Borderland (22 page)
Authors: Anna Reid
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.’
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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.’)
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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.’
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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.
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(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,
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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!’
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– 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.
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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
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– 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 auxiliaries
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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.
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Some were volunteers; others joined to escape the German prisoner-of-war camps, where death rates ran at a frightful two in five.
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‘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.’
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Lastly, in 1943 Germany recruited 13,000 Ukrainians – out of many more volunteers – into a new SS division, ‘SS Galicia’.
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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 their 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!’
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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In October came Soviet-style ‘elections’ to an assembly to ‘decide western Ukraine’s future’ – to confirm its incorporation, in other words, into the Soviet Union. All the candidates having run on a single slate, the resulting body did its job without a hitch. Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and the man in charge of Sovietising Galicia, congratulated himself on the smoothness of proceedings:
The assembly continued for a number of days amid great jubilation and political fervour. I didn’t hear a single speech expressing even the slightest doubt that Soviet Power should be established in the Western Ukraine. One by one, movingly and joyfully, the speakers all said that it was their fondest dream to be accepted into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
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‘At the same time,’ Khrushchev goes on without a trace of irony, ‘we were still conducting arrests.’ The arrestees – in a terror campaign that got fully under way in the spring of 1940 – were almost the entire Galician middle class: landowners, businessmen, peasants who resisted collectivisation, Polish bureaucrats and officers, Jewish refugees, lawyers, priests and politicians of all stripes, left as well as right. In a few cases, the upper grades of entire schools disappeared. As former owners of a timber yard, the Weliczkers feared being picked up themselves:
My father and I hid every night in our basement, for we did not know whether we belonged to the ‘capitalistic’ group or not. When we found that our families would be arrested too, we gave up hiding, for we did not want to be separated; and to hide our whole family, seven children and two parents, would have been impossible.
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Among the arrestees was a cousin of Weliczker’s mother, owner of a confectionary employing seven men – his six sons and himself. The whole family, including daughter-in-law and grandchild, were sent to Siberia.
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In little Avhustivka, the NKVD took away six young men, despite the absence of any anti-Soviet protest in the area. One died of ‘suffocation’ in prison, four of starvation in the Urals.
Altogether, in the two years preceding the German invasion, the Soviets deported between 800,000 and 1.6 million people – 10 to 20 per cent of western Ukraine’s entire population.
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Travelling under guard in closed cattle-trucks, they were sent to farms and labour camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, to a life of earth-floored shacks, starvation rations and forty degrees of frost in winter. Though the deportees included Jews and several hundred thousand Ukrainians, the majority of victims were Poles – inexplicably unable to grasp, according to the disappointed Khrushchev, ‘that their culture would actually be enriched by the annexation of their lands to the Soviet Union’.
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At three o’clock in the morning on the night of 21 June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union. For the Soviet border troops, the invasion came like a bolt from the blue. ‘We are being fired on,’ ran the desperate signals back to headquarters, ‘what shall we do?’
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Eight days later, after three nights of airraids, the Wehrmacht marched into Lviv. Kharkiv and Dnipro-petrovsk fell in August, Kiev in mid-September. Retreating in front of the overwhelming German advance, the Soviets massacred their remaining prisoners: in Lviv corpses were found piled five deep in the cellar of the NKVD gaol. ‘The Poles didn’t find as many “political criminals” among us in twenty years,’ the Avhustivka villagers mourned, ‘as “older brother” Russia did in a year and a half.’
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Along with millions of other Ukrainians, they believed Nazi rule could not possibly be any worse than Stalinism. Photographs (some cooked up by Soviet propagandists,) show smiling Galician peasants running out of their houses to welcome the Panzer crews with bread and salt.
In the wake of the Wehrmacht came the units devoted to slaughtering Jews – SS brigades, the Ordnungspolizei, and the Einsatzgruppen, execution squads specially drawn up by Himmler for this task. All were encouraged to recruit Ukrainians – thus aiming to preserve, as one Einsatzgruppe member later put it, ‘the psychological equilibrium of our own people’.
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On 2 July, three days after the Germans had taken Lviv, two Ukrainian militiamen arrived at the Weliczkers’ house and took Leon and his father at gunpoint to their headquarters: