by Anna Reid
Ivano-Frankivsk, he says, was founded in the seventeenth century as a Polish frontier town. A photocopy of an old map shows the zigzag outline of a fortress, long since disappeared. On the first partition of Poland it found itself in Austro-Hungary, between the wars it went to Poland again, and in 1945 it was handed over to the Soviet Union. Until 1962 it was called Stanyslaviv, after a Polish prince; today’s name is that of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. But the name changes are unimportant, for the people the town really belonged to for most of its history were the Jews.
Up to 1941, over 60 per cent of Ivano-Frankivsk’s population was Jewish. It had fifty-five synagogues and produced dozens of distinguished rabbinical dynasties. Proudly, Moishe-Leib reels off the names – the one I recognise is Shneor Zalman ben Baruch, one of the founders of Hasidism. With the war, 300 years of history came to a swift and savage end. Conveniently placed on the railway-line west to Poland, the town turned into a deportation centre for Jews from all over Ukraine. ‘According to my calculations,’ says Moishe-Leib, lighting another Dollar Gold, ‘120,000 people came through Stanyslaviv. Sixty or seventy thousand were killed here, the rest were taken to the camps.’ It all happened amazingly quickly: Ivano-Frankivsk’s ghetto opened in September 1941, three months after the German invasion, and closed again early in 1943, when there was no one left to kill.
Donning his homburg again, Moishe-Leib takes me back out through the synagogue hall. Inky wooden school-desks do duty as pews, and the walls are stencilled with patterns touchingly designed to look like real wallpaper. We climb into a battered Zhiguli for a tour of Jewish landmarks, Moishe-Leib swivelling round to point things out as we go. There is not much left to see. The old Jewish cemetery, with graves dating back to the seventeenth century, was demohshed in the 1960s, to make way for a tatty Kosmos cinema. Nearly all the synagogues have gone too – of the seven surviving buildings, one is used as a laboratory, one as a school, one as a deaf-mute centre and one as a storehouse; the last two have been divided into flats and shops. The only thing marking the site of the wartime ghetto is a small metal plaque on what used to be its boundary wall. Vandals have scraped off its six-pointed Star of David.
What also remains is a mass grave. On the edge of town the road peters out into a dirt track. We clamber out of the car, and pick our way through the ruts to a patch of open ground. Surrounded by peasant cottages, each with its hens, fruit-trees and sagging chain-link fence, the only thing that distinguishes it from any other bit of suburban wasteland is a series of oddly shaped lumps and hollows. These are the ditches where, during the war, the town’s entire Jewish population were shot and buried. An old woman is sweeping round a pink granite monument with a birch-broom. ‘In this place,’ runs the inscription, ‘German Fascist invaders shot over 100,000 Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.’ The number is cheapened by exaggeration, and, as at the larger Babiy Yar memorial in Kiev, there is no mention of the fact that the victims were Jews.
‘It’s very peaceful,’ I remark, groping for something appropriate to say about this grisly and neglected spot. ‘Not really,’ says Moishe-Leib cheerfully, offering a strip of chewing-gum. ‘People have parties here, they get drunk and fight. You can see where they’ve stolen part of the fence.’ A concrete shelter – he calls it a chapel – marks the spot where one of the town’s famous rabbis is supposed to be buried. Somebody has scratched graffiti into the paintwork: ‘Yids’; ‘Ukraine hates you.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ says Moishe-Leib, ‘just kids playing.’ My interpreter looks appalled. Though she has lived in Ivano-Frankivsk all her life, she never even knew this place existed.
There have been Jews in Ukraine since before the word ‘Ukraine’ existed. The Greek colonies of the Black Sea coast had their Jewish traders, and the earth embankments of ancient Kiev were pierced by a Jewish Gate. The first record we have of the existence of the city is a letter written in Hebrew by the Jews of Khazaria, an eighth-century Turkic kingdom on the Black Sea steppe, to a synagogue near Cairo. There were Jews in Lviv in the fourteenth century, and in the Volhynian town of Lutsk in the tenth. But they did not start arriving in large numbers until 1569, when the Union of Lublin allowed Poles and Jews to migrate east into the Lithuanian Grand Duchy. Through succeeding centuries, despite waves of emigration in the face of pogroms and poverty, Ukraine’s Jewish population grew steadily, totalling about 3 million people – 8 per cent of the population – by the outbreak of war. When the Nazis struck, Odessa had 180,000 Jews, Kiev 175,000 – as many each as the whole of the Netherlands. Kharkiv had 150,000, Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv 100,000 each. In the sleepy shtetlech of Galicia and Volhynia – places like Ivano-Frankivsk – they made up 40 per cent or more of the population.
These were pious places, poor and tradition-bound. Men wore side-curls and velvet hats with squirrel-tails; their wives kept the children quiet with tales of dybbuks and golems, and shone their hair with kerosene. It was the land of miracle-working rabbis and the mystical kabbalah, of arranged marriages and strict Sabbaths full of prayer and song and ritual. The exception was bustling, brash Odessa, synonymous, in Jewish lore, with frivolity and irreligion. Odessa produced musicians and orators (among them Trotsky and the early Zionist Leon Pinsker), and from its poor Jewish quarter, the Moldavanka, a legendary tribe of gangsters. Travellers remarked on the self-confidence and dignity with which Jews walked the city streets, and if a Jew wanted to say that a man was prosperous, he might say that he ‘lived like a God in Odessa’.1
As old as the history of Ukrainian Jewry is the history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. One of the first written records we have of Jewish settlement in Ukraine is also a record of anti-Jewish violence. On the death of Prince Svyatopolk in 1113, according to the Rus chronicles, the Kiev mob rioted, looting the homes of Jewish merchants who had profited from Svyatopolk’s hated monopoly on salt. For the next several centuries, there were too few Jews in Ukraine to be much of an issue, but with Jewish immigration following the Union of Lublin, the potential for hatred increased.
Many Jews arrived as agents to Polish landowners, who deputised to them the collection of rents and taxes, and management of taverns and mills, at which the surrounding peasantry were often obliged by law to buy their drink and grind their corn. They lived huddled under the protection of Polish palace walls, and built their synagogues like mini-fortresses, with gun-embrasures and cannon on the roof. Hence when Khmelnytsky rebelled in 1648, his peasant army’s murderous fury was directed as much at Jews as at Poles. The Polish fortified towns, to which Jews fled for protection, fell like ninepins. In some places Poles shut Jews out, in others they handed them over in exchange for their own lives. Usually both groups were massacred together. In Nemyriv, Khmelnytsky’s soldiers burned the synagogue, murdered Jews with their own ritual knives, and tore up the covers of their holy books to make shoes. Similar massacres took place during the uprisings of the next century, notably at Uman, seat of the Polish Potockis. Again, Poles and Jews shared jointly in the peasants’ fury: a common practice was to hang a Pole, a Jew and a dog from the same tree, with the words, ‘Pole, Yid and hound – each to the same faith bound.’2
Through the 1800s, Orthodox attitudes towards Jews hardly improved, and at the end of the century they actually worsened. While in Western Europe Jews were beginning to integrate, with spectacular success, into middle-class gentile society, in the Russian empire they remained legal and social pariahs. Save in the big cities – from which most Jews were excluded by the Pale of Settlement – the old pattern of Polish or Russian landlord, Jewish tradesman and Ukrainian peasant hardly shifted, all three groups locked together in a frozen web of mutual dependence and resentment. To the peasant, Jewry represented die alien Polish- or Russian-speaking town, the mysterious money economy which paid little for his labour and charged much for manufactured goods. Anti-Semitism became ‘the socialism of the imbecile’. When pogroms broke out in Yeliza-vetgrad (today’s Kirovohrad) in 1881, the local paper blamed the Jews’ precarious dual role as money
-lenders and tavern-keepers: ‘Let the Jew deny a drink to a drunken or penniless peasant, and the hatred begins.’3 Even in rich, easygoing Odessa, as the Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky remembered of bis schooldays in the 1890s, integration was only skin-deep:
Without any propaganda, without any ideology, we ten Jews used to sit on one row of benches in class, next to one another . . . We were quite friendly with our Christian classmates, even intimate with them, but we lived apart and considered it a natural thing that could not be otherwise . . .4
Odessa was the site of the first modern pogroms. In 1871, on the night before Easter, drunken sailors started throwing stones at Jewish homes and shops. Though deaths were few, the looting went on for three days before the police restored order. As the decade progressed, the tsarist government increasingly used anti-Semitism to offset the rising tide of revolutionary dissent. When Aleksandr II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, riots swept southern Ukraine. In Kiev a barefoot mob looted the Brodsky vodka warehouse and rampaged through the poor Jewish suburbs. Though police kept the peace in the wealthier districts, and here and there university students turned out to help defend Jewish property, most townspeople looked the other way. ‘It was a calm and sunny Sunday holiday,’ wrote an onlooker. ‘Christians were strolling about. I don’t know what astonished me more, the boldness of the plunderers or the shocking indifference of the public.’5
