CHAPTER SEVEN  

 

The Vanished Nation: Ivano-Frankivsk

You were my death:

you I could hold

when all fell away from me.

– Paul Celan, 1968

THREE BABUSHKI, STOUT and sturdy as ponies, wiggle their spades under a rectangular flagstone and heave it over. The underside is inscribed in Hebrew: ‘Here lies buried a righteous woman, Sarah, daughter of Shmeor. She died on 11th October 1929.’ The next stone in the search also bears traces of lettering, but is too worn to read.

I am in Ivano-Frankivsk, a nondescript town in south-western Ukraine. The tombstones have been here – in a yard round the back of the railway station – ever since the war, when German troops demolished the town’s Jewish cemetery and used the remains to pave what was then an army repair-shop. Locals had always known that the stones came from Jewish graves, since some lay face-up, with the inscriptions showing. ‘It wasn’t normal, having people walking all over them,’ says one of the women, wiping her hands on her fluorescent orange apron. ‘They should have been back in the cemetery where they belong.’

‘So why didn’t you do anything about it earlier?’

‘Because nobody told us to.’

The man who chivvied the city authorities into action is Viktor – or, in the Hebrew version he prefers, Moishe-Leib – Kolesnyk, the town rabbi. Unlike most of the rabbis in Ukraine, he is not an American, but was actually born here, to a conventional Party family – father a local soviet deputy – that much disapproved of his unexpected interest in religion. Sacked from his teaching job in a village school, he earned a living touring the mountains taking photographs of peasant weddings, before being ordained by New York Lubavitchers in Moscow and sent back to Ivano-Frankivsk to reopen the town synagogue, then used as a dance-hall by the local medical institute. The familiar bureaucratic battle ensued. ‘First we were given a small house in the yard – a shed really. Then, while building works were going on next door, the shed collapsed. We took all the holy books and came in here – we just said no, we wouldn’t go. A year later, we got it officially.’ But despite black mackintosh and patriarchal beard, rabbinical dignity is something Moishe-Leib is happy to put on and off with his homburg. Ensconced among old calendars and piles of books in a makeshift office at the back of the synagogue, he cracks open a packet of Dollar Gold cigarettes and reverts to his other incarnation, as local fix-it man and historian.

Ivano-Frankivsk, he says, was founded in the seventeenth century as a Polish frontier town. A photocopy of an old map shows the zigzag outline of a fortress, long since disappeared. On the first partition of Poland it found itself in Austro-Hungary, between the wars it went to Poland again, and in 1945 it was handed over to the Soviet Union. Until 1962 it was called Stanyslaviv, after a Polish prince; today’s name is that of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. But the name changes are unimportant, for the people the town really belonged to for most of its history were the Jews.

Up to 1941, over 60 per cent of Ivano-Frankivsk’s population was Jewish. It had fifty-five synagogues and produced dozens of distinguished rabbinical dynasties. Proudly, Moishe-Leib reels off the names – the one I recognise is Shneor Zalman ben Baruch, one of the founders of Hasidism. With the war, 300 years of history came to a swift and savage end. Conveniently placed on the railway-line west to Poland, the town turned into a deportation centre for Jews from all over Ukraine. ‘According to my calculations,’ says Moishe-Leib, lighting another Dollar Gold, ‘120,000 people came through Stanyslaviv. Sixty or seventy thousand were killed here, the rest were taken to the camps.’ It all happened amazingly quickly: Ivano-Frankivsk’s ghetto opened in September 1941, three months after the German invasion, and closed again early in 1943, when there was no one left to kill.

Donning his homburg again, Moishe-Leib takes me back out through the synagogue hall. Inky wooden school-desks do duty as pews, and the walls are stencilled with patterns touchingly designed to look like real wallpaper. We climb into a battered Zhiguli for a tour of Jewish landmarks, Moishe-Leib swivelling round to point things out as we go. There is not much left to see. The old Jewish cemetery, with graves dating back to the seventeenth century, was demolished in the 1960s, to make way for a tatty Kosmos cinema. Nearly all the synagogues have gone too – of the seven surviving buildings, one is used as a laboratory, one as a school, one as a deaf-mute centre and one as a storehouse; the last two have been divided into flats and shops. The only thing marking the site of the wartime ghetto is a small metal plaque on what used to be its boundary wall. Vandals have scraped off its six-pointed Star of David.

What also remains is a mass grave. On the edge of town the road peters out into a dirt track. We clamber out of the car, and pick our way through the ruts to a patch of open ground. Surrounded by peasant cottages, each with its hens, fruit-trees and sagging chain-link fence, the only thing that distinguishes it from any other bit of suburban wasteland is a series of oddly shaped lumps and hollows. These are the ditches where, during the war, the town’s entire Jewish population were shot and buried. An old woman is sweeping round a pink granite monument with a birch-broom. ‘In this place,’ runs the inscription, ‘German Fascist invaders shot over 100,000 Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.’ The number is cheapened by exaggeration, and, as at the larger Babiy Yar memorial in Kiev, there is no mention of the fact that the victims were Jews.

‘It’s very peaceful,’ I remark, groping for something appropriate to say about this grisly and neglected spot. ‘Not really,’ says Moishe-Leib cheerfully, offering a strip of chewing-gum. ‘People have parties here, they get drunk and fight. You can see where they’ve stolen part of the fence.’ A concrete shelter – he calls it a chapel – marks the spot where one of the town’s famous rabbis is supposed to be buried. Somebody has scratched graffiti into the paintwork: ‘Yids’; ‘Ukraine hates you.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ says Moishe-Leib, ‘just kids playing.’ My interpreter looks appalled. Though she has lived in Ivano-Frankivsk all her life, she never even knew this place existed.

There have been Jews in Ukraine since before the word ‘Ukraine’ existed. The Greek colonies of the Black Sea coast had their Jewish traders, and the earth embankments of ancient Kiev were pierced by a Jewish Gate. The first record we have of the existence of the city is a letter written in Hebrew by the Jews of Khazaria, an eighth-century Turkic kingdom on the Black Sea steppe, to a synagogue near Cairo. There were Jews in Lviv in the fourteenth century, and in the Volhynian town of Lutsk in the tenth. But they did not start arriving in large numbers until 1569, when the Union of Lublin allowed Poles and Jews to migrate east into the Lithuanian Grand Duchy. Through succeeding centuries, despite waves of emigration in the face of pogroms and poverty, Ukraine’s Jewish population grew steadily, totalling about 3 million people – 8 per cent of the population – by the outbreak of war. When the Nazis struck, Odessa had 180,000 Jews, Kiev 175,000 – as many each as the whole of the Netherlands. Kharkiv had 150,000, Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv 100,000 each. In the sleepy shtetlech of Galicia and Volhynia – places like Ivano-Frankivsk – they made up 40 per cent or more of the population.

