INTRODUCTION



“Will a Slaughter of Jews Be Next European Horror?”

In the years after the Holocaust, survivors around the globe began compiling memorial books, one for each city and town. These literary monuments to destroyed communities preserved local stories and documented the names of victims to keep memory alive. As a historian of eastern European Jewry, I have long appreciated the way these memorial books provide insight into the everyday rhythms of ordinary life. In them, contributors share anecdotes about the local schools, the fire brigade orchestra, the soccer club, the Zionist youth group. They paint portraits of local celebrities whose fame extended only as far as the wheat fields around the town: a favorite teacher, a respected rabbi, the town councilor, the water porter everybody knew. They document events small and large: the time a Jewish soldier returned home from the Russo-Japanese War, the time a traveling theater troupe from Odesa came to town, the time a fire burned down Yankl Friedman’s inn, the day the Nazis arrived.

But such memorial books are not only histories of the prewar period; they are also prehistories of the war itself. Take, for instance, the memorial book from the town of Proskuriv, located in today’s Ukraine. The book’s title, Khurbn Proskurov, captures the calamity the city endured. The Yiddish word khurbn (“destruction”), a term derived from the Hebrew ?urban, denotes the destruction of the two biblical temples in the sixth century BCE and the first century CE—the ur-catastrophes of the Jewish people—and has since been used to describe an array of other disasters, from earthquakes to the sinking of the Titanic. After the Second World War, it became widely understood to refer to the fate of European Jewry under the Nazis.

As is typical of memorial books, Khurbn Proskurov begins with a dedication: “To the memory of the holy souls who perished during the terrible slaughter that befell the Jews of Proskuriv.” The frontispiece depicts a common image in Holocaust art, a single memorial candle and a rosebush with thorny stems evoking barbed wire. A landscape of rolling fields beneath a city on a hill suggests the bucolic countryside around Proskuriv, with fields of flax and wheat and orchards of cherries and plums. As in many such memorial books, the text is in Yiddish and Hebrew and includes a foreword by a well-known townsman—in this case, the folklorist Avrom Rechtman. There are the usual tales of local personalities and municipal institutions. The book concludes with the names of the martyred, a list that extends to thirty pages.

What differentiates Khurbn Proskurov, though, is that it was written in 1924—nine years before Hitler’s rise to power and fifteen years before the start of the Second World War.1 It commemorates a different khurbn, a different holocaust. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say, the real beginning of the same Holocaust. The destruction of Proskuriv took place a year after the establishment of a Ukrainian state that promised broad freedoms and national autonomy to its Jewish minority, and three months after the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended the Great War. Delegates from thirty-two nations had just gathered in Paris to work out the treaties that would formally cap what H. G. Wells called “the war that will end war.”2 Meanwhile, thirteen hundred miles to the east, on the afternoon of February 15, 1919, Ukrainian soldiers murdered over a thousand Jewish civilians in what was at the time possibly the single deadliest episode of violence to befall the Jewish people in their long history of oppression.

Frontispiece to Khurbn Proskurov

The massacre in Proskuriv was not an isolated event. Between November 1918 and March 1921, during the civil war that followed the Great War, over one thousand anti-Jewish riots and military actions—both of which were commonly referred to as pogroms—were documented in about five hundred different locales throughout what is now Ukraine, and which was at the time contested territory between Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and multinational soviet successor states of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.3

This was not the first wave of pogroms in the area, but its scope eclipsed previous bouts of violence in terms of the range of participants, the number of victims, and the depths of barbarity. Ukrainian peasants, Polish townsfolk, and Russian soldiers robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, stealing property they believed rightfully belonged to them. Armed militants, with the acquiescence and support of large segments of the population, tore out Jewish men’s beards, ripped apart Torah scrolls, raped Jewish girls and women, and, in many cases, tortured Jewish townsfolk before gathering them in market squares, marching them to the outskirts of town, and shooting them. On at least one occasion, insurgent fighters barricaded Jews in a synagogue and burned down the building. The largest of the anti-Jewish massacres left over a thousand people dead, but the vast majority were much smaller affairs: more than half the incidents resulted only in property damage, injury, and at most a few fatalities. The numbers are contested, but a conservative estimate is that forty thousand Jews were killed during the riots and another seventy thousand subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks. Some observers counted closer to three hundred thousand victims. Although that higher figure is likely exaggerated, most historians today would agree that the total number of pogrom-related deaths within the Jewish community between 1918 and 1921 was well over one hundred thousand. The lives of many more were shattered. Approximately six hundred thousand Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation and set off alarms around the world.

