Anatomy of a Genocide<\/em> is a book which similarly addresses the historical roots of genocide and the eventual routineness of killing, but with a wholly different geography: the town and environs of Buczacz (Ukrainian transliteration:\u00a0 Buchach), in present-day Ukraine.<\/p>\nReaders of Holocaust narratives will often see a recollection of the years prior to the Holocaust as an idyllic time, when Jews and Christians lived in harmony, and the German occupation came as a tremendous shock.\u00a0 But the experience of this city and the surrounding region was far from this peaceful image.\u00a0 In the early modern period, the region changed hands, from Poles to Russians to Turks, and back to the Poles again, until it became a part of the Habsburg Empire in 1772 and remained so until World War I.\u00a0 The Jewish community was also destroyed in the peasant uprising of 1648, and the entire town was destroyed by the Turks in the late 1670s.<\/p>\n
Under the Poles in the early part of the period and subsequently under the Austrians, the Jewish community received legal protection and took on an important role in trade and business.\u00a0 Serfdom was abolished in 1848 and emancipation of the Jews, that is, the abolition of various legal restrictions, came in 1867.\u00a0 But in this same period when Jews saw improvement of their legal status, the Poles and the Ukrainians of the region became increasingly nationalistic, and divided into Poles vs. Ukrainians, seeking out their own national identities, with each side perceiving the Jews as aligned with their enemies, in addition to resentments against the Jews for their involvement in trade and commerce and their conviction that Jews were taking advantage of innocent peasants by luring them into taverns and impoverishing them by their love of alcohol.<\/p>\n
World War I provided its own tale of woe, with occupation by the Russians, then a retaking by the Austrians, and then a further re-occupation by the Russians, and each of these accompanied by massive destruction of the city, and, when occupied by the Russians, murders of the Jews.\u00a0 After World War I was ended, there were further wars\/rebellions as the Ukrainians battled the Poles for control, before subsequently becoming a part of Poland itself.\u00a0 And in the interwar period, Poland sought to Polonify the region, which was by international agreement supposed to have a certain degree of autonomy.\u00a0 Opportunities for Ukrainians to educate their children in their language and develop their culture were diminished, and underground resistance groups (with varying degrees of nonviolence) were formed.\u00a0 When the Soviets occupied the region in the wake of the Nazi invasion, the shoe was on the other foot:\u00a0 Poles were now the oppressed ones, with Ukrainians taking their revenge.\u00a0 And the Jews, on the one hand, received relatively more favorable treatment from the Soviets now in power, but, on the other hand, were the objects of resentment as a result.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the Nazi occupation.\u00a0 And what\u2019s disappointing about Bartov\u2019s narrative is that this clash of ethnic groups that he\u2019s been building up, the resentments between Poles and Ukrainians, and those directed at the Jews by both of these groups, just seem to melt away, in much of the way he frames his narrative.<\/p>\n
The Germans then enter the story.\u00a0 Presuming that readers will know the broad outlines of the Holocaust, he dives right into the narratives of the various German participants in the killings, drawing from court records of trials held in the 1960s in which, in order to convict an individual, it was necessary to prove that he did not just \u201cfollow orders\u201d but killed \u201cfor sport\u201d in some way or another.\u00a0 Hence, witness testimonies focused on stories of arbitrary random killings, not participation in round-ups and mass killings.\u00a0 (Based on the reports one hears now, it seems that this high bar has been lowered, but I have the impression that this requirement was set so as to be scrupulous about providing fair convictions rather than victors\u2019 justice, though the book doesn\u2019t explain this.)\u00a0 And these reports paint a picture of men who lived ordinary lives, before and after the war, but during the war, had this opportunity opened up to them to become killers, to enjoy exercising this power of life and death.\u00a0 They liked to portray themselves in their testimonies as really quite merciful, \u201cjust following orders,\u201d dispensing favors, and use instances of being offered gifts by the Judenrat<\/em> as a sign of gratitude rather than desperation.\u00a0 They claimed that they only escorted Jews to killing sites but never pulled the trigger themselves.\u00a0 And, of course, they neglect to tell the stories that witnesses shared, of killing Jews point-blank as they plead for their lives.<\/p>\nBut that\u2019s only part of the story.\u00a0 Ukrainian policemen were a constant part of the killing process.\u00a0 It may have been the Gestapo behind the machine guns, but it was the Ukrainian policemen who guarded the Jews and prevented their escape, and one after the next of the narratives of survival that Bartov cites includes the hiding spots of friends and family of the survivor being betrayed by Ukrainians.\u00a0 Yes, there are also stories of Ukrainians hiding Jews, but the pattern seems to be much more a matter of Poles hiding, Ukrainians betraying.\u00a0 And, yes, it is certainly true that the Germans provided incentives for the betrayal, such as monetary rewards, and threatened punishment for those found hiding Jews, and perhaps my own read of these chapters was faulty, but Bartov nonetheless really seems to be skirting the difficult question:\u00a0 to what extent did existing antisemitism among Ukrainians enable the genocide?<\/p>\n
Looking back, when Ukrainians gave their testimonies in later years (by which time there were no Poles, because they were themselves ethnically-cleansed to present-day Poland), the destruction of the Jewish community largely faded from memory.\u00a0 Perhaps to erase their own culpability, they describe the Jews as passive and failing to resist, ignoring the fact that, at the time of execution, the site was surrounded by Ukrainian guards, and as the occupation continued, Jews\u2019 hope in being able to hide faded due to lack of help from their neighbors.<\/p>\n
But having said all this, it\u2019s not an easy question to discuss.\u00a0 The Poles, after all, have not only campaigned against any use of the phrase \u201cPolish death camps\u201d \u2014 which is fair enough, since \u201cdeath camps in occupied Poland\u201d is indeed the right choice of phrase \u2014 but have made its use illegal, and this is really a small part of their overall objection to any telling of the history that suggests that Poles were not solely victims but also, at some times and places, collaborators.\u00a0 One suspects that one doesn\u2019t read similar complaints coming from Ukraine simply because the country is far less visible to the West.<\/p>\n
And if Ukraine were more visible to the West, and the target of accusations of genocide-enabling collaboration, how would they respond?\u00a0 One imagines a certain \u201csure, our ancestors were anti-Jewish, but in the end, the Nazis were the occupiers, not us, and the Holocaust would have happened one way or the other, even if it would have been a little harder for the Nazis to implement without Ukrainian help.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it all matters, in a time when activists are crying out \u201cif we let your guard down for even an instant, White Supremacists will instigate a genocide on American soil.\u201d\u00a0 And of course, we don\u2019t want to foment mass murder, or even garden-variety oppression, but neither do we want to curtail freedoms by imagining that this is what we need to do in order to prevent this.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Buczacz.Bazylianie1.jpg; By Tomasz Le\u015bniowski [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Readers of a certain age may remember the splash Daniel Goldhagen\u2019s Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners made when it was published in 1996, with its thesis that Germans were uniquely \u201celiminationist-antisemitic\u201d and that the Holocaust was the natural, inevitable result of centuries of German culture, not a peculiar stain of Naziism that arose out of nowhere, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":9719,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[989,285,992],"class_list":["post-9707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-genocide","tag-holocaust","tag-ukraine"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n