by Omer Bartov
Volodymyr Kaznovskyi after the war in a Soviet camp. Source: Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhba bezpeki Ukraïny (State Archives Department of the Security Service of Ukraine, hereafter HDA SBU), Ternopil branch, spr. 30466: 1957 indictment of Volodymyr Kaznovskyi.
The policeman Mykhailo Huzar explained that the prisoners were told they were being transferred to the town of Jazłowiec by way of a shortcut, but in fact they were led toward the forest in the direction of the village of Żyznomierz (Ukrainian: Zhyznomyr). “The wives of the prisoners were running behind the column and crying.” As they reached the forest, “a vehicle arrived from which numerous Gestapo men climbed out and joined us. After walking for two-thirds of a mile through the forest, we arrived at a meadow guarded by the Germans. The prisoners were told to sit down at the edge of the meadow, and the [Ukrainian] policemen watched over them. The Germans took one or two men at a time from the group of the prisoners and led them into the forest, where a grave had already been prepared, and shot them there.” When the shooting was over, “the grave with the corpses was covered up by the policemen.”
Many of these policemen knew their victims personally. This too set a pattern, whereby the Jews of Buczacz were later rounded up and at times killed by men who had known them as neighbors, colleagues, classmates, or parents of their children’s friends. Sofia Pelatiuk, the wife of Nagórzanka’s village council chairman Vasyl Pelatiuk, recalled that in July the policeman Danylo Slipenkyi came to their house: “[He] ordered my husband to get dressed and come with him, saying to my husband: ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Pelatiuk, you’ll be back home in two or three days.’ ” Pelatiuk remained incarcerated in the Buczacz prison for weeks, where Sofia brought him food every day. One afternoon, just as she arrived, she saw the prisoners being led away. “I walked behind the convoy with the other wives of the prisoners and saw where they were leading them,” but they were forced by the policemen to turn back. Later the women “went into the forest to look for the bodies. We found the site where they had been shot and the pit into which the bodies had been dumped.”9
Vasyl Pelatiuk. Source: HDA SBU, Ternopil, spr. 30466, appendices.
The early days of the German invasion were filled with terror for the Jews. One witness reported that even “before the Germans occupied our town,” Kaznovskyi became “head of a band that took the law into its own hands” and “shot many Jews, Poles, and other people.” Another testified that the Ukrainians “broke into our homes, destroyed our businesses and plundered whatever fell into their hands.” The radio technician Moshe Wizinger vividly described the terror of seeing the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag flying next to the Nazi swastika from the city hall on July 5. In the evening Mordechai Halpern watched German Army units calmly roll into Buczacz; there was even “one unit on bicycles.” It was, he wrote, “as if they had come on vacation.” But shortly thereafter he saw a captured Red Army soldier denounced by his own comrades as a Jew and shot out of hand by the Germans.10
Violence was swift and ubiquitous. According to Wizinger, on the first night of the occupation “German soldiers, led by the Ukrainian dregs, broke into Jewish houses and raped young Jewish girls.” The businessman Isidor Gelbart saw women being “hauled out of Jewish homes for cleaning work and mishandled” by the Ukrainian policemen. Subsequently, others reported, hundreds of Jews were forced every day to “sweep streets, remove debris,” and “clean the public latrine pits,” while being subjected to “severe beatings” as they worked. Orthodox Jews were a favorite target; Germans and Ukrainians chased them through the streets, “beat them, shaved their beards, tortured them, burned their religious symbols, etc.”11
There were some exceptions to the mayhem and murder. Shmuel Rosen was given a loaf of bread by a German Army cook, who said, “Who knows, maybe one day my children too will be begging for bread.” Gelbart described Ivan Bobyk, the newly appointed Ukrainian city mayor, as “a kind, decent, and unprejudiced man, who tried to help the Jews as much as he could.” Gelbart believed that “compared to other cities, the Christian population of Buczacz was (objectively perceived to be) tolerant,” at least as long as one “did not have particular enemies” among the gentiles. But most Jews recalled those early weeks as being filled with sporadic and at times murderous violence by Ukrainian activists, local hooligans, and unruly Wehrmacht troops. Jews were also targeted in the initial wave of settling political accounts. For instance, Wizinger told of armed Ukrainians breaking into the “houses of former communist activists” and hauling them out: “A few days later their bodies were found terribly mutilated, usually outside the city in some pit or swamp.” The population was terrorized and “people could not sleep at night” since “no one knew whether he would be the next victim.” A delegation of Jewish community leaders appealed to the respected Ukrainian optometrist Volodymyr Hamerskyi, who assured them, “The Ukrainian intelligentsia does not support the murder of the Jews.” Unfortunately, he added, “those who are ruling now are the leaders of the previously secret Ukrainian bands,” i.e., the OUN. Hamerskyi hoped “that once the Germans took over power, the atmosphere in town would return to normal.” But as the Germans monopolized violence, they also systematized the killing.12
