The ghosts of the past still roam freely in the hills and valleys, clutter the unpaved streets, and congregate in synagogues transformed into garbage dumps and in cemeteries grazed by goats. And the inhabitants walk among the ruins and the ghosts, awakened to their presence only when asked by a stranger and forgetting them just as soon as he leaves. It is a region suspended in time . . .
Historian OMER BARTOV1
American author William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”2 During his travels in present-day Galicia and to his family’s hometown, Omer Bartov echoes this sentiment. Unlike Germany—which was in many ways forced to confront its role in the Holocaust from having its citizens paraded through concentration camps to the series of famous trials held there—Eastern Europe has for the most part not confronted the totality of its Holocaust experience in any meaningful way. The ghosts of the Holocaust haunt the region both metaphorically, and for some inhabitants who report actual hauntings, literally.3 Synagogues often symbolize this haunting. Those in Eastern European towns are often in ruins or have been repurposed as barns, movie theaters, and libraries. Many of them stand in towns without a single Jewish inhabitant, reflecting physically the absence of a group of people who once existed in large communities.
Yet immediately after the Holocaust, significant numbers of Jews lived in Eastern Europe. Many emerged from the forests, hiding places, or various Eastern camps. Others began returning from camps in Germany. They often tried to discover the whereabouts and fate of their relatives. Survivor Leon Wells, for example, recalled returning to Lwów and finding his way to a school that was being used as a shelter for Jews. Outside the school, thousands of slips of paper were posted requesting information on loved ones.4 In 1944, the local Jewish committee in Lwów determined that 823 of the 2,500 Jews in the city were actual citizens.5 The pre-war population had been over 150,000. Similar events played out across Eastern Europe as survivors returned home usually to find that their entire families had been murdered or at least were scattered and missing. Still, some Jews tried to reestablish their lives in the East. In Brzezany, Ukraine, a small group of survivors prayed in a single apartment as the synagogue had been turned into a grain depot. There was at least one wedding there as well. And, while some of the child survivors had pleasant memories of the time, the remaining Jews of Brzezany mostly left by 1945.6
The reception of neighbors and non-Jewish inhabitants of these towns added to the trauma of these returns. Given their knowledge of the Holocaust, most locals did not expect any Jews to still be alive. Wells wrote that he was exhausted and sat in the middle of the sidewalk. All around him “Passers-by stopped to look at me. Some stopped only for a second, others for a little longer. They talked among themselves. The only thing I heard them saying was, ‘It is a Jew.’”7 Many Eastern European locals were not particularly happy to see Jews return, looking for their relatives but also for their property and homes that they had been forced to leave. One survivor in Poland recalled approaching the neighbors and friends he had divided his property among for safe-keeping. He said, “now after our return they didn’t want to give them back. They said that Germans or Russians took them away, but the neighbors said that it was not true, because they did not see and did not hear about it. Three-fourths of our goods were taken by the locals.”8 Wells returned to find a Ukrainian family living in his family’s apartment. The father refused to return it, telling the Holocaust survivor that “I shouldn’t think that only the Jews had had a hard time; true, his family had not been killed, but ‘we didn’t have it too easy either.’”9 Across Eastern Europe, many locals feared that returning Jews would attempt to reclaim property that they had stolen from them. Indeed, at war’s end, many believed that Jewish possessions rightfully belonged to them.
Often, they were concerned about much more, for, as we have seen, local collaborators had murdered Jews on their own initiative. One survivor in Ukraine remembered that a friend in hiding with him had run into the street to celebrate with the Red Army soldiers. According to the survivor, local Ukrainians recognized him at once and started shouting in dismay, “Pejsach’s son, Pejsach’s son!” They were terrified, because every Jew who survived was a witness to all the murders committed by the Ukrainians.”10 They also knew that Soviet officials would not look kindly on those who had collaborated with the Germans. For many Eastern Europeans, returning Jews became a very visible and painful reminder of their own guilt in collaborating with the Nazis, victimizing Jews, or profiting from their deaths. This, along with existing antisemitism, created a dangerous environment for the small numbers of Jews trickling back into the East.
