by Omer Bartov
Jacob Heiss, also born in 1930, remembered how the Germans arriving to carry out roundups would call out merrily, “Spielzeit für die Kameraden” (Playtime for the comrades), and the next day “you would get up in the morning and see hundreds of dead people every place you walked.” Yet he insisted that “the Ukrainians were worse than the Germans,” perhaps because before the war he had had “a lot of non-Jewish friends” in Buczacz. Early in the occupation a Ukrainian man barged into the synagogue “and tore the beard off one of the men . . . with the skin”; in the ghetto, Ukrainian policemen “used to beat you up” or “shoot you right there.” On one occasion Jacob was caught fishing in the Strypa and was almost drowned by the police before his brother came to his rescue. They were always hungry; people ate “cats, dogs, horses, everything,” and would even “kill each other” for food. The urge to live could overcome all moral compunctions; some Jews caught by the Germans during roundups sought to save themselves by disclosing the location of bunkers. And yet Jacob and his family survived thanks to acts of kindness; hiding in the sewers, they were given food by local Poles. Before the war one of their rescuers used to supply Jacob’s father, a shoemaker, with leather; he was none other than the dogcatcher Kowalski, who had remade himself a Jew-catcher under the Germans.17
Jacob Heiss and his older brother shortly before the war. Source: Photo courtesy of Jacob Heiss.
The often contradictory attitudes toward gentile locals and even Germans in survivor accounts are not indicative of witness inconsistency, forgetfulness, or irrationality, but rather of the fact that under extreme circumstances people behaved in unexpected and at times conflicting ways, motivated by factors that often contradicted each other: ideological conviction and prejudice, but also altruism and courage; greed and cowardice, as well as pity and compassion; callous indifference and righteous rage, along with fear of retribution and defiance.
Alicja Jurman, the same age as Spielberg and Heiss, faced the whole range of attitudes under German rule. Having already lost one brother to Soviet brutality, she lost another to Nazi forced labor, a third to local denunciation, and the youngest to a Ukrainian policeman. Her father was murdered early on in the registration action; her mother, denounced by a Polish neighbor, was shot in front of her eyes just before the end. Alicja herself was handed over to the Gestapo by her best friend’s father, who had joined the Ukrainian police; she was hidden for a lengthy period by an eccentric elderly Polish nobleman living on the edge of a village, “a splendid, beautiful man,” who defied all threats from local Ukrainians; she was denounced by a local peasant after escaping mass execution, but the soldier who spotted her told her to run, saying, “Du bist ja unschuldig, Mädchen” (You are an innocent girl, after all). Both her survival and the murder of many family members, then, were largely the result of choices made by neighbors and strangers.18
Surviving on one’s own as a young woman could be deeply traumatizing, even for those who had all the attributes necessary for blending into gentile society. By her own account, Fania Feldman “was blond . . . had braids” and “didn’t look Jewish at all”; she also “spoke Ukrainian very well,” so “they couldn’t recognize me.” Indeed, she remarked, “I was with Ukrainians all the time,” but “as soon as I left they killed this one and they killed that one; so they were murderers, they were no good, I was just lucky, that’s all.” Any association with Jews drew hate and violence. She remembered how, early on, when she asked a neighbor for some milk for her sick father, he responded, “I’d rather give it to a pig than sell it to a Jew.” Fleeing to the forest after her father’s death, she was soon relegated to the status of a hunted animal, like so many other Jews at the time. “I was four days without food, I didn’t know where to go” and “didn’t have somebody to ask, to advise, nothing, just alone in the woods.” She was “always afraid [of] what they would do to me,” having heard that the Ukrainians “did terrible things, they take out the eyes, they cut the tongue, they took everything, whatever they wanted.” A truck driver offered her a lift and then stopped the vehicle in the woods. “He says to me, you probably had a husband. And I was so afraid, I was pulling my hair, I was breaking my fingers, I was crying, I said no, I don’t have a husband and I am very young, I said, maybe you have a daughter and somebody would do this to your daughter and what would you do?” In her recollection, the man then drove away; it is not unlikely that he first raped her. Feldman recalled her despair: “I only wished I would get a bullet in my back.” She “used to envy the people that were already dead,” and even “a dog that is free and not afraid.”
