No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe: Vanishing Others 3031108566, 9783031108563

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF EXPERIENCE

No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe Vanishing Others Edited by Anna Wylegała Sabine Rutar · Małgorzata Łukianow

Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience Series Editors

Pirjo Markkola Faculty of Social Sciences Tampere University Tampere, Finland Raisa Maria Toivo Faculty of Social Sciences Tampere University Tampere, Finland Ville Kivimäki Faculty of Social Sciences Tampere University Tampere, Finland

This series, a collaboration between Palgrave Macmillan and the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experience (HEX) at Tampere University, will publish works on the histories of experience across historical time and global space. History of experience means, for the series, individual, social, and collective experiences as historically conditioned phenomena. ‘Experience’ refers here to a theoretically and methodologically conceptualized study of human experiences in the past, not to any study of ‘authentic’ or ‘essentialist’ experiences. More precisely, the series will offer a forum for the historical study of human experiencing, i.e. of the varying preconditions, factors, and possibilities shaping past experiences. Furthermore, the series will study the human institutions, communities, and the systems of belief, knowledge, and meaning as based on accumulated (and often conflicting) experiences. The aim of the series is to deepen the methodology and conceptualization of the history of lived experiences, going beyond essentialism. As the series editors see it, the history of experience can provide a bridge between structures, ideology, and individual agency, which has been a difficult gap to close for historians and sociologists. The approach opens doors to see, study, and explain historical experiences as a social fact, which again offers new insights on society. Subjective experiences are seen as objectified into knowledge regimes, social order and divisions, institutions, and other structures, which, in turn, shape the experiences. The principle idea is to present a new approach, the history of experiences, as a way to establish the necessary connection between big and small history. Editorial board: Benno Gammerl, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Bettina Hitzer, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa, Canada Jacqueline van Gent, University of Western Australia Johanna Sköld, University of Linköping, Sweden Julian Goodare, University of Edinburgh, UK Klaus Petersen, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark Laura Ackerman Smoller, University of Rochester, USA Maarten van Ginderachter, Antwerp University, Belgium.

Anna Wylegała Sabine Rutar • Małgorzata Łukianow Editors

No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe Vanishing Others

Editors Anna Wylegała Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw, Poland

Sabine Rutar Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies Regensburg, Germany

Małgorzata Łukianow Department of Sociology University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland

ISSN 2524-8960     ISSN 2524-8979 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience ISBN 978-3-031-10856-3    ISBN 978-3-031-10857-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe “Built around various geographical locations and diverse topics, No Neighbors’ Lands masterfully weaves together several themes throughout its pages, making a significant contribution to European postwar history. A delicate and compassionate account of the “lost neighbors” (as well as their properties and memories) is at the core of this impressive collective effort, which offers readers a fresh look at the post-Holocaust and postwar era, while reflecting on both short- and long-term consequences of the horrifically engineered “social voids.” Whether professional historian, student, or curious reader, all will find novel and deeply moving information, be it about the armed assault on Jewish Holocaust survivor minors in the Polish town of Rabka, the trial in Soviet Ukraine of perpetrators of sexual crimes against Jewish women, the Romanian communist authorities’ (failed) attempt in the mid-1950s to make amends for the postwar expropriation and collective punishment of its German minority, or the refusal of contemporary Czechs from the Silesian town of Opava to allow a memorial to the German residents expelled after the war. No Neighbors’ Land is at once a harsh and powerful reminder of the long-­ lasting legacies of war and mass violence.” —Diana Dumitru, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, Georgetown University, Washington/DC, USA “How does it feel to wear a dress that once belonged to your murdered neighbor? How is it possible to restore moral, social, and legal order in places where one part of the community was killed or expelled? This book addresses such difficult and important questions, drawing on a variety of disciplines and inviting comparative approaches. It is a much-needed inquiry into the postwar resettlement and migration processes in Europe that followed on from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and border shifts. The authors provide an impressive and detailed account of the long-­ lasting consequences of these events. The book stands out by focusing on those who remained or came to fill the void left by those who had been expelled or murdered, and by questioning fixed notions of the categories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.” —Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University, Sweden

“No Neighbors’ Lands is the first volume to offer a comparative perspective on the immediate and long-term effects of the violence of World War II across Europe. A range of deftly researched case studies deliver an extraordinary account of the complex legacies of mass murder, forced migration, and plunder. As the war and the ensuing mass violence created demographic and social voids, people struggled to rebuild the material environment and reconstruct social networks and relationships. In this volume, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists make full use of their skills to trace the pitfalls of these efforts and add a necessary lens to our understanding of the implications of war, genocide, and nationalism in the twentieth century. ” —Anika Walke, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Contents

 Neighbors’ Lands: Living with Vanished (and Rarely No Returning) Others in Post-1945 Europe  1 Anna Wylegała and Sabine Rutar Part I The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe  27  The Prussian Spirit of the Land: Fighting Fascism and Legitimating Annexation in Soviet Kaliningrad, 1947–1953 29 Nicole Eaton  “The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka”: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing 51 Karolina Panz  New Neighbors’ Land: Istria and the Complexities of Solidarity 75 Pamela Ballinger  Native Borderland Children in the Belgian-­German and Polish-German Borderlands. Comparing Verification and Nationalisation Narratives After the Second World War101 Machteld Venken

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Part II A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction 127  Doctors, Craftsmen, and Landlords: How Vanishing Others Influenced the Galician Economy During and After the Second World War129 Anna Wylegała  The Joy and Burden of Living: Roma Communities in the Western Borderlands of the Postwar Soviet Union155 Volha Bartash  Among Neighbors and Relatives: Intercessions and Jewish Persecution Through the Lens of Bulgaria’s Postwar Trials (1944–45)179 Nadège Ragaru  Rape on Trial: Criminal Justice Actors in 1940s’ Soviet Ukraine and Sexual Violence During the Holocaust205 Marta Havryshko Part III The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues 229  “The Alienation Lacks Any Legal Basis”: The Fate of Jewish Property in Postwar Hungary231 Borbála Klacsmann  Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting A Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania255 Emanuela Grama The Fate of Property in the Kočevje (Gottschee) Region during and after the Second World War279 Mitja Ferenc

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 Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010)305 Sabine Rutar Part IV Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration 331  “The Matter of Four Screws”: Holocaust Commemorations in (Post-)Soviet Russia (the Case of Rostov-on-Don)333 Irina Rebrova  New Settlers as Implicated Subjects: Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia359 Johana Wyss  We, the Perpetrators: Remembering Violence Committed by One’s Own Group in the Polish-Ukrainian Conflicts383 Małgorzata Łukianow  Post-1945 No Neighbors’ Lands: A Conclusion407 Sabine Rutar and Anna Wylegała Index413

Notes on Contributors

Pamela  Ballinger  is Professor of History and Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003) and The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020). Volha  Bartash  is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg, Germany. She has published on the history and culture of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania and is currently working on the research project “Holocaust Memory Activism in the Baltics.” Nicole  Eaton is Assistant Professor of Soviet, German, and modern European history at Boston College, USA. She is the author of German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell University Press, 2023). Mitja  Ferenc is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published extensively on Slovenian history, including the sphere of cultural heritage, partisan health care, the Gottscheer Germans, the German minority, prisoners of war, as well as postwar killings and concealed graves. Emanuela  Grama  is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Modern European History and Director of the Global Studies Program in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Her first book, Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in xi

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Romania (2019), won the 2020 Ed Hewett Prize, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe.” Marta  Havryshko is a historian and an Associate Researcher at the Department of Contemporary History at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in Lviv, Ukraine. She is also a URIS Fellow at Basel University, Switzerland. She is the author of the book Overcoming Silence. Women’s War Stories (2018), and of numerous book chapters and articles about gender dimensions of the Holocaust and World War II in Ukraine. Borbála Klacsmann  is a historian. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Szeged in 2021. Currently she works as an editorial assistant for Eastern European Holocaust Studies. She is the co-editor of Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production (2022) and If This Is a Woman. Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (2021). Małgorzata Łukianow  is a sociologist and an Assistant Professor at the Center for Research on Social Memory at the Department of Sociology of the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her work situated at the intersection of the sociology of culture, memory studies, and the sociology of knowledge. Karolina  Panz  is a sociologist and a member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, Poland. She is post-doc/co-investigator at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the project “The Kraków Pogrom of 11 August 1945 in a Comparative Perspective.” Nadège  Ragaru  is a Full Research Professor of Political Science and History at Sciences Po (Ceri-­Cnrs) in Paris, France. She is the author of “And So the Bulgarian Jews Were Saved …” Researching, Retelling and Remembering the Holocaust in Bulgaria (2020, in French; 2022, in Bulgarian) and editor of Viewing, Reading, and Listening to the Trials in Eastern Europe: Charting a New Historiography (2020). She is currently working on a book dedicated to trials of anti-Jewish crimes in Bulgaria in the concluding phase and aftermath of the Second World War. Irina Rebrova  is a historian, working as a Researcher at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin, Germany. She also is a Research Associate at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute at

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Brandeis University, Waltham/MA, USA.  Her most recent book is Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (2020). Her current project deals with the creation and curation of the traveling ­exhibition about people with disabilities who became victims of the Nazis in Russia during World War II (http://nsvictims.ru/). Sabine Rutar  is interim Professor of Global History at the University of Potsdam and Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany, where she works as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Comparative Southeast European Studies. In her forthcoming monograph Work and Resistance Under Hitler and Tito. Mining and Maritime Industries in Yugoslavia, 1940s–1960s she compares microhistories of industrial labor during World War II and the early Cold War. Machteld Venken  is Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). She studied Slavic Languages and Cultures, European Studies and History in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine, and has been a principal investigator for eight research projects funded in four European countries. Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children, and citizen science. Anna Wylegała  is a sociologist and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (2019) and co-editor (with Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper) of The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020). Johana  Wyss is a social anthropologist (Ph.D. Oxford 2018) and a Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czechia. Her forthcoming monograph Czech Silesia: German Past and Czech Present (CEU Press) focuses on the politics of memory and identity in the Czech-Polish borderlands. She is principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “MEMPOP: Memory and Populism from Below”.

Abbreviations

AK Armia Krajowa/Polish Home Army AVNOJ Antifašističko v(ij)eće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije/ Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia CASBI Casa de Administrare și Supraveghere a Bunurilor Inamice/Office of Administration and Supervision of Enemy Properties CdZ Chef der Zivilverwaltung/Chief of the Civil Administration ChGK Cherezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissia/Extraordinary State Commission DUT Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhand GmbH/German Resettlement Society DVL Deutsche Volksliste/German People’s List ESM Eupen-Sankt Vith-Malmedy GG General Government IB Istriebitielny battalion/Destruction Battalion KEV Komisarstvo za Evreiskite Vaprosi/Commissariat for Jewish Affairs KPJ Komunistička partija Jugoslavije/Communist Party of Yugoslavia KUNI Komisija za upravo narodne imovine/Commission for the Administration of National Property MGB Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti/Ministry for State Security MO Milicja Obywatelska/Citizens’ Militia MVAC Milizia Volontaria Anti-Comunista/Anticommunist Voluntary Militia MVD Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del/Ministry of Internal Affairs ND Endecja/National Democracy Movement NDH Nezavisna Država Hrvatska/Independent State of Croatia

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NKGB

Narodnyi Komissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti/The People’s Commissariat for State Security NKVD Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del/The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/National Socialist German Workers’ Party OUN Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv/Organisation of Ukranian Nationalists OZNA Oddelek za zaščito naroda (Slovenian)/Odeljenje za zaštitu naroda (Serbocroatian)/Department for the Protection of the People PCI Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party PoW Prisoner of War ROAK Ruch Oporu Armii Krajowej/Resistance Movement of the Home Army RSFSR Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic SD Sicherheitsdienst/Security Service SFC Opava Silesian Football Club of Opava SiPo Sicherheitspolizei/Security Police SMD Special Military District SSR Soviet Socialist Republic UB Urza ̨d Bezpieczeństwa/Public Security Office UIIF Unione degli Italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume/Union of the Italians of Istria and Fiume URSR Ukrains’ka Radians’ka Socialistychna Respublika/Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

List of Figures

Native Borderland Children in the Belgian-­German and Polish-German Borderlands. Comparing Verification and Nationalisation Narratives After the Second World War Fig. 1 German territorial changes in the twentieth century. Source: Machteld Venken, ed., Borderland Studies Meets Child Studies. A European Encounter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), 10

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Doctors, Craftsmen, and Landlords: How Vanishing Others Influenced the Galician Economy During and After the Second World War Fig. 1 Changing border of Western and Eastern Galicia between 1939 and 1991. Source: Wojciech Mańkowski131

The Fate of Property in the Kočevje (Gottschee) Region during and after the Second World War Fig. 1 German settlements in the Drava Banovina before the Second World War. Source: M. Ferenc, Nekdanji nemški jezikovni otok na Kočevskem, 24 Fig. 2 The Kočevje region and the settlement area of the Germans along the rivers Sava and Sotla. Source: M. Ferenc, Nekdanji nemški jezikovni otok na Kočevskem, 31 Fig. 3 The village of Dolenja Topla Reber before September 1937. Source: Kočevje Regional Museum

280 285 294

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List of Figures

Fig. 4 The village of Dolenja Topla Reber in 1992. Source: Mitja Ferenc Fig. 5 Well and ruins of a house in Gornja Topla Reber in 1990. Source: Mitja Ferenc Fig. 6 Cemetery in Stari Log in 2002. Source: Mitja Ferenc

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“The Matter of Four Screws”: Holocaust Commemorations in (Post-)Soviet Russia (the Case of Rostov-on-Don) Fig. 1 The first private monument to remember Holocaust victims at Zmievskaya Balka, mid-1940. Source: https://www.holocaust. su/history?pgid=jwlyocb0-­9da27d6a-­3923-­4 dce-­80b0-­929ed9af3beb Fig. 2 The second private monument to remember Holocaust victims at Zmievskaya Balka, 1970. Source: https://www.holocaust.su/hist ory?pgid=jwlyocb0-­46080d2c-­0da7-­46c0-­8003-­c83eeabbcf8a Fig. 3 The first official monument to remember “Victims of the Nazi terror of 1942–1943” at Zmievskaya Balka, 1943. Source: GARO, f. R-4096, op. 1, d. 93, l. 42a Fig. 4 The second official monument in the Zmievskaya Balka area, 1958. Source: Molot, 1958, 13 May Fig. 5 Memorial complex to the Memory of the Victims of Fascism (Zmievskaya Balka), 1975. Source: Irina Rebrova, 2017

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No Neighbors’ Lands: Living with Vanished (and Rarely Returning) Others in Post-1945 Europe Anna Wylegała and Sabine Rutar

Barysz (Barysh), Galicia “Barysz was such a vibrant, such a lively and companionable town,” said 92-year-old Pole Władysław Kowcz with regret while being interviewed in his home in Lower Silesia in Poland in 2020.1 His Ukrainian peer Mariia Kliotsko, who still lives in Barysh, echoed him: “We had everything in this 1  Interview with Władysław Kowcz, born 1928, conducted in Legnica (Poland) in 2020 by Anna Wylegała.

A. Wylegała (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland e-mail: [email protected] S. Rutar Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_1

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town before the war.”2 Kowcz left Barysz in 1945, and Kliotsko stayed, but the town of their childhood ceased to exist much earlier, for both of them. Until 1939, it had been a small multi-ethnic community located in eastern Galicia, populated by approximately seven thousand inhabitants, mostly Poles, Ukrainians, and a small Jewish minority. Between 1918 and 1939, it was a part of the Second Polish Republic, while today it is located in Ukraine (and is spelled Barysh, as distinct from Polish Barysz). Before 1939, Barysz had a market square, two churches (Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic) and a synagogue, three elementary schools, and a prosperous landed estate. The war and subsequent Soviet and German occupations deprived the town of a considerable part of its population. The Soviet occupiers targeted the Polish and Ukrainian intelligentsia, the local landlords (murdered by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, NKVD), and the local peasants (sent to Siberia for opposing Soviet politics of collectivization), while the Germans murdered local Jews during the Holocaust. The final blow to the once vibrant community came from Ukrainian nationalists, who on the night of 5/6 February 1945 slaughtered more than 130 local Poles, mostly women and children. After this attack, Władysław Kowcz and all other surviving Poles escaped to the nearest big city and soon left Galicia for good. They settled in newly communist Poland, which at the time was deporting almost all its Ukrainians to Soviet Ukraine. Several dozen of them ended up in Barysh, living in formerly Polish or Jewish houses. Mariia Kliotsko, as did other Ukrainians, stayed in the town, which soon became a Soviet village. Today, Barysh is a picturesque but sleepy village-like settlement with a decreasing population of less than two thousand. There is one shop and one Orthodox church, remodeled from the former Roman Catholic one, and remnants of a deserted collective farm. The neglected state of now Ukrainian Barysh clearly reflects the failures of the Soviet and post-Soviet economy over the years, as well as Europe-wide processes of rapid urbanization in the second half of the twentieth century. But there is more to the story. 2  Interview with Mariia Kliotsko, born 1929, conducted in Barysh (Ukraine) in 2019 by Marta Havryshko.

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Piran/Pirano, Istria Piran, Slovenia, around 2010, a metaphorical film scene: Veljko, an old man, is thinking about his native Bosnia, about the place he had not returned to since the war had brought him in 1945, as a young partisan, to the Karst mountains of the northeastern Adriatic and finally to the tiny coastal town of Pirano/Piran. After half a millennium of Venetian affiliation, followed by about 120 years under Habsburgian reign, Piran became a part of Italy in 1918. During the Second World War, when Italy capitulated in September 1943, the town, along with the whole of Istria, was occupied by the Germans. Between 1945 and 1954, it was a part of the provisional Free Territory of Trieste, after which it became a part of Titoist Yugoslavia, a decision that was finally ratified with the Treaty of Osimo between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1975. Since 1991, Piran has been located in now independent Slovenia. It is in this last country that film protagonist Veljko, 60-odd years after he first arrived in Piran, asks himself: does he belong here, to this picturesque small town where he has spent most of his life? His wife Anica, a Slovene, died a short time ago. Veljko visits her grave almost daily, talks to her, and feels alone. Does he want to be buried here too? His family, back in Bosnia, slaughtered during the war, never had graves. Then one day—Veljko is at home listening sentimentally to Bosnian music—the doorbell rings. An unknown elderly man presents himself as Antonio Bartole, and says, in Italian: “I was born in this house.” Ending the ensuing plurilingual attempts to make himself understood, he draws the outline of the apartment on a piece of paper, thereby proving to the increasingly baffled Veljko that he knows the place by heart. When Antonio points to an old photo on Veljko’s sideboard and says “Anica,” revealing that he knows Veljko’s deceased wife, Veljko finally recognizes him. Their life stories are deeply intertwined, despite not having seen or heard from each other for more than 60 years. As the film will reveal, Antonio was forced to leave his native Piran in 1945, just as Veljko had been forced to leave his native Bosnia. Eventually, years after the war, Veljko and his wife created a life for themselves in the very apartment that Antonio’s family had left empty. Goran Vojnović directed this feature in the late 2000s: an intimate, subtle, and very locally rooted film centered around the very topic of our volume. Vojnović shows great capacity for capturing the essence of how the void left behind by those who had vanished started to unfold at the

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end of the war, and subsequently, sometimes years later, filled with new, different lives, and what this process did to the people who found themselves in the midst of it.

Lands of No Neighbors: A Pattern in Post-1945 Europe The main point made by this volume is that postwar radical changes, in many cases involving gradual decline, such as those in the small Galician town of Barysz and the Istrian towns and villages, fit a wider pattern. With each disaster unfolding in Barysh since 1939, and in Istria since 1918 and in a radicalized manner since 1943, they belonged more and more to the No Neighbors’ Land, a land of communities deprived of certain groups of people through radicalized ideologies, such as nationalism and communism, as well as occupation and war. In our volume, we refer to them as “neighbors,” stressing the fact that after they vanished, other people remained, continuing their lives without their former neighbors. “Vanishing” is a complex concept, as much encompassing the act of (mass) killing or deportation as it addresses the traumatic consequences of events—the “trauma of loss [...], of people who are important for the individual or the community”—for those not only directly affected by them but also those who were entangled bystanders.3 Our volume is about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the war (Parts I–III), but also considers longue durée remembrance patterns (Part IV). It directs attention to those populations who stayed behind or came to live in “cleansed” borderlands—like Ukrainian Mariia Kliotsko in Barysh and (metaphorically) Veljko and Anica in Piran. The concept of No Neighbors’ Land emphasizes absence, void, and non-cohabitation in what were the complexities of population movements and their enduring aftermath as a consequence of the Second World War. Following Omer Bartov’s suggestion for scholars of the Holocaust in eastern Europe to adopt a local studies approach, the contributors to our volume comprehensively

3  Anna Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 119–148, 136.

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illustrate how the local frame renders motivations to leave or to stay “more complex and yet more easily understandable.”4 The absence of those who were killed was of course total. Forced migration too suggests little agency on the part of the displaced. However, even in situations of violence and persecution, leaving—as well as remaining— may entail a choice, albeit a highly constrained one.5 What is more, the overwhelming attention that has been paid to displacement as typically implying physical movement and dislocation has obscured how individuals may be displaced even when they stay in the same spot, a sentiment frequently expressed by those who remained in places that had been deprived of a substantial part of their population. Those who survived the war and did not leave also experienced a wide range of symbolic and political violence, including both state-directed forms of violence and the intimate violence of neighbors against neighbors.6 On the other hand, among them also lived those who were complicit in the removal of those killed or deported, as “former victims and perpetrators were expected to find a place as neighbors again.”7 In the middle of the twentieth century, many communities in Europe were ethnically diverse. While Władysław Kowcz recalls prewar Barysz with nostalgic sentiment, it is obvious that most ethnically mixed communities were by no means as peaceful and quiet as he wishes to remember his home town. On the contrary, they were filled with a lot of resentment and internal tensions, and these contributed to the way in which they would soon radically change their ethnic and social fabric. As the example of Istria shows, too, loyalties were far more complex than suggested by the assumption that ethnic affiliations divided people into clear-cut groups.8 4  Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 557–593, 592. 5  Rogers Brubaker, “Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the ‘New Europe,’” International Migration Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 1047–1065, 1049. 6  The term “intimate violence” has recently been used extensively by Holocaust scholars when referring to the anti-Jewish pogroms and other crimes committed not by Germans, but by the local population. See, for example, Natalia Aleksiun, “Intimate Violence: Jewish Testimonies on Victims and Perpetrators in Eastern Galicia,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 23, no. 1–2 (2016): 17–33. 7  Hana Kubátová, “Guilt, Responsibility and Trauma: Restoring the Moral Self-Image in Postwar Slovakia,” in Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 207–231, 211. 8  Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Our book focuses on the consequences of the fact that during the war, and also in the immediate postwar period, people living in many European towns and villages were forcibly, often violently, deprived of their neighbors, at times participating in this process. As a result, those who remained also had to build anew both their communities and their personal as well as professional lives. The neighbors who disappeared as a consequence of genocide, mass violence, and deportations, as well as sociopolitical revolutions, were important others in both a social and an ethnic sense. The town of Barysh lost its Poles and Jews, but also a landlord, a doctor, at least two seamstresses, several teachers, and numerous traders and shoemakers. Pola/Pula, Rovigno/Rovinj, Pirano/Piran, and other towns in coastal as well as inner Istria lost the vast majority of their population; they quite literally “emptied.” The dividing lines characterizing the choices to leave or to stay ran as much between Italians on the one hand and Slovenes and Croats on the other as they ran between urban and rural populations, and importantly the boundaries between social and ethnic identities were by no means as clear-cut as such juxtapositions suggest. All over central, eastern, and southeastern Europe, the vanished others were primarily Jews and, to a smaller extent, Germans. However, as shown not only by the Istrian exodus of between 180,000 and 225,000 individuals, other groups were massively affected too: Poles in Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania; Ukrainians in Poland; Hungarians in Romania; Greeks in Bulgaria and Bulgarian-­ occupied western Thrace and Macedonia; Albanians in Greece; and many others. In Yugoslavia, substantial portions of Slovenes, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats were displaced, or murdered, during the war or immediately after its end. In other parts of Europe, too, neighbors vanished, such as, to give but one example, over 75,000 Jews from all over France and 100,000 French inhabitants from Alsace during the war. Taking an approach that goes beyond eastern Europe, our book empirically substantializes what Anna Wylegała has recently suggested as a novel concept: the “social void,” the result of two simultaneous and interdependent processes of radical social change: war and mass violence on the one hand, and the reconstruction of the material environment and of social cohesion on the other. These processes included not only the removal of a substantial

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part of a place’s population, but often enough sustained existing violence or caused it to erupt anew.9 Firstly, this social void was an effect of the destruction brought about by the crimes of the occupying regimes, genocidal politics, as well as the postwar border changes and subsequent resettlements. Secondly, it emerged from the enclaves of the traditional world that had existed until the beginning of the war, and were destroyed. István Deák has noted that until the mid-twentieth century across all of eastern Europe there existed representatives of ethnic groups who had migrated eastward centuries ago and who were legally, economically, or culturally privileged over the local population, such as Poles living in Ukraine, Germans in Romania and Russia, Hungarians in Romania, as well as Jews, a very particular minority, in all of these countries.10 Local populations—especially the peasants—frequently tried to get rid of such minorities by organizing pogroms, uprisings, and massacres. As early as the seventeenth century, Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against Polish lords, while Polish and Ukrainian peasants performed acts of violence against their Jewish neighbors before, and throughout, the Holocaust. The events of the Second World War finally allowed the locals either to directly banish these “others” from “their” cities, manors, and colonies themselves, or to witness their disappearance at the hands of third parties. According to Deák, this—the fact that such minorities ceased to exist—was the most important event in the social history of the region in the twentieth century, rather than communism or fascism. This extinction quite often happened with the willing participation of the dominant population, who, after years of war and suffering, were “simply” looking for a better life and, not rarely, for revenge. Deák’s concept, originally describing central and eastern Europe, can be extended to most regions throughout Europe that were once multi-ethnic and multi-religious. The void left by the vanished others and the ensuing disruptions were important elements in the everyday life of the people from the No Neighbors’ Lands for many years after the war ended.

9  Anna Wylegała, “The Void Communities: Towards a New Approach to the Early Post-­ war in Poland and Ukraine,” East European Politics and Societies 35, no. 2 (2021): 407–36. 10  István Deák, “How to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Monoethnic Society: The Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914–1956,” in Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 205–17.

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Conceptualizing No Neighbors’ Lands Although much has been written on the survivors and perpetrators who left the No Neighbors’ Lands, less attention has been paid to those who remained and had to continue with their lives—without their old neighbors, and sometimes with new ones. The fate of communities such as Galician Barysz, but also of entire regions such as Istria, can be placed within a framework of various historiographic paradigms describing the war and the early postwar period. One of these paradigms is the experience of genocide and mass atrocities. If Timothy Snyder’s construction of the region between, thinking in today’s borders, St. Petersburg and the western borderlands of the Russian Federation, the larger part of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and the Ukraine as “bloodlands”11 points to the expressed extent of mass atrocities here, the pervasive language of “bloodlands,” “fires,” and “shatterzones” running through the literature threatens to reinforce popular assumptions that treat eastern and southeastern Europe as western Europe’s dark mirror, which has served attempts at western European white-washing.12 Careful research into forced migrations eschews the stereotypical essentialisms that treat the region as a font of atavistic hatred; indeed, historians have documented the complicity of western powers from Lausanne to Yalta in sanctioning forced migrations.13 In adopting a comparative perspective that transcends eastern Europe, our volume offers a differentiated perspective on the population movements triggered by the war and its enduring aftermath. The Holocaust was a unique experience. Nevertheless, many other instances of mass violence happened as well. The German and Soviet occupiers killed and deported members of other ethnic groups, and in many places this was intertwined with violence between different groups from the local population. This neighborly violence sometimes ended in the ethnic cleansing of a given group, as was the case of Galicia in Ukraine, where not only in the above-mentioned town of Barysh, but also in other localities Poles were killed by Ukrainians en masse. While research on the victims and the perpetrators has remained significant, the focus on 11  Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 385. 12  Cf. the seminal Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13  See, for instance, Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds, Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

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“bystanders” has shifted over the decades from designating passivity toward the plight of others toward empirically showing that such passivity was often a quite active role of local populations and institutions, to the point of questioning the usefulness of the very term “bystander,” raising renewed and complex questions about individual responsibilities.14 New concepts have been introduced, one of which is “neighbors.” The ground-breaking book by Jan T. Gross on how, in the village of Jedwabne, Polish neighbors murdered their Jewish compatriots in 1941 played a major part here.15 A few years earlier, the motif of “killing neighbors” was intricately woven into analyses of violence in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, as Cornelia Sorabji reflected on “terror and territory” in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina in 1995,16 and especially as Joel M.  Halpern and David A. Kideckel edited their compelling Neighbors at War in 2000,17 at about the same time that Gross published his book. More recently, with explicit reference to Gross’s work, the Canadian historian Max Bergholz has undertaken a painstaking reconstruction of the mass violence that took place in the village of Kulen Vakuf, near the town of Bihać in northwestern Bosnia, part of the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War. Bergholz shows how ethnic identities were shifting before, during, and long after the violence, confirming Brubakerian notions of “ethnicity without groups.”18 His study counteracts the strong tendency in the existing literature to narrate the alliances of occupational authorities with ethnic or national groups in terms of such a groupist perspective, often insinuating that a certain ethnic group is to be monolithically equated with a certain kind of behavior or attitude. However, Bergholz’s research interest has been clearly guided by the present Bosnian condition and by the desire to deconstruct the national factor(s). For example, he leaves 14  Cf. for an overview Victoria J.  Barnett, “The Changing View of the ‘Bystander’ in Holocaust Scholarship: Historical, Ethical, and Political Implications,” Utah Law Review (2017), no. 4, https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol2017/iss4/1; cf. Wylegała (2022). 15  Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 16  Cornelia Sorabji, “A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, ed. Robert A. Hinde and Helen E. Watson (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 80–93. 17  Joel M.  Halpern and David A.  Kideckel, eds, Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 18  Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Cf. Brubaker (2004).

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aside the Holocaust as a frame of reference, which has otherwise remained at the center of attention when it comes to “bystanders” or “neighbors.”19 Another analytical lens on the No Neighbors’ Lands is provided by looking at the postwar resettlement and migration processes, which followed genocide, mass violence, and ethnic cleansing, but were also a direct result of border shifts.20 Here too the focus has been on how those who moved adapted to the new situation, and how they mourned their lost homelands.21 The literature focusing on those “who stayed” is scarce in comparison. Those who opted to stay in now Yugoslav Istria after 1947, the so-called rimasti, have been studied mostly from one national perspective.22 Similarly, studies of people who stayed in the new Polish (formerly German) western territories after 1945, so-called autochthons, had been highly politicized until the fall of communism, and only after 1989 were new approaches offered.23 It is still difficult to aim for a corroborated perspective.24 19   Cf., for example, Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, eds, Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019); David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine, Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-Evaluation (New York: ́ Routledge, 2014); Agnieszka Dauksza and Karolina Koprowska, eds, Swiadek: jak się staje, czym jest? (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2019). 20  Pertti Ahonen, Gustavo Corni, Jerzy Kochanowski, Reiner Schulze, Tamas Stark, and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008); Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). 21  See, for example, Anna Wylegała, Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019); Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1 (2009): 1–18. 22  See, for example, Gloria Nemec, Nascita di una minoranza. Istria 1947–1965: storia e memoria degli italiani rimasti nell’area istro-quarnerina (Fiume: Unione Italiana, 2012). 23   See, for example, Piotr Madajczyk, Niemcy polscy 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2001). 24  For the Istrian case, progress is mostly thanks to the works of anthropologist Katja Hrobat Virloget and historian Aleksej Kalc. Cf. Katja Hrobat Virloget, V tišini spomina: “eksodus” in Istra (Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem, 2021); Katja Hrobat Virloget, “The ‘Istrian Exodus’ and the Istrian Society,” Dve Domovini/Two Homelands 49 (2019): 163–80, doi:10.3986/dd.v0i49.7259; Aleksej Kalc, “The Other Side of the ‘Istrian Exodus’: Immigration and Social Restoration in Slovenian Coastal Towns in the 1950s,” Dve Domovini/Two Homelands 49 (2019): 145–62, doi:10.3986/dd.v0i49.7258; Katja Hrobat Virloget, Catherine Gousseff, and Gustavo Corni, eds, At Home but Foreigners: Population Transfers in 20th Century Istria (Koper: Annales University Press, 2015).

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An important analytical perspective on the No Neighbors’ Lands looks at the long-lasting consequences, namely the memorialization, politics of memory, and collective memory in places that experienced mass atrocities during the Second World War and lost a significant part of their population. While here the focus is finally on those who stayed, most of the works concentrate on the recent two or three decades, that is, on the changes in remembrance patterns after the fall of communism.25 Our book builds on these analytical approaches and adds a new one. Bringing together in-depth studies by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, it takes a complex and comparative approach and focuses on the processes of destruction and reconstruction in the very places where the vanishing of others happened. Thereby it adds a new dimension to the discussion about postwar reconstruction and the persistence of the European postwar.26 The studies gathered in this volume shed new light on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and multi-­ religious, experienced the postwar reconstruction, attempted to come to terms with what happened, and how remembrance has been negotiated and narrated.

25  One of the most interesting examples offering a perspective on the longue durée is Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For more collections dealing with the issue of memory in places of mass violence and resettlements, see Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Bo Petersson, eds, Remembering Europe’s Expelled People of the Twentieth Century, CFE Conference Papers Series 4 (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2009); Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe,” in Whose Memory? Which Future?, ed. Barbara  Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016); John J. Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis, and Blair A. Ruble, eds, Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscape and European Identity (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2009). 26  Sabine Rutar, “(Re-)Scaling the Second World War: Regimes of Historicity and the Legacies of the Cold War in Europe,” in Local Dimensions of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, ed. Xavier Bougarel, Hannes Grandits, and Marija Vulesica (London: Routledge, 2019), 263–81; Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch, and David Feldman, eds, Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Norman M. Naimark, “The Persistence of ‘the Postwar’: Germany and Poland,” in Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe, ed. Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 13–29; Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel, Yvonne Kleinmann, Miloš Ř ezník, and Dorothea Warneck, eds, Ends of War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Past and New Polish Regions after 1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019).

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The authors thus contribute to a better understanding of the fate of the European No Neighbors’ Lands and their inhabitants, to whom fell the task of the post-catastrophe reconstruction. How can we define this particular experience of loss and rebuilding? First of all, it meant the physical disappearance of people, who took with them their cultural and social capital and who left behind their homes, their personal property, the civic facilities belonging to their particular ethnic and social group, as well as sacral buildings and spaces such as synagogues, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, graveyards, and mikvahs. Provided that said property had not been destroyed during the war, it was usually seized by someone else: the houses were repopulated, and the household objects found new owners. In the Galician town of Barysz, the family of Władysław Kowcz left a house, farm buildings, and fields, which as time passed were taken over either by local Ukrainians or by the local collective farm. In the Istrian town of Pirano/Piran, the apartment of the family of Antonio Bartole was left abandoned for years and then taken over by a former partisan from Bosnia and his Slovene wife. The fictive film personalities of all three protagonists are metaphors and monuments to real life. There were ways in which this process was then legitimized in the social discourse; doubtless it was accompanied by strong emotions. While many scholars have paid attention to such issues of victims’ property, most focus on Jewish property, and, while valuable and comprehensive, they lack a comparative approach.27 Our volume brings together studies on the seizure of both Jewish and non-Jewish property, including that of the vanished Germans and Italians, and centrally explores the emotional side of these processes, linking it with social discourses and practices. As scholars show, property restitution to Jewish survivors played a crucial role in postwar relationships between the victims of mass violence and 27  For classical works on Jewish property, see Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jan Grabowski and Dariusz Libionka, eds, Klucze i kasa. O mieniu zydowskim w Polsce pod okupacja ̨ niemiecka ̨ i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Zydów, 2014); Itamar Levin, Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry during World War II and Its Aftermath (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). For a study on German property, see Kornelia Kończal, “Politics of Plunder: Post-German Property and the Reconstruction of East Central Europe after the Second World War” (PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence, 2017), https:// cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/47104.

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the majority population. The (quest for) restitution quite often escalated pre-existing tensions and even brought new waves of violence toward the remaining survivors.28 The people who left had fulfilled particular socio-economic functions, by practicing certain professions, by providing goods and services, and comprehensively by being a part of the social fabric, “the social ecosystem” as employed by Katerina Clark.29 Another scholar researching multi-­ethnic communities from this region and this period, Rosa Lehmann, called these mutual dependencies a state “between symbiosis and ambivalence.”30 It has long been established that no “Chinese Wall” separated Jews from their neighbors in eastern Europe,31 as much as such an image may continue to characterize nationalist accounts and individual memories. But the shtetls with their seemingly rigid boundaries between groups were inhabited by people who had an understanding of place that was similar to those who lived around and next to them. People, even from different backgrounds, shared a sense of being “from here,” of “loyalty, connection, and belonging to the community.”32 After the war, neighbors who had gone missing, whether killed or deported, were a source of significant disruption. In a social sense, their absence signified the absence, say, of a local pharmacist, carpenter, hairdresser, clerk, or, in the case of landed gentry, an employer. As certain professions had been dominated by a particular ethnic and social group, the absence of this group represented a very acute phenomenon for an extended period of time. 28  See, for example, Natalia Aleksiun, “Returning from the Land of the Dead: Jews in Eastern Galicia in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Kwartalnik Historii Zydów 2 (2013): 257–71; David Bankier, ed., The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after WW II (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem/New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 29  Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), passim. 30  Rosa Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001). 31   Israel Bartal and Scott Ury, “Between Jews and Their Neighbors: Isolation, Confrontation, and Influence in Eastern Europe. The Question of Influence and the End of Jewish History,” in Jews and Their Neighbors in Eastern Europe since 1750, ed. Israel Bartal, Antony Polonsky, and Scott Ury (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 3–4, 9, 20. 32   Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, “Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders: Social Relationships in the Shtetl,” in The Shtetl: Myth and Reality, ed. Antony Polonksy (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), 171–96, 191.

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Regional developments in the socio-economic transformation of the No Neighbors’ Lands included various scenarios. Some communities quickly rebuilt their economic structure due to the influx of newcomers who took over services previously provided by the vanished others. This mainly concerned places that welcomed other deportees and migrants after the past neighbors were gone. In other places, locals—sooner or later—took over the functions and roles of those who had disappeared. As Jan T.  Gross aptly notes, the Holocaust constituted for Poles a perfect occasion not only to seize Jewish property, but also to replace the Jews in their social and economic functions.33 In Istria, the social fabric of the emptied (coastal) towns and villages that had been more than 80% Italian-­ speaking was filled with renewed (but different) life by Slovenes and Croats, who were complemented over the years by newly arriving people from other parts of Yugoslavia. Interestingly, newly created loyalties partly replaced the previously strongly antagonistic interethnic relations with antagonisms between “old” locals and new arrivals, regardless of ethnicity.34 The economic politics of the authoritarian regimes that came to dominate in postwar central and eastern Europe either fostered the reconstruction or deepened the decline.35 The decline could even mean the re-agrarianization of a semi-urban area which never again managed to reclaim its prewar status, exactly as in the case of Galician Barysh. Other areas never repopulated to their prewar level, as happened in inner-Istrian villages, whose abandonment is still perceptible today. Whether it was an advancement or a collapse, No Neighbors’ Lands were never the same again: their prewar socio-economic structure was gone, as were the neighbors who had represented it and filled it with life.36 33  Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 34  Virloget (2019), 170; cf. Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 35  There is a vast literature on economic transformation toward socialism and communism in central and eastern Europe after 1945. Among works that take into consideration aspects of the missing groups, see, for example, on Soviet Lviv: Martin Åberg, “Paradox of Change: Soviet Modernization and Ethno-Linguistic Differentiation in Lviv, 1945–1989,” in Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Cultures, ed. John Czaplicka (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2005); Damian Markowski, Anatomia strachu: Sowietyzacja obwodu lwowskiego 1944–1953. Studium zmian polityczno-gospodarczych (Warsaw: IPN, 2018). 36  For an interesting study of socio-economic change resulting from mass migration in a non-European context, see Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

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The people who were gone were connected to those who stayed by all sorts of social ties, characterized by different degrees of closeness. The authors in our book explore the consequences of the breaking of these ties. How does it feel to wear the dress of your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to the fact that friends, colleagues, and neighbors are no longer there as part of your everyday life? Is it easier to cope if the process of destruction took longer? How is moral, social, and legal order brought back after one part of the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another part? How is order restored psychologically if neighbors watched other neighbors being slaughtered by external enemies? The Polish anthropologist and historian of the postwar pogroms against the Jews in Kraków and Kielce, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, when summing up the results of her long-term fieldwork in the Sandomierz region of central Poland, quoted one of her interlocutors who compared the postwar expropriation of the landed gentry to the murders of Jews who had survived the Holocaust at the hands of their Polish neighbors: both groups had to disappear, because “the new reality was about to come.”37 Everything that happened in the No Neighbors’ Lands affected not only the property structure, economy, and social hierarchies, but also norms and values. Jan T. Gross in his article on war as a social revolution noted—and was later confirmed by Anne Applebaum—that the war changed many social standards, especially those concerning the appropriation of the property of others, and the use of violence.38 What had been unthinkable before the war suddenly became completely normal.39

37  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe. Szkice z antropologii historycznej Polski lat 1939–1946 (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2012), 103. 38  Jan T. Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3, no. 2 (1989): 198–214; Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012). See also Marcin Zaremba, “Trauma wielkiej wojny. Psychospołeczne konsekwencje II wojny światowej,” Kultura i Społeczeństwo 2 (2008): 3–42. 39  For other studies on the long-lasting consequences of the war and mass violence as a distinct phenomenon, see, for example, Manuel Braganca and Peter Tame, eds, The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018); Sabine Rutar, ed., The Second World War in Historiography and Public Debate (thematic issue of Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society 65, no. 2 [2017]); Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko, eds, War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (London: Palgrave, 2017).

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No Neighbors: Catastrophe, Reconstruction, Property, Remembrance Our book is split into four thematic parts. The first part, “The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe,” focuses on the very process of the destruction of the prewar world and the narratives pertaining to this destruction. Authors explore encounters between various groups of new and old inhabitants, but also the “problem” of unwanted survivors: sometimes neighbors who were presumed to have died, or at least to have departed for good, stubbornly remained or returned, at least for a while. This caused additional disruptions and unrest. Nicole Eaton, in her chapter on the Germans who were not immediately expelled from Soviet Kaliningrad (Königsberg), explores the relationships between these “remaining” Germans and incoming Soviet civilians and soldiers. She shows how at first local Soviet officials adopted antifascist ideology to incorporate the Germans into the socialist system, to then exclude and scapegoat them as fascist obstacles to postwar reconstruction. In addition, she reveals how, in order to fully stake their claim to the new territory during the expulsion of the German population, Soviet local officials and new Soviet settlers did not appeal only to antifascism. They also constructed an argument of historical legitimacy pointing at ancient inheritances and ethnic primordialism, despite no previous Soviet or Russian settlement having existed in the area. Another group that initially stayed but was finally forced to leave were Jewish children, survivors of the Holocaust, who were placed immediately after the war in a sanatorium in Rabka, a small resort town in southeastern Poland, all but a few of whose prewar Jewish inhabitants were killed during the war. Karolina Panz in her chapter unfolds how prewar antisemitism and wartime witnessing of mass violence and complicity in the crime resulted in postwar attacks on the Jewish orphans committed by local Poles. Panz shows how, as a result, both the prewar Jewish neighbors killed during the war and the Jewish orphans seeking recovery in the resort after the war (neighbors for a while) were consequently excluded from the collective memory of the town, while many of those responsible for the assaults remained part of the local elite. Pamela Ballinger examines the experiences of individuals who remained in the Istrian peninsula—whether by choice or circumstance—even after many family members, schoolmates, and friends had departed. She shows that during the region’s protracted process of transfer from Italy to

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Yugoslavia/Croatia from 1943 to 1954 both migratory flows and non-­ flows resulted from a wide range of factors that included political ideology, economic and labor questions, gender, age, and family duties. Political solidarities intersected with those of kinship and ethnicity in complex ways, especially in towns like Rovinj/Rovigno with strong historical traditions of socialism and antifascism. This made for complex understandings of who, among neighbors, figured as “neighborly” during and after the territorial contest over Istria. Such understandings transcend generic ethnic and political binaries such as Italians/Slavs or fascists/communists. Similarly complex was the situation of the Germans who remained after the war in Poland and Belgium, as Machteld Venken shows. The governments of these two states launched verification and nationalization campaigns that targeted minority groups, and Germans in particular. Venken compares the postwar fates of Germans from the Belgian-German and Polish-German borderlands, who did not leave for Germany. These fates include alienation, emotional resistance against the postwar political order, and a lifelong acute, if not traumatic awareness of the radical changes their lives had undergone as inhabitants of the respective borderlands. Although verification and nationalization were more severe in Poland than in Belgium, more similarities than differences are observed in how native borderland children from the Belgian-German and Polish-German borderlands ascribe meaning to the experiences that so dominantly marked their lives. The second part, “A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction,” focuses on how the destroyed communities sought renewal. The authors bring forth how social, economic, and professional dysfunctionalities were (to be) overcome. Anna Wylegała analyzes the changes in the professional structure of Galicia, before 1939 inhabited by Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. Members of these groups—whether they were killed, deported, or expelled—had been tailors, traders, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, landlords, and practiced many other professions too. After they vanished, their professional roles were either left empty for a period of time, or taken over by members of the remaining population who learned new skills, or by various types of newcomers. Wylegała provides an intricate comparative look at both parts of the region now divided between Poland and Ukraine, analyzing the impact of these changes on the local communities during the war and in the immediate postwar period. Volha Bartash focuses on processes of healing from the traumatic experiences of war, persecution, and dislocation, thereby contributing to a

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better understanding of postwar community reconstruction from an angle that has rarely been the center of attention. Her protagonists are Roma who spent the early postwar years in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. She demonstrates how Roma in the Baltic States, western Belarus, and western Ukraine faced similar challenges and choices. They found themselves affected by the confrontation between the nationalist insurgencies and the Soviet counterinsurgency in similar ways. Drawing on published memoirs and oral histories, Bartash discusses how the Roma communities devastated by the Nazi persecution sought to heal from their multiple losses and reconstruct their community life. While on the local level rebuilding social and professional structures was the most urgent need, from the perspective of the state, trials of postwar collaborators were a means of (attempting at) setting up a new order. In her analysis of such trials in Bulgaria, Nadège Ragaru examines the role of personalized ties in the wartime enforcement of anti-Jewish policies and in the 1944–45 prosecution of crimes against Jews. She uses the judicial proceedings before the Bulgarian People’s Courts as a lens on the relationships between Jews and gentiles during the war as well as in its immediate aftermath. A close reading of the witness testimonies and the defense strategies of the accused as well as their legal counsels reveals complex ties of dependency and power asymmetries between perpetrators and their (former) Jewish victims. In several ways complementing Ragaru’s findings, Marta Havryshko focuses on war crimes trials in Soviet Ukraine during the 1940s that addressed sexual violence against Jewish women and girls. She explores the Holocaust survivors’ and non-Jewish witnesses’ motivation for speaking up about the sexual victimization of Jewish women during the war through a close reading of the content and framing of their testimonies. She juxtaposes these to the defense strategies of those accused. Importantly, many defendants turned out to be prewar neighbors of the victims. Thus, bringing them to court sought not only to punish the crime, but also to restore the moral order the war had destroyed. Part III, “The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues,” takes a broad approach to the concept of “property,” in addressing possessions and (notions of) belongings of vanished neighbors: Jews in Hungary, Germans in Romania and Yugoslavia/Slovenia, and Italians and Bosnians in Yugoslavia/Slovenia. The fate of Jewish property in postwar Hungary is at the center of Borbála Klacsmann’s chapter. Through a micro-historical analysis of case studies from the Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun county, that is

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the capital Budapest and the region to its southeast, she investigates how confiscations and the lack of restitution impacted on Jewish–non-Jewish relations. Klacsmann proves that there was no unified, central procedure for survivors to reclaim their goods, as not one but several institutions and committees handled the “abandoned” properties, and that every level of both society and the administration participated in and profited from the confiscations. Emanuela Grama explores the (unsuccessful) restitution of German property in Romania. In March 1954, the authorities decided to return the houses and some of the land to ethnic Germans, assets that the state had confiscated in 1945 as a form of retribution. The government made the restitution conditional on the ethnic Germans joining the collective farms. This partial and conditional restitution eventually backfired; many Germans regarded it as a gesture that came too late and offered too small an incentive, and it only reinforced their decision to emigrate to West Germany. While the above-mentioned chapters define property as something valuable and desirable for the remaining neighbors, the third chapter in this part shows its ambivalent uselessness in a situation when it is not transferred to someone else but gradually declines and perishes. Mitja Ferenc focuses on property of the Germans in the region of Kočevje (Gottschee), in today’s Slovenia. During the war, the region was occupied by Italy, and the Gottscheers were forced to resettle to the German-occupied part of northern Yugoslavia between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, during the 1950s, more than half of the 176 villages were destroyed. Many cemeteries were either levelled or the German tombstones removed. In the immediate postwar period, the close-to-depopulated Kočevje witnessed the killing of several thousand prisoners of war by the new communist regime. Later, the region was closed off to the public and a number of penal and work camps were set up. Today, very few remnants are left to bear witness to the 600-year-long presence of a German ethnic community here. Although notions of neighborly relationships are present in all chapters concerning property issues, it is the final one that focuses most on the links between property, identity, and belonging. Sabine Rutar writes about the film “Piran—Pirano” (Slovenia, 2010), directed by Goran Vojnović, which is set in the present but works with flashbacks to the final months of the Second World War. It is located in the Istrian town of Piran (It. Pirano) in today’s Slovenia. Until 1945, more than 80% of its inhabitants were ethnic

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Italians. The great majority left the town after the war’s end, when Piran came under Yugoslav control. In the film, an apartment in the town’s center is the key location. Notions of property and belonging circle around the apartment and its inhabitants, the town of Piran (the territory), the language(s) spoken, and the meaning of origin. Rutar’s chapter builds a bridge to the volume’s final section, “Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration,” in which authors venture beyond the immediate postwar years and analyze the experience of those living in the No Neighbors’ Lands via a longue durée perspective. While two chapters have as their point of departure monuments—existing, planned and unrealized, or demolished—the third focuses on how vernacular memory is embodied in the narrative of contemporary interviewees. All three chapters tell the story of decades of living in the shadow of the dead (deported) neighbors. Irina Rebrova’s chapter is devoted to the Holocaust commemoration in Rostov on Don in southern Russia. She links the perspective of the early postwar period with contemporary times. Starting with the present-day conflict over the text on the memorial plaque placed in the Holocaust memorial in Zmievskaya Balka in the outskirts of the city, she describes various forms of commemorative practices connected with the Holocaust that took place in the city from the immediate postwar period until very recently. Her analysis shows how memory politics in the Soviet Union silenced Jews as a specific group of Nazi victims, including them in the single supranational category of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Johana Wyss focuses on the commemorative practices of the contemporary Czech inhabitants of the town of Opava. Today, the town is located on the Czech side of the Czech–Polish border. Until the end of the First World War it had been the capital of the Duchy of Upper and Lower Silesia, as part of the Habsburg Empire. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, Wyss investigates how and why the Germans expelled after the Second World War have (not) been remembered by the town’s population. The Jews of Opava who were killed in the Holocaust eventually did receive a monument. In her account of the entanglements between these two different mnemonic practices, she applies the concept of implicated subjects to those inhabitants of the town who settled there after the war’s end. Małgorzata Łukianow analyzes collectively shared memories about acts of mass violence committed by neighbors against neighbors in Galicia. As a result of Polish-Ukrainian animosities rooted in a long history of mutual resentments and accelerated by the omnipresent violence during the

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Second World War, many acts of such violence occurred. Łukianow compares two acts of ethnic cleansing: the massacre of Poles in the village of Barysz in eastern Galicia, committed by Ukrainian nationalists, and the group murder of Ukrainians committed by Poles in the village of Łubno in western Galicia, which both happened in 1945. She demonstrates how various narrative strategies aimed at toggling responsibilities, locating the conflict in national rather than local frameworks, and how its final stage, the resettlement of Poles from Barysz to communist Poland in 1945 and of Ukrainians from Łubno to Soviet Ukraine in the same year, has been respectively framed as the result of the violence of the other side. * * * The authors have availed themselves of various sources and methodological toolboxes, which have guided this study of the No Neighbors’ Lands. First, engaging in close readings of all available sources, they all search out as much contextualization as possible, which often entails the posing of questions about the sources’ credibility and trustworthiness. Marta Havryshko and Karolina Panz, for example, do not exclude from their purview material drawn from Soviet and Polish (communist) postwar trials, but they approach these accounts critically, using Jewish survivors’ testimonies and in-depth knowledge about the local settings to exercise a critical reading of the courts’ documents. Secondly, many authors do not limit themselves to existing written sources but undertake attempts to create new records. Oral history interviews—conducted for example by Machteld Venken, Marta Havryshko, and Anna Wylegała—as well as the fieldwork of the sociologists and anthropologists included here—such as Johana Wyss, Volha Bartash, Pamela Ballinger, and Małgorzata Łukianow— offer ample evidence in this regard. This multidisciplinary corroboration of fieldwork, interviews, and archival records enables the in-depth explorations of experiences in the No Neighbors’ Lands in the Second World War’s aftermath. Finally, what brings the authors together methodologically is their focus on the subjective aspects of social change and locality. Not coincidentally, this volume is published in Palgrave’s series devoted to the history of experience. It is precisely the way in which individual people and local communities experienced life in their respective postwar No Neighbors’ Land that our book sheds light on in comparative perspective. The true protagonists of this volume are the people who inhabited the No

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Neighbors’ Lands—during the war, in its immediate aftermath, and still today. The testimony of Anastasiia Ivantsiv emblematically represents the essence of our volume: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Barysz, the small Galician town recalled at the beginning of this introduction by a deported Pole and a Ukrainian who had remained, is no more. Tracing its transformation into the post-Soviet Ukrainian Barysh without Poles and Jews that it is today is indeed worth the effort. Because, as remarked by Ivantsiv, born in 1923 and one of the contemporary inhabitants of Barysh who was neither murdered nor deported during the war, but stayed to continue her life in Soviet Barysh without many of her prewar neighbors: “It was so very different before the war, so very different to everybody.”40 * * * This book has its origin in the conference “No Neighbors’ Land: Postwar Europe in a New Comparative Perspective,” organized in 2019 in Warsaw by Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Łukianow at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and financed by the Ministry of Science and Education of Poland. Versions of several of our volume’s chapters were presented there; other authors joined the project at a later stage. We are sincerely grateful for the financial support of the Ministry of Science and Education of Poland, which funded the research that made possible the writing of the chapters by Małgorzata Łukianow, Karolina Panz, and Anna Wylegała, as well as the editing and proofreading of the entire volume; and of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, which supported the open-access publication of the chapters by Volha Bartash and Sabine Rutar. Charlotte Mosedale diligently provided the native-speaker copy editing of all chapters; Jim Gibbons kindly saw to the correction of the revised parts of the Introduction and the Conclusion. Ivana Dinić was of meticulous editorial assistance in compiling the index and the list of abbreviations. And last but not least a warm thank you is due to series editor Ville Kivimäki, for providing such excellent guidance in improving the final manuscript. To all involved we extend our deep gratitude.