These were pious places, poor and tradition-bound. Men wore side-curls and velvet hats with squirrel-tails; their wives kept the children quiet with tales of dybbuks and golems, and shone their hair with kerosene. It was the land of miracle-working rabbis and the mystical kabbalah, of arranged marriages and strict Sabbaths full of prayer and song and ritual. The exception was bustling, brash Odessa, synonymous, in Jewish lore, with frivolity and irreligion. Odessa produced musicians and orators (among them Trotsky and the early Zionist Leon Pinsker), and from its poor Jewish quarter, the Moldavanka, a legendary tribe of gangsters. Travellers remarked on the self-confidence and dignity with which Jews walked the city streets, and if a Jew wanted to say that a man was prosperous, he might say that he ‘lived like a God in Odessa’.1

As old as the history of Ukrainian Jewry is the history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. One of the first written records we have of Jewish settlement in Ukraine is also a record of anti-Jewish violence. On the death of Prince Svyatopolk in 1113, according to the Rus chronicles, the Kiev mob rioted, looting the homes of Jewish merchants who had profited from Svyatopolk’s hated monopoly on salt. For the next several centuries, there were too few Jews in Ukraine to be much of an issue, but with Jewish immigration following the Union of Lublin, the potential for hatred increased.

Many Jews arrived as agents to Polish landowners, who deputised to them the collection of rents and taxes, and management of taverns and mills, at which the surrounding peasantry were often obliged by law to buy their drink and grind their corn. They lived huddled under the protection of Polish palace walls, and built their synagogues like mini-fortresses, with gun-embrasures and cannon on the roof. Hence when Khmelnytsky rebelled in 1648, his peasant army’s murderous fury was directed as much at Jews as at Poles. The Polish fortified towns, to which Jews fled for protection, fell like ninepins. In some places Poles shut Jews out, in others they handed them over in exchange for their own lives. Usually both groups were massacred together. In Nemyriv, Khmelnytsky’s soldiers burned the synagogue, murdered Jews with their own ritual knives, and tore up the covers of their holy books to make shoes. Similar massacres took place during the uprisings of the next century, notably at Uman, seat of the Polish Potockis. Again, Poles and Jews shared jointly in the peasants’ fury: a common practice was to hang a Pole, a Jew and a dog from the same tree, with the words, ‘Pole, Yid and hound – each to the same faith bound.’2

Through the 1800s, Orthodox attitudes towards Jews hardly improved, and at the end of the century they actually worsened. While in Western Europe Jews were beginning to integrate, with spectacular success, into middle-class gentile society, in the Russian empire they remained legal and social pariahs. Save in the big cities – from which most Jews were excluded by the Pale of Settlement – the old pattern of Polish or Russian landlord, Jewish tradesman and Ukrainian peasant hardly shifted, all three groups locked together in a frozen web of mutual dependence and resentment. To the peasant, Jewry represented the alien Polish- or Russian-speaking town, the mysterious money economy which paid little for his labour and charged much for manufactured goods. Anti-Semitism became ‘the socialism of the imbecile’. When pogroms broke out in Yelizavetgrad (today’s Kirovohrad) in 1881, the local paper blamed the Jews’ precarious dual role as money-lenders and tavern-keepers: ‘Let the Jew deny a drink to a drunken or penniless peasant, and the hatred begins.’³ Even in rich, easygoing Odessa, as the Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky remembered of his schooldays in the 1890s, integration was only skin-deep:

Without any propaganda, without any ideology, we ten Jews used to sit on one row of benches in class, next to one another . . . We were quite friendly with our Christian classmates, even intimate with them, but we lived apart and considered it a natural thing that could not be otherwise . . .4

Odessa was the site of the first modern pogroms. In 1871, on the night before Easter, drunken sailors started throwing stones at Jewish homes and shops. Though deaths were few, the looting went on for three days before the police restored order. As the decade progressed, the tsarist government increasingly used anti-Semitism to offset the rising tide of revolutionary dissent. When Aleksandr II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, riots swept southern Ukraine. In Kiev a barefoot mob looted the Brodsky vodka warehouse and rampaged through the poor Jewish suburbs. Though police kept the peace in the wealthier districts, and here and there university students turned out to help defend Jewish property, most townspeople looked the other way. ‘It was a calm and sunny Sunday holiday,’ wrote an onlooker. ‘Christians were strolling about. I don’t know what astonished me more, the boldness of the plunderers or the shocking indifference of the public.’⁵

The 1881 pogroms, passed over in deafening silence even by liberal luminaries such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, were followed by the infamous May Laws, toughest yet in a long litany of anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were excluded from legal practice and from the officer corps, from every sort of government job, from teaching posts, from juries, from the boards of asylums and orphanages, even from military bands. They could not vote or stand in elections for local councils, and they were forced to contribute a disproportionate number of conscripts to the army. They were barred from owning or leasing land, and from the oil and mining industries. A quota system, the ‘numerus clausus’, made it hard to get into secondary school or university. Worst of all was the tightening-up of the Pale of Settlement, under which Jews needed special permits to live in the cities. Foreign visitors were shocked to see lines of migrant workers being driven through the streets at dawn, victims of night-time police raids. Not surprisingly, one of the chief results of the May Laws was the wholesale corruption of the tsarist police force and bureaucracy, enabled, by this mass of lunatic legislation, to extract a fortune in bribes.

As the empire began its long slide towards revolution, right-wing monarchist groups took to blaming Jews for all Holy Russia’s reverses, publishing rabidly anti-Semitic pamphlets and employing uniformed thugs, the ‘Black Hundreds’, to beat up Jews and students. In 1905, when naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese forced Nicholas II to grant Russia’s first-ever constitution, they vented their fury in a new wave of pogroms. In Odessa 302 people are known to have been killed; more deaths went unrecorded. ‘On Tuesday night October 31st,’ the shocked American consul reported home, ‘the Russians attacked the Jews in every part of town and a massacre ensued. From Tuesday ‘til Saturday was terrible and horrible. The Russians lost heavily also, but the number of killed and wounded is not known. The police without uniforms were very prominent. Jews who bought exemption received protection. Kishinev, Kiev, Cherson, Akkerman, Rostoff and other places suffered terribly, Nicolaev also.’6

With tsarism’s final collapse a new superstition – Jew equals Bolshevik – was born. The vast majority of revolutionaries were not Jewish, of course, and the vast majority of Jews not revolutionaries, but it is true that Jews were over-represented in revolutionary organisations in relation to their numbers. (The same, paradoxically, applied to the offspring of Orthodox priests, who were also often well educated but prospectless.) When the Bolsheviks, came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism. The fact that Jews – like all non-Russian minorities – were murdered in disproportionate numbers during Stalin’s purges did little to shake this perception.

