INTERETHNIC RELATIONS IN THE HOLOCAUST AS SEEN THROUGH

POSTWAR TESTIMONIES: BUCZACZ, EAST GALICIA, 1941-44

Omer Bartov

Julija Mykhailivna Trembach was born to a Polish family in the village of Stari

Petlykivci, Buczacz district, on March 6, 1910. Her parents were poor and had many children. In 1940 she married a Ukrainian man in Buczacz, where she has lived ever since, while the rest of her family went to Poland at the end of the war. Her daughter,

Roma Nestorivna Kryvenchuk, was born on June 19, 1941, just three days before the

German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 2003 this daughter wrote down her mother’s account of events in Buczacz during the occupation. Before the war, she remarked, “our city was populated mostly by Jews. They were cultured, wealthy, enterprising and intelligent people. All the stone houses in the center of town belonged to them. The

Jewish people constituted the local intelligentsia.” Then the Germans came and ruined this harmonious community:

I remember well how the Hitlerites committed crimes against the Jews, how they

buried them alive on the Fedir hill, and how those people dug their own graves.

From the street where I live (which is situated opposite that hill) 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. And they committed no crime. The

Germans forbade us to help the Jews and to give them shelter. It was prohibited

even to bury dead bodies. Anyone who broke the prohibition would be killed. But

our people – Ukrainians and Poles alike – tried to help them however they could.

They made dugouts in the ground, and the Jews hid there. Secretly people would

bring food to those dugouts. And God only knows how much food I myself

brought.

Julija Trembach recalled how one day a young woman called Ruchama came running to her:

She had a baby in her arms (the baby’s name was Betty – a very nice little girl

with curly hair). The young woman was crying and exhausted. She whispered:

“Save us, hide us.” At my own risk I hid them in the loft of the cowshed… I fed

that little girl with my own breast, because I had a baby myself. So they stayed at

my house for some time and recovered a little, and I shared my own food with

that woman.

Later the woman and baby left with some other Jews. But, according to Trembach,

that was not the only case. I tried to help [the Jews] however I could, and my

husband never objected. We pitied those people, for they were beaten, always

2 scared for their lives and never knowing what would happen to them next. The

most terrible thing was that those butchers [the Germans] had no mercy for

anyone, not even for women and little children. Everyone was scared at that time,

but the Jewish people suffered for all. Even now they still have that fear, when

they come here as tourists.

One such “tourist” was Willy (Zev) Anderman, who was saved during the Holocaust by

Julija Trembach’s son-in-law’s grandfather and later immigrated to Israel. Trembach relates that even half a century later, before he set out on his first visit to Buczacz since the war,

his wife Batia warned him: “Don’t fall behind your group, those bandits will kill

you.” He told us about it himself. But he saw that it was not true. Our people try

to remember something, to help those who came to their fatherland after long

years. When Willy Anderman came to Buczacz we met him. He couldn’t help

crying and said: “I’ve been looking for the people who saved my life for a long

time, but finally I have found you after all those years.”

Despite the horrors she experienced as a young woman and the hardship of the postwar years, Julija Trembach draws a positive conclusion from her life:

I was good to people and tried to save them from death, so God gave me good

health. Now I’m 93, but I still have a good memory and a clear mind, and I wish it

3 to everyone. As for the Jewish people, we respect them for their ability to

appreciate and remember.1

To be sure, those visiting Buczacz today will hardly gain the impression that the local Ukrainian population shares such memories. [Figure 1: Ratusz today] One is hard put to come by any sign whatsoever of the town’s past Jewish existence. [Figure 2:

Rynek in 1930s] Nothing indicates where the great synagogue had stood [Figure 3: the

Great Synagogue], or the religious school (their last remnants were bulldozed only a few years ago to make room for a market place and a commercial center). [Figures 4 & 5: market place and construction of new center] No signs have been put up to show visitors where the Jews had lived [Figure 6: street of the ghetto], where they were buried [Figure 7: the cemetery], and where they were murdered [figure 8: the Fedor hill], all sites within walking distance and view of each other [Figure 9: view of Fedor hill from the cemetery]. The only change has been the renaming of one of the town’s streets, which now bears the name of its most glorious son, Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-

1970) [Figure 10: Street sign], recently rediscovered by the local population thanks to visitors from Israel who also donated some of his books to the local museum. [Figure 11:

Museum exhibit]

On the Fedor hill (called Fedir by the Ukrainians), where some 5,000 local Jews were shot, the only monument, a tombstone-sized edifice placed there to commemorate a single mass grave containing some 400 bodies, lay on the ground, broken into two pieces, for several decades. It has now been put up again, but one would hardly find it in the

1 Julija Mykhailivna Trembach, written on her behalf by Roma Nestorivna Kryvenchuk, collected by Mykola Kozak, Translated from Ukrainian by Sofia Grachova.

4 forest without an experienced guide. [Figure 12: Fedor memorial] On the Bashty, the hill on the other side of town where the Jewish cemetery is located, the few remaining tombstones – including that of Agnon’s father, Czaczkes – are scattered on an overgrown slope inhabited by numerous chickens [Figures 13 & 14: Czaczkes gravestone and chicken in cemetery]. The other slope of that hill, falling steeply to the Strypa River that hugs the town, was the site of more mass killings, claiming the lives of several more thousand Jews, following which the water is said to have been red with their blood.

[Figure 15: Bashty slope and Strypa] A memorial was put up there after the town was liberated by the few remaining survivors; but it has vanished, and no one knows when or where it was taken. [Figure 16: Bashty memorial]

Maria Mykhailivna Khvostenko (née Dovhanchuk), was born in Buczacz in 1929 to a Ukrainian family, and worked there as a schoolteacher for most of her adult life. In

2003, shortly before she passed away, Khvostenko wrote down her recollections of prewar and wartime Buczacz. Before the war, she recalled, Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish children attending the various public schools in town were “polite, well behaved and friendly; they respected each other. But all the teachers were Polish.” She did not remember any cases of interethnic or interdenominational conflict, and no antisemitism.

In girls’ school the best mathematics students were Pepa Szwarc (who was Jewish),

Marya Skrzypalska (who was Polish), and herself. When one of the teachers retired, both the Roman Catholic and the Greek Catholic priests attended the ceremony, as well as a rabbi.

When the Soviets took over in 1939, things initially seemed to be going well.

