Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  The last months of the German occupation were a period of unmitigated chaos, mayhem, and brutality, sprinkled with rare moments of altruism and grace. Many of the Jewish victims at that time were murdered not by the Germans but by an array of Ukrainian paramilitaries, local bandits, and brutalized peasants. Remarkably, most of the few survivors were saved by a German administrative official and a couple of Wehrmacht officers; it is thanks to the testimonies of those they rescued that we know anything about this world turned upside down, in which the handful who escaped systematic genocide were mercilessly hunted down, yet in recording their agony also preserved the memory of their saviors.

  Eleven-year-old Samuel Eisen was an exception; rather than being saved by others, he became a fighter. In summer 1943 Samuel witnessed the murder of thousands of Jews in his hometown of Tłuste, including many inhabitants of Buczacz recently deported there: “They dug four deep pits in the cemetery, then put boards over them. Ten people, stripped naked, were ordered to stand on each board and a machinegun shot them into the pit; they were followed by another ten people.” Surviving Jews related that “they had to go down into the pits and arrange the corpses one next to the other, packed like sardines, in order to squeeze in as many as possible. Children were thrown into the pits alive, and covered up with the corpses. A German would grab a child by the neck and shout: ‘Nimm das dreck und schmeiss herein! [Grab the filth and throw it in.]’ The children were swimming in blood in those pits. Two girls managed to dig themselves out from under the corpses and came back to town but they had lost their minds and could not speak.”

  For a while, Samuel, his little brother, Jakób, and their father worked on an agricultural farm, but after six weeks the father was killed in a Ukrainian police raid. The boys found him “lying naked among all the other corpses; they had taken away everything. . . . My brother and I dug a hole and buried our father naked. We had no clothes for him.” They then went into the forest. “We had no money, but many Poles lived in that village, they all knew us and were kind to us. They were afraid to hide us, but they always gave us food. We slept in the forest. . . . We washed our shirts in the river and dried them in the sun. We were only afraid of Ukrainians who might give us away.” As winter approached, Samuel joined a Soviet partisan unit operating in the region; he left little Jakób with Ignacy Wiszniewski, giving the Pole “a gold watch” and promising to “give him everything” he had “after the war if he hid my brother.” Samuel relished his service with the partisans. “I was with them for the entire year. . . . They taught me to ride on horseback . . . to hold the reins with our teeth so as to free our hands to load a submachine gun. . . . We were not afraid of anything. When we heard that the Ukrainian police were in the village, we went there, caught them and hanged them on trees in the forest.” They also ambushed and destroyed a German unit, taking many prisoners. Samuel’s partisan detachment welcomed the returning Red Army. “I was the youngest, so they gave me a red flag and I rode in the front between two officers.” He then gave all his property to Wiszniewski and took back his brother; in May 1945 they were living in Kraków. “I only want to work in Palestine,” Samuel wrote. “But when it comes to fighting again, I shall defend it, I shall know then what I am fighting for.”28

  One account illustrates the sheer horror of these final months of German rule in the region. Mojżesz Szpigiel, a forty-four-year-old former estate manager, survived the June 1943 mass shooting in Tłuste with several members of his family, including his father and fourteen-year-old son. They joined the labor camp in nearby Hołowczyńce (Ukrainian: Holovchyntsi), where the Polish work supervisor “extorted money from Jews” seeking to be certified as officially employed in the camp. Some of the wealthier Jews had gone “into hiding with Poles or Ukrainians” but “returned a few weeks later because the farmers had taken everything from them and thrown them out.” In contrast, the German supervisor of all the camps in the area, “Vathie,” as Szpigiel called him, “had a good relationship with the people” and “was tolerant.” Yet the general situation of the Jews in the region was so utterly hopeless that even after the second mass killing in Tłuste, in mid-June, which cost the lives of another 1,800 people, “the few who had escaped began returning to the town because in the woods they were attacked and killed by the Ukrainians.” In early July the camp laborers in Hołowczyńce were warned of a liquidation action and escaped to the forest, and “the local Ukrainians took advantage of this, went into the camp and took everything away from all those who still had something.” Sometime later the camp was raided by the Germans. As the Jews fled into the forest, testified Szpigiel, “we were assailed by peasants. The Ukrainians began catching people, torturing them, and taking their money.” That night Szpigiel’s father and his two nephews were murdered by a Ukrainian who had worked for their family. Yet the few survivors had no choice but to return to the camp in the morning. Now “a reign of hunger and misery began” since “the people did not have clothes and underwear, because they had been robbed of everything,” even their shoes, which led to a typhus outbreak and a mass shooting of the sick.

