Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  By late February 1944, even Petrykevych was willing to concede that Ukrainian insurgents were “driving the Poles out of their villages” in Volhynia and Galicia: “The Poles flee to the cities; those who stay behind in the villages do not sleep at night and stay on guard, armed. Murder, arson, and robbery are rife.” While insisting that the massacre in Korościatyn that month, where Ukrainian “partisans burned down the village and killed over a hundred people with guns or hand grenades,” was provoked by “a Polish ambush that shot dead one or two” Ukrainian fighters, he also observed, “The partisans are having a good time, [and thanks to] the latent thirst for revenge . . . human blood is flowing.” On March 15 Petrykevych wrote, “Those who had enriched themselves have left the city.” So did his wife and children, as the killings continued unabated. On March 20, three days before the Soviets arrived, “the Germans found nine Jews in a shelter and shot them on the Fedor.” All the remaining Christian youngsters were being seized by the Germans for forced labor, while those “merchants, artisans, and other people, who lived in former Jewish houses” were “moving out . . . in view of the recent developments in the war. They anticipate Jewish revenge.” This set off a frenzy of looting by the poor of previously plundered Jewish belongings. Finally, on the afternoon of March 24, “the first Bolshevik tank entered the city.”6

  “The Poles were glad that finally the Soviet troops would return and put an end to the nightmare of the Banderites,” wrote Michał Sobków. In spring 1944 the London-based Polish government in exile estimated that the number of Polish inhabitants in the Buczacz district, which had stood at 48,000 before the outbreak of war, had been halved. Adding to an estimated loss of 10,000 Ukrainians and the vast majority of the original 15,000 Jews, it appears that 50,000 people, over a third of the district’s prewar population of 140,000, were lost through killing, deportation, expulsion, or flight.7

  Suddenly, with the return of the Soviets, the situation was reversed; in summer 1944 seventeen-year-old Stanisław Kubasiewicz joined a locally recruited “destruction battalion,” one of numerous such units established by the NKVD from mostly Polish local inhabitants to suppress the Ukrainian insurgency. They also participated in deporting suspected militants’ families. “I felt quite uncomfortable after such actions,” Kubasiewicz wrote, “which were usually accompanied by women’s cries. I wasn’t suitable for such a job; they were our enemies, and perhaps one of their husbands or sons had participated in murders of Poles in nearby villages, but I could not stir up any hatred in myself. After all, these people were not strangers to us.”8

  The Soviets proved particularly effective in mobilizing local elements to help them establish rule and root out their opponents. As the OUN saw it, the NKVD “mostly relies on the Poles” for information and repression, treating “Ukrainian-Galicians as enemies” and assuming that “every Ukrainian is a Banderite.” But Soviet rule did not entirely eliminate Ukrainian violence, as a gruesome massacre in Puźniki (Ukrainian: Puzhnyky) in February 1945 grimly illustrated. Indeed the recruitment of Polish men left their own villages vulnerable. Sobków recalled that “all young men from [Puźniki] had been conscripted into a ‘destroyer battalion’ stationed in Koropiec,” about midway between Buczacz and Puźniki, of which he was also a member, and so the attacking Ukrainian force found only defenseless “women, children and the elderly.” By the time Sobków’s unit reached the village at daybreak, they discovered a scene of horrors: “Many women with hacked off breasts were howling in pain. Everywhere we encountered people with bleeding head wounds caused by axe strikes.” One toddler’s “skull had been smashed, the pieces held together with bread”; another baby’s “mouth had been cut with a knife.” Altogether 104 people were murdered in Puźniki; only fourteen Polish households remained.

