Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  But a few testimonies concerned primarily with the rescue of Jews give us a glimpse into the courage, ingenuity, and perseverance of Poles who chose to risk their lives to save others. One striking example is Mikołaj Szczyrba, who was raised and educated in Buczacz and was living with his wife, child, and parents on the farm he had purchased in the village of Grabowce (Ukrainian: Hrabivtsi), some eighty miles southeast of Buczacz, on the eve of the war. He described the local Ukrainian peasants as “generally hostile” to the many Jewish farmers, tradesmen, cattle dealers, and butchers living in the surrounding villages: “Very often windows in Jewish houses were smashed, their shops robbed and their apartments demolished.” After the Soviets withdrew in summer 1941, large-scale violence erupted. In the village of Piłotkowice (Ukrainian: Pylatkivtsi), “the Ukrainians took all Jewish men (and boys) to the forest, where they had to dig a pit for themselves and were then killed.” The remaining widows and orphans were driven out. In Zieliniec (Ukrainian: Zhylytsi) the Ukrainians “murdered the whole Jewish population—slashing everyone’s throats: children, women, the elderly, and the men”—and threw the bodies into the river. Only in Łosiacz (Ukrainian: Losyach) did the local priest forbid the peasants from killing “any more Jews or Poles.”

  Szczyrba witnessed much more violence over the next two years, including the liquidation of the ghetto in Borszczów “by German gendarmes and Ukrainian police.” Forced to bury the corpses, he saw that “the walls were covered with blood; fragments of human flesh and brains were everywhere on the streets.” Notices warned people against hiding Jews and promised payment for handing them in. This sparked “many denunciations and informing on others by Ukrainians,” resulting in additional murders of “hidden Jews as well as of the Polish families that had hidden them, while the traitors received a reward.” Initially, Szczyrba testified, when asked by his “Jewish acquaintances” for help, he was “afraid and refused” because “there had been many cases in which Jews were interrogated under torture and disclosed the names of their protectors.” But in May 1943 the twenty-seven-year-old farmer decided to help a group of sixteen Jews from Borszczów to hide in the forest; he provided them not only with food but also with weapons, left behind by Red Army troops he had helped escape in 1941. In time the number of those in hiding rose to thirty-two, “mainly young people and couples without children.” With his instructions and tools they built a large and well-camouflaged underground bunker.

  Three months later Szczyrba was denounced by suspicious Ukrainian neighbors and arrested. He spent seven weeks in prison in Czortków, was “interrogated, abused, beaten, and tortured,” but refused to “confess anything.” Released thanks to generous bribes by his friends, Szczyrba returned home to find that during that time in prison “my wife and my stepfather had taken food to the Jews in the woods every other day.” Not long thereafter some of the Jews joined Soviet partisans, while others organized their own band, raided a German Army barracks for weapons, and managed to release scores of Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish inmates from the prison in Borszczów. Tragically, in December the group was ambushed and most of its members were killed. Of those who had remained in the bunker, many also died in a German forest raid. But there were still six Jews being cared for by Szczyrba when the area was liberated. They remained in touch with him after the war, but as he testified, “Unfortunately they cannot help me at all because they themselves live in very hard material conditions; nevertheless they know best how I and my wife sacrificed ourselves to save their lives.”22

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, some Poles hoped to benefit from true or false claims of having saved Jews. In August 1947, for instance, Michał Boczar, formerly of Porchowa, a small village ten miles southeast of Buczacz, appealed for help from the Central Jewish Committee in Warsaw. Now living on “a dilapidated farm abandoned by German refugees” near Wrocław (German: Breslau), he claimed, “In 1943–44, I selflessly hid five Jews for ten months, risking my own life.” His house was “close to the forest, where many Jews were hiding,” and he regularly provided them with “hot meals, bread, and sometimes also clothes”; in winter they “occasionally spent several nights at my abode for fear of persecution by the Banderites.” After the war those he had rescued were living outside Poland and could neither send him money nor furnish any proof of his good deeds. He thus requested “a single benefit amounting to 30,000 Złoty” (roughly the equivalent of 200 U.S. dollars today) in order “to support three children, one of whom is disabled, a seven-year-old, and a daughter who is getting married soon.”23

