by Omer Bartov
We may wonder what German officials in Berlin made of this Ukrainian attraction to the Olympians of National Socialism. Clearly in the grand scheme of things, the interethnic squabbles in Galicia and the hopes of Ukrainian nationalists for German help in establishing an independent state counted for little. The Reich was about to invade Poland and hand over its eastern territories, including their noisy ethnic minorities, to the Soviets; beyond that interim phase, Hitler had far greater plans to create a German “living space” in the East, and a Ukrainian state certainly had no place there.
War was about to break out just as the conflict between Poles and Ukrainians reached the boiling point. For Galicia and its people this meant that the armed confrontation would unleash fraternal violence on a scale and of a nature that even this region had never experienced before. That was of little concern to Hitler and Stalin, and might even prove amenable to their policies of deportation and genocide. But for the people on the ground this ethnic struggle took on a life of its own, related to but also independent of the larger war, shaping their conduct toward their neighbors, and determining their memories of those years long after the fighting died down and the map had been irreversibly changed.
Dr. Gebhard Seelos, posted as consul to the newly opened German consulate in Lwów merely five months before the outbreak of war, followed events in this ethnically convulsed region right up to its takeover by the Soviets. In late July 1939 he reported on “the bestial manner in which Polish police units operate without any reason against entire Ukrainian villages and do not abstain even from murder.” In one case, a motorized and cavalry police formation numbering several hundred men surrounded a village, severely beat two dozen men and women, destroyed food stores, and paraded some sixty peasants through the village dressed in a manner meant to ridicule Ukrainian national pride. Many more similar cases were detailed by the consul, including one in which a Polish officer “forced people out of their homes with curses and destroyed national pictures,” not least a portrait of the national poet Taras Shevchenko, exclaiming, “A Jew like that should hang in the outhouse.”
Seelos’s last report, sent in early August 1939, assessed the mood of the Ukrainian population and contemplated its potential response to the increasingly likely war between Germany and Poland. Fearing the future, the Poles had “resorted in the last few days to mass arrests,” intended “to weaken the leadership echelons of the Ukrainians” and therefore “directed first and foremost at the clergy, doctors, attorneys, teachers and functionaries of economic institutions.” This attempted destruction of the elites, later employed with devastating effect by the Soviets and the Nazis, would prove counterproductive since it removed those elements that might have exercised more control over the extremists. But Seelos had no doubt that “in case of an armed conflict between Germany and Poland, the Ukrainians” would “rise up as one man . . . take over the Polish estates and the isolated new Polish settlements in Eastern Galicia within a few days,” and “drive out or slaughter the Poles.” He predicted that “within one to two weeks following the outbreak of a general uprising in Galicia the entire land would be in Ukrainian hands, save for the overwhelmingly Polish towns and sites occupied with garrisons or border police barracks.”56 The writing was on the wall, but in Berlin no one was paying attention or cared much about the region. Even Seelos, who soon thereafter would desperately try to return to the Reich, could not anticipate the scale of the horror that was about to envelope Galicia.
