Tales from the Borderlands by Omer Bartov

Author:Omer Bartov [Bartov, Omer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265002
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Radicals in Half-Asia

While Müller and Franzos never returned to their little provincial towns, others of their generation did. Fabius Nacht, Franzos’s exact contemporary, was similarly raised speaking German at home in Buczacz, although the family was described as religious. As a Jew, he too was thwarted from realizing his original ambition, which in his case was to study and teach mathematics. Instead, after graduating from the Polish-language gymnasium in Stanisławów, he attended medical school at the University of Vienna, returning in 1879 to Buczacz, where he soon established himself as a respected physician and member of the community thanks to his professional stature and what people perceived as his “higher,” German culture.20

Between 1891 and his retirement at the age of seventy-seven in 1925, Nacht served as medical director of the new Jewish hospital in Buczacz, which he had helped establish; he kept working as a private doctor until his death in 1937. In its early years, the hospital rented out the first floor as a source of extra funding. When the Baron Hirsch secondary school was opened in Buczacz in 1892—as part of a network of schools established throughout Galicia and Bukovina—it was initially housed in the hospital. The hospital also rented space to the Folks Kiche (soup kitchen), which had been providing cheap meals to the poor since 1890, and subsequently served free meals to indigent students at the Baron Hirsch School.21

Many years later, people recalled Dr. Nacht’s hospital as “the most popular building in the city,” an institution that was “respected and loved by all strata of the population,” and had become “enmeshed in their lives.” It was a modern, “two-story, unadorned white building,” with “large windows” and “a low fence on either side, and a few stairs at the center leading to a strong thick door.” The “large inscription, Szpital Izraelicki,” or Israelite Hospital, on its façade was a source of communal pride. The hospital also contained the only public ice cellar in Buczacz, and after 1908 offered a shelter for the elderly on the first floor. Nacht was fortunate to pass away just before the outbreak of World War II. On 27 November 1942, the Germans and their auxiliaries deported the approximately one hundred hospital patients to the Bełżec extermination camp; those too sick to be moved were shot in their beds. Damaged in the fighting in 1944, the hospital was never repaired; all that remains of it today is an empty lot.22

Whereas Nacht returned to his provincial borderlands town, two of his sons ended up as radical activists very far from Galicia. Indeed, not unlike Franzos’s father, Nacht was among those educated men who prepared the path for the next generation’s break with the shtetl and their entry into the brave new world of the twentieth century, where all too many of them were eventually chewed up by war, revolution, and disillusionment. His son Max, whose sometimes acerbic memoir reflects decades of disappointments, broken promises, and shattered hopes, recalled in 1964: “I got my first

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