Centuries of rejection, and worse
Mark Glanville applauds a focused history. Anne Garvey learns that breaking up doesn’t have to be hard to do
Anatomy of a Genocide By Omer Bartov Simon & Schuster, £25 Reviewed by Mark Glanville
By the middle of the 17th century, following invitations from local nobility, 450,000 Jews were living in Poland — the largest Jewish population in the world. But it was about to be ravaged by Cossack hordes under the command of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in a bitter foretaste of the events that form the heart of Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide, which focuses on Buczacz, one of the afflicted towns.
In the centuries that followed, the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish inhabitants of Buczacz became exposed to the predations of Ottoman Turks, Austrians, Russians and Germans, their alliances shifting, depending on who, at any given moment, best served their frequently opposing interests.
With the rise of late-19th-century nationalism, Poles and Ukrainians fought each other viciously. Jews, who could “neither be recognised as a separate indigenous national group nor assimilated as ethnically kindred”, were mistrusted by both. Some sought salvation in the establishment of a homeland in Palestine, to which the author’s mother emigrated from Buczacz in 1935.
Whether because local peasants were indebted to Jewish moneylenders or perceived them as the descendants of the murderers of Christ, Jews were
regarded as a constant irritation, a people, unlike the Poles and Ukrainians, with no tie to the land, their lives consequently of less worth.
Anton Siewinski, principal of the boys school in Buczacz, enviously accused Jews of owning all the property and dominating trade, describing them as “chameleons who would have hoisted the Chinese flag since their coat of arms is only gold.” (Siewinski’s own house was vandalised during the
First World War by Russians who mistook him for a Jew.)
When the Germans arrived in 1941, the town was ripe for genocide. Ukrainian nationalists, naïvely believing Hitler’s promise of a homeland, became enthusiastic accomplices to the slaughter.
Bartov is alert to the Holocaust’s greyer areas, the depressing collaboration and cruelty of the Buczacz Judenrat (the Jewish council set up by the Nazis) and the Jewish police in the round-ups, deportations and mass shootings.
Meanwhile, Greek Catholic priests went out of their way to preserve Torah scrolls, and individual Poles and Ukrainians concealed and saved Jews at great risk to themselves and their families.
Following demographic restructuring by the Soviets, involving mass transfers of Poles and Ukrainians, Buczacz is now monolithically Ukrainian. But “as a newly resurgent Russia sought to reassert its influence on Ukraine,” Bartov concludes in his outstanding, forensic examination
of his subject matter, “the nationalist, paramilitary Ukrainian People’s Army again came to symbolise the country’s historic struggle against its mighty eastern neighbour: in 2016, its blackand-red banner… was again fluttering from the remnants of the medieval Polish castle overlooking Buczacz. History was back to its old tricks.” Next time, there will be no Jewish victims.