Ukraine’s Vanquished Jews: ‘Their fate was clear to them’
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a five-part series that examines the Holocaust in western Ukraine that nearly wiped out the Jewish community during Nazi Germany’s occupation in World War II. This segment examines how the war crimes were carried out in and near Lviv.
VYNNYKY, Ukraine – In 1943, as a teenaged Bohdan Harata walked along a path on the outskirts of this small town near Lviv, he watched as a German prepared to shoot three Jews and send their bodies tumbling into the ravine below.
“He saw that he had only two bullets,” said Harata, now 79, raising a shaking hand to show where they had been standing. “Then he sent one of the Jews to fetch a bullet. The Jew went and then there were three of them. They stood there and waited. The Jew returned. The men didn’t run. Their fate was clear to them.”
The murder of these three Jewish men who had been working in a forced labor camp in the village was part of what has become known as the Holocaust by bullets – the killing of Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
While much attention has been paid to the gas chambers in death camps on the territory liberated by Allied forces, the killings on what became Soviet land have for decades been largely confined to silent memory.
(Photo: Symon Petliura)
But new investigations following the collapse of the Soviet Union have led many historians to reexamine Eastern Europe’s place in the Final Solution, the Nazis’ plan to eliminate Jews from Europe.
Between 1941 and 1943, more than 1.5 million Jews met their death by bullets in Ukraine.
They were massacred by mobile killing units called the Einsatzgruppen, Waffen SS units and German police. Local residents who collaborated with the Nazis willingly or by coercion helped in the killing.
Today’s western Ukraine found itself at the epicenter of the Holocaust.
Home to some 570,000 Jews before the war, the region became a grisly theater for two types of murder – death by bullet and extermination camps that served as the forerunners for the larger, more famous sites in modern-day Poland.
Some scholars think the foundation for the Holocaust in western Ukraine was set in the inter-war period after World War I. In particular, during 21 months – from September 1939 to June 1941 – when Moscow controlled the region, the tenuous peace between Ukrainians and Jews was finally shattered.
The groundwork was set for the violence that was to come later.
Jews in today’s western Ukraine had often faced anti-Semitism. In the early years of its existence, Dilo, which for nearly 60 years was the most influential regional Ukrainian newspaper, frequently published items derogatory toward Jews.
Halychanyn, a pro-Moscow newspaper published in Lviv from 1893 to 1913, was even more extreme: several reports on inter-ethnic economic disputes ran under the headline “Jewish vampires.”
Still, “Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence was rare in Galicia (Halychyna) throughout the 19th century and immediately after the First World War,” Frank Golczewski, professor of East European History at the University of Hamburg, wrote in the book “The Shoah in Ukraine.”
“By the start of the Second World War, however, this had changed – for the worse,” Golczewski said.
A German soldier guards Jews behind a barbed-wire fence in Lviv between 1941 and 1943. (ushmm.org)
A breaking point in the relationship between the Ukrainian and Jewish communities in Lviv Oblast came on May 25, 1926.
On the streets of Paris, Samuel Schwarzbart assassinated Symon Petliura, the national leader who had led Ukraine’s struggle for independence after the 1917 Russian Revolution. During his trial, Schwarzbart said he sought revenge for the Jewish pogroms that had occurred on Ukrainian territory during Petliura’s reign.
Between 35,000 to 50,000 Jews had died then; Schwarzbart lost up to 16 family members in the pogroms.
Petliura’s role in the pogroms continues to be debated today. Scholars generally recognize he did not show personal anti-Semitism. According to Ukrainian press reports from the time, he tried to stop anti-Jewish violence, but he was unable to control his military officers.
At the time of Petliura’s murder, however, Jewish organizations throughout Europe jumped to Schwarzbart’s defense. In Lviv, Dilo and Chwila, the city’s Polish-language Zionist newspaper, carried on a battle of the words.
Ukrainians became outraged after Schwarzbart was acquitted by a Parisian court; many believed he was a Soviet agent.
