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  Contents

   EPIGRAPH

   MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

  Chapter 1: THE GATHERING STORM

  Chapter 2: ENEMIES AT THEIR PLEASURE

  Chapter 3: TOGETHER AND APART

  Chapter 4: SOVIET POWER

  Chapter 5: GERMAN ORDER

  Chapter 6: THE DAILY LIFE OF GENOCIDE

  Chapter 7: NEIGHBORS

   AFTERMATH

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  To my family

  Wai-yee, Raz, Shira, and Rom

  The rock of my existence and the fountain of my soul

  And in memoriam

  Yehudit (Szimer) Bartov, 1924–1998

  Hanoch (Helfgott) Bartov, 1926–2016

  I closed my eyes, so that I would not see the deaths of my brothers, my fellow townsmen, because of my bad habit to see my city and its slain, how they are tortured by their tormentors and how they are killed in wicked and cruel ways. And I closed my eyes for yet another reason, because when I close my eyes I become as it were master of the universe and see what I wish to see. And so I closed my eyes and called upon my city to stand before me, with all its inhabitants, with all its houses of prayer. I put every man in the place where he used to sit and where he studied and where his sons and sons-in-law and grandsons sat—for in my city everyone came to prayer.

  —SHMUEL YOSEF AGNON, THE CITY WHOLE, 1973

  Note on Place and Personal Names

  The region discussed in this book was populated by several ethnic groups and ruled over time by different regimes. As a result, the names of places and individuals may differ substantially depending on the language and time period. For the sake of consistency, I have generally used the Polish version of place names, since they were also officially used for most of the period covered by this book, while providing in parentheses the alternative (usually Ukrainian, at times German) version when first mentioned, and keeping the original version when citing documents. For this reason I have generally kept the name of Buczacz (Ukrainian: Buchach) in its Polish spelling. But where there exists a conventional English spelling for known places, such as Warsaw, I have preferred that to the Polish Warszawa. Many Ukrainian individuals appear in Polish documents with the Polish version of their names, but whenever the Ukrainian name was known I have chosen to use it. Words in Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hebrew are transliterated more or less according to conventional transliteration rules, apart from those names and terms already known in English spelling. Thus Moscow and not Moskva, Kiev rather than Kyiv, Dniester instead of Dnister or Dnestr, and Dnieper rather than Dnepr or Dnipro. I have normally transliterated the guttural equivalent of “ch” in the Scottish word “loch” as “kh” for all these languages apart from where other conventions already apply. Thus Pinchas rather than Pinkhas, and cheder rather than kheder. I have left out the soft signs from transliterations of Ukrainian and Russian for ease of reading. With a few exceptions, titles of books and articles written in languages not using Roman letters have been translated.

  The author’s mother, grandmother, and sister in Tel Aviv, 1979.

  MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

  The author’s mother as a child in Buczacz, late 1920s.

  Tell me about your childhood,” I said.

  We were standing in my mother’s kitchen in Tel Aviv. She was wearing a simple dress under a large apron. A diminutive, energetic woman, her still-ample curly hair dyed brownish-red, her face lined from the strong Middle Eastern sun and years of hardship. She was in her element in the large kitchen, the most important space in an apartment to which my parents had moved a quarter of a century earlier, just a couple of years before I left home and joined the army.

  It was summer 1995, and she was making chicken soup. My seven-year-old son was playing next to us. Up to that day, I had never asked about her life in Eastern Poland, before her parents moved the family to Palestine in 1935. She was seventy-one. I was forty-one. I had only a vague idea of her youth. I turned on the tape recorder.

  I was born in Kośmierzyn [Ukrainian: Kosmyryn], a little village on the banks of the Dniester River in Polish Podolia, which is now in Ukraine. All the inhabitants of the village were Ukrainian. My father’s father managed the estate of Graf [Count] Potocki’s widow there. He lived on the estate. There was a rather large house there. I don’t know how old I was at the time, perhaps four or five, so to me it appeared huge. It was a two-story house, and the grafina [countess], as she was called, lived there, along with the graf’s sister and their sons. There was a huge courtyard, horse stables, cowsheds, and a large barn. My grandfather lived in a single-story house. There were Grandfather and Grandmother and the sons. I was born in the village. Soon thereafter we moved to Potok Złoty. Then we moved to Buczacz.

  Today Buczacz (pronounced “Buchach”) is a shabby post-Soviet backwater. Poor, derelict, depressed. In 1919 it had about thirteen thousand inhabitants. It currently has the same number. But its setting is enchanting: perched on several hills and intersected by a winding stream. Back when my mother lived there it was a quaint little town, and that’s how she remembered it. She retained only fragments of her past, not unlike the bits and pieces of languages from that world she had kept somewhere in her head—Yiddish, Polish, Ukrainian, German, and the Russian in which she would sing to me as a child. She gently pulled little strands of recollections and affectionately wove them into her own fabric of childhood. She had been a teacher for decades. She had a good, strong voice and enunciated every word clearly.