  In January 1944 the camp was attacked by heavily armed Ukrainian militiamen; the slaughtered included Szpigiel’s son. “It is important to state,” he declared, “that this killing was not a German action, that it was performed by Ukrainian policemen and bandits.” Apparently that day Vathie was on vacation. Still, Jews kept streaming into the camp, having been evicted from their hideouts by peasants fearful of bandit attacks. The camp was raided again on March 8; by Szpigiel’s count approximately a hundred bandits massacred forty-six Jews with knives and pitchforks. Returning from the forest “in the morning, we saw a terrible scene. The child orphans were stacked up in a pile, ten children were butchered, one on top of the other. . . . Other victims were lying with open guts in different locations. We buried them, gathered the injured and took them on two horses and carts to the camp in Tłuste. Everybody said they would rather die from a German bullet than from a bandit’s knife.”

  When Vathie left just a couple of days before the Soviets arrived, “the Jews earnestly cried,” “afraid of this transition period.” By now they “were no longer afraid of the Germans because the Gestapo was there no more”; rather they “were afraid of the Ukrainians.” To their surprise, the new commandant of Tłuste, a young German Army officer, “who saw that we [felt] sorry about Vathie” leaving, announced to the surviving Jews, “As long as I am here, nothing will happen to you.” He then “ordered [someone] to butcher a cow and to give us potatoes.” He was not the only Wehrmacht officer to protect the Jews from armed militias. As Szpigiel testified, the following day a unit of Ukrainian policemen “came to the camp with their guns drawn,” yelling, “Vodka or death!” Szpigiel managed to flee and alerted a German Army major, who “went there with his aide, hit one [Ukrainian] policeman on the head with his revolver, threw them out, and ordered them to leave the area immediately.”

  Soon thereafter the Red Army rolled in. They were finally liberated. However, seventeen-year-old Ester Nachtigal, who was recovering from wounds sustained during a Ukrainian attack, vividly recalled that just then “German planes arrived” and “strafed anyone who was running”:

  I managed to get off my bed and reached the door and began to cry. . . . Until then we always thought only how to survive, always thinking quickly from one moment to the next how to avoid death. Now I understood that I was alone and had survived. But this was not yet the case, because suddenly everything was flying around me, I was already faint from hunger. I found myself in a half-destroyed hut. The other hut was burning. The wounded there died in the flames. I stood there alone without knowing what to do, all covered in blood.29

  A survivor’s sketches of Buczacz. Source: Private document courtesy of Zvi Karniel.

  A survivor’s sketches of a hideout. Source: Private document courtesy of Zvi Karniel.

  Chapter 7

  NEIGHBORS

  OUN-UPA members in Uście Zielone (Ukrainian
: Ustya Zelene), Buczacz district, 1942. Source: PA, photo 4-1. See also O. Synenka, For the Homeland, for My People (Ternopil, 2002, in Ukrainian), 156–57.

  On the eve of 1944, Buczacz was, as Viktor Petrykevych described it in his diary, “a miserable sight,” a town whose heart had been torn out and replaced by refuse: “Since the Jews, exterminated by the Germans, had previously inhabited numerous houses, many buildings stand empty. . . . The Christians—petty merchants, artisans, and workers—have moved into the better houses and keep them as well as they can. But the remaining empty houses, where nobody lives, are in ruins, the windows broken, the window frames torn out, the doors and stairs shattered . . . [rooms] full of garbage and dung. There is so much filth that it is hard to look at them.” Under these circumstances, the old teacher was consumed by self-pity and resentment: “Our present existence is destitute; we live in unprecedented poverty.” And yet, he added, “some of the people live well and comfortably; they make profits and buy everything still available. Certainly, the war destroys and ruins some, and gives too much to others, often undeservedly.” The war, observed Petrykevych, had “caused a revolution in values.” While the “civil servants and clerks are the poorest, and of them, teachers are probably the poorest of all,” the local “merchants and artisans earn well,” particularly because “now they have no Jewish competition” and can offer many “fancy goods,” likely looted from murdered Jews, to trade in. Similarly, “professionals, doctors, veterinary surgeons, and dentists” also benefited from the disappearance of their Jewish colleagues. And in the villages many peasants were thriving by selling “home-brew alcohol,” a product formerly associated with Jewish manufacturers. In other words, for some sectors of the population, the extermination of the Jews could only be described as a blessing. “Such people,” grumbled Petrykevych, “fare well and do not feel the burden of the war.”

  These blessings of genocide were short-lived. In early January 1944 Petrykevych wrote, “This morning we could see for the first time refugees and exiles from the East. . . . The Ukrainians of Buczacz shake their heads and think: what will happen to us next?”1

  As the Red Army advanced, the Ukrainian underground reported that the Wehrmacht was undergoing “demoralization on a scale never seen before,” with German troops “raping young women and girls” and manifesting a growing “inclination to bribery” and a “complete lack of faith” in their cause, accompanied by “fear of partisans.” At the same time, noted the OUN, “the Polish underground” was becoming “very actively engaged in anti-Ukrainian operations,” and Polish peasants in mixed villages had taken to denouncing their Ukrainian neighbors.2

  Viktor Petrykevych in 1930. Source: Petrykevych private papers, courtesy of Bohdan Petrykevych, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