  In Sobków’s view, the most traumatic aspect of this period was the transformation of his community from one enjoying interethnic harmony to one assaulted by ethnic butchery, and like so many other Poles, he perceived the main tragedy of the war as the loss of his homeland. At age seventeen, along with his mother and sister, a horse, and a cow, Sobków left Koropiec forever.9

  The terrifying language of murderous threats, often followed by massive bloodshed, that characterized this internecine conflict was graphically presented in a leaflet distributed in June 1944 by a Ukrainian “self-defense” group to the inhabitants of Hnilcze (Ukrainian: Hnylche), a village located twenty miles northwest of Buczacz. “The Polish authorities and their followers have responded to our repeated efforts to appease Polish-Ukrainian relations,” stated the pamphlet, “with terror, denunciation, murder and plunder”; rather than “fighting against the Muscovite or German occupation,” the Poles were striving “to bring about the greatest annihilation of the Ukrainian people with their help. . . . Polish bullets have cut down hundreds of innocent victims, and many Ukrainian villages have been burned down and destroyed.” But now “terror will be answered with terror!” Justice was on the side of “the Ukrainian people,” which “possesses on its soil sufficient right and might to mow down the Polish leaders with their imperialist delusions.” Hence the group vowed “our vengeance will be tenfold,” and “the irresponsible Polish leaders who began the struggle between the Polish and Ukrainian people will have to bear the responsibility for that.” As Petrykevych remarked at the time, reflecting the brutalization of popular imagery further exacerbated by exposure to systematic genocide, Ukrainians “say that just as the Jews went to Bełżec, so too the Poles should go to Auschwitz.”10

  What ultimately put an end to this fraternal conflict was the flight and subsequent deportation of the Polish population from Eastern Galicia. The Lublin agreement of September 9, 1944, between the Polish communist leadership and the Kremlin facilitated a vast Polish-Ukrainian population exchange. Between 1944 and 1947 an estimated 560,000 Poles were removed from Eastern Galicia, which became part of Soviet Ukraine; altogether up to 750,000 Poles were deported from the western regions of the newly expanded USSR, while over 500,000 Ukrainians were deported from Poland as it was reconstituted in its postwar borders.11 By the end of the decade, then, as a result of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population policies, these once multiethnic lands had become almost completely homogeneous.

  Yet the Lublin agreement did not put an immediate end to the civil war in the region. While the Soviets had initially employed the Poles in their fight against Ukrainian nationalists, now they were busy deporting Poles from the region precisely in accord with Ukrainian nationalist aspirations. In this sense, the Soviet Union had accepted the logic of the nationalists of creating ethnically uniform regions so as to put an end to interethnic conflict. In October 1944 the OUN noted this change in Soviet policies, commenting that the authorities had begun conducting “arrests and raids in Polish villages”: “At the latest meetings of village council heads arranged by the districts, the Bolshevik government discussed the issue of relocating the Poles from Western Ukraine to Poland.” The Poles would have to “leave their residences, abandoning their farms, households, and tools, because Ukrainians from Poland would be taking over their homes. News is circulating,” remarked the OUN with some satisfaction, “that the Bolsheviks are doing this in order to put an end to the internecine conflict between the Poles and the Ukrainians and to ensure appropriate behavior by the Banderites toward the Bolsheviks when Galicia is populated exclusively by Ukrainians.” Of course, stated the OUN derisively, the Poles “cannot get it into their heads that they would have to abandon their hearths in the rich land of Galicia, to which they have made unfounded claims from time immemorial. Today they are still dreaming of Poland on Ukrainian lands.”12 Ironically, then, the old dream of Ukrainian nationalists was about to be realized by their most hated enemy: an ethnically pure Western Ukraine created by Soviet population policies.

  In early 1945 the first secretary of the Buczacz district committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, K. M. Rybachuk, described the conditions he had encountered when he first arrived in
the district. The Germans, he wrote, had “looted and caused terrible devastation” everywhere. “The population was transported beyond the boundaries of the district, the fields were abandoned, and the absence of crops caused the economy of the district to decline even further.” The Germans had destroyed numerous plants and food manufacturing facilities, mills, bridges, water-supply systems, electric and telephone networks, schools, the power station, the railroad station, and a hospital. Worst of all, “the Germans killed more than 10,000 civilians in the district and deported over 6,000 young people to slave labor. The town of Buczacz became desolate. Of the original 15,000–16,000 inhabitants, no one was left in Buczacz by Liberation Day”; six months later, the population had grown to merely 2,750 people.13

  At the time of the report, the town still had more than nine hundred empty houses, some of which were partially destroyed. Much of the livestock in the district was gone; five thousand horses and a similar number of swine, ten thousand heads of cattle, fifty thousand hens, as well as five thousand tons of grain and “many other agricultural products and tools,” had all been removed by the Germans. In return the Wehrmacht had sown 300,000 landmines in the pastures and fields. Rybachuk reported that during those first six months, much had been restored, including two distilleries, a bakery, the power station, the hospital, the printing press, a few agricultural machines, clothes and shoe manufacturing facilities, schools, the town club, and the movie theater; additionally 184,000 mines had been cleared.14 But Buczacz was still in a wretched state, and would remain so for a long time thereafter.

