by Omer Bartov
Most people had little doubt that the whole undertaking was a farcical sham. The engineer Szymula concluded that the insistence on universal voting “had nothing to do with the number of the voting slips inserted into the polling box, which no one bothered to count, but with the number of voters that one could strike off the eligible voters’ list.” The merchant Leon Szydłowski from the village of Pyszkowcy (Ukrainian: Pyshkivtsi) on the outskirts of Buczacz recalled, “The election card was thrown into the polling box inside an envelope; I don’t know what was written on the card.” But the teacher Maria Wołkowa of Koropiec (Ukrainian: Koropets) said that “the election committee, which was made up of the local population, reported that almost all voting slips were crossed out” or scribbled over with “the worst invectives.”20
Some Poles believed the elections were a Jewish and Ukrainian conspiracy. Szymula found it especially “tasteless and bitter” that “Ukrainian and Jewish agitators went from house to house,” urging people to vote, and that “the elections committee was made up only of Jews and Ukrainians, without a single Pole.” In Podzameczek (Ukrainian: Pidzamochok), as reported by Szymin Siwy, “the Ukrainian Ivan Bereshovskiy” chaired the elections committee, and other committee members “were confidants of the Soviets, especially Jews, Ukrainians and political functionaries of the NKVD.” Similarly the shoemaker Stefan Medyński reported that in Barysz (Ukrainian: Barysh) the election committee was made up only of Jews and Ukrainians, the latter being mostly people “who had just come out of prison, only bandits and thieves, or those who were opposed to the Polish regime.” And the peasant Flondro stated, “The polling lists were put together by communists and the NKVD, especially Ukrainians up to age 30 and Jews, who worked to the detriment of the Poles.” Some observers recognized the pattern of Soviet policies. The law student Zbigniew Waruszyński of Monasterzyska remarked, “The Bolsheviks followed the principle of ‘divide and rule’ by using all the national-Ukrainian and communist-Jewish elements in order to strengthen the terror even more.”21
If the elections were both humiliating and absurd, the terror of unpredictable arrests and mass deportations was experienced as a personal and material catastrophe and a collective national trauma. And although early assertions that up to a million people were deported and almost half a million arrested were widely exaggerated, the current estimate of 315,000 Polish citizens deported to Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the far north of the USSR, and of 110,000 arrested, all within the space of twenty-one months, is still quite staggering.22
Deportations occurred in four main waves: about 140,000 were deported in February 1940; 61,000 in April 1940; 75,000 in June and July 1940, and 36,000 in May and June 1941. Here too Poles were an absolute majority of close to 60 percent; Jews, who made up about 10 percent of the population, were proportionately overrepresented at 22 percent of deportations, followed by over 10 percent of Ukrainians and under 8 percent of Belarusians.
The focus of deportations shifted from Poles in the early waves to Jews in June 1940 and Ukrainians in April and May 1941. Fatalities among deportees, while considerably lower than traditional Polish estimates, were nevertheless appalling, perhaps as many as fifteen thousand by mid-1941. In hindsight only Jews could view themselves as “lucky” for having been deported, considering the well over 90 percent death rate of Jews who remained under the German occupation.23
On February 10, 1940, the Soviets deported thirty-two thousand people from the Tarnopol province to Siberia, including three thousand inhabitants of the Buczacz district. When Witold Janda went to school that day, over a dozen students were missing from his classroom; “overcome with despair,” and despite the intense cold, he and his classmates headed off to the train station. “A tight cordon of NKVD men and police did not allow anyone access to the platform, where a long freight train was standing. The cries of numerous small children and the shrill wailing of women echoed from the carriages. When a few female friends attempted to force their way through the cordon,” they were warded off with “brutal blows.” The children from the school dormitory were not allowed to join their parents on the train: “They were forced to stay behind, alone on the streets of Buczacz, deprived of any means of survival.”
The remaining Polish students and families organized charities to support the abandoned children and to send parcels of food to the deported. Janda’s despised classmate Klajnfisz, a “chubby-cheeked Jew” and “the richest person in our class,” brought “a lot of supplies pilfered from his mother’s well stocked pantry.” Janda was surprised that some Ukrainian students also “participated in these collections.” But then came the devastating second deportation, in April, which “primarily affected the residents of Buczacz,” including “the families of a few of our professors.” A void opened up in the community. “Only half of the original number of students in my class remained,” testified Janda, among whom “Jews and Ukrainians predominated.”