Not infrequently, this environment turned violent. Thomas Blatt, who had survived the escape from the Sobibor extermination center and the war, planned to return home to Izbica. A Polish man warned him that there were no Jews there and that “they are looking for you, they are looking. Run, run today to Lublin, before it’s too late.” He managed to escape on a Red Army vehicle.11 Other returning Jews were not so lucky. The most infamous example of postwar violence against Jewish survivors is likely the pogrom which took place on July 4, 1946 in Kielce, Poland. On July 1, a Polish boy disappeared; he returned two days later but his drunken father reported that his son had been kidnapped by Jews, echoing the centuries old Blood Libel. The boy falsely claimed that he had been held in the basement of the Jewish community center housing Holocaust survivors; the building had no basement. Regardless, an angry crowd gathered outside of the building. Some of the Polish Security Service personnel recognized the pogrom for what it was and attempted to protect the Jews, but were soon overwhelmed by a combination of local police, Polish soldiers, and civilians who stormed the building. A Polish policeman recalled that “Jews were brought from the building into the square, where the population cruelly murdered them, and the armed soldiers did not react, they only covered their ears and fled somewhere, and some went back into the building and kept bringing out other Jews.”12 A Jewish witness recalled “how policemen threw two Jewish girls off the second-floor [third-floor] balcony and the crowd in the courtyard finished them off.”13 At least 42 Jews were murdered in Kielce by a broad cross-section of Polish society. The postwar murder of Jews was not limited to Poland. In Romania, the Security Service reported in August 1946 that “Hatred of the Jewish element is on the rise.” In Moldova, dozens of Jews were similarly murdered trying to return to their homes.14
But it was the Kielce Pogrom that made headlines around the world. The New York Times placed the massacre on the front page. Its reporter wrote that Polish government spokesmen “frankly and ashamedly declare that it is not safe for Jews to live in small Polish towns.”15 This was a message not lost on the Jews in Poland themselves. For example, survivor Jack Ahrens recalled that many Jews came to Lwów “because there is a safety in numbers and safety in a big town.”16 These were temporary measures for self-protection, however. The Kielce Pogrom made it clear to Eastern European Jews, particularly in Poland, that it was simply not safe to return home. As a result, the numbers of Jews fleeing the East greatly increased after Kielce. Many of these refugees made their way to displaced persons camps in Germany before emigrating elsewhere. Soviet rule also contributed to the desire to leave, as it cracked down on religious practice and became increasingly antisemitic in Stalin’s last days. Ironically, not a few local collaborators also took the opportunity to pose as refugees and to join the flow of immigrants out of the East, escaping what they knew would be swift and severe Soviet justice.
Indeed, the Soviets began investigations into Nazi crimes in the East in 1944, before the war was even over. A special body known as the Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory from the USSR or more simply Extraordinary State Commission (ESC) had already been created in 1942 for this express purpose. These investigators compiled thousands of statements and other documentation of Nazi crimes, including exhumations of killing sites. It also was responsible for uncovering those Soviet citizens who had been “disloyal” to the regime.17 The Commission was a huge undertaking, involving over 30,000 individuals.18 The Commission reached even small villages, accounting in exhaustive detail the physical and property destruction wrought by the Third Reich. The relationship of the ESC to Jewish suffering was ambivalent, however. The Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) wished to be involved in the investigations when they involved the murder of Jews, but seems to have been rejected.19 This fell in line with the Soviet desire not to single out any particular group, but to include all victims of the Nazis as “Soviet Citizens.” Initially, however, crimes against Jews were specifically documented by many investigators, often as a result of direct questioning.20 Only later would Jews as a victim group slowly be subsumed into the larger death toll of Soviet citizens.
These initial Soviet investigations are, however, vitally important as the first legal examinations of the Holocaust. They also led to the first Nazi war crimes trials. The first took place at Krasnodar in July 1943 and tried eleven Russian and Ukrainian collaborators. These men had been auxiliaries for Sonderkommando 10a.21 One reporter venomously described the defendants as monstrous: “Not human beings but filth, scum . . . They stood before a Soviet court, before the whole Soviet people naked as worms.”22 The proceedings clearly smacked of earlier Soviet show trials with little legal rigor, as all defendants confessed their guilt. The court convicted all of them of treason and eight were executed. In Kharkhov in December 1943, three Germans and one Russian collaborator were tried. Yet, Soviet coverage of the perpetrators’ defenses and motivations was prescient, with one reporter writing, “But let them not seek excuses in the fact that they are rank and file murderers.”23 Moreover, the ESC investigations provided a large amount of evidence to the postwar International Military Tribunals at Nuremburg. Prosecution of local Eastern European collaborators in the postwar years, unless driven by the Soviets, dropped off precipitously. For the Soviets, it became increasingly important to portray the Great Patriotic War as a unified effort by all of the nations behind the Iron Curtain; embarrassing public trials of Soviet collaborators with the Nazis would have worked against this message.