40  Interview with Anastasiia Ivantsiv, born 1923, conducted in Barysh in 2019 by Marta Havryshko.

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———. 2021. V tišini spomina: “eksodus” in Istra. Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem. Hrobat Virloget, Katja, Catherine Gousseff, and Gustavo Corni, eds. 2015. At Home but Foreigners: Population Transfers in 20th Century Istria. Koper: Annales University Press. Kalc, Aleksej. 2019. The Other Side of the ‘Istrian Exodus’: Immigration and Social Restoration in Slovenian Coastal Towns in the 1950s. Dve Domovini/ Two Homelands 49: 145–162. https://doi.org/10.3986/dd.v0i49.7258. Kończal, Kornelia. 2017. Politics of Plunder: Post-German Property and the Reconstruction of East Central Europe after the Second World War. PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence. https://cadmus.eui.eu/ handle/1814/47104. Lehmann, Rosa. 2001. Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Levin, Itamar. 2004. Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry during World War II and Its Aftermath. Westport, CT: Praeger. Madajczyk, Piotr. 2001. Niemcy polscy 1944–1989. Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa. Markowski, Damian. 2018. Anatomia strachu: Sowietyzacja obwodu lwowskiego 1944–1953. Studium zmian polityczno-gospodarczych. Warsaw: IPN. Mazower, M., J. Reinisch, and D. Feldman, eds. 2011. Post-war Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meng, Michael. 2011. Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morina, Christina, and Krijn Thijs, eds. 2019. Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History. New York: Berghahn Books. Naimark, N.M. 2010. The Persistence of ‘the Postwar’: Germany and Poland. In Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe, ed. F. Biess and R.G. Moeller, 13–29. New York: Berghahn Books. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. Nemec, Gloria. 2012. Nascita di una minoranza. Istria 1947–1965: storia e memoria degli italiani rimasti nell’area istro-quarnerina. Fiume/Rijeka: Unione Italiana. Orla-Bukowska, Annamaria. 2021. Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders: Social Relationships in the Shtetl. In The Shtetl: Myth and Reality, ed. Antony Polonksy, 171–196. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Rutar, Sabine, ed. 2017. The Second World War in Historiography and Public Debate, thematic issue of Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society 65 (2). ———. 2019. (Re-)Scaling the Second World War: Regimes of Historicity and the Legacies of the Cold War in Europe. In Local Dimensions of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, ed. Xavier Bougarel, Hannes Grandits, and Marija Vulesica, 263–281. London: Routledge.

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Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. Sorabji, Cornelia. 1995. A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in BosniaHerzegovina. In War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, ed. Robert A. Hinde and Helen E. Watson, 80–93. London: I.B. Tauris. Ther, Philipp. 2011. Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ther, Philipp, and Ana Siljak, eds. 2001. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2012. Okrzyki pogromowe. Szkice z antropologii historycznej Polski lat 1939–1946. Wołowiec: Czarne. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2016. Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe. In Whose Memory? Which Future? ed. B. Törnquist-Plewa. New York: Berghahn Books. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara, and Bo Petersson, eds. 2009. Remembering Europe’s Expelled People of the Twentieth Century, CFE Conference Papers Series 4. Lund: Lunds Universitet. Wylegała, Anna. 2019. Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in PostWar Poland and Ukraine. Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2021. The Void Communities: Towards a New Approach to the Early Post-war in Poland and Ukraine. East European Politics and Societies 35 (2): 407–436. Zaremba, Marcin. 2008. Trauma wielkiej wojny. Psychospołeczne konsekwencje II wojny światowej. Kultura i Społeczeństwo 2: 3–42.

PART I

The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe

The Prussian Spirit of the Land: Fighting Fascism and Legitimating Annexation in Soviet Kaliningrad, 1947–1953 Nicole Eaton

Introduction Over the course of the twentieth century, the ideology of antifascism was mobilized in powerful ways both to challenge authoritarian rule and to uphold authoritarian regimes. During the interwar period, the rally cry of antifascism united Popular Front movements against fascist dictatorships and Nazism, while antifascism after the Second World War was adopted as a narrative across Europe for propagating narratives of wartime victimhood and heroic resistance. Postwar antifascism played an especially central role in communist Eastern Europe, particularly in the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. In the case of East Germany, a number of historians have shown how the antifascist myth was used to legitimize the Socialist Unity Party regime as a necessary prophylactic

N. Eaton (*) Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_2

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against Nazism, while others have pointed out how this myth functioned both to omit Germans’ broad support for the Nazi regime before 1945 and to sustain the fiction that the majority of Germans had been victims of Hitler’s ruling clique.1 In the case of the Soviet Union, historians have likewise shown how antifascism became integral to the postwar Soviet state’s self-conception, forming a “cult of the Second World War” that presented the Soviet Union as the morally righteous victor in the battle against fascism and safeguard against its postwar resurgence.2 Myths serve to uphold social orders, integrate societies, and serve as moral and political guides. In the context of economic or political crises and other periods of disorientation, myths, as Jan Assmann writes, play an especially important role in providing communities orientation as to who they are and the values they hold.3 Evolving foundational myths centered antifascism as the basis for state legitimacy, but the processes by which these myths gained resonance varied significantly depending on the local context, as did their articulations.4 This chapter uses the case of German Königsberg/Soviet Kaliningrad, a site of extreme political rupture and material devastation, as a setting for exploring the processes by which antifascism was reconfigured in the immediate postwar period. Königsberg, a port city on the Baltic Sea, had been inhabited predominantly by German speakers for 700 years and had been an integral part of the Kingdom of Prussia. During the Third Reich, it was the easternmost major city in Nazi Germany. After the war, the city and surrounding countryside of northern East Prussia were granted to the Soviet Union as part of negotiations between Stalin and the Western Allies over postwar borders in Eastern 1  Antonia Grunenberg, Antifaschismus – ein deutscher Mythos (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 2  José María Faraldo, “An Antifascist Political Identity? On the Cult of Antifascism in the Soviet Union and Post-Socialist Russia,” in Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory, and Politics, 1922 to the Present, ed. Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clímaco (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 202–27; Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3  Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 142–3. 4  Clara M.  Oberle, “Reconfiguring Postwar Antifascism: Reflections on the History of Ideology,” New German Critique 117 (Fall 2012): 135–53.

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Europe. Königsberg was among the region’s worst damaged territories, having been devastated by British bombing raids in August 1944, a scorched-earth Wehrmacht retreat and months-long futile defense, and an exceptionally violent and prolonged Red Army occupation in the spring of 1945, as Soviet soldiers looted and pillaged towns, mass-raped German women, and executed German men in bloody revenge for the years of Nazi occupation.5 The region also experienced dramatic demographic transformation. The remaining population, between 150,000 and 200,000 German civilians in the spring of 1945 (down from around 1  million before the flight and invasion), were primarily women, children, and the elderly, as most able-bodied German men had been killed, interned, or deported as forced laborers. They were joined by Red Army soldiers and officers who served in the initial military administration and over 10,000 “repatriates,” former Soviet forced laborers.6 Over the course of 1945–46, Soviet citizens, primarily from Russia (and, to a lesser extent, Belorussia and Ukraine), arrived in a trickle to help rebuild the region’s decimated industry, but the population grew dramatically beginning in late 1946, when a central mass settlement campaign brought hundreds of thousands of settlers to work on newly established collective farms.7 Soviet leaders used antifascist rhetoric to justify the military occupation and subsequent Soviet civilian rule to both the defeated German civilian population who remained and the new Soviet settlers who arrived. The process by which antifascism was reconfigured in Soviet Königsberg– Kaliningrad was particularly complex for this reason, allowing this case study to reveal the multiple and competing ideals underpinning the myth as it developed over time and for different audiences to legitimate the Soviet annexation. By tracing the evolution of antifascism in Soviet Königsberg–Kaliningrad in governmental documents, speeches, and news media, this chapter shows how the state used antifascism at first to mobilize the German population to build socialism but then later to demonize them as irredeemable “fascist” obstacles to socialist construction. It shows 5  Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 74. 6  Although numerous “repatriates” were sent to the Soviet Union after the war, an estimated 8839 remained in May 1946. Ruth Kibelka, Ostpreussens Schicksalsjahre, 1944–1948 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 100. 7  Iu. V.  Kostiashov, “Zaselenie Kaliningradskoi Oblasti posle Vtoroi Mirovoi Voiny,” in Gumanitarnaia Nauka v Rossii: Sorosovskie Lauriaty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1996), 82.

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how antifascism was used to unify Soviet citizens around socialism’s moral victory over fascism, but how that sense of moral superiority—and antifascism more generally—required a perpetual fascist enemy, real or perceived, against which to rally. Yet, while the Königsberg–Kaliningrad case shows the broad applicability of antifascist rhetoric as a legitimating myth, it also reveals its limitations. Antifascism, it turned out, did not fully suffice to explain why the Soviet Union had annexed a land that had no previous historical connection to the Soviet Union or Russian Empire, leading Soviet new settlers to Kaliningrad to turn to other resonate myths of state legitimacy, including, ultimately, ethnic primordialism. This chapter shows the unexpected ways in which these legitimating myths worked together in a local context in order for Soviet citizens fully to stake claim to the once-German land they inherited.

Interwar Myths of Territorial Belonging and the Fate of German East Prussia The expulsion of Kaliningrad’s Germans in 1947–48 was a small episode in the largest population transfer and un-mixing of peoples in human history, as between 12 and 14 million Germans left Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in voluntary or forced migrations between 1945 and 1950.8 Across Eastern Europe, these expulsions coincided with the shifting of borders and the reconfiguration of legitimating myths to assert the remaining population’s rightful ownership of the land. The lands expelling their German populations were also those falling, to varying degrees, into the Soviet sphere of influence. Although antifascism played a central role underpinning postwar myths of state legitimacy, many communist governments drew simultaneously on discourses of nationalism and national self-determination—the call for the boundaries of the nation and the state to be coterminous. In the interwar period, this national ideal fueled interethnic tensions in the successor states created by the breakup of multiethnic empires, and between 1939 and 1945, interethnic violence grew precipitously, exacerbated by the breakdown of the rule of law and Nazi occupation policies that pit ethnic groups

8  R.  M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 1.

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against one another.9 After the war, the argument that the presence of large numbers of ethnolinguistic minorities in Central and East Central Europe had led to political instability and military conflict served as a rationale for the homogenization of the nation-state.10 The newly powerful vocabulary of antifascism came into dialogue with nationalist discourses to justify expulsions and forced migrations, as dominant ethnic groups, with the encouragement of local communist parties, wielded charges of wartime collaboration with the Nazis against ethnic minorities, especially (but not exclusively) against ethnic Germans.11 The interwar discourse often also contained a deeper ethnic primordialist sentiment: the essentialist notion that nations were ancient and fixed entities and that contested territories belonged rightfully to the people whose ancestors had first settled them. The territory, the easternmost province in the German Reich, remained part of Germany but was cut off from its mainland by the creation of the Polish Corridor in 1919. The newly formed neighboring states of Poland and Lithuania sought to dismantle the vulnerable exclave and annex the territory for themselves; they did so by making ethnic and historical claims drawing on East Prussia’s ethnic heterogeneity and contested history of settlement. In the Masurian region of southern East Prussia, up to half of the population in some regions spoke a dialect of Polish, leading Polish nationalists to assert that the land had originally been Polish and that Masurians were in fact Poles (even though the majority of them voted in a plebiscite in 1920 to remain in Germany). Lithuania, likewise, cited historical Lithuanian settlement and Germanized Lithuanian town names in northern East Prussia; Lithuanian troops even occupied a contested stretch of land with tacit League of Nations support in 1923, annexing it outright until Hitler reclaimed it in 1939.12 During the Second World War, when 9  Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 214. 10  Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 3rd rev. and expanded edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 189. 11  See, for example, Michael Fleming, Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944–50 (London: Routledge, 2010). 12  Ralf Meindl, “Vorposten und Grenzland: Ostpreussische Identitäten, 1933–1945,” Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XXIII (2011): 182; Richard Blanke, Polish-Speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians since 1871 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 251; Ruth Leiserowitz, “Memel Territory,” in The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories, 1935–1945, ed. Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 145–6.

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once-­vulnerable East Prussia became a launching point for the Nazi invasions of the East, the Allies resolved to strip East Prussia from the postwar German state. Poland and Lithuania each received portions of East Prussia in the postwar settlement.13 Communist leaders legitimated these annexations by citing both national self-determination and ancient inheritances, while simultaneously legitimating the establishment of postwar Polish and (Soviet) Lithuanian communist governments by appealing to antifascism.14 The Soviet annexation of the northern third of East Prussia, including Königsberg, however, could not so easily be justified through these means. In contradistinction to the territories transferred to Poland and Lithuania, central East Prussia had been inhabited predominantly by Germans (as defined by language and voluntary association) for over 700 years. Stalin’s motivations for claiming the Königsberg region were purely geopolitical: in December 1943, when Churchill had suggested giving all of East Prussia to Poland to compensate for the Soviet Union’s 1939 expansion into eastern Poland, Stalin demanded that at least part of East Prussia go to the Soviet Union in return. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s need for an ice-free Baltic seaport, but made his own appeal to historical legitimacy. The Soviet Union, he explained, deserved northern East Prussia as compensation for Russia’s centuries-long military sacrifices to protect Europe from German aggression.15 “All the more true,” he added with a dubious nod to ethnic primordialism, “because, historically speaking, this is ancient Slavic soil.” Regardless of whether Stalin himself believed the claim that the territory had been originally inhabited by Slavs, Churchill and Roosevelt entertained his demands and agreed to grant northern East Prussia and Königsberg provisionally to the Soviet Union, to be confirmed in the final postwar settlement.16

13  Richard J. Kirckus, The Kaliningrad Question (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 29. 14  Iurii Kostiashov, “Stalin i Kaliningradskaia Oblast’: Popytka Istoricheskoi Rekonstruktsii,” Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XVIII (2009): 58. 15  Kostiashov (2009), 58. 16  Sovetskii Soiuz na mezhdunarodnykh konferentsiiakh perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945  gg. Tom II.  Tegeranskaia konferentsiia rukovoditelei trekh soiuznykh derzhav— SSSR, SShA i Velikobritaniii (28 noiabria–1 dekabria 1943  g.) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1984), 150.

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Mobilizing Antifascism in Soviet Königsberg–Kaliningrad Königsberg underwent abrupt and dramatic political transformation after the war. Unlike elsewhere in Germany, the region came not under joint Allied occupation in the spring of 1945 but direct Soviet control. It was first organized as a Special Military District (SMD) overseen by the Red Army and then converted into a Soviet civilian government, incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR),17 and renamed Kaliningrad in the summer of 1946. In 1945, however, the shape of Königsberg’s Sovietization was still undetermined. Stalin paid little attention to it thereafter, as it constituted less than one percent of the territory coming into the Soviet sphere of influence. With many Soviet cities in ruins, the vanquished enemy city fell low on the Kremlin’s priority list for reconstruction. The Königsberg SMD received few directives from Moscow or the Military Command in Berlin on how to Sovietize the region, other than to rebuild quickly and with very little outside funding.18 More remarkably, they received no instructions for what to do with the German civilians who remained. Despite military administration officials’ numerous inquiries to Moscow and the military command in Berlin about how to treat the Germans, no overarching policies were issued.19 After wartime filtrations led to the arrest of suspected Nazi party members, Wehrmacht soldiers, and would-be saboteurs,20 the remaining German population, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly, became de facto a stateless people: not considered prisoners of war or charged with war crimes, but also not immediately designated Soviet citizens by virtue of living on Soviet territory, in contrast to the populations in neighboring

17  The archival record obscures the reason, although it was ostensibly part of a geopolitical strategy to buffer the newly re-annexed Baltics from the Soviet border. “Ukaz Prezidiuma VS SSSR ot 7 aprelia 1946 goda ‘ob obrazovanii Kenigsbergskoi oblasti v sostave RSFSR,’” printed in Iu. I. Mandel’shtam, ed., Sbornik zakonov SSSR i ukazov Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. 1938 g.–iiul’ 1956 g. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1956), 47. 18  Kostiashov (2009), 60. 19  Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kaliningradskoi Oblasti (GAKO) f. R330, op. 2, d. 4, ll. 8–9; d. 9, l. 1, 15 May 1945; GAKO f. R332, op. 2, d. 3, l. 47, 28 February 1946. 20  Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 9401, op. 2, d. 95, ll. 18–19, 39–43, 13 April 1945; d. 93, l. 31, 15 May 1945.

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Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.21 Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, German minorities were being expelled in wild expulsions beginning in the summer of 1945 and then in organized mass transports,22 but Moscow made no plans to expel Königsberg’s Germans. The SMD did not have the autonomy of action to determine their statehood or citizenship on its own. The Germans’ indeterminate status exacerbated already catastrophic living conditions, as no Soviet military or civilian organizations felt obligated to include Königsberg in their already-tight budgets; the provisional military administration’s frequent requests for funding and supplies, even to feed Red Army personnel, were usually left unfulfilled.23 The occupiers, scrambling to rebuild the city and produce food to feed the population, instituted a forced labor regime for all surviving able-bodied Germans, the majority of them women or adolescents. But with only starvation rations available, the entire civilian population succumbed to hunger and epidemic disease; two typhus outbreaks alone killed 10 to 15 percent of the population between September 1945 and May 1946.24 Early on, relations between occupiers and occupied were poor, in part because of long-term mutual animosity and wartime propaganda. Red Army soldiers continued to rape women and loot German property for trophy items. The administration attempted to curb these excesses and improve relations with the Germans. They did so by appealing to antifascism—asserting the moral superiority of socialism over Nazism and attempting to convert the Germans to their cause. The efforts were not directed by a central authority but were instead decentralized and rudimentary, borne of the pressing need for greater labor productivity. During internal meetings, communist party members emphasized the need, as one speaker put it in June 1945, to “demonstrate culture to the German population” to raise their productivity and convert them to socialism, while others pointed out that Soviet communists should start by improving their own behavior to set a good example. Others emphasized that 21  Alfred Erich Senn, “The Sovietization of the Baltic States,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 317 (May 1958), 123. 22  Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 64–5; Douglas (2012), 93–193. 23  GAKO f. R330, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 61–3, 12 November 1945; d. 7, l. 14, 18 June 1945; op. 2, d. 4, ll. 4–7, 12 May 1945; d. 6, ll. 4–5, 4 June 1945; f. R332, op. 2, d. 3, ll. 37–8. 24  Bernhard Fisch and Marina Klemeševa, “Zum Schicksal der Deutschen in Königsberg 1945–48 (im Spiegel bisher unbekannter russischer Quellen),” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-­ Forschung 44 (1995): 396.

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both Germans and Soviet “repatriates,” morally compromised by exposure to fascism, could be rehabilitated through antifascist example and hard work.25 Living conditions remained catastrophic, however, due to poor administration and the perennial shortages of funding, labor, food, and supplies. Official resolutions issued to the German population recognized the squalid living conditions while blaming them on “fascism”—either the German military’s ideologically motivated, prolonged but futile defense in 1945 or on postwar civilian obstinance. As the head of the SMD, General Kuz’ma Galitskii, announced in a resolution during the dire winter of 1945–46, a time when thousands of Germans were dying of hunger, the German military’s destruction had created hardship, but German civilians were being given ample opportunities to improve their living conditions through “honest and conscientious labor.” Those who worked hard were becoming the beneficiaries of their labor, receiving good food and pay, he explained. But others, “still not freed from the influence of lying Nazi propaganda,” were setting the German population “against the Soviet government and the Red Army,” thus hindering efforts to improve conditions for everyone.26 The disastrous provisional military administration turned over to civilian rule in mid-1946. The new civilian government understood its mission more broadly—not just to resuscitate the ruins, but to build socialism. Extending the language of antifascism to the promise of inclusion in a just and humane socialist society, the government sought to incorporate Germans and Soviets as equals: wages were standardized according to job rather than nationality, schools provided native-language instruction, dilapidated German hospitals were incorporated into Soviet budgets, and a large network of orphanages was set up to provide social welfare. They also recruited prewar Königsberg’s few surviving German communists as antifascist lecturers, hosted educational and cultural programming in an official Antifascist Club, and established the Neue Zeit German-language newspaper to document the crimes of German fascism and tout the progressiveness of Soviet socialism.27 As more Soviet citizens 25  Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii Kaliningradskoi Oblasti (GANIKO) f. 121, op. 1, d. 16, ll. 64–5, 21 March 1946. 26  GAKO f. R332, op. 1 d. 1, ll. 25–6, 15 February 1946. 27  GAKO f. R332, op. 2, d. 7, l. 24, no date; op. 1, d. 2, l. 118, 2 April 1946; GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 3923, l. 138, 7 April 1947; d. 4544, l. 27, no date; GAKO f. R289, op. 7, d. 4, l. 10, 28 November 1946; d. 7, ll. 11–14, December 1946; GAKO f. R83, op. 1, d. 4, l. 10, 1 May 1947.

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arrived in the summer of 1946, the message of antifascism increasingly operated for two audiences, one German-speaking, one Russian-speaking. Whereas language barriers meant that German antifascist rhetoric appeared in only limited forums promoted by the state (official resolutions, children’s education, Antifascist Club lectures, and later the radio and newspaper), antifascism among the Soviet population worked in multidirectional dialogue, as Soviet new settlers, government employees, and party members articulated expectations for the new society by asserting that the moral victory in the war, the superiority of Soviet socialism, and the Soviet people’s wartime sacrifice to defeat the Nazis would be repaid through a better life. As living conditions improved in the summer of 1946, so did informal relations between Germans and Soviets.28 Soviet soldiers and workers danced with German girls and fell in love, German and Soviet soccer teams competed at the old Nazi stadium. In contrast to wartime depictions of German culture as “fascist,” depraved, and corrupted, many Soviets, while not forgetting their wartime suffering, came to respect their German neighbors as a people who, in many ways, embodied the civilizational traits idealized by Soviet public health and education campaigns: cleanliness, tidiness, education, and the outward signs of “culture.” Seeing Germans as sophisticated culture-bearers, local Soviet military and civilian leaders sought out German women to be nannies to their children, to teach them music and foreign languages. Some Soviet employers even preferred to hire Germans because they understood them to be more honest and fastidious than their Soviet peers.29 This brief golden age of cohabitation seemed to point toward long-­ term integration. But despite the administration’s initial efforts, several factors compounded by the winter of 1946–47 led Soviet local leaders and new settlers alike to turn the language of antifascism against the Germans. This transition marked a splitting of the rhetoric—at least formally, German audiences continued to receive positive antifascist messaging and even an increase in government programs. Meanwhile, few Germans felt motivated to adopt this language themselves because of latent hostility and because, despite promises of equal pay for equal work, they remained

28  J. V. Kostjašov, “Russen und Deutsche in Ostpreussen nach 1945 – Konfrontation oder Integration?,” Annaberger Annalen 7 (1999): 169–70. 29  GAKO f. R297, op. 1, d. 107, l. 128, 17 February 1947.

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non-citizens with no formal rights.30 A Moscow-organized settlement campaign initiated in the fall of 1946 further exacerbated this dynamic: the Soviet population grew to 278,000 by January 1947 and the Germans, once the majority of the population, became a vulnerable minority.31 The influx of settlers strained already low food supplies, just as record-­breaking cold weather triggered a winter famine in 1946–47. Although Soviet settlers faced significant hunger, almost all who died were German.32 Amid this demographic transformation, the oblast government and local party organs faced new pressures of accountability to Moscow, as they were confronted with impossible reconstruction plan targets. They also faced accountability pressures from below: settlers had been lured with promises of free transport, tax incentives, supplies, and guaranteed housing. But as an oblast report noted, there had been “an inaccurate presentation of the real situation and conditions of labor in Kaliningrad oblast [.]” Even those who left Soviet areas destroyed by the Nazis were horrified by the destitution of Kaliningrad.33 New settlers were shocked to find Germans still lived there, and rumors spread that the territory would become ground zero in a future war with Germany. The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) reported that collective farmers from Yaroslavl, for example, had heard (untrue) rumors that “the Russians are killed there daily by the dozens, and [the Germans] cut their fingers off.”34 New settlers vocalized their disappointment in the state of housing and city services by pointing to the capriciousness of low-level administrators, calling into question the superiority of a socialist system being built atop ruins more technologically advanced and visibly wealthy. Many settlers, dismayed by the conditions awaiting them, left the oblast for other parts of the Soviet Union; in some years, more settlers left Kaliningrad than arrived.35

 GAKO f. R332, op. 1, d. 2, l. 163, May 1946.  GAKO f. R310, op. 1, d. 7, l. 13, no date. On 1 August 1946, the number of Germans dropped to 108,000 (due to deaths and revised estimates), while the Soviet population increased to 84,000. By January 1947, the Soviet population was 278,000. GAKO f. R181, op. 10, d. 22; Iu. V. Kostiashov (1996), 82. 32  GAKO f. R237, op. 1, d. 1, l. 9 no date [February or March 1947]. 33  GAKO f. R514, op. 1, d. 51, l. 220; GANIKO f. 1, op. 9, d. 86, l. 33. 34  Kostiashov (1999), 163–4. 35  Svetlana Galcova, “Die Neusiedler auf dem Gebiet Ostpreußens (Kaliningrader Oblast),” Annaberger Annalen 7 (1999): 109. 30 31

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The oblast government came under increasing pressure from above and below to rationalize the state of affairs. By early 1947, rationalizing reconstruction delays by pointing to wartime destruction alone no longer sufficed, and blaming Moscow for untenable expectations was politically dangerous. Soviet party leaders responded by turning the antifascist script against the Germans. The first evidence appears in December 1946, when the Head of the Oblast Ministry for State Security (MGB), Evgenii Vasilievich Rudakov, at a party meeting to discuss reconstruction delays, turned the blame outward. Abandoning earlier antifascist rhetoric of redemption, he attacked the Germans, “our open enemies,” and accused them of plotting “all kinds of sabotage” against Kaliningrad’s industry and food production. Rudakov pointed to scattered reports of individual Germans stealing flour and potatoes—acts of pilfering common among Soviets and Germans alike—but cast this survival tactic as a collective, ideologically driven crime of state sabotage. In the spring of 1947, other party leaders followed the lead. Denouncing the Germans as a fifth column of fascist wreckers, they drew on familiar Soviet scripts of internal enemies. At the same time, this justified Soviet rule—despite material hardship, shoddy construction, shortages, and a city still in ruins—as the only safeguard against fascism’s resurgence. German petty theft, black market trading, prostitution, and even hunger-driven cannibalism were cast as organized anti-Soviet opposition; the Germans’ emaciated bodies, as the carriers of epidemic and venereal disease (no matter the source), served as outward proof not of the failure of Soviet social welfare, but of the Germans’ contamination with fascism. Moscow agencies had repeatedly ignored Kaliningrad’s requests for funding, labor, and supplies, but in the spring and summer of 1947, Kaliningrad party leaders, including Rudakov, the Oblast Secretary for Propaganda, I.  P. Trifonov, and the First Oblast Party Secretary Petr Andreevich Ivanov, effectively mobilized this antifascist scapegoating rhetoric to attract Moscow’s attention. By presenting the Germans as a collective threat to socialist construction in a vulnerable western borderland, Kaliningrad’s leaders set off a chain reaction of discussions within the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs and the Politburo.36 Finally, Party Secretary Ivanov wrote a shrill and desperate letter directly to Stalin in May 1947, blaming conditions in Kaliningrad in part on the Germans. 36  GANIKO f. 1, op. 1, d. 26, ll. 38–9, 25 March 1947; GARF f. A612, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1, 1 February 1947; l. 26, no date [spring of 1947].

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He secured a face-to-face meeting in the Kremlin as a result, but the meeting reportedly went poorly: Ivanov reportedly left Stalin’s office visibly distraught and died under mysterious circumstances (shot with his own pistol and ruled a suicide) soon after returning to Kaliningrad.37 Still, the anti-German rhetoric he mobilized proved successful in attracting Moscow’s attention to Kaliningrad’s perennial reconstruction problems. In June 1947, the RSFSR announced the “Stalin Plan” for Kaliningrad’s economic development, a massive investment package designed to demonstrate to Soviet new settlers the state’s commitment to building socialism in Kaliningrad.38 And finally, after months of silence on the issue, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs announced in October 1947 that Kaliningrad’s entire German population would be expelled to the Soviet Zone of Occupation (the future German Democratic Republic) over the course of the following year.39 By scapegoating the Germans for reconstruction failures, Kaliningrad’s leaders legitimated Soviet rule as necessary to prevent fascist resurgence; it was this rhetoric that enabled the distant periphery to secure greater funding for reconstruction. But as the grand promises of the Stalin Plan fell into familiar patterns of inefficiency, squandered funds, and undelivered supplies by the fall of 1947, Kaliningrad’s Soviet population mobilized the fascist threat once again, blaming the remaining Germans for the ongoing destitution. By the fall of 1947, talk of fascist sabotage merged with early Cold War xenophobia, anti-cosmopolitanism, and rising Russian nationalism. The enemies of the Soviet Union, in other words, were no longer just the Germans, but any Soviet citizens lured by their influence.40 In mid-­ September 1947, Kaliningrad’s Propaganda Secretary Trifonov denounced, for example, “the many cases of cohabitation and friendships between our Russian people, even some of our comrades, with German men and women,” and called cohabitation a “betrayal of interests of one’s Russian nation, interests of one’s country.”41 Thereafter, any local Soviet elites who, in the spirit of the previous version of antifascism, had cooperated too closely with Germans, promoting them at work or befriending them,  GANIKO f. 1, op. 1, d. 62, ll. 4–9, 28 May 1947; Kostiashov (2009), 62.  Iu. V. Kostiashov, “Kaliningradskaia oblast’ v 1947–1948 gg. i plany ee razvitiia,” Voprosy istorii (2008): 109–11. 39  GARF f. 9401c, op. 12, d. 229, ll. 104–6, 14 October 1947. 40  Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence, Revolution and Cold War, 1945–1991 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 25–7. 41  GANIKO f. 197, op. 1, d. 31, l. 171, 16 September 1947. 37 38

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were singled out for public ridicule. Kaliningrad’s new First Party Secretary, Vladimir Vasil’evich Shcherbakov, criticized party members for having allowed Germans into their homes; he denounced three communists who in July 1947 had organized a “Russian-German Celebration Banquet” as an excuse to dance the foxtrot with German women. By March 1948, the party had expelled 84 communists due to “amoral failures,” at least nine of them expressly for living with German women.42

“Prussian Spirit of the Land” Demonizing the Germans allowed local leaders to rationalize reconstruction failures and unify Soviet citizens against a perceived fascist enemy. And at the height of this battle, Soviet leaders began attacking the cityscape itself as fascist. Until mid-1947, Soviet Kaliningrad’s city planners had lauded the city’s prewar architecture, infrastructure, and municipal services for their high level of technical sophistication. A Kaliningrad City Soviet representative, Dolgushin, praised the prewar city for its “exceptionally high-level amenities,” and a city architect, Maksimov, called for Kaliningrad to harness this modern infrastructural system as a foundation for building an even more modern socialist city.43 Modernization had long been a central part of the Soviet project—Bolsheviks proclaimed their revolution would help the lands of the former Russian Empire leap over backwardness into technological modernity. Yet the framing of Sovietization as modernization met with contradictions in Kaliningrad as new settlers struggled to rationalize why “fascism” had provided a better quality of life. By the fall of 1947, as the expulsion and anti-cosmopolitan campaigns began, Königsberg’s planners and architects declared that the cityscape was not modern but simultaneously backward and “fascist.” They rationalized construction delays by conflating the prewar city with the postwar ruins. For example, the Kaliningrad Head of Municipal Services explained at a City Soviet meeting in November 1948 that the Soviet government had to build a communal bath house from scratch because prewar Königsberg had no bathing facilities, when prewar Königsberg had a recreational bath house because private residences had indoor plumbing and 42  Per Brodersen, Die Stadt im Westen: Wie Königsberg Kaliningrad wurde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 82. 43  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 4544, ll. 22–3, 26, no date [late 1946]; d. 3923, l. 21, no date [mid-1947]; GAKO f. R310, op. 1, d. 7, l. 32, no date [before October 1947].

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baths. Another speaker claimed prewar Königsberg had “no communal services” at all, and boasted that the government was “giving out a lot of money” to establish bath houses, hotels, and barbershops.44 In May 1948, Kaliningrad’s head architect Dmitrii Tian declared that the entire “architecture of the German city is alien to Soviet architecture and unacceptable in form and content.”45 Tian found traces of “Prussian militarism” (a frequent stand-in for “fascism”) in the austere facades of northern Gothic nineteenth-century architecture, while simultaneously denouncing the city’s Bauhaus-influenced Weimar architecture as an ominous “Gothic in Constructivism.”46 Because the medieval city had been designed as a Teutonic fortress, some planners even opposed rebuilding the original city center, arguing that the architectural form of the ring city would perpetuate the fascist base of irrationality and militarism, making a socialist superstructure impossible. By 1948, however, upon realizing that the ideal socialist city, Moscow, was also built as a ring, they preserved it in Kaliningrad’s new general plan, borrowing heavily from Moscow’s design.47 The new socialist city, as one building engineer, N. Dychovichnaia, wrote in late 1947, should not “slavishly copy” the city’s old architecture, but be built “in the spirit of Soviet ideology” and in accordance with the “cultural needs of our people.48 But as the city remained in ruins, the ersatz goal became simply to make the city less “fascist” or “Prussian”—that is, less visibly German. In September 1947, Oblast Propaganda Secretary Trifonov declared that the party needed to “wipe out the Prussian spirit from this land once and for all” by eliminating the remaining traces of the city’s fascist past. The city’s “Prussian spirit” seeped out of every facade, Trifonov warned: not only the remains of Nazi monumentalist architecture and nefarious German signage (“Entrance for Jews Prohibited”), but any German signage or foreign architectural forms that might remind Soviet new settlers of the city’s German past.49 As the Kaliningrad City Soviet member Ia. Burakov explained in February 1948, Kaliningrad was supposed to become  GAKO f. R216, op. 1, d. 2, l. 410, 18 November 1948.  Dmitrii Tian, Kaliningradskaia Pravda, 1 May 1948. 46  GAKO f. R520, op. 1, d. 12, l. 1 f. 47  Bert Hoppe, Auf den Trümmern von Königsberg: Kaliningrad 1946–1970 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 55. 48  N.  Dychovichnaia, “Stroit’ po-novomu, po-sovetski,” Kaliningradskaia Pravda, 9 October 1947. 49  GANIKO f. 197, op. 1, d. 31, l. 171, 16 September 1947. 44 45

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“one of the bright and cultured cities of the Soviet Union.” But “wherever you go,” he decried, you see reminders of fascist Prussia. How many signs, plaques, and emblems do we have with Nazi swastikas all over the city? […] I think it’s time that we remove all of this junk and throw it on the garbage heap. [T]he city is Russian, and therefore the signs and street signs should be Russian. […] And we, comrades, have the power to clear away all of it.50

Yet four years later, in May 1952, the Oblast Party Committee still complained of German inscriptions on buildings throughout the oblast.51 Socialism—understood either as modernization or as Russification— proved difficult to achieve. As late as 1959, Kaliningrad still appeared so visibly, ominously German that the film Sud’ba cheloveka (The Fate of a Man) used footage of the city’s old fortifications to represent Auschwitz.52

Ancient Slavic Soil While Kaliningrad’s officials struggled to wipe the “Prussian spirit” from the land, they sought other means to legitimate the annexation. They did so primarily through symbolic place renaming, drawing not only on antifascist imagery, but also on deeply resonant myths based on ethnic nationalism and primordialism. Renaming practices early on had been mostly pragmatic while drawing lightly on antifascist imagery. In 1945, the provisional military administration replaced overtly Nazi names with those celebrating the Soviet victory, such as Victory Square (Ploschad’ Pobedy) and Avenue of Heroes (Prospekt Geroev), but for most names they adopted direct translations from existing German names. Imagining a future for Germans in the city, street names celebrating positive German cultural figures remained, including Mozart, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and others. In mid-1946, the new civilian government added Russian cultural figures alongside the German, including Gorky, Gogol’, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, but still in the spirit of antifascism, they named a street after the German communist martyr Ernst Thälmann.53  GAKO f. R216, op. 1, d. 2, l. 91, 14 February 1948.  GANIKO f. 1, op. 11, d. 17, l. 109f, 30 May 1952. 52  Hoppe (2000), 49. 53  GAKO f. R310, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 1–32, 94. 50 51

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The process changed significantly in mid-1946, when the RSFSR Council of Ministers in Moscow began an oblast-wide project to rename towns, rivers, forests, and other landmarks. Whereas Stalin’s wartime remark that East Prussia was “ancient Slavic soil” had previously gone unnoticed in Kaliningrad, the Council of Ministers sought to confirm the claim by asking scholars from the Academy of Sciences to report on East Prussia’s “ancient Russian-Slavic names.”54 Neighboring Poland and Soviet Lithuania de-Germanized place names in former East Prussian territories, altering the place names to more “authentic” ancient roots. But attempts to follow the same principle in Kaliningrad soon backfired. Moscow ethnographers explained to the Council of Ministers that the few non-German ancient place names in northern East Prussia were not Slavic, but old Lithuanian; whenever Slavic names could be found, they tended to be Polish translations from German.55 In February 1947, members of the Institute for Ethnography in Moscow went so far as to insist that “no ancient-Slavic names exist” at all, and that (contradicting Stalin) the region “was never Slavic,” but old Prussian and Lithuanian.56 Some Soviet ethnographers argued that the region should revive the old Lithuanian names. As P. I. Pakarklis, a specialist on the Lithuanian people’s struggle against the Teutonic Knights, explained, “Lithuanian is a language of a Soviet republic,” and some elderly inhabitants of the oblast (meaning the Germans) even still spoke Lithuanian.57 But if Soviet Russian collective farmers moved to lands with ancient Lithuanian names, Russians risked themselves being construed as imperial colonizers of land rightly belonging to the Soviet Lithuanian people. Abandoning this politically charged prospect, the Moscow renaming team chose instead to demonstrate Kaliningrad’s inherent Russianness by translating the formerly German Baltic landscape into the Russian language, so that former East Prussia’s flat meadows, sandy dunes, and dark pine forests, previously depicted as sinister and ominously German, became familiar spaces in Russia’s symbolic geography. Thus, half of resulting new place names stripped the land of all historical context, whether Teutonic, Lithuanian, or “ancient Slavic.” But for half of major  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 3923, l. 81, 20 April 1946.  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 3923, ll. 82–82b, 3 May 1946. 56  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 5950, l. 65, 13 February 1947. 57  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 4950. ll. 67–9, 12 February 1947; d. 5950, ll. 40–41, 20 February 1947. 54 55

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oblast towns, they chose another principle for staking claim to the land— naming places in honor of the Russian and Soviet military leaders who had spilled their blood on German soil. The town of Stallupönen thus became Nesterov, after a hero of the Soviet Union martyred there in 1945; Gumbinnen became Gusev, after another fallen Soviet hero. Preußisch Eylau became Bagrationovsk, after the Georgian prince who died for the Russian state at Borodino outside Moscow in 1812.58 Thus the soil of Kaliningrad oblast became rightfully Russian because it was soaked in Russian blood. Although the myth was abandoned as untenable by Moscow ethnographers, Stalin’s nod to “ancient Slavic soil” offered Kaliningraders powerful language for legitimating the Soviet annexation. As the head architect Tian wrote in November 1947, “the territory of East Prussia—ancient Slavic soil, which found itself for centuries imprisoned—has been returned to its true owners.”59 Blending antifascism and ethnic primordialism, the Oblast First Party Secretary Shcherbakov wrote that the Soviet army had “liquidated the most dangerous base of war and reaction and given the Slavs back their ancient land.”60 Just as making Kaliningrad socialist was a means to safeguard the land from fascist resurgence, so, too, was restoring it to its rightful Russian owners.61 New settlers to Kaliningrad increasingly declared Kaliningrad’s sacred inheritance, insisting that Königsberg—the city whose architecture and people had spawned the germ-seed of fascism—had been built on ancient Slavic soil. At the Stalingrad neighborhood Soviet meeting in Kaliningrad in December 1947, for example, the speaker I.  G. Gavrilin opened the proceedings with the declaration that “we are gathered for the first time on our ancient Slavic soil, which for 700 years was under the heel of the Teutonic Knights, as well as German-fascist bandits.” And “the heroic Russian people” under the leadership of comrade Stalin defended the native land and “in brutal battle with the German invaders, secured the freedom and independence of our motherland, and liberated these ancient

58  GARF f. A259, op. 6, d. 5950, l. 65, 13 February 1947. Bagration was also the code name for the Soviet offensive during the initial invasion in 1944. 59   Dmitrii Tian, “Sovetskii gorod Kaliningrad,” Kaliningradskaia Pravda, 7 November 1947. 60  V.  V. Shcherbakov, Stalinskaia Programma khoziastvennogo i kul’turnogo stroitel’stva Kaliningradskoi oblasti (Vilnius: Sovetskaia Litva, 1947), 3 f. 61  Hoppe (2000), 46.

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Slavic lands from the invaders once and for all.”62 Thus, the foundational myth was complete: Kaliningrad proved its legitimacy not only through antifascism, but also through blood and soil. By adopting the myth of ancient Slavic soil, Kaliningraders present themselves similarly to the inhabitants of other Soviet and Eastern European cities occupied during the war, as a land liberated from the fascist yoke and perennial German oppression. But Kaliningrad was different in that, even after the liberation of the soil, the cityscape itself needed to be continually reconquered, lest the city’s remaining fascist elements reassert themselves and spawn an ideological contagion. This myth of liberation legitimated the Soviet population’s rightful ownership of the land. In doing so, it helped obscure the uncomfortable reality that confronted the new settlers wherever they looked: that they were living in a city that for the past 700 years had belonged to another civilization, one more prosperous than their own.

Conclusion Kaliningrad was a place where victors and vanquished lived side by side and the state adopted antifascist legitimating rhetoric to appeal to both, but in ultimately contradictory ways. Why did some of these articulations of antifascism fail to take root while others blossomed? A primary reason is that attempts to rehabilitate the Germans had no clear measure for success—no means for Germans to be declared individually or collectively redeemed and therefore eligible to become Soviet citizens. Germans were supposed to rehabilitate themselves through socialist labor and loyalty to the new government, but with no other measure for success, German rehabilitation became tied implicitly to the pace of postwar reconstruction. As conditions deteriorated in the winter of 1946–47, however, Soviet officials, under pressure to rationalize reconstruction failures, blamed the high death rates and emaciated bodies of German workers not on the Soviet state’s inability to provide, but on the Germans’ collective contamination with fascism. Another factor was that the Germans themselves, unlike their Soviet civilian counterparts, could never mobilize antifascism as a language of entitlement. The Soviet government originated ostensibly to tend to the affairs of the German population but never involved formal German  GAKO f. R541, op. 1, d. 1, 27 December 1947.

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representation, meaning that no “good” German communists could serve as representatives for any emergent state narrative of German heroic resistance against the Nazis or of collective victimhood at the hands of the “Hitler Clique.” As the historian Clara Oberle has shown in the case of Berlin, antifascism most strongly took root as a legitimating rhetoric when these narratives could be mobilized by individuals to benefit their material circumstances.63 Kaliningrad’s Germans, as a stateless people, remained perpetually complicit, with no grounds to demand rights or recourse. In the economy of shortages, Soviet citizens received priority access to scarce supplies, food, and housing, and by 1947, Soviet civilians increasingly drew on antifascism as a language of entitlement. They did so by referring to their wartime service, both in Kaliningrad and elsewhere across the Soviet Union, in what the historian Mark Edele describes as a veterans’ “entitlement community.”64 Given the resonance of antifascism, why did Kaliningrad’s local officials and new settlers also turn toward ethnic primordialism to justify the annexation? The case shares surprising commonalities with other contexts in which Eastern European national majorities combined postwar antifascism with ethnic nationalism to justify expulsions and assert state legitimacy. This combination ultimately held such strong appeal even in places such as Kaliningrad, where ethnicity-based historical claims to the territory were harder to conjure. While antifascism held great power on its own, it gained the most traction when paired with ethnic nationalism. Stalin’s offhand remark that East Prussia was “Slavic soil” corresponded with the turn toward ethnic primordialism in Soviet nationalities policy since the late 1930s.65 In Kaliningrad, when the ruins of a prosperous enemy civilization threatened to undermine the Soviet state’s claims to technical superiority, this turn toward ethnic primordialism served to bolster the legitimacy of Soviet socialism. In denouncing the ruins of Königsberg as fascist and its former German inhabitants as occupiers of ancient Slavic soil, Kaliningrad’s new residents successfully fused postwar antifascism with Russian nationalism, and in doing so, justified the expulsions and the annexation of a once-German land.

 Oberle (2012).  Edele (2008), 185. 65  Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (December 1998): 860. 63 64

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———. 2008. Kaliningradskaia oblast’ v 1947–1948 gg. i plany ee razvitiia. Voprosy istorii 5: 105–113. ———. 2009. Stalin i Kaliningradskaia Oblast’: Popytka Istoricheskoi Rekonstruktsii. Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XVIII: 57–70. Leiserowitz, Ruth. 2015. Memel Territory. In The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories, 1935–1945, ed. Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh, 136–156. New York: Berghahn Books. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2018. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. 3rd rev. and expanded ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mandel’shtam, Iu.I., ed. 1956. Sbornik zakonov SSSR i ukazov Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. 1938 g.–iiul’ 1956 g. Moscow: Gostdarsvennoe Izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi Literatury. Martin, Terry. 1998, December. The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing. Journal of Modern History 70 (4): 813–861. Meindl, Erich. 2011. Vorposten und Grenzland: Ostpreussische Identitäten, 1933–1945. Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XXIII: 179–187. Naimark, Norman. 1995. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Oberle, Clara M. 2012. Reconfiguring Postwar Antifascism: Reflections on the History of Ideology. New German Critique 117: 135–153. Roberts, Geoffrey. 1999. The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence, Revolution and Cold War, 1945–1991. New York: Routledge. Senn, Alfred Erich. 1958, May. The Sovietization of the Baltic States. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 317: 123–129. Shcherbakov, V.V. 1947. Stalinskaia Programma khoziastvennogo i kul’turnogo stroitel’stva Kaliningradskoi oblasti. Vilnius: Sovetskaia Litva. Sovetskii Soiuz na mezhdunarodnykh konferentsiiakh perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi vojny 1941–1945 gg. Tom II. Tegeranskaia konferentsiia rukovoditelej trekh soiuznykh derzhav—SSSR, SShA i Velikobritaniii (28 noiabria–1 dekabria 1943 g.). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury. 1984. Thum, Gregor. 2011. Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tumarkin, Nina. 1995. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books.

“The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka”: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing Karolina Panz

Introduction Ethnic cleansing is defined as a deliberate action intended to eliminate a socially determined category of people from a given area. Such an action combines violence, persecution, and even murder to frighten and weaken the target group with a view to quickly achieving the aforementioned goal.1 Although the concept of ethnic cleansing did not become mainstream until the conflict in the territory of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Joanna Michlic, a historian and author of Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, argues that the wave of violence 1  Lech M.  Nijakowski, Rozkosz zemsty. Socjologia historyczna mobilizacji ludobójczej (Warsaw: Scholar, 2014), 82; Benjamin Liberman, “Ethnic Cleansing versus Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42–60.

K. Panz (*) Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_3

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directed at the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust observed in Poland in the aftermath of World War II, which accounted for over a thousand deaths and resulted in tens of thousands of Jews deciding to flee Poland due to antisemitism, is in fact a classic example of ethnic cleansing.2 This chapter discusses events which took place in Rabka in the summer of 1945, mere months after the war. The events in question had no precedent in Polish–Jewish relations and are hardly comparable to other instances of postwar violence. The three armed assaults that I discuss here targeted Jewish children, Holocaust survivors, most of whom were orphans. Rabka is a small locality in southern Poland, in a region called Podhale, approximately 70 kilometers from Kraków. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Rabka became a renowned health resort frequented by thousands of patients, most of whom were Jews hailing from Kraków. They were instrumental in creating, at the end of the nineteenth century, the famous therapeutic camp for Jewish children. Throughout its 50-year history, the health camp benefited more than 10,000 patients from the poorest Jewish families from Kraków and throughout Poland.3 In the 1930s, Rabka was home to 450 Jewish residents; they accounted for 8 percent of the population.4 These Jews owned inns and private guest rooms, ran shops, and provided various artisanal services. None were famous or particularly wealthy. They lived among the highlanders, the native inhabitants of Podhale who take pride in their rich tradition and distinct culture. Representatives of the two ethnicities lived side by side, sharing streets, backyards, and stairwells; Rabka did not have a uniquely Jewish district. There was no separate common school either, so Polish 2  Joanna Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 217. Julian Kwiek, who has been studying postwar murders, calculated that at least 1074–1121 Jews died (Julian Kwiek, Nie chcemy Zydów u siebie. Przejawy wrogos ́ci wobec Zydów w latach 1944–1947 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nieoczywiste, 2021). For more on the postwar violence in Podhale region and its victims, see Karolina Panz, “Why Did They, Who Had Suffered So Much and Endured, Have to Die?” The Jewish Victims of Armed Violence in Podhale (1945–1947),” Holocaust Studies and Materials. Journal of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research 2017 (2019): 148–211. 3  Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska, “Ku poprawie zdrowia fizycznego i ‘utrzymaniu duszy dziecięcej w atmosferze słonecznej i radosnej’  – lecznicza kolonia wakacyjna dla dzieci zydowskich w Rabce (1890–1939),” Studia Historyczne, no. 231 (2015): 349–66. 4  “Ziemia. Ilustrowany dwutygodnik krajoznawczy,” 1931, vol. 16, www.wbc.poznan.pl, 201; Yad Vashem Archive (YVA), O.6/410, Wykaz dotycza ̨cy liczby Zydów powiatu nowotarskiego, 2.

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and Jewish children shared school space. This remained the case until 1939. During World War II, virtually all of Rabka’s Jews perished, as well as those Jews who happened to be in Rabka under the Nazi occupation. Most Jews from the latter category were pre-war resort patients and visitors from Kraków who had been expelled from their city by the Germans in 1940.5

The End of the War and the Foundation of the “Children’s Home” Only three Jewish residents of Rabka lived to see the end of the war in their hometown. They were Frania Netzer, her mother Jetti, and cousin Szymon Pistrauch. They had survived 28 months hidden in terrible conditions, mostly prostrated under the roof of villa Truskawka where they had formerly lived. No one knew about their hideout during the war, including their Polish neighbor Eleonora Wagner, who left food for them at a designated place but did not know the exact location of the hideout and did not reveal even to her husband that she was helping them. Frania’s account, recorded in Israel in the 1960s, is the only Jewish account from the end of the war in Rabka: On January 28, 1945, I was liberated. I entered Wagnerowa’s home and I made my appearance. Her husband was taken aback. He didn’t know what was happening to him—where did I come from? I was all black, incredibly dirty. Wagnerowa allowed me to wash myself, she gave me food and let me go to sleep. We were the only ones in Rabka after the liberation. There were no more Jews living here. There were some individual Jews who returned from the camps and stayed with us for a few days. A Jewish camp for children was created for the children rescued from Auschwitz.6

5   On the expulsion of Kraków’s Jews, see Alicja Jarkowska-Natkaniec, Wymuszona współpraca czy zdrada? Wokół kolaboracji Zydów w okupowanym Krakowie (Kraków: Universitas, 2018), 37–51. 6  Ibid., 30–31.