Maria Khvostenko remembers that the many people who came from German occupied

5 Poland “were mostly from the intelligentsia: lawyers, professors, and doctors.” She does not mention that they were primarily Jews. Soon, however, many Ukrainian activists were arrested and then entire Ukrainian families were deported to Siberia, along with some Polish families. When the Germans arrived in 1941, “they set out to establish a

‘new order’: akcjas [were perpetrated] against the Jews and Ukrainian youths were seized for forced labor in Germany.” She, however, attended the free commercial school in the newly organized gymnasium between 1942 and 1944. [Figure 17: the Gymnasium] Her first experience of the Holocaust was from precisely that vantage point. She remembers that

One day… something drew us to a window [in the gymnasium] that faced the

town center, the Ratusz [municipal hall]. [Figure 18: road leading from Ratusz

to Fedor] And what did we see? In the middle of the main street a crowd was

going around the Ratusz towards the bridge over the Strypa [River]. Gendarmes

with dogs, Gestapo and militia with hexagonal stars surrounded the crowd,

hurrying it toward the Fedir hill. What a horrible sight it was! There were women,

men, old people and young – our schoolmates and friends. They were beautiful

and wise, well brought-up, and young, they might have lived, loved and worked…

They were our neighbors and strangers, but they were people! And they were led

with dogs so that nobody would fall behind the crowd! Even now my heart breaks

when I recall that day!

6 Alicia Appleman-Jurman had a very different vantage point. But before she escaped the town and scrambled for survival working in the fields for a slice of bread and sleeping in the open air or in stables and cowsheds, this eleven-year old girl also hankered to go back to the normality represented by the gymnasium. In the fall of 1941, she writes,

the desire to learn overcame the warnings I had received about staying away

[from the Jewish area]. One day I climbed up a tree outside the window of my

classroom and watched. Through the window I could see my former classmates

sitting at their desks. One of these was my friend Slavka, whom I had known

since we first came to Buczacz. She was a gentile, but then, so were many of my

friends. It didn’t take long for my presence to become known to those inside the

classroom. One by one heads turned, and I could see the children whispering

together. When Slavka turned to look, our eyes met… Our exchange was

bittersweet – my misery at not being allowed in the school, her sympathy mingled

with helplessness to correct the situation. In a moment she looked away and didn’t

turn around again.2

The brutal roundups and killings were not happening at some far off site. While some Jews were loaded on trains and shipped off to be gassed in the Bełżec extermination camp, many others were either shot on the street or herded to the nearby

Fedor hill or cemetery, and then shot into pre-dug mass graves. Maria Khvostenko recalls:

2 Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Alicia: My Story (Bantam Books: New York, 1988), 21-22.

7 From about the fall of 1942 to the end of 1943 they [the Germans] would hold

akcja-shootings, always on Fridays. But they would start on Tuesday: on Tuesday

evening the Jewish militia would collect jewels and other valuable things… [as

bribes from people seeking to escape massacre]. On Thursday evening the

[Germans] would come [from nearby Czortków, the local Gestapo headquarters]

… They looked really horrible – they had a metal shield… on their breasts…

[which] hung from a metal chain… On their heads they had high black hats with a

skull and crossed bones. By their appearance they really resembled demons from

hell. They would “act” or “work” all the 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. And they were lying in the mud with smashed

heads and spattered brains… It was not hard to guess what was happening on the

Fedir hill: we could hear machine-gun fire accompanied by the drone of engines.

But this only intensified the sound of the shooting instead of drowning it.

Maria Khvostenko does not mention the Ukrainian militias that were the crucial component of these akcjas. We hear only about the Jewish police (militia with hexagonal stars) and the Gestapo. But one does realize that the evidence of constant massacres was there for all to see. To be sure, many profited from the liquidation of the Jews. Houses were taken over, businesses changed hands, money and valuables were handed over or robbed and looted. But there were those, like Khvostenko, who mourned the destruction

8 of the community. Some who tried to help paid a heavy price. A Polish family living next door tried to shelter their Jewish friends but was denounced. The parents were shot, and the daughter, who had been away, went mad with grief.

Khvostenko remembers one of the survivors, Mina Rosner (Pohorille):

I frequently came to their house. My mother often sent me to bring them some

milk or young potatoes in spring, carrots and peas and some time later sweet corn.

I don’t know how they paid for it, my business was only to take it all and give it

to the mistress. My parents were friendly to all their neighbors, they respected

other people and people paid them by treating them well. The neighbors were

good to our family and to us children.3

Rosner, who lost her entire family, including her toddler son, felt differently when she visited Buczacz in the 1980s. She writes in her memoir:

As we walked on I saw a group of elderly women tending a field, and I couldn’t

help wondering, was it one of those women who handed my family over to the

Nazis? This thought had been in the back of my mind since I had returned to

Buczacz. The people who watched us on the streets, the ones who looked at us

through their window shutters – what did they do during the Nazi occupation?

Were some of the collaborators who helped kill my family still walking the streets

3 Maria Mykhailivna Khvostenko (née Dovhanchuk), Collected by Mykola Kozak, translated from Ukrainian by Sofia Grachova

9 of Buczacz? Every town and village had collaborators. I felt sure some of them

were still there.4

Rosner was saved by the Polish peasant Mieczysław Wicherek and his family. Even after his wife and daughter were killed by an artillery shell, this courageous man and his remaining daughter protected the Jews they were hiding. She was ultimately also saved by a German Wehrmacht officer, who first thought she was Polish and then, when she admitted to being Jewish, vowed to do everything he could to protect her. He too was killed in battle shortly thereafter.

Nevertheless, the fear of the local population never entirely left most of the survivors. This is a curious phenomenon: on the one hand, almost all the Jews who survived Buczacz, and I have the records of more than 150 men and women who were there at some point, were rescued by Poles or Ukrainians. On the other hand, they had lost so many of their family members to denunciations, betrayal, and collaborators from among the local population – who of course could much more easily distinguish between local Jews and non-Jews than the Germans – that often the mere thought of returning there filled them with terror. And this terror extended also to others about to visit the region. Regina Fendler, born in 1923 in nearby Trembowla, was educated in Buczacz until her family left in 1939. The rest of her family, like my own, was entirely wiped out.

