Title: A Small Town in Ukraine – The Place We Came from, the Place We Went Back to
Author: Bernard Wasserstein
Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9780241632703
Pages: 290
Hitler and the Nazis massacred six million Jews in the Holocaust. Beneath this ball-park figure lies an unimaginable level of suffering: both of individuals and the families they belonged to. Families were plucked out of their surroundings and thrown into a machine that usually crushed them out of existence. If they were lucky to escape with their lives, often death looked like the more desirable fate. Bernard Wasserstein, the author of this book, is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Being a Jew whose grandparents lived in Berlin, Germany in the Hitler period, he recounts the story of how they met their death in the Nazi pogrom. His grandparents and paternal aunt perished in the genocide in Poland while his father miraculously escaped as he was away at the time when the family was rounded up. The family originally belonged to the small town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krakowitz) in Poland on the Ukrainian border. Both the World Wars found this little town in the midst of the combat zone. Its ownership changed hands several times - from the Habsburg Austrians to Poland, then to Germany, then to the Soviet Union and finally to Ukraine where it now rests and its name has been changed to Krakovets. This book tells the history of this town too as an inseparable aside to the destiny of the Wasserstein family even though they lived only for a short time in the end. This book is an attempt to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the history of our time could affect ordinary people.
Berl Wasserstein, the author's grandfather, was the head of the family in the 1910s and they hailed from Krakowiec. Being a remote backwater there were no prospects to prosper by industry. The suffocating anti-Semitism thwarted Jewish enterprise to improve their lot. Berl migrated to Berlin which offered better opportunities along with his wife Czarna and children Addi Wasserstein (the author's father) and daughter Lotte (author's aunt). This was 1930s when the Nazis controlled the political and commercial aspects of Germany. Legally, the family were Polish citizens as German identity papers were not issued to them. However, anticipating expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany, Poland shut its gates to those who had not been to Poland in the preceding few years even though they claimed Polish citizenship. Germany expelled all male Jews and Berl and Addi were stranded in the no-man's land between the two countries. They were taken back to Germany temporarily and asked to leave the country. All except Addi went back to Krakowiec and lived there for a few months. When Germany overran the place in World War II, Jews were first isolated in ghettos and then taken to a labour camp where the family was mercilessly shot. Meanwhile, Addi found safe passage to Hungary just before the gates closed. He moved on to Italy, Turkey and finally to Palestine. He then migrated to England to set up a new life there. This story is narrated by the author in a poignant manner. It is only with a sense of deep sadness that readers can go through this book. How stoically the victims met their fate continues to amaze me.
The book provides some horrifying examples of how anti-Semitism was practiced in eastern Europe. In some instances, every Jew was mandated to wear a white armband with a blue star of David. If a Jew passed a German in the street, he was required to remove his hat on pain of death. Anti-Semitism ran high in Poland from very early on. When the town of Krakowiec was annexed to Austria in 1772, its Empress Maria Theresa expressed horror and disgust at the discovery that her new territory contained 200,000 Jews. She considered Jews a plague who practice 'all sorts of dirty dealing'. During World War II, the fortunes of Germany and Soviet Union ebbed and flowed many times. Having tasted German rule, the Jews greeted Soviet occupation with relief, as the lesser evil. The joke went round that whereas the Nazis had condemned the Jews to death, under the Soviets the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Wasserstein brings out the ethnic rivalries in Eastern Galicia to which the town belonged. The Poles and Ukrainians were at each other's throats and both of them were against the Jews. Roman Shukhevych, who is feted as a Ukrainian freedom fighter is claimed in this book as a Nazi collaborator, anti-Soviet guerrilla leader and ethnic cleanser of Poles and Jews. It appears that the Soviet rule was somewhat benign to Jews. But, the Soviet administration carefully avoided the word 'Jew' in their reports on Nazi atrocities. It was replaced with the term 'Soviet citizens'. A final, posthumous indignity was thus inflicted on the victims - the deprivation of their core identity. Today, there is no memorial to its former Jewish inhabitants in Krakovets, apart from a meagre wooden signpost placed in an empty field to mark the location of the former Jewish cemetery.
The book is quite easy to read and the narrative is in an appealing style to most readers. Most of the Polish names of people and places appear without vowels and are hard to pronounce. It also contains a detailed history of Krakowiec over the centuries which seems laborious and does not serve any purpose. If the family was not staying in the town for decades, their links to the place would be tenuous. However, this book is another worthy reminder of the Holocaust and impels the global citizens to take all measures not to repeat such a terrible episode in the future.
The book is recommended.
Rating: 3 Star