Chapter 4
SOVIET POWER
The poet Nairi Zarian recites from his work to young readers in Buczacz, 1940. Source: Derzhavnyi arkhiv Ternopilskoi oblasti (State Archive of Ternopil oblast): Za Nove Zhyttia (For a New Life), December 19, 1940, p.3. One thousand copies of this Ukrainian-language newspaper were published daily and sold for fifty kopeks each by the Buczacz District Committee of the Communist Party of Soviet Ukraine. The Armenian Zarian (Hayastan Eghiazarian), born in 1900 near Van in the Ottoman Empire, was the only member of his family to survive the genocide of 1915. He later moved to Russia; long accused of denouncing fellow writers, he died in Yerevan in 1969.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Just over two weeks later, on September 17, in accordance with the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, the Red Army rolled into Eastern Poland. Izidor Hecht, nicknamed Junk and later known as Viktor Gekht, was eight years old at the time; he remembered that Red Army troops marching into Buczacz handed the children little red stars. Jadwiga-Wanda Turkowa recalled that the Soviets were “greeted with applause by a small group of Ukrainians and Jews.” The teenager Witold Janda, like many other witnesses, was taken aback by the Soviet troops’ response to the relative prosperity and modernity of Buczacz, as they stripped bare the shelves of the stores, covered their arms with wristwatches, and marveled at the miracle of running water and flush toilets.1
The Ukrainian gymnasium teacher Viktor Petrykevych, who was teaching at the time in Stanisławów, wrote in his diary that following the German invasion but before the Soviet intervention the Poles in the city were “in a very gloomy and resigned mood.” Conversely the Ukrainians were exhibiting surprising “optimism,” not least because “each and every one of us, whether educated or common men, has personally witnessed our [national] annihilation; and this experience stirs us to rejoice over the defeat” of the Polish state. But when the Red Army neared Stanisławów on the morning of September 19, the sight of “masses of people, mainly Jews, standing on both sides of the street and waiting for the Bolsheviks” clearly troubled Petrykevych. As the first tank drove into town, “the assembled Judeo-communists were overcome with triumphant emotions. The tank was covered with flowers and garlands,” and when it stopped for a moment “some people leaped” on it and “began cheering the soldiers and kissing them,” calling out, “Long live the USSR! Long live Stalin! Long live Soviet Ukraine!” This fervent welcome, wrote Petrykevych, “was performed mainly by the Jewish proletariat,” although “now and then one could see a Ukrainian or a Pole.” It was proof of “the power of the Jewish element in the cities,” which included also “the Jewish bourgeoisie and plutocracy,” who were soon “strolling down the streets, rejoicing that Hitler had not come to the city.”2
Much of the Polish population in the region experienced this second invasion as a traumatic coup de grâce that put a definitive end to the Second Republic, and also as a sociopolitical upheaval that inverted the order of things. Foreign occupation was shocking enough, but in its immediate wake, those national minorities that had been under the thumb of the Polish authorities, the Ukrainians and even more so the Jews, now had the upper hand, as the Soviets used them to enforce their rule. It was indeed a world turned upside down. According to the construction engineer Stefan Szymula, in Buczacz “the leadership of the city administration was taken over by the Polish Jew Segal, who had spent several years in a Polish prison because of his communist views.” The police too were initially “organized independently” of the Soviets and “recruited from local Ukrainians and Jews.” Turkowa similarly remembered that “Segal—a Jew—was the town mayor, and his assistants and helpers of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] were Frost, a roofer, and Goldberg, a coachman, also Jews.” She had no doubt that “local elements were informing” the Soviets “who should be arrested.” Jan Biedroń, a district fire brigade instructor from Buczacz, claimed that as soon as the Soviets marched in, “the Jewish scum and criminals took over” and “immediately began to destroy everything Polish,” even as they “incited the Soviets to carry out harassment and arrests.” To his mind it was such “denunciations by the local population” that triggered the regime’s “mass arrests of Poles” and the interrogations in which “false statements were extracted” from the victims, resulting in their families being “subjected to repressions of all kinds,” including eviction from their home.3
The overwhelming sense of loss and resentment the Polish elites felt wa