In my correspondence with her, I mentioned that I was about to visit Buczacz, and was promptly warned by her sister to beware of the “Ukrainian murderers” (the latter word still apparently lurking there.5 (רוצחים rendered in Hebrew/Yiddish as rotschim

4 Mina Rosner, I am a Witness (Hyperion Press Limited: Winnipeg, 1990), 8. 5 Letter dated February 19, 2003.

10 Of course, as Julija Trembach had said about Zev Anderman, I too had come to see my “fatherland” after long years. Or rather, to see my mother’s hometown. [Figure

19: my great grandfather] My maternal great grandfather had managed several estates belonging to the great Polish Potocki clan from his house in Potok Złoty, a short distance from Buczacz, which itself had been a private Potocki town until the partition of Poland.

He moved to Buczacz shortly after my mother was born in 1924. [Figure 20: my mother on a sled in Buczacz] She retained fond memories of her years in Buczacz, had vivid recollections of picking mushrooms in the forests with her Ukrainian friends, and could not remember any antisemitism during her childhood there, although when visiting family in Lwów one always barred the windows at night for fear of riots by the extreme right wing Endeks.

My grandfather, however, seems to have resented being under the tutelage of his grand seigneur father, who was probably the last in a line of estate managers dating back to the seventeenth century. Having come under Polish rule in the wake of World War I, which wrought terrible devastation on it and was particularly destructive for a Jewish population made into the target of punitive Russian occupation policies,6 East Galicia was a far less hospitable place for Jews and a progressively impoverished region in the interwar period. Like many others of his generation, my grandfather chose to seek his fortune elsewhere, and applied for a certificate of immigration to Palestine in 1935.

[Figure 21: my grandfather’s certificate application] The family disembarked at the port of Haifa in December of that year. [Figure 22: Disembarkation at Haifa] Both my grandparents became blue-collar workers. [Figures 23 & 24: my grandmother and

6 S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, ed. And trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Metropolitan Books: New York, 2002).

11 grandfather as workers] My grandmother, who had a Ukrainian “shikse” as a maid in

Buczacz, worked on Saturdays as the Putzfrau of the “rich” family across the street, who had come as refugees from Nazi Germany. Nine years later the entire clan left behind in

Buczacz and other East Galician towns had vanished without a trace.

Buczacz was established in the mid-14th century by the noble Polish Buczacki family, and by the 16th century became the center of commerce between Poland and the

Ottoman Empire. [Figure 25: Buczacz in the Commonwealth] In the early 17th century the city passed into the hands of the Potockis, under whom it withstood a Cossack siege in 1648 and a Turkish attack in 1672. While the Treaty of Buczacz detached Podolia and

Ukraine from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, three years later the town was finally liberated by the new Polish king Jan Sobieski.7 Jews resided in Buczacz since at least 1500, and by the late 17th century they made up a substantial portion of the population, and were allowed to live anywhere in the city and to practice all professions.

They also participated actively in the defense of their town.

The main expansion of the Jewish population came in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[Figure 26: Galicia under Austrian rule] In 1772 East Galicia came under Austrian

Habsburg rule, and initially the empire treated the Jews harshly. After 1848, however, many of the restrictions were lifted. When a municipal council was elected in Buczacz for the first time in 1874, its 30 members consisted of 12 Jews, 9 Poles and 9 Ukrainians.

In 1879 the Jew Bernard Stern was elected mayor, a position he held until 1921, serving simultaneously for part of this period as head of the Jewish community and as representative in the Austrian Parliament. Indeed, in 1880 Jews constituted the vast

7 Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture (Hippocrene Books: New York, 1994), 185-7.

12 majority of the population, 6,281 of a total of 9,970. Even in 1910, although the growth in the general population was not matched by the expansion of the Jewish community, it still constituted slightly more than half of the just over 14,000 inhabitants.8 Indeed, a

Polish travel guide published in 1914, according to which Buczacz had a population of

3,500 Poles, 2,000 Ruthenes, and 7,500 Jews, gave “this picturesque city” a star because

“especially on Friday evenings (Shabbes) hundreds of candle lights flicker in the windows.”9

With the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Buczacz came under

Ukrainian rule for a brief period in 1918-19, and then changed hands during the Russo-

Polish War. In 1920 the Red Army conquered it and installed as commissar a young Jew from Tarnopol. Shortly thereafter the city was attacked by the Ukrainian bands of Petlura, which looted, raped and murdered many inhabitants. It was also struck by a typhus epidemic. [Figure 27: Galicia under Polish rule] By the time it finally came under

Polish rule in 1921, the total population of Buczacz had declined to 7,517, of whom

3,858 were Jews. Yet in 1938 Polish state statistics compiled from the census of 1931 – which cannot be seen as entirely free from bias – reported that of a total population of

23,884, no less than 11,823 were Roman and Armenian Catholics, 5,286 were Greek

Catholic and Greek Orthodox, and 6,739 were Jews. Categorized according to their mother tongue, there were as many as 13,348 Polish speakers, only 2,567 and 1,975

Ukrainian and Ruthenian speakers, respectively, 5,557 Yiddish speakers, and a surprising

413 who were raised speaking Hebrew.10

8 Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities: Poland, Vol. II: Eastern Galicia, ed. Danuta Dąbrowska, Abraham Wein, and Aharon Weiss (Yad Vashem: Jerusalem, 1980, in Hebrew), 83-85. 9 Mieczysław Orłowicz and Karol Kwieciński, Ilustrowany Przewodnik po Galicyi: Bukowinie, Spiżu, Orawie I Śląsku Cieszyńskim (Unia: Lwów, 1914), 141. 10 Office Central de Statistique de la République Polonaise, Statistique de la Pologne, Série C, Fascicule 78: Deuxième Recensement Général de la Population du 9 Décembre 1931: Logements et

13 If the Polish state may have exaggerated the presence of ethnic Poles and Roman

Catholics, its statistics clearly reflected the economic decline of the Jewish population.