Two months later Janda’s family moved to Lwów, hoping to reunite with his father in German-occupied Poland. But they were swept up in the third deportation, of June 1940, and sent to Arkhangelsk. Janda eventually fought in the Soviet-organized Polish Berling Army, ending the war as an artillery officer in the Battle of Berlin.24
Thirteen-year-old Barbara Piotrowska-Dubik, whose father had been taken prisoner by the Germans, vividly remembered her family’s deportation from Barysz during an ice storm on April 13, 1940: “Early in the morning an NKVD officer came to our house, along with two soldiers with rifles as well as a Ukrainian from Barysz and a Jew we knew with a red armband on his arm, who was quite jolly and amused. The NKVD officer sat at the table and said: ‘Helena Piotrowska Kazimirowna and the three children, wake up and get dressed!’ ” Barbara “could not grasp why we should be so terribly punished.” Six families were brought to an assembly point in the village. “Some wept, others lamented, still others sat quite still, or cursed. The Jew had fulfilled his mission. He extended his hand to my mother, but she did not respond, and he said to us: Goodbye.” At 8:00 a.m. they were taken on wagons under guard to Buczacz. “At the railroad station there was a big crowd and much hue and cry. Our train had 62 freight cars.” They were “shoved and pushed” inside. “No consideration, not even toward the women, the aged and the children. The railroad car [was] dark and crowded.” Among the deportees was a young Ukrainian woman with her children, several Polish families, and a Jewish couple with their child. “Altogether we were 38 people in the car. . . . The doors are bolted with heavy locks. We stand at the station for a long time; what was all the rush for? It is frightfully cold; we have nothing warm to drink. The train departs from Buczacz the following day, Sunday morning, after waiting for an entire day.” The journey lasted two weeks; on April 28 they arrived at their destination, a kolkhoz (collective farm) in Kazakhstan, 2,500 miles from their home.25
Even those spared deportation faced the harsh realities of Soviet rule, often after their families had been shipped to the East. Jan Bojnowski’s parents had come as colonists to the village of Czarnokońce Wielkie (Ukrainian: Velyki Chronokinski), forty miles east of Buczacz, in 1938. As a teenager working at a restaurant in nearby Borszczów (Ukrainian: Borshchiv), Bojnowski recalled that all the Polish officials there were swiftly arrested and deported. In the surrounding countryside many Polish farmers, including some of the seventeen settler families in his village, were “killed with knives and scythes” by their Ukrainian neighbors. Bojnowski’s parents and younger sister were deported in February 1940 and died in exile; he watched the endless “column of sledges loaded with elderly people, adults and children, even babies, wrapped in blankets and down quilts, holding bundles . . . all covered with frost and huddled in horror.” In Borszczów there was a rash of denunciations. “It was enough to be angry with somebody or to say something stupid in the wrong place—and the bloke was dead.”26
Ukrainian perceptions of these events differed dramatically. Petro Pasichnyk, born in 1923, attended the gymnasium in Buczacz under Sovie
t rule; he had no doubt that during that time things were much worse than under the Germans. The Soviets, he said, “behaved like Asiatics.” As far as he could recall, they victimized exclusively Ukrainians: “I remember only that our people were arrested, our intelligentsia—lawyers, doctors.” He vividly recalled, “They would take students straight out of the classroom!” The principal, a Ukrainian historian “linked to the NKVD,” would come into the classroom, “whisper a few words to the teacher, and then say: ‘Such and such, collect your books and prepare to leave.’ The student would go and never come back. Nobody would ask about him, everyone was too afraid.” Four of those students were subsequently shot. Later, when they were withdrawing, the Soviets executed the inmates in the Czortków prison: “It was not enough to just shoot them. . . . But to commit such atrocities—to tear out people’s tongues, gouge out their eyes . . . it was horrible. They were such sadists.” He assumed the Soviets “didn’t touch” the Poles; as for the Jews, of whom “there were plenty” before the war, they simply “collaborated” with the Soviets.27
Like many other Ukrainians, Viktor Petrykevych’s son Bohdan, who was a young teenager at the time, shared Pasichnyk’s view that under Soviet rule “the Ukrainians suffered the worst.” Although he was willing to concede that the Soviets “also arrested Poles,” including “officers, anybody who was in the police,” and “colonists from inner Poland,” he saw this as just punishment because “they had been colonizing Ukrainian lands.” In any case, he believed, none of these actions could be compared to Soviet crimes against Ukrainians; his own uncle, for instance, was arrested: “He was a very good doctor, a surgeon.” The man’s wife pleaded with the authorities to let him go; after he was deported to Siberia she committed suicide, and their baby daughter died of neglect. “People said that the Jews had denounced him, or the Poles,” concluded Bohdan by way of indicating who was guilty of this tragedy.28