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The aforementioned “Jewish camp for children” was in fact “a therapeutic and educational Children’s Home,”7 whose foundation had been planned as early as February 1945 by the Temporary Committee of Jewish Aid in Kraków (later named the Voivodeship Jewish Committee in Kraków). The institution was founded to welcome the children who sought help at the Kraków chapter of the Committee. Those children had either fled their hideouts or returned from Nazi camps,8 including those brought from Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviets.9 They were ill, malnourished, and traumatized. They required treatment and assistance from specialists, which no one could provide in Kraków at that time, given that the Committee’s Długa 38 quarters (which catered to the entire Kraków Voivodeship) already housed a registration office for the surviving Jews, administrative offices, a kitchen, a temporary shelter, as well as a doctor’s surgery and a hospital ward. As well as 250 homeless adults, approximately 100 children lived there: “our protégés sleep on the floor without pallets or straw. We cannot leave them like that because of their health condition,” Committee authorities reported in February 1945.10 Another pressing problem was the treatment of children suffering from tuberculosis, “either because of the hospitals being filled beyond capacity, or due to […] a particular attitude of some medical and sanitary staff towards Jewish children.”11 Kraków’s Jewish Committee turned to the Voivodeship authorities with a request to lobby Rabka’s mayor to gain his approval for the project.12 It appears that even at that stage, the local authorities

7  Archiwum Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, hereafter AZIH), 303/I/7, Plan pracy CKZP na maj 1945 r., May 1945, 34. “Children’s home” is the popular term for an orphanage in Poland, hence many sources refer to the Rabka institute as an “orphanage,” even if its purpose was considerably different. 8  Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Archive in Kraków, hereafter ANKr), UW II 69/05, Pismo Tymczasowego Komitety Pomocy dla Ludności Zydowskiej w Krakówie do Wydziału Wyzywienia Zarza ̨du Miejskiego w Krakówie, 26 February 1945, 37. 9  AZIH, 303/II/75, Sprawozdanie z działalności Wojewódzkiego Komitetu Zydowskiego w Krakówie od 1 II – 31 X 1945 r., 8 December 1945, 214. 10  ANKr, UW II 69/05, Pismo Tymczasowego Komitetu Pomocy dla Ludności Zydowskiej w Krakowie do Prezydium Miasta Krakowa, 5 February 1945, 12. 11  AZIH, 303/II/75, Sprawozdanie z działalności WKZ w Krakowie od 1 II – 31 X 1945 r., 8 December 1945, 214. 12  AZIH, 303/IX/1186, Pismo Komitetu Zydowskiego w Krakowie do krakowskiego Wydziału Opieki Społecznej, 26 March 1945, 33.

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created hurdles to prevent the foundation of a Jewish “Children’s Home.”13 The search for a suitable place continued for many months.14 Finally, in June 1945, the Committee members were able to rent three neighboring villas named Stasin, Juras, and Niemen. I have been unable to find any documents that might shed light on the decision process or why these particular buildings were deemed suitable. Their very location seems to have been the worst possible choice, considering how hurt and traumatized the children were from the war and the Holocaust; the three buildings rested on a hill just 100 meters from villa Tereska, home to the famous Schule der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD im GG (School for Commanders of Security Police [SiPo] and Security Services [Sicherheitsdienst, SD] in the Generalgouvernement). During the war, this school gained fame as a unique institution whose curriculum required trainee functionaries to learn techniques of torture and manslaughter.15 After the war, everyone who walked toward the “Children’s Home” buildings had to pass not only the School quarters, but also the drill ground and the enormous stairway leading up to it. The stairway, adorned with a Nazi eagle, was made from marble Matzevot which had been collected from local Jewish cemeteries and deliberately placed upside-down. Moreover, the woods immediately behind villa Tereska (visible from the windows of the buildings in which the children were staying) were the site of mass graves of hundreds of Jewish victims killed at the hands of the School’s trainees.

13  Ibid., Pismo Wydziału Pracy i Opieki Społecznej w Krakowie do Zarza ̨du Miejskiego w Rabce, 34. 14  Ibid., List Przewodnicza ̨cego Wojewódzkiego Komitetu Zydowskiego w Krakowie do Centralnego Komitetu Zydowskiego w Warszawie, 2 May 1945, 15. 15  Michał Rapta, Wojciech Tupta, and Grzegorz Moskal, Mroczne sekrety willi “Tereska” 1939–1945 (Wadowice: Grafikon, 2009), 111; Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej Oddział w Krakowie (Archive of the Kraków Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, hereafter AIPN Kr), 075/1/4, Policja Państwowa  – opracowanie Adama Latawca, 22 November 1950, 33; AIPN Okręgowa Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu w Krakowie (District Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation in Kraków, hereafter AIPN OK Kr), Ds. 6/70//26, Zeznanie Abrahama Schiffeldrina, 22 February 1968, 177–83; YVA, O.33/3232, Relacja Jehudy Kestenbauma, October 1966 r., 12.

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The Children The first children arrived at the Rabka “Children’s Home” on 1 July 1945,16 in successive groups of 35. Rabka became a new home to the most unwell children, a majority of whom were orphans from Kraków, Warsaw, Łódź, and other towns. By 30 July, the house was full.17 The list of orphaned children features 116 surnames.18 Among the names can be found Wolf Dziewięcki, a boy who was only two when the war broke out and who survived the Łódź ghetto and concentration camps.19 Nachum Bogner survived on his own in forest bunkers in the vicinity of Przemyślany after losing his parents at the hands of Ukrainian peasants in 1943.20 Benek Brander was barely eight years old when his mother died in the cellar they were using as their hideout.21 Ludwik Rympel, born in 1935, had seen his parents, in utter despair, attempt to take their own lives and that of their son. The boy survived because blood would not flow from his veins.22 Jerzy Cyns had gone through German camps in Płaszów, Gross-Rosen, and Auschwitz, where he had been subject to medical experiments and tattooed three times. This seven-year-old boy arrived in Rabka seriously ill.23 Each of the 116 children from the “Children’s Home” had experienced the hell of the Holocaust in one way or another. Gusta Teiber (married name Snyde), herself a survivor of the Kraków ghetto and German concentration camps, attended to the children as a nurse. She tried to heal both the psychological and physical wounds inflicted by the years of horror:24

16  AZIH, 303/IX/1186, List Przewodnicza ̨cego WKZ w Krakowie do Centralnego Komitetu Zydowskiego w Warszawie, 21 June 1945, 20–21. 17  Ibid., List Przewodnicza ̨cego WKZ w Krakowie do Centralnego Komitetu Zydowskiego w Warszawie, 30 July 1945, 40. 18  AZIH, 303/IX/1405, Wykaz imienny dzieci przebywaja ̨cych na leczeniu, August 1945, 1. 19  AZIH, 303/IX/86, Karta Dziecka: Wolf Dziewięcki, ca September 1945, 145. 20  Ibid., Karta Dziecka: Nachum Bogner, ca September 1945, 77. 21  Ibid., Karta Dziecka: Benek Brander, ca September 1945, 89. 22  AZIH, 301/626, Relacja Ludwika Rympela, 1945, 10. 23  USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Visual History Archive (hereafter VHA), Interview 635, Testimony of Jerzy Cyns. 24  Cf. Joanna Michlic, “‘The War Began for Me After the War’: Jewish Children in Poland, 1945–49,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 482–97.

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[…] so we start to try to heal, to restore the children’s health. Some […], when they put a little boy to bed, saw him run away. He never […] had been, all his life, in bed. He was maybe five and a half, about six. He spent the whole time living and sleeping on a staircase under the roof. So I [was in charge of] one who was all the time, for five years, in darkness. So he couldn’t open his eyes and stand the light of day. He was going around like that, feeling the walls, learning […] to walk. I got one child who was […] walking on his hands and knees because of the long time he had been hiding in such a small place that he couldn’t stand up. So he was four, maybe five years in that poor position. So he was learning to get up straight […]. Some children had difficulty talking even, because […] they hadn’t had anyone to talk to for years, and there were more cases like that.25

The staff did their utmost to provide the children with the best possible environment. Janek Machauf, a teenage boy who was treated for tuberculosis in Rabka, wrote to his mother in a letter: “The institute comprises three modern and spacious villas. Our beds are all equipped with blankets, mattresses and pillows. Everything is immaculate, the beds, the sheets, all the furnishings, even the walls and windows are pleasant to look at.”26 Róza Silberberg, who arrived in Rabka as an 11-year-old, confessed that she had not experienced such luxury in a long time. She was surprised by the generous amount of food and the offers of second helpings. Thanks to the Joint parcels, the children were given personal sets of clothes; Róza received a dress and a pair of shoes.27

 VHA, Interview 9219, Testimony of Gusta Snyde.  Letter of Jan Machauf, 31 July 1945, in: Janina Naskalska-Babik, “Jest mi tu dobrze i zyję w dobrych warunkach pod kazdym względem’ Historia Janka Machaufa, zydowskiego dziecka z rabczańskiego sierocińca i jego listy do matki z lata 1945 roku,” in Judaista Studenckie Czasopismo Naukowe, no. 8 (2021): 70. 27  Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library, Rose S.  Holocaust testimony (HVT-1740); VHA, Interview 33261, Testimony of Rose Silberberg-­Skier. 25 26

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The Violence The only bothersome aspect of the children’s new life in the “Children’s Home” was their limited freedom. Their guardians had good reason to fear for their safety. In early summer of 1945, a pogrom took place in Rzeszów (south-east Poland, approximately 200 kilometers from Rabka). Across the country, an increasing number of Jews who were returning to their homes received threats, became targets of assaults, or even lost their lives.28 The Rabka “Children’s Home” received written threats and several boys were insulted and beaten on their way back from the barber’s.29 Even the youngest children received threats while playing in the woods. On 11 August 1945, Kraków witnessed a pogrom, and only a day later the Rabka “Children’s Home” was attacked for the first time.30 On the night of 12/13 August, 96 children were sleeping in the three “Children’s Home” buildings, with a few female staff members on duty.31 As Janek Machauf wrote several hours after the attack, “At about 1 AM, a light grenade was hurled towards the Niemen villa. No casualties. We were under fire from bullets until 3 AM. At first, the shooters were close, later they retreated to nearby hills. I don’t know everything, I just heard footsteps outside and a few shots close by.”32 Anna Górska, a kitchen assistant in one of the buildings, described the effects of the explosion to the Jewish Committee a few hours later: “The children are in terrible turmoil. There was no militia or any other authorities on the premises.”33 She also said of the aftermath of the attack: “There was a hole between 10 and 15 centimeters in perimeter in the floor, the windows were broken, the walls damaged, medical equipment broken, the long chair turned upside down in one of the rooms, and the underwear from the chair scattered all around.”34

28  ANKr, Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość (WiN), 7, Rozkaz nr 46 o tępieniu wysta ̨pień antysemickich, 13 August 1945, 41. 29  VHA, Interview 43707, Testimony of Roman Ferber. 30  On the Kraków pogrom, see Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 31  VHA, Interview 9219, Testimony of Gusta Snyde; AZIH, 303/IX/1406, Spis personelu dla Rabki, 1945. 32  Letter of Jan Machauf, 13 August 1945, in: Naskalska-Babik, p. 74. 33   Ghetto Fighters House Archive (hereafter GFHA), Holdings Registry, 1399, Wojewódzka Zydowska Komisja Historyczna w Krakowie. Sprawy antysemityzmu, Napad na sierociniec w Rabce, not dated, 13. 34  Ibid.

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Sheer luck saved a 13-year-old girl in an isolation ward when a grenade landed next to her bed. The girl dropped to the floor, but did not suffer any serious injury.35 Immediately after the Rabka assault, 28 children left Rabka to join parents or relatives. The remaining children received further threats. Anna Ostrowska, who removed her children from Rabka on 14 August, informed the Kraków Committee of threats directed at both the Polish employees of the “Children’s Home” and food providers: “The woman who used to deliver dairy products refused further cooperation citing an order she had received. She cannot tell us who gave it and what would happen to her if she did not comply. The local staff resigned and declared they would not come to work anymore. To justify their decision, they said that someone had threatened to shave their heads should they fail to comply.”36 Provisions for the Jewish children had to be brought from Kraków, as many as 70 kilometers away from Rabka.37 The local authorities did not delegate anyone to write a report; more than a dozen hours had elapsed before they informed the director of the “Children’s Home” that they “cannot contain the situation and they cannot guarantee that the Jewish children at the resort will remain safe and sound.”38 The omnipresent climate of terror and the peculiar conduct of the local militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO) officers who sided with the attackers were reflected in the children’s letters received by the Kraków Committee: “Those who assaulted us today threaten us with further assaults. The militia has been involved in the plot […] this place is very dangerous.”39 In response, the Voivodeship Jewish Committee resolved to dispatch ten armed men from Kraków, tasked with protecting the “Children’s Home.”40 The second assault took place on 19 August 1945, just six days after the first. Gusta Teiber described it as follows: Then Saturday came, and […] at night they start using their guns. And the children have been asleep. […] the bedrooms have a lot of windows to get 35  AIPN Kr, 0125/207, t. 2, Protokół oględzin miejsca przestępstwa, 1 September 1945, 10. 36  GFHA, Holdings Registry, 1399, Podburzanie do bojkotu, not dated, 8. 37  VHA, Interview 9219, Testimony of Gusta Snyde. 38  ANKr, WiN 42, Sprawozdanie z zajść antysemickich w Krakowie 11 i 12 sierpnia 1945 r., 33–4. 39  GFHA, Holdings Registry, 1399, Wyja ̨tki z listów dzieci, not dated, 14. 40  AIPN Kr, 0125/207, t. 2, Zeznanie Bronisława Roznera, 1 September 1945, 7.

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the, like, air in. And the beds are near the windows. I was afraid that the […] broken glass, when they start using their guns, will cut them. So […] I started taking the children—they have been asleep, half asleep—out of the beds, pushing them into the corridor, then putting them on the floor where there was no light, no window, […] they even cut our telephone lines, so that we couldn’t ring for the police to come to our rescue.41

This time, all the buildings were under fire from both manual and automatic guns. Grenades were also thrown.42 On the following day, a militia unit of 11 men arrived to protect the “Children’s Home,” delegated by the County Civil Militia Station in the nearby town of Nowy Targ.43 From then on, the children went on walks escorted,44 and their bedrooms were moved to windowless corridors and cellars in the expectation of another assault. The third assault came on the night of 26/27 August (Sunday/ Monday). The attackers used pistols, machine guns, and grenades, and even fired a rocket-propelled grenade.45 The cannonade lasted several hours but the Rabka militia failed to dispatch any units to the site;46 the children’s guardians made fruitless attempts to reach the militia by phone.47 The extant sources do not indicate clearly whether the connection had been blocked by phone operators at the post office or, possibly, whether the militia officers had been notified but chose not to answer the call. The first shots from the Public Security Office (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB), whose headquarters were situated on the same street, were directed at the attackers only two hours later. Immediately after the assault, a “Special Report” was prepared for the Politics and Education Section of the Voivodeship Chapter of the Civil Militia in Kraków. The report read: “The officers who were on duty in Rabka headquarters, as well as the functionaries of the local UB did not make any move to fend off the attacks on the ‘Children’s Home.’ The reasons behind the absence of the MO unit and

 VHA, Interview 9219, Testimony of Gusta Snyde.  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Zeznania Anieli Ła ̨ckiej, 23 August 1950, 130. 43  AIPN Kr, 0125/207, t. 2, Zeznanie Antoniego Kamińskiego, 1 September 1945, 8. 44  AZIH, 301/7149, Relacja Józefa Jamy, 1 February 1985, 2–3. 45  AIPN Kr, 110/4235, Zeznania Andrzeja Palarczyka ps. “Komar,” 4 August 1950, 37–8. 46  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Zeznanie Stefana Rybickiego, 4 April 1950, 279. 47  AIPN Kr, 0125/207, t. 2, Zapiski dochodzenia, 29 August 1945, 3. 41 42

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their failure to defuse the conflict are currently being investigated.”48 On the basis of the 1 September 1945 “Crime Scene Report,” one can conclude that the buildings were also destroyed by dum dum bullets, and that the most damage to the walls and windows was reported on the northern flank of the building. 49 The attackers secured their positions in the woods, the same woods in which a mass execution of the local Jewish people had been carried out only three years earlier. The Rabka “Children’s Home” closed down a day after the assault, on 28 August 1945. All children who could do so returned to their parents. Gusta Teiber accompanied the children who were most severely ill, as well as those who had no guardian, to the Zakopane “Children’s Home” managed by Lena Kuechler. The latter noted that the children transferred from Rabka had lost weight and their health had deteriorated due to the constant fear of further assaults.50

The Perpetrators The direct perpetrators of these three acts of violence were teenage students from Dr. Jan Wieczorkowski All-Boys Private Resort High School in Rabka. They were members of the school unit of the Resistance Movement of the Home Army (Ruch Oporu Armii Krajowej, ROAK), one of many organizations founded in Poland soon after the war to continue the legacy of the Home Army (AK), the armed forces of the Polish Underground during World War II dissolved in January 1945, and to combat the communist government. The students from Rabka who were active in ROAK formed a scout troop comprising roughly a dozen individuals.51 In the third assault, they were aided by local ROAK partisans who were not associated with Wieczorkowski School. This private school was attended by the children of the local elite. Rabka’s elite in 1945 consisted of teachers, doctors, pharmacists, local 48  AIPN Kr, 0125/207, t. 2, Raport specjalny nowotarskiego komendanta powiatowego MO, 27 August 1945, 16. 49  Ibid., Protokół oględzin miejsca przestępstwa, 1 September 1945, 10. 50  GFHA, Holdings Registry, 023135, Uwagi o Olesiu Aronowiczu, 1946 r., 10. 51  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Protokół przesłuchania Józefa Hojoła, 8 February 1950, 86. It was Władysław Sikorski Scouting Team, the so-called Yellow Second (Zółta Dwójka: II Druzyna Harcerzy im. Gen. Władysława Sikorskiego w Rabce-Zdroju 1945–1948. Ludzie, czasy, zdarzenia, ed. Jerzy Janowiec and Jerzy Klimiński (Rabka-Zdrój: Handel i Usługi ATK. Anna Klimińska. Sklep Filatelistyczno-Numizmatyczny, 2005.

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entrepreneurs, hotel owners, and commune authorities. They maintained a close relationship with the local clergy, the parson Rev. Mateusz Zdebski and vicar Rev. Józef Hojoł. This social circle held regular meetings at the rectory and in private homes to play bridge and discuss social and political issues of the day, brought together by shared criticism of communism. Some of them sympathized with or belonged to local structures of the conservative and nationalistic political movement: the National Democracy (known also as Endecja, from its abbreviation ND).52 Rev. Hojoł was held in particular esteem by the residents of Rabka. He was the leader of the local Catholic Youth Association and a scout district; he also taught religion at Wieczorkowski School.53 The scouts were additionally overseen by another of Hojoł’s bridge companions, Edmund Chodak, who taught Polish at the school. The boys who attacked the Jewish “Children’s Home” were scouts and former pupils of the two men. The leader who orchestrated the attacks, Mieczysław Klempka, was a 19-year-old school student whose father, a hotel owner in downtown Rabka, was also part of the bridge club.54 Following the second assault, a second meeting was arranged at the home of the Klempkas. This is how it was described by one of the attendees, Rev. Hojoł: Klempka Mieczysław, alias “Cat” […], a gymnasium student, son of Klempka Władysław […] gave an account immediately after the assault […], how they completed the assault […]: they hurled grenades, how they damaged the electrical light, terrible shrieks of children, the nurses were running around with candles […] Klempka Władysław […] criticized his son’s activity […], 52  AIPN Kr, 010/9916, Raport z wywiadu, 19 July 1952, k. 96; ibid., Charakterystyka dziekana z Rabki Zdebskiego Mateusza, 26 August 1952, 94–5. 53  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Protokół przesłuchania Anny Bali, 11 April 1950, 338–9. 54  I have been able to establish the following identities of assault participants: Mieczysław Klempka, Stanisław Wróbel, Jan Czyszczoń, Edward Górny, Henryk Kręcioch, Zbigniew Lisowski, Edward Liszka, Jerzy Ła ̨czyński, Andrzej Palarczyk, Adam Półtorak, Stanisław Pyka, Franciszek Śmietana, Władysław Śmietana, Marian Topór, and a nephew of Rev. Hojoł, alias “Lot” (ibid., Zeznanie Stanisława Wróbla, 18 January 1950, 208; AIPN Kr, 110/4235, Zeznania Andrzeja Palarczyka ps. “Komar,” 4 August 1950, 37–8). From the local ROAK group: Edward Palarczyk, Mieczysław Blacharczyk, Franciszek Janowiec, Jan Karkula, Stanisław Kramarczyk, Mieczysław Mlekodaj, Edward Piwowarczyk, Stanisław Skowroński, Jan Świder, his cousin (name unknown) (ibid., Zeznania Andrzeja Palarczyka ps. “Komar,” 4 August 1950, 37–8), as well as Jan Osiecki and Teofil Papierz (ibid., Zeznania Stanisława Pyki, 14 August 1950, 93).

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so I reacted to it […] and said, it is not a big thing, if groups of Jews are driven away, as long as there are no accidents […], I praised the deeds […]. Then I reported the news to professor Chodak […]. I, Hojoł Józef, based on my personal conviction approved of the organized assault on the Jewish orphanage, with the endorsement of professor Chodak.55

A meeting during which a teenage student “reports” on yet another assault on Jewish children clearly demonstrates that the members of the local elite knew perfectly well who the perpetrators of those violent acts were. Moreover, the shooters assaulting the “Children’s Home” included Rev. Hojoł’s nephew and a son of the organist from the local parish, who was also a bridge regular.56 Rev. Hojoł apparently used to say that the current regime persecuted religion and guaranteed no freedom of confession. He also claimed that Poland was governed by Jews.57 Moreover, Hojoł was believed to have authored the letters that Mieczysław Klempka left for the managers of the “Children’s Home” before the assaults, which threatened that unless the children left the territory of Rabka, repressive measures would be used to drive them away.58 Another bridge companion was the commander of Rabka militia, Józef Zaja ̨c; it was he who failed to react to the shootings directed at the buildings housing the Jewish children. Soon after the assaults, Captain Stefan Rybicki, a member of the postwar underground, inquired about the fate of the Jews in Rabka. Edmund Chodak was heard responding to him: “no jewriej [Jew in Russian] will come near here, for we will drive him away.”59 Substantial evidence points to the fact that the most important people in the small locality of Rabka not only knew the perpetrators of the assaults on the children, but also approved of such violence, or even facilitated it. The case regarding the assaults on the “Children’s Home” was investigated in court only twice. The first hearing concerned the three individuals from the ROAK unit charged with assaulting the children. The indictment written in 1950 contained a rather curious passage: “In August 1945 in the town of Rabka, alongside approximately thirty other members 55  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Protokół przesłuchania Józefa Hojoła, 4 April 1950, 104. A similar account was delivered by another attendee, Anna Bala (ibid., Protokół przesłuchania Anny Bali, 11 April 1950 r., 339). 56  AIPN Kr, 010/9916, Raport z wywiadu, 19 July 1952, 96. 57  AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Zeznanie Stanisława Pyki, 24 July 1950, 270. 58  Ibid., Protokół przesłuchania Stanisława Wróbla, 31 March 1950, 253. 59  Ibid., Zeznanie Stefana Rybickiego, 5 April 1950, 277.

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of the gang, he violently assaulted the functionaries of UB and MO who were protecting the Jewish children’s camp.”60 This peculiar perspective on the events, first expressed in the document of the communist Military Regional Court in Kraków, blatantly concealed the real target of the assaults, the Jewish children. Unfortunately, it has been considered the official version of events ever since. 61 On the other hand, the indictment of Rev. Hojoł and Professor Chodak, who were tried in 1951 for anti-­ government activity, reveals that the students carried out the three assaults on the Jewish children’s camp in Rabka under their influence and with their approval.62 The verdict itself, however, did not support this charge. Rev. Józef Hojoł was sentenced to 12 years in prison for anti-government activity; he was released on parole after four years. Professor Edmund Chodak, sentenced to five years in prison, remained free thanks to an amnesty.63

The Expulsion of Jews from Rabka During their hearings, the young perpetrators testified that their intention was to “expel” the Jewish children from Rabka, “disperse Jewish groups,” “vanquish Jews and force them to leave this place,” “drive Jews away from Rabka.”64 They acted on behalf of their immediate social circles. Just a few years earlier, in March 1938, representatives of that circle had published an article in a local periodical, Zakopane and Rabka News, which talked of a Rabka “cleansed of unwelcome guests” who would eventually be replaced by “Christian resort patients.”65 The publisher of the periodical was a local Endecja activist; contributing writers included a few of the individuals who frequented the postwar bridge club.66 To the  AIPN Kr, 110/4235, Akt oskarzenia Andrzeja Palarczyka, 19 September 1950, 172.  “Partyzant nie nadstawia policzka,” interview with Maciej Korkuć, Tygodnik Powszechny 36 (2006). 62  AIPN Kr, 110/4239, t. 2, Akt oskarzenia ks. Józefa Hojoła i prof. Edmunda Chodaka, 25 October 1950, 92. 63  Ibid., Wyrok w sprawie ks. Hojoła i prof. Chodaka, 10 January 1951, 319–21. 64  AIPN Kr, 110/4235, Zeznania Jerzego Ła ̨czyńskiego ps. “Maciek,” 28 August 1950, 83–4; AIPN Kr, 110/4239 t. 2, Zeznanie Anny Bala, 5 October 1950, 76; AIPN Kr, 110/4239/1, Zeznanie Stanisława Wróbla, 15 July 1949, 258; ibid., Protokół przesłuchania Edmunda Chodaka, 15 January 1950, 156. 65  “Najazd Zydów na Rabkę,” Wiadomos ́ci Zakopiańskie i Rabczańskie 18 (1938): 9. 66  Wiadomości Rabczańskie w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (1937–39), https://pl. linkfang.org/wiki/Wiadomo%C5%9Bci_Rabcza%C5%84skie (accessed 10 March 2021). 60 61

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nationalist-­ conservative elite, the Jewish holiday makers and patients embodied undesirable social elements: “Unfortunately […] among Rabka-­ destined guests, Jews constitute a majority […]. It is indeed sad that our Resort is called a Jewish resort […] we are capable of being self-sufficient and defending our national interests with loyalty. Get to work!,”67 read the article. Unsurprisingly, shortly after Jewish patients had arrived in postwar Rabka in the aftermath of the Holocaust, they were expelled through collective effort. The victims of that violence were fully aware of what was happening. Seven-year-old Oleś Aronowicz, a boy who survived the Rabka assaults, told Lena Kuechler about his experiences in 1946 and ended his account with the following words: “A friend of mine, a soldier, told me that we had to leave because the Poles are taking over all of Rabka.”68 The last group of Jewish children from the “Children’s Home” left Rabka almost exactly three years after the memorable 30 August 1942, the day when the local Jewish community was annihilated. It was also on that day that the German perpetrators were given thanks for their efforts in Rabka at a rally organized by the local activists of the “highlander nation” (Goralenvolk) movement. Members of this movement supported the concept of a supposedly Germanic origin of the highlanders, an idea that the Germans themselves promoted. The group included widely known and esteemed leaders of the prewar Association of Highlanders, made up of members of fine highlander families.69 The Goralenvolk propaganda, which proclaimed the uniqueness of highlanders, presented the Podhale Jews as “heavy stones that drag down the economic development of the highlander nation.”70 During the war, all over Podhale, people associated with Goralenvolk benefited from the tragic fate of the local Jews, who were gradually stripped of their rights: not only were they banned from running businesses in the first months of the war, but also saw their property

 Wiadomos ́ci Zakopiańskie i Rabczańskie 17 (1938): 9.  GFHA, Holdings Registry, 023135, Z opowiadania Olesia Aronowicza, spisane przez Lenę Kuechler we Francji, 1946 r., 7. 69  See Wojciech Szatkowski, Goralenvolk. Historia zdrady (Kraków: Kanon, 2012), 37 and 178. 70  The Goralenvolk “Memorial” by Henryk Szatkowski, written on behalf of the highlanders and addressed to the German authorities in the fall of 1939 (Memoriał Henryka Szatkowskiego, quoted after Szatkowski (2012), 200). 67 68

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confiscated. Some Goralenvolk members appropriated Jewish businesses and plundered Jewish warehouses and buildings.71 The purpose of the Rabka rally was the promotion of Kennkarten (national identity cards), which would feature the term “Highlander” rather than “Polish” under declared nationality. The ongoing tragedy of the local Jews made it easier to control those highlanders who were reluctant to file for such an identification card; they were threatened with expulsion should they refuse, and simultaneously promised an easier appropriation of Jewish-owned real estate and property should they comply. On that day, the staff of the German SiPo and SD School were carrying out the last stage of Aktion Reinhard. From dawn, Rabka’s Jews were being murdered both in their homes and in the streets, or loaded onto wagons destined for the Bełzec extermination camp, while the rally organized in the most representative part of the resort (less than a kilometer away from villa Tereska and the mass graves) gathered between 1000 and 1200 people. One attendee, an employee of Rabka’s Commune Office, testified after the war: Hitler’s portrait was hanging on the wall. Wacław Krzeptowski [the leader of the Highlander Committee] said […] you are not Polish, you are highlander […], he thanks Malsfey [Nowy Targ starosta (County head) under the German occupation] with Weissmann [Gestapo head in the Nowy Targ County] for liberating Podhale from the greatest enemy, the Jew.72

Wacław Krzeptowski resolved to grant an additional token of gratitude to the “liberators of Podhale.” Roman Dattner, a Jewish storeman, one of approximately 200 prisoners of the labor camp operated by the School,73 remembered that the director and the staff of the School received a bonus of 5000 Egyptian cigarettes and 25 liters of vodka from the Highlander Committee for expelling Jews from Rabka.74 Following the rally, the Goralenvolk activists went on to share a festive banquet, where vodka and 71  Cf Karolina Panz, “To juz nie jest szczyt głupoty, to jest podłość i zdrada  – ruch Goralenvolk a zagłada podhalańskich Zydów,” in Jak rodzi się zło. Sprawcy, wykonawcy, pomocnicy, ed. Alicja Bartuś (Oświęcim: Fundacja na Rzecz MDSM, 2018), 37–50. 72  AIPN Kr, 502/867, Protokół rozprawy głównej, 8 November 1946, 12. 73  Cf. Karolina Panz, “Powiat nowotarski,” in Dalej jest noc. Losy Zydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski, ed. Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Zydów, 2018), 300–8. 74  AIPN OK Kr, Ds. 6/70/25, Zeznanie Romana Dattnera, 29 January 1948, 6.

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smoked meat were served, courtesy of Rabka’s homeowners and entrepreneurs. The threats and incentives announced by the Goralenvolk leader on the day of the “final solution” proved effective. On the following day, 600 people came to receive the highlander Kennkarten.75 In the end, the percentage of Rabka residents who received them reached 49.76.76 It is impossible to establish how many people signed up out of fear of potential repression, and how many decided to simply take advantage of the opportunity. The slogans broadcast far and wide on that day had long-term consequences for the Jews who sought refuge in Rabka.77 About two or three weeks after the deportation, remaining Jews who tried to hide in the town were tracked down and caught. Jewish witnesses, who were prisoners in Rabka’s labor camp operated by the School at villa Tereska, estimated that in the autumn of 1942 about 50–60 people were killed as a result.78 It was local civilians, not functionaries, who captured them. One prisoner, Rubin Traum, said in 1945: “Peasants denounced everyone except for one mother with a daughter who were saved by the local community and are now in Kraków.”79 These two lucky survivors were Frania Netzer and her mother Jetti, hidden under the roof of villa Truskawka in Rabka, saved by Eleonora Wagner. As mentioned earlier, these two women, along with Szymon Pistrauch from the same hideout, were the only local Jews who survived until the end of the war in the heart of Rabka. Jews were removed from the registry of Rabka residents in mid-­ September 1942, a few weeks after the “deportation action” and annihilation of the local Jewish community. The names had been crossed off the registry up to the letter “L,” and the last date listed is 17 September 1942. On that day, the person in charge of the civil registry, Czesław Trybowski, was arrested for underground-related activity and the task was never completed.80 I was unable to find any list of surviving Jewish citizens in  Ibid.  ANKr, ONS, St NT II/15, Einwohnerzahl in der Kreishauptmannschaft Neumarkt, January 1943, not numbered. 77  YVA, O.33/3226, Frania Tiger Account, November 1966, 16. 78  AIPN OK Kr, Ds. 6/70/25, Zeznanie Abrahama Schiffeldrina, 22 February 1968, 187. 79  AZIH, 301/614, Relacja Rubina Trauma, 1945, 6. 80  ANKr, 29/3054/0/9/90, Rejestr osób opuszczaja ̨cych gminę Rabka, not dated, not numbered; AIPN OK Kr , Ds. 6/70/32, Protokół przesłuchania Czesława Trybowskiego, 21 April 1961, 81. 75 76

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postwar Rabka; this is because those who survived in camps, in the territory of Soviet Russia, and in hideouts outside of Rabka, eventually registered in Kraków and Lower Silesia:81 “I knew that things were not going well and there was no point in staying in Rabka,”82 said Frania Tiger (née Netzer) 21 years after leaving her hometown.

The Desecrated Graves The shootings from subsequent executions and the screams of the victims echoed throughout the region for several months from May 1942. Up until the end of August, the citizens of Rabka knew who had died and when, as Wilhelm Rosenbaum, the principal of the SiPo and SD School, ordered that the census records keep track of the names of executed Jews, with the annotation “died from heart attack.” Czesław Trybowski remembered making about 200 annotations of this kind. During the hearing pertaining to the crimes perpetrated by the staff of the School during the war, he testified: “I heard Jews shouting and the shooting sounds from my home very clearly.”83 The documentation from the trial of Wilhelm Rosenbaum includes detailed descriptions of the tragic fate of Rabka’s Jewish residents. A field owned by the parents of Stanisław Kaciczak bordered the woods in which executions took place: The gestapo told my father to provide a horse cart. I replaced my father and delivered it. After my arrival in the vicinity of villa Tereska I found four more cart drivers. We were given a bottle of vodka each and I was forced to drink it. In the stables near villa Tereska there were many Jews, women and children. My cart was charged with lime and one wachman got into the cart and I was told to drive the cart to the forest whence the sound of shooting could be heard. […] in the woods […] there were pits next to which Jews were getting undressed. At one point, a Jew whom I knew, named Paloge, a glazier by profession, started to yell some words. His daughter took him by the elbow and as they were getting closer to that pit she said, “dad, we’re going to ascend the seventh heaven” […]. Once there had been a layer of cadavers 81  AZIH, 303/V/702, Ziomkostwo Zydów z Rabki zamieszkałych obecnie w Krakowie, not dated, 59–62; ibid., Spis Zydów byłych mieszkańców miasta Rabka-Zdrój województwo krakowskie, przebywaja ̨cych obecnie na terenie Dolnego Śla ̨ska, 31 August 1946, 64. 82  YVA, O.33/3226, Frania Tiger Account, November 1966, 36. 83  AIPN OK Kr, Ds. 6/70/32, Zeznanie Czesława Trybowskiego, 21 April 1961, 79.

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in the pit, I drew closer with the lime, which Jewish workers pelted down onto the dead bodies. I saw […] a group of Jewish children who […] threw themselves at the feet of Rosenbaum and […] begged him for mercy. Rosenbaum kicked the children, took the younger ones by the legs and smashed their heads against the trees. I saw that some Jews lying in the pits were still alive, because they were moving. Regardless of that, the pits were being covered over with earth.84

There are many testimonies recalling the names of particular people and revealing the circumstances of their death. They indicate that the massacre of the Rabka Jews was seen, heard, and remembered by their Polish neighbors. The desecration of the victims’ mass graves, noted in the documents only three years after the events in question, therefore seems all the more shocking. It is highly likely that it was the delegates of Kraków’s Jewish Committee who were looking for buildings for rent who notified the Social-Political section of the Voivodeship Office of the deplorable condition of the graves. In early May 1945, the president of the Committee sent a letter to the Nowy Targ starosta. Its title read, “The desecration of mass graves of the victims massacred by germans in Rabka”: In Rabka, near villa Tereska, the building of the former Ge-Sta-Po [sic!], one finds graves of the people murdered by germans [sic!]. It has been brought to our attention that the area where the graves are situated is to be used by the commune of Rabka as a pasture; or perhaps the local people lawlessly desecrate the aforementioned area where the graves are, which is inadmissible for understandable reasons—we recommend a prompt administrative action in order to ensure the quickest possible protection of these graves.85

I discovered more of this correspondence while perusing a set of documents pertaining to the property and population loss in Rabka during the war. The content of the folder is noteworthy, especially when placed in the context of the desecration of the Jewish graves shortly after the war. It lists war-related damage to private property, cites the damage caused by the Soviet troops who marched through the region and were stationed at  AIPN OK Kr, Ds. 6/70/26, Zeznanie Stanisława Kaciczaka, 6 December 1968, 221.  ANKr, UW II 2817, Pismo Naczelniczki Wydziału Społeczno-Politycznego do Starostwa Powiatowego w Nowym Targu, 2 May 1945, 55. 84 85

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Rabka, and provides statistics indicative of population loss in the Commune of Rabka. According to this document, a total of 26 residents of Rabka lost their lives as a result of direct warfare, murder, prison, forced labor, wounds, or illness. The listing did not feature the hundreds of Rabka Jews; the only people included were those who “belonged to the Polish nation with Polish citizenship.”86 The documents also contained a “Registry of war casualties 1939–1945 buried at the Catholic cemetery in Rabka,” complete with the names, dates of birth, deaths, cause of death, and place of residence of the deceased, as well as documents pertaining to the cemetery of the 136 soldiers of the Red Army who died in combat over Rabka. The starosta sent a letter to the Commune Office in Rabka regarding the mass graves with an annotation strikingly similar to that from the Voivodeship Office.87 He did not indicate that the matter concerned Jewish graves specifically. A hand-written note in pencil was added three months later, in a response issued by the wójt [commune leader] of Rabka addressed to the starosta. Apparently, at that point the annotation was deemed necessary, as the village leader informed his superior that Rabka authorities would not take on responsibility for the protection of the graves, but it would be assumed by the leadership of the “local Jewish colony.”88 The letter was issued on 9 August 1945. Three days later, the first assault on the “Children’s Home” took place. The graves remained unprotected for several decades, with no indicator of their existence; photographs have been taken of cows grazing in the field. In 1947, the Voivodeship Office in Kraków created a registry of cemeteries and military graves, but the Commune Office in Rabka neither signaled the existence of the cemetery of hundreds of Jewish victims in the woods behind villa Tereska nor mentioned any other Jewish grave in the vicinity.89

 ANKr, GM R/38, Ogłoszenie, 5 October 1945, 305.  Ibid., Pismo starosty nowotarskiego do Zarza ̨du Gminnego w Rabce, 15 May 1945, 451. 88  Ibid., Pismo wójta Gminy Rabka Maksymiliana Czerwca do Starostwa Powiatowego w Nowym Targu, 9 August 1945, 453. 89  ANKr, UW II 1017, Mapa grobów wojennych w powiecie nowotarskim, 24 March 1947, 70. 86 87

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Conclusion Andrzej Leder, a Polish philosopher of culture, called the social revolution observed in Poland between 1939 and 1956 a “sleepwalking revolution” (przes ́niona rewolucja): It was carried out by the Others without the most subjective part of the nation sharing in either the decisions, the activities or the responsibility for the events. As a result, the revolution was experienced by the Polish society in a way akin to the way one experiences a nightmare; a nightmare in which the most covert and the most cruel dreams and fears come true. It was a nightmare in which the dreams and fears were experienced passively, without involving one’s agency, as if everything happened on its own. It all occurred on its own.90

When one takes a closer look at Rabka and the actual dreams of the local elite before the war, when one considers what happened when hundreds of its citizens were being killed, when one examines the events immediately after 30 August 1942, as a result of which only three Jewish inhabitants survived in their hometown, when one looks at the graves of Jewish neighbors desecrated after the war, and, finally, when one observes how a collectivity orchestrated assaults on innocent children, all of these events lead one to question the supposed passivity and lack of participation of the “most subjective part of the nation.” Nothing “happened on its own.” Crossing Jews off the list of residents immediately after the annihilation was not merely an administrative move. The Rabka Jews were excluded from common memory, cast out, and denied human empathy or remorse. In order ultimately to achieve their dream of a health resort without Jews, the Rabka elite turned to unprecedented measures: armed assaults targeting innocent children. Joanna Michlic noted that in spite of the exceptional brutality and mass murders, the goal of the postwar assaults was not to eliminate all Jews, but rather to pressure them to flee Poland.91 Józef Kuraś, alias Ogień [Fire], the leader of the partisan unit Błyskawica [Lightning] who fought against the communist government in the Podhale region and with whom the majority of the assault perpetrators collaborated just months after the 90  Andrzej Leder, Przesniona ́ rewolucja. Ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014), 17. 91  Michlic (2006), 225.

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events (including Rev. Hojoł, Parson Zdebski, as well as the Rabka militia and its commander), formulated the following ultimatum in 1946, stating that it was a sine qua non for any further debate with the authorities: “removal of all Jews from Nowy Targ as soon as possible; otherwise, he will cull them mercilessly.”92 Since the condition had not been satisfied, over several weeks in the spring of 1946, his sub-commanders murdered 25 people of Jewish descent in Podhale. The casualties included children. Lena Kuechler, along with 60 children from Zakopane’s “Children’s Home,” managed to flee abroad before the surge of violence. Along with her fled the entire group of children who had moved to Zakopane following the closure of the Rabka institute, accompanied by their guardian Gusta Teiber. The last Jews were murdered in Podhale in Rabka in August 1947. Zygmunt Goldstein with his wife Dora (whose nearly two-year-old son was wounded by a bullet), and Sabina Cyns who had come to stay in Rabka at the health resort, died at the hands of local anti-communist partisans. These tragic events unfolded before the eyes of nine-year-old Jerzy Cyns who, just two years earlier, had been among those children assaulted in Rabka. Jerzy Cyns never fully recovered from the trauma of witnessing his mother’s death. He suffered from neurosis until the end of his life.93 In 2003, the facade of the building in which Mieczysław Klempka shared his account of the attack on the “Children’s Home” was decorated with a plaque installed in the presence of his comrades from the partisan unit to commemorate his contribution to the disarmament of the Germans during World War II. In 2011, the facade of Rabka St Mary Magdalene’s Church officially displayed a similar commemorative plaque in honor of the anti-communist endeavors of Rev. Hojoł. Their collaboration in the assaults on the Jewish children is never mentioned. Acknowledgments  The research for this chapter was funded by the research grant of the Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki, no. 0 ­ 101/NPRH3/ H12/82/2014.

92   AIPN Kr, 06/1/16, Meldunek specjalny WUBP w Krakowie do Ministerstwa Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, 27 March 1946, 47–8. 93  Panz (2019), 202–8.

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Bibliography Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna. 2014. Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarkowska-Natkaniec, Alicja. 2018. Wymuszona współpraca czy zdrada? Wokół kolaboracji Zydów w okupowanym Krakowie. Kraków: Universitas. Julian, Kwiek. 2021. Nie chcemy Zydów u siebie. Przejawy wrogoscí wobec Zydów w latach 1944–1947. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Nieoczywiste. Leder, Andrzej. 2014. Przesniona ́ rewolucja. Ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Liberman, Benjamin. 2010. Ethnic Cleansing versus Genocide. In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, 42–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maślak-Maciejewska, Alicja. 2015. Ku poprawie zdrowia fizycznego i ‘utrzymaniu duszy dziecięcej w atmosferze słonecznej i radosnej’ – lecznicza kolonia wakacyjna dla dzieci zydowskich w Rabce (1890–1939). Studia Historyczne 231: 349–366. Michlic, Joanna. 2006. Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2010. ‘The War Began for Me After the War’: Jewish Children in Poland, 1945–49. In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman, 482–497. Abingdon: Routledge. Naskalska-Babik, Janina. 2021. Jest mi tu dobrze i zyję w dobrych warunkach pod kazdym względem’ Historia Janka Machaufa, zydowskiego dziecka z rabczańskiego sierocińca i jego listy do matki z lata 1945 roku. Judaista Studenckie Czasopismo Naukowe 8. Nijakowski, Lech M. 2014. Rozkosz zemsty. Socjologia historyczna mobilizacji ludobójczej. Warsaw: Scholar. Panz, Karolina. 2018a. Powiat nowotarski. In DALEJ JEST NOC. Losy Zydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski, ed. Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, 213–358. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Zydów. ———. 2018b. To juz nie jest szczyt głupoty, to jest podłość i zdrada – ruch Goralenvolk a zagłada podhalańskich Zydów. In Jak rodzi się zło. Sprawcy, wykonawcy, pomocnicy, ed. Alicja Bartuś. Oświęcim: Fundacja na Rzecz MDSM. ———. 2019. Why Did They, Who Had Suffered So Much and Endured, Have to Die? The Jewish Victims of Armed Violence in Podhale (1945–1947). Holocaust Studies and Materials. Journal of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research 2017: 148–211. Rapta, Michał, Wojciech Tupta, and Grzegorz Moskal. 2009. Mroczne sekrety willi “Tereska” 1939–1945. Wadowice: Grafikon. Szatkowski, Wojciech. 2012. Goralenvolk. Historia zdrady. Kraków: Kanon. Zółta Dwójka: II Druzyna Harcerzy im. Gen. Władysława Sikorskiego w RabceZdroju 1945–1948. Ludzie, czasy, zdarzenia, ed. Jerzy Janowiec and Jerzy Klimiński. Rabka-Zdrój: Handel i Usługi ATK.  Anna Klimińska. Sklep Filatelistyczno-Numizmatyczny. 2005.

New Neighbors’ Land: Istria and the Complexities of Solidarity Pamela Ballinger

Since the 1990s, two distinct bodies of historical work have rethought the twentieth-century experience of those overlapping geographic regions commonly designated as Eastern Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans, and Southeastern Europe. Both historiographical approaches reflected the epochal shifts wrought by the end of the Cold War. Even as some observers consigned the very notion of Eastern Europe to the dustbin of history,1 scholars meticulously traced and deconstructed the genealogies of a notion of the region(s) as liminal and set apart from and temporally behind Western Europe. Inspired by Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined 1  For a more detailed discussion, see Pamela Ballinger, “Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries,” East European Politics and Societies 31, no. 1 (2017): 44–67.

P. Ballinger (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_4

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communities, on the one hand, and by Edward Said’s seminal study of Orientalism, on the other, a lively and vigorous debate arose as to whether such easternisms operated as variants of orientalisms or something sui generis, the latter position associated with the notion of Balkanism put forward by Maria Todorova. The extensive Orientalism/Balkanism debate centered on how to interpret the multiple imperial legacies that had shaped the area and the appropriateness of seeing the region (however labeled or named) as postcolonial.2 At stake was not just the intellectual history of an idea—that of the East—but its political consequences for those enfolded within its symbolic geographies, past and present, and the conceptual consequences for scholarship, in particular the “gatekeeping” concepts that delimit and set scholarly agendas. Another set of historians instead investigated histories of forced migrations and genocides, particularly those that had been little acknowledged by state socialist regimes. Here, the new conceptual vocabulary of “ethnic cleansing,” together with access to previously inaccessible archives, permitted scholars to sketch out a vast terrain of unmixing of peoples, leading some to place Eastern and Central Europe at the heart of a “Thirty Years’ War of Nationalities.”3 These two schools of historical work clearly sit in tension with one another. Admittedly, careful research into forced migrations eschews the stereotypical essentialisms that treat the region as a font of atavistic hatred; indeed, historians have documented the complicity of Western powers from Lausanne to Yalta in sanctioning forced migrations.4 Nonetheless, a pervasive language of “bloodlands,” “fires,” “shatterzones,” and “multi-level trauma” running through this work threatens to reinforce popular assumptions that treat the region as Western Europe’s dark mirror. As Bartal and Ury put it, the image of “a perennial, if not inevitable or inherent, divide and subsequent state of isolation and conflict

2  More recent contributions to the expansive literature on Balkanism have queried the status of race in such understandings. Catherine Baker, for instance, has called out the scholarly privileging of ethnicity and religion as forms of difference defining the Balkans to the exclusion of race. See Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-­ conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 3  Marina Cattaruzza, “‘Last Stop Expulsion’: The Minority Question and Forced Migration in East-Central Europe: 1918–49,” Nations and Nationalism 16, no. 1 (2010): 120. 4  See, for instance, Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds, Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

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between members of different groups has shaped [...] the very definition and image of the entire region itself, ‘Eastern Europe.’”5 This edited volume reflects this paradox: importantly directing attention to those populations who stayed behind or came to live in cleansed borderlands, the title No Neighbors’ Lands nonetheless emphasizes absence, void, and non-cohabitation. This tension reflects the complexities of such population movements and their enduring aftermath. In this chapter, I examine the experiences of individuals who continued to live in the Istrian peninsula after a mass migration by their family, neighbors, and other community members out of the area between 1943 and 1955 when it passed from Italian to Yugoslav sovereignty. The analysis here draws upon ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Istria in the mid-1990s with members of the Italian minority there. I revisit interviews conducted over 25 years ago, re-reading them in light of more recent historiography on Istria, particularly work by historians from the region, that has sharpened our understanding of the political complexities that characterized early postwar Istria as the nascent Yugoslav socialist regime sought to consolidate its power there. Returning to interviews I analyzed in my monograph History in Exile (2003), and in some instances drawing upon hitherto unused material, I consider individuals’ experiences and narratives through new literatures examining solidarities under state socialism, as well as sociological accounts of solidarity and trust.

The Making of an Exodus In the twentieth century the Istrian peninsula experienced three periods of dramatic regime change: the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 and Italy’s formal assumption of control in 1920; the contestation by Italy and Yugoslavia over the territory at the end of World War II, with the area successively awarded to Yugoslavia by agreements in 1947 and 1954 (the latter ratified by treaty in 1975); and the peninsula’s subsequent division between Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 with the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia. Each transition brought about significant population movements. After World War I, German speakers from Istria and Trieste 5  Israel Bartal and Scott Ury, “Between Jews and their Neighbors: Isolation, Confrontation, and Influence in Eastern Europe. The Question of Influence and the End of Jewish History,” in Jews and their Neighbors in Eastern Europe since 1750, ed. Israel Bartal, Antony Polonsky, and Scott Ury (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 4.

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migrated to the rump state of Austria while individuals from the pre-1920 Kingdom of Italy ballooned the already significant population of so-called regnicoli. During the 1920s and 1930s, both political and economic motives prompted flows out of Istria to the new state of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as well as to classic countries of political exile and labor migration like France and Switzerland. With the peninsula’s division in the 1990s, the Croatian territory of Istria instead witnessed the influx of refugees, particularly from Herzegovina. Yet it was the decade following World War II that arguably brought about the greatest modern demographic change in the peninsula, as anywhere between 180,000 and 225,000 individuals departed in an extended process collectively known as the “Istrian Exodus.”6 This exodus has largely been memorialized—particularly in Italy, where roughly two-thirds of the migrants resettled and formed a large network of political associations and cultural clubs—in ethnicized terms as a flight by “Italians” out of territory rendered unlivable by its new Slavic, socialist overlords. In its simplest version, the explanation of a complex and temporally extended set of processes runs something like this: in the aftermath of 20  years of Italian control over the area in which the fascist regime pursued nationalization campaigns toward its ethnic Slovene and Croatian citizens, with the installation of Yugoslav control Italians paid the price for “the sole crime of being Italian.” Central to this account are the executions carried out by Yugoslav partisans and forces in 1943 and 1945 in the karstic pits known as the foibe. Writing of these sites, journalist Arrigo Petacco summarized what, during the 1990s, became the prevalent narrative in Italian popular media: “The disproportion of such a revenge was clear … it had to be a project of ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out deliberately to eradicate Italians from Istria by killing them or forcing them to flee.”7 The foibe’s presumed causality in provoking flight explains historians’ increasing tendency to include Istria within their surveys of the

6   See Raoul Pupo, “Gli esodi nell’Adriatico orientale: problemi interpretative,” in Naufraghi della Pace: Il 1945, i profughi e le memorie divise d’Europa, ed. Guido Crainz, Raoul Pupo, and Silvia Salvatici (Rome: Donzelli, 2008), 5–24; Orietta Moscarda Oblak, Il ‘potere popolare’ in Istria, 1945–1953 (Fiume: Unione Italiana, 2016), 24. 7  Arrigo Petacco, A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of Italians from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, 1943–1956, trans. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 48.

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twentieth-century forced migrations that dramatically reconfigured Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.8 Like others explored in this volume, however, the Istrian case demands that we problematize both components of the concept of “ethnic cleansing.” First, it complicates understandings of ineluctable ethnonational logics at work in Central or Eastern European borderlands. The means, moments, and motivations for departing Istria varied widely. After Italy’s capitulation in 1943, state officials hailing from other parts of Italy left the peninsula; other individuals fled the threat of the foibe in 1943 and again at war’s end, as well as forced labor and beatings; others instead departed between 1947 and 1952, using the procedure for “opting” to retain citizenship laid out in Article 19 of the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy, which awarded much of southern Istria to Yugoslavia; many in “Zone B,” the area of northwestern Istria under Yugoslav military control between 1947 and 1954, departed only when the 1954 Memorandum of Understanding dashed any hope of remaining part of Italy; and yet others in the late 1950s and early 1960s went on tourist visas to visit family and friends in Italy and never returned. Motivations for such departures included political, religious, and economic issues. While many of those departing described themselves as “Italians,” others felt themselves to be Slovene, Croat, or Istrian. Recounting the tragic death of her 19-year-old brother in the Istrian foibe in 1943, an elderly woman from Rovinj/Rovigno warned me against ethnic reductionism, given that “it was not just Italians who were killed in the foibe” and personal vendettas took the lives of many. Sottovoce, she implied those responsible for her brother’s death still lived in the town.9 Likewise, members of the same families in Istria often took different paths, despite sharing putative ethnic and linguistic identities. Thus, after the exodus there remained in Yugoslav Istria (as well as Kvarner) individuals officially recognized as part of a non-titular Italian minority.10 In addition, the phenomenon of the “counter-exodus”—the organized migration 8  Antonio Ferrara and Niccolò Pianciola, L’età delle migrazioni forzate: Esodi e deportazioni in Europa 1853–1953 (Bologna: Il mulino, 2012); Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9  Interview with Laura (pseudonym), conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 28 February 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. The names of all interview partners denoted with an asterisk (*) are pseudonyms. 10  Under Yugoslavia, recognized community organizations for the Italian minority (first Circolo Italiani and then Comunità Italiane) did not exist in Dalmatia.