  Accounts by Poles focused primarily on the destruction of Polish existence in the eastern territories. This tragedy differed from the genocide of the Jews in that it had little to do with German policy; instead it was the result of a nationalist Ukrainian campaign to ethnically cleanse the lands for a future independent Ukraine. The radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, known as OUN-B after the name of its leader, Stepan Bandera, whose followers were consequently called Banderites (Polish: Banderowcy; Ukrainian: Benderivtsi), was now in the process of transforming itself into the underground political wing of an insurgency against German rule and in preparation for the possible return of Soviet rule. In 1943 many Ukrainian policemen serving the German occupation authority abandoned their units and formed the new military arm of the OUN-B, the Ukrainska Povstanska Armiya (UPA, Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Operations by the UPA in Volhynia, the province northeast of Galicia, led to massive ethnic cleansing of the Polish population there. In early 1944, with most of the Jews gone, the UPA and the OUN increased their pressure on the Polish inhabitants of Galicia. The result was that next to the ongoing efforts by the Germans to exterminate the last remnants of the Jewish population, and the intensifying struggle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in Ukraine, a civil war between Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, largely organized by the Polish Home Army and local peasant formations, cost the lives of thousands of civilians and paramilitary combatants, quite independently of the German occupiers and their interests.

  Altogether between 30,000 and 40,000 Poles and up to 5,000 Ukrainians were massacred in Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945, with an overall toll in the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of possibly as many as 100,000 Poles and 15,000 to 20,000 Ukrainians. The killings continued even after the Red Army returned to Eastern Galicia, although at that point the UPA turned its attention largely to resisting Soviet rule. Mobilizing some thirty thousand partisans and faced with tens of thousands of NKVD troops sent in to subdue the insurgency, the OUN-UPA kept up the fight until the early 1950s. By then Soviet punitive policies had led to the deportation of over 200,000 family members of insurgents to the interior of the USSR.3

  “Crimes committed by Bandera OUN-UPA groups in Buczacz County.” Source: “Ludobójstwo i czystki etniczne: Zbrodnie banderowskich bojówek OUN-UPA w pow. Buczacz, woj. Tarnopolskie,” Na Rubieży 4 (1995): 4.

  To justify its activities, the OUN claimed it was under attack. In the district of Buczacz in particular, the local OUN leadership asserted that the Polish underground was directly involved in “physically eradicating our membership,” while “the Polish population praises” such “terrorist activities.” In Petrykevych’s estimate, some three thousand partisans were now engaged in chaotic rural fighting throughout the region: “Polish partisans attack the Ukrainians; when Ukrainian partisans arrive, they punish the Poles for the murder or beating and looting of Ukrainians. What has been happening in remote villages of the district, on the edge of the forest, can only be described as anarchy.” As the UPA moved into the area, and with the corresponding expansion to 3,500 armed fighters of the Buczacz district’s Polish Peasants Battalions, loosely connected to the Polish Home Army, the interethnic struggle in the region was unleashed in earnest; there was only sporadic German intervention. And as sometimes happens in fraternal conflicts, according to Władysław Wołkowski, a member of the Polish underground, it was often difficult to tell the two sides apart. During the Ukrainian assault on Korościatyn (Ukrainian: Korostiatyn, now Krynytsya), fifteen miles west of Buczacz, in February 1944, for instance, the attackers sowed confusion in the Polish ranks by pretending to be Poles, so that “the Polish formation that arrived” on the scene “stood helplessly by for some time, because everyone was yelling in Polish not to shoot their countrymen.”4

  This clearly had to do with the tradition of Polish-Ukrainian intermarriage in this area, which went back many generations. Father Ludwik Rutyna explained that “there were many mixed families,” in which the boys followed the father’s religion, the girls followed the mother’s, and families attended services together in both Roman and Greek Catholic churches. For the nationalists on both sides, this was always perceived as a threat, especially when the fate of the region was once more hanging in the balance. In August 1943 the Polish Interior Ministry in exile observed that “the issue of so-called ‘mixed’ marriages” was increasingly “perceived as a serious danger” and “condemned by the Ukrainian press as the strongest factor of Polonization in the prewar period.” By the end of the war, Rutyna recalled, there were “many [Greek Catholic] priests in the [Ukrainian] underground,” and the Poles were running for their lives. “They didn’t want to leave,” but “when death grabs you by the throat, anyone who can will flee.” Only some of “the mixed families stayed”; “many Ukrainian women married to Poles immigrated to Poland.” The heavily mixed nature of families in the town of Koropiec, fifteen miles southwest of Buczacz, motivated an increasingly homicidal effort to tear them apart. In one case, the entire family of the Ukrainian Justyna Maćków, who had married a Pole and had three sons by him, was hanged. As related by Michał Sobków, the teenage child of a Polish father and a Ukrainian mother from Koropiec, “News spread that all B
anderites with a Polish sister or mother should kill them, since this was the demand of patriotism.” In Koropiec, he wrote, “the Poles feared the Banderites” and “the Ukrainians feared the Poles.” Everywhere “grown men stood guard on the roads from evening to morning . . . armed with pitchforks, axes, scythes, and iron bars, whether Banderites or Poles.”5