Three Accounts—Two World Wars—One Town: Narratives of War and Genocide in Eastern Galicia

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová. This article argues for using personal accounts in reconstructing the inner lives of interethnic communities in Eastern Europe in times of crisis. Focusing on the Eastern Galician town of Buczacz as representative of numerous other such communities, it also suggests that the events of the Holocaust must be seen within the larger context of coexistence and violence since 1914. After briefly examining the relevant historiography, the article turns to a close analysis of the diary of a Polish headmaster, written in 1914–1922; the World War II diary of a Ukrainian gymnasium teacher, and recollections of the Holocaust by a Jewish radio technician, composed in 1947. All three men lived in Buczacz; all three wanted their accounts to be read by others, but they are only now being made available to the public by the author. Each provides a strikingly different perspective: that of a Polish nationalist educator whose sons were fighting to create an independent Poland; that of a Ukrainian activist who resented Polish rule and Jewish influence but felt ambivalent about wartime and genocide profiteering by fellow Ukrainians; and that of a young Jew who meticulously recorded both collaboration and rescue by his gentile neighbors and ended up fighting in a local Polish partisan unit. And yet, seen together, these personal narratives shed light on aspects of mass violence in that region largely missing from more general or nationally oriented histories.