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(invited by the Yugoslav regime) between 1946 and 1948 of several thousand communist workers from Italy into Yugoslav cities emptied out by departures—underscored the ways in which, at least in certain moments, political or ideological loyalties could trump those of ethno-­national affiliation. Largely labeled Cominformists in the 1948 Tito-Stalin dispute, many of these Italians would ultimately return to Italy, sometimes after enduring harsh imprisonment at the political re-education camp at Goli Otok, a barren island in the northern Adriatic. Yet some of the most prominent intellectual voices of what became the Italian minority in Yugoslavia belonged to Italians who had come from the Italian peninsula to fight fascism and build socialism in Yugoslavia, and settled there permanently: Alessandro Damiani (born in Sant’Andrea in Calabria); Giacomo Scotti (originally from Naples); and Eros Sequi (born in Treviso but raised in Tuscany and Sardinia). These individuals joined the many workers and families from southern Yugoslavia, as well as parts of the Istrian interior, who came to live in houses left empty. The Istrian case thus also prompts reconsideration of the notion of cleansing, in terms of both processes and outcomes. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki has noted the limitations of many frameworks for analyzing displacement, in which “there is an implicit assumption that in becoming ‘torn loose’ from their cultures, ‘uprooted’ from their homes, refugees suffer the loss of all contact to the lifeworlds they fled. It is as if the places left behind were no longer peopled.”11 For scholars of displacement, Malkki put on the intellectual agenda the inextricable process of emplacement (as well as replacement), asking, “What is the state of not being a refugee like? How is it denoted?”12 Although forced migration suggests little agency on the part of the displaced, even in situations of violence and persecution, leaving—as well as remaining—may entail a choice, albeit a highly constrained one.13 Furthermore, displacement typically implies physical movement and dislocation, obscuring how individuals may be displaced even when they stay in the same spot, a sentiment frequently expressed by those who remained in Istria. In the course of the twentieth century, inhabitants of Istria and the 11  Liisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 515. 12  Ibid. 13  Rogers Brubaker, “Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the ‘New Europe,’” International Migration Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 1049.

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broader region experienced a wide range of symbolic and political violence,14 including both state-directed forms of violence and the intimate violence of neighbors against neighbors. Yet, as Max Bergholz has argued, violence can prove generative: “the forging of profound antagonisms and solidarities during periods of violence creates new forms of communities.”15 In this chapter, then, I consider transformations of Istrian life during the postwar exodus through an analysis of the (re)constitution of solidarities, including the meanings of being a neighbor. In the context of Istria’s cities, towns, and villages, solidarity during this period possessed multiple valences, only some of them ethnic. Following Bartov’s suggestion for scholars of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe to adopt a local studies approach, I focus here on the town of Rovinj/Rovigno, on Istria’s western coast. As Bartov puts it, the local frame renders motivations “more complex and yet more easily understandable.”16 This methodology also reflects my own research in the 1990s, when I spent 21 months in the Italian port city of Trieste and the Croatian Istrian town of Rovinj/Rovigno conducting fieldwork on the contested memory of the Istrian exodus. In the tricky political relations between the associations of the esuli or exiles and the Italian minority (the so-called rimasti) during the Cold War and the subsequent Yugoslav Wars, there was often little sense of shared kinship expressed. I learned this the hard way during a 1995 interview in Trieste. One of my interlocutors—who, it turned out, had relatives who remained in what is today’s Slovene coast—nearly ended our conversation when I referred to “Italians” still living in Istria. Those who had not taken the path of migration were, in her eyes, traitors. Not all my esuli informants shared this sense of rupture with their kin in Istria, however, and there existed a wide range of relationships with relatives and former homes across the borders. In addition, the institutional relations between those who left and those who stayed in particular locales varied widely. This highlights the variety of processes sometimes referred to under the label “emplacement,” including the ways in which 14  Raoul Pupo, “Logiche della violenza politica nei dopoguerra del ‘900 nell’Adriatico orientale: Una ricognizione preliminare,” Storia e problemi contemporanei 74 (2017): 15–40. 15  Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 315 [emphasis in the original]. 16  Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 592.

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both those who migrated and those who remained rendered space meaningful.

Remaking “Italian Istria” Historically a region of small-scale cultivation and fishing, the Istrian peninsula’s strategic position at the head of the Adriatic Sea made it valuable to its multiple sovereigns: the Venetian and Habsburg Empires and nation-­ states that followed them. Gloria Nemec has underscored the challenges in making generalizations even about this relatively small space, given that “each community in Istria presents peculiar and differentiated traits, so much so that we might think about an archipelagic territory made up of many microcosms communicating amongst themselves but certainly not assimilable to one another.”17 Nemec adds that, despite this, the Italian historiography of the eastern Adriatic has tended to validate a city/countryside distinction—one pervasive in the region’s symbolic geographies— that maps ethnic-linguistic groups onto particular spaces. In this line of reasoning, what in the early modern period were understood largely as differentiations of class and profession increasingly hardened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into ethno-national distinctions that expressed themselves through spatial separation (Italian/Slavic::urban/ rural::coastal/interior). As socialist Giuseppe Lazzarini put it in 1900, the fact that Italians constituted the intellectual and capitalist class in Istria explained the peninsula’s “strange ethnic distribution.”18 Paralleling the myth of a “Chinese Wall” separating Jews from their neighbors in Eastern Europe,19 the image of Italian communities existing as separate “islands” in a Slavic sea characterizes many nationalist accounts and individual migrants’ memories of Istria alike. But just as in the shtetls with their seemingly rigid boundaries between groups, understandings of place joined Istrians, even from different backgrounds, as being “‘from here’”, sharing “loyalty, connection, and belonging to the community.”20 17  Gloria Nemec, Nascita di una minoranza. Istria 1947–1965: storia e memoria degli italiani rimasti nell’area istro-quarnerina (Fiume: Unione Italiana, 2012), 37. 18  Giuseppe Lazzarini, Lotta di classe e lotta di razza in Istria (Pola: Tip. J. Krmpotić & Co., 1900), 16. 19  Bartal and Ury (2012), 3–4, 9, 20. 20   Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, “Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders: Social Relationships in the Shtetl,” in The Shtetl: Myth and Reality, ed. Antony Polonksy (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), 191.

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In reality, then, Istria’s “microcosms” entailed a wide range of interactions between individuals who would come to identify and be identified with specific ethnic groups—Italian, Croatian, and Slovene primary among them. Since the Venetian period, Italic/Latinate variants (istriotto, istro-­ veneto) had served as the lingua franca of urban political life and the broader maritime economies encompassing the upper Adriatic, though by the nineteenth century, Croatian and Slovene elites and public spheres had emerged in the peninsula. Until the end of World War II, though, the linguistic landscape of Istria, as well as nearby Trieste, was characterized by diglossia. This made for a linguistic hierarchy together with distinct patterns of linguistic competence. Those in cities and towns—particularly along Istria’s western coast—who spoke some version of the language of high culture, “Italian,” could exist as monolingual speakers. Bilingualism instead prevailed among those populations who spoke Slavic variants at home but also needed to communicate in the language of administration, trade, and social mobility. Yet even for relative “islands” like Rovinj/Rovigno, inhabited largely by speakers exclusively of Italian variants, like istro-veneto or the local ruvignese (a form of istriotto), ethno-linguistic boundaries proved fluid. As Lazzarini noted at the turn of the twentieth century, there existed among the peninsula’s communities “a relationship that is more complex, more intimate.” Any attempt to disentangle those populations risked “undermining the existence” of all.21 Key figures of crossing and mediation included the female vendors of eggs and milk (or Šavrinke) who traveled between Trieste and Istria on foot. Likewise, Habsburg commercial and navy ships provided other important spaces of interaction. Of the 25-­person crew of the Tegetthoff that explored the Arctic in the name of the Habsburg emperor, for example, at least 10 hailed from Istria or the Kvarner, another two from Dalmatia and one from Trieste. Julius von Payer captured the resulting linguistic diversity—and its often situational nature—in his account: “the crew speaks primarily Slavic amongst themselves, Italian on duty. German is [spoken] in the cabin, Norwegian with the harpooneer, Carlsen […] Doctor Kepes interacts with the crew in his medical practice in Latin and Hungarian, but with [Captain] Lusina in French.”22 These  Lazzarini (1900), 20.   Cited in Stephen Anthony Walsh, “Between the Arctic and the Adriatic: Polar Exploration, Science and Empire in the Habsburg Monarchy” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 102. 21 22

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polyglot maritime worlds thus reproduced the empire’s conditions of linguistic intermixture. Forcible linguistic assimilation policies imposed by the fascist regime during the interwar period rigidified what had been fluid practices of multilingualism within a wider Habsburg imperial frame. A sense of Italian identity rooted in language nonetheless often remained a “circumscribed” one. Nemec contends that while the symbolic vocabularies of Italian irredentism and nationalism nourished it, Istria’s formal incorporation into the Italian state paradoxically increased Istrian Italians’ sense of remaining apart from their Italian brothers in the pre-1920 Regno.23 As in Eastern European communities where “relations between Jews and other Jews were often just as intricate, complicated, and difficult as those between Jews and their neighbours,”24 so too were solidarities between “Italians” in Istrian communities complicated by a host of non-ethnic markers and identifications. The advent of fascism sharpened ideological differentiations within communities, forcing traditions of socialism in the peninsula underground and giving birth to antifascist movements of various stripes (communist, socialist, and Catholic). The trajectory of Andrea Benussi, born in Rovigno to a family of small farmers, typified the experience of many Istrian antifascists. A long-standing socialist, Benussi endured arrests, beatings, and the forced drinking of castor oil from local fascists before going into exile in royal Yugoslavia and then France. During one of his many arrests, Benussi found himself in a Yugoslav jail cell alongside Tito.25 For leftists like Benussi, the partisan fight in Istria during World War II demonstrated the popular, participatory character that distinguished Yugoslavia’s liberation from that of other Eastern European state socialist regimes that came to power only with considerable Soviet help. The intersecting histories of armed partisan groups and their relationships to the Italian Communist Party and the Yugoslav Communist Party in Istria reveal a more complex tangle of ideological and ethno-national loyalties. Orietta Moscarda Oblak has meticulously reconstructed the establishment of potere popolare (People’s Committees) in the part of the Istrian

 Nemec (2012), 39–40.  Bartal and Ury (2012), 28. 25  Andrea Benussi, Ricordi di un combattente istriano (Zagreb: Iz kućne zbirke, 1951), 67–87, 102, 127, 160. 23 24

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peninsula annexed by the terms of the 1947 Treaty.26 As the most important population centers in this zone, Rovinj/Rovigno and Pula/Pola possessed strong leftist political movements dating to the Habsburg period. In both locales, local communists took their cues from the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), rather than the Komunistička partija Jugoslavije (KPJ), at least until 1943.27 With a developed working-class consciousness forged in the tobacco and fish processing factories established during the time of Austria, Rovinj/Rovigno—sometimes known as Rovigno la rossa (Red Rovinj)—became under socialist Yugoslavia a stronghold of an Italian minority proudly asserting its role in the antifascist struggle during the war. As a former leader of the town’s Comunità Italiana put it, “Rovigno was a special case because the Rovignesi are tough (duri).” Informants in other towns often pointed to Rovinj/Rovigno’s particularity. While Chiara* contended that few of the rimasti in her hometown of Vodnjan/Dignano stayed because of a conscious ideological choice for communism, she noted that “perhaps in Rovigno that’s a different story.”28 In recognition of its role as symbol of the Italians in Yugoslavia, for instance, Rovinj/Rovigno was chosen as the site for the first Cultural Festival of the Italian minority, held in 1948.29 The town’s special status emerges clearly in a text like Rossa una stella, one of the most important early publications of the Centro di Ricerche Storiche di Rovigno, established in 1971 as a library and archive dedicated to the Italian minority. Endorsing a standard narrative of Italo-Slavic brotherhood, the volume’s first lines announced its intent to highlight the sacrifice made by Italians, dedicating the study to the Pino Budicin battalion and its fratelli di sangue (blood brothers/brothers in blood) who stood as a “symbol of the Italians of Istria and Fiume who fought in the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia.”30 Rovinj/Rovigno, “the city  Oblak (2016), 19.  The party sections for Venezia Giulia and Istria came under the purview of the PCI after the 1921 Congress of Livorno. See Benussi (1951), 37. In 1943, the PCI section in Pula/ Pola integrated into SKOJ or Savez Komunističke Omladine Jugoslavije. 28  Interview with Chiara (pseudonym), conducted in Vodnjan/Dignano on 6 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 29  UIIF, Documenti dell’Unione degli italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume (gennaio 1947–maggio 1948), ed. Giovanni Radossi (Documenti Centro di Ricerche Storiche di Rovigno, no. X, 2010), 429–465. 30  Giacomo Scotti and Luciano Giuricin, Rossa una stella (Fiume: Unione degli Italiani, 1975), 11. 26 27

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that contributed the largest number of fighters to the Budicin battalion was … its baptismal font” and became “the city that the survivors of the Budicin have as their symbolic home.”31 Even in spaces like Rovinj/Rovigno where there existed considerable consensus, antifascism had many meanings beyond those endorsed by such “official” narratives. Participants in the Istrian partisan brigades “Vladimir Gortan” and “Pino Budicin,” enfolded into the 43rd Istrian Partisan Division of the Yugoslav Army in August 1943 and subsumed yet again in 1945 within the Yugoslav IV Army, for example, nourished multiple visions of the better world for which they fought. What these groups did share was a commitment to expelling the fascist and Nazi occupiers, a solidarity expressed in the broadest terms. The basis for such solidarities could prove fragile, however. Even before the war’s end, in January 1945 Rovinj/Rovigno had become a “problem” within the KPJ and its partisan command, and all associated party organizations dissolved. As Oblak puts it, this action served as a “punishment, a confrontation with those among Rovigno’s communists who, in their relationships with the district heads of the Regional Antifascist Council, often claimed ‘earned rights’ based on their antifascist credentials.”32 Admittedly, this summary action provoked discord among various Yugoslav authorities, whose power remained fragmented. Ultimately, many of Rovinj/Rovigno’s communist faithful were incorporated into party structures but there remained a suspicion about their “trustworthiness” (fiducia),33 a distrust that erupted after 1948 with the Cominformist purges. The wariness with which party officials at various levels viewed Rovinj/Rovigno’s communist brothers reflected concerns about a form of communism that was perhaps too organic (given the Rovignesi willingness to assert themselves based on their contributions to the antifascist struggle) and simultaneously too “Italian.” Given the complex entanglements of political and ethno-linguistic loyalties in Istria, focusing on questions of trust and solidarity offers a useful optic into reframing our understanding of the climate in Rovinj/Rovigno during the decade in which the exodus unfolded and with the  Giacomo Scotti, “Da una primavera all’altra,” in Scotti and Giuricin (1975), 20.  Oblak (2016), 81. For a discussion of tensions already evident in 1943 between Istrians adhering to the PCI and those to the KPJ, see Paolo Sema, Siamo rimasti soli: I comunisti del PCI nell’Istria Occidentale dal 1943 al 1946 (Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 2004), 104–15. 33  Oblak (2016), 83–84; see also, however, 146. 31 32

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reconstitution of community life. Though not synonymous, concepts of trust and solidarity—together with friendship and kinship—are often closely related in practice and lived experience.34 Many understandings of trust focus on the future or what one sociologist deems “a bet about the future contingent actions of others.”35 This helps us go beyond simplified narratives of the Istrian exodus as a kind of informal plebiscite on Italianness, in which individuals voted with their feet, an explanation that forces us to edit out other, seemingly contradictory experiences. Rather, the mass migration of individuals out of Istria with its transition into a Yugoslav territory reflected a lack of trust in the regime’s future actions. For some, this distrust stemmed from overt violence (from the foibe to deportations to forced labor), for others it was caused by dramatic economic transformations (expropriations of property, sequestrations of salaries earned in Zone A), for others it was a worry about their children’s future in a world in which Italian speakers had become a small minority, or their ability to practice Catholicism. As Giovanni*, a long-time contributor to the exile association Famìa Ruvignisa, put it, his family left because of fear of the future. Giovanni’s own parents reflected the divided ideological loyalties of Istrians, with his mother a fervent anticommunist and his father a socialist. Although his father initially wanted to stay in Istria, after the police detained him he agreed with his wife that for the children’s sake they must leave.36 But for those who stayed behind in towns like Rovinj/Rovigno, what forms of solidarity remained or emerged?

Emplacing Solidarities: From Above and Below Scholars of communist regimes have recently turned their attention to solidarity as both state-sponsored strategy and lived practice, focusing on the valence of projects of internationalist solidarity that connected Eastern Europeans with Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as with one another. Taking solidarity and related issues seriously has served as a corrective to sociological and political science perspectives dominant in the 1990s that treated socialist and postsocialist societies as inevitably marked by low 34  Davide Torsello, “Action Speaks Louder than Words? Trust, Trustworthiness and Social Change in Slovakia,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17 (2008): 98. 35  Sztompka, cited in Torsello (2008), 98. 36  Interview with Giovanni (pseudonym), conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 27 May 1996 by Pamela Ballinger.

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levels of trust, social capital, and cohesion. Instead, scholars have demonstrated how, from above, “socialist states themselves used solidarity both to assert their responsible and progressive engagement in a divided world, and to claim broader legitimacy for their own domestic political project whose values now supposedly echoed across the world.”37 Simultaneously, however, and particularly for young people embracing solidarity, “this culture of international connection and solidarity was also capable of sparking disruptive projects ‘from below’ that contested the state’s readings of global revolution and domesticated its ideas in politically disruptive forms that challenged official aspirations for the future of socialism at home.”38 The potential of internationalist solidarities to offer an alternative to regime-sponsored narratives worried Yugoslav authorities throughout the socialist state’s existence, whether such alternative solidarities derived from specific “national” instantiations of internationalism, such as those of the Italian Communist Party, or from student protests in support of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In the discussion that follows, I employ solidarity as both an emic category and a conceptual frame.39 The motto of Yugoslavia’s partisan war and the regime it made was, famously, “Brotherhood and Unity.” Just as important in Rovinj/Rovigno and the Istria/Kvarner region was the designation of la fratellanza italo-­ slava or Italo-Slavic brotherhood. With hindsight, it is easy to see this as utopian thinking at best, or mere top-down propaganda at worst. As Nemec reminds us, however, “for many young people resident in Istria the ideology of brotherhood was not merely ambiguity and mystification, but rather a possible destination, a dream that could be achieved in daily practice and family choices.”40 This sense of a utopian project, however much betrayed, characterized many of the stories of my informants in Rovinj/ Rovigno about their experiences a half century earlier. The agents of betrayal that feature in such accounts are multiple: a “corrupt” Yugoslav 37  James Mark, Péter Apor, Radina Vučetić, and Piotr Osęka, “‘We Are With You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 462. 38  James Mark and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989,” The Journal of Modern History 87, no. 4 (2015): 854. 39  See Evythmios Papataxiarchis, “Unwrapping Solidarity? Society Reborn in Austerity,” Social Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2016): 205–10; Theodoros Rakopoulos, “Solidarity: The Egalitarian Tensions of a Bridge-Concept,” Social Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2016): 142–51. 40  Nemec (2012), 44.

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regime, the secret police OZNA (Odeljenje za zaštitu naroda) and its “politics of terror,” the trauma of Goli Otok, and “Italians themselves” (whether in the form of the minority leadership or those who participated in intra-ethnic violence as “Rovignesi took away Rovignesi”). In the years in which Istria’s exodus unfolded, little discursive space existed within Istria for expressing such dissident views. Instead, belief in brotherhood’s possibilities was given eloquent expression in documents such as Eros Sequi’s partisan war diary Eravamo in tanti, published in 1953 and turned into a 14-episode radio play by Lucifero Martini. An Italian who came to fight fascism on Yugoslav territory, Sequi remained after the war and became an important (if controversial) intellectual figure within the Italian minority. Sequi’s diary stresses his role as “Other”—as talijan—among his Yugoslav co-combatants. Again and again, Sequi records the ways in which Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and other South Slavs perceive him in both ethno-national and class terms, as a representative of Italians and as an “educated person.”41 One of his brothers-­ in-­arms, for example, associates Italy with sport and chatters on about soccer. In Zagreb, by contrast, he encounters many who tell him the Italians are “villains” (vigliacchi), a distinction that Sequi himself comes to adopt to differentiate good Italian comrades from fascists, that is, humans from beasts.42 For Sequi, fighting for a just world becomes the means by which he can cleanse himself of the guilt of “his name as an Italian, which weighs on him like a bad conscience marred by crimes.”43 As he puts it, “But there are Italians and then there are Italians. As one who goes to the woods [to fight], I am among those loved dearly by a Croatian mother whose son the fascists took from her.”44 The battle itself thus becomes the means by which Sequi shakes off the association of Italians with fascism and is reborn as a partisan brother worthy of that Croatian mother’s love. Sequi’s diary intersperses Italian reported dialogue with Serbo-Croatian, emblematic of a growing comprehension between Italians and Slavs fighting alongside one another and an implicit linguistic brotherhood. At one point, Sequi’s Yugoslav comrades tease him by singing Bandiera Rossa, the 1908 song that symbolized the

 Eros Sequi, Eravamo in tanti (Milan: Edizioni Cultural Box, 2013 [1953]), 107.  Ibid., 67. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid., 12. 41 42

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socialist and communist movements in Italy.45 Their laughter, interspersed with the song, suggests a kind of easy affection and familiarity among these partisans. By the diary’s end, Sequi’s own linguistic transformation has been completed, when he comments, “It’s enough to sing ‘Comrade Tito, we swear to you’ [Druže Tito mi ti se kunemo] and one advances forward.”46 In Sequi’s telling, such moments become the basis for a genuine solidarity, one that permits an old peasant near Zagreb to kiss Sequi and treat him like the son she lost to the fascists. This contrasts with those “Italian fascists and [Croatian] ustasha and Germans who consider each other like cats and dogs.” Joined together only by their inhumanity, the fascists lack the unity of the partisans for whom “we are all a family.”47 The narrative tropes in Sequi’s personal account of a lived solidarity in the field (one with the potential to redeem Italians from the crimes of fascism) are echoed in the institutional documents issued by the Unione degli Italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume (UIIF). In his diary, Sequi marks the July 1944 founding of the Unione, in which he would play a critical role as secretary between 1945 and 1951. A UIIF publication at war’s conclusion articulated what would become the official position of the Italian minority organs. The publication stressed the need to consolidate Italian-­ Croatian brotherhood, eschewing and combatting “reactionism” in favor of a mediating role as a “bridge” between Italy and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the UIIF saw itself as contributing to the rebirth of Italian culture. In that document, Sequi called upon the Italian government to recognize the “democratic right to self-determination,” in this case for the annexation of Istria and Fiume to Yugoslavia demanded “in the name of all Italian antifascists of Istria and Fiume.”48 Self-determination here implies something beyond ethnicity, though the (“rightful”) claims of Slavs also figured in such pronouncements. During the early years of the territorial contestation over Istria and nearby Trieste, the overwhelming test of loyalty to the KPJ was whether one supported the region’s joining to Yugoslavia.49 After the 1948 split between Tito and Stalin, in which the Soviets expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, the key ideological test became  Ibid., 39.  Ibid., 161. 47  Ibid., 17. 48  UIIF, L’Unione degli Italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume (Pola: Edizione de ‘La Nostra Lotta’, 1945), 47. 49  Oblak (2016), 147; see also UIFF (2010), 206. 45 46

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loyalty in and of itself to Tito and, by extension, the KPJ.  Those who explicitly supported Stalin over Tito or who were accused of doing so often found themselves sent to Goli Otok, where prisoners were turned on one another in an attempt to prevent any potential solidarities from forming in a twisted version of “No Brotherhood and No Unity.” In our wide-­ ranging conversations, Marianna*, a longtime activist for the Italian community in Rovinj/Rovigno, repeated the pervasive belief in Istria that Goli Otok offered the Tito regime a convenient way to delegitimize Italian antifascists who might offer a leftist political alternative.50 Undoubtedly, by criminalizing a form of internationalism associated with the Soviet Union, the purge of Cominformists fractured further the tentative new solidarities being constituted in places like Rovinj/Rovigno. To paraphrase Sequi, “there are brothers and then there are brothers.” In Rovinj/Rovigno I became acquainted with family members of those sent to the hellish island, as well as a man who survived two periods of imprisonment there.51 Born in 1937, Domenica* grew up in a family of communists. Her father had been among those participating in the foundation of the PCI at the Livorno Congress of 1921. Domenica’s father paid a dear price for his convictions, suffering multiple imprisonments under fascism; her uncle instead fled to France. After 1948, both Domenica’s father and brother found themselves sent to Goli Otok for their fidelity to the Italian Communist Party over the KPJ.  Domenica admits that at the time she did not understand much of what was happening, as Goli Otok remained a kind of public secret about which one did not talk, even within families. Release from the island carried the condition of silence about its very existence, even as wives and children of Cominformists endured public humiliations. Domenica’s mother, for example, was forced to sweep the streets. When the authorities threatened to move her family to a squalid accommodation, no neighbors or friends would help them, underlining how the accusation of Cominformism disseminated distrust within small communities like that of Rovinj/Rovigno. The silences within families about these events created further divisions and separations. Many of those who survived the camp, including

50  Interview with Marianna (pseudonym), born 1929, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 4 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 51  Interview with Giuseppe (pseudonym), born 1918, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 4 September 1997 by Pamela Ballinger.

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Domenica’s brother, ultimately made their way to Italy in the hopes of repairing broken lives.52 The Rovignese poet Eligio Zanini, however, famously remained in Yugoslavia even after he saw his hopes for socialism betrayed. Despite three brutal years on Goli Otok, Zanini did not take the path of exile, as his ex-wife and children had done during his imprisonment. Triestine writer Claudio Magris explained that for his friend Zanini, “it didn’t seem right to eat from the plate of food into which one had spit, and he also felt the duty to stay, to give testimony as to the civilization and the people there, where it was most difficult, in the desolate situation of Istria, where for the Italians who stayed it was certainly more difficult than even the tough conditions experienced by the exiles who left.”53 Zanini left behind a rich legacy of poetry in his native ruvignese dialect, poems that serve as a kind of elegy for the Adriatic Sea and its winds and scents. Perhaps the ultimate solidarity of those who remained behind was with a place (the “small homeland”) and an ever diminishing linguistic community. While I collected dramatic testimonies from those who had fought as partisans in the woods, mirroring the trajectory of Sequi, more common were narrative self-stylings of the “partisan spirit” required to carry the Italian community forward in the difficult years of the exodus and beyond. My interlocutors described the emptying of the peninsula as a “laceration” manifested by shuttered houses and empty school desks. Because of the fraught procedure of the citizenship option, Antonia* recalled, people kept their decisions secret until the moment of their departure. We would note the “carts with furniture,” she remembered, as “each day another

52  Interview with Domenica (pseudonym), born 1937, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 2 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. For a penetrating analysis on the postwar public silence surrounding various types of witnessing of violence in wartime Galicia, including that by children, turn to Anna Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in Trauma, Experience, and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 119–148. For the Yugoslav context and the ways that so-called horrorosis and partisan hysteria upended narratives of resilience and endurance imputed to antifascists, refer to Ana Antić, “‘We Will Cry a Little, But Then We Will Forget’: Narratives of Loss and Victory in Postwar Yugoslavia,” contained in the same volume. 53  Claudio Magris, “Ligio Zanini, il poeta e il gabbiano Filippo: Il poeta di Rovigno Ligio Zanini nel ricordo di Claudio Magris,” http://esperienzediscuola.blogspot.com/2018/08/ il-poeta-di-rovigno-ligio-zanini-nel.html (accessed 24 June 2020).

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person was missing.”54 The emptying out of the city of Pula/Pola in the aftermath of the 1947 Peace Treaty proved particularly dramatic. Sissi*, who hailed from a hamlet outside the city and had been sent there to urge Italians not to depart, recalled the desolation and eerie silence, “as if you were on the moon.”55 Nelida Milani, whose family numbered among the relatively few staying in Pola, commented, “For those of us who stayed behind, it was the beginning of a new era. Afterwards, in fact, things would never again be equal or easy.”56 Lucio*, who had fought for communism alongside his comrades in the Pino Budicin battalion and later found himself banished to Goli Otok, described the plunder that followed such departures. In particular, he singled out OZNA agents for seizing goods and furniture from the homes of those leaving Rovinj/Rovigno. The most dramatic such episode involved the sacking of the estate of the local noble Hütterott family in the wake of the disappearance of the matriarch Marie and her daughter Barbara. Like Goli Otok, knowledge of the fate of the Hütterott women—execution by partisans and the dumping of their bodies at sea—circulated through the town in subterranean fashion and in exile circles. Townspeople sometimes glimpsed items associated with the family, such as a signet ring bearing an “H” or monogrammed sheets, in the custody of local communists.57 As goods and objects disappeared, newcomers arrived. These included Istrians from the interior and, after 1947, inhabitants of greater Yugoslavia. These newcomers brought new habits and different ways of living. Writing of the Macedonian and Montenegrin neighbors who occupied the houses left by those departing Pula/Pola, Anna Maria Mori notes the newcomers’ habit of placing a couch in the kitchen. Mori admits that she viewed her neighbors as “inexperienced and ignorant,” underscoring how sometimes banal practices of daily life became sites of incomprehension: “Horrified, 54  Interview with Antonia (pseudonym), conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 1 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 55  Interview with Sissi (pseudonym), conducted in Šišan on 27 November 1995 by Pamela Ballinger. 56  Anna Maria Mori and Nelida Milani, Bora (Milan: Edizioni Frassinelli, 1998), 142. 57  Libera Rocco Zucconi, “Intervista; Esule anzitempo nel ricordo del terrore degli infoibamenti, tra le molte rivisitazioni della sua giovinezza trascorsa a Rovigno,” in L’Esodo da Rovigno: Storie, testimonianze, racconti, ed. Francesco Zuliani (Trieste: Famìa Ruvignisa, 2008), 48–9. In an interview, Uccia Malusà claimed that a commission from Belgrade subsequently took away most of the valuable objects left behind in the Hütterott villa; Nemec (2012), 88–9.

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we saw Croatian women going to the grocery store with their house dresses and slippers on: women from Pola would never leave the house if not fully dressed and always with some lipstick on.”58 Such comments, of course, reflected differences in class and geography (urban orientation), as well as those of ethnicity or nationalism. In addition to changes in customs, the soundscapes of daily life altered dramatically. Diglossia now became inverted, as members of the Italian minority struggled to adapt to what one of my interlocutors deemed a new “linguistic frontier” (confine linguistico). Guarantees of bilingualism and the establishment of Italian language schools meant that one could continue to learn, live, work, and love in an Italian linguistic sphere. Nonetheless, the ability of monolingual Italian speakers to make their way in a new Yugoslav reality varied greatly. With a relatively large number of rimasti and with bilingualism enshrined in the town’s statute, Rovinj/ Rovigno remained a place where Italian dialect served as one language of everyday life. For the first generation of post-exodus rimasti, though, remaining a monolingual speaker carried the risk of a fairly circumscribed existence within a shrinking world of kin and neighbors. Rovignese Nina*, who had risen to a position of prominence in the Istrian partisan movement, joked that she was assigned an important role as a partisan but did not realize it, because she did not speak Croatian and had not understood the announcement.59 Similarly, many of the women I interviewed who were in middle or high school during the years of the exodus admitted to having learned Croatian only very imperfectly there. Antonia, for instance, studied Croatian at high school but only really acquired fluency when she made a Dalmatian friend at work. Her brother, by contrast, still does not speak Croatian after all these decades. Martina*, whose parents (hailing from a hamlet outside the town) spoke both Croatian and Italian, grew up as a monolingual Italian speaker in Rovinj/ Rovigno. When she attended the University of Zagreb she struggled linguistically and continued to take notes in Italian.60 Likewise, Domenica recounted that it was only her experiences working in a bank—and later

 Anna Maria Mori, Nata in Istria (Milan: Rizzoli, 2006), 109.  Interview with Nina (pseudonym), born 1922, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 11 November 1995 by Pamela Ballinger. 60  Interview with Martina (pseudonym), conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 14 May 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 58 59

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her marriage to a man who came from the area of Croatia near the Hungarian border—that compelled her to really learn (Serbo-)Croatian. Work and, to a lesser degree (at least for this first generation) school, provided contexts in which new linguistic and other solidarities with new neighbors were forged. Elena*, a doctor born in 1943 in Rovinj/Rovigno, described the sorrow and sense of solitude when her family accompanied her departing relatives to the station. As a young person, though, she quickly made friends with the Croats, Serbs, and Kosovar Albanians who came from other parts of Yugoslavia to take their place. Inter-marriage offered another space in which new solidarities and ways of living in Istria developed. Elena, for example, married a non-Italian and their son studied at local Croatian schools before completing his last two years of high school at Rovinj/Rovigno’s Italian language liceo.61 Decisions within mixed marriages about language and schools could become a point of contention as well. Rosalba*, a former teacher in Rovinj/Rovigno’s Italian language schools whose parents had returned to Istria from Monfalcone as part of the “counter exodus,” married a man from Susak. She described her “battle” to send her two children to Italian schools, admitting that it is “not easy being married to someone of another nationality.”62 Linguistic solidarities and capacities thus intersected, informed, and, at times, undercut those of kinship and neighborliness. Milovan*, born in 1930 to a family of agriculturalists in nearby Rovinjsko Selo/Villa di Rovigno, exclaimed that “Italians here insist on speaking Italian and pretend not to know or understand Croatian! Why is this?”63 This despite the fact that one of his grandchildren (who is perfectly bilingual) is the product of a mixed union and completed Italian schools in Rovinj/Rovigno. Forced under fascism to Italianize his name and to attend Italian language schools, Milovan refused to acknowledge the internal dislocation experienced by his granddaughter’s paternal family or his neighbors. Tina*, for example, had lived her entire life in Rovinj/Rovigno and remembered when Milovan and his family moved from the countryside into a house a few doors down from her. A minor at the time of the exodus, her father had changed his mind about opting for Italian citizenship when he 61  Interview with Elena (pseudonym), conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 27 May 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 62  Interview with Rosalba (pseudonym), born 1937, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 3 June 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 63  Interview with Milovan (pseudonym), born 1930, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 18 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger.

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witnessed the abuse hurled at potential optants. Tina’s schooldays ended early and she began working in the town’s cigarette factory. Thus, any Croatian Tina learned was on the job. Like many of her generation, she knew just enough to make herself understood at the town office and on the factory floor.64 Many years after I first interviewed her, Tina suffered a stroke and spent months recuperating at a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of town, unable to speak. While I was visiting her one day, one of the other patients entered her room. Ida*, a spry 93-year-old, began to chat (or ciocolar) and sing songs in ruvignese, the local dialect Tina had grown up speaking. Tina, well known in her youth for her beautiful singing voice, widened her eyes and began to hum and bob her head as she heard the familiar cadences. Even as the language of brotherhood and unity had become a discarded historical relic, there survived a solidarity—in this case, one of sisterhood—tied to a localized sense of place and its language(s). As in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, “a single community of place not only permits, but actually requires and thrives on, various sets of similarities and differences.”65

Conclusion: Istria Revisited In this chapter, I have directed attention to questions of solidarities and neighborliness in the aftermath of both dramatic population change and intimate, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, in the Istrian town of Rovinj/ Rovigno. Doing so offers a subtle but significant shift away from perspectives that privilege either the ethnic character of the Istrian exodus or its political and ideological motivations, factors bound up together but sometimes in cross-cutting or contradictory ways. Though I have not sidestepped the question of why this exodus occurred and how it damaged or destroyed solidarities within families and between neighbors, I have highlighted the generative nature of such violence to constitute new, if often fragile, communities. In Rovinj/Rovigno, the exodus and the area’s incorporation into Yugoslavia forged new types of relationships among long-­ standing community members, as well as communities made up of new workmates and neighbors, who in turn sometimes became family 64  Interview with Tina (pseudonym), born 1935, conducted in Rovinj/Rovigno on 15 April 1996 by Pamela Ballinger. 65  Orla-Bukowska (2012), 174.

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members. This reconstitution of community at the level of everyday life occurred within a rapidly mutating political scene. Activists for what became the Italian minority situated themselves within “official” understandings of brotherhood, frameworks to which partisan figures and intellectuals like Sequi contributed but from which many found themselves excluded or from which they withdrew after the Cominform split. Owing to the complexity of the case, I have focused on the critical years of the exodus in Rovinj/Rovigno. Certainly, a longer analysis could trace out changing understandings of solidarity with Yugoslavia’s liberalization in the 1960s and 1970s. Many members of the Italian community who came of age during this period viewed ritualized celebrations of brotherhood and unity with indifference or as empty gestures, a cynicism toward late Titoism’s official narratives captured in Rovignese Sabrina Benussi’s 2012 film, Vedo rosso. For the Italian minority, the “golden years” of Yugoslav consumer society and general prosperity were also a time when leaders like Rovinj/Rovigno’s Antonio Borme faced criticism and defenestration, as attempts by the Italian community to assert itself politically were condemned by Belgrade and Zagreb as nationalism and irredentism. The Tudjman regime that governed the newly independent Croatian state after 1991 for nearly its first decade of existence likewise accused members of the Italian minority of nationalism. This was the context in which I conducted most of my interviews, and many of my speakers contrasted the depredations and divisions of the Tudjman years to the ideals, however imperfectly realized, of brotherhood under Yugoslavia. This period was also one in which new neighbors from Slavonia and Herzegovina arrived in Istria, a process that reinforced a sense of a multiethnic, multilinguistic, but still territorialized Istrian identity that reworked and updated narratives of Italo-Slavic brotherhood grounded in the distant experience of the partisan war. In the course of these multiple transformations, “Italians” in Istria have contributed to building new communities even as they have sought to preserve and celebrate their contributions to the peninsula. Though referring to the ideological struggle to build a new world, the title of Sequi’s famous diary, Eravamo in tanti (We were many), today serves as a reminder of the many neighbors who have left, remained, and arrived in Istria since 1943.

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Bibliography Antić, Ana. 2022. ‘We Will Cry a Little, But Then We Will Forget’: Narratives of Loss and Victory in Postwar Yugoslavia. In Trauma, Experience, and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese, 177–206. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Catherine. 2018. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ballinger, Pamela. 2003. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2017. Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries. East European Politics and Societies 31 (1): 44–67. Bartal, Israel, and Scott Ury. 2012. Between Jews and Their Neighbors: Isolation, Confrontation, and Influence in Eastern Europe. The Question of Influence and the End of Jewish History. In Jews and Their Neighbors in Eastern Europe since 1750, ed. Israel Bartal, Antony Polonsky, and Scott Ury, 3–30. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Bartov, Omer. 2008. Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide. The Journal of Modern History 80 (3): 557–593. Benussi, Andrea. 1951. Ricordi di un combattente istriano. Zagreb: Iz kućne zbirke. Bergholz, Max. 2016. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1998. Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the ‘New Europe’. International Migration Review 32 (4): 1047–1065. Cattaruzza, Marina. 2010. ‘Last Stop Expulsion’: The Minority Question and Forced Migration in East-Central Europe: 1918–49. Nations and Nationalism 16 (1): 108–126. Ferrara, Antonio, and Niccolò Pianciola. 2012. L’età delle migrazioni forzate: Esodi e deportazioni in Europa 1853–1953. Bologna: Il mulino. Gatrell, Peter. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lazzarini, Giuseppe. 1900. Lotta di classe e lotta di razza in Istria. Pola: Tip. J. Krmpotić & Co. Magris, Claudio. 2018. Ligio Zanini, il poeta e il gabbiano Filippo: Il poeta di Rovigno Ligio Zanini nel ricordo di Claudio Magris. 3 August 2018. http:// esperienzediscuola.blogspot.com/2018/08/il-poeta-di-rovigno-ligio-zanininel.html. Accessed 15 Nov 2022. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. Mark, James, and Péter Apor. 2015. Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989. The Journal of Modern History 87 (4): 852–891.

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Mark, James, Péter Apor, Radina Vučetić, and Piotr Osęka. 2015. ‘We Are With You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. Journal of Contemporary History 50 (3): 439–464. Mori, Anna Maria. 2006. Nata in Istria. Milan: Rizzoli. Mori, Anna Maria, and Nelida Milani. 1998. Bora. Milan: Edizioni Frassinelli. Nemec, Gloria. 2012. Nascita di una minoranza. Istria 1947–1965: storia e memoria degli italiani rimasti nell’area istro-quarnerina. Fiume: Unione Italiana. Oblak, Orietta Moscarda. 2016. Il ‘potere popolare’ in Istria, 1945–1953. Fiume: Unione Italiana. Orla-Bukowska, Annamaria. 2012. Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders: Social Relationships in the Shtetl. In The Shtetl: Myth and Reality, ed. Antony Polonsky, 173–195. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Papataxiarchis, Evythmios. 2016. Unwrapping Solidarity? Society Reborn in Austerity. Social Anthropology 24 (2): 205–210. Petacco, Arrigo. 2005. A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of Italians from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, 1943–1956, Trans. Konrad Eisenbichler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pupo, Raoul. 2008. Gli esodi nell’Adriatico orientale: problemi interpretative. In Naufraghi della Pace: Il 1945, i profughi e le memorie divise d’Europa, ed. Guido Crainz, Raoul Pupo, and Silvia Salvatici, 5–24. Rome: Donzelli. ———. 2017. Logiche della violenza politica nei dopoguerra del ‘900 nell’Adriatico orientale: Una ricognizione preliminare. Storia e problemi contemporanei 74: 15–40. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2016. Solidarity: The Egalitarian Tensions of a BridgeConcept. Social Anthropology 24 (2): 142–151. Scotti, Giacomo, and Luciano Giuricin. 1975. Rossa una stella. Fiume: Unione degli Italiani. Sema, Paolo. 2004. Siamo rimasti soli: I comunisti del PCI nell’Istria Occidentale dal 1943 al 1946. Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana. Sequi, Eros. 2013 [1953]. Eravamo in Tanti. Milan: Edizioni Cultural Box. Ther, Philipp, and Ana Siljak, eds. 2001. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Torsello, Davide. 2008. Action Speaks Louder than Words? Trust, Trustworthiness and Social Change in Slovakia. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17: 96–118. Unione degli Italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume (UIIF). 1945. L’Unione degli Italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume. Pola: Edizione de ‘La Nostra Lotta’. ———. 2010. Documenti dell’Unione degli italiani dell’Istria e di Fiume (gennaio 1947–maggio 1948), ed. Giovanni Radossi. Documenti Centro di Ricerche Storiche di Rovigno, no. X.

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Walsh, Stephen Anthony. 2014. Between the Arctic and the Adriatic: Polar Exploration, Science and Empire in the Habsburg Monarchy. PhD diss., Harvard University. Wylegała, Anna. 2022. Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia. In Trauma, Experience, and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese, 119–148. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Zucconi, Libera Rocco. 2008. Intervista; Esule anzitempo nel ricordo del terrore degli infoibamenti, tra le molte rivisitazioni della sua giovinezza trascorsa a Rovigno. In L’esodo da Rovigno: storie, testimonianze, racconti, ed. Francesco Zuliani, 47–49. Trieste: Famìa Ruvignisa.

Native Borderland Children in the Belgian-­German and Polish-German Borderlands. Comparing Verification and Nationalisation Narratives After the Second World War Machteld Venken

The belief that nation-states could achieve security and homogeneity by assimilating minorities underpinned many policies in both Eastern and Western Europe after 1945.1 As also the chapters of Eaton and Panz in this edited volume make clear, borderland changes approved at postwar international conferences went hand in hand with national verification 1  Hans Lemberg, ed., Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: aktuelle Forschungsprobleme (Marburg, Lahn: Herder Institut, 2000), 168, 179.

M. Venken (*) Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_5

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campaigns selecting who could stay and who must leave, as well as nationalisation campaigns aiming to make borderland inhabitants indistinguishable from people from the country’s core. This study compares the Belgian-German border region of Eupen-Sankt Vith-Malmedy (hereafter ESM), an area covered with woods and agricultural land, and the Polish-German border region of Upper Silesia (hereafter UpS), more specifically its most rural part with a comparable size, the Lubliniec district within Polish Upper Silesia, which belonged to the Polish state before and after, and was annexed to the German Reich during the Second World War (Fig. 1). Comparing ESM with the Lubliniec district of UpS seems unusual, but postwar resettlements and expulsions took place in both. It is not commonly known that the verification campaign in ESM resulted in a number of local inhabitants having to leave for Germany. In Poland, on the other hand, most research on postwar verification and nationalisation has been conducted in the many areas that fell under Polish jurisdiction after the war,2 with West Upper Silesia, for example, operating as a rich laboratory for cultural and sociological research on early postwar nationalisation.3 Less is known about how children experienced verification and nationalisation after the Second World War in a region that had already belonged to Poland in the interwar years. The Lubliniec district was located at a state border line before and during the war, but shifted to a more central location once Poland’s state borders were redrawn after the war. This chapter examines how international decisions on border changes, and the national policies that accompanied those decisions, influenced the narratives of inhabitants who stayed as children in the Belgian-German or Polish-German borderlands after 1945. In particular, it analyses and compares how native borderland children growing up during the early postwar period narrate their experiences of verification, rehabilitation and nationalisation policies. Verification is referred to as the establishment and

2 ́ ̨sku Opolskim 1945–1950 (Opole: Wydaw.  Jan Misztal, Weryfikacja narodowosciowa ́ na Sla ́ ̨żacy! Rodzimi mieszkańcy Instytutu Śla ̨skiego, 1984), 160; Maria Szmeja, Niemcy? Polacy? Sla Opolszczyźny w swietle ́ analiz socjologicznych (Kraków: Universitas, 2000), 199. 3 ́ ̨sku Opolskim w poszukiwaniu tożsamoscí  Danuta Berlińska, Mniejszosć́ niemiecka na Sla (Opole: Stow. Instytut Śla ̨ski, 1999); Antonina Kłoskowska, National Cultures at the Grass-­ Root Level (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001); Szmeja (2000).

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Fig. 1  German territorial changes in the twentieth century. Source: Machteld Venken, ed., Borderland Studies Meets Child Studies. A European Encounter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), 10

implementation of criteria and procedures for sorting Germans from, respectively, Belgians or Poles.4 Rehabilitation is the procedure through which those who were considered to have collaborated with the enemy during the Second World War were granted the opportunity to live as citizens in Belgium or Poland. Nationalisation is interpreted as the actions undertaken by representatives of the nation-state to include borderland inhabitants into the nation. How do locals from the German-Belgian and German-Polish borderlands recall their upbringing in the specific historical setting of the early postwar years, and how do their narratives compare? Do the fundamental differences in political regimes—the restoration of a 4  Bernadetta Nitschke, Wysiedlenie ludnoscí niemieckiej z Polski w latach 1945–1949 (Zielona Góra: WSP, 1999), 102.

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liberal nation-state with parliamentary democracy in Belgium, and the installation of national communism in Poland—result in radically different experiences and narratives? Or can we, despite dissimilar political conditions, detect similar patterns in how interviewees narrate verification and nationalisation? This study examines native borderland inhabitants growing up in the early postwar years, from 1945 until the mid-1950s. Tara Zahra’s research has already shown that children were privileged over adults as central objects of early postwar nationalising projects all over Europe, not primarily because they were considered innocent and vulnerable, but because they represented the “biological and political future of national communities.”5 Throughout postwar Europe, there was a widespread consensus that children had been hindered by the war in their development and needed to be properly educated in order to become responsible citizens. They were to form the system’s backbone, regardless of whether that system was democratic or communist.6 The age cohort selected for this study consists of children born between 1930 and 1939. While members of this cohort were too young to go through the verification procedure as independent individuals, even the youngest have vivid childhood memories of their early postwar years.7 Later, in the mid-1950s, a new historical era began both in Belgium and in Poland: Belgium simplified border-crossing regulations in a bilateral agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany (1956) and Poland allowed more family members to join their relatives in East or West Germany (1955–58).8 It is only recently that the testimonies of those growing up in the 1930s have received scholarly attention. Previously, there was scepticism about children’s ability to understand the situations they had been in, as well as their capacity to reproduce their experiences. However, psychological 5  Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 20. 6  Machteld Venken and Maren Röger, “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Second World War: European Perspectives,” European Review of History 22, no. 2 (2015): 199–220. 7  Fiona Jack, Gabrielle Simcock, and Harlene Heyne, “Magic Memories: Young Children’s Verbal Recall After a 6-Year Delay,” Child Development 83, no. 1 (2012): 159–172, 160. 8  Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjs ́cia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2010), 112–13.

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research on child eyewitnesses in court indicates that child accounts should not be dismissed but assessed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. This has encouraged historians to research child agency in acting and postaction narrating, instead of perceiving children as pure objects in historical events.9 Shortcomings in language use and references to time and place fail to justify why rich descriptions of interpersonal relations and everyday life conditions cannot contribute to reconstructing a fuller picture of past life practices. Testimonies here are considered a gateway to examining the impact of social and political relations on childhood experiences.10 By means of oral history, this article builds a clearer picture of how children after the war experienced and narrated verification and nationalisation. Seven biographical interviews were conducted in Belgium with previously publicly unheard local inhabitants born between 1930 and 1939, with the duration of the interview ranging between 33 minutes and 2 hours.11 In addition, 19 autobiographies (published or archived) and 88 interviews gathered under the citizen science project Damit nichts verloren geht (‘So that nothing gets lost’, 2005–08) were included. While the entire interview collection is diverse, it offers the best available entrance into the life worlds of children from the early postwar period. In Poland, 12 long biographical interviews were conducted with local inhabitants born between 1930 and 1939, with the duration of the interview ranging between one and seven hours.12 9  Gail S.  Goodman and Jennifer. M.  Schaff, “Over a Decade of Research on Children’s Eyewitness Testimony: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go from Here?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 11 (1997): 5–20. 10  Joanna Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Survival and Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust as Reflected in Early Postwar Recollections (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 16, 92. 11  Interviews with Hermann Langer, Johanna Gallo-Schmitz, Josef Altenberg, Martin Schröder, Monique Janssen, Franz Ingenleuf and Johanna Stoffels, conducted in ESM in 2012–13 by Wendy Müller for the research project FWF V 360—G 22. The interviews are archived and can be consulted in the Belgian Royal Archives in Eupen. 12  Interviews with Edward Karpe, Kazimierz Bromer, Jan Myrcik, Edward Wieczorek, Kazimierz Koszarek, Jerzy Ciba, Aniela Trybus, Maria Magdalena Wolik, Waltrauda Brzezina, Teresa Wieczorek, Stefania Morysson-Stoksik and Jerzy Malec were conducted in the Lubliniec district in 2013–14 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski for the research project FWF V 360—G 22. The interviews are archived and can be consulted in the History Meeting House in Warsaw (Dom Spotkań z Historia ̨).

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The Lubliniec District in East Upper Silesia During the twentieth century, the regions to the east and west of Germany underwent repeated changes in sovereignty. Most of ESM, which covered 1053 km2, was German until 1918, joined the Belgian state in 1920, was annexed by Germany in 1940 and returned to Belgium after Hitler’s last offensive, a change approved in the Potsdam Agreement. However, the Polish-German border region covers a much larger area of 103,000 km2, and not all terrains switched sovereignty in the same way. East Upper Silesia, for example, was Polish in the interwar years, under German rule in the Second World War, and was later reunited with Poland. Other border regions, including Warmia, most of Masuria, and West Upper Silesia, were part of a territorial dispute in the aftermath of the First World War, but remained German until 1945. Their change to Polish sovereignty was also confirmed in the Potsdam Agreement. The Lubliniec district covered 700  km2 and counted approximately 50,518 inhabitants in 1938 and 51,067  in 1949.13 Between 1945 and 1947, about 3248 people left or were forced to leave for Germany, and 47,764 native inhabitants stayed.14 The postwar Lubliniec district was a part of the postwar Silesian voivodship, in which “the greatest number of people subject to ethnic verification actions and rehabilitation” lived.15 Scholars usually detect three stages in the de-Germanisation of Poland’s border regions: the evacuations and flights before the arrival of a foreign army, the wild expulsions immediately after the end of the war, and organised resettlements following the Potsdam Agreement.16 In 1941, the German regime installed the Deutsche Volksliste (hereafter DVL), which classified borderland inhabitants according to their knowledge of the language or membership of pro-German versus pro-Polish organisations, with DVL I inhabitants considered to be more German than DVL IV inhabitants. Most inhabitants in UpS received a DVL III classification, which granted individuals German citizenship on revocation and yielded 13  Adam Dziurok, “Narodowa identifikacja,” in Województwo sla ́ ̨skie 1945–1950: Zarys dziejów politycznych ed. Adam Dziurok and Ryszard Kaczmarek (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śla ̨skiego, 2007), 598. 14  Ibid., 574. 15  Adam Dziurok and Ryszard Kaczmarek, eds, Województwo sla ́ ̨skie 1945–1950: Zarys dziejów politycznych (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śla ̨skiego, 2007), 750. 16  John J. Kulczycki, Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 67.

