Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Schematic map of Buczacz in late spring 1943, as sketched for postwar German trials. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42-869-Skizze.

  Chapter 6

  THE DAILY LIFE OF GENOCIDE

  Bodies exhumed in 1944 by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission on Fedor Hill. The victims were likely former Soviet officials executed by the Germans in early August 1941 on Fedor Hill, halfway between Buczacz and Żyznomierz. Source: HDA SBU, Ternopil, spr. 30466, appendices.

  Most of what we know about the daily life of Jews in Buczacz comes to us from accounts by a handful of survivors. Even fewer voices can be heard of those who left behind letters or diaries before they perished, often expressing sentiments of love and compassion, so sorely lacking in their surroundings.

  “I am writing you the last letter of my life,” wrote Leon Rosen to his remaining children on October 4, 1943, “because after four months of squatting in a goat pen with three goats—it is impossible to stand up here—I must hand myself in to the Gestapo and ask them to shoot me, as I can . . . no longer endure these conditions. I have only suffered in the hope that I would perhaps still see you, but sadly I have no more strength.”

  In February that year the Rosen family was ordered into the ghetto of Buczacz and found room in the house of a former school director. “It was there that your beloved dear Mother was discovered and shot together with the Balin family in the hallway [of the house] on April 13, 1943,” wrote Rosen. “The beloved Francia, your dear sister, was also discovered there and along with many hundreds of others was shot on the Fedor and thrown into a mass grave.” Other friends and family members were murdered in quick succession: “Zosia Rosenman with her father and sister” were ordered to move to the town of Tłuste (Ukrainian: Tovste), twenty-five miles southeast of Buczacz, but “were killed on the way. Those who remained here in Buczacz were taken to the Fedor and shot,” including “our beloved Frydzia Lipka and all her children.” In September “the parents of the beloved Malka were found in a bunker in the city . . . and sadly shot, along with the beloved Lelka.” As for Rosen himself, “I was in a forest and was robbed and stabbed by bandits, all I have left is the shirt I am wearing, without any other clothes, not a penny, I must go and report myself so as to put an end to my life. Dear children, stay healthy and many kisses, your Father, Leon.”1

  Children too found themselves isolated and alone. “Dear Daddy,” wrote Duzio R. from his hiding place near Tłuste, “I am really surprised that you have not written me anything. . . . Must I add worries about you to my own misfortune and that awful wait for death?” It appears that the father was either in Buczacz or Czortków. Duzio was also taking care of his younger sister, Klara: “Our suffering is unbelievable. I cannot see any solution, and I have actually resigned myself to the thought that I will die. The only thing that breaks my heart is the thought that I may cause you trouble. Despite all my efforts, I have not been able to find any place for Klara. This girl is an angel. She begs me insistently to go to you. But my conscience will not allow me to leave her alone when she is in need.” The children were hiding in a Polish village. “Yesterday there was much panic. Many militiamen came to Tłuste. We were sure there would be an action. We spent the night in the field and almost froze to death. I am ill. . . . My bones are aching terribly, but that’s nothing. I cannot spend the night in the village, because the Poles themselves are afraid. Everyone is shattered. . . . I wish I could see you again.” But the children likely never found their father. As their situation became increasingly desperate, Duzio reported, “Klara asks God to cut short our suffering.” He too was losing hope. “I am begging you again,” the boy wrote his father, “do save us.” As the children fled to ever more remote villages, conditions kept deteriorating. “Here it’s a real hell, indescribable dirt, hunger, poverty. There’s no place to sleep, there’s nothing to eat. . . . We are both begging for death. On top of all that misfortune, our guardian here,” the peasant sheltering them, “demands money for keeping us. . . . If only I could find some place for Klara here. Please save me, otherwise I will die.” Duzio and Klara were probably killed just days before the Red Army arrived. They were just two of thousands of Jewish children hunted down like animals, separated from their parents and desperately clinging to each other. In Duzio’s possession was a letter from his friend Giza Hausner in Czortków: “I am here all alone, without Mama, without any money and belongings. Help me if you can. . . . We are waiting for the end at any moment. . . . You are my last hope. Do something for me if only you can.”2

  Some parents sought safety for their children by handing them over to gentiles. Hiding with his wife, Malwina, near Buczacz in summer 1943, Aryeh Klonicki (previously known as Leon Klonymus) began feverishly writing an account of their life under German occupation. The roundups began just weeks after their baby, Adam, was born. Even then Klonicki was aware that the deported “would be burned in special crematoria,” writing, “Every time I looked at my little child, so beautiful and full of life, I would imagine that I was seeing not a child but a box filled with ashes.” He had witnessed multiple murders of children by the Germans, who found it easiest to fulfill their “task . . . in the hospitals and shelters for children. They would simply walk in and shoot the sick in their beds and throw the children out of the windows of the upper floors.” At the execution sites “they no longer kill the children; they bury them alive (sparing bullets).” The Judenrat, on which Klonicki had served in an administrative position, as well as the Jewish police “made a fortune from the torments of the Jews and lived by the slogan: ‘Eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die!’ ” Appalled by the “many Jewish policemen who were renowned for their cruelty,” who accepted “bribes from those taken to camps,” and would “search through the clothes of the murdered and find dollars and valuables,” he depicted this period as “a new chapter in our Golgotha: degrading Jewish morality to the lowest depths.”