A German soldier guards Jews behind a barbed-wire fence in Lviv between 1941 and 1943. (ushmm.org)
By 1939, many Ukrainians had come to believe that Jews were associated with Communism. The press was often filled with references to “Judeo-Bolshevism,” pointing out that a number of leaders of the Russian Revolution – such as Leon Trotsky, Lazar Kaganovich, and Grigory Zinoviev – were Jews.
When the Red Army in 1939 took over Lviv, which was then part of Poland, ethnic tensions were heightened by Soviet policies of repressing all nationalities. Those who did not bow to Soviet rule, including Jews, were deported to Siberia, arrested or killed.
When German troops marched into Lviv on June 30, 1941, they were welcomed by many Ukrainians who saw them as liberators from the Soviets.
It did not take long for terror to be unleashed on Lviv’s Jewish population, which had swelled to some 200,000 people, including refugees who had come from parts of Nazi-occupied Poland. The first killings of Jews began on the day Germans entered the city.
Before they quit the city, the Soviets, meanwhile, had murdered some 7,000 political prisoners held in three prisons. Using Soviet propaganda methods, the Germans blamed the massacre of the mostly Ukrainian and Polish prisoners on Jews, and thus helped incite a pogrom that killed some 4,000 Jews over four days.
Lviv’s Jewish ghetto was established in November 1941. Over the next two years, Jews were subjected to so-called “Aktion” operations that involved their mass assembly, deportation and murder, frequently with the help of local Ukrainians, archival documents in Lviv show.
The height of the Aktion came between March and December 1942, when tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to Janowska – a labor, transit and concentration camp located on the outskirts of Lviv.
Or the Germans sent Jews to Belzec, which was one of the first Nazi extermination camps. Located 47 miles northwest of Lviv, now in modern Poland, it was one of the most efficient death camps. Only two Jews are known to have survived it out of the 430,000 to 500,000 Jews estimated to have died there, including the majority of Lviv’s Jewish population.
Lviv itself was declared “Judenrein” – totally cleansed of Jews – on Nov. 23, 1943.
Yet it is in places like Vynnyky where average Ukrainians came face-to-face and experienced the intimate nature of the Holocaust.
With a population of 5,000 in 1925, the town was comprised of 3,300 Poles, 2,150 Ukrainians, 350 Jews and 200 Germans.
Harata said he does not remember a Jewish ghetto being established in Vynnyky. Instead, all of the city’s women and children were deported, and a labor camp for men was established shortly after the Germans came.
Harata said when prisoners had served their purpose, or were too sick to work anymore, they were led to the ravine not far from the center of town.
“The Jews went to death calmly,” he said, noting he had witnessed at least 10 executions during the war. “They dug their own graves and then stood at their edge. You did not see fear. They were a deeply religious people.”
TIMELINE: World War II in Lviv
Aug. 23, 1939 – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which both powers pledge to remain neutral if either country were attacked by a third party. The treaty contained a secret protocol dividing Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
As part of the pact on:
- Sept. 1, 1939 – Germany invades Poland
- Sept. 17, 1939 – Soviet troops cross the Polish border.
- Sept. 22, 1939-June 30, 1941 – Lviv falls under Soviet rule.
The period is marked by deportations and executions of all nationalities, particularly the elite and those opposed to Soviet rule. Lviv’s Jewish population, which numbered 110,000 before the war, swells to 200,000.
June 22, 1941 – Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union at 3:15 a.m., violating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
June 23-26, 1941 – Nearly 7,000 inmates – mostly Ukrainians and Poles, but also Jews – are murdered at three area prisons, including infamous Brygidki. The event becomes a negative milestone in Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
June 30, 1941-July 26, 1944 – Lviv is occupied by Hitler’s Germany. So-called Aktion Reinhard – the Nazi code name for operations to round up Jews to send to concentration and death camps – begin immediately. Over the next two years, some 12 Aktion Reinhard occurred in Lviv, decimating the city’s Jewish population.
July 27, 1944 – Lviv again falls under Soviet rule.
May 7, 1945 – Germany signs the document of unconditional surrender in Reims, France. All told, the Nazis imprisoned and exterminated an estimated 9 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews.
Natalia A. Feduschak
30 June 2011 KyivPost
