Omer Bartov’s book provides the complete history of the Jews in the small border town of Buczacz in Galicia, which belonged at different times to Poland, the Habsburg Empire, again to Poland, then to the Soviet Union, and now to Ukraine. Although a significant part of the book is devoted to the Holocaust of Jews in Buczacz, the earlier history of the Jewish community and Jewish Christian relations is very important for understanding the roots of the violence and the behavior of the local gentile population during the Nazi occupation of the town.
Jews settled in Buczacz in the 16th century, when town belonged to Poland. In 1772 Galicia was annexed by the Habsburg Empire, and Buczacz was under Austrian rule until the collapse of the empire in 1918. The population of the town was always multiethnic: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians lived there. As Bartov shows, Jews and gentiles lived in the town together and apart. Ukrainian and Polish nationalists blamed Jews for exploitation of the local Christian population and for the poverty and drunkenness of the peasants. Bartov points out that, “While Jews were relatively better off than the peasants … the vast majority of Jews in Buczacz, as in the rest of Galicia, were poor” (28). Many Jews from Galicia immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
During the First World War, “Buczacz was swept into the carnage early on, when once again it found itself in the path of invading armies” (38). Russian troops organized anti-Jewish pogroms, killed Jews, raped Jewish women, and expelled Jews from their homes and burned them. During the occupation of Galicia, the Russian military administration blamed Jews for supporting the Austria-Hungary government and accused them of espionage for the enemy. Many thousands of Jews were expelled from Galicia, and the movement of the rest of the Jewish population was restricted, as was delivery of provisions to the region, which was suffering from the war. Famine, contagious diseases, and violence devastated the Jewish population in Buczacz and Galicia, and destroyed many Jewish communal institutions there.
From September 1920 to the beginning of the Second World War, Buczacz was under Polish jurisdiction. Bartov points out that Christian–Jewish relations were quite complicated in Buczacz in the interwar period. The Jews of Buczacz were marginalized “in a far-off corner of an aggressively nationalist and economically backward new state” (95). Although Jews made up a majority of the 11,000 residents of Buczacz in 1936, they “were governed exclusively by Roman Catholic Poles” (119). Jews often encountered anti-Semitism, and most young Jews in Buczacz “had no hope of attending the gymnasium” (95).
When the Second World War began, the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland, including Buczacz. A Polish Jew and communist, Segal, became the town mayor. Bartov shows that while a few Jewish radicals benefited under Soviet rule, most Jews in Buczacz suffered during the Soviet occupation. Many Jews were classified by the new authorities as bourgeoise and were deported to Siberia. The deported Jews lived in horrible conditions in exile, but most of them survived, while almost all of those who remained in Buczacz were killed during the Nazi occupation.
The Nazis occupied Buczacz on July 5, 1941, and violence against Jews began immediately. Bartov writes that not only German soldiers, but also the local gentile population, participated in the torture and humiliation of Jews. The entire Jewish population of Buczacz was accused of Judeo-communism, while only a small percentage of Jews had really supported the Soviet regime. Bartov mentions that the favorite target for the Nazis and their collaborators were Orthodox Jews, who were utterly uninvolved in any facet of political life. “Germans and Ukrainians chased them through the streets, ‘beat them, shaved their beards, tortured them, burned their religious symbols, etc.’” (167). Jews were banned from walking on the main streets of the town, and were ordered to wear “white armbands with a blue Star of David” (169) and take off their hats whenever they encountered a German under threat of the death penalty. The Nazis arrested the Jewish community leaders and threatened to kill them if the community did not pay a large ransom. In response, the Judenrat and Jewish police were formed. Perhaps some Jews joined them in hopes of surviving, but most of them were also eventually killed by the Nazis.
Most Jews in Buczacz were killed between October 1942 and June 1943. The members of the Security Police outpost, located in the nearby city Czortkow, participated in the murders, assisted by a Ukrainian Auxiliary Police battalion, local German gendarmeries, and Ukrainian and Jewish police. Bartov shows that the murderers not only fulfilled the order to exterminate Jews, but many of them also truly enjoyed doing this. They chased Jews in the town and woods, hunted them as wild animals, and boasted how many they had personally killed. According to Bartov, for many of these murderers, “this was clearly the best time of their lives: they had almost unlimited access to food, liquor, tobacco, and sex, and, most important, they became supreme masters over life and death” (185).
Before the extermination of the Jews, the Nazis used them for a while as slave laborers. They used Jewish tailors, dentists, and hairdressers, and some Nazi wives used Jews as house cleaners and even as babysitters. But when the order came to implement the final solution, “well over 10,000 Jews were shot in Buczacz or deported to the Belzec extermination camp” (229). Bartov writes that the murder of Jews was very open, very public. Often the murderers knew their victims quite well, because they had used them previously as slave laborers.
The Nazis conducted several actions in which they killed thousands of Jews. Often the local gentile population denounced hiding Jews to the Nazis. In the last month of the Nazis occupation, many Jews were murdered “by an array of Ukrainian paramilitaries, local bandits, and brutalized peasants” (259).
Bartov points out that all three ethnic groups—Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles—greatly suffered during the Nazi occupation, but only the Jews were totally exterminated. Today almost no Jews remain in Buczacz, which is now in Ukraine. The Jewish memorial on the one of the killing sites, Fedor Hill, “is surrounded by a dense forest and barely accessible” (295). Some modern Ukrainian publications about Buczacz repeat the Soviet approach of talking about the murder of civilians by the Nazis, omitting mention that most of the victims were Jews. They also avoid talking about Ukrainian nationalists’ collaboration in the Holocaust.
Bartov’s book raises very important questions about Jewish–gentile relations in the small town Buczacz and their influence on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. This book also shows the intimacy of the killing, when the gentile neighbors and even the Nazis often knew their victims well. The murder of most of the Jews occurred over a year from the beginning of the Nazi occupation, so the Nazis had time to use their victims as slave laborers before the murders were ordered. Problems with the commemoration of the Holocaust in Buczacz are unfortunately quite typical for modern Ukraine. There exists the tendency to downplay or even deny participation of Ukrainian nationalists and part of the local population in the Holocaust. The book provides an excellent microhistory of Jews in the small town Buczacz, which brings to light many aspects of the Jewish–Christian relations and the Holocaust typical for the entire region.