The old Ukrainian elite did intervene after “the Great Synagogue was gutted, the furnishings inside destroyed, the silver candelabras looted and many of the holy books thrown on the floor.” The hooligans carried the Torah scrolls to the bridge leading to the Basilian monastery, where they “were unbound with one end attached to the top of the bridge and the other reaching almost all the way down to the water.” This sacrilege “provoked a harsh protest by the Ukrainian priests, who demanded categorically from the leader of the Ukrainian bands, Dankovych, to stop profaning holy sites.” The Greek Catholic abbot even “proposed to the Jews to bring the scrolls to the monastery where they would be safe.” This was not the only time that local Christian leaders intervened to save Jewish religious items. In spring 1943 Samuel Rosental with several other Jews brought forty-five Torah scrolls and other objects to the Basilian monastery for safekeeping, and a couple of months later they hid the remaining twenty scrolls with the local Roman Catholic priest. Even as the community was massacred, many of these scrolls survived.13
As the Germans tightened their grip on the city in August 1941, they imposed the wearing of white armbands with a blue Star of David, banned Jews from walking on the main streets, and ordered them to take off their hats whenever encountering a German, all on pain of death. They also demonstrated their predilection for extortion, arresting Jewish community leaders and threatening to kill them unless paid a ransom of one million rubles. Once the money was paid, the community was ordered to establish a Judenrat and Ordnungsdienst (OD, Jewish police).14 Judenrat members, who represented a cross-section of the local Jewish elite, served their oppressors exceedingly well, even as they tried, in different ways, to save at least part of their community. Some of them illustrated the capacity of genocide to soil and implicate all too many of those who come into contact with it. The Judenrat’s enforcement agency, the Ordnungsdienst, which numbered up to thirty men, had a particularly bad reputation. Many survivors never forgave those who collaborated with the Germans; others saw redeeming features in individual Judenrat and OD men. Some changed their opinions over time; in published accounts the most incriminating details about certain individuals and actions were often left out by the witnesses or expunged by the editors.
Working with the enemy, even if with the avowed intention of helping the community, presented those in positions of relative authority with impossible choices. Isidor Gelbart asserted that, “compared to other Jewish councils,” the Buczacz Judenrat “was considered very good, because within the constraints of its powers it took care of the public’s welfare.” The teenager Izaak Szwarc saw it as “a kind of ‘labor office,’ to which all German demands for workers were directed,” and hence a great improvement over the haphazard seizure of Jews for work by the Germans and the Ukrainian poli
ce. He praised it for its efforts to provide housing for the “thousands of Jews evicted from Subcarpathia,” who “inundated Buczacz” in summer 1941, shortly before being murdered in Kamieniec Podolski. But he asserted that the Judenrat members “did not see, at least not at the beginning, that they would ultimately become a tool of the Gestapo.”15 Indeed, while he agreed that “collaboration by the Buczacz Judenrat was far more limited than that of many other Jewish councils,” Szwarc concluded that it would be “better not to speak about it, especially during the period in which Baruch Kramer presided over it.” He was even more disgusted with “the disgraceful actions of the Ordnungsdienst, which at the height of its degeneration and depravity was under command of M.A. [Mojżesz Albrecht].” In his first testimony, given in 1945, Szwarc was even more scathing, stressing that from the very beginning, “the wealthy, helped by the Judenrat, were able to buy their release” from serving in the murderous forced labor camps of Kamionki, Borki Wielkie, and Hłuboczek Wielki (Ukrainian: Kamyanky, Velyki Birky, Velykyi Hlybochok), and “instead of them, the Judenrat chose the poor.”16
Jews deported to Buczacz from the surrounding communities. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-53d.