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to (forced) enrolment in the German Army.17 Between the end of the Second World War and the signing of the Potsdam Agreement, the borderlands formerly annexed to the German Reich experienced an implosion of moral values and social bonds between inhabitants, in which people considered of German descent were often subject to wild verifications and even wild expulsions from their homes.18 Later, an official verification policy aimed to separate inhabitants according to the war classification of the DVL. At first, inhabitants with a DVL I or II classification were to leave the country, whereas those with a DVL III or IV classification could undergo a rehabilitation procedure and be granted the right to stay.19 Whereas ESM inhabitants accused of collaborationism were held in prison, inhabitants with a DVL I or II classification from UsP were too numerous, and were therefore housed in detention camps with deplorable living conditions.20 During the verification procedure, unverified people faced acts of physical violence, forced labour, and were not entitled to health insurance or to their own property.21 Verification procedures and practices varied from village to village and relaxed over time, enabling more people, including those with a DVL II classification, to stay.22 As a result, those who were deemed Polish through verification did not always identify with Poland as their nation-state. It took historians a long time to start to research how the Second World War had looked like on the ground in the border region. As late as in the twenty-first century, they pointed to pragmatism both from officials (who wanted local blue-collar workers to stay and intellectuals to leave) and from individuals (who could keep their house if they declared themselves

 Ibid., 39.  Piotr Sztompka, “Kulturowe imponderabilia szybkich zmian społecznych: zaufanie, lojalność, solidarność,” in Imponderabilia wielkiej zmiany: Mentalnosć́ , wartoscí i więzi społeczne czasów transformacji, ed. Piotr Sztompka (Warsaw, Kraków: WN PWN, 1999), 265–82. 19  Dziurok (2007), 544–5. 20  Ibid., 578 and further. 21 ́ ̨sku w latach 1945–1950 (Opole:  Bernard Linek, Polityka antyniemiecka na Górnym Sla Stow. Instytut Śla ̨ski, 2000), 379. 22  Philipp Ther, “Die einheimische Bevölkerung des Oppelner Schlesiens nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die Entstehung einer deutschen Minderheit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26, no. 3 (2000): 407–438, 424. 17 18

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Polish).23 Many native inhabitants underwent a rehabilitation procedure, but accurate figures are scarce. In 1946, for example, the rehabilitation committee was dealing with 5498 native inhabitants possessing a DVL II classification.24 By 1949, 1105 Polish migrants from the former eastern Polish provinces that had been re-incorporated into the Soviet Union after 1945, and 2198 Poles who had migrated from the country’s centre, had also found a home in the Lubliniec district.25 A total of 54,701 Silesian children initially verified as Poles were given the opportunity to move, with or without their mothers, to join their fathers who had earlier been transported to occupied Germany after the Red Cross drew international attention to the refusal of Polish authorities to undo their verifications.26 Children of mixed marriages, moreover, were often removed from their German relatives so they could become reliable Polish citizens.27

The Region of Eupen, Sankt Vith and Malmedy The ESM inhabitants were better informed about the imminent arrival of the United States Army—which came to Eupen in September 1944, and the rest of the region (including St Vith and Malmedy) after the Ardennes Offensive in 1944/45—than the UpS inhabitants were regarding the arrival of the Red Army. As ESM locals who had been cooperating with the Nazi regime had had more time to leave than their counterparts in UpS, few were left to be wildly verified or expelled in the early postwar period.28 Even though the main part of Belgium had been occupied and ESM annexed, the Belgian government used the same measures to verify people’s war activities throughout the country as it considered the annexation to have been illegal.29 Twenty-five per cent of around 60,000 ESM 23  Andreas Hofmann, Die Nachkriegszeit in Schlesien: Gesellschafts- und Bevölkerungspolitik in den polnischen Siedlungsgebieten 1945–1948 (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), 271. 24  Dziurok (2007), 547. 25  Ibid., 598. 26  Linek (2000), 377–83. 27  Ines Hopfer, Geraubte Identität (Vienna: Böhlau, 2010), 229–30. 28  Peter J.  Elstob, Hitlers letzte Offensive: Die Ardennenschlacht (Munich: List, 1972), 29, 46. 29  Martin Conway, The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction, 1944–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115.

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inhabitants were suspected of having collaborated with the enemy, of whom 1503 (quadruple the Belgian national average) were found guilty. More than 7000 had their civil rights removed, either temporarily or permanently, and courts annulled the Belgian citizenship of 1325 male citizens along with their families, who saw no reason to stay and decided to leave, mostly for occupied Germany.30 Verification also severely affected the way in which public life was organised. Around half of all men entitled to vote (Belgian women would receive that right in 1948) were excluded from compulsory voting in the 1946 elections.31 Citizens deprived of civil rights could not be civil servants. However, penalties for collaboration softened by the late 1940s, and many people initially condemned were found not guilty during their appeal.32 In order to draw borderland inhabitants closer to the country’s core, a nationalisation campaign was launched. Local studies on nationalisation in schools demonstrate how, in a country where the constitution prescribed free use of the French, Dutch and German languages, the French language was revered in education.33 The Eupen-St. Vith region received cultural independence in 1970, but that had much more to do with the unitary Belgian nation-state being dismantled and with language and education policies being directed towards regions than with the involvement of borderland inhabitants.34 In the 1990s, local historians started to research local inhabitants’ involvement in the Second World War and postwar verification and nationalisation.35

30  Carlo Lejeune, Die Säuberung, Bd. 2: Hysterie, Wiedereingliederung, Assimilierung (1945–1952) (Büllingen: Lexis Verlag, 2007), 83–5. 31  Ibid., 113. 32  Ibid., 85. 33  Ursel Schmitz, Zur bildungspolitischen Entwicklung des Sprachenproblems in den belgischen Ostkantonen seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 17. 34  Hubert Jenniges, Hinter Ostbelgischen Kulissen: Stationen auf dem Weg zur Autonomie des deutschen Sprachgebiets in Belgien (1968–1972) (Eupen: Grenz Echo Verlag, 2001). 35  See, for example, Carlo Lejeune. Mut zur eigenen Geschichte. Der 8. Mai 1945. Anmerkungen zur ostbelgischen Vergangenheit (St.Vith: Aktuell, 1995).

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Similarities in Narratives on Verification Testimonies pay significant attention to verification. Despite differences in how verification policies were implemented, interviewees often recall similar experiences. The first similarity lies in their negative attitudes towards verification principles. Children frequently did not know what was at stake on a political or legal level, and also report that adults rarely attempted to explain this to them. They nevertheless understood that verification affected people they liked and had confided in, an awareness that often stayed with them later in life. A man from ESM recalled, for example: After the end of the war, I witnessed policemen visiting my mother and wanting to know from her what the political orientation of my father had been […] My father, who came from a very pro-German family, had nevertheless not been a party member—I do not know why. The police wanted to take my mother to sign a declaration that my father had been an NSDAP member. But my mother refused […] Despite the threats, she did not give her signature. As a child I experienced these interrogations and I developed disdain for all policemen for years.36

The interviewee recalls not having known why his family was pro-­ German during the war, or why his father did not join the NSDAP. Leaving factual accuracy aside, we note that the interviewee strongly sympathised with his parents without knowing whether his father was to be considered guilty, despised those who wanted to take his father away, and stated that this feeling influenced his later life. Native borderland children in UpS also found the early postwar verification principles unclear. Jerzy Ciba, for example, experienced the verification of his father, a local Silesian who had been enrolled in the German Army, and who had deserted and fought for the liberation of Europe in the First Polish Armoured Division of the Allied Armed Forces. Ciba did not understand why his father was sought after he returned to Poland, and feared his father would be taken away: Later we got a card that he was missing at the front, so we didn’t know if he was just dead or what was going on […] And only after a few months, 36  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, C1/02–70-34-M. The names of interviewees are not provided. See also the interview with Willi Wittrock, born 1941, conducted in Reuland on 14 August 2012 by Wendy Müller.

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through Sweden, we received the information that my father was in England […] I remember my father’s return because it was very characteristic. Namely, we didn’t know, of course, when he would return, because he was brought to Gdynia by ship, and then he came back by train. After an hour, when he returned, the first guests were security officers. They had a conversation with him, they threw all of us out of the house, and […] my father brought some rings because he thought that in such a country, maybe in the future, if I got married, such a ring would be needed. Because he got his pay there, he could easily buy it. Well, he gave these rings to these security officers, and something else, coffee or so, all he brought they took away. So that they would leave him alone.37

By taking away the present his father had brought for him from the West, the Secret Service officers made clear to the boy that his father was not welcome in postwar Poland. His father, however, soon started work as a postman in a town further away (in Chorzów), where he encountered no further problems and eventually regained his Polish citizenship. Almost 70 years later, Jerzy Ciba reflected that “those who were somehow clever could do different things […] Even leave. They were already in another town, where one talked differently to them,” but that others were postwar victims. They took them to camps somewhere. And because they couldn’t organize their own defense or ordinary life problems, they were physically destroyed. They died in these camps. And this is the worst thing that happened here after the war.38

Whereas Polish administrative sources mention a deportation camp in Lubliniec from which 641 local inhabitants with a DVL I or II classification were deported in July 1945, and 149 Volksdeutsche from the district who were kept in prison in August 1945, no records are available about the number of people who may have died there.39 Jerzy Ciba, however, was convinced that injustice had been done to locals, including his father. A second similarity marking the narratives of native borderland children is a feeling of disorientation following the disintegration of their communities. An interviewee born in the Belgian borderlands, for example, described how wild verification shattered the social order. Having described 37  Interview with Jerzy Ciba, born 1938, conducted in Gliwice on 9 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 38  Ibid. 39  Dziurok (2007), 567, 580.

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how the daughter of village peasant leader Martin Theissen had her head shaved along with her father, he continued: A Feidler [a boy—MV] was shaving the wife of Martin Theissen. When he had half-shaved her, she said (she was a friend of mother Feidler) to him: “If your mother could see what you are doing to me, it would not fare you well!” He hesitated for a moment, then he dropped the scissors and said: “I will not cut any further!” Then Paulis [the local teacher—MV] picked up the scissors and completed the haircut […].40

Research on Jewish child memories of the Second World War has already shown that children vividly remember what happened to their peers and, thanks to that specific viewpoint, enrich historical knowledge.41 The interviewee recalls seeing a young person stopping what he was doing when he realised he was shaving a friend of his mother. One could interpret this as the young person acting according to values shared by the interviewee’s community, with respect for the elderly being a social code standing above reprisal. The interviewee experienced a mismatch between his moral standards and those practised in his direct social environment. He is confused that the local teacher, one of the most respected community members, continues the shaving.42 This observation leaves him with a feeling of disorientation even today. He realises he could have been in the same situation as the peasant family if his parents’ war activities had been different. The shaving punishment made him uncertain about what social codes to follow in the future: to whom should he be loyal and why if state borders and national sovereignty are liable to change? In UpS as well, interviewees ranked the social order of their community above the national differences that verification aimed to introduce. This is, for example, how Waltraud Brzezina recalled the death of her grandfather, who had received a DVL II categorisation: Later, they took my grandfather to prison, because he was in favor of Germany and had Volksliste number two. And after the war he was i­ mprisoned 40  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B1/09–80-31-M, Interviews with 4 Interviewees, Born 1931, Report 2. 41  Boaz Cohen and Rita Horvath, “Young Witnesses in the DP Camps: Children’s Holocaust Testimony in Context,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 103–25. 42  Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović, Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology (Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993), 60.

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[for this]. He was very abused in this prison, he was beaten very much. Later he got to the hospital. In this hospital, a guard stood next to him, but he could neither speak nor eat. And later he was brought out of this hospital, because he was already […] He died in a week. Such memories are terrible. I was six years old at the time, but I remember that much. I remember my grandfather, he was such a poor wretch. His legs were thinner than my hands. Tragedies, tragedies! […] And we had a neighbor who was an insurgent [who fought on the Polish side in the Silesian Uprisings (1919–22)— MV], he was in prison, and my grandfather saved him and pulled him out of this prison. And after the war, he became mad and reported the worst things about my grandparents.43

As a little girl, Waltraud Brzezina saw the consequences of the oppression of Polish state representatives on her grandfather. For Waltraud, moreover, a local inhabitant was to blame for the fate of her grandfather. She seems to have grown up with a feeling that both the German and Polish regimes had been foreign to Silesians, and that it had been the task of locals to help each other out. The worst thing had happened; that social code had been broken. Both in ESM and UpS, borderland children believed that verification disrupted the social rules governing their village communities. The verification was of an arbitrary nature, did not offer convincing results, and left native borderland children disoriented. Native borderland children growing up in both Belgium and Poland recall that their right to aid depended on how aid distributors judged their parents during the verification campaign. As most of Belgium suffered relatively little damage, the heavily devastated small southern part of ESM, which reportedly had the harshest living conditions in postwar Belgium, could easily be identified as requiring humanitarian aid.44 The distribution of that aid, however, was politically motivated and deprived children whose parents had been accused of collaborationism. One testimony shows how the family of an interviewee struggled to make ends meet while his father was in prison awaiting trial: “From that point on, the Red Cross considered the family was no longer entitled to civic rights, which meant that no parcels or support were to be expected anymore.”45 The ­interviewee 43  Interview with Waltraud Brzezina, born 1938, conducted in Lisowice on 17 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 44  Gerd Kleu, Die Neuordnung der Ostkantone Belgiens 1945–1956: Politik, Kultur und Wirtschaft in Eupen, Malmedy und St. Vith (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 120. 45  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B1/15–90-37-M.

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recalled how his feelings of uncertainty increased when his mother stopped receiving income in September 1945 and the family relied on the help of acquaintances and sympathisers. After the verdict, the boy’s father lost his civil rights and was not allowed to continue teaching, but he could keep his Belgian citizenship and, from 1946, the family received state-­sponsored child allowances, putting the children on equal legal terms with those from the mainland. Nevertheless, the interviewee’s narrative is dominated by a sense of injustice for the impact that the verification policy had on his family, and utmost respect for the people who made up for the discrimination that the family faced. Although war devastation was on a larger scale in Poland, its subsequent territorial changes larger and its recovery slower, Polish authorities made efforts to provide aid (money, clothing and shoes) in UpS from 1946 onwards. However, this did not satisfy needs and verified citizens appear to have had privileged access. Children of unverified parents often did not receive enough milk and/or were locked up, with or without their parents, in detention camps awaiting deportation to Germany, despite international regulations.46 Maria Magdalena Wolik, born into a family that received a DVL II classification, recalled how in the difficult days of the early postwar period, when the family was released from a detention camp but was not entitled to aid, a neighbour helped her mother to feed her little sister. Although grateful, Maria remains frustrated to this day because that help was insufficient: “My youngest sister […] was not even one year old. I remember that Mrs. Fronczykowa always gave us a small pot of milk […] She always gave it to us when we went. But what is such a pot of milk for such a child?”47 Even though governments in both Belgium and Poland adopted policies to end postwar child discrimination, native borderland child narratives remain dominated by feelings of inferiority and an aversion to officials.

46  R.  M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 234. 47  Interview with Maria Magdalena Wolik, born 1933, conducted in Lubecko on 16 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski.

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Similarities in Narratives on Nationalisation Prompted by security concerns, officials in various countries believed nationalisation to be a cornerstone of postwar reconstruction. Nation-­ states resolved to take control not only of their territories and borders, but also of their children, who were to be “captured and remodeled by nations looking to expand their ranks.”48 Verified borderland children were considered assimilable, and a series of policies were adopted to mould these children into future model citizens. It is unsurprising, therefore, that native borderland children chiefly focus on their experiences of nationalisation within their testimonies. Native borderland inhabitants in both Poland and Belgium were supposed to relinquish German-sounding first names and surnames. In UsP, name changes in official paperwork were obligatory, but the policy was not always effectively carried out.49 Jan Myrcik, for example, remembered: “My sister-in-law, who was born in Bytom in a German family, was called Edeltraut Kolbe. Edel is a noble, traut—as if trusted. They christened her Urszula Koczula. Her brother, Horst was his name, was given the name Janik.”50 Waltraud Brzezina, on her turn, could keep her name, but recalls having been discriminated against: I had a name—Waltraud, German, because my dad was more for Germany, and my mother was a real Silesian. And my dad gave me that name. To this day, I have that name because I will not change what my parents gave me, but I was persecuted at school. A school principal was so terrible that he even tried to molest me, but I was a firm girl and I did not give up. I was persecuted very much. He was so angry with me that he didn’t let me start the next class. And I never complained to anyone, never […] There were more children like me.51

In ESM too, the names of native children were often orally transformed into French ones. An interviewee recalled his first school day in 1945:  Zahra (2011), 36.  Szmeja (2000), 154. 50  Interview with Jan Myrcik, born 1931, conducted in Koszȩcin on 10 August 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 51  Interview with Waltraud Brzezina, born 1938, conducted in Lisowice on 17 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 48 49

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We had to line up in rows and were then asked for our names. Then came one of the first, that was Wansart Nicholas. Mister Johan asked him: “What is your name?” “Wansart Nicholas.” “WHAT is your name?” “Wansart Nicholas,” he said. Slap, he had one on his cheek. “This means that from now on your name is Wansart (French pronunciation) and is no longer Wansart (German pronunciation), remember that well!”52

Native borderland children were also encouraged to exchange their language for French or Polish respectively when speaking in public. Local officials were often fired because they were considered war collaborationists and were replaced by state officials from the mainland who communicated the link between the locals and their state in the official language.53 As Niederfränkisch and Rheinisch, versions of German spoken in ESM, are closest to Hochdeutsch and barely related to French, while Silesian is a tongue related to Polish influenced by German, this change seems to have been more difficult for children in Belgium.54 An interviewee recalled, for example: “All forms were in French and the staff of the administrative district were all in favor of Belgium.”55 In UpS, Polish handbooks from the late 1930s were brought back into the schools. Jan Myrcik remembered: In 1945 […], for the second time in my life, the Polish school was founded. There were no textbooks. My parents somehow had kept the textbooks from before the war through the occupation. It was a punishment! Up to prison! You were not allowed to have any Polish books. And after the war, the German ones were not allowed. During the war, it was not allowed to speak Polish, and just after the war, it was not allowed to speak German.56

In sum, native borderland children grew up in a traditional and isolated world that centred around work on family farms and featured scarce 52  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B1/09–80-31-M, Interviews with 4 Interviewees, Born 1931, Report 1. See also Interview with Rudolf Kolvenbach, born 1944, conducted in Eupen on 18 August 2013 by Wendy Müller. 53  Machteld Venken, “Nationalisation Campaigns and Teachers’ Practices in Belgian– German and Polish–German Border Regions (1945–1956),” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 42, no. 4 (2014): 223–41. 54  Ulrich Ammon, Hans Bickel, and Alexandra N. Lenz, eds, Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2004), L. 55  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, A3/20–80-36-M. 56  Interview with Jan Myrcik, born 1931, conducted in Koszȩcin on 10 August 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski.

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contact with officials.57 They all negatively recall the brief but emotionally difficult moments when state officials introduced them to the core values of the nation. They searched for ways to escape their isolation and feelings of national domination, but could not leave for Germany. Sentences such as “between us and Germany was a wall” frequently recur in their testimonies.58 Between the end of the 1940s and the mid-1950s, westward outmigration from UpS came to a halt, and the Belgian-German border remained one of the most difficult to cross in Western Europe until the mid-1950s, earning the name of the Glass Curtain.59

Differences in Narratives Testimonies from native borderland children in ESM have a notably more positive tone than those from UpS in recalling the end of the Second World War. Children in ESM often refer to the arrival of the Americans in a joyful way: “I ate my first chocolate then. Before we hadn’t known it […] We were free, had hung out with the Americans who we had smoked cigarettes with and got up to other stuff.”60 In contrast, fear of the Soviet Army was a central feature in all testimonies from UpS, as Soviet Army soldiers often indiscriminately treated local civilians as Germans.61 In early 1945, Soviet authorities deported around 16,000 Upper Silesians to Donbas and Siberia, burned down villages and terrorised inhabitants.62 Aniela Trybus remembered how soldiers of the Red Army treated her because they considered her to have been German:

57  Andreas Fickers, “Die Veränderung von Raum und Zeit durch die Erfahrung der Welt,” in Spuren in die Zukunft: Anmerkungen zu einem bewegten Jahrhundert, ed. Carlo Lejeune, Andreas Fickers, and Freddy Cremer (Büllingen: Lexis Verlag, 2001), 117. 58  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private archive of Carlo Lejeune, A4/05-80-30-W. 59  Lejeune (2007), 231; Stola (2010), 66. 60  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B8/08-60-34-M. See also Emil Gennen, Die Amis kommen! Ein zwölfjähriger Zeitzeuge erinnert sich: Dokumente, Notizen und Eindrücke zur Befreiung des südlichen St. Vither Landes sowie der angrenzenden luxemburgischen und deutschen Ortschaften im September 1944 (Burg-Reuland: Beschützende Werkstätte Meyerode, 1995). 61  Throughout Poland, inhabitants were afraid of the Soviet Army. See Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2012), 343. 62  Ther (2000), 421.

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When I was four years old, the army entered Lubecko and started bombing. We escaped to the basement, and […] when they entered this basement, there were a lot of people hiding there, they threw everybody out and put us against the wall. Really, I remember it […] I was four years old but I remember it all. How they came in with these rifles and put us under […].63

Contrary to the situation in ESM, in UpS children were also directly targeted during the verification campaign. Maria Magdalena Wolik, for example, whose parents had been classified as DVL II during the war, recalled how after her father was “taken away” to the Soviet Union in 1945, where he eventually died, her mother and siblings were forced to leave. When officers approached their house, Maria’s mother escaped through the window, thinking that if she left the children, the officers would not take away the house. Maria Wolik honours her mother’s successful attempt to help her children leave the collection point they were brought to by relying on the different treatment they were given as children; Maria and her sister received permission from the officer to leave, supposedly to get their baby sister’s soother. Maria and her sister hid and saw their mother and baby sister being “loaded on a wagon” and driven away.64 After three days, their mother and baby sister returned. Until today, Maria celebrates her birthday twice: “Because this birthday was the birthday of the Mother of God […] Because it was terrible for us. Because dad was gone and my mother was taken away with my little sister.”65 The interviewee does not put the blame for “being left alone” on her mother, who left the children on their own twice, but on the verification officers. When, after the sham national elections in 1947, the Polish state dramatically interfered in borderland communities by collectivising the agricultural sector and punishing those who spoke German in public, Polish nationalisation took on a dictatorial dimension. At this point, the Belgian and Polish political regimes significantly diverged. The fear of Stalinist repression can be felt in testimonies. Kazimierz Koszarek, for example, remembered how:

63  Interview with Aniela Trybus, born 1939, conducted in Lubecko on 16 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 64  Interview with Maria Magdalena Wolik, born 1933, conducted in Lubecko on 16 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 65  Ibid.

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When we were in class 11, Generalissimus Stalin was hanging on the wall, but without the rim, only the paper itself. And someone, a silly one, shortly before the finals, tore this Stalin down. Damn it! I don’t know if they found out who did it, I don’t think they did. But it was dangerous, because none of us may have gotten to college because of that.66

It is worth looking at what Stalinist repression could do to an individual child like Jerzy Ciba, whose father, as mentioned above, had fought on both fronts, and who in the early postwar years was living in a big house with his extended family, including his aunt. Her husband had fought for the Polish case in the Silesian Uprisings (1919–22), had worked as a policeman in Polish Upper Silesia in the interwar years, and when the Second World War broke out was evacuated further east, where the Soviet Army took him into captivity, deported him and executed him as part of the Katyń massacre, the mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers mainly by the Soviet secret police in 1940. In the afterwar period, Jerzy Ciba was sometimes considered her son: (J.C.): Aunt had problems. (Interviewer): Which aunt, the one who lost her husband? (J.C.): Yes, the one with whom we lived. Because those who spied on us probably identified me as her son. Perhaps those problems that I had were due to the Secret Services being uninformed? (Interviewer): So, as a “Katyn child”? (J.C.): As a “Katyn child,” yes.67

Instead of being perceived as a child of a local inhabitant categorised as DVL III during the war, or as a child of an ex-combatant who fought for the liberation of what became seen as the hostile Western world during communism, Jerzy Ciba thinks he was perceived as the child of his uncle, the embodiment of what the communist regime no longer stood for: an elitist, bourgeois Second Polish Republic. Now grown up, Ciba still wonders whether the problems he encountered while being taught by members of communist-oriented partisans in his local school in the early postwar years may have been the result of this misconception. 66  Interview with Kazimierz Koszarek, born 1931, conducted in Lubliniec on 9 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 67  Interview with Jerzy Ciba, born 1938, conducted in Gliwice on 9 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski.

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Native borderland children also have different criteria regarding the delineation of membership of social groups. The testimonies from ESM reveal that there was a conflict line between children whose parents had been pro-Belgian or pro-German during the Second World War. Let us consider this example: “Children whose parents had done misdemeanor often suffered later on. When they wanted to start something with a girl, then their parents’ deed was held up and they often felt guilty too, without being guilty.”68 The testimonies from UpS, however, differentiate between more groups, and in finding alliances mostly disregard war and verification classifications. The larger postwar immigration in UpS causes native borderland children to focus more on “who came from where” in the early postwar years, than on the war and verification experiences that marked the collective identifications of children in the Belgian-German borderlands. Kazimierz Bromer summarised, for example: “We have four groups: Silesians, those from Westphalia, repatriates and settlers. And the Silesians and repatriates got along best. Here are the western borderlands, here are the eastern borderlands.”69 Despite administrative sources from the late 1940s mentioning hostility between locals and immigrants from the pre-­ war Polish eastern lands, like Bromer, most interviewees refer to the borderland experience they share with the latter and evaluate relationships between the two as good.70 A final difference lies in the opportunities for witnesses to compensate for nationalisation policies in other spheres of their everyday life. Once they had finished school, most children went to work in Wallonia. Narrators often point to feelings of inferiority while recalling their contact with people from the country’s centre. They explain how discrimination occurred because their local language was associated with the past war occupier.71 A Belgian interviewee summarised his situation in Wallonia:

 Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B1/05-80-35-M.  Interview with Kazimierz Bromer, born 1931, conducted in Lubliniec on 10 August 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 70  IPN BU MBP 314, k. 142, Raport miesięczny WUBP w Katowicach za okres od 1 VII do 31 VII 1948, quoted in Dziurok (2007), 602. See for example: Interview with Maria Magdalena Wolik, born 1933, conducted in Lubecko on 16 November 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. 71  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, A1/08-80-31 W. 68 69

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“We were just the vatschis, the cow boys. That was the lowest job.”72 Only a handful of educated native borderland children outgrew their inferiority complex and pursued careers such as journalism or medicine in the country’s centre.73 Since UpS had more local jobs on offer, outmigration to the centre of the country for study or work was rare. However, because of the inward migration of Poles from elsewhere in the country and from interwar Polish eastern provinces to UpS, and because of the social advancement policy of the new communist regime, which valued enthusiasm for the regime above professional skills, competition for the better paid jobs was high. Edward Wieczorek, for example, born in UpS, found a successful strategy to develop his career. By learning Polish well, he managed to outdo the immigrating Poles in the communist regime’s social advancement policy: “Good mastery of the Polish language meant that at the Dymitrów mine, I could dominate many who were there at the time of social promotion. I could spark there, you could say, among these bandits.”74 A more common strategy, however, was to leave Poland. From the mid-1950s, migration from both border ESM and UpS increased, but more natives left UpS than ESM. Every interviewee from UpS had a family member or neighbour who left for Germany from the mid-1950s onwards. The Belgian-German border became easier to cross legally, and the geographical position of ESM next to Germany even made it possible for local inhabitants to live in Belgium and go to school or work in Germany.

72  Damit nichts verloren geht, Private Archive of Carlo Lejeune, B1/24–60-37-M. See also Förderverein des Archivwesens in der Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens V.o.G., ed., In Stellung: Einblicke in das Leben ostbelgischer Dienstmädchen im 20. Jahrhundert (Eupen: Grenz Echo, 2007); Interview with Franz Ingenleuf, born 1933, conducted in Sankt Vith on 16 August 2012 by Wendy Müller. 73  Hubert Jenniges, Eifeler Kindheit: Erinnerungen aus einem fernen Jahrhundert (Eupen: Grenz Echo, 2004); Emil Mertes, Emil Mertes erinnert sich... Verantwortung als Mediziner und Politiker. Eine ostbelgische Karriere (Eupen: Grenz Echo, 2005). 74  Interview with Edward Wieczorek, born 1938, conducted in Koszȩcin on 17 August 2013 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski.

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Conclusion Although verification and nationalisation were more severe in Poland than in Belgium, more similarities than differences are observed in how native borderland children from the Belgian-German and Polish-German borderlands ascribe meaning to the experiences that so dominantly marked their lives. Using a comparative approach to look beyond differences of postwar political regimes, it appears that native borderland children affected by the outcome of international peace talks and national policies hold much in common. Although native borderland children born in the 1930s were supposed to form the backbone of national order, the policies that ensued had a deeply negative and long-lasting impact on their personal development and self-identification. Native borderland children were too young to understand the essence of verification, but nevertheless observed that it affected the people in whom they had put their trust (or even themselves), disrupted the social order in their communities and rescinded their right to humanitarian aid. Nationalisation measures, such as name changes and contact with state officials in a foreign (albeit national) language, were experienced as intimidating. Differences in the historical context explain why the end of the Second World War and the recovery period in the Belgian-German borderlands is narrated more positively than in UpS. In addition, some native borderland children from UpS were directly affected by the verification campaign, as they were sent to detention camps. Testimonies from native borderland children in UpS are also marked by a fear of Stalinist repression, and, unlike their peers in the Belgian-German borderlands, interviewees delineate group membership based not on the war, but on the inhabitants’ postwar status. The verification and nationalisation policies of Belgian and Polish early postwar authorities had an effect diametrically opposed to their aims. Instead of becoming a virtuous generation of national citizens securing the nation’s stability, this age cohort of native borderland children report that they experienced alienation, emotional resistance against the postwar political order, and developed a lifelong awareness of the historically changing political and social situation of their home territories. Acknowledgements  The research for this chapter was funded by the Austrian Science Fund under the Elise Richter Grant Number V 360-G 22.

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Jack, Fiona, Gabrielle Simcock, and Harlene Heyne. 2012. Magic Memories: Young Children’s Verbal Recall After a 6-Year Delay. Child Development 83 (1): 159–172. Jenniges, Hubert. 2001. Hinter ostbelgischen Kulissen: Stationen auf dem Weg zur Autonomie des deutschen Sprachgebiets in Belgien (1968–1972). Eupen: GrenzEcho-Verlag. ———. 2004. Eifeler Kindheit: Erinnerungen aus einem fernen Jahrhundert. Eupen: Grenz Echo. Kleu, Gerd. 2007. Die Neuordnung der Ostkantone Belgiens 1945–1956: Politik, Kultur und Wirtschaft in Eupen, Malmedy und St. Vith. Essen: Klartext. Kłoskowska, Antonina. 2001. National Cultures at the Grass-Root Level. Budapest: CEU Press. Kulczycki, John J. 2016. Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lejeune, Carlo. 1995. Mut zur eigenen Geschichte. Der 8. Mai 1945. Anmerkungen zur ostbelgischen Vergangenheit. St.Vith: Aktuell. ———. 2007. Die Säuberung, Bd. 2: Hysterie, Wiedereingliederung, Assimilierung (1945–1952). Büllingen: Lexis. Lemberg, Hans, ed. 2000. Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: aktuelle Forschungsprobleme. Marburg, Lahn: Herder Institut. ́ ̨sku w latach Linek, Bernard. 2000. Polityka antyniemiecka na Górnym Sla 1945–1950. Opole: Stow. Instytut Śla ̨ski. Mertes, Emil. 2005. Emil Mertes erinnert sich… Verantwortung als Mediziner und Politiker. Eine ostbelgische Karriere. Eupen: Grenz-Echo-Verlag. Meštrović, Stjepan Gabriel. 1993. Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Michlic, Joanna. 2008. Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Survival and Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust as Reflected in Early Postwar Recollections. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. ́ ̨sku Opolskim 1945–1950. Misztal, Jan. 1984. Weryfikacja narodowosciowa ́ na Sla Opole: Wydaw. Instytutu Śla ̨skiego. Nitschke, Bernadetta. 1999. Wysiedlenie ludnos ́ci niemieckiej z Polski w latach 1945–1949. Zielona Góra: WSP. Panz, Karolina. 2023. ‘The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka’: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing. In No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others, ed. Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar, and Małgorzata Łukianow, 51–73. Cham: Palgrave. Schmitz, Ursula. 1993. Zur bildungspolitischen Entwicklung des Sprachesproblems in den belgischen Ostkantonen seit 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Stola, Dariusz. 2010. Kraj bez więzi? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989. Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej.

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PART II

A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction

Doctors, Craftsmen, and Landlords: How Vanishing Others Influenced the Galician Economy During and After the Second World War Anna Wylegała

In the summer of 1944, when Baruch Milch, a Jew who had had a medical practice in the town of Tłuste (Tovste)1 in the Tarnopol region before the war, came out of his hiding place, he was besieged by patients desperate for medical help. Milch, exhausted after nearly three years of hiding from

1  I use the Polish prewar names of Eastern Galician localities when describing what happened before 1944, and Ukrainian names when discussing the postwar period, as well as to indicate the location of the contemporary oral history interviews conducted in Ukraine. Alternative Polish or Ukrainian names are provided in parentheses when the name appears for the first time.

A. Wylegała (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_6

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the Germans, recalls that he was not able to satisfy all their needs.2 Shortly after the end of the war in Galicia, people were dying because there was no one to treat them. Vira Holinach from a village near Tłuste recalls how they were unable to find a doctor to treat her mother, who was suffering from a chronic leg wound. She was saved by a Soviet feldsher (a less qualified healthcare professional) from a unit passing through the village, who amputated the leg.3 There were simply too many people in need. In postwar Galicia, the lack of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists was acute, but this was only the tip of the iceberg. To understand why there was also a shortage of teachers, merchants, and craftsmen, it is necessary to look at the situation in this region before and during the war. Before 1939, Galicia was a multi-ethnic region that was part of the Second Polish Republic. The western part was dominated by Poles (who were also politically privileged as the titular nation), while Ukrainians formed the vast majority in the eastern part. Jews made up at least a 10% minority in the whole region, traditionally concentrated in towns, where their share in the population was usually at least 30%, sometimes reaching 70–80%. In 1939, after the disintegration of the Polish state, the Germans seized the western part of the region and incorporated it into the General Government (GG) created from occupied Polish lands, while the Soviets incorporated Eastern Galicia into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) (Fig.  1).4 While the Holocaust and repression of the Polish intelligentsia began in the GG, the Soviets murdered or deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens in Eastern Galicia within two years.5 During the four major deportations deep into the USSR, as well as executions and murders, Polish landlords disappeared from Galicia along with Polish colonists (settlers from Central Poland who bought land in the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic in the interwar period), Polish judges, ­prosecutors,  Baruch Milch, Testament (Warsawa Ośrodek KARTA, 2001).  Interview with Vira Holinach, born 1934, conducted in Tovste (Ukraine) in 2018 by Natalia Otrishchenko. Some of the interviewees asked for anonymity and were granted it. Otherwise, they are quoted using their first and last names. 4  For stylistic reasons, further on in the chapter I use the term Western Galicia interchangeably with Małopolska, and Eastern Galicia interchangeably with Western Ukraine. Małopolska is divided into the Kraków and Podkarpacie regions, while Eastern Galicia is divided into the Tarnopol, Lwów, and Stanisławów regions (former voivodeships). 5  On the subject of deportation to Siberia in 1939–41, see: Stanisław Ciesielski, Grzegorz Hryciuk, and Aleksander Srebrakowski, Masowe deportacje ludnoscí w Zwia ̨zku Radzieckim (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2003); Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 2 3

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Warszawa (Warsaw)

Kraków (Kraków)

Lwów (Lviv) Złoczów (Zolochiv)

Tarnopol (Ternopil) Stanisławów (Stanyslaviv)

Polish state border before September 1939 Contemporary state borders Border between Nazi Germany and USSR after September 1939 Western Galicia | Eastern Galicia (Distrikt Galizien after 1941)

Fig. 1  Changing border of Western and Eastern Galicia between 1939 and 1991. Source: Wojciech Mańkowski

senior officials, policemen, teachers, doctors, postmen, and foresters—all classified by the Soviet authorities as patriots and therefore dangerous to the new authorities. However, Ukrainians and Jews also fell victim to the successive waves of repression: the Polish elite were followed by wealthier entrepreneurs of all nationalities, Ukrainian “nationalists” (mostly members and sympathizers of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv]), and Jewish refugees from the GG. German occupation policy also affected the elites of the occupied societies, but on a less massive scale. Jews were the main victims of the Nazis. They were being murdered as early as 1939  in the western part of the

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region, while in the east, the murders started in the summer of 1941, after the German attack on the USSR and the establishment of the District of Galicia. In Eastern Galicia alone, the Germans murdered about half a million Jews in local massacres or deported them to the Bełzec extermination camp. Another act in this spectacle of genocide in Eastern Galicia was the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the OUN and its military branch, UPA (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, Ukranian Insurgent Army), often with the participation of Ukrainian civilians, and Polish retaliatory actions against Ukrainians. As a result, approximately 60,000 Polish and several thousand Ukrainian civilians lost their lives.6 When the Red Army again entered Galicia in 1944, thousands of Ukrainians, who had worked in the German administration between 1941 and 1944 and served in the Ukrainian auxiliary police, escaped from the eastern part of Galicia along with the retreating Germans. The conflict between the Soviets and the Ukrainian independence underground, the UPA, also began almost immediately, taking the lives of several thousand insurgents and many civilians in the long run, and resulting in the deportation to Siberia of more than 150,000 Ukrainians accused of supporting the UPA.7 This was also the period of the postwar population exchange between the Soviet Ukraine and communist Poland: about 650,000 Poles from Eastern Galicia (and almost all the surviving Jews) were displaced to Poland (some of them settled in Western Galicia), and about 450,000 Ukrainians left Western Galicia for the Soviet Ukraine (most of them finally settled in Eastern Galicia). The last act of this bloody play was the agricultural reform in communist Poland in 1944, which expropriated and partially repressed landlords in Western Galicia (and the rest of the country).8 After 1945, Galicia was finally divided into Western Galicia, belonging to Poland, and Eastern Galicia, belonging to the USSR. 6  For academic overviews of the conflict, see, for example, Grzegorz Motyka, Od rzezi wołyńskiej do “Akcji Wisła”: Konflikt polsko-ukraiński 1943–47 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011); on the brotherly character of the conflict, see Jared McBride, “Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN–UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944,” Slavic Review 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 630–54. 7  For an overview of the underground activity, see Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960: działalnosć́ Organizacji Ukraińskich Nacjonalistów i Ukraińskiej Powstańczej Armii (Warsaw: ISP PAN, Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, 2006); on the postwar deportations from Western Ukraine, see Tamara Vrons’ka, Upokorennia strakhom: simeine zaruchnytstvo u karalnii praktytsi radianskoii vlady (1917–1953) (Kyiv: Tempora, 2013). 8  For an overview of the postwar fate of the Polish gentry, see the first chapters of Longina Jakubowska, Patrons of History: Nobility, Capital and Political Transition in Poland (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).

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The fate of Galicia during and immediately after the war, as outlined above, shows that the region was a true heart of darkness. All those who disappeared from the region—Poles, Ukrainians, Jews—were part of a social and economic system in which they performed certain roles, and their absence was bound to cause a temporary or permanent dysfunction. The present chapter focuses on this aspect of the effects of war and loss, on which there is so far little research, namely the changes in the professional and economic structure. Although Jews were murdered because of their ethnicity rather than their profession, their extermination in the long run caused a shortage of doctors, pharmacists, craftsmen, and merchants, as they had dominated these professions before the war. The deportation of Polish landlords to Siberia was part of the Soviet plan to destroy the social elite of the occupied lands, but it also resulted in a complete reconstruction of social and economic relations on the lands still largely dominated by large land estates. The purpose of the present chapter is to take a close look at these “staff shortages” and their consequences. As my disciplinary perspective is that of a researcher of social life, not an economic historian, I am primarily interested in the subjective dimension of the changes that occurred. What did the disappearance of a doctor, shoemaker, or landlord mean for the remaining inhabitants of Galicia? Who replaced these people in their jobs, and when? How much damage was done by the resulting void and dysfunction, in the short or long run, and to what extent did they bring certain benefits (and to whom)? The chapter focuses on villages and small towns, taking the view that they were economically and socially completely different in nature to large cities. Moreover, it is easier to trace the changes that took place in small communities. I use archival documents, as well as ego documents, the most important of which are journals, memoirs, and diaries, and oral history. A third important category of sources consists of more than 250 biographical interviews conducted by my colleagues and myself in Galicia between 2017 and 2019 with interlocutors born between 1917 and 1938. In addition, I also use interviews recorded by me during previous research projects between 2008 and 2014. Finally, as a fourth category of sources, I analyze press reports published in the war’s immediate aftermath.

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In the Countryside: Between a Land Estate and an Inn On the eve of the Second World War, the Galician countryside, both in the east, where it was ethnically diverse, and in the more homogeneous west, was to a large extent post-feudal, with local landlords (usually Poles) playing an important role. Landlords employed landless peasants and, seasonally, those who did not have enough of their own land to make a living. In 1939, most of the landed estates in Eastern Galicia were divided by the Soviets among local peasants, along with the stock. Ivan Yakymenko from Vyshnivchyk (Wiśniowczyk) (Ternopil region) recalls: “It was the time of harvest. And so, piece by piece, everyone [was given a piece of land]. Everyone would reap, mow and bring it back home. And so did I, I mowed, loaded it up and brought it to my house.”9 Everyone who could took the land; no one refused: the overpopulated countryside was craving land. By the end of 1939, 2,750,000 hectares of land had been taken over by the state in Western Ukraine, of which 1,300,000 hectares were distributed to 473,000 peasants (the rest was used to create kolkhozes and state farms).10 At first, peasants were euphoric, as the additional hectares and remaining livestock seemed like great wealth. However, disappointment soon came: The land allocation was very small: a half to three hectares of land at most. However, it did not help the rural poor, because 90% of them had no tools, livestock or grain for sowing. Therefore, between 1939 and 1940, there were thousands of hectares of uncultivated land in all western Ukrainian territories.11

Furthermore, it soon became clear that the real goal of the Soviet authorities was to rebuild agriculture on the Soviet model of collectivization. The “voluntary” creation of kolkhozes began as early as 1940. The peasants were first encouraged to voluntarily donate the land they had just 9  Interview with Ivan Yakymenko, born 1927, conducted in Vyshnivchyk (Ukraine) in 2018 by Marta Havryshko. 10  David R.  Marples, “The Ukrainians in Eastern Poland under Soviet Occupation, 1939–1941: A Study in Soviet Rural Policy,” in The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–1941, ed. Keith Sword (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 241. 11  Milena Rudnytska, ed., Zakhidna Ukraina pid bol’shevykamy. IX.1939–VI.1941 (New York: Naukove Tovarystvo im. Shevchenka v Amerytsi, 1958), 345.

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received to the kolkhoz. Next, various methods of pressure were applied, high taxes being the most common. Letters intercepted by the Soviet censorship in 1941 paint a picture of a countryside that is poorer than before the war, tormented by excessive taxes and the threat of arrest. Vasyl’ Khmara from the village of Peresev (Stanisławów region) complains in a letter to his relatives: Soon, the people will be left naked, hungry, in rags and faithless. They say that the capitalist used to exploit the poor but this is not true—the poor themselves don’t want them [the Soviets] and they say: “Just take back this land and go away, we will be farming our own land.” … Our village still hasn’t joined the kolkhoz but we don’t know how for much longer we can make it.12

By June 1941, 13% of the farms and 13.7% of the land in Galicia and Volhynia were collectivized.13 When the Germans entered Galicia in 1941, they disbanded the kolkhozes. The goal was anything but improving the peasants’ lives, however: the occupiers wanted to make farming more efficient to feed the army that was heading east. They took away the land that had been given to the peasants by the Soviets and turned what were large private estates before 1939 into Liegenschaften (agricultural estates owned and managed by the German state), which were often managed by former landlords or administrators, if they remained alive and available for these positions.14 Just like before the war, local peasants were employed on the estates. The difference now was that while the Polish master had paid the peasants, the German administrator did not, instead forcing people to work. Nataliia Zaremba from the village of Lany near Lviv, who came from a middle-ranking peasant family, remembers that immediately after their entry, the Germans took over a former Polish estate and forced the

12  Radians’ki orhany derzavnoi bezpeky: dokumenty HDA SB Ukraïny, ed. Vasyl’ Danylenko and Serhii Kokin (Kyiv: Vydavnychyi Dim Kyievo-Mohylianska Akademiia, 2009) (GDA SBU, f. 16, op. 84, spr. 8, ark. 98–100, Zi spetspovidomlennia 4–ho viddilu NKDB URSR narkomu derzhavnoi bezpeky URSR P. Meshyku pro zmist vyluchenoho z mizhnarodnoi korespondetsii lysta, 23 chervnia 1941), 1112–3. 13  M. K. Ivasiuta, Narysy istroii kolhospnoho budivnytstvs v zakhidnykh oblastiakh Ukrains’koi RSR (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Akademii Nauk Ukrainskoi RSR, 1962), 67. 14  Biblioteka Ossolineum, 14115.II, vol. 5, Ciemniewski Leon—Poprzez skiby mazowieckie, podolskie i s ́la ̨skie. Wspomnienia z lat 1900–1964, cz. 5, 26 IX 1939–I 1945; Kost’ Pankivs’kyi, Roky nimetskoii okupatsii, 1941–1944 (New York: Kluchi, 1983), 376.

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peasants to work there. As an 11-year-old girl herself, she was put to work weeding the field.15 The history of the peasants in Eastern Galicia came full circle when the Soviets returned. Although they initially continued their pre-1941 propaganda and returned the land taken from the peasants by the Germans, this time too they were only pretending. As soon as Western Ukrainian agriculture recovered from the war damage, a ruthless collectivization campaign was carried out, combined with a fight against the Ukrainian independence underground, supported by many villagers. Within three years, between 1948 and 1950, almost all Western Ukrainian land was collectivized. The peasants lost what they had had before the war, as well as the allocations of Polish landlords’ land given to them by the Soviets.16 The same story, although on a less brutal scale and with a slightly different ending, can be seen in the western part of Galicia after the entry of the Red Army in the autumn of 1944. Under orders from Moscow, an agricultural reform was carried out in Poland, which expropriated all landlords with more than 50 hectares of land. The land, like in Western Ukraine, was given to peasants, primarily to farm workers, but also to landless peasants and smallholders. The problems these peasants had to face were similar to those of Ukrainian peasants in 1939–41. Being given land was a dream come true, but it took a lot of effort for the new owners to manage it. They lacked livestock and tools, and were not able to build dwellings or sow the land they received. A peasant from the area of Ropczyce (Podkarpacie region), landless before the war, wrote in his diary: After the agricultural reform we received 0.84  ha of the best land. We became landlords! The land was there, but there were no seeds to sow and no crops to grow. Famine came. We would roam the field picking rotten, frozen potatoes left from the year before, which we used to make pie.17

15  Interview with Nataliia Zaremba, born 1930, conducted in Lany (Ukraine) in 2019 by Anna Wylegała. 16  David R.  Marples, Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 111–28. See also Damian Markowski, Anatomia strachu: Sowietyzacja obwodu lwowskiego 1944–1953. Studium zmian polityczno-gospodarczych (Warsaw: IPN, 2018), 393. 17  Archiwum Zakładu Historii Ruchu Ludowego, Nowe pamiętniki chłopów, (208/906) Marian Stanisław Assynger, no pagination.

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Unlike in the Ukrainian SSR, the attempt to collectivize agriculture in the People’s Republic of Poland, made in the 1950s, failed. The farm cooperatives established at that time survived only until Stalin’s death in 1953 and then were mostly disbanded.18 Those new owners of allocated land who managed to get back on their feet and start farming gained general respect over time and fed the class of individual farmers that dominated Polish agriculture not only in the immediate postwar period, but also long after. There were also other changes in the rural economy, equally irreversible. Soviet nationalization and the genocide of Jews largely changed the collection system for agricultural produce and the character of rural trade. On the eve of the war, Jewish traders and intermediaries still dominated these fields of the economy in terms of numbers, skills, and client trust.19 While the Soviet occupation of 1939–41 only temporarily changed those relations by merging small producers into state artels (cooperatives), the true change came with the Holocaust, in both parts of the region. Jews locked in ghettos could no longer work as itinerant traders; they no longer went from village to village, offering their goods and buying crops from peasants. Janina Dadej from Maszkienice (Kraków region) recalls that before the war her family sold calves to an itinerant Jewish trader, who then delivered them to the town. After the outbreak of war, the trader came less and less often, until he finally stopped, and the family had to deliver the animals to the German collection point themselves.20 Outside of the official market controlled by the occupier, smugglers took over the supply of the towns. The 1943/44 report on the situation of Polish lands prepared for the Polish government in exile states: At that time, the Jewish trade is being eliminated from the system (closed ghettos), creating urgent needs in this respect. Here, peasant smugglers coincided with smugglers from the town, but there was enough work for both, as mainly they were in charge of supplying towns, especially the larger 18  See Antoni Kura, Aparat bezpieczeństwa i wymiar sprawiedliwoscí wobec kolektywizacji wsi polskiej 1948–1956 (Warsaw: IPN, 2006); Dariusz Jarosz and Grzegorz Miernik, “Zhańbiona” wies ́ Okół: opowies ́ci o buncie (Warsaw, Kielce: IHP i UJK w Kielcach, 2016). 19  On economic relations in Eastern Galicia, see Maksym Hon, Z kryvdoiu na samoti: Ukrains’ko-ievreis’ki vzaiemyny na zakhidnoukrains’kykh zemlakh u skladi Polshchi (1935– 1939) (Rivne: Volyns’ki oberehy, 2005), 55–90. 20  Interview with Janina Dadej, born 1922, conducted in Maszkienice (Poland) in 2018 by Hanna Gospodarczyk.

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ones. Young peasants, mainly those who came back from the cities from service or work, became smugglers.21

From one side, this was hardly a surprising change, since every war and occupation with their economic limitations encourages illegal trade. From the other side, the situation was unexpected, because it was not the group that was already experienced in trade that went into illegal business, but another group, so far absent from the competition. At the same time, in Eastern Galicia, where the Germans favored Ukrainians after 1941, a kind of “Ukrainianization” of farm outlets, such as dairies, was taking place. After 1941, the Ukrainians completely ousted Poles from this domain, while the Germans excluded Jews. In September 1942, a dairy in Horodenka (Stanisławów region), which purchased milk from the entire region, was employing 70 people, exclusively Ukrainians. A journalist in the local press wrote: “the dairy is becoming more than just a milk outlet; it is also getting social significance for the [Ukrainian] population.”22 The genocide of Jews had a very visible impact on the economic dynamics in the countryside. Especially in Eastern Galicia, many villages resembled semi-towns before 1939; there were numerous stores, workshops, and bakeries (almost exclusively Jewish). In Stratyn (Stanisławów region), a Jewish baker supplied the village with bread until 1941, when, as a woman born in the village in 1923 said, “they killed the Jews, so there was no bakery either.” When asked whether the bakery reopened after the end of the war, the woman answered with surprise: “And whoever would run it?”23 The situation was similar in Wiśniowczyk, a village in the Tarnopol region, where before the war people went shopping in the so-called town, which was simply the center of the village. Ol’ha Tsymbala stated that after the murder of the local Jews, it was no longer possible to buy anything in Wiśniowczyk, and people had to go to the city to get what they needed.24

21   United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter USHMM), RG-59.030 (Prezydium Rady Ministrów), PRM-122 (Sprawozdania sytuacyjne z ziem polskich, Listopad, grudzień 1943, styczeń 1944), Raport o młodziezy wiejskiej, 1 marca 1944—o nastrojach panuja ̨cych wśród polskiej młodziezy wiejskiej na terenach okupowanych, 178. 22  Stanislavs’ke slovo, 1942, vol. 5 (36): 6 September, 6. 23  Interview with a woman, born 1923, conducted in Stratyn (Ukraine) in 2017 by Marta Havryshko. 24  Interview with Ol’ha Tsymbala, born 1930, conducted in Vyshnivchyk (Ukraine) in 2018 by Marta Havryshko.

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The economic degradation of the countryside was permanent. The rural itinerant trade never fully recovered. Julia Hudy from the village of Jadowniki in Małopolska remembers that “later, when the Russians set us free, those Jews did not come anymore, and nobody did.”25 A similar thing happened with small Jewish stores: nobody took them over, they simply disappeared, and people had to satisfy their needs in the city a dozen or more kilometers away. Jewish inns also permanently disappeared from the countryside. In the village of Prybyn (Lwów region), the inn building was taken over from a Jew named Moszek by his neighbor, but the inn itself never reopened.26 An interviewee from Stary Wiśnicz (Kraków region) said: There was an inn here too, people would go there on their way back from the church. And later, after the Jews were gone, people demolished the building and this was the end of the inn. [So, the inn remained open as long as the Jews run it?] Yes, and the building was there and the Gypsies moved in, they set fire by accident, sometime in 1946, I believe, or 1947. And then the folks demolished the building, levelled the ground and it’s gone.27

After the Holocaust and the expropriation of landlords, the Galician economy in the countryside became much more monotonous, both in the east, where the farms were collectivized, and in the west, dominated by smallholders.