Ukrainian–Jewish relations were not all bad. In 1918 the Ukrainians’ short-lived Rada government declared ‘national-personal autonomy’ for Jews and set up a special ministry for Jewish affairs. Its banknotes were printed in four languages – Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish – and the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the Paris peace talks, amazingly, was a Jew, Arnold Margolin. In Galicia too, Ukrainians and Jews sometimes cooperated: in 1907 four Zionists were elected to the Vienna Reichsrat with Ukrainian support (both sides hoping to shake off the Poles), and in 1922, Jewish and Ukrainian parties fought joint campaigns in elections to the new Polish parliament. But in the 1930s, as Polish democracy crumbled, attitudes hardened. Popular support for the moderate Ukrainian party UNDO fell away in favour of the underground terrorist group OUN, which borrowed its philosophy from fascist Germany. (Members swore to a Decalogue of ten commandments, the first of which was ‘You will attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it’, the ninth, ‘Treat the enemies of your nation with hatred and ruthlessness.’)7 In 1940, six months after Germany and Russia had carved up Poland between them, OUN split in two – the more moderate ‘Melnykivtsi’, under the Civil War veteran Andriy Melnyk, and the fanatical ‘Banderivtsi’, under the young head of OUN’s terrorist unit, Stepan Bandera. Released from prison by the Germans in 1939, Bandera explicitly declared war on Ukrainian Jewry. “The Jews in the USSR,’ an OUN congress in Cracow resolved, ‘constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine.’⁸

For all Ukraine, the war years were ones of unparalleled violence, destruction and horror: 5.3 million of the country’s inhabitants died during the war – an astounding one in six of the entire population.⁹ (The equivalents for Germany, France and Britain were one in fifteen, one in seventy-seven and one in 125.) Of these, about 2.25 million were Jews. Most died in situ, rounded up, shot and buried in woods and ravines outside their own home towns. Others were sent to the gas chambers at Belzec – just over the present-day border with Poland – or to the slave-labour camp on Janowska Street in Lviv. Two hundred thousand people died in Janowska Street,10 and of all 600,000 people deported to Belzec – greeted at the railway station by a poster, ‘First a wash and breakfast, then to work!’¹¹– only two are known to have survived. Altogether, the Holocaust killed 60 per cent of the Jews of Soviet Ukraine, and over 90 per cent of the Jews of Galicia.¹²

For Ukrainians, the war was fratricidal. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, they split three ways. The vast majority of direct participants – 2.5 million men¹³– were conscripted straight into the Red Army. Several tens of thousands – known as ‘Hiwis’ – short for Hilfswillige or ‘willing-to-helps’, joined the Nazis in various capacities. At least 12,000 worked as police auxiliaries¹⁴ helping round up, deport and massacre Jews, and others became camp guards. Survivors reported about 400 Ukrainians at Sobibor, 300 at Treblinka, and more at Sasow, Ostrow, Poniatow, Plaszow and Janowska Street.¹⁵ Some were volunteers; others joined to escape the German prisoner-of-war camps, where death rates ran at a frightful two in five.¹⁶ ‘Russian war prisoners,’ wrote Leon Weliczker, a Janowska Street survivor, ‘consisted of the most varied types of characters. There were some who were really worse than the SS, but, on the other hand, there were also many who merely filled the job in order to secure for themselves a better means of livelihood.’¹⁷ Lastly, in 1943 Germany recruited 13,000 Ukrainians – out of many more volunteers – into a new SS division, ‘SS Galicia’.¹⁸ The division was not sent into battle until the summer of 1944, and eventually surrendered to the Allies in southern Austria. After a long internment in an Italian displaced-persons camp, most of its members were allowed to emigrate to Britain, where their descendants form quite a large proportion of the diaspora population. Yet more Ukrainians – somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 – fought both Russians and Germans, in the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

In Polish-ruled western Ukraine, the war started with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 23 August 1939. Nine days after the pact was signed, the Wehrmacht marched into Poland from the west; a fortnight later, the Red Army did the same from the east. By mid-October Poland had been wiped from the map for the second time in its history, and Galicia, for the first time ever, had come under Russian rule.

Initially, the change-over went peacefully. In Avhustivka, a small village east of Lviv, Ukrainians greeted Poland’s demise with delight. In memoirs written after post-war exile in Siberia, the local Uniate priest, Pavlo Oliynyk, remembered them saying ‘Let the devil come, as long as he isn’t Polish!’19 In Lviv, fourteen-year-old Leon Weliczker looked on with amusement as hayseed Russian conscripts wandered wide-eyed round the city’s shops:

A soldier would come into a store to buy a bar of chocolate. When he got it, he would ask if he could buy a second bar. After he got the second bar he would look around to see if anyone from the army was around, and then, in a low voice, would ask if he could get the whole box.²⁰

Even the wives of the newly arrived Soviet bureaucrats were so unused to consumer goods that they mistook nightgowns for evening dresses and wore them on the street.