By 1938 only 383 out of 1,453 Jewish heads of families paid communal taxes, even though the lowest annual tax was merely 5 złoty.11 Nevertheless the Jews retained a strong local political representation, uniting their numerous factions when participating in local elections. Jewish sources estimate the population of Buczacz at the time of its annexation by the Soviet Union in September 1939 at 10,000 Jews, 5,000 Ukrainians, and

2,000 Poles.12 These figures are notoriously unreliable, however, not least because thousands of Jews were arriving as refugees from German-occupied Poland, often only to be deported to the east by the Soviet authorities, along with other Jewish, Polish, and

Ukrainian property owners, professionals and nationalists. In 1941 the Red Army also conscripted many young men from the town just before the advancing Wehrmacht pushed it out. [Figure 28: Galicia under German rule]

Over the next three years, almost the entire Jewish population of Buczacz, along with many inhabitants of nearby villages and towns first concentrated in the city, were murdered in a series of killing operations. After an early mass execution in July 1941, mass killings began in earnest in October 1942 and lasted until the city was declared

Judenfrei in May 1943. In March 1943 the German Generalgouvernement responsible for

Ménages. Population. Professions: Voïévodie de Tarnopol (Warsaw, 1938), 30, 33. 11 Jewish occupations included, by order of prominence, commerce, petty industry, wagon driving, and white-collar professions. But official Polish statistics, anecdotal memoir literature, and an elaborate study on the adjacent distinct of Stanisławów indicate a growing prominence of land-ownership and agricultural work. See Jakov Babicki, Jewish Agriculture in the Stanisławów Voivodship (Yiddish Scientific Institute [Yivo], 1938, in Yiddish). 12 According to Ivan Bobyk, The City of Butchach and Its Region: A Historical and Memoiristical Collection (Ukrainian Publishers: London, 1972, in Ukrainian, trans. Sofia Grachova), 475, a census hurriedly taken by the Soviets just before they retreated showed a population of 8,000 Jews, 3,600 Ukrainians and 3,500 Poles.

14 East Galicia recorded the total population of Buczacz as numbering 16,200 people.13

About half of the estimated 10,000 victims were murdered in Bełżec, while the rest were shot in and near the town itself. The Germans were assisted by a local Jewish council

(Judenrat), a Jewish police force (Ordnungsdienst), and Ukrainian militia units. The few instances of armed Jewish resistance were largely ineffectual. In March 1944 the Red

Army liberated Buczacz, but most of the 800 surviving Jews who came out of hiding were subsequently murdered when the Germans recaptured the city. When Buczacz was finally liberated in July, less than 100 Jews were still alive in the area.14

With the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Polish population, this multiethnic community ceased to exist. [Figure 29: postwar Galicia] It should be stressed that despite the nostalgia felt by some and the rage and bitterness of others, this had been neither an idyllic pluralistic society nor one of constant conflict. Mutual fear and ignorance were part of the mix just as was constant interaction in school, on the marketplace, and in some public events and cultural activities. People lived in their own neighborhoods, went to separate houses of worship, often had traditionally distinct occupations, and rarely intermarried. In some ways, life had gone on in this manner for generations. [Figure 30: Folk costumes in 19th century] In other respects, however, the advent of nationalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century brought about radical changes, as the notion of a separate and distinct ethnic community was grafted onto traditional religious allegiances. People began to think of a place that had been the hub of interaction between different groups as one that belonged to some not to others, and to

13 Statistisches Amt des Generalgouvernements, Amtliches Gemeinde- und Dorfverzeichnis für das Generalgouvernement auf Grund der Summarischen Bevölkerungsbestandsaufnahme am 1. März 1943 (Burgverlag Krakau: Krakow, 1943), 4. 14 Pinkas Hakehillot, 86-9; Yisrael Kohen (ed.), The Book of Buczacz (Am Oved: Tel Aviv, 1956, in Hebrew), 39-74, 233-302.

15 distinguish between alleged outsiders and intruders, on the one hand, and the indigenous and rooted, on the other. Growing poverty, divisive governmental policies, strident political ideologies, along with and war and brutal occupational practices, transformed anxiety and resentment into unimaginable savagery. [Figure 31: Polish Jew]

Maria Khvostenko provides us with one example of the fear engendered by strange and inexplicable religious practices:

I often recall one day in 1938. Our street was crowded with strange people – they

were our neighbor’s guests who came for their holiday [obviously Yom Kippur].

We used to take water from the stream that flows under the hill along Kolijowa

Street… into the Strypa. That day, when I was taking water, I saw both banks of

the stream crowded with people. They were standing close to each other with

open prayer books, reading and praying, shaking their handkerchiefs as if they

were trying to shake out something, and wetting their hands with water [obviously

the tashlich, a ritual cleansing of sins by shaking handkerchiefs or emptying one’s

pockets]. I felt uncomfortable; it seemed that they were worried whether anybody

was looking at them. So I bent over my bucket and looked surreptitiously to one

side or another. When the bucket was full I hurried away so as not to disturb those

people. Only now do I understand from the book by Mina Rosner that on that

holiday the whole Pohorille family got together, close and distant relatives even

from other cities of our land such as Kolomea and others.

16 Here Jewish of the Christians was matched by anxiety among their gentile neighbors. Only fifty years after the city was declared Judenrein, and thanks to a memoir by one of her former neighbors, did Khvostenko learn about the ritual of Yom Kippur.

Writing half a century after the event, Khvostenko wanted to “stress also that Jews used to appreciate people’s honesty and decency.” One such honest man was her father, who returned an excessively large sum of money he was erroneously paid for the wares he had brought to the tobacco factory in nearby Monasterzyska. The Polish government had actually nationalized the factory in 1935, but its former owner, the Jew Freintal, remained its manager, and demonstrated his appreciation of the man’s honesty by giving him a job.

What is most striking about Maria Khvostenko’s story is her recognition of the need for public commemoration. [Figure 32: the synagogue at Brzeżany] When traveling in East Galicia today, one often encounters ruined synagogues, former cemeteries now used as market places, and a striking dearth of any memorialization of past Jewish urban culture. If one asks why these sites are treated with such blatant lack of respect, one often hears the answer: “The Jews are rich, if they wish to restore their sites, they should pay for it.” Khvostenko disagrees:

I want to finish this story by mentioning that on the western slope of Fedir hill

there is a small forest where the Jewish community murdered in 1942-1943 by the

German Fascists is buried. [Figure 33: Fedor memorial for Ukrainian victims]

It is time for our city (and not only the city, but also the region and the country) to

pay attention to the place where the Fascists murdered many Jews and to honor

their memory by putting up a decent monument or sculpture. For they were honest

17 citizens of the city and the country, who loved our land and our city, worked for it

and suffered guiltlessly. May we always remember them! And may their glory

last forever! We should honor them and remember so that it will never happen

again.

