentiments. But while the authorities perceived it as a threat to Polish hegemony, Prosvita’s self-perception throughout the 1930s was of an association struggling both for funds and for greater support and loyalty from the people it hoped to enlighten. Father Vasyl Melnyk complained as early as 1930 that the general “decline and inertness of the reading clubs” reflected “the aversion shown by citizens and Prosvita members to popular education.” Instead people preferred to indulge in reckless drinking. “A drunkard,” thundered Melnyk, “while drinking alcohol, drinks in fact the tears and blood of his family, his relatives, and his nation.” At a time when “there are no means available to revive Ukrainian cultural institutions, the Ukrainian people in Galicia squander their resources on drink.”30