  Two months later, Eugenia Czechowicz, living at the time in Szczecin, also appealed to the Central Committee. Beginning in the fall of 1942, she wrote, she had taken to hiding Jewish children in Buczacz whenever an action was expected; she even adopted an orphaned five-year-old boy “as my child.” Thanks to her actions, she said, she was nicknamed “the wet nurse of the Jews.” She had also sheltered adults, including Munio Altchiler (Maurycy Altschüler), who later “went abroad and has not been heard from since.” In April 1944, when the Wehrmacht reoccupied Buczacz, Czechowicz was arrested and the Jews she was hiding, including her adopted son, were taken away. She herself was “beaten and tortured” for four weeks “in a concrete basement,” then released. She ended up in Poland, having lost all her property and also her husband, a cavalry officer, who ran off with Anna Zilber, a Jewish woman they had hidden, “while I and my child were deprived of husband and caregiver.” Feeling betrayed by the very people she had saved and suffering from failing health, Czechowicz asked for money to help her open a shop.24

  It is impossible to tell whether these stories of rescue were true, but from numerous Jewish testimonies we know that most of those who survived were helped by Christian acquaintances or complete strangers, and that such help could and at times did come at a steep price for the rescuers. It is also true that some survivors began seeking their saviors only many years after the war, whereas others showed their gratitude as soon as they were able to. There were also, however, false claims, made by people who had never helped and by people who had sought to make a profit during the war and now hoped to gain a little more. Yet as Czechowicz’s story indicates, assuming it was true, beyond the life-and-death struggle for existence, people caught in these events also experienced many other, more mundane but deeply painful tragedies, of love and passion and betrayal, which marked their lives for many years thereafter. In Czechowicz’s case, what could be told as an unlikely romance between a Polish cavalry officer and a Jewish woman in hiding became the unjust consequence of an act of kindness and sacrifice.

  The October 1944 investigation of Nazi crimes in Buczacz was not much more than a sideshow in the effort to reestablish Soviet power in the region, dedicated primarily to crushing the Ukrainian insurgency and transforming the demography of an already devastated region. It was a herculean task. In August 1944 the first secretary of the Tarnopol regional committee, Ivan Kompanets, wrote the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, at the time first secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, about the dire conditions in the recently liberated territory. One’s first impression, Kompanets pointed out, was that “the vast majority of the inhabitants . . . had been transported to Germany by the Nazis” and that the towns were “totally lifeless.” Just as disconcerting was the fact that when the population began trickling back a few days later, “the vast majority” were Polish. As Kompanets explained, “from conversations with the people of the liberated towns and villages it became clear that before the German army retreated” it had “forced the inhabitants . . . to march to Germany in columns.” One villager related how “the Germans chased every man like beasts” and then “took them away, no one knows where.” Kompanets made no reference either to Poles fleeing Ukrainian terror or to Ukrainians fleeing anticipated Soviet and Jewish vengeance. Instead he triumphantly informed his boss, “The population of the Nazi-occupied regions, after experiencing the harsh German oppression, was greeting the Soviet representa
tives with open arms, telling them about all the Nazi atrocities, and volunteering to assist the local authorities in restoring what the Germans had destroyed.” One peasant had allegedly exclaimed, “We and our offspring will hate them forever. Now we know how much we should appreciate Soviet power.”25