Over time the composition of the Judenrat also changed for the worse. Mendel Reich, the first chairman, was described as “a good Jew, an intelligent and honest man,” nominated to his position by the town’s venerable rabbi, Shraga Feivel Willig. But neither he nor his two immediate successors could withstand the pressure for long and either resigned or fled. The last chairman, Baruch Kramer, was described as “more a collaborator than a Jew.” As Shmuel Rosen put it, Kramer was “a veritable bandit,” a former Hasid who “shaved his beard under the Germans and became their servant” to such an extent that “during roundups he would walk around with a hatchet and betray the hiding places of the Jews.” He also reportedly “amused himself with the Germans and forced young Jewish women to come to such amusements.”17
Rosen described Dr. Bernhard Seifer, another prominent member of the community, as the “number two bandit” on the Judenrat. He represented one more example of the tension between seeking to help the community and relentless self-preservation, making the most of the tenuous but also critical authority given the Judenrat by the Germans—even as it became ever clearer that the occupiers’ ultimate goal was total extermination. Halpern also claimed that Seifer had “played a particularly disgraceful role” precisely because, “in his capacity as physician, his job was to determine the medical condition of Jewish workers.” He therefore “extorted vast sums of money from Jews by promising to release them from the most dangerous assignments,” while “the sick were actually sent to the most difficult labor where, unable to withstand the heavy burden, they perished.” Halpern found it an outrage that in 1948 Seifer was “still alive and liv[ing] abroad,” one of only two Judenrat members who survived the war. According to Wizinger, in spring 1943 Seifer and Kramer took exorbitant bribes to allow surviving Jews to enter the newly erected labor camp in Buczacz, considered the last remaining safe haven in the city: “In this manner the two-hundred richest Jewish families found their way into the camp,” while the rest of the population were deported to other towns and either “slain on the way” or murdered shortly after their arrival. Rosen concluded that because Seifer had “traded with people” in this manner, by the time Buczacz was liberated for the first time, in March 1944, “apart from a handful of decent people, only the dregs survived: policemen and informers”; most of these people were also murdered after the Germans retook the city in April.18
Seifer was spotted after the war in Łódź and was subsequently rumored to be living in Paris, England, South America, or Australia. In June 1946 he wrote to Abraham Sommer in New York to provide his own version of events: “People react in different ways to human wickedness, which has no limits, but I owe you an explanation, since you are my friend.” Seifer was making no apologies. The day after the Germans appointed Mendel Reich as head of the Judenrat, he wrote, they ordered Reich “to supplement the list with the name of a doctor,” who would direct the Jewish hospital. “As M. Reich was my friend, he gave my name without asking for my permission and I started organizing the hospital.” Even Seifer’s harshest critics, such as Wizinger, conceded that he had “managed, under the most difficult circumstances, to gather a very professional team and to acquire medicines that were officially banned.” As for the systematic corruption of internal Jewish rule, Seifer put the blame on Reich, otherwise “a wonderful man,” because of his naïve belief that he could “win over at least the local Germans by offering them some gifts.” Since “the demands of the Germans were insatiable,” the Judenrat had no choice but “to impose taxes” whose revenues would allow it to “buy those items from the Jews” and deliver them to the Germans. This was at best only partly true, since the Jewish police often forcibly confiscated whatever it wished.19