* * *

I had always thought that the Holocaust was simply inconceivable before it happened—that it was beyond the ability of humans to imagine, to predict, or to prepare for. My father, whose story of survival informed my early knowledge of the Holocaust, emphasized how “normal” everything seemed before. He lived an upper-middle-class life in Budapest, enjoying fencing lessons and family vacations at Lake Balaton, until the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Likewise, the most famous victims of the Holocaust had their first encounters with genocidal antisemitism only several years into the war. Anne Frank went into hiding in July 1942, and the Gestapo discovered her secret annex in August 1944. Elie Wiesel reports that he first heard rumors of massacres as early as 1941, but it was not until May 1944 that he was deported to Auschwitz from the Sighetu Marma?iei ghetto, which had been set up a few weeks earlier. Many popular portrayals of the Holocaust similarly emphasize the suddenness and unexpectedness of what took place. When I bring my students to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, for instance, they enter the exhibition in a large open space filled with Jewish ritual objects and photos of everyday Jewish life in Europe, testifying to a vibrant, rooted existence. Then, turning a corner, they encounter a massive portrait of Adolf Hitler looming over a long hallway that descends into the next exhibit room. The impression is that Hitler appeared out of the blue, with no hint of the coming apocalypse.

But the evidence is clear that the murder of six million Jews in Europe was not only conceivable but feared as a distinct possibility for at least twenty years before it became a reality. On September 8, 1919, for instance, the New York Times reported on a convention held in Manhattan to protest the bloodshed then underway in eastern Europe. UKRAINIAN JEWS AIM TO STOP POGROMS, the headline read; MASS MEETING HEARS THAT 127,000 JEWS HAVE BEEN KILLED AND 6,000,000 ARE IN PERIL. The article concluded by quoting Joseph Seff, president of the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in America: “This fact that the population of 6,000,000 souls in Ukrainia and in Poland have received notice through action and by word that they are going to be completely exterminated—this fact stands before the whole world as the paramount issue of the present day.”4

A few months before the Times warned of the extermination of the Jews of eastern Europe, the Literary Digest ran an article on the unrest in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine with the tagline WILL A SLAUGHTER OF JEWS BE NEXT EUROPEAN HORROR? These fears were enunciated in a comprehensive report by the Russian Red Cross that soberly concluded: “The task that the pogrom movement set itself was to rid Ukrainia of all Jews and to carry it out in many cases by the wholesale physical extermination of this race.”5 The American Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent much of 1920–1921 in the region, described a “literary investigator” she met in Odesa who had been collecting materials on the pogroms in seventy-two cities. “He believed that the atmosphere created by them intensified the anti-Jewish spirit and would someday break out in the wholesale slaughter of the Jews,” Goldman wrote.6 The Nation titled a 1922 feature article on the pogroms in Ukraine THE MURDER OF A RACE, as though searching for a phrase to describe what would later be termed “genocide.” Writing from Paris in 1923, the Russian Jewish historian Daniil Pasmanik warned that the violence unleashed by the civil war could lead to “the physical extermination of all Jews.”7 The Great War and the breakdown of social order had brutalized society, fostering a disposition toward barbarism and bloodshed.8 The slaughter of over one hundred thousand Jews and the complete elimination of Jews from individual towns fostered the idea that the Jews as a whole could one day be annihilated.

The New York Times report on efforts to end pogroms in Ukraine, September 8, 1919

During the interwar period, Jews not only spoke about the violence of the pogroms in cataclysmic terms, they also acted accordingly. They fled the threatened region by the millions, radically altering the demography of world Jewry. They established far-reaching self-help and philanthropic organizations. They lobbied the Great Powers, pressing the newly established states of Poland and Romania to accept clauses guaranteeing the rights of minorities in their constitutions. They colonized new lands, setting the groundwork for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. They memorialized the pogroms in elegies and art. In the Soviet Union, one of the successor states to the ravaged region, they joined the civil service, government bureaucracy, and law enforcement expressly to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again and to bring the perpetrators to justice. And they acted, alone and in groups, to forestall what many adamantly believed was a coming catastrophe.

