by Omer Bartov
The Ukrainian Petro Pasichnyk, born in the village of Zielona, six miles north of Buczacz, and a former member of the UPA, was haunted by wartime memories. Because of the “great animosity” between Poles and Ukrainians, he said, “our people destroyed” Polish villages; in return, after the Germans were driven out, “Poles in ‘destroyer battalions’ ” helped the Soviets suppress the Ukrainian insurgency. In one case “they caught a female teacher” deployed as a messenger for the UPA “and just murdered her, just chopped her into pieces.” He described the murder of the Jews, including some of his classmates, but found it somewhat mystifying. “I saw how they were driven into the forest to execution,” he said, “but I just wonder: how could they go so passively?! They did not escape. Did they believe that this was their fate, or something else?” After all, he insisted, “there were only a couple of Germans” at the site. “It was a horror,” he added. “It is indeed dreadful to see corpses lying [on the ground], murdered children.” Pasichnyk had evidently observed some of the killings from close by, but he made no reference to the numerous Ukrainian policemen who rounded up the Jews and guarded the perimeter of the execution site. Indeed, when asked, he responded adamantly, “I did not see the police, I saw the SS. The SS would come, take [Jewish] children and throw them out of windows. You would go through the street and see bodies everywhere. But our people—I don’t know, there could have been something somewhere, but I can’t say anything because I know nothing.”
Pasichnyk’s insistence that this was a purely German action made it necessary to explain the alleged failure of the Jews to escape by invoking their predetermined fate or uncanny acceptance of massacre. It was also immediately relativized by reference to Ukrainian martyrdom, even if by a different regime: “Equally horrible was the time when the Soviets were executing our people. Every day . . . there were corpses, corpses, corpses. . . . They would bring them [to Buczacz]—and display them. . . . When they hanged someone, they would bring people to watch.” And since Pasichnyk also energetically confirmed that “yes, of course, the Jews collaborated” with the Soviets, his account created a certain symmetry of horror between the somewhat mysterious eradication of the Jews and the heroic martyrdom of “our people.” This was a version of the past that many Ukrainians of his generation in Western Ukraine had internalized and retained for decades thereafter. But it demanded a degree of selective recollection.1
According to Ihor Duda, the author of a guide to Buczacz published in 1985, Buczacz had experienced tremendous progress over the previous four decades of Soviet rule. (He did not know that the communists would soon be out of office.) It was also an idyllic site for tourists. Along the “picturesque banks” of the Strypa, he wrote, “various recreation areas have been laid out—parks, public gardens and a beach. The extraordinary beauty of the Strypa valley with its partially forested rocky slopes, narrow creeks and terraces, and deep ravines, is quite striking.” Buczacz also “abounds in monuments of history and architecture,” dating back to earlier centuries as well as “from the Soviet period.” The latter included such delectable sites as “the house where the district Revolutionary Committee was situated in 1920 and the Provisional District Administration Board convened in 1939”; a Lenin monument; and an artillery gun along with a tractor “placed on pedestals as testimony to the glory of the Soviet people in war and labor.” Additionally Buczacz benefited from new industrial undertakings, including factories for metal and tinned food, a mechanized bakery, a sugar refinery, a distillery, a mixed fodder plant, a cheese dairy, and a unit of mobile mechanized machinery. There were numerous schools as well, for agriculture, technology, motor transport, music, art, and sports, supported by fourteen libraries, two “palaces of culture,” a cinema, and a museum of local history. Judging by this account, Buczacz was a veritable Western Ukrainian haven of the best Soviet civilization could offer. No wonder that, according to Duda, year by year the city was “becoming younger and nicer. It has a rich history and beautiful present.”