But Galicians quickly discovered that Soviet rule was no joke. Lvivites learned to set their clocks two hours ahead to Moscow time, and stopped talking politics or even reading the newspapers. ‘The best thing,’ Weliczker remembered, was ‘to be as ignorant as possible’.²¹ In Avhustivka villagers were summoned to a meeting, where they were told to create a ‘Committee of the Poor’ – the usual prelude to collectivisation – and regaled with the charms of life under communism. ‘The representative,’ Oliynyk wrote, ‘vividly described how well people lived in the Soviet Union, how the disabled and elderly were provided with all necessities – housing, heating, shoes, food, clothes . . .’ But having seen their stores stripped bare and the contents of their village library burned in the market-place, the villagers were not fooled, quickly declaring themselves ‘fed up with having to listen to these children’s fairy-tales’.22

In October came Soviet-style ‘elections’ to an assembly to ‘decide western Ukraine’s future’ – to confirm its incorporation, in other words, into the Soviet Union. All the candidates having run on a single slate, the resulting body did its job without a hitch. Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and the man in charge of Sovietising Galicia, congratulated himself on the smoothness of proceedings:

The assembly continued for a number of days amid great jubilation and political fervour. I didn’t hear a single speech expressing even the slightest doubt that Soviet Power should be established in the Western Ukraine. One by one, movingly and joyfully, the speakers all said that it was their fondest dream to be accepted into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.²³

‘At the same time,’ Khrushchev goes on without a trace of irony, ‘we were still conducting arrests.’ The arrestees – in a terror campaign that got fully under way in the spring of 1940 – were almost the entire Galician middle class: landowners, businessmen, peasants who resisted collectivisation, Polish bureaucrats and officers, Jewish refugees, lawyers, priests and politicians of all stripes, left as well as right. In a few cases, the upper grades of entire schools disappeared. As former owners of a timber yard, the Weliczkers feared being picked up themselves:

My father and I hid every night in our basement, for we did not know whether we belonged to the ‘capitalistic’ group or not. When we found that our families would be arrested too, we gave up hiding, for we did not want to be separated; and to hide our whole family, seven children and two parents, would have been impossible.²⁴

Among the arrestees was a cousin of Weliczker’s mother, owner of a confectionary employing seven men – his six sons and himself. The whole family, including daughter-in-law and grandchild, were sent to Siberia.25 In little Avhustivka, the NKVD took away six young men, despite the absence of any anti-Soviet protest in the area. One died of ‘suffocation’ in prison, four of starvation in the Urals.

Altogether, in the two years preceding the German invasion, the Soviets deported between 800,000 and 1.6 million people – 10 to 20 per cent of western Ukraine’s entire population.²⁶ Travelling under guard in closed cattle-trucks, they were sent to farms and labour camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, to a life of earth-floored shacks, starvation rations and forty degrees of frost in winter. Though the deportees included Jews and several hundred thousand Ukrainians, the majority of victims were Poles – inexplicably unable to grasp, according to the disappointed Khrushchev, ‘that their culture would actually be enriched by the annexation of their lands to the Soviet Union’.²⁷

At three o’clock in the morning on the night of 21 June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union. For the Soviet border troops, the invasion came like a bolt from the blue. ‘We are being fired on,’ ran the desperate signals back to headquarters, ‘what shall we do?’²⁸ Eight days later, after three nights of air-raids, the Wehrmacht marched into Lviv. Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk fell in August, Kiev in mid-September. Retreating in front of the overwhelming German advance, the Soviets massacred their remaining prisoners: in Lviv corpses were found piled five deep in the cellar of the NKVD gaol. ‘The Poles didn’t find as many “political criminals” among us in twenty years,’ the Avhustivka villagers mourned, ‘as “older brother” Russia did in a year and a half.’²⁹ Along with millions of other Ukrainians, they believed Nazi rule could not possibly be any worse than Stalinism. Photographs (some cooked up by Soviet propagandists,) show smiling Galician peasants running out of their houses to welcome the Panzer crews with bread and salt.

In the wake of the Wehrmacht came the units devoted to slaughtering Jews – SS brigades, the Ordnungspolizei, and the Einsatzgruppen, execution squads specially drawn up by Himmler for this task. All were encouraged to recruit Ukrainians – thus aiming to preserve, as one Einsatzgruppe member later put it, ‘the psychological equilibrium of our own people’.30 On 2 July, three days after the Germans had taken Lviv, two Ukrainian militiamen arrived at the Weliczkers’ house and took Leon and his father at gunpoint to their headquarters:

A spectacle such as we could never have dreamed of awaited us. A huge heap of men, one lying on top of another, lay helpless on the floor of the room. Militiamen with truncheons in their hands moved among them. At first I thought that the men on the floor must be corpses and that we had been fetched to carry them out . . . In this confused state I reached for the foot of one of them in order to draw him out of the heap. As I did, a savage blow on the head stunned me, and I toppled among the bodies.³¹

Later – how much later Leon couldn’t tell – the survivors were ordered to get up and go outside. Having been forced to perform physical jerks for the amusement of the guards, they were lined up with their hands behind their heads and marched through the streets to the town’s hockey-pitch:

Thousands of men were lying here in rows. They lay on their bellies, their faces buried in the sand. Around the perimeter of the field searchlights had been set up. Among them I caught sight of German officers standing about. We were ordered to lie flat like the others. We were pushed and shoved brutally, this way and that. My father was separated from me, and I heard him calling out in despair: ‘Let me stay with my son! I want to die with my son!’ Nobody took any notice of him.

Now that we were all lying still, there was a hush that lasted for a moment or two. Then the ‘game’ started. We could hear the sound of a man, clearly one of us, stumbling awkwardly around, chased and beaten by another as he went. At last the pursued collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. He was told to rise. Blows were rained down upon him until he dragged himself to his feet again and tried to run forward. He fell to the ground again and hadn’t the strength to get up. When the pursuers were at last satisfied that the incessant blows had rendered him unable to stir, let alone run, they called a halt and left him there. Now it was the turn of the second victim . . .32

Night fell, and Weliczker sank into oblivion. But

the welcome state of unconsciousness passed all too quickly. I came to, and was startled by a painful stab of dazzling light . . . We sat up, one beside the other, so close we could not stir. Directly in front of me sat two men with shattered skulls. Through the mess of bone and hair I could see their very brains. We whispered to them. We nudged them. But they did not stir. They just sat there, propped up, bulging eyes staring ahead. They were quite dead.³³

The Lviv massacre – dubbed the ‘Petlyura action’ in revenge for Sholem Schwartzbard’s assassination of the Ukrainian Civil War general fifteen years earlier – went on for three days, killing over 2,000 people.³⁴ Over the next weeks, as the Einsatzgruppen swept on east, similar atrocities took place all over the country. One of the first towns to fall was Schulz’s Drohobycz, a pretty little place known for its frescoed wooden churches. On 14 July a member of the local Einsatzkommando, SS Sergeant Felix Landau, recorded the events of the day in his diary:

We drive a few kilometres along the main road ‘til we reach a wood. We go into the wood and look for a spot suitable for mass executions. We order the prisoners to dig their graves. Only two of them are crying, the others show courage . . . Slowly the grave gets bigger and bigger. Two are crying without let-up. I let them dig more so they can’t think. The work really calms them. Money, watches and valuables are collected. The two women go first to be shot; placed at the edge of the grave they face the soldiers. They get shot. When it’s the men’s turn, the soldiers aim at the shoulder. All our six men are allowed to shoot. Three prisoners have been shot in the heart.