Taken in for a while by a Ukrainian family that knew her before the war, Feldman soon heard that the local priest was warning his parishioners against hiding Jews. Not long thereafter the village was raided by a band of armed Ukrainians, and she barely managed to escape. On another occasion she witnessed seven of her relatives, four adults and three children, denounced by villagers and murdered by the local police: “The Ukrainians, they knew these people. . . . They told them . . . ‘Just give us whatever you have, and we will let you go.’ They gave them everything, and when they went out everyone separately got a bullet in the head. . . . I heard every shot.” There were many other cases in which material gain easily trumped human lives. At one point two Jewish lads hiding with her in the forest tried to retrieve a sewing machine left with a gentile neighbor so as to barter it for food. Instead one of the boys was stoned to death, and the other, who later related this to Feldman, was left for dead. “This was the very good friends who kept their sewing machine, you trusted them. I couldn’t trust nobody,” she remarked. Although she largely owed her own survival to Ukrainians, Feldman insisted, “Nobody can tell me that there are some good Ukrainian people, maybe one or two, because I know best what they did, what murderers they were. When [the Jews] gave the money to Ukrainian people . . . they killed the person, put him in a sack, and threw it down in the water. . . . It could be the nicest neighbor.”19
A number of surviving male teenagers and young men were critical of the Jewish elite and recalled Christian rescuers with respect and gratitude. Like many other survivors, Zev Anderman, born in 1927, described the Ukrainians as “terrible” and “a thousand times worse than the Germans.” But he also depicted in detail how his family found shelter with several Polish and Ukrainian families in the nearby villages of Podzameczek, Medwedowce, and Piława (Ukrainian: Pylyava) during several actions. He spoke with derision about Judenrat chairman Mendel Reich, who acceded to German demands for “furs, blankets, boots,” and about the “young Jewish lads,” the policemen who requisitioned them. Many members of Zev’s family, including his mother, were murdered in October 1942, when “a Jewish girl” informed the Ukrainian police where their bunker was located in the hope that “they would spare her.” Yet Zev could recognize the fact that “the will for life,” perhaps especially among the young, “was enormous.” He recalled having to exhume the victims of the February 1943 mass shooting that were polluting the town’s water supply: “The soil was frozen. They stuck to each other. We worked there with pickaxes to separate one piece of flesh from another. . . . We did not cry. We were stronger than steel.” Possibly it was that same will for life that motivated Zev’s brother Janek to join the police. Zev never alluded to this directly, describing instead how in June 1943, just as he intended to join the partisans (like other Ordnungsdienst men), Janek tried to conceal a bunker sheltering his father and many other Jews; identified by the Germans, he drew his pistol and shot at them, upon which they beat him to death. Zev saw this as one of several Jewish actions that deterred denouncers by demonstrating “that Jews are shooting back,” accounting for why “many Jews survived in Buczacz.” These youngsters, he exclaimed, were “glorious heroes.”20
At the time, Zev and his uncle were hiding in the village of Petlikowce Nowe (Ukrainian: Novi Petlykivtsi) with a Polish acquaintance, who used the first opportunity to rob them of all their belongings. Fortunately they were then taken in
by the Ukrainian brothers Mykhailo and Ilko Baran of the same village, who were already hiding several other Jews; they stayed there until spring 1944. Zev described Mykhailo as “an angel.” He fed them well, and his wife “would wash our shirts and underclothes.” Ilko supplied the teenage Zev with books: “I put them in the bunker and that’s what saved me, I read non-stop.” Altogether the Baran brothers saved fifteen Jews; after the fall of the communist regime Zev sought out their sons, and they were recognized by Yad Vashem, the State of Israel’s national institute for the memory and commemoration of the Holocaust. “Among the Christians, Poles and Ukrainians, there were also human beings,” concluded Zev. “We and history must not forget that.”21