Trials of German perpetrators (Einsatzgruppen members, camp guards, Wehrmacht killers, civil administrators and others) also had mixed success. The Nuremburg trials successfully prosecuted the main offenders at the highest levels, and the subsequent Nuremburg trials prosecuted medical, military, business, and SS perpetrators, again at a high level. The Dachau trials conducted by the Americans targeted some lower level officials from concentration camps in Germany, but were hampered by accusations of legal irregularities including the use of torture, which turned out to be true. In spite of these immediate Allied trials, many of the worst Nazi criminals escaped prosecution by fleeing Europe, often with the help of the Red Cross and the Catholic Church.24 Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, was one of these.
Other war criminals from the East escaped justice due to the inconsistent and flawed nature of the German system itself. Despite some of the largest postwar German trials such as the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial (1958), Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–67), and Stuttgart Lwów Trial (1968), most perpetrators remained at large. The Allied process of denazification, intended to remove former Nazis from positions of authority in society, largely fell short of that goal. Both the judiciary and the police often contained former Nazis and, worse, actual war criminals. In Bavaria in 1949, 81 percent of judges on the bench were former Nazis.25 It got worse. When senior police officials were also war criminals, they were often in a position to be very informed about cases against them. When German police burst into the home of Ludwig Hahn, former SD chief in Warsaw (and current police official), they were astonished to discover “not just ten binders of photocopied witness statements [in the case against him] but also photocopies of the most recent notes of the States Attorney’s office [in the case against him] from which he could learn the names and addresses of witnesses who had not yet been interviewed.”26
When the system itself was not corrupted, legal constraints often prevented many middle- and low-level perpetrators from standing trial. By 1960, a statute of limitations limited prosecution to the crime of first-degree murder, which placed a very high bar in front of prosecutors, requiring them to prove the perpetrator had acted out of base motives such as antisemitism, to prove his mindset. This is always a difficult legal challenge, doubly so regarding the Holocaust. In addition, even conscientious authorities faced a lack of witnesses and documentation, an obstacle exponentially greater for crimes committed in Eastern Europe, where both distance and politics inhibited cooperation. As a result, the bulk of Nazi participants in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe remained unpunished. Only recently have trials against the lowest level perpetrators such as Oskar Groening, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” moved forward, now that the German legal code has determined that presence at a camp constituted participation in its crimes. Of the many Eastern European perpetrators who fled to the United States, only a small number have been uncovered and deported for lying on their immigration documents about their Nazi past. The most famous of these was John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian Trawniki man who served at the Sobibor extermination center. He was eventually deported from the United States, tried (and found innocent in Israel) before being extradited to Germany where he was convicted as an accessory to murder.
Trials and prosecutions are only one form of confronting the past. In the case of most of Eastern Europe, that past was not confronted either in trials or in public and private spaces. A Polish ethnomusicologist working in small villages there wrote sadly:
The most painful thing for me is the attitude in the countryside towards Jews, and a universal sense of triumph because they are no longer there. Universal. And one more thing, which I rarely wrote about, and which weighs terribly on my conscience: the killings of Jews who were hiding in forests by the peasants. The number of these crimes and incidents that I know about it is a terrible burden.27
In small communities across Eastern Europe, not just in Poland, the crimes of the Holocaust remain very present. Scholar Jan Gross describes this as “a collective deed, implicating all those present, a group experience of ultimate transgression marking forever the local community where it took place, especially that people later had to live alongside the murderers.”28 These transgressions continued even after the war, as locals dug up the grounds of extermination centers and tore apart formerly Jewish houses in search of gold and valuables. Thus, the collective knowledge and guilt often remains a hidden undercurrent of local history and likely contributes, along with continuing antisemitism, to the silence regarding the Holocaust in the East.