  Once Buczacz was declared Judenrein, the remaining Jews sought “shelter in bunkers, among the Christians, in the fields. Had it not been for the hatred of the local inhabitants,” insisted Klonicki, “it might have been possible to hide.” Instead “every shepherd, every Christian child who sees a Jew, immediately reports him to the authorities and they go looking for him. Some Christians hide Jews for a lot of money and then rob their property and denounce them to the authorities.” The Klonickis had given their possessions to a Christian woman in Buczacz in return for a hideout in her mother’s village, but as soon as they arrived there they were robbed of all their remaining belongings. As a last resort they turned to Malwina’s former Polish maid Franka Wąsik and her husband, Stanisław, who agreed to care for the baby, while Aryeh and Malwina hid in their cornfield. Crouching in the high corn, they could hear the men talking just a few feet from them “about peasants who made a fortune from Jews and are buying themselves the most expensive suits.” On July 8 two dozen Jews were discovered in three different bunkers nearby and shot, and shortly thereafter the informer Nahajowski, who had “stepped up in his public stature to become a Jew-catcher,” denounced several Jews hiding in the same village as the Klonickis. “Usually the work is done now by the Ukrainian policemen themselves,” Aryeh noted. The Germans had “killed enough and do not go looking for Jews”; they depended on “such types as Nahajowski to bring them the prey.”

  On July 18 the Klonickis were spotted by a peasant and had to bribe him not to give them away. Fearing the worst, Malwina wrote her family, “I would like so much to raise my beloved child. . . . Perhaps you will be entrusted with raising him, and perhaps . . . the cruel hand of the murderers will reach him. . . . Will God have mercy on such a tiny and innocent being?” That same day Aryeh raged in his diary, “As if the hatred of an enemy such as Hitler were not enough, added to it is the hatred of the surrounding population, which knows no boundaries. Millions of Jews have been slaughtered and yet it is not satiated!” His last diary entry was dated July 22, 1943: “All night it rained and again in the morning . . . w
e were lying in a swamp.” According to the Wąsiks, Aryeh and Malwina were murdered on January 18, 1944, most likely by Ukrainians. Before being evacuated to Poland, the Wąsiks handed Adam over to local Ukrainian nuns, who baptized him Taras; raised in an orphanage, the child’s whereabouts could not be established for many years. But in 1962 Aryeh’s brother in Israel received a letter from Western Ukraine. Taras, it tersely noted, “lives in the Lviv province, but . . . does not want his origin to be known. . . . He thinks of himself as Ukrainian, and is ashamed that his uncle lives in Israel. In my opinion, his uncle should give up the matter.”3

  Another rescued baby was Emil Skamene, subsequently a distinguished professor of medicine at McGill University in Canada, who spent the first twenty-seven years of his life believing he was the son of a Christian family from Prague. Shortly after coming to Harvard on a postdoctoral fellowship in 1968, Skamene received a letter informing him that in fact he was born in Buczacz, whence he was brought to Prague as a baby, together with “some material goods, like money and some gold and gifts,” by a certain Rudolf Steiger. The letter was written by Steiger’s recently widowed second wife, clearly in the hope of sharing some of the baby’s inheritance. Having confirmed this story with his adoptive parents, Emil discovered that he was born in 1941 as the only child of Benio and Gisela Kleiner. His father, an accountant, had attended the Buczacz gymnasium, and his mother was a pharmacist.4

  At the time of his rescue in early 1943, Emil and his parents were hiding in a Ukrainian peasant’s cellar near Buczacz. Afraid that they might be denounced or killed, Benio wrote to his sister Frederika, who had studied medicine in Prague before the war and was living there with her husband, Richard Skamene, asking her “to do something to save” the baby. She in turn asked Steiger, an ethnic German who had “some function in the SS,” to bring Emil to Prague for a fee that would be provided by the Kleiners. After two failed attempts Steiger managed to extract the baby from the cellar and take it all the way to Prague by train hidden in a backpack. Emil had been trained to keep silent; years later he recalled his father taping his mouth so that he could breathe only through his nose.

  Raised as the Skamenes’ natural son, Emil observed that throughout his childhood and youth Steiger “always appeared when something was happening to me” but “was always not introduced.” Emil had no inkling of his Jewish origins: “I was even chasing Jewish boys on the street and I was yelling at them ‘dirty Jew’ as all of my other classmates [were doing] after the war.” Later he found out that his mother “was celebrating all the high Jewish holidays in the synagogue in Prague,” although “at home we were brought up as Christians.” Even after he learned that his mother was Jewish, he was certain that his adoptive father “was a Christian” who had “helped my mother survive,” which he “always thought was very heroic” and “an act of love.” Only at the end of her husband’s life did Frederika tell Emil that he too was a Jew.