The shooting goes on. Two heads have been shot off. Nearly all fall into the grave unconscious only to suffer a long while. Our revolvers don’t help either. The last group have to throw the corpses into the grave; they have to stand ready for their own execution. They all tumble into the grave.35

Just over a month later the Einsatzgruppen reached Uman, where notices were posted telling Jews to report for a census. Twenty-four thousand men, women and children duly assembled, and were taken in trucks to a square in front of the city airport, where ditches had already been dug and sacks of lime laid out. ‘One row of Jews,’ wrote Erwin Bingel, a Wehrmacht lieutenant who witnessed the scene, ‘was ordered to move forward and was then allocated to the different tables where they had to undress completely and hand over everything they wore and carried. Some still had jewellery which they had to put on the table. Then, having taken off all their clothes, they were made to stand in line in front of the ditches, irrespective of their sex.’ SS soldiers and Ukrainian militiamen marched down the lines with automatic pistols. Infants, wrote Bingel, were ‘gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of the pistol-butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead’.³⁶

A week later, Bingel saw two more massacres in Vynnytsya. The first, he estimated, killed 28,000 people, the second, in the town park, another 6,000.

In Kiev, the killing began on 27 September, just eight days after the city’s surrender. Ordered to report for ‘resettlement’, the city’s Jews were taken out to the suburbs, to a steep wooded ravine known as Babiy Yar. The mouth of the ravine forms a precipice; men, women and children were driven towards it in columns, and machine-gunned by SS men and Ukrainian militia from the opposite bank. In two days, according to the records of Einsatzkommando in charge, 33,771 Jews went to the Yar. The earth shovelled into the ravine when the operation was over did not cease moving for some time after.

Through October, the slaughter continued. Four and a half thousand Jews were killed at the port of Kerch; 14,300 at the Crimean capital of Simferopol; 17,000 at the Volhynian town of Rivno, where those who refused to undress beforehand had their eyes put out. In Ivano-Frankivsk militiamen surrounded the Jewish district and marched its occupants, beaten and bleeding, to the newer of the town’s two Jewish cemeteries – the same place I stood fifty-four years later with Moishe-Leib. Here the Jews were ordered to undress, hand over their valuables, and line up beside three large ditches. ‘The German stormtroops together with the Ukrainian police took up their stations beside the machine guns,’ remembered a survivor. ‘Fifteen of the stormtroops shot, and fifteen others loaded the guns. The Jews leapt naked into the graves. The bullets hit them while jumping . . .’ By the time the shooting stopped, the ditches were overflowing. ‘All around lay the dead, strangled, trodden underfoot, wounded. Those of us who remained alive felt ourselves to be infinitely unfortunate.’37

On 23 October came the turn of Odessa, home to one of the largest and most flourishing Jewish communities in the world. Six days after the city’s capture by the German and Romanian armies, a bomb exploded in Romanian headquarters, killing several officers. The next day, Romanian soldiers herded 19,000 Jews into a fenced square near the port, where they were sprayed with gasoline and burned alive. Another 16,000 were marched to the nearby village of Dalnik, where they were tied together in groups, pushed into anti-tank ditches and shot. When this method proved inefficient the Romanians drove the remainder into four large warehouses and machine-gunned them through holes in the walls. Three of the warehouses, containing women and children, were then set on fire, and the fourth demolished with artillery fire. The rest of Odessa’s Jews were sent to concentration camps – Dumanovka, Bogdanovka, Atmicetka and Vertugen – sixty miles to the north, where they died, along with tens of thousands of others from central Ukraine and Moldova, of disease, starvation, cold, and in more mass executions.

The recorded examples of Ukrainians hiding or helping Jews are inspiring, but not, relative to the size of the slaughter, very numerous. Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, the aged, semi-paralysed head of the Uniate Church, sheltered fifteen Jews in his episcopal palace, arranging for another 150, mostly children, to be hidden in nunneries and monasteries. Early in 1942 he wrote to Himmler protesting that ‘Ukrainian auxiliary police are being forced to shoot Jews’, and in November of the same year he issued a pastoral letter under the title “Thou shalt not kill’, which was read out from pulpits all over the country. At the other end of the scale a professional burglar, Leopold Socha, hid twenty-one Jews in the Lviv sewers, which he knew well having used them to stash stolen goods. For fourteen months he brought food every day – including a bottle of vodka to celebrate Stalingrad – and arranged for the weekly laundering of their clothes. He produced a Jewish prayerbook, and provided potatoes instead of leavened bread every Sabbath. Of this group, eight left the sewers and were captured immediately, one drowned, and one fell ill and died; the remainder emerged safely above ground on liberation, to be greeted by Socha and his wife with cakes and vodka. Elsewhere woodsmen, peasants, priests and ex-servants to Jewish families hid escapees in attics, under cowsheds and in hen-coops. For the rescuers, of course, discovery meant death: German reports list around a hundred such executions in Galicia alone between October 1943 and June 1944.38

But on the whole, as in the rest of occupied Europe, gentiles treated the slaughter going on around them as a sideshow to their own predicament. The Sunday Times correspondent Alexander Werth, visiting newly liberated Uman in March 1944, remarked that ‘the Ukrainians in the town did not talk much about it: they seemed to look upon it as rather a routine matter under the Germans’.39 In Kharkiv he interviewed a ‘buxom young lady barber, with rouge, lipstick, manicure and perm’, who described Jews being driven wailing through the streets, pushing prams and wheelbarrows. ‘I could understand their wanting to send the Jews away somewhere,’ she told him, ‘but to kill them all in that awful way, that was going a bit far, don’t you think?’⁴⁰

Oliynyk remembered Jews from the local ghetto being shot on market days, while peasants from the neighbouring villages looked on. ‘People grew so accustomed to these atrocities,’ he wrote, ‘that they would go home and tell their families all about them.’ The children learned to play at ‘shooting Jews’. ‘One group of boys’, Oliynyk wrote, ‘would stand at the edge of the ditch, and the others would aim at them. After the call “fire” the “Jews” would fall into the ditch . . . priests had to go to great lengths to make the children give up this horrible game.’⁴¹ Although in general Oliynyk’s parishioners condemned the Jewish massacres, they were much angrier about the massacre of Ukrainians by the NKVD: ‘Germans were killing their own race enemy while the moskali did this to their brother Ukrainians . . .’⁴²