Trade and Crafts Both trade and crafts were dominated by Jews in Galicia. Although it is difficult to estimate the share accurately, it can be assumed that, depending on local conditions, between 50 and 75% of the trade was in the hands of

25  Interview with Julia Hudy, born 1931, conducted in Jadowniki (Poland) in 2018 by Anna Wylegała. 26  Interview with Mykola Myrka, born 1929, conducted in Utikhovichi (Ukraine) in 2019 by Marta Havryshko. 27  Interview with Stanisław Kokoszka, born 1937, conducted in Stary Wiśnicz (Poland) in 2018 by Małgorzata Łukianow.

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traders of Jewish origin.28 After the Jewish stores were closed, trade died out in many places. This happened mostly in towns where Jews made up the majority of the population: in the tiny town of Szczerzec (Lwów region), almost all the stores closed after 1941.29 The situation was similar in Brzesko, a town in the region of Kraków. Julia Hudy remembers that during the German occupation she would no longer go to Brzesko with her mother, because there was nothing left to buy from the stores there, and the Jews did not have money to buy from peasants bringing their products to the market.30 So the Jews not only stopped selling, they also stopped buying. A Ukrainian woman from Khodoriv (Chodorów) said that during the war her family lost their source of income because the Jewish stalls, where the family sold their small wooden products, closed: “Later on our people set up the stalls but before that, only Jews had had their stores.”31 This void lasted for shorter or longer periods of time. It was certainly more acute in Eastern Galicia, where, apart from Jews, Poles (murdered, deported, or resettled) and Ukrainians also disappeared. As early as February 1946, Lev Savchyns’kyi from Staryi Sambir (Stary Sambór) noted sadly in his diary: “The market failed again, there was no one to trade. No Poles, no Jews, even no Muscovites.”32 However, trade was the area of the economy that recovered fastest compared to others, as it required the least specialization. Poles and Ukrainians did not always take ownership of stores. Ownership in Eastern Galicia had already been eliminated by the Soviets, which the Germans eagerly took advantage of, leaving larger companies state-owned (German) after 1941. In Western Galicia, the larger Jewish stores were taken over by the Germans from the beginning, without the involvement of Poles. Smaller stores, however, were taken over by Poles and Ukrainians. In some cases, their former owners watched helplessly as they were replaced. Zelda 28  Maksym Hon reports that in 1937 in the Stryj district (excluding the towns of Stryj and Skole), 66.9% of small merchants were Jewish, 23.9% were Ukrainian, and 7.9% were Polish, while in the countryside, 51.3% were Jewish, 39.1% were Ukrainian, and 7.4% were Polish. See Hon (2005), 68. Ben-Cion Pinchuk claims that in the whole of the Eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic, 76% of trade was run by Jews. See Ben-Cion Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 14. 29   USHMM, RG-50.589*0173, Oral history interview with Yahad-In Unum interviewee 723. 30  Interview with Julia Hudy. 31   USHMM, RG-50.589*0191, Oral history interview with Yahad-In Unum interviewee 741. 32  Lev Petrovych Savchyns’kyi, Spohady (Lviv: Krai, 2007), 100.

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Mechlewicz-Hinenberg, who was hiding using Aryan papers during the occupation, describes a similar situation in Sokal (Lwów region) in 1942: “In Sokal, Jewish stores are kept by Catholics.”33 Poles and Ukrainians entered Jewish stores as eagerly as Polish and Ukrainian peasants took landlords’ land. Ukrainian rag newspapers from the time of the German occupation were full of information about how well Ukrainians were doing in trade. In 1942, for example, Ternopil’s’kyi holos reported that all 12 stores in the town of Skałat were in Ukrainian hands, and that “Ukrainian merchants as novices are getting more and more skillful—they already serve their customers quite competently and courteously.”34 The new Ukrainian staff were also being trained quickly. In Brzezany, where Ukrainian merchants were said to be performing so well, bookkeeping courses were eagerly organized, and accountancy courses in Rohatyn.35 With time, both Poles and Ukrainians distanced themselves from the process. In 1955, a participant in a memoir contest from Podkarpacie region wrote about “elements recruited from nationalists,” who cooperated with the Germans because “it suited them well to destroy the Jews, because they took over their stores both in the towns and in the countryside.”36 Józefa Zurek from Brzesko (Kraków region) recalled many years later that her father, who in 1939 lost his job as a railroad official in Kraków, opened a textile store in Brzesko after the war. He may have preferred to continue working on the railroad, but undoubtedly it was possible for a person with no experience in trade to enter the market, because there was no longer any Jewish competition. She also mentions a number of Brzesko families who took up trade after the extermination of the Jews and managed to make a fortune, before private entrepreneurship was outlawed in Poland.37 In Eastern Galicia, the short-lived prosperity of Ukrainian merchants ended even faster. As soon as the Soviets returned in 33   USHMM, RG-67.026, Eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust period collection (RG-104), YIVO Archives, Folder no. 200, Rawa Ruska, memoirs of Zelda Mechlewicz-­ Hinenberg (Oksana Panasiuk) “Chcę zyć!,” 20 April 1946, 14. 34  Ternopil’skyi holos, 1942, vol. 8. 35  Chortkivs’ka dumka, 1942, vol. 11, 1 November, 6; ibid., 1943, vol. 7 (72), 14 February, 6. 36  H. Ruszkiewicz and B. Wiloch, eds, Nowe pamiętniki chłopów (Warsaw: Ksia ̨zka i Wiedza, 1962), 2. 37  Interview with Józefa Zurek, born 1928, conducted in Brzesko (Poland) in 2018 by Hanna Gospodarczyk.

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1944, stores that had been partially privatized by the Germans were nationalized again. This applied to both former Jewish and Polish businesses. In Koropiec upon Dniester (Koropets), a bakery owned by a Pole named Pachner was nationalized during the first Soviet occupation. The Pole then managed to get it back from the Germans, but when he left for Poland after the war, the bakery was taken over not by his Ukrainian competitor, but by the Soviet cooperative.38 Before the war, craftsmanship as a trade was similarly dominated by Jews. Ben-Cion Pinchuk estimated that in the entire Eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic, 52% of craftsmanship was in Jewish hands, while the Katzmann Report (a famous document detailing the Holocaust of Galician Jews in 1943) showed that in Galicia this share was as high as 80–90%, explaining why the mass murder of Jews there took place gradually—too much haste could have damaged the economy of the Reich during the war.39 The gap left by Jewish craftsmen was first filled by Poles and Ukrainians who had the necessary skills, but for various reasons had lost out to Jewish craftsmen before the war. These were mainly non-Jewish craftsmen from the countryside, who after 1941 emigrated to towns in huge numbers to take over the deserted Jewish workshops, or who stayed in their villages, expanding their activities. A report for the Polish government in exile from 1944 states: Tailors and shoemakers in villages, who before the war took great effort to compete with the products of the Jewish cottage industry, now have their hands full and engage more and more younger peasants to work. Modifications and repairs of used clothes and shoes, imported by smugglers from the towns, are also part of their work.40

There was much enthusiasm. Just after the war, a diarist from the Kraków region recalled that people from the nearby villages “replace the murdered 38  Interview with Stefaniia Shkvaryliak, born 1930, conducted in Koropets (Ukraine) in 2019 by Anna Wylegała. 39  Pinchuk (1991), 14; Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944, trans. Kathleen M.  Dell’Orto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 256. 40  USHMM, RG-59.030, PRM–122, Sprawozdania sytuacyjne z ziem polskich, Listopad, grudzień 1943, styczeń 1944, Raport o młodziezy wiejskiej, 1 marca 1944—o nastrojach panuja ̨cych ws ́ród polskiej młodziezy wiejskiej na terenach okupowanych, 1, 780, 179; see similar remarks on Eastern Galicia in the Ukrainian press of that period: Chortkivs’ka dumka, 1942, vol. 5, 20 September, 6.

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Jews in craftsmanship, shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, woodwork, etc., some live in clover.”41 However, unlike in trade, the lack of experience could not be made up for in craft; people had to learn the necessary skills. Poles and Ukrainians were starting apprenticeships in large numbers, and young people were taking advantage of special courses and vocational schools organized by the Germans. The demand was enormous. In 1943, the Ukrainian press reported that most of the deserted craftsmen’s workshops were lacking workers. In the area of Czortków, for example, there was a lack of watchmakers, tinsmiths, glaziers, and upholsterers.42 In neighboring Podhajce (Pidhaitsi) in January 1943, a total of 100 “Aryan” schoolboys and schoolgirls were accepted for fast-track apprenticeships; in Brzezany, 70 students began studies at a craft school. “In time, these newly trained professionals will replace the foreign professionals,” hoped a journalist from a rag newspaper.43 The swift replacement of one craftsman by another was not always successful, however. Sometimes the workshops remained empty for years, as there was simply no one to work in them. The situation was particularly bad in regions or towns that specialized in a particular craft. In the town of Zhovkva (Zółkiew), for example, known before the war for its expert Jewish furriers, the furriery disappeared completely after the war.44 If considered in purely economic terms, the Shoah opened up new opportunities for professional advancement for many Polish and Ukrainian peasants, as well as for the urban unskilled proletariat. Ukrainian rag newspapers from the occupation period saw this change in terms of national liberation from Jewish oppression. As early as November 1941, Zolochivs’ke slovo proudly stated that crafts and trade had finally become 88% Ukrainian.45 In December, the same newspaper reported: We should be hosts in the city, not guests. … We should take the empty posts behind the counter, in the workshop and in the factory! Remember— 41  Krystyna Kersten and Tomasz Szarota, eds, Wies ́ polska 1939–1948: Materiały konkursowe, vol. 2 (Warsaw: PWN, 1968), 477. 42  Chortkivs’ka dumka, 1943, vol. 7 (72), 14 February, 6. 43  Chortkivs’ka dumka, 1943, vol. 4 (69), 24 January, 6. 44  Gerszon Taffet, Zagłada Zydów zółkiewskich (Łódź: Centralna Zydowska Komisja Historyczna, 1946); interview with a man, born 1922, conducted in Zhovkva (Ukraine) in 2008 by Anna Wylegała. 45  Zolochivs’ke slovo, 1941, vol. 7, 30 November, 2.

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the time has come to abandon the limitations of the “peasant nation”! … Will Zolochiv be ours? Let our hard work be the answer.46

The reports prepared for the Polish government in exile were free from the ideological clichés typical of the rag newspapers, but their message was the same: the murder of Jews made room in the economy for crowds of “useless and unemployed” people who had thus far been unproductive: Among the rural youth, there was a growing conviction that they would finally cease to belong to the category of superfluous people, living together somewhere on small farms and waiting for each of them to find work and life opportunities to start a family. Many people were making their personal life plans while taking into consideration the opportunities to find a permanent job in industry, crafts and trade.47

Intelligentsia and Liberal Professions While people could go without new shoes and overlook inefficient service at the store (at least they were selling something), no one could replace the doctor. Before the war, Jews were also over-represented in this profession, in relation to the general share of the population; there were slightly fewer Polish doctors and many fewer Ukrainian doctors. The purge among doctors and pharmacists was carried out gradually. They were hit first by the Soviet occupation: those of Polish origin and those active in social life before the war were deported and arrested. Józef Czyniewski, a Polish doctor from Koropiec, was mobilized in September 1939 and left; when he returned after demobilization, he found that his office had been sealed by his prewar Jewish competitor, Jakub Kronberg, who had managed to establish friendly relations with the new Soviet government. After some negotiations, Czyniewski reopened the office (the simple fact was that the Soviets needed him), but as early as 1940 he was arrested and deported to Siberia.48 The Soviets also deported several Ukrainian doctors who had been too obviously displaying their national identity.

 Zolochivs’ke slovo, 1941, vol. 11, 28 December, 2.  USHMM, RG-59.030, PRM–122 Sprawozdania sytuacyjne z ziem polskich, Listopad, grudzień 1943, styczeń 1944, Raport o młodziezy wiejskiej, 184. 48  Archiwum Wschodnie (hereafter AW) II/1212A, Józef Czyniewski, Wanda Czyniewska, Wspomnienia. 46 47

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The Germans took a simpler approach: they killed all Jewish doctors. There was an element of pragmatism. The ban on Jewish doctors treating Aryan patients was lifted very quickly; there were simply no other doctors, especially in Eastern Galicia, where Soviet cleansing had taken its toll. In Złoczów, for example, the ban on practice was initially imposed on 34 Jewish doctors, but it soon became clear that maintaining these restrictions was unrealistic.49 Jewish doctors were allowed to live a relatively long time, and were not displaced to ghettos in larger cities. Jakub Kronberg, a doctor from Koropiec (together with his wife, a pharmacist), was the only Jew left in the town by the Germans after the rest had been displaced to the ghetto in the neighboring Monasterzyska (Monastyrys’ka).50 In the village of Szabelne (Shabel’ne) near Rawa Ruska (Lwów region), one of four local Jews was a veterinarian by profession, serving the whole neighborhood. After the invasion of the Germans, the inhabitants tried to defend “their” veterinarian from the Germans, even writing letters, but to no avail.51 Wherever possible, the posts vacated by the deported and murdered were occupied by locals, sometimes less qualified, and usually belonging to a group that was not subject to repression or extermination. The pharmacy run by Jakub Kronberg’s wife, after she was displaced to the ghetto in Monasterzyska, was taken over by her former employee, a Ukrainian, Justyna Moroz.52 In Western Galicia, the place of murdered Jews was often taken by Polish doctors from the Poznań region, who had themselves been displaced by the Germans to the GG after 1939, or by Polish doctors from Eastern Galicia, who escaped from the Soviets to the GG in 1939. Maria Brzezińska recalls that in 1942  in Szczawnica (Kraków region), doctors from Poznań and Lwów took care of her sick husband.53 49  Kostiatyn Kurylyshyn, Ukrains’ke zhyttia v umovakh nimetskoi okupatsii (1939–1944 rr.) (Lviv: NAN Ukrainy, 2010), 103. 50  AWII/2577, Michał Sobków, Koropiec nad Dniestrem (1425–1993), 129–30. Alexander Kruglov cites German documents reporting that in neighboring Stanisławów voivodeship all Jews from smaller towns—apart from a certain number of pharmacists and doctors—had been displaced to the Stanisławów ghetto by the end of 1942. See Aleksander Kruglov, ed., Sbornik dokumentov i materialov ob. unichtozhenii nacistami evreev Ukrainy v 1941–1944 (Kyiv: Institut Iudaiki, 2002), 337. 51   USHMM RG-50.589*0040, Oral history interview with Yahad-In Unum interviewee 435. 52  AWII/2577, Michał Sobków, Koropiec nad Dniestrem (1425–1993), 129–30. 53  Biblioteka Narodowa, III.10445, Maria Brzezińska, Jan Brzeziński. Zycie i praca, 1.

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In Rymanów a dental practice was opened by a doctor from the Poznań region, supported by another local Polish doctor.54 The gap was filled only temporarily and only partially. There was a dramatic shortage of doctors in the whole of Galicia throughout the war and in the first years after the war. In November 1944, the district hospital in Bóbrka (Bibrka, Lwów region) had 65 beds, but there was only 1 doctor, 4 nurses, and 1 obstetrician (for the entire region).55 A report from the Lwów region, dated 1944 and sent to the Polish government in exile, complains about the fact that Polish doctors were forced to leave for the other side of the San River, that is, to the areas that Poland retained after the war, “while in the city and the whole region the number of doctors was far below the need.”56 In the western part of Galicia, the influx of Polish doctors displaced from the eastern part clearly did not remedy the situation. In November 1944, there were plans to give feldshers the same rights as doctors, in order to prevent the spread of epidemics due to lack of medical care.57 In Western Ukraine, the shortages were partially filled by newcomers from the Eastern Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, who, in addition to their pragmatic professional functions, were also expected to undertake the Sovietization of the new western borders of the USSR, just like the teachers and engineers. The only doctor at the Bibrka hospital in 1944, mentioned above, was Semen Pirogov, a Ukrainian from the Soviet Ukraine, from the Zhytomyr region.58 He replaced the Jew Felix Blej, murdered by the Germans in 1942. Pirogov (like Blej in the past) was well liked in the town, but because of his origins, the stories told about him, as well as Blej, had a similar trace of class and ethnic-­ cultural strangeness.59 54  Interview with Stanisław Krukar, born 1933, conducted in Rymanów (Poland) in 2018 by Małgorzata Łukianow. 55  Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Lvivs’koi Oblasti (hereafter DALO), f. R.285, op. 1, spr. 4b, ark. 15, Zvit zaviduiuchoho likaria rajzdrava vid 10 lystopada 1944. 56   USHMM, RG-59.043, Kancelaria Cywilna i Gabinet Wojskowy, A.48.4 Kraj/B1 Raporty z kraju październik 1943—listopad 1944, Odpis depeszy lwowskiej reprezentacji Politycznej i Okr. Del. z dnia 3.X. 1944, 307. 57   USHMM, RG-59.043, Kancelaria Cywilna i Gabinet Wojskowy, A.48.4 Kraj/B2 Depesze i raporty z Kraju, listopad 1944—sierpień 1946, 154. 58  DALO, f. R.285, op. 1, spr. 2, Proekty postanov i postanovy Raionnoho vykonavchoho komitetu, 150–52. 59  Interview with Yosif Mykytiv, born 1923, conducted in Bibrka (Ukraine) in 2019 by Marta Havryshko; interview with Ivanna Danylovych, born 1934, conducted in Bibrka (Ukraine) in 2019 by Anna Wylegała.

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On both sides of the border set in 1945, the lack of doctors stopped affecting people only after the jobs left by the murdered and displaced were taken by a new generation of doctors, educated after the war and coming from the layers of society enabled by the socialist government. A Pole, Lityński, had a practice in Brzozdowce (Lwów region) before the war. After his departure in 1945, the Soviet authorities set up a clinic in the former Catholic parish. First, a Russian doctor worked there, then an Azerbaijani, and only many years later a feldsher from Western Ukraine.60 When I asked who worked on the local maternity ward after the war in Koropiec, the interviewee told me: “[The nurses] were sent from that [Soviet] Ukraine. And then, with time, our girls learned the job too. Somehow it was quicker for a nurse. It took quite long to have our doctor [from Western Ukraine].”61 Lawyers, judges, and other members of the intelligentsia and the liberal professions also fell victim to Soviet repression and German extermination. However, for the average inhabitant of Galicia, the lack of teachers was more important. In September 1939, out of 14,203 teachers at public schools in Western Ukraine, 10,125 were Polish, 2477 Ukrainian, 95 German, and 17 Jewish.62 After the annexation of Galicia in 1939, the Soviet Union not only fundamentally rebuilt the entire education system, in order to formally and ideologically adapt it to the Soviet model, but also replaced a significant part of the teaching staff. The place of Polish teachers was to some extent filled by Ukrainian teachers educated in Polish teacher seminars, who had been deliberately deprived of jobs by the Polish authorities (deemed as an element unsuitable for raising Polish citizens). Soviet statistics mentioned at least 2300 unemployed Ukrainian teachers in 1939.63 However, some of them would soon lose their jobs, accused of Ukrainian nationalism. The second group that started to teach in Galician schools were teachers of Jewish nationality, who often sympathized with 60  Interview with a woman, born 1930, conducted in Berezdivtsi (Ukraine) in 2013 by Anna Wylegała. 61  Interview with Olena Popiv, born 1927, conducted in Koropets (Ukraine) in 2019 by Anna Wylegała. 62  Tamara Halaichak et al., eds, Kul’turne zhyttia v Ukraini: Zakhidni zemli. Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1: 1939–53 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1995) (DALO, f. 163, op. 2, spr. 78, ark. 26–31), 52–3. On primary education in Galicia before 1939 in the context of Polish– Ukrainian relations, see Olga Linkiewicz, Lokalnosć ́ i nacjonalizm: Społecznoscí wiejskie w Galicji Wschodniej w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (Kraków: Universitas, 2018). 63  Halaichak et al. (1995) (DALO, f. 163, op. 2, spr. 78, ark. 26–31), 54.

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communists before the war. However, most new teachers were those who had been sent to work in Galicia from the pre-1939 Soviet Union. Their main task was to supervise an important element of Sovietization, namely education. Their qualifications were less important. A Polish teacher deported to the East states in a report submitted in 1942 in Tehran: “The teaching forces [were] replaced—qualified professionals were replaced by people who were often taken straight from the street and had no professional training.”64 Most Soviet teachers escaped in panic from Western Ukraine in June 1941, but Polish teachers never returned. The education system, which was reduced by the Germans mainly to elementary and vocational schools, slowly became dominated by local Ukrainians. Apart from a few Polish-­ language schools, Ukrainians took most managerial positions in education.65 In 1944, when the Germans withdrew from Galicia, history turned full circle. Now, the majority of patriotic Ukrainian teachers, fearing accusations of collaboration with the Germans (and rightly so), fled to the West to escape the approaching Red Army, to eventually end in exile. This, together with the purges among teaching staff, left Western Galicia dramatically short of teachers after the war. Some children did not go to school because of the postwar poverty, but there were also not enough staff to teach them. The total number of schools decreased from 7696 in the school year 1940/41 to 5691  in February 1945.66 In the Bibrka region, just before the beginning of the school year 1944/45, the staffing shortfall was estimated at 130 teachers. However, 81 teachers enrolled, while only 58 were accepted. The rest did not have the required qualifications or they were not suitable for political reasons (among those accepted, only slightly more than half had any pedagogical education).67 The problem of teacher shortages was solved after 1945 in a slightly more systemic way than during the two short years of the first Soviet 64  USHMM, RG-59.051, Kolekcja Wincentego Ba ̨kiewicza, Kol 138/288/D/44, numer relacji 10685, Dziedzicka Bronisława, Sprawozdanie dotycza ̨ce stosunku na terenie Polski po wkroczeniu wojsk sowieckich, 7 grudnia 1942, Teheran. 65  Rohatyns’ke slovo. Orhan povotovoi upravy, 1941, vol. 2, 26 July, 6; Chortkivs’ka dumka, 1942, vol. 11, 1 November, 6. 66  Halaichak et al. (1995) (TsDAVOV, f. 337, op. 10, spr. 5, ark. 53–9, 70–71, 90–92, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120–24), 243. 67  DALO, f. R.285, op. 1, spr. 4b, ark. 2, Do Lvivs’koho oblvykonkomu. Informatsiia Bibrs’koho RVK pro vidnovlennia roboty shkil vid holovy RVK Omel’chenka vid serpnia 1944 roku.

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presence in Galicia. The authorities focused on educating local staff (in the right spirit), very often at an accelerated pace. Nataliia Zaremba from Bibrka was only 17 years old when she started teaching: I finished the tenth grade and went to an extramural pedagogical high school. They told us so. And we immediately started working as teachers, because there were no teachers. These were the orders from the district party committee.68

However, before the locals learned how to teach, teachers from the pre-1939 Soviet Union again started coming to Galicia. In order to establish regular support for the new Soviet deal, the regional departments of elementary schools were merged into pairs: Lviv–Kyiv and Kharkiv; Ternopil–Dnipropetrovsk; Stanyslaviv–Vinnytsia. The partner departments collected textbooks and methodological materials, but first of all provided teachers.69 Young Soviet teachers—Ukrainians from eastern districts and Russians—sometimes settled in one place and sometimes were moved several times from one place to another by the authorities. They also often followed their husbands, many of whom were engineers or Red Army officers. Born in 1927, a Ukrainian woman from Poltava oblast came to Zhovkva in 1948, because her husband was sent to work in a local factory.70 Her friend from the Kyiv region got a referral to work in the Ternopil’ oblast in 1946, and in 1950 she was also moved to Zhovkva.71 Relations between locals and newcomers were varied. Teodor Svintsitskyi from Pidhaitsi remembers Russian teachers from his postwar school who tried very hard to learn Ukrainian and were well liked and popular.72 The above-mentioned teacher from Poltava oblast remembered that Zhovkva residents were generally friendly and helpful, but she also quietly said that she was afraid to walk home alone in the evenings. In many places, the teachers sent from the Soviet East, just like other  Interview with Nataliia Zaremba.  Halaichak et al. (1995) (TsDAVOV, f. 337, op. 10, spr. 5, ark. 53–9, 70–71, 90–92, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120–24), 243. 70  Interview with a woman, born 1927, conducted in Zhovkva (Ukraine) in 2008 by Anna Wylegała. 71  Interview with a woman, born 1923, conducted in Zhovkva (Ukraine) in 2009 by Tetiana Rodnienkova. 72  Interview with Teodor Svintsitskyi, born 1933, conducted in Pidhaitsi (Ukraine) in 2018 by Anna Wylegała. 68 69

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­ ewcomers from the USSR, were victims of violence from the Ukrainian n underground, as they were perceived as “soviet agents.” In Hlibiv (Ternopil’ oblast) just after the war, local Ukrainian partisans murdered at least two female Soviet teachers; children going to school in the morning found their naked bodies on the road.73 The postwar reports of the Soviet secret services are full of accounts of attacks on civilians considered by the Ukrainian nationalists to be representatives of the authorities: teachers, nurses, kolkhoz directors, party activists.74 With time, when the violence stopped, many teachers integrated to some extent into the local community, although this was often done on a “strangers for strangers” basis. Prewar Polish teachers, representing the Polish state and the Polish patriotic model, were ultimately replaced by Soviet teachers, representing Soviet power and the Soviet educational model.

Conclusion The years 1939–45 in Galicia were marked by two occupations, warfare, civil war, the Holocaust and several other instances of ethnic cleansing, as well as deportations, forced resettlement, and radical political and economic change. All of this resulted in violence, death, and a mass outflow of people. In the literature, these processes are rarely considered in economic terms, for obvious reasons. The fate of the victims is always most important. However, both genocidal violence and repression without direct fatalities—from deportation to social degradation and forced migration—prove to be inextricably linked with the economy and with the fate of those who survived and stayed, as well as those who replaced “vanished others.” Everything that happened in Galicia was in fact part of a great social and economic transformation, even if it consisted of many interdependent processes. This transformation affected different groups to different degrees, and its effects were more or less long-lasting. It is difficult to present an unequivocal balance in terms other than the fate of the victims. Some people were direct economic beneficiaries of the disappearance of the 73  Interview with a woman, born 1938, conducted in Hlibiv (Ukraine) in 2019 by Marta Havryshko. 74  For examples of sexual violence against female incomers from the USSR, see Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukraiiny (hereafter HDASBU), F. 71, op. 9, spr. 43, k. 213.

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repressed groups because of their prewar position in various economic fields. For the Polish and Ukrainian peasants, therefore, who were given land taken away from Polish landlords, this certainly meant social advancement, comparable only to the abolition of serfdom in Galicia, that had happened almost 100 years earlier. Polish and Ukrainian craftsmen benefited from the disappearance of their Jewish competitors, while peasants eagerly gave up difficult farm work and moved to deserted cities, to fill the economic niches, previously unavailable to them, left by the Holocaust and the murder and displacement of Poles (in Eastern Galicia). The accelerated training of new specialists—teachers, doctors, engineers—also meant that young people from underprivileged classes could climb the social ladder. Of course, the question remains whether this process would have taken place anyway after the communists had taken power, but it would certainly not have gained such pace and momentum if the Germans and the Soviets had not murdered so many people. However, these benefits were often short-lived and never encompassed the entire population. While the Polish peasants managed to keep their possessions, the Ukrainians lost their land during the collectivization. During field research conducted in Galicia, people often said that things were better under the Polish landlords than in the Soviet kolkhoz. Newly enriched merchants and craftsmen soon also had to give their possessions away: both in Poland and in Ukraine, the authorities cracked down on private enterprise within a few years. Even if a store taken over from a Jewish merchant was left as it was, it ceased to be owned by the person who came into its possession as a result of the Holocaust. Moreover, short-term benefits only concerned selected individuals: those who were more industrious, with a minimum of necessary qualifications or belonging to a specific social group (such as landless peasants). While a Polish doctor competing with a Jewish one before the war may have felt some relief after the disappearance of the latter, his neighbors suffered without medical help (or without new shoes, glazed windows, or a village store). While benefiting from one change, one could lose out terribly from another. There were also other, less obvious social and economic consequences of the discussed changes. The disappearance of so many people left Galician towns deserted after the war. The influx of new people—Poles deported from Eastern Galicia in Małopolska, Ukrainians displaced from Poland and newcomers from the USSR in Eastern Galicia—could not make up for the losses. Moreover, those who came were often unable to replace those

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who were missing, in terms of professional qualifications, education, and lifestyle. For example, most of the Ukrainians displaced from Poland to the USSR in 1944–46 were peasants. All this contributed to the temporary abandonment of towns and cities (Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote to Stalin in July 1944: “There are hardly any people in the towns and cities”75), and in the long term, to the secondary agrarianization of those towns that did not manage to make up for the losses. For example, in Koropiec, mentioned several times in this chapter, there was a twofold decrease in the population after the war. It never reached its prewar size again. None of the processes that contributed to the disappearance of several million people from Galicia between 1939 and 1945 was purely economic. However, the architects of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing tried hard to adjust these processes so they would not harm the economy too much. In the end, mass murder, repression, and deportation had an enormous impact on the shape of both the wartime and the postwar economy and the employment structure. Acknowledgments  The research for this chapter was funded by the research grant of the Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki, No. 0101/NPRH3/ H12/82/2014.

Bibliography Ciesielski, Stanisław, Grzegorz Hryciuk, and Aleksander Srebrakowski. 2003. Masowe deportacje ludnos ́ci w Zwia ̨zku Radzieckim. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek. Gruner, Wolf. 2006. Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944, Trans. Kathleen M. Dell’Orto. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hon, Maksym. 2005. Z kryvdoiu na samoti: Ukrains’ko-ievreis’ki vzaiemyny na zakhidnoukrains’kykh zemlakh u skladi Polshchi (1935–1939). Rivne: Volyns’ki oberehy. Ivasiuta, M.K. 1962. Narysy istroii kolhospnoho budivnytstvs v zakhidnykh oblastiakh Ukrains’koi RSR. Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Akademii Nauk Ukrainskoi RSR. 75  Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Desiat’ buremnykh lit. Zakhidnoukrainski zemli u 1944–1953 rr. Novi dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Khudozhnioi Literatury “Dnipro,” 1998) (Lyst M. Khrushchova I. Stalinu pro stanovyshche v zakhidnykh oblastiakh URSR, 26 July 1944, CDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, spr. 937, ark. 27–37).

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Jakubowska, Longina. 2012. Patrons of History: Nobility, Capital and Political Transition in Poland. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. Jarosz, Dariusz, and Grzegorz Miernik. 2016. “Zhańbiona” wies ́ Okół: opowies ́ci o buncie. Warsaw, Kielce: IHP and UJK w Kielcach. Kura, Antoni. 2006. Aparat bezpieczeństwa i wymiar sprawiedliwos ́ci wobec kolektywizacji wsi polskiej 1948–1956. Warsaw: IPN. Kurylyshyn, Kostiatyn. 2010. Ukrains’ke zhyttia v umovakh nimetskoi okupatsii (1939–1944 rr.). Lviv: NAN Ukrainy. Linkiewicz, Olga. 2018. Lokalnosć́ i nacjonalizm: Społecznos ́ci wiejskie w Galicji Wschodniej w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym. Kraków: Universitas. Markowski, Damian. 2018. Anatomia strachu: Sowietyzacja obwodu lwowskiego 1944–1953. Studium zmian polityczno-gospodarczych. Warsaw: IPN. Marples, David R. 1991. The Ukrainians in Eastern Poland under Soviet Occupation, 1939–1941: A Study in Soviet Rural Policy. In The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–1941, ed. Keith Sword, 236–252. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1993. Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s. New York: St. Martin’s Press. McBride, Jared. 2016. Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN–UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944. Slavic Review 75 (3): 630–654. Motyka, Grzegorz. 2006. Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960: działalnosć́ Organizacji Ukraińskich Nacjonalistów i Ukraińskiej Powstańczej Armii. Warsaw: ISP PAN, Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm. ———. 2011. Od rzezi wołyńskiej do “Akcji Wisła.” Konflikt polsko-ukraiński 1943–47. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Pinchuk, Ben-Cion. 1991. Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Sword, Keith. 1994. Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48. London: St. Martin’s Press. Vrons’ka, Tamara. 2013. Upokorennia strakhom: simeine zaruchnytstvo u karalnii praktytsi radianskoii vlady (1917–1953). Kyiv: Tempora.

The Joy and Burden of Living: Roma Communities in the Western Borderlands of the Postwar Soviet Union Volha Bartash

Introduction Most chapters in this volume address sedentary populations, albeit displaced by war and ethnic cleansing. But what did postwar reconstruction and healing look like in the case of people on the move? Edward Dębicki (Krzyżanowski), a Polish Romani musician, recalled the end of the German occupation for Roma in the Polish-Ukrainian border regions:

V. Bartash (*) Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_7

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Every day someone from our family was found. Many were, nevertheless, killed by Germans and Banderites1 in ghettoes and forests. The Cyganie (Pol. Gypsies)2 who had managed to escape death gathered together in Hrubieszów, while looking for their beloved ones. We camped in the forest like we used to before. But the difference was that there had been a lot of merriness by the campfire the last time—there had been singing and dancing; and now it was crying and mourning.3

Edward’s parents Władysław Krzyżanowski and Franciszka Raczkowska, managed to survive the Nazi genocide and World War II together with their children in the forests and marshes of Volhynia. Malnourished and physically exhausted, they left their forest hideout in the spring of 1944 only to find that many of their relatives and a large part of the pre-war Polska Roma (Rom. Polish Roma) community of Volhynia were gone. Most had perished in the Nazi genocide or at the hands of Ukrainian pro-­ nationalist partisans.4 Others had died while hiding in the wilderness— from starvation, infectious diseases, natural threats, and severe weather. These unbearable losses, along with their own physical and mental condition, prevented the Romani survivors in Volhynia from feeling the joy of liberation. In which direction to move? How to make a living? Where to look for disappeared family members and lost children? How to take care of parentless minors, elderly, and disabled relatives? Just like the Krzyżanowski family, communities of Roma throughout the western borderlands of the Soviet Union—in the Baltic States, western Belarus, and western Ukraine—faced similar challenges and had to make difficult choices. To complicate this picture even further, these decisions were having to be made by individuals and families who found themselves devastated by the war, in the midst of overall postwar destruction, and often in a hostile environment. 1  Here, banderowcy or Banderites is used in the sense of “Bandera fighters” or fighters of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, that is, followers of Stepan Bandera, ideologist and leader of the Ukrainian ultranationalists since the 1930s. 2  It was the preference of Edward Dębicki to use the term Cyganie, instead of Roma or Romowie, in his memoir. Edward Dębicki, Ptak umarłych (Warsaw: Bellona, 2004), 6. 3  Dębicki (2004), 203. 4  Few works so far have sought to examine the attitudes and practices of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army towards nomadic Roma. For the pioneering research of Mikhail Tyaglyy, see “‘Problem cygański’ w ideologii i praktyce ukraińskiego ruchu nacjonalistycznego podczas II wojny światowej,” Studia Romologica 11 (2018): 211–25.

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The effects of the Nazi persecution on Roma communities went far beyond physical destruction, human losses, and the collapse of community life. Historical patterns of interaction between Roma and non-Roma were broken. As I have shown in my earlier publications on the interwar period, most Roma in the region under consideration were semi-nomadic, although there were some fully sedentary families. This means they traveled in summer, offering their services to the local population, and took up residences in winter, renting and even sharing peasant homes and taking part in village social life. Even if only seasonally, traveling families changed from commercial partners, fortune-tellers, and random acquaintances into neighbors. Given the fact that most traveling groups took the same route each year, they had local networks of contacts. These patterns of interaction resulted in interethnic marriages and symbolical family ties, such as godparenting.5 Moreover, sedentary Roma were part of their local communities, often valued for their professional skills—as blacksmiths and veterinarians. After the war their local communities lacked these professionals of Romani origins in the same way they lacked Jewish doctors and traders (see Anna Wylegała in this volume). Nevertheless, the war challenged these patterns of co-habitation. Roma families became targets for the Nazi genocidal violence and had to go into hiding, while peasants were reluctant to host them for fear of personal repercussions from the Nazi police.6 After the war, it was challenging for Roma to draw on the same mobility patterns, as many of their pre-war local contacts had been displaced or killed. The effects of the Nazi persecution on Roma communities were long-­ lasting, and the processes of family reunification, (mobile) home making, community reconstruction, and trauma healing lasted for many years, even decades. Drawing on the oral histories and published memoirs of Roma genocide survivors, I outline the lived experiences of Roma in the western borderlands of the postwar Soviet Union. Since 2005 I have 5  For more on these patterns of interaction, see Volha Bartash, “The Romani Family before and during the Holocaust: How Much Do We Know? An Ethnographic-Historical Study in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Border Region,” in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R. Adler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 17–41. 6  For more on the survival experiences of Roma, see Nikolay Bessonov, “Tsyganje SSSR v okkupatsyi. Strategii vyzhivanija,” Holokost i suchasnist’. Studii v Ukraini i Sviti 6, no. 2 (2009): 17–52; Piotr Wawrzeniuk, “‘Lwów Saved Us’: Roma Survival in Lemberg 1941–44,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 3 (2018): 327–50.

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conducted ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews in western Belarus and, since 2016, in eastern Lithuania. During my field trips to the border regions, I had a chance to converse with visiting Roma from Latvia and Ukraine about their families’ pasts. Most of the people whom I interviewed did not see the war with their own eyes or were too young to remember. They recounted the histories of their families, who survived the war and genocide in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. My survey often took a form of family conversations, involving several generations of Roma. Therefore, the family biographies I have documented are multi-layered and reflect different aspects of intergenerational transmission and family memory. In addition, I refer to the published memoirs of Roma who spent the postwar years in the Soviet western borderlands. As well as the memoir of Edward Dębicki (2004) cited above, this includes the memoir of Ivan Korsun, who survived the war as a child in western Ukraine.7 Korsun’s individual journey, which started with his mother’s death, covered several countries: Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Latvia. The postwar situation in the western borderlands was different from that in the rest of the Soviet Union. First of all, these regions were heavily affected by the military confrontation between the nationalist insurgencies and the Soviet counterinsurgency.8 The roots of this conflict(s) go back to 1939/40 when the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Eastern Poland (at present, western Ukraine, and Belarus). Political repression and mass deportations immediately followed the annexation. As the Soviets sought to re-establish their rule after World War II, they faced significant anti-Soviet resistance. Pro-nationalist partisans who had been based in the woods attacked Soviet activists, militaries, and educators, thus sabotaging the Sovietization and collectivization policies in the countryside. Moscow sent experienced secret police officers to suppress the resistance in the West. The so-called war after the war lasted well into the 1950s and cost the lives of thousands of civilians. In this chapter, I 7  Ivan Korsun, “Tsyganskaja doroga. Vospominanija Ivana Korsuna. Vstuplenije, publikatsija i primechanija Nikolaya Bessonova,” Holokost i suchasnist’. Studii v Ukraini i Sviti 6, no. 2 (2009): 172–210. 8  For more on this military conflict, see Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For more on the Soviet deportations from the Baltic States, see Violeta Davoliūtė and Tomas Balkelis, eds, Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States (Budapest: CEU Press, 2018).

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analyze how the “war after the war” affected the Roma groups who kept on the move and tried to rebuild their relations with the countryside population. The history of Roma in the Soviet Union suggests a chronological scope for this chapter from the end of the German occupation in 1944 to the beginning of the Soviet sedentarization campaign in 1956.9 During this period, most Roma in the region under consideration kept on the move. Even formerly sedentary families joined nomadic groups. How can we explain the socio-cultural phenomenon of nomadism revival that happened amidst the overall postwar destruction and the “war after the war”? My analysis of Romani postwar mobility employs a community lens, examining the relationship between nomadism and postwar community reconstruction. Finally, let me introduce the people in focus: the Roma community or, to be more precise, communities. The groups who name themselves Polska Roma, Litovska Roma, Ruska Roma, Lotfitka, and others had historically traveled in the regions that were to become the Soviet western borderlands. Their self-naming can be traced back to different historical periods and is closely linked to the multi-ethnic history of these lands. A big part of what was now the “western borderlands” of the Soviet Union had been the “eastern borderlands” of Poland in the interwar years (1921–39), and earlier the “western provinces” of the Russian Empire (1795–1917). In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, these lands were central to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Roma families indeed crossed cultural and linguistic borders as they traveled, engaging in interethnic contact on a daily basis. Although all of them spoke related dialects of the Baltic branch of Romani, there were some cultural differences in customs and daily life, professional occupations, and religion. To a large degree, these differences were cultural and linguistic borrowings from the populations among whom they lived. For instance, most Polska Roma were Catholic and used Polish as their language of external communication, while Ruska Roma were Orthodox Christians and spoke Russian with their contacts outside the community. Ukrainian Servy were to a greater degree acculturated by Ukrainian culture and often resided in cities. As rightly noted by Bessonov, these group differences and, primarily, the level of 9  See Volha Bartash, “The Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union after 1956: A Case Study from the Former Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic,” Romani Studies 25, no. 1 (2015): 23–51.

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acculturation came to play a role during the German occupation.10 Arguably, sedentary Servy had a higher chance of survival than nomadic Polska Roma in Ukraine. As “Polska,” the latter found themselves affected not only by the Nazi persecution but also by the Ukrainian-Polish interethnic conflict. After the war, Polska Roma faced a dilemma: whether to stay in the Soviet Union or join one of the Polish-Soviet population transfers. In this, they shared their experiences with ethnic Poles. As I will show in this chapter, the postwar experiences of Roma in the Soviet Union were different and yet also similar to those of others. As pointed out by Romani studies scholars, the exoticization of Roma presents one of the most widespread methodological problems.11 Even though their cultural peculiarities, such as their (semi-)nomadic lifestyle, suggest a unique place for Roma in European history, it would be a mistake to consider them outside the context of their regional histories. Like all other populations, Romani families and communities were influenced by microand macro-socio-political processes and shared many of their postwar experiences with people of other ethnic backgrounds, for example, Jewish Holocaust survivors who struggled to rebuild lives and reconstruct families after the war.

Where to? Postwar Mobility from a Community Perspective Already during my first ethnographic field trips, I met several Roma families who had lived a sedentary lifestyle before and during the German occupation and started traveling only after the war. While traveling seemed a reasonable option for “roofless” nomadic families after the war, the story of my sedentary acquaintances posed a major empirical puzzle: why would one start a life on the road amidst the postwar destruction and ongoing military conflict? My interlocutors did not provide me with a clear answer, talking instead mainly about family reunions that had happened on the move. The phenomenon of postwar nomadism has also caught the attention of other scholars. For instance, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov  Bessonov Nikolay (2009).  Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, “Between Exoticization and Marginalization: Current Problems of Gypsy Studies,” BEHEMOTH: A Journal on Civilisation 4, no. 1 (2011): 86–105. 10 11

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proposed to understand it as an economic strategy: the rural population needed horses to work the land, and Roma were able to meet this demand, engaging in their traditional occupation of horse trading.12 Keeping on the move allowed them to quickly recognize new opportunities and travel from one fair to another. But is the economic perspective sufficient to explain this socio-cultural phenomenon? As noted by others, historical and ethnographic studies often overlook personal and familial aspects of Romani mobility.13 This section seeks to offer a more nuanced picture by examining the role of mobility in community life. I do not confine the postwar mobility of Roma to nomadism, and organize my analysis in several subsections: postwar nomadism; internal migration within the Soviet Union; and cross-­border mobility. This is, however, a conventional division. While (semi-)nomadism was a lifestyle, the latter two were, indeed, migration patterns. They were not, therefore, mutually exclusive. For instance, some Polska Roma families who had traveled for several years in the Soviet western borderlands after the war later migrated to Poland or moved to Middle Asia, to take part in Soviet agricultural projects. For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be noted that there were Romani families who did not travel after the war. The decision on whether or not to travel depended largely on their wartime experiences. This was especially relevant for those who had survived the occupation in the Soviet partisan units. In my earlier publications, I outlined the partisan experiences of the extended Yanovich family from the north-west of Belarus, many of whom were active in local partisan detachments.14 After the war, some of the family settled in Braslaũ, where they were offered temporary housing by the town administration. It is likely that partisan families were able to rely on their partisan networks and the references of partisan commanders. Moreover, their life in multi-ethnic partisan communities prepared them for integration into postwar Soviet society.

12  Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, “Gypsies in USSR: Ethnic Identities and Economic Strategies of the Gypsies in the Countries of the Former USSR,” Mitteilungen des SFB “Differenz und Integration” 4, no. 1 (2003): 289–310. 13  See, for instance, Michal Růžička, “Researching and Politicizing Migration: The Case of Roma/Gypsies in Postsocialist Czecho-Slovakia,” in Boundaries in Motion: Rethinking Contemporary Migration Events, ed. Ondrej Hofirek, Radka Klvanova, and Michal Nekorjak (Brno: Centrum pro demokracii a kulturu, 2009), 79–103. 14  Bartash (2020), 35–6.

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Nomadism Revival To understand the nomadism revival, one must first understand what traveling was about. Traditionally, Romani families who spent the winters in villages would prepare their mobile households and means of transportation and gather in caravans, or traveling groups, in the spring. Traveling groups consisted of around 50–100 members, often relatives. Merry celebrations at forest encampments and weddings marked the new nomadic season. Traveling was certainly not only about economic strategies but about social interaction and cultural life. The war and genocide turned everything upside-down. Survival was an individual and family task, traveling was no longer possible, community life collapsed, and extended families disintegrated. The memoir of Edward Dębicki, quoted in the introduction above, describes how the Romani survivors who had left their forest hideouts organized in new traveling units. These newly formed communities were based on the principles of cooperation, mutual help, and solidarity. Keeping on the move, they sought to survive through small-scale trade and horse barter. Nevertheless, the early postwar years were extremely challenging. In addition to the devastating effects of the Nazi persecution, Roma groups experienced daily danger and robbery on the road and often fell victim to the military confrontation between the Soviets and the anti-Soviet resistance. According to Ivan Korsun, it was not possible to avoid dangerous encounters while traveling through the rural terrain of western Ukraine. His memoir describes one such scene. While crossing the fields in the summer of 1951, their caravan witnessed the victimization of an unknown man. The man was hanging from a tree but still alive. As several Roma stepped towards the victim in an attempt to save him, they found themselves under fire from gunmen who were guarding their victim from a hideout in the bushes.15 Likewise, one of my informants lost her father in a road attack in the north-west of Belarus in the early postwar years, during which most adults from their caravan were killed. She and several other children survived, hiding in the river. Although they were extremely frightened and one girl was wounded, the children managed to make their way to a nearby village.16  Korsun (2009), 191.  Interview with a Romani survivor, born 1938, conducted in Minsk in June 2015 by Volha Bartash. 15 16

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It seems that the very lifestyle of nomadic Roma, with their visibility on the roads and at local markets, drew unwanted attention. According to Korsun, their encampments in the suburbs of Ukrainian cities attracted different groups of visitors, not all with good intentions. In addition, the anti-Soviet fighters who were based in the woods might view passing caravans as undesirable witnesses or potential spies. The hostility of local peasants often added to the plight of nomadic families. As mentioned above, the war unrecognizably changed the ethnic and social picture of the western Soviet borderlands. Many of those who had previously hosted Roma families in wintertime were now displaced or killed. Building new local networks and relationships of trust was not easy. This is not to mention the general atmosphere of fear and suspicion that dominated the region, which was jeopardized by the military conflict and continuing ethnic tensions. Korsun gives us another hint about why “the locals” might have seen nomadic Roma as unwanted tenants: because they kept on the move, they knew too many “dirty” local secrets, secrets which the locals did not want to reveal to the Soviets, for example the fact of collaboration with the Germans.17 Roma families recall that it became more difficult to find winter accommodation. A Polska Roma family who traveled in the western regions of Belarus shared this story with me: Even now, people tell a joke about my dad who was known for his passion for horses. Once in winter he and his family continued travelling in spite of the severe weather. Peasants did not want to let them stay overnight—they were always afraid of being robbed by Tsyganje (Russ. Gypsies); while Tsyganje were afraid of being killed by peasants. So it was a cold night and peasants did not want to shelter them. My father decided to drive the family to the woods, as it was warmer there. He gathered some dry brushwood and made a fire to melt the snow around him. Then he made a shelter of fir tree branches and comforted himself, while my mother and the kids lay covered under feather pillows in a warm wagon. So my dad said to her: –– Stick your hand out and feel how cold it is! She reached her hand out and said: –– How cold, Misha, how cold! The lesson is that a Tsygan can find a way out of any plight.18  Korsun (2009), 181.  Bartash (2015), 30.

17 18

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Despite its anecdotal style and optimistic ending, the plot clearly shows the difficulties that Misha’s family experienced in finding seasonal housing, and the hostility they encountered. Little research has been done on how postwar Soviet policies affected nomadic groups, and whether they fell victim to a new wave of Stalinist repression. Based on the testimonies and memoirs at my disposal, it seems that Roma were not targeted as a group, although there were incidents of expropriation of horses by Soviet militaries following the liberation (see below). Individual arrests did take place. For instance, Dębicki mentioned regular identity checks on caravans carried out by the Red Army. Family members who had been active in the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), which stayed in opposition to the Soviet partisan movement, immediately fell under suspicion and were subsequently arrested. Likewise, several family members had been drafted into the Red Army and never returned.19 However, nomadic Roma shared these experiences with other populations in the region. As paradoxical as it may sound, the centralized campaign against nomadic Roma began after Stalin’s death, during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Despite all of the difficulties and dangers associated with traveling in the postwar years, Korsun described this time as a revival of nomadism in the Soviet Union: At that time, Roma lived—what can I say—simply on wheels. In one month they found themselves in different regions. For instance, those in Ukraine knew that there would be a fair in the city of Velikie Luki (V.  B.—Pskov region of Russia). So the whole caravan came from Ukraine. After a successful barter, we celebrated. New contacts were made. Girls were married off. New friendships were made. By the campfire, Roma decided where to go next and how many families would gather. Besides (our) caravan, other Roma also came to the fair. They always came to the (nearby) village and asked: –– Have you seen Roma passing by? They answered: –– Yes, they came by last week. Their tents are based outside the city, close to the river.

 Dębicki (2004), 220–21.

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Everyone knew where a caravan was—they could tell by the campfire, by the sounds of songs. Women from the city headed there to tell their fortune. And Romani women went to the city to tell fortunes at the marketplace. They came back with eggs, meat, potatoes, milk and honey for their children.20

Nostalgic in mood, this piece mirrors the overall atmosphere of Romani nomadism after the war. When I interviewed the generation of Roma raised in caravans in the decade after the war, many recalled that time with nostalgia. One of my interlocutors, for instance, said: “Despite all the difficulties, I had a childhood like in fairy tale.” In her narrative, she further emphasized the closeness to nature and the beauty of Romani cultural traditions.21 For many Roma of that generation, memories of postwar hardship overlap with memories of cultural revival.