Seifer claimed that early on he had heard from one of his German patients “that Hitler had undoubtedly condemned us to death”; Seifer consequently demanded from the Judenrat that it “allow young people to go to the forest” and “to buy weapons,” believing that “it was better to be killed fighting than simply to wait.” But, he asserted, “no one else wanted to believe that such a cruel sentence could be carried out.” At the same time, he also heaped praise on Baruch Kramer, whom he described as “a very brave man,” and generally depicted the Judenrat of Buczacz as “the best” of its kind throughout the region, “the only oasis in Poland where there was no ghetto at all” and “where the mayor disclosed the time of the roundups” in advance, as did the “chief of the gendarmerie.” No wonder, he concluded, that “Jews from all other areas kept coming to Buczacz.” Much of this was untrue: all other accounts presented Seifer as a strong opponent of the resistance; a ghetto was in fact created in Buczacz, although, as was common in the area, it was “open” in the sense of not being surrounded by a fence; and while Seifer may have been told in advance of roundups thanks to his good connections with local Germans, that information did not reach much of the community.20
As hospital director, Seifer “had to examine and approve every man referred to labor” and “could not exempt everyone”; hence “whoever was referred became my enemy.” He admitted that the Judenrat had been “deluding itself into thinking that as long as the Jews were working they were useful” to the Germans and “therefore safe.” But he insisted that despite the “tragedy” of June 1943, when the last remaining Jews of Buczacz were murdered, “the work of Reich and Kramer was not quite in vain,” since at the first liberation “over 1,000 human shadows emerged from the forests,” making it into “the only town in Europe which could boast such a number of survivors.” Consequently, he exclaimed, one “could not possibly have any reason to be ashamed” of having belonged to the Judenrat. “I knew those people and their work,” and “no one should sling mud” at them. Such accusations had to do with a certain postwar “psychosis in Europe, mostly provoked by the Jews in Palestine and those who were in Russia during the war, which claimed that every Jew in Europe who survived had obviously collaborated with the Germans.” That was just “a downright lie.”
In the immediate postwar context Seifer had little hope of convincing anyone of his version; others attributed the initially high survival rate of Buczacz’s Jews to the resistance, which Seifer had opposed, and certainly not to the Judenrat. He concluded his letter with these somber words: “Under the present circumstances, since we shall probably never meet again in this life, please attach these pages to the book on Buczacz that should spring forth from amongst you, as fully worthy of credence, coming from a man whose life is over and who craves only death, in the face of which I am sending you this explanation. What else can I add? I make no excuses, because I have a clean conscience.”21 He then vanished from sight. His letter was never included in any publication on Buczacz; it was a self-serving statement filled with distortions, half-truths, and blatant lies, and lacked any hint o
f remorse. But it did reveal something about how decent men in dark times can become useful instruments in the realization of genocide.
Shmuel Rosen as a lad in Buczacz. Source: Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (hereafter YVA), 3592/3.
There were also instances of personal courage. Wizinger declared that Jakob Ebenstein, “who, during his few months at the Judenrat, had become hated by everyone and was branded an agent of the Gestapo, died a hero’s death.” During the roundup on November 1942 Ebenstein was ordered to help the Germans search for bunkers, but when they began “demolishing one of them,” he “said that he would guarantee with his own head that searching there was useless.” Once the German “started pulling the Jews out of there, Ebenstein figured that his end had come, [so he] grabbed a hatchet and tried to strike the Gestapo man. At the same moment another soldier shot him.” According to Emanuel Worman, Ebenstein’s own family was hiding in the bunker, which was why he had “vowed with his life that no one was there.” In any case, Ebenstein “had risked his life to save others: This is a fact that people should know.”22