Jewish escapees to the forests – like the 2,000 people who fought their way out of the Volhynian town of Tuczyn in September 1942 – were often betrayed by local peasants, in exchange for a little sugar or a few cigarettes. Others were killed by Ukrainian and Polish partisans, who, according to Weliczker, ‘hated the Jews just as much as they hated the Germans’.⁴³ (Yet others, paradoxically, survived the war attached to partisan units as doctors or tailors.) Gentiles who did hide Jews were scared of reprisals from neighbours. Weliczker, who spent the last months of the war huddled with twenty-three others in a cellar under a Polish farmer’s barn, remembered his rescuer begging them not to come back and thank him because ‘it would go hard for him if it were known that he had hidden Jews’.⁴⁴

‘When they’ve finished with the Jews,’ Oliynyk’s parishioners wondered, ‘will they I begin on us?’45 It was no idle fear – Slavs too were Untermenschen. For Erich Koch, the knout-wielding head of Reichskomissariat Ukraine, Ukrainians were ‘niggers’ fit only for ‘vodka and the whip’. ‘If I find a Ukrainian worthy of sitting at the same table with me,’ he once remarked, ‘I must have him shot.’⁴⁶ Himmler wanted the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be ‘decimated’;⁴⁷ Göring thought the solution was to kill all Ukrainian males over the age of fifteen and ‘send in the SS stallions’.⁴⁸ Hitler himself, visiting advance headquarters near Vynnytsya, instructed that Ukrainian education should be restricted to ‘one single sentence: the capital of the Reich is Berlin’.⁴⁹

Ukrainian nationalists had had high hopes of Germany, believing it might back an independent Ukrainian state. In the 1930s the Nazis had provided a haven for leaders of the underground group OUN, encouraging its terrorist campaign in Poland. And in 1939 they released Bandera, leader of OUN’s radical wing, from a Polish prison, allowing him to join in the training of Ukrainian troops in readiness for the invasion of the Soviet Union. By 1941 the Ukrainians seem to have believed that a decla ration of Ukrainian independence would be welcomed by Germany, or at least accepted as a fait accompli.

They were wrong. Though some senior Nazis – among them von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Ostministerium – did indeed advocate establishing a Ukrainian puppet-state as a buffer against Russia, it was the Untermensch philosophy that won out. The first sign that the Germans regarded their Ukrainian alliance as no more than a marriage of convenience was the débâcle known as the ‘Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine’. In October 1938, just after the Munich agreement, Germany encouraged OUN-led Ukrainian nationalists in Transcarpathia, a sliver of ethnically Ukrainian territory attached to eastern Czechoslovakia, to declare autonomy. This they duly did, winning reluctant recognition from the tottering Czechs. But when Germany overran Czechoslovakia the following March, it allowed Transcarpathia to be taken over by Hungary. As the Hungarians marched in, the Ukrainians proclaimed complete independence and sent a telegram to Hitler asking for acceptance as a German protectorate. No help came: the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine lasted exactly twenty-four hours.

Much the same thing happened when Germany invaded Ukraine itself. When the Wehrmacht attacked in June 1941, it was joined by two 600-strong OUN units, ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’, recruited and drilled under the approving eye of German military intelligence. Nachtigall, clad in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, marched into Galicia; Roland, in the uniform of the First World War Ukrainian Sich, into the southern steppe from Moldova. OUN also organised ‘march groups’ of young activists, who raced forward into eastern Ukraine setting up Ukrainian city administrations (many of which joined enthusiastically in the first Jewish massacres).50 But almost immediately, the Ukrainians ran up against the limits of German tolerance. A few days after entering Lviv, a leader of OUN’s Bandera faction, Yaroslav Stetsko, called a ‘national assembly’ in the old Prosvita building and proclaimed a ‘Sovereign All-Ukrainian State’.⁵¹ The announcement was broadcast from the city radio station, together with a message of support from Sheptytsky. Ten days later Stetsko and Bandera were arrested and sent to Berlin. The arrest and execution of dozens more OUN activists followed, and Nachtigall and Roland were both withdrawn from the Ukrainian front and sent to fight Soviet partisans in Belarus.

The honeymoon with Germany over, the Ukrainian nationalists went underground. A variety of partisan groups sprang up, the largest being the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, controlled by the Banderivtsi. Fielding up to 200,000 men, for a few months in the autumn and winter of 1943 it controlled most of north-west Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and hospitals. Even more remarkably, small UPA guerrilla units carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign against the Soviet Union for years after the end of the war. The last UPA commander, Roman Shukhevych, was killed in a shoot-out near Lviv in 1950, but small detachments continued to operate in the hills and forests, despite wholesale deportation of villages suspected of giving them shelter.

UPA’s methods were every bit as ruthless as those of the SS and the NKVD. During the German retreat, it massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia. ‘At night, and even by day,’ Oliynyk recounts,

partisans would pounce on Polish houses and kill everyone from the youngest to the oldest . . . There was an incident in our village when one of the men, Petro Vasylchyshyn, refused to join in and went home to his parents. A week later, the USB [OUN’s secret police] took him to the woods and shot him. And when the USB found out that his parents were complaining, they shot them too.52

Fighting continued in the Bieszczady mountains of south-eastern Poland until the spring of 1947, when UPA was rounded up by the Polish army. Over the next months Ukrainian villages in the area were systematically demolished, and their inhabitants forcibly deported to the ex-German ‘recovered territories’ in the north and west, or to the Soviet Union.

Retreating westward in the last months of the war, the Wehrmacht marched to a gloomy Russo-German ditty: ‘Es ist alles vorüber, es ist alles vorbei/Drei Jahre in Russland, und nichts ponimai’ – ‘Everything’s over, everything’s past/Three years in Russia, and we don’t understand a thing.’ It was truer than the soldiers knew: one of the Nazis’ biggest mistakes of the war was their treatment of Ukraine.

Germany’s suppression of the OUN-led partisans affected only a relatively small group of committed, even fanatical nationalists. What turned the population as a whole against Nazi rule, initially welcomed as a deliverance from Stalinism, were two other policies: its treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the mass deportation of civilians to Germany as slave-labourers.