  Emil believed that although Steiger “originally did it for money,” the act of rescuing a baby was such “an emotional and spiritual experience” that it became “important for him” to see the child “growing up and achieving something.” This act also ended up benefiting Steiger in a more immediate manner. After the war, Emil pointed out, this former collaborator “would likely be killed by the Czechs” had it not been for “an affidavit from my parents” attesting that he had saved a Jewish baby. In that sense, Steiger had “lived his life basically in exchange for this unbelievable act of heroism.” To be sure, he was also given all the money that came with the baby, except for a golden cigarette case that Emil’s parents had “expressly wanted me to have as a memory of them.” Ironically it was rumors about the riches that came with the baby that ultimately led Emil to discover his real identity. He also learned that his parents’ fears were justified: they were apparently murdered by the Ukrainian peasant who hid them and wanted to put his hands on the rest of their money and the single fur coat they owned.5

  Very few other babies and toddlers born in Buczacz and its vicinity are known to have survived. One of them was Jacob Neufeld, later an American historian and director of the U.S. Air Force Historical Studies Office. Jacob was born in 1940 as the son of the communist activist Natan Dunajer, who led a Jewish resistance group during the German occupation and was killed in April 1944. Jacob still recalled his father showing off his submachine gun when he visited the family’s hiding place. Eventually they were denounced, and Jacob had nightmarish recollections of being a four-year-old running away from “wild shooting.”6

  Several small children survived with false identities and remained unknown to the rest of the Jews in Buczacz. In 1942, when Anita Karl was four years old, her mother, Mali, a fluent Polish speaker, took her, an older sister, and a baby girl out of the Lemberg ghetto, tore off their Jewish stars, and boarded the train to Buczacz. There Mali presented herself to the Roman Catholic priest as the wife of a Polish officer whose papers were lost in an aerial bombing. Having acquired false documents, they stayed in Buczacz for the next two years. Mali baked and peddled cakes, and with the income managed to bring her husband, Samuel, from the ghetto, though because of his accent and Jewish appearance he hid in their cellar. From their house, perched on a hill, the children could observe the killings all around them. During one action, a Jewish youth was discovered nearby. Anita recalled, “They shot him right in front of me. . . . The blood splattered all over the window and he died there.” In summer 1943 a large bunker with scores of Jews was discovered in the vicinity of their home. Anita saw “how they pulled the people out through a hole by their hair, ripping it out in the process; the screams and shouts were horrible.” Her mother was standing close by, and “one of the women pushed a little bundle toward her; it was a baby. As my mother bent down to pick it up, the Nazi [policeman] saw her and pulled out a gun and pointed it at her, saying that if she picked it up, he would shoot her. He took the baby out [of the bundle] and in front of everyone ripped it in half. The rest of the babies were beaten against the cement wall, and the adults were taken away and killed.”

  In March 1944 Mali and the girls were evacuated from Buczacz with the rest of the civilian population, leaving the father in the cellar. Seeking to save him, Mali returned a few hours later, claiming she needed warm clothes for the children. It was too late; Samuel had been discovered and was executed shortly thereafter. He was thirty-three years old.7

  While children could evoke sympathy, they were just as often seen as a liability and were always vulnerable to deception, exploitation, and murder. Renia Tabak recalled hiding in a bunker in Buczacz in 1942; she was six and her sister was three. “Before long we heard screaming and shooting and dogs and looting in our house. First the Germans came, screaming, ‘Juden, Juden raus, raus!’. . . We knew, not a word, not a sneeze, not a cough, because then you could be heard and it would be instant death.” Renia’s cousin Danny “was not silent and complained. People said, ‘Put a pillow on him and choke him,’ and everyone agreed, there were eighty people there, and they began to put a pillow on him and he was smart and stopped crying.” Once “the Germans were finished came the Ukrainians and the Poles, looting and taking everything out of the house and calling ‘żyd, żyd!’ Then you came out and found a bloodbath in your house, outside the door, in the street, bodies everywhere.” In one such roundup her aunt “ripped up the feather blanket and put the kids under the feathers, but they found one of her limbs sticking out and shot her and then found the kids and shot them too.”

  Because Jewish life was so cheap and readily available, perpetrators could afford to show gallantry in the midst of slaughter, especially toward elegant and well-educated young women. During one roundup Renia successfully evaded the Gestapo and reached the bunker, but the rest of her family was caught. Shortly thereafter “my parents and sister arrived; due to Mother’s perfect German she talked them out of [killing the family]. She said to them: ‘You are going to get us sooner or later. My little daughter is gone. Let us live
another day or two.’ ” Renia’s mother, Sala, was “educated and classy,” a graduate of the Buczacz gymnasium. In summer 1943 they were stopped again on the street in their hometown of Skala, forty miles southeast of Buczacz, this time by regular soldiers. “My mother asked them to let us go just for this day. And the German said, ‘Gehen Sie, Gehen Sie’ [Go, go], and closed his eyes.” As Renia saw it, whereas the Ukrainians “could tell who were the Jews . . . the ones who saved our lives were the Germans,” because her “mother was a lady and would not throw herself at them but reason with them and this way she got us out.”