But this is hardly the reality in contemporary Ukraine. It still seems extremely difficult to discuss the matter of Ukrainian conduct during the Holocaust in a frank and objective manner. Unlike Poland, Ukraine is still not ready for its own Jedwabne debate, though East Galicia knew numerous Jedwabne-like massacres. When Shimon Redlich’s book on the Holocaust in nearby Brzeżany came out in Ukrainian translation, it caused no stir.15 Putting aside blatant antisemitic expressions, such as an article published on the front page of the main Ternopil daily while I was doing research there in spring 2003,16 discussion of interethnic relations during the war is often coded and euphemistic. A good example is an article published in the regional newspaper Nova Doba in December 2000.

Entitled “The Holocaust in Buczacz,” this brief essay combines compassion for the

Jewish victims of Nazism, Soviet-era pathos and fabrication, nationalist pride and apologetics, and a good measure of unconscious prejudice.

The article opens by asserting that while “in our city… many things have changed” in the past half a century, “only people’s memories have been left unchanged.

15 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2001); Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2004); Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzeżany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 2002); Bernd Boll, “Złoczów, July 1941: The Wehrmacht and the Beginning of the Holocaust in Galicia: From a Criticism of Photographs to a Revision of the Past,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan (The New Press: New York, 2002), 61-99; Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lwów during the War, 1939-1944 (Keter: Jerusalem, 2001, in Hebrew), 86-90. 16 Yaroslav Demydas’, “Zhydivs’kii Pogrom,” Ne Zdamoc’! 3 (March 2003), front page.

18 On them is etched that horrible moment of our history.” In fact, of course, the opposite is the case. [Figure 34: Prewar Buczacz] The city has changed very little; but the memory of the Holocaust and of prewar life has been all but erased. [Figure 35: Buczacz, March

2003] But, as the article says, “let us remember.” Now we discover that “people of

Jewish nationality came here from everywhere” because “the ancient City of Buczacz… has always been a profitable place for commercial activity.” Still, “it seemed that those people had an inborn ability for commerce,” and while “they would generously lend you,” they “knew how get their money back with interest.”

Having established the Jews’ foreignness (they came to an already profitable city to earn money), the article turns to eyewitnesses of the destruction of this alien but generally amiable and useful presence.17 Ivan Synen’kyj, a native of Buczacz, reports that as a sixteen-year-old lad he had witnessed regular akcjas, whereby masses of people were shot in the forest on Fedir Hill. There were so many bodies there, some still alive, that the thin layer of soil over the pit would heave. Other mass shootings took place on the Jewish cemetery (“Okopisko”), after which, he notes, “people could see streams of reddish liquid

17 Bobyk, The City of Butchach, 475-77, written by a Ukrainian postwar exile, takes a similar tone. Pre-Habsburg Jews “had immunity from the city authorities; they were exempted from taxes, but profited from fairs and markets… All this resulted in the impoverishment of our citizens, who were forced to move to the outskirts of town.” Nevertheless, “Buczacz citizens were well disposed toward the Jews and lived together in peace.” The Jews “did not like to serve in the [Austrian] army.” During the Soviet occupation of 1939-41, while the “Jewish merchants, intelligentsia and craftsmen were not delighted with Bolshevik rule… everybody knew that the leadership of the Communist Party in Buczacz was mainly Jewish.” During the German occupation, “the Ukrainian population sympathized with the grim fate of the Jews and tried to help them whenever they had an opportunity, exposing themselves to the worst consequences… However, it is very strange that almost all Jewish publications on World War II accuse the Ukrainian population of having helped the Germans to exterminate the Jews. It is true that in some cases the local Ukrainian police took part in police actions as escorts. But in some other Galician cities there were Jewish police as well. Besides, Ukrainian policemen never took part in executions. There were also some individual cases when local policemen persecuted the Jews, but this is no reason to accuse the entire Ukrainian population, just as we cannot accuse all the Jewish population on the grounds that some of them collaborated with the NKVD and helped to arrest and exile to Siberia the most prominent citizens of Buczacz.” It should be noted that Ivan Bobyk was the mayor of Buczacz during the German occupation. Bobyk cites a long letter sent him in 1969 by Isidor Gelbart, a Jewish friend who survived in hiding along with his family (77-79). Gelbart’s letter, as well as his postwar testimony, confirm Bobyk’s own decent behavior, but indicate the collaboration of Ukrainian policemen in the killings. Yad Vashem Archives (from here on YVA) 033/640.

19 with a peculiar smell flowing from the slope where the grave was situated – human bodies were intensively decomposing. Later that liquid penetrated into a water reservoir that was situated nearby and used by local population.”

Curiously, the conduct of the Jews seems to preoccupy the witness and the author of the article much more than the attitudes of the local population or the Germans:

The Jews themselves behaved in a strange way. Rarely if ever did they try to

escape. There was no fear in their eyes. Some of them explained their behavior by

old prophecies that came true, others would turn to local people and say: “We are

the first, but you will be the next.”

Thus the Jews were either dying because of some old prophecy (the reference is clearly to the Crucifixion), or were serving as a warning to the Ukrainians. And why this warning?

The article does not elaborate. If the first explanation is traditionally antisemitic, the second is a coded condemnation of Ukrainian passivity, if not collaboration. That someone was making a profit from all this butchery is clear. As Synen’kyj reports, “there was also a shop in the city where the clothes of the murdered were sold cheaply.”

Assistance was less visible than profit making. We read that “the local people were very careful about associating with the Jews in any manner. The majority were scared for their lives; others did help, but very cautiously.” Synen’kyj cites an example, whereby “a Jewish man who had managed to get out of the grave” came to a local resident. “It was at night, so the host gave him the necessary help but could not let him stay in his house. That same night that man went away to the forest.” Another story

20 concerns Liumcio Rosenbach, who was murdered along with his wife and their 12 daughters. Only their son survived by being in Russia at the time: “After the war he returned to Buczacz. He wanted to get back his house but the price fixed by new owners was too high, so he had to abandon his dream. At present he lives in Israel.”

Even the tales of empathy and rescue are tinged with ambivalence. Here the article reflects much of what we will find in Jewish survivors’ testimonies. Mrs. Stefania from Buczacz was six-years-old during the war. She could not understand why her mother forbade her to bring some provisions to the Jews arrested by the Germans. “Thirst and hunger tortured them. Sometimes the girl managed to throw over the fence a piece of bread or some potatoes. When her mother found out she scolded her for disobedience.”