In most of Eastern Europe, this silence began with the return of Soviet rule, which refused to distinguish between Jews and other victims of the Nazi genocidal project, adhering to a policy of “Don’t divide the dead.” As a result, memorials to murdered Jews, where they were allowed to be built at all, only mentioned “peaceful Soviet citizens,” as on the monument to the murdered Jews of Krupki in Belarus.29 The official monument to the 33,000 Jews murdered at Babi Yar in Ukraine also defined them as “Soviet citizens.” Worse still, hundreds of mass gravesites across Eastern Europe remain unmarked, though they are fixed in the memory of the local communities, who can easily take a visitor there if asked. During the Soviet years, small groups of Jews remaining in the East often visited killing sites, cemeteries, and memorials for small, impromptu remembrances, but no official ceremonies were sanctioned.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it appeared that some space had opened for returning the Jews as specific victims of the Holocaust. Memorials were updated or new ones built, often with money from Jewish communities of emigrés. However, in many formerly Soviet states that were now independent, nationalist commemorations overshadowed remembrance of Jewish victims. In Latvia, the government instituted a national day of remembrance (since abolished) for the Latvian Legion, a Waffen-SS unit whose members included Latvian auxiliary war criminals. To this day, marches to commemorate this deeply problematic unit continue. In Kaunas, Lithuania, the museum at the Ninth Fort Massacre site focuses more on the Soviet deportation of Lithuanians than on the murder of Jews that took place a hundred yards from its doors. Worse are the nationalist commemorations at the Ponary Forest killing site where 100,000 people were murdered, including 70,000 Jews. Here, right-wing groups commemorate the murder of around 100 members of the Lithuanian Territorial Self-Defense Force (an organization that actively collaborated with the Nazis) . . . and who were only killed when they refused to continue. In Ukraine, the OUN and its leader, Stepan Bandera, are commemorated with statues and marches, ignoring the antisemitism of the OUN and its role in murdering Jews—both with the Nazis and on its own initiative—during the Holocaust. In present-day (2016) Lwów, adjacent to the ruins of the famous Golden Rose Synagogue is a “Jewish-themed” restaurant where Ukrainians dress up as Jews and customers must barter for their meals. A lawsuit forced the new memorial at the site of the ruins to remove language that condemned Poles and Ukrainians.30 Finally, as of the printing of this book, Poland has passed a law making it illegal to refer to death camps in Poland as “Polish” or to claim that Poles collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating Jews. Violations of this could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years. Famed Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer replied that, “A law that imposes punishment on someone who says Poles participated in the murder of Jews contains a total lie.”31 This Polish law aptly summarizes the failure of many other Eastern European countries to come to terms with their own participation in the Holocaust. Poland, of course, suffered greatly under the Nazis who murdered 3,000,000 non-Jewish Poles, but it has chosen to focus on that suffering and literally outlaw discussion about its own collaboration, which, as we have seen, was widespread, not as a state or ally of Germany, but through the actions of individuals.
This book has sought to examine the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe both chronologically and from a variety of perspectives. It situates the events of the Holocaust as experienced by perpetrators, victims, and collaborators in the complex times and places in which it took place as well as in the longer-term history of the region. We have seen how and why Eastern Europe became the epicenter of the Holocaust, the home of the extermination centers, and is the land in which the developmental steps toward the Final Solution can most easily be seen. In addition, this text has endeavored to explain and give examples of the diverse responses and behaviors that individuals and groups displayed when faced with the horrors of the Nazi genocidal project. It is only by applying this kind of local analysis that we can begin to look more broadly at a region as large as Eastern Europe. The East is, naturally, critical to our understanding of the Holocaust, as the overwhelming majority of victims, perpetrators, and collaborators were located there. However, it is also vitally important to understand the events of 1939–45 due to the frightening increase in xenophobic and antisemitic behavior there today. This is but one symptom of a past yet to be fully confronted. If Eastern Europe seems haunted by the Holocaust, it is because, as one scholar has written, “Endings that are not over is what haunting is about.”32
In May 2006, a Polish man appeared at the Bełzec extermination center museum and memorial. He had been born in the town of Bełzec and, when he was 18, his grandmother had given him a woman’s gold ring which had obviously been taken by someone digging in the remains of the camp. A Jewish girl appeared to him in a dream after he had a near death experience on the highway asking him to return the ring to the extermination site. He traveled there shortly thereafter to do so. “One usually forgets dreams,” he wrote in a letter accompanying the ring, “but this one is fixed in my memory forever.”33 Perhaps the passing of time will allow Eastern Europe to confront its own dreams and memories of the Holocaust with more clarity.
*Megargee, Geoffrey P., ed. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Vol. II, vol. A. Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009, pp. 503–5.
Selected Readings
Bartov, Omer. Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Desbois, Patrick. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Gross, Jan Tomasz. Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz- an Essay in Historical Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Himka, John-Paul, and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds. Bringing the Dark Past to Light the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe. Lincoln: UNP – Nebraska, 2013.
Steinacher, Gerald. Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Book.