Sketches from a Secret War by Timothy Snyder

Author:Timothy Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

HOLOCAUST

When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and divided Poland in September 1939, Poland’s Jews had been divided, it appeared, into two communities of fate. The Jews of Lódź along with those of Warsaw and Cracow fell under German occupation; the Jews of Volhynia along with those of Galicia and Belarus under Soviet occupation. About 200,000 Jews, including tens of thousands of Jews from Lódź, fled east from the Germans in September 1939. Jews who remained behind were closed in ghettos; the Lódź ghetto was established on 10 December 1939. Jews who fled east joined a native Jewish population of about 1.2 million in the Soviet zone of occupation, in lands that had been eastern Poland.38 Many Lódź Jews, such as Joel Cygielman, made their way to Volhynia. Cygielman had his own car, and drove from Lódź to the village of Dąbrowica. There he allowed some local Jews to persuade him to drive to Sarny to greet the Red Army. The Red Army was a pathetic sight, and the car’s engines frightened away columns of soldiers. Upon reaching Sarny, Cygielman was hailed by a Red Army officer with a grenade in hand, who stole his car.39 This, in a few hours, presaged the tone of the twenty-two months of Soviet occupation: it brought hope to some, material loss to most, and disappointment to almost everyone. It saved Jews from the Germans: for a time.

On 22 June 1941, the German army began another eastward march. Hitler had betrayed his Soviet ally, and ordered Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Volhynia was now the front line of a new war. The Luftwaffe bombed Luck on the first day of hostilities. Special task forces, the Einsatzgruppen, followed the German army east, under orders to shoot communists and Jews.40 In Volhynia, Einsatzgruppe C tried to induce the local population to kill Jews and communists in “self-cleansing” pogroms. The Germans presented themselves as liberators from Soviet tyranny, and told Ukrainians and Poles that the Jews had been the cause of their woe under the Soviet occupation. German propaganda exploited the murder of political prisoners by the NKVD, presenting it as a crime of Jews upon Ukrainians. The NKVD, of course, had been composed of personnel from the east, not of locals. Communism in Volhynia had always been a joint project of Ukrainians and Jews. Whether the Germans understood this or not, their propaganda implicitly exonerated Ukrainians from participation in the Soviet occupation. It seems entirely possible that one Ukrainian motivation for murdering Jews in Volhynia was to prove that one had had nothing to do with the Soviet occupation. After all, Ukrainian collaborators in Soviet organs must have been more numerous than Jews.

This German “self-cleansing” experiment led to pogroms in a broad arc of territory from the Baltic to Bukovina.41 In Volhynia, the most deadly pogrom was apparently in Krzemieniec, where the NKVD had murdered 100–150 prisoners before departing in haste, and where the disinterred bodies revealed signs of torture. Here the local population killed about 130 Jews.

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