An ad for the Literary Digest’s special edition, “Will a Slaughter of Jews Be Next European Horror?”

These actions cast suspicion on the Jews of Europe, whose desperate movements were seen as threatening what American president Woodrow Wilson had hoped would be a “just and secure peace.” The hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees arriving in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Warsaw taxed the resources of these war-weary cities. Demagogic propagandists and pamphleteers stoked fears that the newcomers could be closet Bolsheviks, igniting a worldwide red scare and paving the way for the rise of right-wing political movements. Governments responded by issuing new border regulations; Romania, Hungary, Poland, Germany, the United States, Argentina, and British Palestine—the countries to which the largest numbers of Jewish refugees were fleeing—each revised their immigration policies to foreclose further Jewish immigration and to insulate themselves from the Bolshevik menace. The pogroms had rendered the Jews “the world’s foremost problem,” as Henry Ford’s diatribe The International Jew put it in 1920.

* * *

Despite all the alarms it raised at the time, the extermination of over one hundred thousand Jews in the aftermath of the Great War has largely been forgotten today, overwhelmed by the horrors of the Holocaust. Its absence from history textbooks, museums, and public memory of the Holocaust is startling. Yet the pogroms of 1918–1921 can help explain how that next wave of anti-Jewish violence became possible. Historians have sought explanations for the Holocaust in Christian theological anti-Judaism, nineteenth-century racial theories, social envy, economic conflict, totalitarian ideologies, governmental policies that stigmatized Jews, and power vacuums created by state collapse.9 But rarely have they traced the roots of the Holocaust to the genocidal violence perpetrated against Jews in the very same region in which the “Final Solution” would begin only two decades later. The primary reason for this oversight has been a particular focus on the persecution of Jews in Germany, where anti-Jewish violence in the decades before Hitler’s rise to power was relatively rare, and on the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland, where the German bureaucracy modernized and intensified its killing methods. Even the systematic shooting operations common in Ukraine were seen as categorically different from the type of localized frenzy of violence characteristic of pogroms. Pogroms, in short, seemed like relics of a bygone era.

But over the last several decades, historians have come to recognize that in the German-occupied regions of the Soviet Union, the killing was driven primarily by animosity toward Bolshevism and the perceived prominence of Jews in that movement, the same factors that had motivated the pogroms of 1918–1921.10 Detailed examinations of the massacres that occurred in Ukraine and Poland in 1941 have also revealed the complex ways in which political instability, social and ethnic stratification, and group dynamics turned “ordinary men” and “neighbors” into killers.11 These studies have expanded our allocation of culpability to include not just remote leaders like Hitler, abstract political philosophies like fascism, and large impersonal organizations like the Nazi Party, but also common people who made decisions on the local level. They have reminded us that about a third of the victims of the Holocaust were murdered at close range, near their homes, with the collaboration of people they knew, before most of the death camps even began functioning in 1942. Indeed, survivors of these massacres referred to them as “pogroms,” linking their experiences to a familiar prototype. At the same time, a closer analysis of the pogroms of 1918–1921 shows them not only to be ethnic riots carried out by enraged townsfolk and peasants, but also military actions perpetrated by disciplined soldiers.

What happened to the Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War, then, has roots in what happened to the Jews in the same region only two decades earlier.12 The pogroms established violence against Jews as an acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism: the Bolsheviks’ forcible requisitioning of private property, their war on religion, and their arrest and execution of political enemies. The unremitting exposure to bloodshed during that formative period of conflict and state-building had inured the population to barbarism and brutality. When the Germans arrived, riled up with anti-Bolshevik hatred and antisemitic ideology, they found a decades-old killing ground where the mass murder of innocent Jews was seared into collective memory, where the unimaginable had already become reality. As the demographer Jacob Lestschinsky presciently noted on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the “heritage of atrocities” left by the “Ukrainian horrors” of 1918–1921 had “still not fully healed.”13 The continued presence of Jews was a constant reminder of the trauma of that era, of the crimes that locals had perpetrated against them and their property, and of the terrible repercussions of those actions. The Nazi German genocide, with its unprecedented scale and horrifying death toll, offered the prospect of a type of absolution, the opportunity to remove the evidence of past atrocities and to relativize the sins of the previous generation, to allow the pogroms to be forgotten amid far greater villainy. As US president Bill Clinton put it during a visit to Kigali, where he acknowledged his failure to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide: “Each bloodletting hastens the next, as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”14