Many Jews had an ambivalent response to Soviet rule, both because of their prewar experience in Poland and because of what they knew about Nazi Germany; their experiences also depended a great deal on their social class, politics, and age. For the middle-aged Zionist activist Emanuel Worman (Bazan), the new regime meant liquidation of his bookstore and interrogation “by a Jewish NKVD lieutenant,” to whom he pledged to disavow his former convictions. For the rest of the Soviet occupation he lived “in terror that they would knock on my door at night and take me back to the NKVD and no longer release me.” He later found out that his name had been on “a list of all the Zionist leaders of Buczacz who were to be deported in early July 1941 to the far north of Russia.” Ironically, he was spared that fate by the German invasion.29
Mina Rosner, the recently married daughter of a well-to-do businessman, saw her elderly father lose his business and be reduced to manual labor; she moved with her husband and baby to another town for fear of being identified as class enemies of the state. The teenager Etunia Bauer, also from a wealthy family, recalled that their estate was nationalized, most synagogues were closed down, and the study of Hebrew was prohibited. They now all had to work “for a minimal salary, barely enough to buy a loaf of bread once a week.” Members of her family who had escaped to Buczacz from the German occupation zone “were pulled from their beds, loaded into trucks, and sent to Yakutsk in Siberia,” where some perished. One could be arrested “for any number of crimes real or fabricated,” but unlike under the Germans, “at least they could walk on the streets legally and not in fear of death.”30
For fifteen-year-old Aliza Reinisch (Nir) the occupation began with looting by Ukrainian neighbors: “They forced their way into every store, they took all the merchandise from the Jews; the Russians said that these were rich people who had exploited the workers so now the Ukrainians could do what they liked.” She remembered “one Ukrainian, who was a good friend of Father’s,” saying to him, “Now the good times are over for you, now we can no longer be friends, now it’s our time.” Her uncle was denounced and deported to Siberia, where he died. Hilda Miller (Weitz) was haunted by the thought that had her father not succeeded in saving her uncle and his family from deportation they might have survived the war. Izidor Hecht, whose next-door neighbors were also deported, expressed the same sentiment: “Many of those people who were sent away somehow survived,” whereas “had they stayed in Buczacz, all of them would have certainly been murdered. I still have mixed feelings about all these facts.”31
For working-class lads who had little to lose, as well as for communists, things were different. Mordechai Halpern claimed the Red Army “was welcomed with joy and kisses by the local communists, most of whom were Jews, sons and daughters of families from the religious middle class,” like his own. This reception “enraged quite a few Poles who had lost their independence, as well as the Ukrainians who had been waiting for the Germans.” But Jewish enthusiasm “did not last long,” and even some of the local “communists discovered that this was a false prophet.” Still, “most of them” were initially given “positions in the new administration as senior officials or policemen.” Although Halpern’s father became an agricultural laborer, as a teenager he himself benefited from the new order and gained admission to the gymnasium. Similarly, ten-year-old Pesach Anderman, who remembered that before the war children in school would chant “Jews, go to Palestine,” commented that when the Red Army invaded “we were happy, because we had been told that in Russia there was no hatred of Jews.” But that very day he witnessed a brutal gang rape by Red Army troops, and although “the anti-Semitic taunts ceased” in school, he was aware that “the old communist faithful in town managed to seize positions of power.”32