  This peasant’s view was clearly not unanimously shared by the Ukrainian population. Reporting again to Khrushchev in September, Kompanets noted that the Tarnopol region had been experiencing a “significant increase in bandit activity,” so that “in July and August not a single day went by without the murder of a district officer, a village head, or a Soviet activist.” Indeed, he stressed, “terrorist groups and even larger bandit formations have penetrated almost all districts in the region,” and their activities “go practically unpunished.” Kompanets was especially concerned about “the professional OUN leaders with their many years of underground experience,” and the insurgents’ supply of “portable radios and underground printing presses,” with which they “disseminate propaganda literature to the population of the region.” Simultaneously the UPA “had prepared a significant number of commanders and leaders” and had “considerably increased the number of their trained fighters.” These “bandit gangs terrorize the local population, murder Soviet and village communist activists, stage raids on village councils, burn grain and threshing machines, rob cooperatives, storage silos, and butter plants, burn down Polish villages and kill Poles,” and “organize daytime and nighttime ambushes on the highways, shoot at military vehicles and kill army troops.” Kompanets thus asked for urgent military and NKVD assistance, additional weapons and ammunition, and “permission to deport the families of the bandits from the region.”26

  The response by the Soviet authorities was swift and brutal. In early October 1944 units of the NKVD began streaming into the region, and anti-insurgent operations, including massive deportations, greatly intensified. On October 14 the NKVD reported that “3,329 families of OUN members are scheduled for resettlement from the western regions of Ukraine, altogether 10,517 persons.” Additional resources were needed for the “transfer of OUN-families” to Siberia, entailing “the resettlement of 5,000 families with 15,000 people, scheduled for October and November 1944.” From the region of Tarnopol alone, 525 families, or 1,500 people, were scheduled for deportation, with another 245 families numbering 711 people already confirmed for resettlement. The deportations were carried out under appalling conditions. On November 18 even an NKVD officer expressed concern that “the families of OUN-members are being transported to Kiev in train cars unfitted for winter. Thus train number N-49339 is unheated; there are no windows in the railcars, and the stoves do not work. As a result there has been a high incidence of illness among these special resettlers, among them twelve dead children.” But such petty complaints had no impact on the overall situation. By November 26 a total of 13,320 people had been deported from Western Ukraine, with many more awaiting their turn.27

  Deportations of civilians went hand in hand with hunting down and eliminating the insurgents. In planning its operations in the Buczacz district for 1945, the NKVD identified a large number of underground groups and allotted forces for “annihilation actions” in numerous villages. For this purpose several “destruction battalions” were established, each numbering 180 men, and intelligence was gathered through recruitment of “internal agents” charged with “infiltrating the UPA organization as well as the OUN underground.” Local officials were instructed to “intensify the repression against the families of bandits,” as well as to “fill the ranks of combat units fighting the UPA” with “all those arrested during an operation” who might “express a desire to fight the bandits” rather than end up in a gulag. Finally, all adult district residents were registered, and families were warned that if “a person in hiding” did not “show up for registration in the city council, Soviet power will consider him a collaborator with the [insurgent] bands and will apply repression against his family.”28

  As a result of this system of raids, recruitment, and surveillance, by late fall 1946 the Buczacz district authorities had “liquidated” five “gangs,” killed 188 and jailed 167 “bandits,” arrested 254 OUN members, and deported 58 “families of bandits and their collaborators.” The estimated overall number of nationalist fighters thus declined from 500 to 71.29 By the end of 1946 the insurgency in the Tarnopol region was clearly on the wane, with over 200 insurgent groups liquidated, approximately 2,500 fighters killed, close to 6,000 fighters and underground members arrested, and 1,000 “families of bandits and their accomplices” deported. Less than a year later, the authorities in the Buczacz district concluded that the insurgency had diminished to a single OUN group of four fighters and “20 isolated bandits.”30 One estimate put the total number of nationalist victims of repression in the Buczacz district between 1944 and 1953 at 671 fighters killed, including 59 women, as well as 1,628 imprisoned or deported to Siberia, about half of whom were women. Meanwhile, as military operations were winding down, deportations were intensifying, with close to 350 families deported between July and October 1947. It was stated that “the vast majority of the poor and middle class people approve of and support” these deportations, whereas “the mainly rich villagers and relatives of the deported sympathize with them and are frightened.” Clearly deportations entailed not only punishing the insurgents but also social engineering and buying off the much larger poor section of the peasantry with the property of the deported. As soon as the trains left for the East, the troops and local Soviet activists reportedly proceeded “with the inventory and removal of the deportees’ belongings.”31