During its initial advance, the Wehrmacht captured vast numbers of prisoners – over 60,000, according to German records53 – in its pincer movement on Kiev alone. Partly because the number of surrenders was so huge, partly because Slavs were Untermenschen undeserving of even basic care, few preparations were made for their reception. Instead, the Wehrmacht herded hundreds of thousands of men into ‘cages’ – bare enclosures surrounded with barbed-wire. The Jews and political commissars among the prisoners were executed, and since deciding who was Jewish was left up to officers’ ‘intuition’, so too were tens of thousands of circumcised Muslims from the Caucasus and Crimea. It sufficed, according to one observer, ‘for a man to have black hair and black eyes in order to be considered a Jew and shot’.⁵⁴

Ravaged by typhus, beaten and starved, the remaining prisoners died like flies. At no camp was the death rate less than 30 per cent, and in some it was as high as 95 per cent.⁵⁵ The bodies were left lying for weeks on end, the guards only entering the verminous compounds in order to incinerate the dead and dying with flame-throwers. Cannibalism made its appearance: ‘After having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots,’ Göring joked with the Italian foreign minister, ‘they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry’.⁵⁶

In the final months of the war, thousands of prisoners were shunted west in death marches similar to those suffered by the inmates of the concentration camps. Altogether, of the 5.2 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by Germany during the war, 2 million are recorded as having died in camps, and another 1.3 million fell into the catch-all category of ‘escapes, exterminations, not accounted for, deaths and disappearances in transit’. Taking only the most conservative figure of 2 million deaths, the Eastern Front’s prisoner-of-war camps killed over a third as many people again as the entire Holocaust.⁵⁷

Unsurprisingly, the fate of Soviet PoWs shocked the civilian population far more than did that of Ukraine’s Jews. The Avhustivka villagers threw loaves of bread over the wire to prisoners in a nearby transit camp; the Jewish massacres, in contrast, were treated by some at least as entertainment. Germany’s treatment of its prisoners also gave Soviet soldiers, many of whom had little or no enthusiasm for Stalinism, the best of incentives not to change sides. After the initial German advance, numbers of deserters dropped sharply – ‘because’, as a Soviet officer explained, ‘most of the prisoners have been disappointed . . . days without food; only cursing and beating; shootings without reason, often only because the prisoner cannot understand what the Germans want from him . . .’58

Worst of all, from the average civilian’s point of view, was the Nazis’ programme of forced labour. Between the spring of 1942 and the summer of 1944, Germany deported 2.8 million Soviet civilians – 2.1 million of them Ukrainian and just over half women⁵⁹ – to the Reich as Eastworkers or Ostarbeiter. Initially recruitment was voluntary, but as news of atrocious work conditions got back home, the Germans resorted to violence, piling people into lorries as they left churches or cinemas. Thirty-eight thousand Kievans – over 10 per cent of the city’s population – were delivered to the Ostarbeiter programme in the first ten months of occupation.⁶⁰ Once in Germany, they were forced to wear badges embroidered with the letters OST, barred from fraternising with Germans and from public transport, subject to punitive whippings and paid starvation wages. ‘A glass of cold water,’ ran an Ostarbeiter song, ‘keeps you working ‘til the afternoon/The soup is good – a litre of water, one grain of kasha and one little potato . . .’⁶¹ Escapees were executed or sent to concentration camps. As the more pragmatic of Hitler’s henchmen repeatedly but vainly pointed out, one of the chief results of the Ostarbeiter scheme was that more and more Ukrainians fled to the forests to join the partisans.

In Kiev’s main post office I met an ex-Ostarbeiter, an old woman with gold front teeth, a furry white beret and bright blue eyes. We started chatting in the queue for stamps – she wanted to know if I believed in God. I forget how it came up that she had been in Germany during the war, but I finally persuaded her – ‘You’re not a communist, are you? You’re not going to print this?’ – to come to my flat and talk. With feet planted wide apart, and many theatrical flourishes of a tear-stained handkerchief, she told her story – a remarkable, but not, for her generation, a particularly unusual one. Her name was Lydiya Gordeyevna, and she came from a poor Kiev family; her mother was a seamstress and her father worked in a canteen. In the spring of 1942, aged sixteen – ‘Oh such a long time ago, I had beautiful hair then, down to here!’ – she was sent to Germany. First she weeded beets on a farm, and when summer was over she was transferred to an armaments factory, where she worked on a lathe. The norm was 450 shells an hour, which meant lifting nine and a half tonnes of metal a day. ‘The Germans fed us with cabbage full of worms. When we complained they said – this is meat for you!’

In 1943, having been discovered writing to a friend that ‘the Germans would run away from Russia with their trousers down’, she was sent to the women’s section of Ravensbrück. Had I heard of it? Yes, I had. The guards ‘were like witches. They had black uniforms and rubber sticks and they hit us on the head, everywhere – real witches. Even the SS men weren’t as bad as the women.’ At three o’clock each morning a siren went off and the prisoners had to stand outdoors at attention for ‘two or three hours – shivering and shivering’. Girls who were too ill to work were taken away on ‘transports’ and never seen again. ‘There were rumours that patients were burned but we didn’t know exactly what happened – we only saw the chimney, with black smoke coming out. We didn’t know about the gas chambers.’ Crippled by rheumatism, Lydiya only just escaped the chimneys herself. ‘An officer came to the hospital, and insisted I should go on the transport. But the old doctor was looking around for reasons for me not to go. He said – look at her glands, she’s got diptheria, she might contaminate German air!’ To thank him, she gave three days’ bread ration to ‘a Ukrainian woman there who was a sort of sculptor. She got a bit of cardboard from somewhere, a bit of red velvet from an old dress, and some steel turnings from the factory. She made a picture of a vine – really beautiful, with leaves and grapes and everything. I hid it under my jacket and gave it to him. He was really pleased.’

The end of the war found her in another camp near Leipzig. ‘In 1945 they collected up all the women and marched us off under guard. We marched day and night and slept on the ground. We were only allowed a glass of porridge a day – not even bread. Lots of people died – young girls – on the road. Crows picked at their eyes. It was a horrible sight – even the Germans cried.’ Passing through woods, some of the women ran off into the trees. ‘Then we saw that the younger guards were doing the same. Only the old ones were left – they had plenty of bullets but they couldn’t run.’ Lydiya and a friend ran too, and hid in a hay barn. ‘We sat there for three days and nights. Then suddenly we heard Russian swear words – we knew our people were coming.’ Their liberators were not, however, the clean-cut heroes of Soviet legend. ‘The commander arrived, he said – you, come over here! I didn’t know what he wanted. I saw he had all sorts of bits of gold hidden under his jacket – perhaps they’d taken it off dead bodies. Then he pointed to a bed.’ Outside, German soldiers were coming out from the farm buildings with their hands up. ‘I heard – bang bang!’ – the old woman pretended she was holding a machine-gun – ‘and they all fell down.’