  We all lived in one house with Grandfather. The house had two units; we lived in one unit, on the right, and in the left unit lived Grandfather and Grandmother and my father’s sister, who later married. The house was on a hill and was linked to the street by a stone staircase. And I remember the street—it led to the train station.

  She never alluded to the fact that the street on which her house was located soon witnessed the deportation of thousands of the city’s Jews, who were led along it, humiliated and beaten, to that very same train station, whence they were transported in inhumanly crowded cattle cars to the Bełżec extermination camp. Of the family that stayed behind, both hers and my father’s, not a single member survived—all of them murdered. That too she didn’t speak about in such terms. But our conversation must have evoked deeply suppressed memories in her because not long after, my mother began speaking about taking a trip back to Buczacz.

  It never happened. She died three years later.

  That conversation with my mother made me want to learn more about my ancestors—how they lived and how they died. So I spent the next two decades searching. I traveled across three continents and nine countries. I dug through countless archives. At one in Lviv, I found a note from March 1935 concerning three men from Buczacz requesting permission to enter Palestine. One of the three names is that of Izrael Szimer, my maternal grandfather.

  Note from the Buczacz local branch of the Jewish Organization to the main office in Lwów on sending documents for immigration certificates for three men from Buczacz, including Izrael Szimer, the author’s grandfather. Source: Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv, m. Lviv (Central State Historical Archives of Uk
raine in Lviv, hereafter TsDIAL), fond 338, op. 1, spr. 240, p. 12, March 12, 1935.

  I also discovered that the ship on which my mother and her family sailed to Palestine was launched in Glasgow in 1910. By the time it was scrapped in 1939, the Polonia had made 123 voyages between the Romanian port of Constanţa and Palestine, bringing thousands of Jews.1

  But I didn’t find much more than that. I had set out on my quest too late. The people who could remember further back than my mother could were all dead. Some of the few remaining family photographs are inscribed and dated on the back, and at times I can identify a family resemblance, but no one is left to tell me anything about them. The moment to tap into the memories of the few who knew is long past.

  Over those two decades, however, I did learn a great deal about the history of Buczacz and the catastrophe that befell it in World War II. I found a great many documents, mostly untouched since they were first deposited in dozens of archival collections, libraries, and other research institutions. I also identified scores of living survivors, as well as hundreds of written, audiotaped, and videotaped testimonies whose collection began even before the war ended and continued well into the 1990s. Personal diaries, eyewitness reports, judicial depositions, recorded testimonies, published and unpublished memoirs—all reflecting the manner in which each side understood itself and perceived others.

  By letting those who lived that history lend their own words to the telling of it and providing accompanying photos, this book attempts to reconstruct the life of Buczacz in all its complexity and depict how the Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish inhabitants of the town lived side by side for several centuries—weaving their separate tales of the past, articulating their distinctive understanding of the present, and making widely diverging plans for the future. Life in towns such as Buczacz was premised on constant interaction between different religious and ethnic communities. The Jews did not live segregated from the Christian population; the entire notion of a shtetl existing in some sort of splendid (or sordid) isolation is merely a figment of the Jewish literary and folkloristic imagination. That integration was what made the existence of such towns possible. It was also what made the genocide there, when it occurred, a communal event both cruel and intimate, filled with gratuitous violence and betrayal as well as flashes of altruism and kindness.

  If I have learned anything from the story of Buczacz, it is that we are all merely one link in that fragile yet astonishingly resilient chain of generations, of fate and struggle, of which history’s relentless unfolding of events is made. Who we are, what we remember, how we raise our children, what we say and believe in and cherish and despise—these are the combined consequence of haphazard chance and human action, taken for reasons good and bad, deliberate and thoughtless, by us and by our ancestors. I may not have found out much about my family, but in a certain sense all history is family history. We all carry within us a deeply embedded fragment of memory, transmitted from one generation to the next, of those long centuries lived for better or for worse in what my mother called in Yiddish ek velt, that end of nowhere whence we came, like the fading echoes of a lost yet never entirely forgotten childhood.

  The author’s mother (front row on the left) about to board the ship to Palestine, 1935.

  Chapter 1

  THE GATHERING STORM

  Election rally in Buczacz, 1907. Jewish candidate Natan Birnbaum at center front; Shmuel Yosef Agnon wearing a white fedora in the crowd on the right. Source: The Nathan & Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto.

  Buczacz first appears in the chronicles of medieval Poland in 1260 as an estate belonging to the noble Buczacki clan, noted defenders of Poland’s eastern borderlands. In their prime, these early owners of Buczacz built a palatial wooden castle on a hill overlooking the village and river in the valley below. The sweeping landscapes of what the Poles call the kresy, or frontiers, have lodged themselves deep in the Polish romantic imagination. (The name of the ruling family, and hence the town’s name, was probably derived from the surrounding beech forests, or buczyny.) In 1882 Sadok Barącz, a Polish Dominican monk of Armenian origins who spent his entire life in the region, published a colorful history of Buczacz that has become a rich source of local fables and legends.