To our relief, however, this is not a bad mother after all, for later on her mother reveals to her that “in the cellar under their house she was hiding a strange woman called Hanka.

Neither her father nor the other five members of the family knew about it. Later that young Jewish woman went away with her people. Stefania and her mother kept their secret for half a century. Only on her deathbed did the old woman relate this event to the whole family.”18

This reluctance to admit to one’s own community such acts of rescue is at least as significant in trying to understand interethnic relations as is the question of collaboration or resistance.19 Why did the mother keep this secret from her own family? Did this have

18 Tetiana Pavlyshyn,” The Holocaust in Buczacz,” Nova Doba 48 (December 1, 2000), Collected by Mykola Kozak, translated by Sofia Grachova. 19 The Soviet version of the event had its own logic. In Igor Duda, Buczacz: The Guide (Kameniar: L’viv, 1985, in Ukrainian, translated by Sofia Grachova), we read the following lines: “On July 7, 1941, the Hitlerites occupied Buczacz. During the time of the occupation they exterminated about 7,500 civilians from the city and the district villages; 1,839 young men and women were drive to forced labor in Germany. 137 buildings were destroyed, as well as a number of industrial enterprises and schools. Nevertheless the population did not submit to the fascists.” Neither in this section, nor in any other part of the peculiarly Communist-nationalist Ukrainian narrative history of the city is the word “Jew” mentioned even once. The Fedor hill, on which some 5,000 Jews were slaughtered, is mentioned twice. First for the discovery by archeologists excavating in 1924 of tools form the late Stone Age. Second, as part of the very detailed tour

21 to do with the men’s actions in the war, with the mother’s own discomfort at having endangered the family, with the fear of social stigma, or perhaps with uncertainty about the morality of this action in an environment that looked askance at such altruism? Jan

Gross relates the story of the Wyrzykowski family, who had to leave Jedwabne after the war, in one case going as far as Chicago, because they carried the stigma of having sheltered Jews during the occupation.20 In Buczacz, the Poles were more likely to help than the Ukrainians, no doubt because they themselves were threatened, and indeed eventually most of them were subjected to violence by their Ukrainian neighbors and were expelled. But Ukrainians who helped, as a rule, wanted to conceal their actions just as much from their own neighbors as from the Germans. Joe Perl, who was born in nearby Monasterzyska in 1931, remembered that he and his mother were hidden by a local leader of the Ukrainian „Banderowcy” who was involved in hunting down and killing Jews. When the Soviets took Buczacz in March the man said to them: “Don’t walk out of my house [in the daytime] because I don’t want anyone to see that I had been helping Jews.” They had to “sneak out like thieves in the middle of the night.”21

There were good reasons to fear one’s neighbors. On March 8, 1944, just two weeks before the Red Army entered Buczacz, Etunia Bauer Katz’s entire family was discovered hiding in their own manor house. A Ukrainian “Banderowcy” squad broke in and killed her father, her sister, and her two remaining brothers. The eldest brother had

of the city – which excludes any Jewish site and the name of any of the well known former Jewish inhabitants – as the location of a common grave for the Soviet soldiers who fell while liberating Buczacz (the monument, erected in 1984, has meanwhile been removed). The guide also provides an apocryphal interpretation of the word “Fedor” (or “Fedir” in Ukrainian). The tour ends of the top of Bashty hill, from which one may have an especially charming view of the city. This also happens to be where the Jewish cemetery is located, but no mention of it is made, nor of the fact that thousands of Jewish inhabitants were massacred there in 1942-43. 20 Gross, Neighbors, 129-30. 21 Joe Perl, Shoah Foundation (from here on SF), video interview, October 14, 1996.

22 already been murdered in the first mass shooting in 1941. The family was betrayed by their neighbors, who had known them for many years. Only Etunia escaped. She was saved by two Polish lads who were patrolling the perimeter of their own village to protect its from attacks by Ukrainian bands.22

The early mass shooting on July 28, 1941, remembered as the “registration” massacre, in which Etunia’s brother was killed along with 350-600 other Jewish men, also claimed the life of Alicia Appleman-Jurman’s father. At the time, the Jews in

Buczacz did not know what had happened to those taken to the Fedor hill. They heard the shooting, but could not be sure whether anyone had survived. In January 1944 Alicia wandered into a barn and discovered a man hiding behind a false wall. The man told her of his lucky escape from that first massacre, even though a bullet had hit him in the thigh.

He claimed to have been the only survivor: “There was one man that I thought would make it,” he told her. “He had a good chance. The German, seeing his medal for bravery from the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, was impressed enough to let him escape… The

German told him to run, but a Ukrainian policeman shot him in the back.” This was

Alicia’s father.23

The man Alicia met was a furrier. So was Yisrael Munczer’s father, who also claimed to have been the sole survivor of the “registration” massacre. They may well have been the same person. Yisrael’s father, however, was saved from the massacre thanks to a Ukrainian policeman. As they were being shot into a pre-dug trench, he pretended to be hit and then crawled to the side and jumped into a well. A German policeman saw him and sent over an armed Ukrainian to watch over him. This man

22 Etunia Bauer Katz, Our Tomorrows Never Came (Fordham University Press: New York, 2000), 96-99. 23 Appleman-Jurman, Alicia, 163.

23 apparently knew the Jew he was guarding and told him to run off, shooting after him to make it seem that he had simply escaped. In winter 1944, however, while hiding in a barn, Munczer’s father was betrayed and shot.24

Alicia Appleman had many jarring experiences with her neighbors. Perhaps the most painful occurred when a Ukrainian policeman picked her up in December 1942 and took her to the local jail. The next morning the arrested Jews were processed before being sent to the Gestapo headquarters in nearby Czortków. Alicia knew well the policeman in charge: “This man, who was helping murder my people, was the father of my childhood friend, Olga… I still remembered when he told his daughter how fortunate she was to have me help her with her homework and how glad he was that we were friends.”

