by Omer Bartov
At other times, none of this mattered. In summer 1943 Renia and her family were hiding in a field of tobacco when she woke to “terrible screaming and curses in Ukrainian.” “The Ukrainian militia . . . were chasing the Jews with dogs and we heard this rampage and started running . . . blindly for our lives. . . . It was the scariest thing I can remember, we saw dismembered bodies, bodies without heads and . . . death all around us.” They were saved by the locals, hidden in a pit under the barn of a Polish peasant who had worked for Renia’s father before the war. “No one could stand up” in the pit and it was “full of rats and other vermin. . . . When the [farm] animals urinated the urine would spill into the hole.” But for Renia “stara pani, the old Polish woman, was truly a saintly and wonderful human being who risked her life and that of her daughters.” She gave them seven dumplings stuffed with potatoes or cabbage every Sunday and “very little in-between.” It almost ended happily, but in April 1944, while escaping the German reoccupation of the region after a brief period of Soviet rule, Renia’s little sister was killed by shrapnel. When she finally returned to her liberated hometown that summer, Renia had little room for pity. She remembered going “for our entertainment to the hangings . . . of collaborators in the municipality. . . . We saw them strung up and urinating and I’d be in heaven.” For the rest of her life she suffered from neuroses, was terrified of the dark, disliked being surrounded by people, and would choose “to sit at the end [of a row of chairs], for a quick escape.”8
In the immediate aftermath of the liberation surviving children were often still deeply traumatized. Interviewed in 1946, ten-year-old Genia Weksler recalled hiding in a bunker in Buczacz during a roundup: “I was suffering from German measles,” and the others “wanted to strangle me because I was coughing.” Later she was sheltered with her mother and four-year-old brother by a peasant “who hid us under a thatched roof and brought us food.” Then the Germans arrived and “looked for grain” precisely “where we were hiding. I closed my eyes so that I would not see how the Germans beat me. But the Germans threw the whole thatched roof on me and did not find us.” Throughout this time, she said, “I was very afraid of people; I always wanted to be alone. I dreamed of food. Oh, I envied Polish children: ‘Why is God punishing us, for which sins,’ I thought.” At some point they tried to pass as Christians. “The Poles said that we were insane people. A German gave me bread and a blanket.” Toward the end of the occupation Genia worked in a remote village. “I grazed cattle. I didn’t like playing with children. I was afraid. I didn’t speak Polish very well. In the house they often talked about Jews,” saying “ ‘Jews are cheats.’ . . . The children always played ‘Germans and Jews’ . . . and ‘Jew hunt.’ . . . I was often told that I have Jewish eyes, black Jewish hair. I answered that if ‘you take a closer look it is possible that I’m completely Jewish.’ ” Two years after the liberation, Genia was still haunted by these events: “My daddy often appears in my dreams. I dream of the Germans, how they catch us, but we manage to escape.”9
Children’s extraordinary will to survive could also lead them to betray others. While hiding in a bunker, six-year-old Aliza Griffel heard a Jewish boy saying to a Ukrainian policeman, “I’ll show you where there are Jews, will you let me live?” But most Jewish informers were killed along with those they turned in. Friendship often counted for little. When Aliza’s father “knocked on his friend’s window,” the Ukrainian peasant said, “We cannot help you with anything.” But they were taken in by complete strangers, Ivan and Paulina Kozak, “very poor” peasants who sheltered them for half a year and “treated us well,” even teaching Aliza “how to cross myself like the Ukrainians” and “how to recite all their prayers.” She slept with the peasants and their children in one large bed. Still, the constant threat of death took its toll, and Aliza remembered that one day she could not stop crying: “Mother held me in her arms and I looked at the Holy Mother, and I said to Mother that if I survived I wanted to be like her, to be Christian, I would never be Jewish.”
Under such circumstances, love could lead to thoughts of homicide. When hiding in winter 1943 in the freezing attic of an abandoned Jewish house in Buczacz, Aliza, her older sister, Dvorah, and their mother were slowly dying. At some point, recalled Aliza, “Mother took me in her arms and said, ‘Go to sleep, I’ll press you very, very hard, and then you will not suffer cold and hunger any more, and you will be with . . . all the angels.’ ” But Aliza insisted, “I want to live!” recalling with horror, “She simply wanted to strangle me. . . . She probably could not bear to see me suffering.”