* * *

Most of Ukraine was once part of the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multinational republic hailed as a “paradise for Jews.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though, this commonwealth was torn apart by neighboring powers. The lowland plains and vast steppes stretching eastward from the Zbrucz River across the Dnipro river basin to the Donets River, and from the Black Sea in the south to the Prypiat marshes in the north, were incorporated into tsarist Russia, becoming the provinces of Volhynia, Katerynoslav, Kyiv, Podilia, Poltava, and Chernyhiv. The area west of the Zbrucz, including the Carpathian foothills, became the Austrian province of Galicia.

In the early twentieth century, nearly three million Jews lived in these lands. Constituting about 12 percent of the overall population, they coexisted in a mutually beneficial, if fraught, relationship with Ukrainian peasants, Russian bureaucrats, and Polish nobility.15 The Jews were an underclass, differentiated from their neighbors by their religious practice, language, clothing, names, occupations, and by hundreds of discriminatory legal edicts imposed upon them by a succession of tsars in the lands under Russian rule. The most notorious of these were the residency laws that restricted most Jews to the “Pale of Settlement” in the western provinces of the Russian Empire and to the Kingdom of Poland, which was also controlled by Russia.

In many of the cities and the small market towns, or shtetls, that overlooked the valleys and riverbanks, Jews made up more than a third of the total population and Yiddish was the most commonly spoken tongue.16 Most of these Jews worked as artisans, shopkeepers, or petty merchants, eking out a living in one of Europe’s poorest regions. But a small elite were making a mark in the growing metropolises. The port city of Odesa, the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, attracted Zionist dreamers, Marxist revolutionaries, reform rabbis, Hebrew poets, and Yiddish playwrights. Kyiv, the medieval capital, only allowed Jews who met certain economic or educational criteria to settle in the city, but it, too, was acquiring a notable Jewish character, particularly around the booming sugar and grain industries. And Lviv, the largest city on the Austrian side of the border, drew, in addition to peddlers and traders, a growing number of Jewish entrepreneurs, who settled among the Polish upper crust that dominated the city.17

In the countryside, by contrast, Jews were a rarity, even a curiosity in the villages, where they typically made a living managing Polish noble estates or running roadside inns and taverns. Over 80 percent of the rural population spoke Ukrainian, a Slavic language that (despite a growing highbrow literature) was often disparaged as just a dialect; Russians called the language and the people who spoke it “Little Russian,” while Austrians referred to them as “Ruthenian,” a term derived from the same root as “Russian.” The cities and the surrounding villages, in other words, spoke different languages, both literally and metaphorically. It is no coincidence that the Yiddish term goy can refer to a peasant as much as to a non-Jew, just as the Russian word for peasant, krestianin, is derived from the Russian word for Christian. For the most part, Ukrainians adhered to Orthodox Eastern-rite Christianity, which they inherited from Byzantium. In the eastern and central regions, the church was headed by a metropolitan; in the west, believers were in full communion with the pope in Rome and were therefore commonly known as Greek Catholics.

In literature, Ukrainian village life was often romanticized. The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko idealized its authenticity along with the freedom-loving rebelliousness of the people. His 1841 epic poem Haidamaks, for instance, celebrated the revolt of peasant insurgents against the Polish overlords and their Jewish managers. In Austrian Galicia, the socialist writer Ivan Franko wrote popular stories about hardworking Ukrainian oil workers who are cheated by their Jewish bosses. The image of indolent Jews exploiting the labor of the peasantry and mocking Christianity were tried-and-true tropes in Slavic folklore. A popular myth told of Jews holding church keys or other holy objects as pledges. Jewish estate managers and moneylenders were accused of impoverishing the peasants by issuing them credit they could never repay, and Jewish tavern keepers were blamed for peasant drunkenness. But, most of all, Jews were simply baffling to regular churchgoers, who wondered why they adhered to such bizarre practices and why they obstinately rejected the truth of Gospel.18

