In 1946, the compelling memoir of a young Jewish girl was published in post-World War II Poland. Penned in the Polish language, it told the story of the Nazi occupation of Lviv, the western Ukrainian metropolis, of the youngster’s life in that city’s ghetto and subsequent escape from its infamous Yanivsky concentration camp.
It took 65 years for that Lviv-centered journal, written by Janina Hescheles, to be published in Ukraine. Now, however, “Through the Eyes of a 12-Year-Old Girl” joins a growing list of foreign-language books that explore how World War II and the Holocaust unfolded in Ukraine and which are being translated into the Ukrainian language.
Individually and collectively, these books provide a fuller picture of Ukraine’s place in the war and the Holocaust, the 70th anniversary of which is being marked this year.
The Polish chronicle joins well-regarded works by Shimon Redlich, who survived the Holocaust in Berezhany with the help of Ukrainians, and Kurt I. Lewin, who was saved with the blessing of Andrey Sheptytsky, the metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Their memoirs, respectively, are “Together and Apart in Brzezhany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945” and “A Journey Through Illusions.” The latter works are also available in English.
They tell the varying stories of how children survived the war in Ukraine. Redlich and Lewin were adults when they penned their memoirs, giving them time and distance to reflect on events.
Redlich, a retired university professor, intermingles his own childhood memories, historic sources and interviews with Ukrainians, Poles and Jews who lived in Berezhany, to tell not only his story but that of the town. Reaching back into history, Redlich paints a picture of the “close and distant neighbors” who shared Berezhany, a quaint town situated in today’s Ternopil Oblast.
“Brzezany was for centuries home to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians,” Redlich writes in the introduction to his book. “The war and the Holocaust dismembered this multi-ethnic town, and what is left of it remains only in the historical record and in the memories of its former inhabitants.”
“Brzezany was for centuries home to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians,” Redlich writes in the introduction to his book. “The war and the Holocaust dismembered this multi-ethnic town, and what is left of it remains only in the historical record and in the memories of its former inhabitants.”
While the narrative of Redlich’s salvation is uniquely his own, the story of Berezhany and the events that took place there during the war are a mirror for happenings that occurred in other western Ukrainian towns.
Lewin, whose father was Lviv’s last rabbi, casts a much wider net in his memoir. He writes not only of his childhood in Lviv, but delves deeply into the two years he spent in hiding with monks from the Order of St. Theodore the Studite.
While the tome also explores the post-war years and his involvement in building the Israeli state, Lewin’s discussion of the role Sheptytsky and his brother, Clement, played in saving Jews during the war for the Ukrainian reader is of particular importance.
From Lewin’s account, it is evident Sheptytsky was willing to risk his church, including the lives of its representatives, in order to save Jews. It is with Sheptytsky’s blessing and guidance that young males lived among the Studites in various monasteries throughout western Ukraine during the war. In order to protect them, often neither children nor monks knew who the Jewish children were.
“They did it voluntarily, for the love of Christ, without expecting thanks or a reward. Like most Ukrainians, they were not particularly friendly toward Jews, or interested in them. Nonetheless, a large number of Jews (over two hundred) were saved in extraordinary circumstances, considering the size of the order,” wrote Lewin.
Hescheles was still a child when she put pen to paper. Her thin memoir – 62 pages in total – is told with a child’s innocence and urgency.
Deeply personal, Hescheles writes of the people closest to her, including her father. She begins her memoir with the 1941 withdrawal of Russian troops from Lviv and the days that followed.
“On Monday, the Germans entered,” she writes, “Mother went to the hospital, she was worried about Grandfather and Grandmother, that they will be left home alone…On Tuesday, at 4:30 a.m., we were still in bed, when someone knocked on the door. I thought it was Pani Yadzia, but it was Father. He brought with him from our aunt salo [pig fat] and a bun. Father told me to get dressed and we went to look at Lviv after the bombing. The city was unrecognizable. At the gateways of buildings loomed blue-and-yellow flags.”
Hescheles’ father, who was the long-time editor of Chwila, the esteemed Polish-language Zionist newspaper, was murdered in the first days of German rule.
The most recent book to be translated into Ukrainian is “The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews” by Father Patrick Desbois. It joins Wendy Lower’s “Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine” in exploring how the Nazi machine made genocide possible in Ukraine.
Omer Bartov’s “Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present Day Ukraine,” looks at the Holocaust’s aftermath decades later. A professor at Brown University, Bartov traveled through many western Ukrainian villages, only to find that the institutions that defined the region’s centuries-old Jewish life – its synagogues, cemeteries, cultural buildings – lay in ruins.
“I traveled into what was for me a white space on the map,” he writes. “But it was also a journey into a black hole that had sucked in entire civilizations along with individuals and never-to-be-met family members, making them vanish as if they had never existed, just as those explorers of old ended up transforming the white spaces on their maps into colonial hearts of darkness.”
Ukrainians have often complained their suffering has often been overlooked during the war in Western publications.
Ukrainians have often complained their suffering has often been overlooked during the war in Western publications. Karel C. Berkhoff’s award-winning “Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule” fills that void. Berkhoff zeroes in on why Ukraine was important, and notes his book looks at the situation in Ukraine from the bottom up.
“Only in this way, I believe, will it be possible to provide the readers with a sense of the every day experiences of the natives under the Nazi system,” he writes.
Staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