Suddenly recognizing the twelve-year-old Jewish girl, he said to her: “The Germans will be here soon to take you away. When they get here, I want you to get down on your knees and beg for your life.” But Alicia was unable to do this. Filled with guilt and rage, the man struck her powerfully on both cheeks. She barely escaped death in Czortków.25

Alicia lost her entire family, one by one. After her three bothers were killed – the first died in a Soviet prison during the first Russian occupation – she found shelter with her mother at an eccentric peasant’s house. Only after the war did it turn out that the man was in fact a Polish aristocrat named Władysław Czenicki. When the Soviets entered

Buczacz in March 1944, Alicia returned to town with her mother, but as the Germans recaptured the city the two of them were betrayed by their neighbors and the Gestapo killed her mother in front of her eyes. Arrested once again, she escaped a mass execution

24 Yisrael Munczer, A Holocaust Survivor from Buczacz (Gefen: Jerusalem, 1990, in Hebrew), 15, 33. Nevertheless, Munczer writes that on the day of the massacre “the Ukrainian and German policemen, thirsty for Jewish blood, treated them like wild beats.” Ibid., 14. 25 Appleman-Jurman, Alicia, 69-71.

24 for the second time, but was left without a soul in the world. Like so many others, her survival is a story of rescue and betrayal, altruism and denunciation.

Rosa Brecher, also nine-years-old when the war broke out, hid between May 1943 and March 1944 with the peasant woman Antosia Sztankowska in the village of

Myszkowce. Like virtually all the hiding places of the Jews of Buczacz, the village was within a couple of hours’ walk from the city. But Rosa never felt safe. The greatest threat to her safety were not the Germans, but Antosia’s brother-in-law Hryń, a Ukrainian peasant who collaborated with the Germans, was frequently drunk, beat up both his wife and Antosia, and seems to have molested the young Jewish girl whom he constantly threatened to denounce. Rosa’s testimony reveals extreme physical and psychological terror from this man; but it is also full of compassion for Antosia and for some of the other peasant women who confided in this terrified yet better educated girl, telling her about their hard-drinking and abusive husbands, fathers, and in-laws.26

The close link between providing shelter and denouncing is ever present in survivors’ testimonies. It is of course true that virtually all of the survivors were rescued by their gentile neighbors. It is also true, however, that the vast majority of the handful of survivors experienced denunciation by other neighbors, as well as on occasion by their own temporary rescuers. Joe Perl relates that his mother was offered shelter in their town of Monasterzyska but refused to go. Others who went there were robbed by those who had promised to hide them and were then reported to the authorities and killed.27 Mina

Rosner’s family hid in a bunker in the center of Buczacz, built under the house of a

26 There are two testimonies by Rosa Brecher. The first is a relatively short text, taken down in German on May 20, 1945, at a refugee home in Bucharest: Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (from here on ZIH) 301/4911. The second, written in Polish with a fair amount of Ukrainian influence, is longer, more confused but also richer in details and emotionally more revealing, probably taken down a few months earlier in Czernowitz: YVA 033/765 (originally from ZIH). 27 Perl, SF.

25 Polish woman named Janka. Some weeks later Mina heard that Janka had called in the

Gestapo. She was the only member of her family to survive.28

Simcha Tischler, who was born in Buczacz in 1921, was sheltered for much of the time by Jozef and Troika Luczow, a Ukrainian family living in a village near the city. In a 1997 videotaped testimony he commented about his rescuer: “You can say that a brother would not have done more [for me] than he did.” He ate the same food and drank the same vodka with his hosts. Tischler had contempt for the Jewish Kapos and respect for his Ukrainian friends. But he and his father were also denounced and ended up spending 11 months in a pit underground with hardly any food or water.29 [Figure 36:

Manko Swierszczak] Manko Swierszczak, the undertaker of the Polish cemetery in

Buczacz, hid the Rozen brothers and their mother in a grave, and during the winter of

1944 in a bunker under his house. His heroism was all the greater because he was suspected by the Ukrainian militia of harboring Jews, was arrested and given a severe beating, yet never betrayed the Rozners.30 Rescuers had much more to fear from their neighbors than from the Germans, who often could also not distinguish between Jews and gentiles in these foreign environs.

Arie Klonicki (Klonymus) was born in Kowel in 1906. He studied mathematics and Physics at the University of Wilno (Vilnius), and then worked as a teacher at the

Hebrew high school in Pinsk. There he met Malwina Herzman, who was born in Buczacz in 1912 and was working as a Polish language teacher at the gymnasium and the Hebrew

“Tarbut” school. They married in 1937. The couple was visiting Malwina’s family in

Buczacz when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Unable to return home, 28 Rosner, I am a Witness, 70-71, 76. 29 Simcha Tischler, transcript of videotaped testimony, June 26, 1997, YVA 03/10229, cassette # VT-1585. 30 Zev Anderman, interview with me, Tel Aviv, December 3, 2002.

26 they remained in the city, where their son Adam was born in 1942. They did all they could to save the baby, but few people were willing to take a circumcised Jewish boy.

[Figure 37: Basilianer Monastery] Shortly before the city was declared Judenfrei, they handed Adam to the Basilianer Monastery, and then agreed with a local woman who had previously hidden them to leave her all their property (inherited from Malwina’s murdered parents) as payment for hiding at her mother’s house in a nearby village. Upon reaching the village, however, they were robbed by a Ukrainian who had been informed of their coming by their Polish “rescuer.” They now had neither property nor shelter.

Hiding in the fields, they could hear the peasants working a few feet away from them discussing the advisability of denouncing Jews and sharing stories about mass executions.

It was during these few weeks in July 1943 that Klonicki decided to write an account of these events. The diary was written in Hebrew, and signed with his previous name Klonymus, as a gesture of defiance against his Christian compatriots. Meanwhile

Adam was ejected from the monastery and delivered to the forced-labor camp in

Buczacz, from which his parents barely managed to save him. Adam was now cared for by the Polish peasants Franka and Stanisław Węszyk, in whose field they were hiding.

But news about denunciations and more mass shooting made the Poles reluctant to keep the baby or allow the parents to remain in the field. Most feared of all was a Ukrainian called Nahajowski, a former dogcatcher who had transformed himself, as conditions demanded, into an expert at finding Jewish hiding places, for which he was apparently rewarded by the Germans.