s articulated succinctly by Jadwiga Janicka, the wife of an army captain. “At the moment of the Red Army’s invasion,” she testified, “an indescribable depression dominated the Polish population. Conversely, there was lively enthusiasm among the Jews and the Ukrainians.” As the district and city administration of Buczacz were taken over by “the local Jews—the greatest scum,” arrests were also carried out by “local militiamen, recruited primarily from the Jews and Ukrainians.” Janicka was appalled to discover that the new “head of the prison was a Jew, the coachman Goldberg.” Stanisław Pawłowski, a former Polish state police detective superintendent, commented along precisely the same lines, emphasizing how disconcerting it was to find that “those in charge of all offices were communists who before the war had served time in prison.” The brutal methods now employed in the prison were described by the grocer Wacław Mroczkowski, who noted that “interrogations were conducted with weapons and rubber truncheons in hand, mostly in the presence of three or four NKVD men and an officer. . . . They hit until they drew blood and broke bones; outside the prison they placed a generator, which was intended to drown out the screams of the prisoners.” He too had no doubt that “the torture was done with the assistance of local communists and Jews.” The Polish farmer Władysław Bożek said his house was regularly raided by local Ukrainians. Attempts at self-defense only brought police raids, arrests, and confiscations of weapons, so that “the Ukrainians could now act against the Poles with impunity,” while police inspections, as the peasant Antoni Bodaj testified, were also “often followed by plundering and destruction,” in which the Soviet authorities “were helped by Ukrainian militiamen.”4
Reports from the rural areas surrounding the city of Buczacz contain many more accounts of Ukrainian violence just before and in the early phases of the Soviet occupation. Maria Bogusz, a twenty-four-year-old Polish settler from the village of Trościniec (Ukrainian: Trostyanets), related that as soon as the war broke out the Ukrainians “began to torment us and asserted that we are on their land.” On August 28 they burned down the house of the teacher at the local Polish school, hoping that the fire “would kill all the Poles” since “on this street only Poles lived; but the wind changed direction and within two hours 160 houses burned down, homes of Poles and Ruthenians, and only ashes remained.” Józef Flondro of the same village recalled that the Ukrainians also “murdered the estate owners . . . all civil servants, policemen, foresters . . . and even wealthy house owners. Power was taken over by the worst human element on earth, only bandits, thieves, and criminals.” His neighbor, Canon Franciszek Bosowski, commented, “The NKVD officials called for a village meeting and asked the Ukrainians what they wanted, and they said that they wanted to take over the property of the colonizers and settlers.”5
Polish accounts of Ukrainian and Jewish collaboration often refused to acknowledge that these groups had good reasons to welcome the removal of Polish rule, even as they profoundly misunderstood the nature of Stalin’s regime. Quickly forgetting their two-decades-long suppression of Ukrainian national aspirations and increasing anti-Jewish measures, Poles now felt they had been stabbed in the back by disloyal national minorities and associated their loss of independence and subsequent mass deportations by the Soviet authorities with Ukrainian nationalism and Jewish communism. The latter allegation, encapsulated in the Polish term żydokomuna, or Judeo-communism, was used during the war and in its immediate aftermath to explain popular Polish violence against Jews as a regrettable but understandable response to collective treason.
The early wave of fraternal killing evoked questions about the meaning and reality of interethnic relations, friendships, and communities, certainly among Poles and Ukrainians, who frequently intermarried, but also among Jews, who recalled many gentile friends and acquaintances. People repeatedly asked, Why did our neighbors, classmates, teachers, colleagues, friends, even family members turn their backs on us, betray us to the perpetrators, or join in the killing? The scale of the horror was such that survivors tended to paint an idyllic past of coexistence, even as they portrayed their victimizers as belonging to an essentially murderous or traitorous group, in a mirror image of how they were being perceived by their persecutors. The intimacy of friendships that served as a barrier to stereotypes was now transformed into an intimacy of violence that strove to eradicate personal qualms by inflicting gratuitous pain.
The Polish priest Ludwik Rutyna, born in Buczacz in 1917, conceded that while prewar Buczacz was “populated primarily by national minorities” nevertheless “the Polish side had the hegemony” and viewed itself as superior to Ukrainians, marginalizing them socially and professionally, and thereby creating “antagonism against the Poles.” But he was also convinced that “certain circles of Jews and communists” had acted as “a fifth column,” were “supported from abroad,” and “prepared the local society for a future war.” Furthermore, he insisted, not only was “commerce overwhelmingly in Jewish hands,” but “their education in the synagogues and in certain circles was guided by the will to dominate their surroundings.” This naturally led to the establishment of Polish “self-defense organizations” (samoobrona), intended “to finally get rid of Jewish hegemony” by way of boycotts of their businesses and professional services. Priests such as himself, observed Rutyna, had “understanding for the necessity of self-defense, but did not create feelings of animosity against Jews, or against Ukrainians,” even if “it certainly did happen that a priest would warn his congregation to beware of being enslaved,” all in the spirit of “self-defense aimed at enlightening people and raising their consciousness.”