Internal Migration Within the Soviet Union The Soviet collectivization campaign and the transformation of the countryside soon challenged the reviving nomadism in the Soviet Union. These policies destroyed the natural peasant economies to which the Roma’s nomadic lifestyle and main occupations—horse barter and trade—were connected. All of this unavoidably led to the impoverishment of nomadic Roma. By the beginning of the 1950s, large groups of Roma had gathered in the suburbs of major Soviet cities in search of opportunities in industry and construction.22 This is reflected in archival documents. The records of the Soviet Council of Ministers from 1952 to 1953 contain a significant number of letters from nomadic Roma asking for help with employment and housing.23

 Korsun (2009), 192.  Archive of the Institute for the Study of Arts, Ethnography and Folklore, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (AISAEF), Fond 8, Opis 2010, File 1, Ethnographic field trips of Volha Bartash, 1. 22  See Nikolay Bessonov, “Tsyganje v Rossii: prinuditelnoe osedanie,” in Rossia i ee regiony v ХХ veke: territoria – rasselenie – migracii, ed. O. Gleser and P. Poliana (Мoscow: OGI, 2005), 631–40. 23  Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, “‘Letter to Stalin’: Roma Activism vs. Gypsy Nomadism in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe before WWII,” Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 272. 20 21

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Thus, the contact zones between Roma and non-Roma gradually moved from the countryside to the cities. Unlike the rural dwellers who had been living with nomadic Roma for centuries, city dwellers often demonstrated hostility towards them. Korsun recalled how nomadic groups were falsely accused of robbery and had to deal with the Soviet militia.24 In the light of Romani impoverishment, it does not seem surprising that young individuals and families decided to look for opportunities within the enlarged Soviet Union. For instance, one of my interlocutors mentioned that his traveling group headed from the south of Belarus to Moldova, where they intended to find work in agriculture.25 Other young Roma families from Belarus and Ukraine joined the Virgin Lands campaign in Kazakhstan in 1954. Several of my interlocutors were born in Kazakhstan, where their parents had been working in agriculture and collective farming.26 These families nevertheless returned to Belarus; the failure of the campaign was obvious by the 1960s, and ordinary workers were living in extremely poor conditions in the Virgin Lands settlements. However, departures to Middle Asia were not only economically motivated. One of my interlocutors shared the story of her mother Anna, a genocide orphan. Anna was the only child survivor of her nomadic group, her parents, several siblings, and other relatives all having been killed by the local police in the forest massacre near Vidzy (Vidze) in (presumably) the autumn of 1943. Anna, whose survival was seen as miraculous, was later adopted by an Orthodox priest and his wife. According to my interlocutor, the loss of her biological parents and the trauma she experienced overshadowed Anna’s childhood and youth, even though her adoptive parents took good care of her. After finishing school, Anna trained as a tractor driver and joined the Soviet agricultural venture in Kazakhstan, taking advantage of the Soviet gender policies and mobility opportunities. According to her daughter, Anna’s wartime experience informed this decision.27 While some families and individuals saw mobility within the Soviet Union as an opportunity to improve their economic condition, others were determined to leave the place where they had endured such persecution.  Korsun (2009), 185.  As my interlocutor eventually decided to resign and return to his home, the outcome of this venture is unknown to me. AISAEF, Fond 8, Opis 2010, File 1, Ethnographic field trips of Volha Bartash, 61. 26  AISAEF, Fond 8, Opis 2010, File 1, Ethnographic field trips of Volha Bartash, 60. 27  Interview with a second-generation survivor, conducted in Narach in August 2017 by Volha Bartash. 24 25

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Cross-border Mobility After the war, many Polska Roma families who had lived in the western Soviet borderlands (formerly the so-called Eastern Borderlands of interwar Poland) faced a dilemma: whether to stay in the Soviet Union or join one of the postwar population transfers to Poland (1944–46; 1955–59). Although these were initially planned as mutual population exchanges between the Soviet Union and Poland, the reality on the ground was different. Much depended on the attitudes of the local authorities. For example, the population transfers from the Vilnius region and the western parts of Ukraine were de facto an expulsion of the local Poles, as part of Ukrainization and Lithuanization policies. At the same time, the Soviet authorities in Belarus, where ethnic tensions were arguably less sharp, agitated Polish peasant families against a potential move.28 It is possible to trace the regional differences in the decision-making processes among Polska Roma as well. To a large degree, their decisions can be traced back to their wartime experiences. Polska Roma from Volhynia who had experienced persecution from the Ukrainian pro-­ nationalist partisans were inclined to migrate, while Polska Roma from the western regions of Belarus were more considerate in their decisions. My ethnographic data show that a large part of the local Polska Roma community remained.29 Many families who were either sedentary or traveled only locally could not imagine leaving their homes, even if they were no longer part of Poland. Nevertheless, the question “Where to?” was often understood by Roma as “With whom?” Family interests came before political and economic considerations. For instance, Edward Dębicki recalled that his family remained in western Ukraine for several years after the war because they were looking for his grandmother. Despite their painful memories of the persecution they had suffered at the hands of the Ukrainian pro-­nationalist 28  For a concise history of the “repatriation” from the former eastern borderlands of Poland, see Jerzy Kochanowski, “Gathering Poles into Poland: Forced Migration from Poland’s Former Eastern Territories,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-­ Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 135–55. For a more sophisticated and personalized account of the resettlement from Ukraine and its aftermath, see Anna Wylegała, Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019). 29  My ethnographic survey carried out between 2005 and 2009 revealed about ten patronyms (kin names) typical for Polska Roma in Belarus.

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partisans, the family continued to travel in the region from the spring of 1944 to the spring of 1946. During that time, they continued to experience hostility from the local population, as well as the daily threat of the ongoing military conflict and sometimes disturbing encounters with the Red Army and Soviet militia.30 All of this added further distress and anxiety to their plight. According to his memoir, it took considerable effort for Edward’s parents to obtain Polish identity papers (under a different name) and accumulate the material resources needed for a cross-border move, such as a means of transportation. Carrying a baby girl at her breast, Edward’s mother went to local marketplaces and villages every day, offering fortune-­ telling and healing services, while his father traded in horses at local markets. On several occasions, the family had been ready to move but different circumstances intervened with their plans. For instance, on one occasion the family experienced a robbery, and on another, Red Army officials expropriated their horses without explanation. It was therefore not until the spring of 1946 that the Krzyżanowski (now Dębicki) family made their way to Poland in a group of about 50 carts.31 Additional research is needed to clarify where in Poland those who had left finally settled, and how they felt in their new places; or how those who had chosen to stay faced the departure of other community members. During my field trips to Lithuania in 2016 and 2018, I met several Polska Roma families. The subject of “repatriation” naturally came up in our conversations. For example, one lady in her eighties talked with regret about her and her husband’s decision to stay in Soviet Lithuania, pointing out the loneliness they experienced after the majority of their community, including her parents and siblings, had left.32 Other survivors, nevertheless, faced more immediate and perhaps more dramatic effects from the Soviet-Polish mutual border politics. For instance, one of the life stories from my collection narrates the postwar separation of orphaned siblings; two of them remained within their relatives’ circles in Soviet Belarus and Lithuania, while one was adopted by a Polish family and migrated to Poland in 1946. The siblings reconnected only after the fall of the Soviet Union.33  Dębicki (2004), 192–222.  Ibid., 224. 32  Interview with a Romani survivor, born 1936, conducted in Eišiškės in October 2016 by Volha Bartash. 33  Interview with a Romani survivor, born 1938, conducted in Minsk in June 2015 by Volha Bartash. 30 31

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Last but not least, one may wonder whether eastward migration of Roma took place in the first decade after the war. The mass return to Lithuania of Roma survivors from labor camps in France and Germany is a good example in this regard (about 1000 Roma from Lithuania were deported).34 During my field research in Vilnius and Panevėžys, I talked to some children of deportees. Our conversations revealed how family-­oriented the survivors’ decisions were; Lithuanian Roma were returning from DP camps in Western Europe in the hope of reuniting with their families. They wished to do this despite the notoriously suspicious attitudes of the Soviet authorities towards the returnees and the system of filtration camps. In the context of this volume, it seems remarkable that the internal dynamic within the Roma population mirrors that of the general population in the Vilnius region. The expulsion of ethnic Poles took place in the context of the Soviet Lithuanization policies. Likewise, Litovska Roma from the former independent Lithuania (1918–40) were gradually taking the place of the Polska Roma, leaving for Poland. This again illustrates the interconnectedness of Romani and local histories. Estonia who lost its almost entire Roma community in the genocide (Lause Roma) saw a wave of Romani migration from Latvia in the postwar years.35

Reconstructing Communities, Healing Traumas Signs of Community Dysfunction When sisters V., concentration camp survivors, were eventually able to return to Indura (near Hrodna), where they had been separated from their family, they found no-one of “theirs” alive. They learned from the locals that almost all their family members—parents, grandparents, and siblings—had been killed in a forest massacre. Sisters V. also heard a rumor that one “Gypsy boy” had survived and been taken in by a childless Polish woman who lived in the countryside. When the sisters went to the village 34  Vytautas Toleikis, “Lithuanian Roma during the Years of the Nazi Occupation,” in Murders of Prisoners of War and of Civilian Population in Lithuania 1941–1944, ed. Christoph Dieckmann, Vytautas Toleikis, and Rimantas Zizas (Vilnius: Margi Raštai, 2005), 275. 35  Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz, “(In)visibility and the (Unheard) Voice of the Roma in Estonia: the Depiction of Roma History and Culture in Museum Exhibitions,” Journal of Baltic Studies (Special issue “Memory and recognition of the Nazi genocide of Roma in the Baltic context”), forthcoming.

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to meet the boy, they recognized their little brother Lauren. Lauren, about nine years old, now called the Polish woman mother and had another Polish-sounding name. Sisters V. managed to get the boy back quite quickly. As it turned out, his foster mother had been in a relationship with a German officer during the occupation and, afraid of potential repercussions, was set to leave the Soviet Union. For little Lauren, it was a heart-breaking separation. Throughout his life, he cherished the memories of his rescuer. When he recounted the story of his survival to his children years later, he would refer to this woman as his second mother.36 Lost children constituted one of the biggest challenges for Roma communities, as did the reintegration of “found” children into the community. Like Lauren, children adopted during the war developed strong attachments to their rescuers. Despite their relatives’ efforts, some were unable to reintegrate into their native communities and eventually left. In one family history that I recorded in western Belarus, a girl who had been claimed back by her relatives left their caravan soon afterward and returned to her adoptive non-Roma family.37 How does one find her/his kin in the midst of postwar chaos and population movement? Just like the sisters V., many relatives returned to the places where they had been separated from their loved ones. They talked to the locals about the fates of their family members, and often discovered horrible details. The so-called Romani post also played a role in spreading information among Roma and enabling family reunions. Ivan Korsun recalled his brief reunion with his mother before she passed away: At the end of the war, my mother was liberated from her camp in Belorussia. I was in Ukraine, and Roma knew that. Roma used to pass such kind of news (that someone saw someone) from one to another. So she started to tell passing caravans her whereabouts. And this is how we met in the place of Spirovo of the Kalinin oblast. I have a photograph of us together. There, my mother was just 30 years old. But she was exhausted and somehow suddenly got older. I was found in April; and in early May she died.38 36  Interview with a second-generation Romani survivor, conducted in Radun in July 2018 by Volha Bartash. 37  Interview with a second-generation Romani survivor, conducted in Braslau in August 2017 by Volha Bartash. 38  Korsun (2009), 182. Kalinin oblast is now Tver oblast of Russia.

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The fate of Ivan, nine years old, after his mother’s death illustrates the situation of orphans in Roma communities. Although the boy stayed within his circle of relatives, he was passed from one guardian to another and changed (mobile) homes and countries of residence several times, living in Ukraine, Russia, and Latvia. During his stay with distant relatives in Valka, Latvia in (presumably) 1945–46, Ivan and other Romani children from their multi-family barrack were placed in a school by the local authorities. As an orphan, he received additional benefits, such as lunches and warm clothing. Nevertheless, Ivan’s maternal aunt soon took him from Valka to Ukraine. Between 1946 and 1953 Ivan traveled with his maternal relatives in different parts of Ukraine and the south of Belarus. It was only in 1954 that he was able to start living on his own, enrolling in a construction training program in Estonia.39 Ivan shared his fate with other Romani children whose life was split between relatives and Soviet institutional care. My conversations with orphans of the Roma genocide revealed another under-researched issue: the separation of siblings.40 In the previous section, I mentioned the story of three siblings separated by the state boundary between Poland and Soviet Belarus and Lithuania. In another case, four siblings stayed in Belarus but were “divided” (according to the survivor) among relatives, each taken in by a different family. Two of them later landed in an orphanage.41 Use of the expression “divided” reveals how, for siblings, adoption marked yet another round of separations, adding further anxiety to their lives. These oral histories point to the structural dysfunctions in the community life. Under normal circumstances, a parentless child would be permanently placed with a guardian, usually a maternal aunt or grandparent. Now the situation was different. Often, no close relatives had survived, and those who did were not in a position to take care of a child. What would happen if prospective guardians were themselves suffering from chronic diseases, psychological disorders, or living in poverty? Oral history  The reconstruction of Ivan Korsun’s biography here is based on his memoir (2009).  A sibling perspective is often missing in studies on Holocaust orphans, as pointed out by Laura Hobson Faure. See Laura Hobson Faure, “Siblings in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in France and the United States: Rethinking the ‘Holocaust Orphan’?” in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R.  Adler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 103–14. 41  Interview with a Romani survivor, born 1943, conducted in Ashmiany in September 2015 by Volha Bartash. 39 40

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research shows that it was not rare for biological parents to be unable to care for their children, having to rely on institutional childcare. One of my informants shared the experience of her family. Her mother, a concentration camp survivor, and father, a former partisan, had to temporarily place their children in a shelter, as both of them needed hospitalization.42 Yet becoming a step-parent was seen by many as a rewarding and healing experience. Taking care of a child and focusing on its needs helped in coping with wartime losses and provided much-needed healing for wounded souls. In the case of Lauren discussed above, the older sister who had lost her young child in the concentration camp stepped into the role of Lauren’s primary caregiver. “Surrogate” Families The war and genocide caused the separation of families and the dysfunction of Roma communities. In their efforts to survive, individuals often had to rely on their own survival skills, cooperate with people of other ethnic backgrounds, and turn to them for help. Not only did children find themselves adopted by non-Roma; adults, too, bonded with the people with whom they shared the daily experiences of surviving life-threatening situations and harsh environmental conditions. The intensity of those experiences evoked a whole range of human feelings and emotions: fear, anger, and despair on the one hand, and hope and gratitude on the other. All of this enabled personal attachments and family-like bonds between “strangers,” people who would likely have little in common in times of peace. Drawing on her analysis of the memoirs of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Natalia Aleksiun calls new family-like relations “surrogate families”: “These new bonds included stepping into the role of murdered spouses, parents, children, and siblings; taking on responsibility; sharing and providing resources such as food and money; and providing a degree of protection, sexual relations, and emotional comfort.”43 The memoir of Edward Dębicki offers an excellent example of such relations. His family developed a close friendship with a non-Romani man, 42  Interview with a second-generation Romani survivor, conducted in Ashmiany in September 2015 by Volha Bartash. 43  See Natalia Aleksiun, “Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families,” in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R. Adler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 98.

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Mishka. Mishka was a Red Army soldier who had found himself in a German roundup in Volhynia and went into hiding along with a small group of other men. Edward’s family came into contact with the group while hiding in the same area. After Mishka had lost his comrades to a Nazi raid, he joined Edward’s family, taking on a role comparable to an older son. Mishka accompanied the father of the family on his daily missions, such as hunting for food, surveying the area, and guarding the small family camp—all with a high level of risk. Having another adult man in their group enhanced their sense of safety and protection, and helped secure means of subsistence. Soon after the Soviet “liberation” of the region, Mishka was recruited into the Red Army reserves. This is what their farewell looked like: When he came to us, he was unable to say a word and cried like a young child. And we cried together with him. He asked us to stay with him at that military post for a day. We fulfilled his wish. He said that we were the best family in the world for him—we had survived Hell together, and, therefore, he would remember us forever.44

Healing and Reconstruction As Roma survivors searched for family members and gradually discovered the truth about their fate, they joined distant relatives and acquaintances on a temporary or longer-term basis. In this way, postwar mobile communities were born. Although survivors brought their sorrow with them, there was potential for healing in these new social units. As well as (economic) cooperation, they provided a sense of collectivity, protection, and emotional comfort. All of this fostered the processes of healing and reconstruction. At the same time, the life of nomadic groups was, to a large degree, focused on the needs of the present. As outlined in the previous section, nomadic life was challenging and full of daily threats and dangerous encounters. Nevertheless, it seems that it was that very focus on the present that helped survivors cope with their traumas and difficult memories, as did familiar cultural settings and closeness to people who had suffered similar fates. New encounters that took place in the context of nomadism revival resulted in new friendships and marriages. Despite the postwar hardship, Roma communities saw a marriage boom, followed by a baby boom. Young  Dębicki (2004), 198.

44

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people as well as widows and widowers with children came together. Younger people who had shared experiences—war orphans or former child prisoners of concentration camps—created families. It is likely that the similarities in their wartime experiences brought people closer. In a way, these new families were seen to compensate for those lost. There was a tendency to name new-born children after lost relatives; these children were seen not only as a “physical” continuation of one’s kin but as living memorials to the dead.45 Actual memorials had, nevertheless, to wait. At the same time, it would be a mistake to say that there were no attempts to memorialize the dead in the years after the war. Archival documents show that several locations of mass killings of Roma in western Belarus were marked with wooden crosses. Likewise, there were documented applications for reburial permissions.46 My conversations with Romani families confirm this. Several families reburied the remains of their loved one in their local cemeteries, so they could visit their graves on commemoration days, namely All Saints’ Day (1 November), or Radunica, in the case of Orthodox Christians.47 Nevertheless, the challenges of the present and the lack of financial and administrative resources prevented many sedentary and nomadic communities from commemorating their relatives in the form of a memorial. According to oral histories and memoirs, the older generation of nomadic Roma sought to avoid painful memories in their daily lives. Nonetheless, even if not articulated, difficult memories would often overcome survivors in the most unexpected situations. In his memoir, Ivan Korsun describes an episode that took place by the campfire during their stay near Novohrad-Volynskyi in (presumably) 1950. Their caravan was enjoying the performance of two young dancers: It felt like time stopped. All forgot their difficulties and the war was behind us. Only the old Romani woman Nelly, who was sitting away from the fire, started wiping her eyes with the end of her handkerchief. Her daughter anxiously asked: –– Mama, what is the matter? 45  I am grateful to Tara Zahra for articulating the idea of children as living memorials during our post-conference conversation in Prague in September 2017. 46  Volha Bartash, “Towards Ethnography of Archival Silence: Romani Memory of Nazi Genocide Confronts the Soviet Records,” La Ricerca Folklorica 2, no. 74 (2019): 21–2. 47  Radunica is the main commemorational day in Orthodox Christianity (observed on the Tuesday of the week after Easter).

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The mother answered: –– Nothing, really. It’s just… The daughter kept on asking her: –– Tell, tell me! But the mother had already wiped her eyes and was pretending that nothing had happened. The performance was going on. The boy and the girl were dancing […]. Although I was watching them, I had noticed that the woman was crying. I came closer and heard how the daughter was trying to comfort her: –– No need, no need to cry. So many years have passed. –– I cannot… I cannot forget. Your sister danced in the same manner. And the girl [the dancer] looks so much like her! Her legs are as skillful as hers were; and the hair is that thick… Oh, I cannot, cannot! She was weeping now…48

As it turned out, Nelly’s daughter, of whom the girl reminded her, had been captured during the roundup of their group near Rivne. While their family tried to escape, the grandmother got stuck in long grass and fell down. Nelly’s daughter had gone to help her but was herself captured by a German. He killed the grandmother on the spot and brought the girl to the group of arrested Roma. All of them were killed. At night, the relatives took the girl’s corpse from the mass grave and buried her in the village cemetery. This episode provides an illustrative example of memory work. An event that Nelly was supposed to enjoy together with other Roma of her caravan evoked her most painful memories. The scene took place about seven years after the events, when Nelly’s sorrow was still fresh. Nonetheless, most of my interviews with children of the war show that, no matter how much time has passed, wounds from the loss of a loved one never fully heal. Arguably, the older a survivor is, the more inclined they are to turn to memories of their childhood and youth. As an informant in her nineties told me, “How will I rest in peace after I die when I did not bury my parents? Those Germans killed and burnt them….”49  Korsun (2009), 189–90.  Interview with a Romani survivor from Ukraine, born 1923, conducted in the Lida region in July 2018 by Volha Bartash. Here, the interviewer expresses her unease at not having an opportunity to bury her parents in accordance with ritual. 48 49

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Some survivors had been so traumatized by the loss of their family members that their journey to the sites of bitter memory was postponed for decades, or never happened. For instance, one of my interlocutors talked of the intergenerational silence in her family, which had left her unaware of the place where her parents were killed.

Conclusion To return to my initial question: what did the postwar reconstruction and healing look like for Roma, and how did their experiences differ from those of “others”? My analysis of Romani postwar mobility has shown that the revival of nomadism in the western regions of the Soviet Union was associated with processes of community reconstruction. In fact, this is what the rebuilding and healing looked like for Roma: new mobile units provided social spaces within which Romani traditions were reproduced, traumas healed, and families restored. Roma mobilized their networks to reunite family members and take care of orphaned children. At the same time, their mobile lifestyle, with its daily challenges, along with the lack of material resources and administrative access, inevitably delayed the memorialization of the dead. In this, Roma communities differed from the local sedentary populations. Family and community motivations played a role in the internal and external migration of Roma as well. Nevertheless, these mobility patterns were shared with “others.” Throughout the western borderlands, families and individuals left their homes, seeking new opportunities in the depths of the Soviet Union or returning to their roots in Poland. Even if Romani cross-border movement looked different and took the form of caravan border crossing, the nature of the migration was the same. These observations point to the importance of reading Romani experiences in the local historical context and alongside demographic developments. Like all others, they found themselves affected by a situation in which former neighbors were no more. As demonstrated above, it became difficult to find winter accommodation in the countryside when so many of their local contacts—former hosts, neighbors, and commercial partners—had disappeared. Structural changes in their societies affected nomadic Roma too. In particular, the Soviet transformation of the local countryside gradually leveled their historical patterns of interaction with peasant families, displacing their contact zones from the countryside to the city.

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Yet the postwar lives of Roma communities, and especially the ways in which they sought to cope with their losses and rebuild families, were similar to those of other populations affected by the Nazi genocide, interethnic violence, and displacement, for example, the Jewish Holocaust survivors attempting to rebuild their lives in the postwar Soviet Union. Acknowledgments  My work on this chapter was made possible by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Horizon 2020) at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg (project registration no. 793826).

Bibliography Aleksiun, Natalia. 2020. Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families. In Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R. Adler, 85–99. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bartash, Volha. 2015. The Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union after 1956: A Case Study from the Former Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Romani Studies 25 (1): 23–51. ———. 2019. Towards Ethnography of Archival Silence: Romani Memory of Nazi Genocide Confronts the Soviet Records. La Ricerca Folklorica 2 (74): 13–28. ———. 2020. The Romani Family before and during the Holocaust: How Much Do We Know? An Ethnographic-Historical Study in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Border Region. In Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R. Adler, 17–41. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bessonov, Nikolay. 2005. Tsyganje v Rossii: prinuditelnoe osedanie. In Rossia i ee regiony v ХХ veke: territoria – rasselenie – migracii, ed. O. Gleser and P. Poliana, 631–640. Мoscow: OGI. ———. 2009. Tsyganje SSSR v okkupatsyi. Strategii vyzhivanija. Holokost i suchasnist’. Studii v Ukraini i Sviti 6 (2): 17–52. ———. 2010. Tsyganskaja tragedija. 1941–1945. Fakty, dokumenty, vospominanija. Vol. II. Vooružennyj otpor. Saint Petersburg: Shatra. Davoliūtė, Violeta. 2017, November 17. Heroes, Villains and Matters of State: The Partisan and Popular Memory in Lithuania Today. Cultures of History Forum. https://doi.org/10.25626/0078. Davoliūtė, Violeta, and Tomas Balkelis, eds. 2018. Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States. Budapest: CEU Press. Dębicki, Edward. 2004. Ptak umarłych. Warsaw: Bellona.

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Faure, Laura Hobson. 2020. Siblings in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in France and the United States: Rethinking the ‘Holocaust Orphan’? In Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Katerina Capková and Eliyana R. Adler, 103–114. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kochanowski, Jerzy. 2001. Gathering Poles into Poland: Forced Migration from Poland’s Former Eastern Territories. In Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, 135–155. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Korsun, Ivan. 2009. Tsyganskaja doroga. Vospominanija Ivana Korsuna. Vstuplenije, publikatsija i primechanija Nikolaya Bessonova. Holokost i suchasnist´. Studii v Ukraini i Sviti 6 (2): 172–210. Marushiakova, Elena, and Veselin Popov. 2003. Gypsies in USSR: Ethnic Identities and Economic Strategies of the Gypsies in the Countries of the Former USSR. Mitteilungen des SFB “Differenz und Integration” 4 (1): 289–310. ———. 2011. Between Exoticization and Marginalization: Current Problems of Gypsy Studies. BEHEMOTH: A Journal on Civilisation 4 (1): 86–105. ———. 2020. ‘Letter to Stalin’: Roma Activism vs. Gypsy Nomadism in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe before WWII. Social Inclusion 8 (2): 265–276. Růžička, Michal. 2009. Researching and Politicizing Migration: The Case of Roma/Gypsies in Postsocialist Czecho-Slovakia. In Boundaries in Motion: Rethinking Contemporary Migration Events, ed. Ondrej Hofirek, Radka Klvanova, and Michal Nekorjak, 79–103. Brno: Centrum pro demokracii a kulturu. Statiev, Alexander. 2010. The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. New York: Cambridge University Press. Toleikis, Vytautas. 2005. Lithuanian Roma during the Years of the Nazi Occupation. In Murders of Prisoners of War and of Civilian Population in Lithuania 1941–1944, ed. Christoph Dieckmann, Vytautas Toleikis, and Rimantas Zizas, 267–284. Vilnius: Margi Raštai. Tyaglyy, Mikhail. 2018. ‘Problem cygański’ w ideologii i praktyce ukraińskiego ruchu nacjonalistycznego podczas II wojny światowej. Studia Romologica 11: 211–225. Wawrzeniuk, Piotr. 2018. ‘Lwów Saved Us’: Roma Survival in Lemberg 1941–44. Journal of Genocide Research 20 (3): 327–350. Wylegała, Anna. 2019. Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Postwar Poland and Ukraine. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Among Neighbors and Relatives: Intercessions and Jewish Persecution Through the Lens of Bulgaria’s Postwar Trials (1944–45) Nadège Ragaru

Flipping these pages, the reader might be doubly puzzled. First, why should Bulgaria feature in a volume dedicated to the complex entanglement between the absence, survival, and remembrance of neighbors, Jews prominently among them? As is widely known, nearly all Jews holding Bulgarian citizenship survived the Second World War. That a country allied to Nazi Germany ultimately refused to deport its Jewish population was long indexed to the presumably unique quality of interethnic relations in this multicultural state. However, centering on what is conventionally known as the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews,” accounts of Bulgaria’s wartime policies have until recently sidelined both the range of anti-Jewish

N. Ragaru (*) Sciences Po Paris (Ceri-Cnrs), Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_8

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measures implemented in the “old” kingdom (Bulgaria’s pre-1941 boundaries) and the fact that in March 1943 an estimated 11,343 Jews residing in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation were rounded up, deported to Nazi-occupied Poland, and exterminated.1 Second, no less surprising is the fact that it is precisely in a country where most of the local Jews survived the Holocaust that a special chamber of the People’s Courts—the extraordinary jurisdictions set up in the fall of 1944 to prosecute alleged war criminals and usher in communist political change—was established to prosecute individuals suspected of anti-Jewish crimes. Elsewhere in Europe, prior to the end of the war, a number of individuals involved in the persecution of Jews had been taken to courthouses, notably in Soviet-reconquered Krasnodar (summer 1943), Lublin (November–December 1944), and Budapest (January 1945).2 Nevertheless, in Krasnodar, the Jewish identity of the victims was subsumed under the notion of “peaceful Soviet citizens,” or anti-Jewish suffering was mingled with other kinds of predicaments. In Lublin, neither the Jewish identity of the victims was mentioned in the accusation nor was antisemitism invoked as a possible motive for the deeds committed.3 Additionally, the defendants were mostly tried before courts whose purview encompassed crimes committed against Jews as well as non-Jews. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on these paradoxes by using the judicial proceedings as a lens on the relationships between Jews and non-­ Jews during the war, as well as in its immediate aftermath. Scholars of genocide and extreme violence have repeatedly stumbled against the following observation: neighbors are involved in most situations where people targeted for extermination are rescued from certain death;4 they also feature prominently in cases of denunciations to the police, plunder,

1  Nadège Ragaru, “Et les Juifs bulgares furent sauvés…” Une histoire des savoirs sur la Shoah en Bulgarie (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2020). 2  Jeremy Hicks, “‘Soul Destroyers’: Soviet Reporting of Nazi Genocide and Its Perpetrators at the Krasnodar and Khar′kov Trials,” History (2013): 530–47; Ildikó Barna and Andrea Petö, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015); Andrew Kornbluth, The August Trials. The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2021); Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (Toronto: UTP, 2018). 3  Finder and Prusin (2018), 18–24 and 29–40. 4  Jacques Sémelin, The Survival of the Jews in France 1940–44 (London: Hurst, 2018).

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and mass murder.5 Otherwise put, mutual knowledge, long-standing social relations, and the existence of established patterns of exchanges cannot suffice to explain the choices neighbors make during wartime. The archives of Chamber 7 of the People’s Courts provide new insights into these conflicting dynamics. Set up a few weeks after the overthrow of the pro-Nazi regime (September 9, 1944), the deployment of the Red Army on Bulgarian territory, and the formation of a government by the Fatherland Front (a communist-led coalition), this jurisdiction furnishes a privileged site of observation of Bulgaria’s changing domestic and international setting. The signing of a truce with the Allies in Moscow on October 28, 1944, and the upcoming international peace negotiations granted exceptional significance to the public treatment of the Jews. After switching military sides, Bulgaria was hoping to be recognized as co-belligerent in the war against the Third Reich. Meanwhile, at home, the recently begun restitution of Jewish properties hurt the interests of many Bulgarians who had benefitted from the expropriation of Bulgarian Jews during the war. These challenges arguably found their way into the courtroom. There are two additional reasons why taking the trials as a research object is worthwhile. First, the criminal investigations documented both anti-­ Jewish politics and the role of personalized ties in the implementation or circumvention of these policies. Second, the attempt by the defendants and their legal counsels to bring to court Jews willing to testify for the defense publicly exposed the existence of complex ties of dependency between several perpetrators and their former victims/friends/relatives. In order to make sense of these processes, a triangle of social norms occupies center stage in this chapter—relations, favors, and personalized intercession/protection (hodataystvo). These notions and the associated social conventions had accompanied the establishment of state institutions and the enforcement of legal norms in Bulgaria at least since the creation of a Principality in 1878. In the interwar era, as the country evolved into an authoritarian regime with power being concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite, the existence of dense webs of personal connections allowed 5  Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For a reflection shifting positions in neighborly communities “from onlooker to perpetrator, from perpetrator to starer, from bystander to supporter, from supporter to victim,” see Anna Wylegała, “Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia,” in Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, eds. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 119–148.

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for both the maintenance of intra-group solidarities and the crossing of social barriers. Getting things done usually required a combination of oral intercession and written request. The Second World War gave these informal social practices unprecedented salience. The local Jewry frantically searched for connections with the hope of lessening the destructive impact of anti-Jewish rules on their lives. As the People’s Courts set out to document war crimes, personal links came once more into play. The most prominent accused, in particular, sought relatives who could secure their release from prison or at least improve their internment conditions, help them to hire a good lawyer, and find Jewish witnesses who might agree to testify in their favor. As I show in the following, this flurry of intercessions by non-Jews and Jews alike presented the Bulgarian trial lawyers with a conundrum as they attempted to ensure the conviction of the defendants. From the entry into force of the Law for the Defense of the Nation in January 1941, Jews in Bulgaria were subjected to identification measures, curtailment of civic rights, professional exclusions and economic marginalization. These anti-Jewish policies, soon extended to the Yugoslav and Greek territories occupied in April 1941, became increasingly stringent following the passing of two discriminatory fiscal laws (July 1941 and February 1942), the granting to the executive of all powers on the Jewish question in July 1942 and the creation of a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (KEV) under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior in late August 1942. The new repressive arsenal comprised the resettlement of Jews to specific city areas, the compulsory wearing of yellow stars, the imposition of a curfew, the liquidation of forbidden businesses, the freezing of Jewish bank accounts, as well as preparative work for deportation. Whereas the round-ups were diligently executed in Vardar Macedonia, the Serb region of Pirot, and western Thrace in Greece in March 1943, the plan to expedite about 8000 Bulgarian Jews to Nazi-occupied Poland failed as a result of local protests and the fading might of the Third Reich. However, the changing tide of the war did not prevent the Bulgarian government from forcibly dispatching in May 1943 the Jews living in the capital city Sofia and other municipalities (Kazanlăk, Stara Zagora, etc.) to provincial towns and villages. Until September 1944, the Bulgarian Jewish community lived in constant fear of being sent to a certain death in Poland. In exploring the role of personal connections in the daily routine of anti-Jewish policies as well as their legal prosecution, this study makes three arguments. The first argument concerns the social dynamics of violence against the Jews during the war. The court auditions indeed lift a veil

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on how wartime changes in expectations and ethnocultural hierarchies fostered a commoditization and a brutalization of exchanges of favors. In this context, some relatives turned into predators. The second point relates to antisemitic attitudes in end-of-war Bulgaria. Chamber 7 was presented by its initiators as “the trial of the antisemites.” A closer look at the auditions and the judgment, however, suggests that the court was expected by the ruling coalition of the Fatherland Front and its communist core, the Workers’ Party, to punish a small number of “fascist” bureaucrats so as to make a case for the historically good relations between Jews and gentiles in the country. More strikingly, perhaps, the examination of the speeches of several defense attorneys reveals the existence of antisemitism in a society presumably devoid of such attitudes.6 The third and final argument revolves around Jewish responses to the bringing to justice of members of the anti-Jewish bureaucracy. Elsewhere I have emphasized the part played by intra-Jewish political contention in their reception of the action of Chamber 7.7 The present chapter complements and nuances the role conferred upon political variables in Jewish court testimonies. Victim statements are set against a broader range of contexts, including the ongoing return of Jewish properties, the continuation of wartime power asymmetries in the courtroom, and the retraumatizing effect of publicly retelling one’s recent experience. At a time when the definite repeal of anti-Jewish measures was uncertain, the administrative and legal obstacles to the restoration of Jewish lives encouraged the search for connections with individuals close to the former regime. These circumstances minimized the chances that even the leading accused would receive their due sentences. This chapter is organized in two sections. After reconstituting the context within which anti-Jewish crimes were prosecuted, including the challenges associated with the restoration of Jewish rights and intercommunal relations in the final months of the war, the focus moves toward an examination of interpersonal solidarities and enmities in the courtroom.

6  Stefan Troebst, “Antisemitismus im ‘Land ohne Antisemitismus’: Staat, Titularnation und jüdische Minderheit in Bulgarien, 1878–1993,” in Antisemitismus im östlichen Europa, ed. Mariana Hausleitner and Monika Katz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), 109–25. 7  Nadège Ragaru, “The Prosecution of Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria: Fashioning a Master Narrative of the Second World War (1944–1945),” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33, no. 4 (2019): 941–75.

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Jews and Non-Jews: An Uneasy Return to Normalcy Judging Anti-Jewish Crimes: Boldness and Limits of an Initiative On October 6, 1944, the “Decree law on the judgment by a people’s court of those responsible for dragging Bulgaria into a global war against the allied nations and for the misdeeds associated with it” entered into force. On the home front, the prosecution of alleged war criminals helped to consolidate the power of the Bulgarian Workers’ Party. Internationally, the resort to justice was intended to prove that Bulgaria had severed ties with the “fascist regime” and could be considered a trustworthy ally. The belief that judging those responsible for the “persecutions of Jews” (goneniya na evreite) would be well received on the international stage may also explain why the Bulgarian government created a specialized jurisdiction in late November 1944, at a time when no other European country had yet considered the possibility of singling out one category of victim and one category of misdeed. From the outset, however, the action of the chamber of the People’s Court in charge of examining anti-Jewish crimes (Chamber 7) was hampered by restrictions relating to the persons liable to prosecution and the legal counts. A narrow group of defendants fell within its purview, chiefly members of the Bulgarian Commissariat for Jewish Affairs and affiliated personnel (no foreign national was brought to justice).8 Sixty-four individuals stood trial, much fewer than anticipated in Jewish communist milieus. Most glaring was the absence of armymen (but for those involved in the supervision of forced labor), policemen (to the exception of one police commander), and state officials (one mayor confirmed the rule), who had played a focal role in the deportations of Jews—no doubt the result of political arbitrage. The prosecution was also handcuffed by the restricted qualifications of the crimes. Two series of offenses were drawn up: first, the “persecutions of Jews” (art. 2, al. 10), more precisely the “acts, writings, speech or […] other ways” that could qualify as “active” and “effective” contributions to persecutions; second, the use of “connections with the power holders, or with the combatant states, or their professional position, to obtain illegally for themselves or for others property-related benefit” (art. 2, al. 4). Yet only those accused who had 8  Centralen Dărzhaven Arhiv (CDA), Fund (F) 1449, opis (o) 1, arhivna edinitsa (ae) 179, vol. 2.

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shown excessive zeal in the implementation of anti-Jewish laws, ordinances, or orders faced legal sanctions. In part as a result of the above, the court showed surprising clemency toward the accused. Nine cases were suspended (mostly on account of the defendants fighting the war against Bulgaria’s former allies at the time), and twenty of the remaining defendants were acquitted. The most severe verdicts (including the only two death sentences and three life imprisonments) were passed on defendants judged in absentia. Here again, it is safe to assume that the court’s judgment was not immune to political interference. In his final speech, attorney Gavril Anchev had warned of the risk that strong penalties might foster antagonism between Jews and non-­ Jews. Pretending to speak on behalf of some of the Jewish victims, he stated: “We, they say, do not want to obscure the indestructible link that exists between the Bulgarian people and the Jewish people. Through Chamber 7 of the People’s Court, we only want to create an additional link between the Bulgarian Jews and the Bulgarian people.”9 A consideration of the evolving relations between Jews and gentiles in the final months of the war will throw further light on this ambivalent statement, as well as on the policies of the ruling coalition of the Fatherland Front. The Slow Restoration of Jewish Rights and Properties By all accounts, the regime change of September 9, 1944, was welcomed with a huge sense of relief by the Bulgarian Jews, regardless of their political sensitivities.10 Following the May 21, 1943, decision to send local Jews into internal exile, most Jewish citizens had lived with the fear that their relegation might be just a step away from a general round-up and deportation across national borders. Furthermore, the arrival of a large number of needy Jews who were forbidden to work or draw money from their frozen bank accounts was occasionally received with mixed feelings in provincial settlements. On occasion, the initial gestures of support gave way to complaints about the scarcity of housing and the alleged contribution of Jews to the black market.11  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 155.  Boyka Vasileva, Evreite v Bălgariya, 1944–1952 (Sofia: U.I. Sv. Kliment Ohridski, 1992); Shlomo Shealtiel, Ot rodina kăm otechestvo: Emigratsiya i nelegala imigratsiya ot i prez Bălgariya v perioda 1939–1949 (Sofia: U.I. Sv. Kliment Ohridski, 2008). 11  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 221. 9

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In the fall of 1944, the reinstalment in Sofia of about 25,000 Jews proved a protracted process. Undoubtedly, Bulgaria’s capital city did not witness any of the extreme forms of antisemitism—verbal attacks, blood libel, threats, collective violence, pogroms, etc.—observed in Poland, Hungary, or Slovakia.12 Many Bulgarian Jews testified after the war that their apartments had been vacated shortly before their return, and that neighbors, friends, and relatives had protected the valuables they were entrusted with.13 There were cases, however, of returnees finding their housing bereft of their possessions or still inhabited by new tenants. The destruction caused by Allied bombing in the fall of 1943 and spring of 1944, as well as the massive arrival of refugees following the retreat of the Bulgarian army from Yugoslav and Greek occupied zones, had caused severe accommodation shortages. The confinement of Jews to the mainly Jewish-inhabited worker area of Yuch-Bunar in the fall of 1942, followed by the expulsion of Sofia Jews to the province in May 1943, had created a category of beneficiaries who were not inclined to relinquish the apartment buildings they had occupied or acquired. Against this background, on November 28, 1944,14 the council of ministers offered a restrictive interpretation of the decree law on the vacation of apartment buildings formerly held or inhabited by Jews: “Article 16, al. 2 is interpreted in the sense that only those houses which belonged to Jews and were inhabited by their owners will be emptied within a thirty-day deadline.”15 This measure excluded from the purview of the decree thousands of Jews who had until then lived in rented apartments. The dismantling of the main body of anti-Jewish policies was more diligent. Some pieces of legislation had been annulled as early as August 1944.16 By mid-October, the main discriminatory laws were cancelled.17 For a number of Jewish craftsmen or petty traders, however, no return to

12  Gross (2001); Audrey Kichelewski, Les Survivants. Les Juifs de Pologne depuis la Shoah (Paris: Belin, 2018); Michala Lônčíková, “Atrocities in the Borderland: Anti-Semitic Violence in Eastern Slovakia (1945–1946),” European Review of History 36, no. 6 (2019): 928–46. 13  See, for instance, the Bulgarian testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. 14  CDA, F 136, o 1, ae 48, l. 55. 15  CDA, F 136, o 1, ae 48, l. 21. 16  CDA, F 136, o 1, ae 9, l. 26 r/v. 17  CDA, F 88, o 1, ae 212.

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normalcy could be expected until they achieved restitution of or compensation for their businesses, production equipment, and inventories. During the war, several legal means had ensured the economic dispossession of the Jews.18 In July 1941, the Bulgarian Jewry had been compelled to relinquish 20 to 25 percent of their properties, assets, and other valuables pursuant to the adoption of a discriminatory fiscal law.19 Many tradesmen, craftsmen, and petty entrepreneurs had been forced to sell their businesses to non-Jews to pay the tax. In February 1942, a law against Real Estate Speculation additionally allowed the state to confiscate and nationalize any Jewish possession found to be “excessive.”20 The May 1943 expulsion from Sofia and other cities propelled a new wave of sales of inventories, production equipment, and household items at extremely discounted prices. In the meantime, the extension of professional exclusions led to the Aryanization of many Jewish shops, which were transferred either to the state or to non-Jewish third parties. The proceeds from these liquidations were placed in frozen bank accounts in the owners’ names. In November 1944, an interministerial commission was set up to reverse these policies. Its work paved the way for the adoption by the council of ministers on December 29 of a decree law allowing for the recovery of Jewish properties and belongings, whose publication in the state gazette and promulgation waited until March 2, 1945.21 To the disappointment of even the most dedicated communists, the document and ensuing guidelines for its implementation introduced a profusion of bureaucratic and legal obstacles to the return of and compensation for confiscated properties. The so-called voluntary property transfers and sales made under duress in July 1941, February 1942, and May 1943 were not considered for restitution under the law. The reacquisition of these valuables depended on face-to-face negotiations between the old and new owners. For those properties considered for restitution, the Jewish claimants were supposed to reimburse the Aryan proprietors for the improvements made since the acquisition of the Jewish assets. State compensation for the confiscated properties and the taxation of Jewish patrimony was 18  Roumen Avramov, Spasenie i ‘padenie’: Mikroikonomika na dărzhavniya antisemitizăm (Sofia: U. I. Sv. Kliment Ohridski, 2012). 19  Dărzhaven Vestnik (D.V.), no. 151, 14 July 1941. 20  D.V., no. 32, 13 February 1942. 21  CDA, F 136, o 1, ae 64, l. 26 and D.V., no. 50, 2 March 1945.

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approved, but only a small amount was to be paid in cash, the remaining payment being provided in bonds over a period of six years. Postwar Zionist accounts of the events have blamed the government’s failure to diligently retrieve Jewish properties on the alleged lack of concern of the communist Jews for the fate of the local community.22 Prior to the December 29 meeting of the council of ministers, however, the communist-­ dominated Central Consistory of the Bulgarian Jews had penned a detailed report advocating a comprehensive restitution and compensation scheme. To no avail. In fact, the communist Jews enjoyed only limited room to maneuver.23 Had they advocated Jewish rights too noisily, they might have been accused of Jewish nationalism at a time when the Workers’ Party campaigned against all strands of “great nationalism.” The Jews of communist persuasion would go to great lengths to dissociate themselves from the recently reformed United Zionists accused of eroding the unity of the Bulgarian nation. In a report to the Histradrut, the general organization of workers in Israel, dated January 17, 1945, Aron Ben Yosef, a representative of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, observed: They have started to return their assets to the Jews in very limited amounts; however they are not being given the means to earn a living, for instance their shops are not returned to them, there are no goods to trade in Bulgaria, and people fear that today’s regime might be nothing else but the first step towards a bolchevik system.24

One point is beyond doubt: the empathy of the communist Jews toward the Jewish bourgeoisie was close to non-existent, as the latter were seen as both their class enemy and political opponents. Following the regime change, the Central Consistory was granted custody of the Jewish belongings formerly held in the warehouses of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, as well as the financial holdings placed in the “Jewish municipalities” fund of the Commissariat. A number of Jews accused the Consistory of allocating these goods on the basis of political allegiances. The latter 22  Haim Keshales, Tova se sluchi prez onezi godini. Belezhki za zhivota na bălgarskoto evreystvo prez godinite 1944–1950, Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group O.13, Bulgaria collection, File no. 3, 50. 23  By comparison with their Romanian and Hungarian counterparts, the Bulgarian Jews were poorly represented at the helm of the Bulgarian Workers’ Party. In March 1945, the Central Committee comprised only one Jew. 24  Haim Keshales, Tova se sluchi, 66.

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rebuked the allegation and explained that their concern lay with priority distribution to the neediest. They, in turn, denounced the United Zionists’ attempt to monopolize the distribution of international Jewish assistance. These political divisions, which encompassed other key issues such as the interpretation of the recent past and the vision of a possible future in Palestine, were bound to impact attitudes toward Chamber 7. A close reading of Jewish testimonies and defense speeches, however, suggests a multilayered configuration in which political allegiances mingled with other forms of solidarity (professional links, social affinities, friendships), symbolic debts incurred during the war, and relations of dependency between witnesses and defendants. It is now time to enter the courthouse and observe how these variables played out before the judges. For that purpose, I shall rely primarily on a study of defense strategies and prosecution witness testimonies.

Favors and Crimes: Ties of Dependency Banal Antisemitism at the Trial of the Antisemites As Minister of Propaganda (Dimo Kasazov) has said, with this present process Bulgarian tolerance is seeking its rehabilitation, and the Bulgarian people is seeking its rehabilitation and to demonstrate to the world community and above all the world public opinion of the Jewry that the Bulgarian people did not agree with the policies enforced until yesterday.25

This is how attorney Georgiev, defense counsel for Asen Paytashev, once the commander of the Skopje detention camp where the Macedonian Jews were held prior to their deportation to Poland, depicted the missions assigned to Chamber 7 on March 30, 1945. Surprisingly, this wish to present the Bulgarians as a “tolerant people” did not deter many attorneys from using rhetorical devices with anti-Jewish overtones. Given that their purpose was to seek lenient sentences for their clients, one may presume that they did not consider these statements as transgressive of the common social norms or as likely to foster negative reactions on the part of the jury. Twenty-six lawyers and four defendants with a legal background were granted two days to deny the charges filed against the accused. Some had  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 64.

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been commissioned by the Sofia Board Association; others were hired by the defendants. Most of them had little time at their disposal to acquaint themselves with the case files, see their clients, and collect the documents needed for their defense. Their differences in experience, reputation, and prestige transpired through the deference (or lack thereof) shown by the president of the court toward them. Most rhetorical arguments, however, knew no boundaries of class or professional recognition. In a number of speeches, the historical significance of the trial served as a pretext to describe offenses as too menial to be worthy of attention: “You are at a political trial, a trial for political crimes,” attorney Kospartov claimed, for instance. “It seems to me that we should not profanate it and turn it into a process […] which occupies itself with mere criminal crimes, with ordinary crimes.”26 Such remarks were frequently sewn together with a variant of superior orders. As defense lawyer Kerelov put it, referring to Yaroslav Kalitsin, second in command of the Commissariat and one of the chief organizers of the deportations, he was “unfortunate” enough to have occupied the wrong position at the wrong time.27 Yet, when need be, the blame was deflected onto low-ranking civil servants who had ensured the daily observance of anti-Jewish rules. Beyond these common tropes, in their effort to lessen their clients’ punishment (most lawyers pleaded acquittal), the attorneys sketched the Jewish predicament during the war with a light pencil. First came the relativization of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Lawyer Stoenchev, who defended Pencho Lukov, a high-ranking official of the Commissariat, made the point clear: “If the Bulgarian people, in its majority and entirety, was compelled to endure a number of restrictive measures, these measures were not limited to the Jews, they restricted the entire Bulgarian people.”28 Unable to hide his condescension toward the “good” and subservient Jewish minority, Stoenchev even implied that some politicized Jews might have been responsible for the deterioration of intercommunal relations: Mister judges, the Bulgarian Jewry was well received, tolerated and seen among our people and the Bulgarian element. The artificial planting of an antisemitic spirit in our country did not find its way […]. It did not develop

 CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 140.  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 209. 28  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 51. 26 27

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thanks to the good manners of the Jews towards the Bulgarian element, thanks to the tolerance of the Bulgarian element towards the Jewry, thanks to this long-term and centuries-old friendship, if you will, and to the good behavior of the Jews in the whole world towards the cause of the Bulgarian element and undoubtedly thanks to the behavior of the Jewish element in our national struggles, struggles in which they always took an active part. The unhappy moment, mister judges, was that, at one point, the Jewry was degraded by some political elements who tried to create an antagonism between Bulgarians and Jews (author’s emphasis).29

The conclusion was predictable. For the sake of national cohesion, a severe verdict had to be avoided at all costs. The judgment of individuals involved in the enforcement of anti-Jewish laws would create interethnic tensions. Complacent and self-satisfied, attorney Stoenchev wound up his final plea: I beg in the name of the well-understood interests of the Jewry and the Bulgarian government not to create a tense atmosphere in the future, for no matter what we say, let us be frank then, when there are 80 defendants, when those defendants have two to five members in their family and 10 to 15 relatives, when they accomplished that work to get a portion of bread, when it did not depend on them whether certain measures were to be implemented or not, if the defendants are convicted for the fact that they have enforced some lawful decrees, or if they are convicted as opponents of the Jews, this will give rise to a mass of opponents to the Jewry, an opposition which will come by force of circumstances because of the hatred born in the souls of their relatives and friends. And we do not want to see such a thing happen, gentlemen judges.30

Some defense counsels took one more step. Not content with assigning responsibility for intercultural tensions to the victims rather than the perpetrators or the bystanders, they toyed with anti-Jewish prejudices— Jewish greed, especially. Gavril Staridarev, a Bulgarian National Bank official during the war, had heard there were vast amounts of unreported Jewish assets in Shumen, in northeastern Bulgaria. Along with a colleague and a police officer, he traveled all the way to this city and, resorting to psychological torment and physical violence over dozens of Jews in the spring of 1943, managed to locate 16 million leva. In his retelling of the  Ibid.  Ibid.

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facts, attorney Stefanov blamed the Jewish victims for reclaiming their belongings, allegedly proof of their lack of empathy toward poorer Jews: Of course we will believe Dr Rosenfeld because he tells you that first they did not complain, that later they started to complain about the fact that they were cruelly beaten […] after September 9, […] they start hoping […] that these jewels and banknotes worth 16 million leva overall can be returned to them. They should be returned to them? Why? Because they did not go to the cashier’s desk of the Central Bank. In the name of the Law for the Defense of the Nation, [these assets] are used by the Jewish municipality to support poor Jewish families and if the defendants have expressed jealousy, this jealousy deserves to be praised for its result was useful to the poor Jews.31

Jewish municipalities were communal institutions, which were transformed into mere relays of the state during wartime, when the “Jewish municipalities” fund was chiefly used to finance anti-Jewish measures with Jewish means. When the KEV took control over their resources through the “Jewish municipalities” fund, some of the proceeds from the liquidation of Jewish properties were placed in the fund. Ultimately, Staridarev was handed down a 5-year prison sentence. Legal cases of forced labor offered additional opportunities to stigmatize the Jews, both on identity-based and social grounds. In Bulgaria, a mobilized labor service had been established following the Treaty of Neuilly (1919). The program was progressively militarized. By 1940, “labor soldiers” had become a separate armed corps, which comprised members of the ethnic minorities (mostly Turks, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, and Roma), as well as ethnic Bulgarians of modest background. Jews, however, were not enrolled in labor battalions until the adoption of anti-Jewish legislation. From 1941 onward, they faced increasingly repressive and discriminatory treatment as forced laborers. In court, defense attorney Drupchev, in his plea for lieutenant Pavlov, astutely comingled social and racial stereotypes. What happened in the forced labor units? A clash of two worlds, he argued, that of armymen socialized into discipline and hard labor and that of soft-handed prosperous Jews: This is how they came to work with the Jewish soldiers, who were considered as ordinary labor soldiers. But what do they find there? They find a mass different from the ones they have worked with in the ranks of the labor  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 148.

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soldiers. They find a mass which works heavy physical work and which is composed of physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, etc. They are expected to work according to a plan. My clients have to control their work and since the results are not delivered, one comes to a conflict between two worlds, between the superiors and the subordinates, and this conflict ultimately leads my client to the dock.32

Lawyer Kiril Sestrimski, who represented engineer Ivan Gasharov, a leading figure in the Ihtiman (a town southeast of Sofia) forced labor units, further built upon the notion of Jewish poor work ethics. His client, he claimed, had shown extreme dedication to an infrastructural project of huge importance to the governing elite. Jewish laborers, by contrast, were lazy and even prided themselves on sabotaging Bulgaria’s national aims: Mr public prosecutors, he [the prosecutor Eli Baruh] […] refused to support the thesis that they worked excessively, because they did not work too much, rather too little, as a fact they did not work at all. This is the truth of the process. […] [Ivan Gasharov] had the misfortune to have Jewish workers who, according to the accuser himself, did not want to work, who sabotaged the work—the prosecutor himself affirms that they did sabotage—and this was, according to them, a patriotic deed. Alright, misters, you did not want to work. That is the truth. […] What are you going to accuse [Gasharov] of ? Of being a conscientious public servant, a clerk who entirely dedicated himself to his task?33

Judging by the verdict of the court, one may assume that this line of reasoning was well received by the members of the judicial board (and, presumably, by the leadership of the Workers’ Party): in 1945, forced labor was not recognized as a repressive policy toward the Jews.34 None of the unit commanders present in the dock received a guilty verdict for Jewish persecution, and two were handed down a one-year prison sentence for taking bribes. One of Sofia’s most renowned lawyers even contended that discrimination worked the other way round. The mere existence of Chamber 7

 CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 178.  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 204. 34  In 2004, the Claims Conference obtained funding from the German government to compensate the Bulgarian Jewish victims of forced labor: http://www.claimscon.org/ regions/eastern-europe/bulgaria/. 32 33

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introduced an element of asymmetry between Jews and non-Jews, at the expense of the latter: Here, earlier, we talked about [Ivan] Gyoshev, and about the fact that he had given three slaps to some Jew […]; hey, had he slapped not Jews but some subordinate Bulgarian, would he have been asked to answer for his acts pursuant to the law for the prosecution before the People’s Court? Of course not. Why must such a difference be made then? Why must the People’s Court act in relation to this kind of action towards a Jew, and not a Bulgarian; aren’t they both equally valuable citizens in this country; we see, mister judges, that in such cases one reaches a situation that can find no justification from the legal standpoint.35

The most striking statement, however, came from Vladimir Tumparov, a well-known Sofia lawyer who—seemingly blind to the reports published in Soviet, Western, and Bulgarian media—raised doubts about the fate of the Jewish deportees in Poland: Some witnesses have established that in Hungary they have met Jews from Western Thrace and Macedonia, they have heard that they were to return to Bulgaria, and, on the other hand, of late in the newspapers one can read about some actions undertaken by Jews in Poland—a fact, which shows that not all Jews in Poland were liquidated.36

One might be tempted to index these statements to the roles of the lawyers (defense attorneys), as well as the social and political background of some of them. Nevertheless, a consideration of testimonies by prosecution witnesses invites a more nuanced judgment. The issue here does not reside in the public expression of antisemitic sentiments. Rather, it concerns the extraordinarily lenient attitude shown by some high-ranking members of the ruling coalition toward several key defendants who planned and coordinated Jewish round-ups or Jewish internment in detention camps. What motive did they put forward to ask for attenuated penalties? Personal acquaintance. Particularly eloquent here is the statement made on March 16 by the then minister of social policy Grigor Cheshmedzhiev, a social democrat who had penned the letter of protest against anti-Jewish legislation signed  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 126.  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 92.