Shmuel Rosen, his brothers Henryk and Yehiel, and their mother spent much of 1943 in a hideout they built inside the Potocki family crypt at the Christian cemetery on the slope of Fedor Hill. In this they were helped by the Polish undertaker Marjan Świerszczak and his Ukrainian wife, Maryna. Despite interrogations and beatings by the Ukrainian police, Marjan never revealed their whereabouts. Shmuel admired the undertaker’s courage, as opposed to the Judenrat officials he despised, especially Dr. Seifer, who had taken exorbitant bribes from “the 200 richest Jewish families” in Buczacz in order to allow them to enter the labor camp in spring 1943 while the rest of the population were murdered. But Moshe Wizinger, who had known Marjan since their youth, recalled that when he escaped to the cemetery in June 1943, Maryna had told him to leave right away because “the Germans might come to look here any day now and if they find you we might also be punished.” She suggested that he follow the example of other Jews who “were giving themselves up to the Germans,” since “sooner or later they are going to find you anyway.” Wizinger, who eventually joined a local Polish resistance group, told his leader, known only as Edek, about this denial of shelter, and in response Edek raided the Świerszczaks’ home and gave the wife a severe thrashing. He also warned the husband, “If you are afraid of repression by the Germans for helping Jews and partisans, I want you to know that we will punish loyalty to German orders with death. Remember this and tell the others.”22
This episode encapsulates much of the complexity of rescue and betrayal: the same Świerszczak who was remembered as a “gorgeous man” by Henryk Rosen had also denied shelter to Wizinger, thereby betraying their friendship. Almost killed by a Polish resistance fighter for betraying the national honor, decades later Świerszczak was honored as a righteous gentile by Yad Vashem. Wizinger recalled a speech by Edek exhorting Jews to fight the Germans and greatly admired his fellow Polish fighters and the villagers who helped them; he was even prouder when he found out about the small Jewish bands led by Dawid Friedlender and Natan Dunajer. The impact of Jewish resistance was marginal, but it gave these youngsters a sense of meaning and purpose in the midst of utter inhumanity. Still, by the time of the liberation, these local bands had been decimated and most of their leaders were dead. As Wizinger awaited the arrival of the Soviets with a few remaining young Jews, he thought victory had come too late: “I look at the others: they are the last of a dying nation.”23
Yitzhak Bauer, who successfully transitioned from the police to the resistance, provided some insight into the capacity and purpose of armed Jewish bands. As he recalled, in the wake of the liquidation action of June 1943, “we organized a rather large group and went to the forest some twenty miles from Buczacz.” After acquiring a pistol and a few rounds from Soviet partisans, Bauer and his brother, along with two other lads, decided to leave the vulnerable family camp that formed in the forest and returned to the vicinity of Buczacz. There they established contact with Dunajer, who was living in a cave with his wife, their four-year-old child, and two other men, also brothers. “We had one sawed-off shotgun and my Nagant [Russian service pistol] and thought that we could fight the entire German empire,” chuckled Bauer. They also made contact with Friedlender’s group and took part in an attempt to assassinate a Polish denouncer.
Natan Dunajer (left) and Dawid Friedlender (right) in the 1930s. Source: Polish police file (Dunajer); Eyal Ziffer private collection (Friedlender).
Unlike his self-deprecating view of the resistance, Bauer was adamant that in the Buczacz area “the Ukrainians were relatively alright”; even police chief Kaznovskyi refrained from acting when he discovered that his own father had “hidden several Jews” after the ghetto was liquidated. The Bauer brothers relied on contacts with Ukrainian friends and acquaintances. When they went to visit their elderly prewar neighbor he called out to them, “ ‘Children, my children,’ in Ukrainian, ‘dity moyi dity.’ ” He “made a package of food for us, and said, ‘I wish you manage to survive.’ ” Their friend Alpinski “would sit us at the table and make us an omelet whenever we came to him from the forest,” and he helped find hideouts for other Jews. A man called Shenko stored some of their belongings, provided the Bauers with food, and hid three Jewish women in his barn; in early 1944 they were shocked when he joined the Ukrainian police, but he argued that “the alternative was to enlist for labor in Germany or join the SS-Division ‘Galicia.’ ” According to Bauer, becoming a policeman did not help Shenko; his house was burned down when “they found Jews there.” Much worse, their friend Alpinski was denounced and murdered along with his wife and younger daughter. For that reason Bauer found it important “to emphasize that there were among them people who were not evil, especially among the inhabitants of Buczacz. The villagers” were different, and “each time there was an action, they would come with sacks to plunder.”24
Almost all of the more than two hundred testimonies by Jewish survivors of the German occupation of Buczacz and its environs reflect the same ambivalence about relations with gentile neighbors, ranging from gratitude and admiration to rage and desire for vengeance. Some older witnesses and parents of young children at times had greater insight into the cynicism, greed, and callousness that genocide can bring out in those not directly subjected to it; they may have recognized with greater clarity the rare cases of pure altruism as well. The saved were obviously more likely to have experienced that altruism than the far larger multitudes of the drowned, but even in their case, instances of unadulterated goodness appeared miraculous precisely because of their rarity.