They were rescued by a Polish couple in the nearby village of Wojciechówka (Ukrainian: Martynivka), where they stayed until the Soviets returned in March 1944. When Aliza’s family went back to their home in Buczacz they found that the floor had been ripped out in search of hidden money. The only trace of the community was “a forest clearing” on Fedor Hill, “around which everything had grown, only the mass grave was barren.” It was said that “the soil was too densely fertilized” with human remains. Aliza participated in the commemoration at the site, captured on camera: “I am in that photo, one of the children.”10
Some children ended up entirely on their own in barely imaginable conditions. Ten-year-old Izidor Hecht (Viktor Gekht) hid during the first roundup, in October 1942, with his family in the hayloft of Ukrainian friends: “We could hear the screams of those who had been murdered, mostly the elderly, children, and the ill.” During the second deportation action, in November, they hid “on an isolated farm, not far from Buczacz,” with a Polish-Ukrainian couple, Józef and Barbara Zarivny, whom Izidor remembered as “very kind and brave people.” Later they were crammed into the ghetto, where they shared “a tiny second-floor hallway” with “a group of skinny, hungry, and worn out adults and children. Many of them had starvation-related edema, were crippled, and were lying on the floor. Many had typhus. There were multitudes of fleas and lice. There was barely any food or water. Almost all our belongings had been traded for food. It was also very cold, and I became sick very often.” Trying to find food outside the ghetto, the boy’s mother was stopped “by one of the local Ukrainian policemen” and shot when she tried to run away. During the third action they hid behind the staircase; “up to thirty Jews were standing jammed in that tiny space.” Then “a young child started to cry,” wrote Izidor. “Its mother was scared that because of its crying we would be discovered, so she placed a pillow over the baby’s head.” Later, when “she lifted the pillow, we all saw that the baby was dead. Everyone was quietly sobbing.”
Survivors and the makeshift memorial on Fedor Hill, 1945. Source: YVA, 10002/1.
The experience of hiding in a cramped space with armed men searching just inches away was deeply traumatizing. During the roundup of April 1943 Izidor hid “in complete darkness . . . lying motionlessly next to each other and barely breathing. Above our heads we could hear boots stamping, curses, yells and gunshots. . . . The feeling of death stomping right above your head is impossible to communicate. You wish you could turn into an ant, you close your eyes and try to hide somewhere deep in the ground. I felt my heart pounding like a great bell, and that people walking aboveground could hear it. It was impossible to believe that up there it was a sunny spring day. I felt that we would never get out of this place.” Eventually Izidor fled Buczacz with his father “like hunted animals; we were hiding in the surrounding ravines, pits, wheat and rye fields, and forests. There was almost no food or water. I kept fainting. . . . I was almost constantly delirious.” They had no choice but to return to the Zarivny family, where Izidor’s maternal grandmother, Rosa Hirschhorn, his aunt, and her three-year-old daughter were already hiding. “We were all lying there in the dark almost motionlessly.” But in 1944 the Ukrainian police raided the farm. Everyone was murdered, save for Izidor and his grandmother, who managed to reach the hayloft in time; from their vantage point, they “could hear the shots and our relatives’ last screams.” They were th
e only survivors of their family, thanks especially to the Zarivny couple, who “were constantly risking their own lives.”11
During the chaotic Soviet evacuation of April 1944, when the Wehrmacht returned to Buczacz, Izidor and his grandmother fled to Skalat, where the boy was adopted by the Red Army. He was “extremely skinny, poorly dressed, practically barefoot and covered with lice.” Taken in by a field hospital, he recalled how the nurses “cut my hair, bathed me, altered a military uniform to my size and even found a belt and small-sized boots for me.” The boy was “transformed from a barely alive vagabond into the ‘son of the regiment.’ ” But shortly thereafter the field hospital was relocated, and Izidor was separated from “the single close person I had [his grandmother]. . . . I never saw her again, and I felt guilty and suffered from that for the rest of my life.” Educated in a Soviet orphanage, Izidor remained in the USSR. Only in 1999, at age sixty-eight, did he finally visit his relatives in Israel; his grandmother had long since passed, having lost any trace of him. All he could do was visit her grave.12
Jewish accounts of the German occupation in the Buczacz district are invariably about rescue and betrayal by local gentiles. This is why testimonies are filled with mixed emotions of rage and vengeance, on the one hand, and gratitude and guilt, on the other—guilt not only for having survived when so many died but also for failing to acknowledge and thank those who made survival possible at enormous risk to themselves and their family. Yet the memory of goodness cannot erase the horrors enabled and perpetrated by the callous indifference, gratuitous violence, and homicidal avarice of neighbors, much of it lacking even the veneer of ideological motivation, however perverse and inhumane.