  The Soviets also dedicated considerable efforts to investigating the crimes committed during the German occupation. Already in late July 1944, an inquiry was launched into Nazi crimes in the recently liberated districts of Czortków, Zaleszczyki (Ukrainian: Zalishchyky), Tłuste, and Kopyczyńce. The report explicitly referred to German “mass executions (‘pogroms’) of the Jewish population,” noting that “the entire Jewish population” of the town of Czortków “was annihilated.” Many other details, such as the imposition of identifying armbands, ghettoization in the cities, practices of extortion and bribery, epidemics and starvation, and methods of mass execution, were elaborated. The report concluded with the cautious statement that in the entire Czortków district a total of “13,000 entirely innocent peaceful Soviet citizens” were murdered, but the bulk of the report left no doubt that the Jewish population was the main target of the German perpetrators, as well as of many, mostly Ukrainian “traitors to the Fatherland.” Some of these men were mentioned by name, but most eluded justice.15

  German aerial photo of Buczacz, April 1944. Source: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 373: GX12125 SD, exps. 32, 33, 62, and 63 (combined).

  Soviet sketch of killing sites, May 21, 1945. Source: YVA JM/19988, from Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federazii (GARF) (State Archive of the Russian Federation), 7021-75-731.

  In early October 1944 local representatives of the Soviet Extra-ordinary Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes launched a similar inquiry in Buczacz. The investigators exhumed mass graves and carried out forensic analysis, interviewed locals, and tried to obtain information from survivors. The commission also identified by name (although often misspelled or garbled) many Sipo men, gendarmes, Ukrainian policemen, and other local collaborators involved in the killings. An interim report issued in mid-October identified fourteen mass graves on Fedor Hill, containing altogether 13,670 victims; it was followed a few days later by a report on three mass graves found at the Jewish cemetery with an additional 5,000 victims. But the final report, submitted on November 5, concluded that “about 7,000 decomposed corpses” had been found, undressed and showing signs of firearm wounds to the back of the head, including “children aged under 15,” some “with crushed skulls.” This final version omitted all previous references to local collaborators, and while witness testimonies had unambiguously pointed out that the vast majority of the victims were Jews, the conclusion merely stated that these were “crimes against Soviet citizens.”16

  For Ukrainians in Buczacz, the mass murder of the Jews had been both appalling and a cause for apology and self-justification. Like many others, Petrykevych was shocked by the roundups of winter and spring 1943, when he witnessed the Jews being “taken to the Fedor, where the Baudienst [labor service] had already prepared graves a few days earlier; they shoot them in the back of the head and throw them into the grave.” But he insisted, “Our policemen let some of the Jews escape; our people are hiding them in barns and haystacks.” At precisely the same time, hundreds of young Ukrainians in Buczacz were volunteering to serve in the Waffen-SS Division “Galicia,” established in spring 1943 to symbolize Ukrainian participation in the German fight against the approaching Red Army.17

  And yet, as Petrykevych noted, in the countryside the Germans were carrying out widespread requisitions of food from the peasants with such “draconian brutality” that the villages were filled with “wailing, groaning, and grief.” German rule had become increasingly destructive, yet the prospects of Soviet occupation filled Ukrainians with dread. As Petrykevych observed in late September 1943, “some people have begun packing their possessions” for fear that the Soviets would “wreak ferocious revenge on those who collaborated with the Germans.” Since the most damning witnesses of this collaboration were the few surviving Jews, this provoked a new wave of denunciations. “Every week, by chance or through denunciation, their bunkers are discovered; from there, they are taken to the police.” Nonetheless Petrykevych was troubled by the fact that the Jews were “getting bolder. Carrying arms, some of them come in the evening to families that had been asked by other Jews to store their belongings, and demand to hand them back.” And “if anyone refuses to return [the belongings], they declare that the Jews will punish them later.”18