Nahajowski was eventually shot by an armed Jew, but the denunciations persisted. A second attack on another professional Jew-catcher called Kowalski also had

27 little long-term effect. Eliasz Chalfen, who was born in Buczacz in 1930 and described these events in an account he wrote in 1947, noted the following dynamic:

The [Jews] who were hiding with peasants paid high sums of money for their

shelters, and the simple-minded peasants went to town and bought large amounts

of whatever they wanted. The peasants became jealous of each other, and this

made the work for the Ukrainian murderers all the easier. They followed those

peasants, found where they lived, set out on searches, and found Jews in attics,

cellars, and so forth. After they found these victims they shot them on the spot in

the peasant’s courtyard. Then began large-scale denunciations. The peasants

themselves started killing the Jews or expelling them, because there were various

rumors that whoever was found sheltering a Jew would be executed along with

his family and his house would be burned down. The peasants believed this and

tried to get rid of their Jews by all means, and in this manner made the work of

the murderers all the easier. The Jewish fighters could do nothing against this.

Their own lives became difficult, because at the time all kinds of gangs were

established, such as the Ukrainian bands (the Bander men [“Banderowcy”] and

the Polish units (A.K. [Armia Krajowa, Home Army]), and especially the

German-Ukrainian police, which did all it could to destroy the fighting Jewish

group.31

31 Eliasz Chalfen (Elijahu Chalfon), YVA M1/E 1559 (in Polish, translated by Eva Lutkiewicz), and YVA 03/8553 (in Hebrew), October 21, 1947, and Kohen, The Book of Buczacz, 269-70. One member of the Jewish partisans was Yitzhak Bauer, who was born in Buczacz in 1923. In an interview I conducted with him on November 6, 2003, in Tel Aviv, he rejected the notion of “Jewish partisans.” In his words, “we posed no threat to the Wehrmacht. All we wanted was to survive.” But he acknowledged that assassinating some of the more notorious “Jew-catchers” had a certain impact. He also provided a very detailed account of the attack on the botched attacks on Kowalski’s home and his father’s funeral.

28 It was in this growing chaos and violence that the Klonickis tried to survive. The odds were against them. Arie wrote in his diary:

In the forests rules the law of the jungle. The strongest is victor. There are several

bands of youngsters there. The largest numbers some 40 men. They have pistols.

If they hear that anyone has entered the forest, they attack him and rob him of

everything: money, belongings and shoes…. Of course, the members of these

gangs are Jews.32

On July 18, 1943, Arie and Malwina were confronted by a peasant who took from them the rest of their money. They expected that he would denounce them. In desperation, Arie wrote: “The hatred of an enemy such as Hitler is not enough, added to it is the hatred of the immediate surroundings, which knows no boundaries. Millions of Jews have been slaughtered and it is not yet satiated!”33 The last entry in the diary was made on July 22.

On February 25, 1947, Jacob Klonymus, Arie’s eldest brother, who was living in the

United States, received a letter from Stanisław and Franka Węszyk, informing him that

Arie and Malwina were killed on January 18, 1944, but that their son was alive. They also informed him of the diary and photographs that Arie had left with them. However, despite numerous attempts to find the boy’s whereabouts by Jacob, other members of the family, and representatives of Jewish organizations in Poland, only evasive responses arrived from the Węszyks. It appears that Adam was baptized and given the name Taras,

32 Arie Klonicki-Klonymus, The Diary of Adam’s Father (Jerusalem Post Press: Jerusalem, 1969, in Hebrew), 40. 33 Ibid., 47.

29 and was then left by Franka in a Polish orphanage in Buczacz, while the couple was transferred to Poland. But another letter indicated that Adam/Taras had been handed over to the Ukrainian nuns. The Węszyks also made it very clear that they expected considerable compensation for their troubles during the war. It was never clarified whether the boy had in fact been given away or was simply abandoned. But a last communication came in 1962:

As I wrote you, he lives in the Lwów area, but does not want to know about his

origin, because he sees himself as Ukrainian and is ashamed of having an uncle

who lives in Israel. In my opinion, his uncle should let the matter rest; it will in

any case not be resolved. As for me, I can no longer do anything.34

*

Some words of conclusion: There have been many theories and assertions about interethnic relations in general, their links to violence more specifically, and, most pointedly, their impact on the Holocaust. Apologetics and recriminations have relied both on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, and on wide-ranging generalizations.

They have also maintained a tense, often mutually contradictory relationship with each other. While everyone agrees that the Germans were the real culprits, Jewish accusations of gentile collaboration (especially in Eastern Europe) have been met by allegations of

34 Ibid., 71.

30 Jewish economic dominance, collaboration with the Soviets, lack of patriotism, unwillingness to fight, and, not infrequently, the greatest sin of all, the murder of God.

Conversely, both the survivors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and their neighbors carried a heavy burden of guilt through the following decades. Whether acknowledged or suppressed, this sense of guilt was a response to what had been done and what had not been done at a time of almost indescribable horror. Nor was life after the war easy for any of the protagonists. The Poles were ethnically cleansed and had to rebuild their lives in what became Western Poland in areas from which the Germans had in turn been driven out. The Ukrainians came under a particularly harsh Soviet regime after a fruitless struggle against their new occupiers that lasted well into the 1950s. Not a few Jewish survivors reproached themselves many years later for not having expressed sufficient gratitude to their rescuers. At times, decades after the end of the war, they sought them out and proposed their names to Yad Vashem as righteous gentiles.

This belated step was not merely the result of first having to rebuild one’s life and to struggle with the memories of loss and atrocity. It also had to do with the ambivalence felt by the survivors. For everyone who survived was rescued; but everyone who was rescued was a living testimony of betrayal, denunciation, greed and indifference. Yet when the recognition of the rescuers came, it did more than provide a moment of glory to the aging, often wretchedly poor “righteous gentiles.” It also provided a new sense of self-respect and dignity to the survivors, for it allowed them to acknowledge that even in the darkest, most desperate hour of their lives, there were those who saw them first and foremost as human beings. And this recognition, in turn, gave the rescuers an added

31 glory: not simply as brave and kind, but also as beacons of humanness at a time when the lives of men, women, and children became less important than a few stale potatoes.

All this can be glimpsed only by immersing oneself in the complex fabric of testimonies and memoirs. Generalizations are ultimately inescapable if one wishes to draw some conclusions from the evidence. But here nuance rules. A few anecdotal testimonies mean very little, for each experience was unique. A mass of testimonies from a wide variety of locations is just as meaningless, for it robs the evidence of its context. Ultimately, we must learn to know the place and the circumstances through the voices of the protagonists who lived there and experienced the event. This essay is merely a first step in this direction. But it may provide some indication of where I am heading.

32