  Buczacz, he wrote, was situated “on the frontiers of Podolia and Red Russia,” also known as Rus or Ruthenia, in “a green valley on a rocky base, divided into two parts by the narrow stream of the Strypa River. It is one of several charming, beautiful valleys in the region, richly endowed with capricious nature. The gloomy, ancient forests, the clear lakes, the wooded hills, the rich pastures, God’s holy might splendidly spread out: all can powerfully harness the Slavic soul seeking freedom and security.” The town was also directly on “the path of the Tatars,” but the warriors of that “brave family from Buczacz” defended it “with their own bodies” against raids by these “wild oppressors.” The Buczackis, Barącz assures us, “set an example to the knights of Rus and Podolia” by building “a defensive fort to protect the successful development of the town,” motivated by “the holy flame of love for the land and for their ancestors.” Whenever they heard “the terrifying sound of the enemy coming up from the dark valley,” these “military units materialized on their brave steeds—known throughout Poland—as if they had sprung out of the earth.” Horses from this region were “highly sought after, and one pointed at them with pride: Look! This is a horse raised in Buczacz.”1

  Buczacz in the early twentieth century. Source: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (hereafter AT-OeSt) / Kriegsarchiv (hereafter KA), BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5839.

  The Nobel Prize–winning writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who was born in Buczacz in 1887, also associated the town’s splendid physical setting with divine grace. In his posthumously published history of the town, The City Whole, he described Buczacz as “a city to which God has seemingly loaned some of His own land’s glory.” He envisioned it as a region of paradise, “situated upon mountains and hills,” surrounded by “forests thick with trees and bushes,” and nourished by a river that “flows within and around” it, by streams that “feed reeds and bushes and trees,” and by “good springs” that “abound with fresh water.” In Agnon’s telling of it, his city was founded by a caravan of Jews, whose “pure hearts yearned to go to the Land of Israel” but who found themselves instead in a place of “endless forests, filled with birds and animals and beasts.” There they encountered a band of “great and important noblemen,” who were “so astonished by their wisdom and their well spoken manner” that they invited the newcomers “to dwell with them.” Once the nobles “recognized that the Jews were their blessing,” they told them, “The whole land is wide open to you. . . . Dwell where you wish, and if you want to trade in it so much the better, for there is no one in this land who knows how to trade goods.” And so the Jews stayed; they “struck roots into the land, and built houses, and the nobility of the land liked and supported them, and the women were pregnant or with babies, and some had become exhausted and weak, and the elderly had aged a great deal and the journey would be hard for them.” There they “lacked for nothing in learning of the Torah and the knowledge of God and were secure in their wealth and honor and their faith and righteousness.”2

  The events described in Agnon’s mythical account fit the historical context, for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 had facilitated the takeover of vast tracts of Eastern Europe and Ukraine. As Poland expanded to the east, the nobility invited Jews to develop towns, commerce, and manufacturing, offering them favorable leases and privileges. The oldest tombstone in Buczacz’s Jewish cemetery has been dated to 1587.

  In 1612 the city was taken over by Stefan Potocki and remained the private property of this vastly rich and powerful Polish clan for a century and a half. Stefan had the foresight to convert the old wooden fortress into a formidable stone castle, protected by a complex of ramparts and trenches that enveloped the whole city. His son Jan, who inherited the city in 1
631, saw the strength of the fortress repeatedly tested during the second half of the century.

  By the mid-seventeenth century the 450,000 Jews of Poland constituted the single largest Jewish population in the world. But the colonization of these lands also caused mounting resentment among the local peasants and gentry, setting the background for the massive Cossack and peasant uprising of 1648. The destruction of Jewish communities was vividly described in Nathan Hanover’s eyewitness account, The Book of the Deep Mire (Sefer yeven metsula). Descriptions are so gory as to stretch credulity, yet they came to feature in people’s imagination as identifying marks of the past and as threats or models for the future. As Hanover wrote, the Jews “were martyred in strange and cruel and bitter deaths. . . . Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and feet chopped off, and were then thrown on the highway to be trampled by wagons and crushed by horses,” and “many were buried alive.” The most ghastly violence was directed at the most defenseless: “Infants were butchered in their mothers’ laps. Many children were torn apart like fish; they slashed the bellies of pregnant women and took out the fetus and struck their faces with it. They tore open the bellies of some women and placed live cats in them,” then “sewed up their bellies and cut off their hands so they would not be able to remove the live cats from their bellies.” In other cases they “skewered some children and roasted them over fire and brought them to their mothers to eat.”

  View of the castle in the early twentieth century. Source: ÖSA-KA.AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5840.