Back home in Kiev – after a train journey during which officials ‘collected all photos and postcards and made us throw them away so we couldn’t show anyone what life was like in the West’ – things were not much better. The returning Ostarbeiter were treated like pariahs. ‘I couldn’t get a job. The managers kept saying – were you in Germany? Then get out! They really hated us, despised us. Even now I’ve got a neighbour who keeps saying I’m a fascist – why? – because I was in Germany, that’s all.’

Now Lydiya lives off her pension in a one-room flat with her husband and an orphaned grandson. She has been abroad once since the war, when a German organisation arranged for a group of camp survivors to go back to Ravensbruck for the fiftieth anniversary of liberation. Producing a grubby Soviet passport from inside her dress, she turned to the page with the German visa on. It was big and shiny and multicoloured; it even involved a holograph. She stroked it as if it were a piece of silk: ‘Look, isn’t it beautiful?’

What the worthy organisers of Lydiya’s trip presumably did not know was that Lydiya is, by Western standards, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. Talking about Ravensbrück she referred to Jews as zhidy – yids – or, conspiratorially, to ‘members of a certain nation’: ‘The block where the Polish members of a certain nation were kept had a terrible smell. We used to say – it’s the dirty yids.’ It was not the first time I had heard this sort of thing. In Odessa, I stayed with a very sweet old lady who fed me to bursting with a lethal mixture of fried fish and stewed pears, the purchase of which must have used up nearly all the five dollars a night I was paying her. Unfortunately, her conversation was heavily larded with tales of how Jews took all the best jobs, hid gold under their beds, and so on. Even young, educated Ukrainian friends were prone to throw-away jokes about Jewish cunning and Jewish parsimony, looking genuinely baffled when I explained to them, with some heat, that in Western society this would not go down well at all.

Is Ukraine still an anti-Semitic place? At the official level, definitely not. There is no Soviet-style ‘nationality’ entry on the new Ukrainian passports, the informal quotas on Jews entering higher education are long gone, and there are Jews in senior positions in every branch of government. Israeli and Ukrainian foreign ministers exchange cordial visits, and Odessa has elected a Jewish mayor. Synagogues are slowly being reopened (though the one on Rustaveli Street in Kiev is still subject to a rearguard action by a children’s puppet theatre), and Kiev recently got its first kosher restaurant. No Ukrainian political party save the tiny UNA uses anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the country has no political figure, to its great credit, even approaching Russia’s ghastly Zhirinovsky. Though Ukraine still has anti-Semites – the graffiti and the bricks through the synagogue windows testify to that – anti-Semitism is no longer an institutionalised part of its culture.

But if Ukrainian society is coming to terms with its living Jews, the same cannot be said of its dead ones. As in Soviet days, the Holocaust is one of the great unmentionables, fitting in as badly with Ukraine’s new story-book self-image of doughty Cossacks and martyred poets as it did with the Soviets’ square-jawed Slav brothers standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the fascist invader. ‘Ukrainians don’t want to talk about it,’ a Jewish friend told me. ‘They prefer talking about Ukrainians fighting Germans and Russians, and Ukrainians being sent to Siberia.’ When Ukraine’s first post-independence president, Leonid Kravchuk, made a speech at Babiy Yar on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre ‘it was a real shock, because before that, people didn’t even pronounce the word “Jew” – they used euphemisms, they talked about “individuals of Jewish nationality”.’ Babiy Yar has a new menorah-shaped memorial to remind passers-by that the people killed there were not just ‘Soviet citizens’, but hundreds of other sites round the country remain forgotten and unmarked. The subject is not taught in schools, nor much discussed in the media. This selective amnesia applies, it should be added, not only to Jews, but to all Ukraine’s vanished minorities – Poles, Germans, Greeks and Armenians. All are uncomfortable muddiers of the waters in a country that has not even begun to come to terms with a history strewn with more than its fair share of blood and paradox.

Among the Ukrainian diaspora, the Holocaust is still an acutely touchy issue, alternately the subject of flaming polemic and defensive silence. The entry for Babiy Yar in a new English-language guidebook to Ukraine, published in Baltimore and obviously aimed at a diaspora readership, consists of a single astonishing sentence: ‘O. Teliha (1907–42), a poetess and a leading activist of the Melnyk faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, executed by the Germans, is buried here.’ Nazi-hunters and Ukrainian organisations have had frequent spats, the most notorious and longest-drawn-out being the Ivan Demjanjuk affair. In 1986 a Cleveland car-worker, a post-war Ukrainian immigrant, was extradited to Israel on the charge of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, one of the operators of the gas chambers at Treblinka. The case collapsed (Demjanjuk having already spent seven and a half years in prison) when it was proved that prosecution evidence provided by the Soviet government had been faked.

In reality, the question of Ukrainian anti-Semitism is an increasingly academic one. There are few anti-Semites left in Ukraine, because there are few Jews. They were less than 1 per cent of the population in 1989, and are fewer still now. Back in Ivano-Frankivsk, Moishe-Leib tells me that 150 families have emigrated in the last three years – most to Israel, some to America or Germany. ‘Every month another two or three lots go, and the old people left behind are dying. The rest are assimilated – half-Ukrainian or married to Ukrainians – and they don’t come to synagogue.’ Even on festival days his congregation numbers only fifty or so – elderly, courteous men dressed with the painstaking respectability of the old Soviet middle class. Moishe-Leib gives Sabbath school to the children and Hebrew lessons to the adults – ‘so they don’t arrive in Israel like wild people’ – and helps with visa applications.

Wouldn’t it be better, I ask, to try to get people to stay, to rebuild something of what was lost? Impossible, he says: ‘The fact is, people have lost their traditions.’ Besides, most of the Jews living in Ivano-Frankivsk today are Easterners who moved in after the war. The real Galician shtetl communities are already long gone. When he has no congregation left, Moishe-Leib will emigrate himself: ‘I’m only here because there are still people I can help. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, I will have gone too.’ What will happen to the synagogue and the graves then, he doesn’t know.

Driving back through town, Moishe-Leib tells one last oh-so-Ukrainian story. As we bump past a routinely hideous Intourist hotel, he points to the bit of empty pavement where Ivano-Frankivsk’s Lenin statue once stood. ‘I’ve done a deal to re-use the stone for a Holocaust memorial,’ he says. ‘We’re paying them back in their own currency.’