Regarding that rich past, Soviet Buczacz was especially proud of its local history museum, opened in 1982 in the former city hall, which displayed such items as, on the first floor, “a model-reconstruction of the Buczacz castle, the interior of a peasant’s hut,” and “items of national costumes, ceramics and household objects,” while the second floor was dedicated to more recent Soviet history. Here the eager tourist could find “photographs and personal belongings of the Western Ukrainian People’s Council delegates,” along with those of “other honored citizens, veterans of war and labor,” and “many materials concerning the Great Patriotic War and the liberation of the city from the German-Fascist occupants.” The museum had swiftly become, according to Duda, “a center of patriotic and internationalist education for the youth,” who learned in this manner “about the high price paid for our beautiful present.” Those youngsters privileged enough to study in the former gymnasium, now Secondary School No. 1 and named after the locally born Ukrainian ethnographer Volodymyr Hnatiuk, imbibed a regular communist educational diet that strictly avoided any information on such prewar students as Emanuel Ringelblum and Simon Wiesenthal, let alone anything about the author Shmuel Yosef Agnon or more generally on Jewish Buczacz. Leading his readers from one site to another, mostly Soviet schools, factories, and memorials, Duda ended his recommended walk through the city at “an observation spot” located on “top of the Baszty hill.” From there, he wrote, “we can see almost all the routes we passed” while touring the city. Duda and his imaginary tourists would have been standing at that moment just feet away from the Jewish cemetery and its mass graves. But the guide made no mention of the Jews who lived and died in Buczacz.2
At a commemoration ceremony held in 2006 next to the OUN-UPA memorial on the slope of Fedor Hill, only a couple of dozen veterans attended. After the fall of the communist regime, the local administration officially recognized the veterans’ sacrifice and provided them with a symbolic supplement to their pensions. Even more important, they now had a keeper of the flame, Oresta Synenka, a small elderly woman who directed the local branch of the Poshuk (Search) society in Lviv, served as chairperson of the Russian Memorial society’s district affiliate, and was founder and director of the Museum of the Liberation Organizations, located in the former offices of the NKVD in Buczacz and dedicated to commemorating the victims of communism and the martyrs of Ukraine’s struggle for independence.3
Oresta came to Buczacz as a twelve-year-old in 1945; she recalled that there were still two synagogues in the city at the time, “one at the place where now the yellow house stands, and the other right behind it.” The former was the Study House, or beit hamidrash, a site that the author Agnon fondly invoked in many stories about his hometown. The latter was the Great Synagogue. Oresta’s father worked as a foreman in a construction and demolition brigade; he told her that since “the whole block of houses” in that location “had been bombarded,” the crew decided that “there was no sense in repairing the synagogue, so they demolished it. They were done by 1950.” It was said that the materials from the Great Synagogue were used to construct the new Soviet cinema that stands in the city to this day.
The Buczacz Museum of the Liberation Organizations, 2006. Photo courtesy of Sofia Grachova.
Oresta’s interest in local veterans may have first been sparked when she met her future husband, Ivan Synenkyi, whose own succinct testimony she eventually recorded in 2004. Ivan, who was a teenager at the time, was deeply scarred by his wartime experiences. “I was witness to the events of the Holocaust,” he stated, recalling that “before the war” Jews had lived in Buczacz “in peace with Ukrainians, Poles and other national minorities.” Under German rule, “the Hitlerites carried out regular monthly actions against the Jews,” during which “they would assemble 300–400” people and “shoot them all in the forest on the Fedor hill. . . . They would force the doomed to undress, take them to the edge of the pit and shoot them down.” Among the victims he knew were “Lumcio Rose
nbach, his wife and their twelve children.” Only one son “survived by miracle; later he found himself in Russia, and now he lives in Israel.” Asked whether people in the city could hear the executions of the Jews, he said, “Oh yes, we could hear that very well.” Oresta, presumably reporting what her husband had told her, added, “Some guys would even go to see the shooting. They would climb on trees and watch.” Ivan must have been one of the onlookers, since he too was puzzled by the victims’ conduct: “The Jews would go to the execution site passively. They didn’t resist, they only lamented.” His wife explained, “They knew they were doomed. They had no help from anywhere. Ukrainians were not hostile, but they would be executed for helping a Jew.” Still, some did help. “Ivan’s brother-in-law saved a Jewish girl and baptized her. Later she married. She still lives in Rohatyn,” not far from Buczacz.
Ivan insisted that while “the Nazis were merciless to Ukraine” as well, “the bloodiest trace they left in our city was the fate of the Jews.” Describing the killing sites around Buczacz, he concluded, “There are almost no Jews left in the city, but the graves and the memory of the bloody terror of that time remain.”4 In fact contemporary Buczacz contains very few traces of the lives and mass murder of its Jews. The memorial tombstone on Fedor Hill is surrounded by a dense forest and barely accessible; a humble memorial at the Jewish cemetery, erected a decade ago, has been damaged and is hidden for much of the year under tall thorny bushes.
Memorial tombstone on Fedor Hill, 2003. Photo by the author.
As for the Study House, the only original Jewish religious edifice in Buczacz, Ivan said, “The Germans turned it into a granary. It was still a granary in the 1990s, until it was pulled down.” The event was witnessed by Ruhama Albag, an Israeli scholar of Hebrew literature, who happened to be visiting Buczacz on Agnon’s birthday, August 8, in 2001. She recalled from Agnon’s writing that “in the heart of the city there were two that had become one: The old Study House adjacent to the Great Synagogue.” As they “approached the market square,” she wrote, all that was left “were mounds of dirt, piles of stones and wooden beams. Deafening tractors had reduced . . . the old study house to ruins.” What Agnon had considered to be the soul of his town was gone, replaced by a garish yellow shopping center.5
Demolition of the Study House, 2001. Photo courtesy of Ruhama Albag.