Jewish folklore and literature, for its part, could also be cruel and demeaning, often portraying Christian peasants as drunken simpletons. Sholem Rabinovich, the Yiddish writer better known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories are mostly set in these lands, portrayed the pious Jews he wrote about as living separate lives in a hostile environment, satisfied that God had created Jews and Ukrainians differently. As his most famous character, Tevye the Dairyman, puts it, “He created man in His likeness, but you had better remember that not every likeness is alike.”19 In Sholem Aleichem’s world, Jews prefer the third-class cabin, where “you can feel like you are at home” and where “it is only us brothers, the children of Israel.”20 In his stories, each community keeps largely to itself, interacting primarily in the highly controlled environment of the market, where money depersonalizes their relations and “everything is mixed up together: goyim, horses, cows, pigs, Gypsies, wagons, wheels, harnesses, and Jews of all kinds.”21

Nevertheless, in ordinary times, relations between Jews and Christians were peaceable, sometimes even amicable. Peasant farmers would ride their carts into town to have their wheat ground in a Jewish-owned mill or to have the sugar extracted from their beets in a Jewish-owned factory. They would sell the flour and their produce to Jewish traders who brought it to market, and, while in town, would pick up some dry goods from the Jewish shops, and perhaps stop by the Jewish blacksmith to have their horse’s hooves reshod or a kitchen implement repaired. The Jewish cobblers, tailors, coopers, glaziers, and small-shop owners clustered around the market square and the muddy streets leading into it, while Ukrainian townsfolk tended to live farther out, closer to the fields, orchards, and pastures. In the east, Jews shared the urban space with Russian bureaucrats and military personnel garrisoned in town; in the west, they shared it with Polish nobles, many of whom were impoverished despite their distinguished ancestry. The growth of large factories in the first years of the new century also attracted growing numbers of Ukrainians to the cities; they labored there alongside their Jewish coworkers, then often returned to their villages in the summers to help with the seasonal farm labor.

Western Europeans tended to regard this part of Europe as economically backward. Barely industrialized, it was largely dependent upon the grain of the famed black-earth zone, which runs along southern Volhynia and Kyiv provinces eastward into Russia.22 The forgiving land disincentivized agricultural innovation. It allowed the peasant farmers to maintain the old three-field system of crop rotation: to plow with oxen, reap with scythes, and thresh by hand.

However, the construction of railways and the development of soap, tallow, and leather factories transformed the crumbling market towns and regional administrative centers along the rails into bustling cities and created a new class of wealthy Jewish manufacturers. By the turn of the century, tobacco and sugar beet factories were emerging all around Kyiv Province, many of them named after their Jewish owners: Kogan, Rotenberg, Shishman. The growing disparity between town and country energized a revolutionary movement, which sprouted among the urban intellectuals and factory workers and quickly spread to the rural masses. The Great War intensified the growing unrest by destroying harvests, demoralizing villages, and destabilizing families. But it was the revolutionaries’ promise of a postwar redistribution of the land from the predominantly Polish nobles who owned it to the Ukrainian peasants who farmed it that most excited the countryside.

As the great multinational empires collapsed in the waning days of the Great War, a Ukrainian People’s Republic emerged, promising an equitable distribution of the land and autonomy for the region’s national minorities, a commitment celebrated by Jews around the world. But the area quickly became embroiled in a bitter conflict, often called, somewhat simplistically, a civil war. Various proponents of Ukrainian statehood wrestled with anarchists, warlords, and independent militias, while fighting against a “White” army seeking the preservation of a united Russia, a “Red” army trying to establish a global Bolshevik empire, and a Polish army intent on recovering its historic borders. This war, from 1918 to 1921, led to the loss of about one million people in Ukraine through famine, disease, and military violence.23 These casualties added to the six hundred thousand tsarist soldiers killed at the front during the Great War and more than two million soldiers and civilians across the Russian Empire who perished from disease.24 Between 1914 and 1921, Ukraine lost nearly 20 percent of its total population.25 The region’s troubled history is reflected in the appellations that scholars have given it: “Bloodlands,” “Shatterzone of Empires,” “The Lands Between,” “No Place.”26


Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Veidlinger