Buczacz

Abstract

Buczacz (in its Polish spelling, or Buchach as transliterated from Ukrainian) is a small town located today in western Ukraine, about 100 miles southeast of Lviv. Initially owned by the Buczacki family, in 1612 it came into the hands of the noble Polish Potocki clan. As of the 1500s Buczacz was populated mostly by Jews and Poles, while much of the surrounding rural population was made up of Ruthenians. Following the devastation of the Cossack and Turkish wars in the 17th century, Buczacz prospered in the 18th century, at which time its most famous edifices were built. It came under Habsburg Austrian rule in the first partition of Poland in 1772 as part of the newly created province of Galicia. By the 1880s Jews comprised two-thirds of its 10,000 residents, although their share declined somewhat by 1914, with Poles constituting the second-largest group. Heavily damaged in World War I and the Ukrainian-Polish and Polish-Bolshevik wars that followed it, Buczacz remained part of the Second Polish Republic throughout the rest of the interwar period. Annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, Buczacz experienced mass deportations and other repressive measures in line with Soviet policies throughout eastern Poland. Following the German occupation in 1941, the city saw the mass murder of its Jewish population by the German Security Police, gendarmerie, and auxiliary Ukrainian police units. Altogether about 10,000 Jews from Buczacz and its vicinity were either murdered in situ or deported to the extermination camp of Bełżec. As of late 1943 the Polish population was subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Ukrainian nationalists; the surviving Poles were removed in accordance with a population exchange agreement between the Soviet and communist Polish authorities in the wake of the war. Buczacz became a largely Ukrainian town under Soviet rule and it has remained so since Ukrainian independence in 1991. It has few remnants or memories of its multiethnic past and of the violent destruction of its Jewish and Polish inhabitants. It does have, however, a major place in Jewish memory and literary representation. Among its best-known sons were the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the founder of the “Oneg Shabbat” (Yiddish: Oyneg Shabes) archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; the “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, and the Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, much of whose writing was dedicated to Buczacz as representative of the lost world of eastern European Jewry.