Writing about “the Holocaust in Buczacz” in a local newspaper in 2000, the Ukrainian journalist Tetiana Pavlyshyn may have been right to conclude that although “more than half a century has passed since that time . . . people’s memories have not changed” and “are stamped with that horrible moment in our history.”6 Those fraught and traumatized memories contain as much forgetting as remembering. But selective as they are, they hold great elements of truth and pain despite the massive memory erasure imposed by the previous Soviet narrative of the war, whose effects still linger long after the fall of communism. An echo of that tale could be found in another essay in the same paper, published just a few weeks before Pavlyshyn’s article and intended to enlighten readers about the events of World War II in the Buczacz area. In describing the crimes of the Germans, the author, Oksana Chorniy, simply noted, “Over seven thousand civilians were exterminated, and 1,839 young men and women were deported to Germany.” The only brief reference to Jews in the entire essay came from the mouth of Hanna Muzyka, a Ukrainian woman who had worked in a German Army kitchen. One of the Germans, she was quoted as saying, “employed two Jewish girls as servants, and nobody denounced them. Later those girls thanked everybody for that.”7
Fifteen years earlier, Duda’s guide to Buczacz had provided a local version of the classic Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Although “about 7,500 civilians from the city and the district villages” were “exterminated” by “the Hitlerites,” “the population did not submit to the fascists”; following the liberation “hundreds of Buczacz residents joined the ranks of the Red Army,” and “over thirty of them fell in action fighting for their Motherland.” This was not the same motherland for which the men and women of the OUN-UPA had fought. And just as the memory of the insurgents was expunged from the Soviet narrative, so too the memory of the Ukrainian nationalists’ complicity in the genocide of the Jews and their direct engagement in the ethnic cleansing of the Poles was erased from their own postcommunist glorification. In the Buczacz district, these fighters included Mykola Ivantsiv (“Rosa”), an adherent of Prosvita and a loyal member of the OUN, who joined the UPA in Volhynia in 1943, “where he received his baptism of fire.” Ivantsiv, who “continued to fight after returning home” to the Buczacz district, eventually “blew himself up with a hand grenade” rather than surrender to Soviet troops in 1947. Even more tellingly, Volodymyr Lutsiv (“Orel”), the leader of the local Sich that undertook “cleansing” operations following the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1941, joined the fight against the Poles and the Soviets in 1944 and was killed by NKVD troops in 1948. By then his parents had died in Soviet deportation; of his three brothers, one was deported, a second jailed and tortured, and a third killed in the ranks of the UPA. Lutsiv’s wife, an OUN activist, was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag and died shortly after her release, while their daughter died of neglect at a young age. In 2003 Volodymyr and his daughter were reburied in a solemn ceremony in Buczacz, in a “holy grave for a son and a daughter of the Ukrainian nation.”8
If the Poles described the Ukrainian insurgents as savages, and the Jews saw them as “worse than the Germans,” from their own point of view they were martyrs of a just and holy cause, the liberation of their land from foreign oppression: the goal justified the means, including massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Many of them died in battle, were executed by the NKVD, or spent long years in gulags. Others fled to the West, where they formed the nationalist hard core of the Ukrainian diaspora. Vilified by the communists as fascist collaborators, they emerged from obscurity and were celebrated as the harbingers of the nation after Ukrainian independence in 1991, especially in Western Ukraine. Two decades later, as a newly resurgent Russia sought to reassert its influence on Ukraine, the UPA again came to symbolize the country’s historical struggle against its mighty eastern neighbor: in 2016 the black-and-red banner of the insurgent army was again fluttering from the remnants of the medieval Polish castle overlooking Buczacz. History was back to its old tricks.
UPA flag on top of the castle in Buczacz, 2016. Photo by the author.
Acknowledgments
This book has been long in the making. It spans two decades, three continents, nine countries and as many languages, and scores of archives. Most important, it was nourished by a network of support and wisdom, institutional and professional, as well as personal and emotional, so thick and dense and entirely indispensable that I would never be able to sufficiently thank and acknowledge it. At the same time, I must admit that I have been waiting for a long time to write these words, not only in order to express my profound gratitude, but also because they signify the completion of an undertaking which, at times, seemed to have taken on a life of its own and to have entirely taken over mine. By having brought it to completion I have had to accept that it is far from perfect, but also that perfection is unachievable and that we therefore always hover somewhere between what we can make and how we would like it to be. Bringing things to a close is both an accomplishment and a surrender to the constraints of time and ability. Halfway through writing this book I encountered the wonderful saying by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the great biographer of Buczacz, who once described his vast, unfinished masterpiece on his hometown with the words: “I am building a city.” The construction of living cities never ends; they are the products of all those who build them. Building a city of ghosts, or as Agnon called Buczacz decades before its destruction, “a city of the dead,” is another matter. It is a very lonely project, but it cannot be accomplished alone. I am at a loss for words to thank those who led me on this path, and I apologize to them all for having taken so long to co
mplete this book and for the multiple imperfections it contains. All I can say is that “for us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
I owe this book first of all to my mother, who planted its seed and never lived to see it grow, and to my father, whose faith in this work sustained me throughout all these years, and who slipped away to a better world just as it was finished. May their memory be a blessing.
I would not have been able to research and write this book without the generous help of Rutgers University during the project’s inception and the sustained and unstinting support of Brown University since my arrival in 2000. I have been fortunate to enjoy many research grants that allowed me periods of leave to concentrate on research and writing. I am especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the American Academy in Berlin, the Pembroke Center and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Distinguished Visiting Professorship at National Taiwan University, the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations at Tel Aviv University, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, and the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.