The 1881 pogroms, passed over in deafening silence even by liberal luminaries such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, were followed by the infamous May Laws, toughest yet in a long litany of anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were excluded from legal practice and from the officer corps, from every sort of government job, from teaching posts, from juries, from the boards of asylums and orphanages, even from military bands. They could not vote or stand in elections for local councils, and they were forced to contribute a disproportionate number of conscripts to the army. They were barred from owning or leasing land, and from the oil and mining industries. A quota system, the ‘numerus clausus’, made it hard to get into secondary school or university. Worst of all was the tightening-up of the Pale of Settlement, under which Jews needed special permits to live in the cities. Foreign visitors were shocked to see lines of migrant workers being driven through the streets at dawn, victims of night-time police raids. Not surprisingly, one of the chief results of the May Laws was the wholesale corruption of the tsarist police force and bureaucracy, enabled, by this mass of lunatic legislation, to extract a fortune in bribes.
As the empire began its long slide towards revolution, right-wing monarchist groups took to blaming Jews for all Holy Russia’s reverses, publishing rabidly anti-Semitic pamphlets and employing uniformed thugs, the ‘Black Hundreds’, to beat up Jews and students. In 1905, when naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese forced Nicholas II to grant Russia’s first-ever constitution, they vented their fury in a new wave of pogroms. In Odessa 302 people are known to have been killed; more deaths went unrecorded. ‘On Tuesday night October 31st,’ the shocked American consul reported home, ‘the Russians attacked the Jews in every part of town and a massacre ensued. From Tuesday ‘til Saturday was terrible and horrible. The Russians lost heavily also, but the number of killed and wounded is not known. The police without uniforms were very prominent. Jews who bought exemption received protection. Kishinev, Kiev, Cherson, Akkerman, Rostoff and other places suffered terribly, Nicolaev also.’6
With tsarism’s final collapse a new superstition – Jew equals Bolshevik – was born. The vast majority of revolutionaries were not Jewish, of course, and the vast majority of Jews not revolutionaries, but it is true that Jews were over-represented in revolutionary organisations in relation to their numbers. (The same, paradoxically, applied to the offspring of Orthodox priests, who were also often well educated but prospectless.) When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism. The fact that Jews – like all non-Russian minorities – were murdered in disproportionate numbers during Stalin’s purges did little to shake this perception.
Ukrainian–Jewish relations were not all bad. In 1918 the Ukrainians’ short-lived Rada government declared ‘national-personal autonomy’ for Jews and set up a special ministry for Jewish affairs. Its banknotes were printed in four languages – Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish – and the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the Paris peace talks, amazingly, was a Jew, Arnold Margolin. In Galicia too, Ukrainians and Jews sometimes cooperated: in 1907 four Zionists were elected to the Vienna Reichsrat with Ukrainian support (both sides hoping to shake off the Poles), and in 1922 Jewish and Ukrainian parties fought joint campaigns in elections to the new Polish parliament. But in the 1930s, as Polish democracy crumbled, attitudes hardened. Popular support for the moderate Ukrainian party UNDO fell away in favour of the underground terrorist group OUN, which borrowed its philosophy from fascist Germany. (Members swore to a Decalogue of ten commandments, the first of which was ‘You will attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it’, the ninth, ‘Treat the enemies of your nation with hatred and ruthlessness.’)7 In 1940, six months after Germany and Russia had carved up Poland between them, OUN split in two – the more moderate ‘Melnykivtsi’, under the Civil War veteran Andriy Melnyk, and the fanatical ‘Banderivtsi’, under the young head of OUN’s terrorist unit, Stepan Bandera. Released from prison by the Germans in 1939, Bandera explicitly declared war on Ukrainian Jewry. ‘The Jews in the USSR,’ an OUN congress in Cracow resolved, ‘constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine.’8