  Other Ukrainian witnesses similarly combined empathy with denial. Maria Khvostenko, a teenager at the time, vividly recalled watching a terrifying scene from the window of the gymnasium facing the town center: “In the middle of the main street a crowd was going around the city hall and toward the bridge over the Strypa. Gendarmes with dogs, Gestapo, and policemen with six-pointed stars surrounded the crowd and were hustling it toward the Fedor hill. What a horrible sight it was! There were women, men, old people and young—our schoolmates and friends. . . . They were our neighbors and strangers, but they were people!” This was only one of many horrors she encountered. “The killing machine worked methodically and without a hitch. From about the fall of 1942 to the end of 1943 they would hold execution actions, always on Fridays.” Arriving “on Thursday evening,” the Germans would “ ‘act’ or ‘work’ all night, and the next morning, as we were running to school, we could see the results of their work: corpses of women, men and children lying on the road. As for infants, they would throw them from balconies onto the paved road. They were lying in the mud with smashed heads and spattered brains.” Near Fedor Hill “we could hear machine-gun fire accompanied by the drone of engines, which were intended to drown the sound of the shooting but instead only intensified it.”

  Parade of volunteers for Waffen-SS Division “Galicia” in Buczacz, 1943. Source: PA.

  Khvostenko remembered that a Polish family living nearby had “tried to save their Jewish friends and were all shot,” save for their daughter, who was her classmate. “She had been away on some errand and when she came back she found her family dead. She went mad and nobody saw her after that.” There were several other stories of rescue: one Jewish woman was hidden in the Basilian monastery; another hid in the basement of the Roman Catholic church. But Khvostenko firmly believed that “our people respected the religious feeling of the Jews and never abused them” and that “there were no quarrels between neighbors, no slander or disrespect.” While she indicated the presence of Jewish policemen “with six-pointed stars,” she failed to mention the ubiquitous presence of armed Ukrainians at the killings and the rash of denunciations that cost t
he lives of so many Jews on the eve of liberation.19

  Julija Trembach, who came from a Polish family but married a Ukrainian and remained in Buczacz after the war, was still troubled by memories of the German “crimes against Jewish people” even at the age of ninety-three. During the war she had a front-row view of how the Germans “buried them alive on Fedor Hill, and how those people dug their own graves. From the street where I lived, I could see how the ground was moving over the people who were still not dead. I will never forget the moans and cries of those people,” who had “committed no crime.” But she also insisted that although “the Germans forbade us to help Jews and to give them shelter” on pain of death, “our people, both Ukrainian and Polish, tried to help in any way they could. They made dugouts in the ground, and Jews hid there. Secretly people would bring food to those dugouts. And God only knows how much food I brought by myself.” During one roundup, she recalled, a young woman “came running to me. She had a baby in her arms.” The woman “was crying and exhausted. She whispered: ‘Save us, hide us.’ At my own risk I hid them in the hayloft. . . . I fed that little girl with my own breast, because I had a baby myself.” She kept them at her house for several days, until a group of Jews took the mother and baby with them. Nor was this “the only case,” declared Trembach. “We pitied those people, for they were beaten, always scared for their lives and never knew what would happen to them at any moment.”20

  For some Poles, including sympathetic observers, the German murder of the Jews was associated with the alleged Jewish participation in the Soviet victimization of the Poles. The Buczacz power plant manager Władysław Hałkiewicz conceded that as far as the Jews were concerned, both Poles and Ukrainians “had an opportunity to help more but did not want to,” largely because under Soviet rule “the poor Jews had collaborated with the Soviets, leading to the deportation of the Polish intelligentsia to Siberia,” while “the Jewish intelligentsia” conveniently “assumed a neutral stance toward the Bolsheviks.” Father Rutyna agreed decades later that the people of Buczacz had “suffered so much under the Jews, since the latter had bound themselves to the Soviets during the war with all their agitation and sympathies.”21