Anne Herzog experienced the consequences of betrayal as an eight-year-old in late 1942, when a gentile barber in Buczacz, who heard the sounds of digging under his shop, informed the Germans of the bunker where she and her parents, along with many other Jews, were hiding during a roundup. “About 90 percent of my family were taken out of that bunker” and shot, she testified. She still recalled the “screaming and shooting and gassing” inside the bunker, as she and her parents escaped into a roomful of people who had been “shot dead on their beds” and “hid under those beds, where the blood was dripping down.” Eventually finding shelter with Ukrainian peasants in the countryside, Anne recalled that just “a few days before the liberation” the peasants who were hiding another Jewish family nearby “took them out to the bitter cold winter on the white snow in a remote area of the village and shot them.” Anne and her parents were so close they “could hear” the shots. The peasants knew the Jew they had killed because “he had a store there,” where he “used to sell bread and all kinds of things.” Fearful of the repercussions, the peasants hiding Anne’s family simply “threw us out, and we were just on the snow. . . . We were walking and saw a little house and we just had no other recourse, we went in, and there in that farm was such a poor farmer, he had nothing, he had no cows, he just had an empty stable, so he let us stay in that stable until we were liberated.”13
At times the margin between rescue and abuse was very narrow. Rózia Brecher, thirteen years old, was hidden in the village of Myszkowce (Ukrainian: Myshkivtsi), near Buczacz, by the Polish Antosia Sztankowska, between May 1943 and March 1944. Shortly after the liberation Rózia recounted her physical and mental abuse by Hryń, Antosia’s Ukrainian brother-in-law. In one instance, Hryń climbed to the hayloft where she was hiding: “He hugged me and began to ask whether I had ever been in German hands and faced death and whether I was a communist. He said he would go to town to take part in a roundup. At that moment I didn’t want to live any longer. He continued to talk but I didn’t know what was happening with me. He went down from the hayloft and I began to cry. Antosia came, but I didn’t say anything.” Another time she related, “I heard Hryń come into the stable with another guy and they drank. The other man left and Hryń climbed up to the hayloft. . . . He was very drunk and . . . he asked who was my father and what organization my parents belonged to and what they believed in.” On yet another occasion, Hryń “climbed up to the hayloft and grabbed me by the neck but I managed to scream and begged him to let me go. He said, ‘Give me 1,000 [złoty] and I will let you go, and if not I will denounce you.’ ” At that point his wife and Antosia arrived. “I climbed down from the attic in the dark and ran to the courtyard, to a hole where sugar beets were stowed, and I threw myself under them.”14
Whether Rózia couldn’t bring herself to admit to being raped or, considering her traumatic experiences, could not remember or recount the event, such incidents were hardly uncommon. Aliza Reinisch (Nir), who was seventeen when the Germans occupied Buczacz, recalled that “gentiles would come from the villages and go through the houses in the ghetto looking for a beautiful girl so they could hide her.” Subsequently some of these women “returned to the ghetto pregnant”; others were taken “straight to the Gestapo after the man had used them as much as he could.” And yet “the parents of such girls would say, ‘go [with the gentile] just so that you survive.’ It’s inconceivable now, but this was the price of staying alive.”15
The most striking feature to emerge from these accounts is the ambivalence of goodness: even those who took in Jews could at any point instruct them to leave or summon the authorities; even those who had initially hoped to enrich themselves from the Jews they sheltered could be moved at a certain point to risk their own and their family’s lives without any thought of profit. Evil was less ambivalent: most of the perpetrators killed thoughtlessly and displayed no pangs of conscience either then or decades later. But occasionally, out of impulse, the pleasure of displaying their absolute power over life and death, or even a momentary recognition of the victim’s humanity, individual perpetrators could spare lives in capricious acts of goodness in the midst of slaughter. For those spared, such haphazard decisions were a momentous event that determined the rest of their lives and were never forgotten, even if for the perpetrators they could be nothing more than a blur in an ocean of blood and horror. The single act of goodness cannot be said in any way to have diminished the evil of mass murder, but the choice not to pull the trigger, whether it emanated from a deep and never entirely extinguished sense of shared humanity or was performed as a grotesque display of gallantry, demonstrated that there always was a choice, a path taken by very few, and in even fewer cases for reasons we might associate with pure kindness.