For all Ukraine, the war years were ones of unparalleled violence, destruction and horror: 5.3 million of the country’s inhabitants died during the war – an astounding one in six of the entire population.9 (The equivalents for Germany, France and Britain were one in fifteen, one in seventy-seven and one in 125.) Of these, about 2.25 million were Jews. Most died in situ, rounded up, shot and buried in woods and ravines outside their own home towns. Others were sent to the gas chambers at Belzec – just over the present-day border with Poland – or to the slave-labour camp on Janowska Street in Lviv. Two hundred thousand people died in Janowska Street,10 and of all 600,000 people deported to Belzec – greeted at the railway station by a poster, ‘First a wash and breakfast, then to work!’ 11– only two are known to have survived. Altogether, the Holocaust killed 60 per cent of the Jews of Soviet Ukraine, and over 90 per cent of the Jews of Galicia.12
For Ukrainians, the war was fratricidal. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, they split three ways. The vast majority of direct participants – 2.5 million men 13– were conscripted straight into the Red Army. Several tens of thousands - known as ‘Hiwis’ – short for Hilfswillige or ‘willing-to-helps’, joined the Nazis in various capacities. At least 12,000 worked as police auxiliaries14 helping round up, deport and massacre Jews, and others became camp guards. Survivors reported about 400 Ukrainians at Sobibor, 300 at Treblinka, and more at Sasow, Ostrow, Poniatow, Plaszow and Janowska Street.15 Some were volunteers; others joined to escape the German prisoner-of-war camps, where death rates ran at a frightful two in five.16 ‘Russian war prisoners,’ wrote Leon Weliczker, a Janowska Street survivor, ‘consisted of the most varied types of characters. There were some who were really worse than the SS, but, on the other hand, there were also many who merely filled the job in order to secure for themselves a better means of livelihood.’17 Lastly, in 1943 Germany recruited 13,000 Ukrainians – out of many more volunteers – into a new SS division, ‘SS Galicia’.18 The division was not sent into battle until the summer of 1944, and eventually surrendered to the Allies in southern Austria. After a long internment in an Italian displaced-persons camp, most of its members were allowed to emigrate to Britain, where th
eir descendants form quite a large proportion of the diaspora population. Yet more Ukrainians – somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 – fought both Russians and Germans, in the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
In Polish-ruled western Ukraine, the war started with the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of 23 August 1939. Nine days after the pact was signed, the Wehrmacht marched into Poland from the west; a fortnight later, the Red Army did the same from the east. By mid-October Poland had been wiped from the map for the second time in its history, and Galicia, for the first time ever, had come under Russian rule.
Initially, the change-over went peacefully. In Avhustivka, a small village east of Lviv, Ukrainians greeted Poland’s demise with delight. In memoirs written after post-war exile in Siberia, the local Uniate priest, Pavlo Oliynyk, remembered them saying ‘Let the devil come, as long as he isn’t Polish!’19 In Lviv, fourteen-year-old Leon Weliczker looked on with amusement as hayseed Russian conscripts wandered wide-eyed round the city’s shops:
A soldier would come into a store to buy a bar of chocolate. When he got it, he would ask if he could buy a second bar. After he got the second bar he would look around to see if anyone from the army was around, and then, in a low voice, would ask if he could get the whole box.20
Even the wives of the newly arrived Soviet bureaucrats were so unused to consumer goods that they mistook nightgowns for evening dresses and wore them on the street.
But Galicians quickly discovered that Soviet rule was no joke. Lvivites learned to set their clocks two hours ahead to Moscow time, and stopped talking politics or even reading the newspapers. ‘The best thing,’ Weliczker remembered, was ‘to be as ignorant as possible’.21 In Avhustivka villagers were summoned to a meeting, where they were told to create a ‘Committee of the Poor’ – the usual prelude to collectivisation – and regaled with the charms of life under communism. ‘The representative,’ Oliynyk wrote, ‘vividly described how well people lived in the Soviet Union, how the disabled and elderly were provided with all necessities – housing, heating, shoes, food, clothes . . .’ But having seen their stores stripped bare and the contents of their village library burned in the market-place, the villagers were not fooled, quickly declaring themselves ‘fed up with having to listen to these children’s fairy-tales’.22