  Even as the Soviets were hunting down insurgents and deporting their families to the East, they were simultaneously engaged in “repatriating” the remaining Polish population in the region to what became communist-ruled Poland and absorbing Ukrainians deported from Poland, as agreed in Lublin. In this the authorities were paradoxically helped by the OUN-UPA’s ferocious attacks against Polish communities, which led to increasing pressure by local Poles to enable them to flee the region. As Secretary Kompanets reported from Tarnopol, in the first ten months of 1945 close to 80,000 Polish families, almost a quarter of a million people, had registered for repatriation, of whom 45,000 individuals had already left the region. During the same period 7,000 Ukrainian families with 23,000 people had arrived from Poland. The figures kept growing, despite various logistical difficulties and attacks by armed bandits on caravans trekking from one country to another. By late June 1946 the Czortków region had relocated to Poland 107,000 Polish citizens (including 1,852 Jews and 1,000 “others”); of the remaining 1,000 still slotted for repatriation, half preferred to stay where they were. The Buczacz district had relocated 12,000 Poles, leaving behind not a single registered Polish citizen. With this, declared the local official in charge, “the transfer of Polish citizens is basically complete.”

  By 1948 the Buczacz district’s demography had been entirely transformed. The overall population had shrunk to 36,000, including merely 4,000 in the city of Buczacz. As the district authorities reported, these were “principally . . . Ukrainians,” including close to 1,500 relocated persons from Poland. People were said to be “generally well disposed toward the Soviet authorities,” largely thanks to financial investments and economic development in the district.32

  Once the two main obstacles to a firm hold on the region—the interethnic conflict with the Poles and radical Ukrainian nationalism—were removed, the heavy shroud of Soviet power descended on the towns and villages of the Buczacz district. Promises of economic and educational progress, greater equality and the eradication of poverty, improved professional training, and employment prospects may well have appealed to a population desperately trying to recover from years of upheaval and oppression, shattered hopes, and drastic dislocation. But the system ended up choking the region, thanks to its own internal contradictions and because so many of the most enterprising and best-trained inhabitants had been m
urdered, expelled, or deported. Those who tried to fill the vast gaps torn in the fabric of society were ill prepared for these roles, coming into the desolate towns either from nearby backward villages or as deportees from remote rural locations in Poland.33 By the time the curtain was raised in 1991, towns such as Buczacz had all the appearance of having remained stuck in a time warp, their shabby Soviet façades and dusty streets reflecting the hopelessness of their inhabitants, so many of whom still seemed, even decades later, to be grappling with the question of what urban life in a neglected borderland province should look like. Not a great deal has changed since then.

  AFTERMATH

  The Jewish cemetery in Buczacz, 2003. Photo by the author.

  All three ethnic groups living in Buczacz and its district underwent extreme suffering, although their agony peaked at different times and often at the hands of different perpetrators, just as their propensity to collaborate with the occupiers depended on different factors and changing circumstances. And yet, at the time and long after, each group sought to present itself as the main victim, both of the occupying powers and of its neighbors. Poles and Ukrainians were particularly keen on highlighting their martyrdom, in part out of fear that the Nazi genocide of the Jews would overshadow their own victimhood but also because in reality both groups had far greater room for accommodation with the Germans, even as they benefited from much more elaborate and effective underground organizations than were available to the Jews under the relentless German onslaught. Additionally widespread anti-Jewish prejudice and resentment, fueled by suspicions of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and a common view of the Jews as not belonging to the land and not deserving any share in its future, combined to marginalize or dismiss the mass murder of the Jews, isolated expressions of sympathy and compassion notwithstanding.