Edzia Spielberg was saved more than once by gentile neighbors and strangers, as well as Germans, by the time she was liberated at the age of fourteen. In July 1941 she and her family were staying with Christian friends in her parents’ ancestral village of Połowce (Ukrainian: Polivtsi), halfway between Czortków and Buczacz. One night a group of locals “went to our home and threw in a hand grenade.” These were “neighbors; Ukrainian people who bowed and said good morning, good afternoon, and good evening . . . very polite . . . people that we literally knew.” One of them was Edzia’s female schoolteacher. Then the mob banged on their hosts’ door and demanded that they hand over the Jews. “They were there with axes and guns. And I was in bed shaking.” When their Christian friends refused to open the door, the mob went to Edzia’s uncle. “He went under the bed. His wife and two little boys panicked as she went to the door, and they just split their heads with axes, all three of them.” They also “axed to death” another couple, two of their children, and the grandmother. The Germans had not yet arrived on the scene.
Both survival and destruction often depended on local intervention. As conditions under German rule deteriorated, and the family was slowly “dying from hunger,” Edzia’s mother sneaked out of the ghetto and walked to the village of their former Ukrainian maid to barter for food; instead the maid called in the Ukrainian police. “They were going to kill her right there.” But the mother was accompanied by a German friend, the wife of “some kind of an executive” in Buczacz, who reportedly said, “I’m not going to come back without this lady,” until the pol
ice relented. On another occasion, Edzia herself was arrested and brought before Ukrainian police chief Kaznovskyi. Although she reminded him that he knew her father, who was brewing alcohol for local consumption at the time, and gave him her mother’s wedding ring, Kaznovskyi told the little girl, “You are going to be executed.” When he finally let her go she was sure he would shoot her from behind. “This is something very difficult to describe. . . . You don’t breathe and you wait for that bullet to kill you. He didn’t. He let me go.”
In early summer 1943 the family went into hiding on a farm; from now on their lives depended entirely on the goodwill of those sheltering them. Five other family members, including two children, were denounced by the peasant hiding them on a nearby farm. Edzia was subsequently told, “My uncle was pulling out his hair and begging the [Ukrainian] police, just don’t kill the two little girls, let them live. . . . My little cousin who was five years old . . . was holding the policeman’s hand. He just pushed her away and took the revolver and killed her first in front of the parents because she was annoying him, she was kissing his hand.” But Edzia’s family was kept for eight months in a hole dug under the cowshed by the Ukrainian Kafchuk family, “a poor farmer with a wife and four children.” They were, recalled Edzia, “very kind, wonderful people.” Kafchuk’s wife assured them, “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, we will share our bread and potatoes with you.”
When the Germans recaptured Buczacz in April 1944, Edzia’s father was caught on the street and executed, but the rest of the family managed to flee the city. Edzia, who looked “Aryan,” found work “peeling potatoes, washing dishes” for a German Army unit, while her mother and little brother hid nearby. The local commander took a liking to the girl, but then her Ukrainian coworkers denounced her as a Jew. Rather than shooting her, the officer escorted Edzia, her mother, and her brother toward the front line, leaving them there with the words “I hope you all live well.” A few hours later they were liberated. Edzia recalled being “very happy to get away from the Ukrainians” when they left for the West in late 1945, “because they had pogroms after the war. They were killing Jews.” To her mind, “they were worse than the Germans. . . . I think my family was mostly killed . . . by Ukrainians who were our friends.”16