Róża Dobrecka, a well-educated young woman from Western Ukraine, who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto with her five-year-old child, Seweryn, in summer 1942, arrived in Buczacz just before the massive action of February 1943. Her husband and mother escaped the ghetto later and joined them. They barely survived, hidden by Polish acquaintances. Speaking perfect Polish and equipped with false papers, the family’s survival depended on posing as Poles whenever they left the confines of the ghetto. Things became even scarier when Dobrecka realized that she knew SS corporal and camp commandant Paul Thomanek’s “Jewish Gestapo-man Wolf,” with whom he frequently showed up in Buczacz, since he had been “often a guest in our house before the war.” Now “all dressed up in leather,” Wolf “was obviously pleased that the same people who” in the past “had wanted to have no contact with him, since he was a gambler and a seedy character, were now dependent on him.” Throughout that spring Wolf and Thomanek spent much of their time in Buczacz “terrorizing the population. They orchestrated endless orgies, demanding to have young women brought to them.” Invariably “their presence produced victims. Thomanek shot into crowds of Jews,” and at times Wolf “would take Thomanek’s revolver from his hand and shoot on his own.”25
Dobrecka’s own family was soon targeted. Her mother was denounced and shot on the way to see her other daughter, Hala, who was living as a Pole in a nearby town. Her younger brother, Olek, was sent to a labor camp as punishment for having “spoken ill of the vice-head of the Judenrat, Dr. Seifer.” Even “on the edge of the abyss,” observed Dobrecka, “the ghetto’s leaders were blinded by ambition and vanity.” After his release, Olek was arrested while visiting Hala; denounced as Jews, the two siblings were shot, and Hala’s meager belongings were promp
tly stolen by her denouncers. Similarly, when Dobrecka and her husband emerged from their bunker after the action of April 1943, they “found nothing; our neighbors had cleaned out and taken away everything”; indeed she saw “one Buczacz resident walking around in my clothes from Warsaw.” Following the “Judenrein action” in June, surviving Jews hid with “ ‘their’ so-called peasants,” but as Dobrecka pointed out, “in many cases” they were quickly “robbed down to their shirts and thrown out.” Finally she and her child simply boarded the train to Warsaw, where they eventually survived disguised as Poles. Her husband and remaining brother were murdered within days of her leaving Buczacz.26
Possibly the oldest Buczacz witness was Józef Kornblüh, already sixty-five at the time of these events. His survival, while remarkable for a man of that age, revealed the entire gamut of gentile engagement in Jewish fate, ranging from sheer exploitation to selfless rescue. Kornblüh had paid the Judenrat 2,000 Złoty to allow him to stay in the ghetto after the mass execution action of April 1943, but in early June he wisely went into hiding with a local Polish municipal worker. This saved him from two rounds of killings later that month, but on June 28 he was asked to leave because the Germans were inspecting former Jewish homes (suggesting how his host came by his property). After a few wretched days in the open, Kornblüh was offered assistance by a young Pole who turned out to be a proper profiteer, handing Kornblüh from one person to another and charging him ever more money. Eventually, in November 1943, Kornblüh was ejected from his hideout with a Polish widow, who claimed that she had received no payment for her trouble, and found himself without any shelter at the height of winter: “I didn’t know where to go. I knew there was no rescue for me and sat down at the edge of the woods. . . . The following morning an elderly beggar-woman spotted me. She saw at a glance that I was a Jew and asked me why I’d been sitting in a place where everybody could see me and hand me over to the police. I told her that I had been thrown out and that there was no place for me to go. She asked me if I was hungry. I told her that I didn’t have any food.” That afternoon the woman returned “and brought me coffee and food. I learned at that time that there also exist people who are willing to help without expecting anything in return.” Eventually Kornblüh made it to the village of Żnibrody (Ukrainian: Zhnyborody), twenty miles south of Buczacz, “where Poles helped me.” He described his rescuers as “very proper and noble.” When the Red Army reached the other bank of the Strypa, Kornblüh could not cross over since the bridge was heavily guarded; instead his Polish host’s son “arranged to meet me at the river, undressed completely and carried me across the river. Thanks to this noble man I reached the Soviet side earlier and was liberated.”27