Rutyna was also convinced that Soviet rule in Buczacz was supported “mostly by Jews and Ukrainians,” who “spontaneously organized and greeted the Soviets with flowers” when they arrived. Later, he recalled, they “used to say to us Poles: ‘Your time is over, ours has arrived.’ ” Since the Soviets had no idea whom to arrest, “the local Jews took this task upon themselves, walked around and pointed at people”; “with communist armbands and rifles,” he quipped, “they already were great warriors.” He recollected the arrests with horror: “I saw how they threw their captives like cattle into the truck and sat on top of them with their rifles and took them away. These were teachers, people from the administration,” whom “they unfortunately all later slowly murdered.”
Father Ludwik Rutyna in the Roman Catholic church in Buczacz, 2007. Photo by the author.
Rutyna’s own opposition to physical violence was, in his words, practical, since “the enemy becomes a martyr through his suffering.” It was an enemy he knew well, since he had visited the synagogue on numerous occasions and had Jewish friends; some even came to his home, where they “had a good time.” One friend was his classmate Engelberg, whose father, a water mill owner, was a “progressive Jew, who already ate sausage and bacon with the peasants.” Rutyna, who lived nearby, often went swimming with the younger Engelberg, but the lad was eventually “uncovered as a member of a communist association” and expelled from the gymnasium. Shortly after the Soviet takeover Rutyna encountered him again, this time as a Red Army officer; hearing that Rutyna was desperately trying to return to the theological seminary in Lwów, Engelberg swiftly arranged a travel permit for him.6
Władysław Hałkiewicz, born in 1914 and raised in Buczacz, worked in the local power plant from 1937 to 1944. Before the war he had good relations with members of the Jewish intelligentsia. But “the destitute Jews belonged to the communist party,” and the local cell of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine constituted “a small group made up only of Jews.” Conversely, “there was not a single Jew” in the government-controlled power plant. But when Hałkiewicz returned from the war in October 1939, everything had changed. Now the vice mayor was “Segal, a Jew and a communist,” who had “been expelled from Israel,” or rather Mandatory Palestine, “because of his communism.” Segal asked Hałkiewicz to “restore order in the power plant,” fearing that otherwise “those idiots [i.e., the Bols
heviks] will burn everything down.” Now many of the workers in the plant were Jews: “They were pleased to see me arriving and together we restored order.” Not only did Hałkiewicz find that “Jews are well-behaved people,” but he also got along with the two Jewish plant directors; the first, he said, was “a very intelligent fellow” called Weinstock or Heller, while his replacement, also “a very decent fellow,” was an engineer from Tarnopol named Cyzys. Noted Hałkiewicz, “During the Bolshevik period I was the only Pole working at the power plant in a managerial position; I was allowed to remain in this position because Jews helped me, since the official view was that I had ‘erred.’ ”
At the same time, Hałkiewicz maintained, “the destitute Jews helped the Soviets,” not least by denouncing Polish officers trying to flee across the border or pointing out family members who had stayed behind. Many Ukrainian peasants too denounced Poles, especially colonists, “because they wanted to rob them” of their property and to reclaim the land allocated to Poles by the previous Polish government.7
Jadwiga Kozarska-Dworska, who lived in Buczacz until 1941, had similarly ambivalent recollections. As a child she played with Jewish and Ukrainian classmates, and at the gymnasium, she insisted, “there was no differentiation between Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.” There were also Jewish teachers, such as Weingarten, “a wonderful man” who “taught physics and chemistry,” and “Korngut, who taught Latin.” The tolerant atmosphere at the gymnasium, she believed, was reflected in the school’s practice of celebrating both Roman and Greek Catholic holidays; the Jews were simply “allowed not to come to school” during their holidays. In her view, “the problem of nationality did not exist for us”; it was primarily “the problem of social origins.” From this perspective, Kozarska believed that Jewish children were “the best students” not only because they “had to read and write at preschool age” while attending cheder, but also because most of them “came from poor families” and had to excel in order to receive the state subsidy and to have better job prospects, considering that they had little likelihood of civil service positions reserved for ethnic Poles: “In Jewish families they used to say: ‘You have to have something in your head.’ ” When her own father, who belonged to the landed gentry, “dropped out of the gymnasium in Tarnów,” his father said, “ ‘He can take the liberty of not completing it.’ ”