Gershon (George) Gross, a young man from a working-class family, also recalled that before the war “the gentile kids didn’t like us” and “the teachers called us names.” Conversely, while under the Soviets “the rich people feared that they’d be taken to Siberia,” the authorities “did nothing to us.” Indeed, he maintained, “it was better than under Polish rule” since “the Jews had jobs from the Russians: police, militia.” Simcha Tischler, another young manual worker, agreed that the Soviets “were greeted with joy,” and “most Jewish communists, or even just leftists, as well as those without party affiliations, began working for the Russians. We accepted their rule, it wasn’t anything special.” Unlike Polish times, when “there were rich and poor people,” under Soviet rule “we were all the same.” Still, his father lost his carpentry shop, and the Zionist youth movement to which he had belonged was “eliminated.”33
As the roofer Jakub Szechner put it, the Soviets “kept a tight rein on everyone,” but “there was no peace.” He saw it as a time of unremitting fear and suspicion: “Poles denounced Poles, Ukrainians denounced Ukrainians, and Jews [also] denounced.” Victimization was about class, he believed, not ethnicity: “those who suffered most” at the time “were all members of the intelligentsia: Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles—everybody.” But not everyone shared this view. The young workers Dawid (Ducio) Friedlender, Natan Dunajer, and other young communist activists “hastened to volunteer to help the Soviet authorities in their persecution of Ukrainian nationalists.” Dawid’s younger brother Yehoshua (Ozio) stated, “After the German invasion Ducio regretted that initiative, since at that time the Ukrainian police excused its murderous treatment of the Jews as revenge for the role those Jewish communists had voluntarily played in the deportation of nationalists to Siberia.”34
While most Poles and Ukrainians perceived the Jews as beneficiaries of Soviet rule, many Jews recalled it as a period of oppression, denial of rights, loss of property, and profound uncertainty about the future. To be sure, for some Jews and Ukrainians it also initially appeared to be a time of opportunity and empowerment, however fleeting, especially when compared to their treatment by their former oppressors. This view of victimhood and victimization is in many ways typical of all three major groups: all saw themselves as the main victims of various configurations of the Soviet and German occupations,
and each perceived the persecution of the other two groups as at least partly justified. Many Poles and Ukrainians had no trouble coming up with reasons for punishing Jews; Poles also overwhelmingly supported actions against Ukrainian “bandits”; Ukrainians enthusiastically approved the deportation of Polish colonists. For their part, few Jews in such towns as Buczacz mourned the demise of Poland; subsequently they fervently wished for vengeance against Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis. Each group’s conviction in the uniqueness of its own victimhood thus went hand in hand with a desire to punish those associated with its suffering; this was, in essence, the same kind of reasoning employed so successfully by the Nazis, who consistently presented themselves as victims of those they murdered.35
An anonymous report sent in late 1940 from Western Ukraine to the Polish government in exile epitomized the extent to which certain views remained unchanged despite the dissolution of the state. In their quest “to destroy the Polish nation,” asserted the report, the Soviets were using “the dregs of society”; specifically “excelling in the oppression of the Poles were the Ukrainians and Bolshevized Jews,” in a process whereby initial “lawlessness was replaced by organized terror.” The Soviets had initially targeted Polish elites, along with “those whom the Jews suspected of anti-Semitism.” In the face of what the report described as Ukrainian, and even more so Jewish complicity and duplicity, the Polish victims were said to “bear these atrocities heroically . . . singing the national anthem and sacred hymns as they leave their homeland,” accompanied by thousands of priests who “bring solace to those wretched people.” The merely “several hundred Ukrainian nationalists” deported by the Soviets were apparently targeted on the reasonable grounds that “they posed a threat to Soviet actions.” Only “a few dozen rich Jews, mostly Zionists, and therefore also Jewish nationalists,” were deported, once again for what appeared to be a sound cause. This could hardly compare to the alleged 400,000 Polish deportees—and according to “some sources much higher numbers”—of whom “about 20 percent died.” The competition for victimhood that began with the outbreak of the war and continues to this day was certainly making its mark on these distorted figures and accounts. Significantly, the report made a clear distinction between the deportation of Ukrainians and Jews, which was said to have been “of a clearly political and preventive nature,” and that of Poles, which “was aimed at the destruction of the nation’s substance.” In other words, the Poles were targets of genocide, whereas Soviet actions against Jews and Ukrainians were at worst political persecution and at best security-oriented measures.36