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by 23 members of the Union of Writers in the fall of 1940. A lawyer, writer, and journalist of experience, Cheshmedzhiev enjoyed much public respect and could not be suspected of even the slightest antisemitic feeling. The example he uses to illustrate the quality of Jewish–non-Jewish relationships during wartime, however, is most unexpected: “I even saw, when the goods of the Jews were being sold, how peasants and urban dwellers bought more [than they needed] so as to help the Jews. Here too, there might have been some black sheep, as in any herd, who overdid it, but the majority of the masses empathized with the Jews.”37 That the acquisition of Jewish goods sold at discounted prices on the eve of an uncertain departure should be presented as a mark of support is unheard of. Even more striking is the fact that, when it came to examining specific cases, prosecution witness Cheshmedzhiev spoke solely in defense of the accused. He blamed himself for Judge Hristo Stomanyakov’s decision to take charge of the KEV in October 1943.38 He pleaded for Atanas Ovcharov, the KEV official who had supervised the dispatch of the Greek Jewish deportees at the assembly point of Demir Hisar (Greece), by referring to his good family credentials, and confessed to attempts to prevent his prosecution: I do not know [the defendants], but for this young man, Ovcharov. I am surprised that he should be here. His mother came to see me, and told me he was arrested. I sent notes to a few popular prosecutors, because his father was very dear to me and was my friend, Ivan Ovcharov, he was a socialist, by birth I would say, since the time I became socialist myself. Now that they should call his son a fascist, this sounds somewhat strange to me. But it is possible that after his father departed, so that they [their family] do not die of hunger, they appointed him to the Commissariat.39

The gentiles, however, were not alone in letting personal familiarity prevail over the consideration of criminal offenses and in interceding on behalf of some defendants. As we now turn to Jewish testimonies, a complex web of interpersonal links, moral debts, and dependencies appears. Examining the ties between some accused and Jewish victims also highlights the central role played by exchanges of favors and intercessory power in both the enforcement and the attenuation of anti-Jewish measures.  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 181, l. 215–27.  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 181, l. 223. 39  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 186, l. 224. 37 38

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Ultimately, such social practices hindered the comprehension and judicial punishment of anti-Jewish acts. Personalized Protection, Personalized Destruction: The Challenging Pursuit of Anti-Jewish Crimes A number of Jewish witnesses—even among those brought to the witness stand by the prosecution— spoke in favor of some high-ranking KEV figures. To the dismay of the prosecutors, they pinpointed the personal favors they were granted or insisted that those individuals they once knew as respected and respectful colleagues could not have committed the horrendous misdeeds of which they were accused. This invisibilization of larger crimes (against the Jews as a community) behind the diversity of small gestures (toward specific Jewish individuals) needs to be set against a broader historical context. It also betrays an attempt on the part of some victims to retain a belief in specific moral norms and the possibility of reconnecting with pre-war life. Following the creation of a Bulgarian Principality in 1878, the appropriation of the novel state by its citizens was mediated through personalized networks. The daily operation of institutions and legal frameworks (access to information, jobs, housing, etc.) relied on face-to-face exchanges, personal recommendations, and bonds of trust. Obviously, not all social agents were equally endowed with connections: networks were denser and wider at the helm of the social pyramid. Personalized ties did not preclude the existence of social hierarchies either (in fact they mediated their continuation).40 Moreover the economy of favors did not entail the absence of monetary payments. Getting things done rested on a variety of steps, an entanglement between print and orality, gift and payments. There was, however, one implicit rule common to all ways of personalizing institutions and the law, that of reciprocity. Although the demand for counter-­ favors was not usually made explicit, the possibility of a return was left open. The adoption of anti-Jewish laws both reinforced and remolded these social conventions. As each new piece of legislation further reduced Jewish 40  The daily operation of personalized intercession and patronage in post-Ottoman Bulgaria has received limited scholarly attention. Its prevalence transpires in literary writings: Ivan Vazov, “Toy e mlad, zdrav, inteligenten,” in Draski i sharki (Sofia: n.p., 1895, vol. 2); Stefan Lazar Kostov, Golemanov: Komediya v tri deystviya (Sofia: n.p., 1928).

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rights and access to means of livelihood, most Bulgarian Jews turned to friends, relatives, and colleagues in the hope of alleviating the consequences of anti-Jewish laws. Their capacity to continue their professions, transfer their assets to trusted business partners, postpone conscription into force labor units, and avoid being relocated away from their home depended on their ability to engage in personalized relations. In Sofia, intercessory power reached a climax at the time of the May 1943 expulsion of Jews from the capital city. However, the reshuffling of racial and social hierarchies as a result of state antisemitism did not only give increased salience to favors and intercessions. It also introduced twists and turns to these practices. Witness the case of Ivan Mitsiev, a former central bank employee, who joined the Commissariat in May 1943. Attorney Gudev’s attempt to refute the testimony of a Jewish victim against his client is emblematic: At one time [Natan Goldstajn] said that he gave 9,000 or 10,000 leva, and in addition 5,000 and when we asked him: when you gave this money to Mitsiev so that the physician who examined your wife would produce the necessary certificate for her to stay [in Sofia], what was your impression— that this money was really given to the doctor or that he kept it? He did not answer in an affirmative way: the Jews, as they leave Bulgaria, they will not come back. His depositions are contradictory, but he also said: I have known Mitsiev for many years. When he was an employee at the National Bank, he did a number of favors for me, and there never was any question of whatever retributions.41

Unknowingly, the witness had set a finder on the reason behind changes in social norms. Notions of reciprocity require an open-ended vision of time. The Bulgarian project to deport, if not all, at least a segment of the Bulgarian Jewish community challenged these expectations, thereby creating a configuration conducive to the transformation of favors into financial extraction. In his testimony for the prosecution, Isak Francez, a communist lawyer who was appointed transitional Commissioner for Jewish Affairs after September 9, 1944, aptly portrayed this brutal commoditization of personalized transactions on the occasion of the May 1943 expulsion:

 CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 82–3.

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Then the deportation started, with the son being sent to a place, and the mother to another one. Obviously in these tragic conditions when people were expecting their lives to be liquidated anytime, they wanted at least in this ultimate moment to be with their relatives. […] around the Commissariat a handful of people had stuck together whom I can name in no other way than vultures, who sought to feed themselves with this carrion the Commissariat placed at their disposal—people close to those who enforced the [anti-Jewish] action, intercessors [hodatay] and lawyers who looked for their victims, who for 20-30-50 or 100,000 leva changed the permit from one city to another. […] hundreds, thousands of leva fell from these people who were constantly squeezed.42

That the moral economy underpinning personalized intercession was transgressed did not signal its end, however. The latter remained the dominant cognitive frame through which Jews and non-Jews alike assessed individual behavior. One may assume that for a number of Jews, distinguishing between those friends and relatives who had abided by the erstwhile social conventions (they applied state rules but granted individual exemptions), and those who either refused to curb the law or demanded outrageous amounts of money to do so, offered a way to preserve a sense of self and a definition of their place in Bulgarian society. The testimony of Menahem Fayonov, a jurist who was general secretary of the Ministry of Propaganda in March 1945, offers a telling illustration of this cognitive map. The second witness called by the prosecution, Fayonov, testified against KEV official Zahari Velkov (then in prison in Yugoslav Macedonia), who had requisitioned his apartment for himself. He also incriminated Dr. Ivan Popov, former head of the KEV’s Economic Department whom he believed stood behind his internment and that of his daughter in the camp of Somovit in May 1943. Nevertheless, when it came to assessing the role of the head of the KEV, Hristo Stomanyakov— who directed the Commissariat at the time when the Somovit concentration camp was set up on the Danube at the border with Romania—he could not envision the possibility that Stomanyakov might be guilty: I have absolute 100% and special trust in our colleague, Neyko Neykov, who is known to all lawyers and judges. Since Neyko Neykov told me that Stomanyakov did all that depended upon him to assist me in my case, I believe him; hence, consequently I believe Mr Stomanyakov, when he says  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 182, l. 237.

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that all that depended upon him as a state employee he did, for we have been colleagues for years. He is a judge, I am a lawyer, we have been entertaining the best and collegial relations, we have always expressed respect towards one another, since I respected him in the same way as I believe he respected me. I believe that Mr Stomanyakov took these steps.43

Admitting anything to the contrary would have meant renouncing a set of professional and personal beliefs that were central to Fayonov’s continued existence in Bulgaria. Bonds of another nature also impacted the oral evidence delivered to the jury by some Jewish victims, namely, the persistence of asymmetrical ties of dependency between defendants and witnesses. Vili Shpeter had been asked to testify by Peyo Draganov, the former commander of the Skopje camp where more than 7240 Macedonian Jews were detained in March 1943 pending deportation to Poland. A lawyer by training, Draganov ensured his own defense. In a different context, French scholar Élizabeth Claverie has justly emphasized the power dynamics involved when until recently all-powerful perpetrators are granted the right to access their files and interrogate witnesses.44 The exchange between Draganov and Shpeter makes this point clearly: Draganov: How did I get into the KEV, didn’t I want to resign many times, was I held there by Jewish friends? President: What will you say, Mr Shpeter? Shpeter: Mr President! I, despite the fact that I was able at the time, because my wife was Bulgarian, to get rid of all the burdens, despite that, I did not do it. I say this so that our people do not accuse [me]. Two of my brothers were killed by the fascists in Poland, but despite that, I will say the truth. Mr Draganov, I have known for about 12 years. […] He never was an antisemite, Mr Draganov, that I positively know. Perhaps he was the only one there in this nest, who was always polite and kind towards the Jews, who always kept a good tone and, as far as he was able to, I know that he always made favors. Personally I went to intercede for my close people, and he did what he could, he was a human kind of a man […] Draganov: My feelings towards Belev, what were they, have I spoken about that?  CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 181, l. 210–11.  Élizabeth Claverie, “Bonne foi et bon droit d’un génocidaire,” Droit & société 3 (2009): 635–64. 43 44

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Shpeter: Yes, they even wanted to take me out of the apartment. I went to Mr Draganov and told him […] He told me: If I go and see Belev, I will hurt [your interests], because our relations are bad. Then he asked a colleague of his in the office to go in his stead. I went on the next day and he arranged that I be allowed to stay on Rakovska [street].45

This excerpt leaves a sense of unease. The ruthlessness of the questions stands in sharp contrast to the awkward and fragile answers of a former victim for whom testifying in court might have been a re-traumatizing experience.46 For want of archival records, the reader remains powerless to move past the feeling that there are many silences behind these words. What can be ascertained is that Draganov, unlike most of the other defendants, had managed to obtain his release from custody on March 13. This freedom of movement gave him the time, social resources, and self-­ confidence to build his case. Moreover, he boasted several highly placed connections in the new state apparatus, including a vice-minister of justice. Following the testimony and interrogation of Shpeter, prosecutor Rahamimov tried to initiate a short cross-examination. He asked the witness whether he knew of Draganov’s deeds as commander of the Skopje internment camp. As expected, the answer was negative. Since the court refused to validate incriminating evidence collected in a foreign country, and the three Macedonian Jewish survivors identified as possible witnesses by the prosecution could not appear in court, no voice came to provide evidence of Draganov’s role in the deportation of the Macedonian Jews. He left the courthouse a free man. On his list of witnesses, Draganov had included two Jewish names. He was not the only defendant to do so. In a society structured around favors and intercessions, each and every individual could point to cases in which they had curbed the law for a Jew. Each powerholder had his “beneficiaries.” A cursory look at the archives of the May 1943 expulsions reveals that even such devoted antisemites as Minister of the Interior Petăr Gabrovski, Chief Jewish Commissioner Aleksandăr Belev, and second in

 CDA, F 1449, o 1, ae 184, l. 3–4.  On the challenges and benefits associated with the uses of the notion of “trauma” to examine the impact of World War Two in the East, see Mark Edele, “Towards a History of Trauma in Central and Eastern Europe After World War II: A Coda,” in Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 321–331. 45 46

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command Yaroslav Kalitsin granted exemptions.47 One more factor stands out: in the wake of September 9, 1944, many Jews reached out to former KEV officials and lawyers evolving around them in the hope of recovering their belongings. The public announcement that authors of anti-Jewish crimes would be prosecuted created a window of opportunity for some victimized Jews: a number of people who had “acquired” Jewish properties under dubious conditions hastened to negotiate a settlement with their former victims. The fact that some transactions were still under way at the time of the auditions may explain why some Jewish witnesses adopted such a cautious stance in court.

Conclusion A Janus-faced picture emerged from the trial. There were arguably extremely shocking depictions of the round-ups and transfer of Jews, especially from Greece; several former forced laborers also offered detailed depictions of the physical and psychological violence to which they were subjected. Besides, the prosecutors presented to the court an impressive amount of incriminating material evidence, mostly from the archives of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs. Yet the addition of the testimonies for the prosecution failed to give a global view of anti-Jewish policies, the actual role of the KEV in their enforcement, and the positions of the defendants in the (in)formal hierarchy of the Commissariat. One might well argue that such a result is common in legal proceedings for war crimes, since they examine the deeds of specific actors. In the spring of 1945, however, even individual responsibilities seemed to melt away as most of the key accused found victimized witnesses or members of the Fatherland Front to speak on their behalf. As I have shown in an earlier article, political factors did have a major share in this outcome.48 However, additional variables need to be taken into account. The defense strategies of the accused resonated with familiar social configurations. Matters of law had long been enmeshed with social linkages, unwritten rules, and informal practices. Managing differential access to legal and bureaucratic resources was part and parcel of the routine exercise of power. Paradoxically enough, the exceptions to the “rules”—far from evidencing the existence of general discriminatory  CDA, F 190 K, o 3, ae 133, l. 1–127.  Ragaru (2019).

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­ rinciples against the Jews—were seen by the court as proof that the state p officials sitting in the dock had behaved like ordinary bureaucrats. This configuration made it impossible to comprehend the uniqueness of anti-­ Jewish policies and Jewish suffering during wartime. At a time when the slow restitution of Jewish properties fostered tensions between the beneficiaries of the anti-Jewish measures and their victims, and as the public denunciation of “greater nationalism” and “speculation” allowed for the continuation of anti-Jewish sentiments under a new guise, the failure to fully expose the extent of Jewish persecutions in court did not encourage a thorough public discussion of the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Bulgaria over the longue and short durées. A representation of Bulgarian society as tolerant toward its minorities and devoid of antisemitism was thus construed, which has mostly endured until today.

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Lônčíková, Michala. 2019. Atrocities in the Borderland: Anti-Semitic Violence in Eastern Slovakia (1945–1946). European Review of History 36 (6): 928–946. Ragaru, Nadège. 2019. The Prosecution of Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria: Fashioning a Master Narrative of the Second World War (1944–1945). East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33 (4): 941–975. ———. 2020. “Et les Juifs bulgares furent sauvés…”: Une histoire des savoirs sur la Shoah en Bulgarie. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Sémelin, Jacques. 2018. The Survival of the Jews in France 1940–44. London: Hurst Publishers. Shealtiel, Shlomo. 2008. Ot rodina kăm otechestvo: Emigratsiya i nelegala imigratsiya ot i prez Bălgariya v perioda 1939-1949. Sofia: U.I. Sv. Kliment Ohridski. Troebst, Stefan. 1995. Antisemitismus im ‘Land ohne Antisemitismus’: Staat, Titularnation und jüdische Minderheit in Bulgarien, 1878–1993. In Antisemitismus im östlichen Europa, ed. Mariana Hausleitner and Monika Katz, 109–125. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Vasileva, Boyka. 1992. Evreite v Bălgariya, 1944–1952. Sofia: U.I.  Sv. Kliment Ohridski. Vazov, Ivan. 1895. Toy e mlad, zdrav, inteligenten. In Draski i sharki, vol. 2. Sofia: n.p. Wylegała, Anna. 2022. Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia. In Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Peter Leese, 119–148. Cham: Palgrave.

Rape on Trial: Criminal Justice Actors in 1940s’ Soviet Ukraine and Sexual Violence During the Holocaust Marta Havryshko

Decades of research into the gender history of the Holocaust have yielded the undeniable fact that Jewish women and men had very different experiences of the Shoah. One of the most considerable differences is related to gender-based violence. Although some Jewish men did suffer various forms of sexual violence,1 the vast majority of victims were women. This violence took different forms and occurred in different areas at different stages of the war and was committed by different perpetrators—the

1  Dorota Glowacka, “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-So-Silent) Silence,” German History 39, no. 1 (2020), 78–99, doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghaa032.

M. Havryshko (*) I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Lviv, Ukraine e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_9

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Germans, their allies, and local accomplices in different occupied territories. However, the knowledge and memory of these facts have not always been part of the metanarrative or public memory of the Holocaust. Not only was the early research on postwar memories of Holocaust survivors marked by silence and marginalization around the issue of sexual violence during the Nazi genocide of Jews but international and local war crimes trials, which were an important step in understanding the war and its lessons, also underestimated the gender aspects of Jewish suffering. Despite the fact that the Nuremberg tribunals recorded numerous cases of sexual victimization of Jewish women, sexual violence was not included in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 6, which provided a definition of the newly established concept “crimes against humanity.” None of the defendants in the Nuremberg tribunals was convicted of sexual crimes against Jews,2 in contrast to the Soviet war crimes trials. A number of scholars have studied Soviet postwar transitional justice,3 but none has touched precisely upon the state’s response to martial sexual violence committed by Nazis and their local helpers. Did Soviet investigators document sexual crimes committed by local Nazi accomplices? What testimony—and whose—served as evidence in trials concerning sexual violence? Were local Nazi collaborators convicted of military sexual violence? It is these questions that this chapter aims to answer. It concerns the analysis of judicial practice in the prosecution of sexual crimes committed by local Nazi collaborators in Soviet Ukraine. The chapter considers the positions and narratives of the three key actors of judicial proceedings—the victims, the witnesses, and the perpetrators—as well as the attitudes they 2  Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen and Alona Hagay-Frey, “Silence at the Nuremberg Trials: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and Sexual Crimes against Women in the Holocaust,” Women’s Rights Law Reporter 35 (2013–14): 43. 3  Among others: Sergey Kudryashov and Vanessa Voisin, “The Early Stages of ‘Legal Purges’ in Soviet Russia (1941–1945),” Cahiers du Monde Russe 49, no. 2/3 (2008): 263–95; Tanja Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953),” Cahiers du Monde Russe 49, no. 2/3 (2008): 341–64; Alexander V. Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 1–30; Alexander Prusin, “The ‘Second Wave’ of Soviet Justice: The 1960s War Crimes Trials,” in Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays across Disciplines, ed. Norman J.  W. Goda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 129–57; Diana Dumitru, “An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 142–57.

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encountered on behalf of the fourth actor, the Soviet state, embodied by investigators, prosecutors, and judges. It traces the language and stories chosen by these actors, what their statements meant to them and their identity, and how they were perceived by the judiciary. The sources used for the study are the materials of war crimes trials of Nazi collaborators— members of military and police structures, administrative agencies, and other persons—which took place in Soviet Ukraine in 1943–49. These documents are stored in former KGB archives: the present Archive Department of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv and in its regional (oblast) branches. Parts of these materials were copied by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and formed into its special collection, which was used as a source for this study. Other materials were found in mentioned Ukrainian archives. For the purpose of this study, only those judicial cases that regard sexual violence perpetrated by locals during the Holocaust in Ukraine were analyzed.

Soviet War Crimes Trials in the 1940s as a Phenomenon and Historical Source The large-scale prosecution of war criminals in the USSR started as early as 1943, with the public trials of Germans and their Ukrainian and Russian accomplices in Krasnodar, Kharkiv, and other cities.4 The legal framework for this was set forth in the decree “On measures of punishment for German-fascist villains guilty of killing and torturing the Soviet civilian population and captive Red Army soldiers, for spies and traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens and their accomplices,” issued on April 19, 1943, by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (April decree). It was followed by guidelines for clarification in November of the same year, which identified types of punishments for various war crimes and clarified the definition of such notions as traitors and accomplices (izmienniki rodiny i posobniki). There was no specific mention of sexual violence as a war crime in these documents, but it could hypothetically be classified as nasiliye nad naseleniyem (violence against the population), which was a broad category. This attests to the fact that sexual crimes during the war were underestimated, and thus the Soviet authorities had little interest in investigating them specifically. However, as will be 4  Jeremy Hicks, “‘Soul Destroyers’: Soviet Reporting of Nazi Genocide and Its Perpetrators at the Krasnodar and Kharkov Trials,” History 98, no. 4 (332) (2013): 530–47.

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demonstrated later in this chapter, such investigations were eventually inevitable due to the insistence of many witnesses on the importance of information about the rape of Jewish women, especially when committed by indigenous Nazi accomplices. Unlike the Germans, Hungarians, or Romanians, who were newcomers and thus difficult for the witnesses to identify, they knew the local perpetrators and their wartime deeds. They were also aware that some of them had got away with their actions and even lived peacefully in the communities that had suffered from their violence during the war. Thus, it is the testimony of victims and witnesses and confessions of the accused on which the prosecution relied. In addition, investigators used the evidence gathered by the Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-Fascist Crimes (created in 1942)5 and its local branches. Pre-trial investigation was conducted by the secret police—NKVD and NKGB, renamed as the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and Ministry of State Security (MGB) in 1946—and members of the Soviet Military Counter-Intelligence, SMERSH.6 Two types of court—special military courts—handled the criminal prosecution of war criminals: field courts martial (voenno-polevye sudy) of the frontline divisions and war tribunals in divisions, corps, armies, army groups, and NKVD.  The entire military judicial system was headed by the Supreme Court of the USSR. The trials of war criminals of the 1940s, which are the subject of analysis in this study, have their own specifics in comparison with the later trials that continued in the USSR until the 1980s. Firstly, most trials of the Stalinist period took place in the first years after the liberation of Ukrainian territories. Between 1943 and 1953, the NKVD arrested 93,590 potential “homeland traitors and accomplices” (izmenniki rodiny i posobniki), with most of them (57 per cent) arrested in 1943–45.7 Second, war crimes trials were fast, due to their aim of cleansing the liberated territories of potential spies and other “enemies.”8 This particularly affected the quality of pre-trial investigation, which could last for just a few days and involved 5  Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 118–41. 6  Acronym of the Russian phrase “Death to Spies.” 7  Volodymyr M.  Nikolskyi, Represyvna diial’nist’ orhaniv derzhavnoi bezpeky SRSR v Ukraini (kinec’ 1920-ch-1950-ti rr.): Istoryko-statystychne doslidzhennia (Donetsk: Un-tu, 2003), 206–24, 451–2. 8  Kudryashov and Voisin (2008), 280.

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only a small number of witnesses. Some trials even took place days after the suspect was indicted. Third, a large number of sentences in the 1940s, especially during the war, were severe and provided for hanging or execution by firing squad (for spies and traitors), or 15–20  years of katorga (hard forced labor) (for accomplices), with deprivation of civil rights for 5 years and confiscation of property, if they had any. Most were accused of treason of the Motherland under Part 1 of the April decree or 54-1a (for civilians) and 54-1b (for soldiers) of the 1934 Criminal Code of the USSR. Notably, judges (military or NKVD officers) interpreted the idea of a “traitor” quite loosely, indiscriminately including in it very different categories of citizens, even those who had committed minor offenses.9 Fourth, all witnesses, victims, and accused testified at a time when the horrors of war had only recently ended. People therefore had very “fresh” memories of loss and suffering, as well as ideas about who was to blame for that suffering. Indeed, Soviet war crimes trials were primarily a powerful political tool to restore and reinforce Soviet rule in the liberated territories, including Ukraine, and to fight dissidents and alleged “enemies” of the regime. Soviet propaganda tried to dehumanize the accused, portraying them as bestial killers, undeserving of sympathy or mercy. Their confessions, to which the Soviet investigation attached particular importance, should be treated especially carefully taking into consideration the wide use of torture during interrogations in the Stalinist period.10 In addition, the defendants’ testimonies, as well as all other testimonies, were written down by investigators themselves, using the “correct,” politically constructed language of the time, which could not accurately reflect the thoughts of the witnesses and accusers.

Voices of Jewish Rape Victims: Speaking the Unspeakable Not every case against war criminals charged with sexual crimes includes testimony from the victims themselves. Such evidence is presented in a relatively small number of cases. The primary reason for this is that many likely victims of sexual violence were silenced by death. Among those who survived, not everyone was willing to testify about sexual violence for 9

 Penter (2008), 350.  Prusin (2003), 17.

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various reasons, including feelings of shame, guilt, fear of condemnation and distrust, as well as unwillingness to upset their loved ones.11 The very circumstances of the procedure may have constituted an obstacle for women, as they were reluctant to see their rapist or identify him in a photo, or to tell the story multiple times, which may trigger re-traumatization. In addition, the vast majority of investigators, as well as prosecutors and judges, were men. It is likely that some women found it uncomfortable or even shameful to discuss sexuality with men to begin with. Another reason that could have influenced women’s decisions to testify about sexual violence or to remain silent was the possible publicity of the trials. This was exactly the case with the trial of Dmytro Zhuk, the head of Vradiivka police during the war. The Chornomorska Komuna (Black Sea Commune) newspaper of July 16, 1944, contained an article about him eloquently entitled “Fascist Sellout.”12 The article included the full names of his three rape victims, including one survivor, Halyna Yusym. The available materials do not allow for an unequivocal conclusion about whether Halyna permitted the publication of her name or whether she had any opportunity to influence this at all. However, it can be assumed that the article had some impact on other survivors of rape. On the one hand, it may have deterred those who feared the disclosure of their identity. On the other hand, it could have encouraged women to seek justice in court and public acknowledgment of their suffering, especially that caused by men who were neighbors or had economic or personal relationships with them. In those cases, women could clearly name the perpetrators, their occupation before, during, and after the war, and provide details about their personal life. For example, when Tsilya Rosenberg from Ney-Leben near Kryvyj Rih was describing one rapist, Maksym Shevchenko, she emphasized, “I know him well.” She told the investigators that he had been a member of the Soviet Communist Party of Bolsheviks before the war, moved to her village Ney-­Leben in the fall of 1941 with his family, and was mobilized to the Red Army after the village was liberated from the Nazis.13 She 11   See more on reasons behind silence about rape: Carol A.  Kidron, “Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2009): 5–27. 12  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-31.018 M (Postwar war crimes trials related to the Holocaust), reel 23, spr. 11,512, frame 473. 13  Arkhiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy (AUSBU) u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18894, t. 2, ark. 1–2.

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provided Soviet investigators with biographical data on the other accused as well, as most of them were her fellow villagers during the war. Women described different forms of sexual violence, including threats of genital mutilation.14 Most narratives, however, were about actual and attempted rape perpetrated by one or more people. Sometimes the rapes described by women had a sort of transactional nature, with women receiving certain benefits from their rapists for the sexual service, such as an opportunity to avoid arrest.15 However, while describing these situations to investigators, the women tried to prove that they were unequivocally violent acts. To illustrate this, the women made sure to emphasize the imbalance of power between themselves and the perpetrators, their extreme vulnerability in the moments when the sexual acts took place, and their inability to put up resistance. Among other things, they cited having been threatened with murder or outing to the German authorities. The testimony provided by 23-year-old Genya Bromberg is especially typical in this regard. When questioned on June 7, 1944, she said that in August 1942, in the village of Sernyky in Rivne oblast, she was caught by policeman Kyrylo Fedorov, who started leading her toward the precinct. The girl tried to bribe him. Fedorov did take her men’s shirt, but he demanded sexual services in addition. Genya explained: “He offered me, ‘If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll kill you.’ Fearing that Fedorov would shoot me right away, I was forced to have sex with him. After Fedorov used me, he took me to police officer Poliukhovych’s apartment.”16 Genya’s choice of the word “used” reflects her perception of the genocidal circumstances and the dynamic of power between the local Nazi accomplices and Jewish women generated by those circumstances. In this situation, police officers had every opportunity to abuse their power and establish their authority over Jewish women through sexual violence. Other women also pointed this out during the investigation. Fira Holzman testified that in the fall of 1941, she was detained and placed, together with other Jewish people, at the local orphanage named Detgorodok (children’s town) in the city of Liubar in Zhytomyr oblast. She stated: “While we were under arrest, police officer [Fedir] Chyrko harassed me and a girl named Waltman, so  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 10, spr. 4717, frame 1176–7.  This phenomenon has been described in the literature as “survival sex,” “forced prostitution,” and “sexual barter.” See more: Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–33. 16  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 284, ark. 48. 14 15

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we would go sleep with him. But I personally turned down Chyrko’s offer, and he beat me with his handgun.”17 Some women, who had suffered multiple sexual attacks, were too afraid to speak openly and directly during the investigation. Such testimony is fragmentary, concise, and sometimes confusing, and also partially contradicts the testimony of other witnesses, making it impossible to piece together a holistic view of these women’s traumatic experience. For unknown reasons, investigators in those cases did not always seek more clarity, did not ask the survivors to share details, and did not conduct additional examinations or face-to-face confrontations. One such example is the group case against local Nazi collaborators in Vradiivka area in Mykolaiv oblast. One victim was 44-year-old Holocaust survivor Sofia Liubchenko. At the questioning on April 6, 1944, she testified that while she had been in the Vradiivka prison in November 1941, she had been raped by a Romanian then-praetor. She was later abused by the local police. Sofia testified: “After he [police officer Ivan Pornul] beat me, he forced me to go from my cell into the hallway, and he raped me.18 [Petro] Tsybulskyi knows about this, since they were together, and after this Tsybulskyi tried to rape me.”19 On the same day, the investigator who interrogated Sofia heard another version of these events from her Ukrainian friend Oleksandra Mala. What she had learned from Sofia, according to her, was that on the night of the rape, police officers Tsybulskyi and Hryhorii Tsybukh had entered the cell where Sofia and a 12-year-old girl were held, demanding gold from them. Having failed to get what they wanted, “Tsybulskyi raped the girl and Sofia Liubchenko, and after this, Tsybukh started raping them.”20 Liubchenko herself testified about this girl: “There was a Jewish girl in the cell with me, called Lena or Raya; I don’t know her last name. In the evening, she was transferred from my cell to the next one, and in the morning she was returned to mine. She was wailing because she had also been raped by police officers, including Tsybulskyi.”21 As neither the mentioned praetor nor Ivan Pornul was charged in this case, the investigator did not press further in the investigation. However, he also did not try to find out any more details about  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 4077, ark. 207 zv.  The rape of Sofia by Ivan Pornul was also confirmed by one of the defendants (USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 682). 19  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 759. 20  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 762–3. 21  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 757. 17 18

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Tsybulskyi’s actions against Sofia, even though the former was one of the accused. The investigator’s insufficient attention to the victim’s testimony meant that this situation was not even mentioned in the indictment. During the court hearing, however, Oleksandra Mala emphasized again, at her own initiative, that, according to Sofia, Tsybulskyi had raped her.22 As Sofia herself had died before the hearing, the court summoned her husband Dmytro to testify. He highlighted that his wife had told him she had been raped by a man, while “Tsybulskyi interrogated her and tried to force her into sozhytielstvo [concubinage].”23 Thus, both Sofia and her husband maintained the version of an attempted rape by Tsybulskyi. However, the court assumed that she was ashamed to tell the truth both to her own husband and to investigators, revealing it only to her friend Oleksandra. In the judgment, Tsybulskyi was found guilty of “raping Ms. Liubchenko and a 12-year-old Jewish girl.”24 In this case, the Soviet court ruled that a girl had been a victim without her personally testifying in court, based instead on the testimony of another rape victim. This practice was not common in war crimes trials in Soviet Ukraine. It was up to the court’s own discretion whether to take such testimony into account. An important characteristic of rape victims’ testimony was the emphasis on the demonstrative nature of certain sex crimes. It was important for women to emphasize that rapes during the war often took place not as private acts, but as public acts with “spectators”—relatives, friends, acquaintances, fellow victims, and non-Jewish neighbors. The victims’ emphasis on the presence of witnesses during the rape may have stemmed not only from their pragmatic intention to help the investigation find additional evidence of the perpetrators’ guilt, such as other people’s testimony. It may also attest to a major psychological trauma following the public act of sexual humiliation. On the one hand, the presence of other persons during rape was a source of additional shame for the victims; on the other hand, it intimidated women who witnessed the act and humiliated the men, showing them as “unable to protect their women.” The aforementioned Tsilya Rosenberg from Ney-Leben testified that in September 1941, she had to move with her family into a house in which four other families resided. One evening they were attacked by local collaborators and their acquaintances. Tsilya said about one of the  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 917.  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 921. 24  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 5776, frame 930. 22 23

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perpetrators: “After beating [my mother], Shevchenko made us all go into the hallway from the apartment, and this time he left me with a six-month-­ old baby in my arms, whom Shevchenko ordered to give to somebody in the apartment, or he would kill it. Because of Shevchenko’s threats, I gave the child to my mother. After that, Shevchenko tormented me, threatened to stab me to death, beat me, and then raped me.”25 Most adult residents of the house probably knew or guessed what Tsilya had gone through. At least one of the survivors later told Soviet investigators about Tsilya’s rape. The house in which these and other women with their families and acquaintances resided for a few months in the fall and winter of 1941 generally became a location of systematic sexual terror. The women pointed out to Soviet investigators that they had been raped in the presence of their parents, siblings, and their children, and they had also seen their sisters or women they knew being raped by one or multiple men. Public rape could take place not only in women’s private homes but also in places of captivity. On August 20, 1945, Liudmyla Trefilieva testified about a former senior police officer of Nova Heorhiivka precinct in Kirovohrad oblast, Arkhyp Sandrak: “In prison, on the very first night, Sandrak started harassing me; he offered me to have sex with him right there in the cell, unashamed of the presence of other detainees. When I did not agree to this, he brutally beat me with the other detainees present. A few days later, when I recovered a bit after the first beating, Sandrak showed up in the cell again, drunk. He twisted my arms back, pushed me on the floor, and raped me. Apart from me, detainees Valentyna Hryhoriivna Korshunova and Marchenko were in the cell. They were afraid to defend me.”26 Another important aspect of Liudmyla’s testimony was her emphasis that at the time of the rape she had been 17, and Valentyna, who had also been raped by Sandrak, according to her testimony, had been 15; both of them “were girls.” The victims’ emphasis on their age and the age of other victims played a major role during the investigation. It showed that a significant proportion of rape victims during the war were minors, which was an aggravating circumstance in determining the guilt of the accused. In addition, rape victims used the word “girls” to refer to themselves and other victims, evidently highlighting that the rape was their first sexual experience. This mention of virginity in itself was a

 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18,894, t. 2, ark. 6.  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 90, spr. 9139, frame 1018–19.

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powerful statement, requiring no explanation to show the significance of this experience for the victims’ further life.

Witness Testimonies In most war crimes trials involving the issue of sexual crimes, the testimony was provided by witnesses, not victims. Witnesses can be divided into three categories: Jews, non-Jews, and perpetrators (mostly non-Jews). A significant proportion of witnesses were Holocaust survivors. It is likely that some Jewish female witnesses could tell their own stories of sexual victimization. However, for various reasons, they chose to speak about crimes against “other” women, considering this to be safer. It gave them the opportunity to cast light on sexual violence and seek justice without risking social stigma. Sources show that, overall, Soviet investigators heeded the testimony of Holocaust survivors on sexual violence. However, to issue indictments based on this testimony, certain criteria had to be met, namely being as complete and detailed as possible. Witnesses were asked to provide as much information as they could about the victims and perpetrators: their names, ages, place of birth, education, occupation during the war, and the circumstances of the sexual crimes. Indicating the source of information was a mandatory component of the testimony. In other words, witnesses were asked how they knew about the sexual violence and whether they had seen it with their own eyes. These cases were few. They included mostly relatives of the victims or fellow victims who were with them in captivity. Ilia Ginzburg, a prisoner of Shumsk ghetto, testified on December 4, 1946, that he had seen one of the ghetto guards, Pavlo Khvesiuk, break into Jewish homes, rob them, and beat and rape young women, including Raya Poliak.27 There were also Jewish witnesses who saw the physical consequences of the rapes. One example of this is a gynecologist from Brailiv. On April 5, 1944, he testified that, “as a doctor,” he knew that local police officer Anton Kabaliuk had raped “over a hundred girls.”28 Holocaust survivors also repeated rape stories they had heard from the victims themselves. In such cases, detailed testimony from a single witness was often enough to charge the accused with rape. The only witness talking about night-time rapes in the labor camp on Lysa Hora near Berdychiv  AUSBU u Ternopilskii oblasti, spr. 21,760, ark. 46 zv., 52 zv.  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 8, spr. 13,425, frame 714.

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in the spring of 1942 was its former prisoner Volodymyr Pekelis. Based on his testimonies, one of the guards involved in the sex attacks—Oleksandr Kushnarenko—was found guilty of rape.29 A single Jewish witness also accused a ghetto guard in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ivan Chaikovskyi, of raping a ghetto prisoner, Klara Moskal. During questioning on May 15, 1944, she said: “Chaikovskyi usually released women from the ghetto only when they agreed to have sex with him. Thus, hungry women only agreed to have sex with Chaikovskyi to be allowed to go to the market and get food.”30 At first, the accused denied this, but at the face-to-face meeting, Klara emphasized: “[He] raped ghetto inhabitants: Tania Brott, a woman named Khanka, young girls Basia and Donia Amster and many others. They would later come to me and my mother, cry and tell us about it.”31 Chaikovskyi then confessed. Many testimonies about the rape of Jewish women were given by non-­ Jewish men and women who had personal or professional contact with rape victims, lived near places where Jews were detained or shot, or were with the victims in places of detention. Unlike Jewish witnesses, they had rarely witnessed rape in person. They heard rape stories from other Jews or non-Jews or from the perpetrators themselves. Some of the non-Jewish female witnesses who testified were themselves survivors of sexual violence. They experienced rape and attempted rape by defendants, and this was likely a powerful motivation for them to speak up, not only about their own experience but also about the experience of fellow Jewish women who were sexually violated by the same men. In many cases, however, non-Jewish testimonies failed to meet certain criteria. For example, if witnesses were unable to name the victim or the exact time and circumstances of the rape, their testimony could be likened to rumor. Soviet investigators were therefore not particularly interested in such “evidence,” and often considered it insufficient to investigate possible sex crimes more thoroughly. This was the case with Hryhorii Bezkostnyi, a former police officer in the village of Chukiv, Vinnytsia oblast. At the end of an interview on June 3, 1944, when the investigator asked Ukrainian man Vasyl Repula whether he had anything to add to his testimony, the latter said he “had heard from one Jew” whose name he did not remember that the accused had raped “a young Jewish woman”  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 29,923, ark. 30 zv. 52.  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 52, spr. 11,259, frame 615. 31  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 52, spr. 11,259, frame 634–5. 29 30

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“approximately” in early 1943.32 The Soviets did not follow up on this issue when questioning Repula again. They did not ask about the rape in his face-to-face meeting with the accused, and he did not talk about it himself any further.33 In the end, the rape was not mentioned either in the indictment or in the court judgment concerning Bezkostnyi. It is also evident that when non-Jews testified about violence against Jews, including rape, Soviet investigators tended to pay less attention to rape while recognizing other details of the story as true. A typical example in this regard is the case of Oleksii Kolbasov, a former police officer in the village of Martynivska, Mykolaiv oblast. On June 18, 1946, Ukrainian man Davyd Kotkov testified about the sexual violence committed by Kolbasov before he became a police officer. He said that in the fall of 1941, while mowing the grass near Martynivska station, a Jewish man approached him and asked him to help his wife. He went on: “I went to their booth where I saw a horrifying picture. There was a Jewish woman lying down with a cut up stomach and all the entrails coming up … [She] said that it had been done by a local, who had raped her and ripped her stomach open, but she did not say who it was.” The witness learned the name of the attacker a short while later, as the perpetrator was publicly boasting about his act.34 Despite the fact that Kolbasov consistently denied it both at interrogations and in face-to-face meetings,35 he was accused of the “brutal murder” of the said woman, but not of her rape,36 even though Kotkov testified that this woman and her husband had been killed by “a German soldier” a few days after the rape he described. There were cases in which multiple statements on rape made by non-­ Jews encouraged investigators to look into those situations more closely. One example is the case of Yakiv Sulymko, who served as deputy chief of the Lypovets police in Vinnytsia oblast in 1941–44. Eight non-Jewish witnesses testified about the sexual violence he committed against various Jewish girls. Out of eight witnesses, six were non-Jewish women, who said they had heard about the violence from the victims personally. They told these stories carefully, including every detail they knew. They stressed that all the women involved had been killed during the war, so they could not  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 2502, ark. 70.  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 2502, ark. 70, 72, 80–81. 34  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 23, spr. 11,588, frame 2230. 35  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 23, spr. 11,588, frame 2167, 2230. 36  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 23, spr. 11,588, frame 2238. 32 33

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confirm their testimony. Another witness was Sulymko’s colleague, who told how Sulymko flaunted having committed rapes in the presence of other police officers.37 As a result, Sulymko was found guilty of “raping Lisa Lansberg, Maria Meister, Leya Pecher, and others.”38 A similar case is that against Ivan Poyasok, who was the head of the Polonne police in Khmelnytskyi oblast in 1941. Two Ukrainian male witnesses testified that, during the occupation, they had been arrested on suspicion of communist activity and imprisoned in Polonne. At the same time, three Jewish women were being held in the next cell. According to the eyewitnesses, “a drunk Poyasok” ordered two of them out of the cell and raped the third, the youngest of the three. Although the accused denied the allegations, the court found him guilty of rape.39 After Poyasok’s appeal, the investigation resumed. The two aforementioned witnesses repeated their testimony, highlighting the fact that the victim had been 16 years old. A third witness appeared during the resumed investigation, who named the exact date of the rape and said that Poyasok had forced the girl to have sex with him, promising to free her from prison.40 Thus, the second court verdict of March 28, 1945, stated that Poyasok had raped a “16-year-old Jewish girl.”41 Another group of witnesses who testified about sexual violence during the war were the perpetrators of war crimes themselves. Their testimony was mostly about other police officers with whom they had worked or about whom they had heard. During interrogations, the witnesses often talked at their own initiative about sexual crimes committed by other police officers, without being prompted by investigators. The likely intention of providing such testimony was to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with the investigation, in hopes of reducing their sentence. They often testified against people who were in hiding or who had fled abroad, as opposed to those already arrested by Soviet secret services, assuming that this information could be useful for the Soviet government in the future.42 In most cases, however, sex offenders were disclosed by perpetrators investigated in the same case. A possible motive for the men to testify was  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 24,722, ark. 45 zv-46.  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 24,722, ark. 74. 39  AUSBU u Khmelnytskii oblasti, spr. 21,279, ark. 87, 114, 157 zv. 40  AUSBU u Khmelnytskii oblasti, spr. 21,279, ark. 241. 41  AUSBU u Khmelnytskii oblasti, spr. 21,279, ark. 282 zv. 42  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 52, spr. 11,259, frame 655. 37 38

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to redirect the investigation away from their own war crimes and, as mentioned above, to demonstrate their commitment to the Soviet government. On June 27, 1944, at a face-to-face meeting, Vasyl Balaban testified that his former boss, Fiodor Pohorilov, who was the police chief in the village of Yastrubynove, Voznesenskyi rayon, Mykolaiv oblast, “raped girls,” as did other police officers.43 The accused confessed immediately.44 Stepan Diachuk, a former police officer in the village of Vakhnivka, Vinnytsia oblast, also testified against his immediate commander, Savva Leshchenko, who was charged in the same case. On January 22, 1944, Diachuk told a Soviet investigator: “I personally know that he [Leshchenko] raped four girls, namely Lemberska, Fuchs, Broder, and I do not remember the fourth name. He took the girls to his office for rape, locked up, and then let them go home.”45 Notably, the Soviet investigator did not press further with this testimony and did not ask Leshchenko himself about the rape during interrogations. He did not raise the issue in the face-to-face meeting between Leshchenko and Diachuk either. Only at the end of the face-to-face meeting, when the investigator asked Diachuk if he wanted to add anything to the testimony, did the witness emphasize the rape incidents he knew about.46 Interestingly, Diachuk used the word komsomolka (Komsomol member) to refer to the victims, probably believing this would make the investigators more interested in Leshchenko’s sex crimes. This tactic paid off; the indictment of Leshchenko contains the phrasing “raped Komsomol girls of Jewish nationality.”47

Perpetrators: Defense Strategies During interrogations about their activity during the occupation of the Ukrainian land by Germans and their allies, none of those accused of sexual violence spoke about rapes they had committed. It was the investigators who initiated this type of conversation, based on the testimony of witnesses and victims. Only then were the men forced to look for ways to justify their actions. The most common defense strategies include full denial, partial denial (confession to having witnessed but not perpetrated  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 9051, frame 94.  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 22, spr. 9051, frame 95. 45  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 13,943, ark. 33. 46  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 13,943, ark. 67. 47  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 13,943, ark. 72. 43 44

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a sex crime), denial of the coercive nature of intercourse with Jewish women, and confession. Some defendants consistently followed the same strategy during the investigation, in court, in appeals, and requests for pardon. Others changed them depending on the circumstances and their own assessment of those circumstances. The most common defense strategy was full and consistent denial of rape, even despite the testimony of rape survivors and other witnesses. This strategy was used by, among others, the aforementioned Yakiv Sulymko. He was first interrogated by an investigator of a SMERSH counterintelligence department of the 68th Guards Rifle Division on January 21, 1944. As early as 26 January, he was convicted and sentenced to capital punishment by hanging. The period of investigation and trial was extremely short, which may indicate a high level of psychological pressure on the accused. Despite the intensity of the investigation, and despite the presence of eight witnesses who detailed how Sulymko had raped three Jewish girls and attempted to rape two more, he denied all allegations. He also maintained this position during face-to-face meetings with witnesses. For instance, on January 22, 1944, during a face-to-face meeting with the accused, Olha Honcharenko repeated her testimony about Leya Pecher, a doctor who she said had been raped by Sulymko in prison. She also stated that Riva Usherenko told her “many times” that she was raped by the defendant and other Germans in her own house.48 The accused denied everything. He used a similar defense strategy in face-to-face meetings with other witnesses who spoke about his sexual crimes. In court, he followed the same line of defense, adding that “perhaps, those girls were raped by the Germans,” of which he said he knew nothing.49 Another defense strategy is partial denial or acknowledging their presence at the crime scene but placing the blame for the crime entirely on others.50 This strategy is most common in gang rapes. It was also used with varying success by those accused who had been the official supervisors of rapists at the moment of the crime. Thus, the investigation studied not only their personal responsibility as alleged rapists but also their responsibility as commanders who could have prevented or stopped the violence or punished the perpetrators, having all the powers available to do so. One noteworthy case here is that against Fadei Matviichuk. In July  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 24,722, ark. 52 zv.  AUSBU u Vinnytskii oblasti, spr. 24,722, ark. 66. 50  USHMM, RG-31.018 M, reel 5, spr. 63,143, frame 2180, 2200. 48 49

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1941, he became the commandant of the local police in Sukhovolia, Rafalivka rayon, Rivne oblast. Two witnesses testified that at the same time, he and his subordinates had raped four Jewish girls who had been hiding in a barn belonging a Sukhovolia resident. One of the witnesses heard this from the barn owner himself. In a face-to-face meeting with the accused, he named one of the victims, Paya Schindel. In response, Matviichuk named his three subordinate police officers who had raped the girls, but fully denied being a rapist himself. As he did not confess, the investigators found another witness, a Holocaust survivor, Oleksandr Lysak. He was an eyewitness to the crime, having been hiding in the same barn with the girls on the night in question. He stressed that “Matviichuk yelled, threatening the girls that if they screamed, he would shoot them.”51 On the second day after receiving this testimony, the investigator immediately interrogated Matviichuk about the rape again. The latter responded: “I went to that small village solely to perpetrate violence against girls, but at the moment of violence, when the girls started screaming and crying, I stepped aside and allowed my police officers the freedom to torment them.”52 This response, however, did not satisfy the investigators, and after a short while, they organized a face-to-face meeting between Oleksandr Lysak and Matviichuk. Lysak repeated his testimony, specifying the names of all four victims.53 Matviichuk said that he had not entered the barn, but stood “in the street.” However, the investigators found Matviichuk’s words unconvincing. This was probably influenced by the fact that, according to Oleksandr Lysak, one of the rape victims was a komsomolka, which added a political hue to the case. Matviichuk was charged with “beating and raping girls.”54 Even after this, at the court hearing on October 18, 1944, Matviichuk placed the blame for the rape entirely on his subordinates.55 Another defense strategy used by offenders accused of sexual violence was denial of the coercive nature of sexual intercourse. A typical example of this strategy is the case against a former police officer of Liubar police in Vinnytsia oblast, Oleksandr Chyrko. His former colleague testified that he had “personally witnessed” him raping girls, including Sonia and Mania  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 3489, ark. 37 zv.  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 3489, ark. 23. 53  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 3489, ark. 46. 54  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 3489, ark. 52. 55  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 3489, ark. 57. 51 52

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held in Dythorodok. Among other things, he “tormented Jewish girls, took them out of the cell into the hallway and even brought them into another room, where he raped them, and if a girl did not come with him, he beat her with a gunstick.”56 The accused said that he took the girls out “for a conversation,” which included an offer to have sex. However, he denied that when the girls refused to have sex, he committed sexual violence against them.57 The court nonetheless ruled that Chyrko was guilty of raping “young Jewish women.”58 Another suspect, Trofym Piskun-­ Oberemskyi, was the chief of guard in a camp on Lysa Hora near Berdychiv. On February 12, 1944, a former prisoner accused him of raping women in the camp, whose names he knew. But the defendant responded: “I often went to see Jewish girls and I spent nights with a Jewish girl named Dora, but I never raped them.”59 However, later he admitted his guilt and was charged with rape.60 Confession as a defense strategy was not a first choice for most perpetrators during the investigation. It was much easier for men to confess to guarding places of captivity, escorting Jews to places of execution, beating Jews, or looting their property than to raping them. The probable reason for this is that the perpetrators could justify the violent acts listed above by citing the orders given by the Germans and their allies, police command, and their fear of being punished for failure to comply. Rape, on the other hand, could not be a direct order, nor was it on the list of duties of police officers and other local Nazi accomplices. Therefore, the defendants would normally confess to sexual violence only at later stages of the investigation. One factor that contributed to confession was the detailed testimony of witnesses and victims. Another factor was the personality of the accused, particularly his psychological condition. Some men could make peace with their destiny. Others, fearing severe punishment, agreed to cooperate with the investigation, hoping for the court’s mercy. An interesting case in this regard is that of Pavlo Ivanov, a young collective farmer who lived in the village of Ney-Leben. During the war, he and local collaborators participated in attacks on Jewish homes, looting, and beatings of Jews. This was confirmed by numerous witnesses in the case, including Holocaust  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 4077, ark. 190, 233.  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 4077, ark. 114 zv–115, 117 zv. 58  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 4077, ark. 281. 59  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 7091, ark. 18 zv. 60  AUSBU u Zhytomyrskii oblasti, spr. 7091, ark. 34, 51. 56 57

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survivors. One of them told a Soviet investigator on November 3, 1945, that Ivanov had raped her friend, 16-year-old Zinaida Rosenberg.61 He was arrested the following day, and on November 13, after a very brief interrogation in which the issue of sexual crimes was not even addressed, formal charges were filed, including rape. On the same day, Ivanov fully admitted his guilt and described in detail his attack on Zinaida, emphasizing that it had been a gang rape, and that three other men had participated in it.62 This behavior set him apart from the other defendants in the same case; unlike him, they denied allegations of rape. It may be that Ivanov’s conduct during the investigation was due to the hope of mitigating punishment, as he had not formally collaborated with the Nazis, and because at the time of the war crimes, he was among the youngest offenders in the group at just 19 years. He was not, therefore, the main leader or instigator of the attacks on the Jews, as is evident from his own and other defendants’ testimonies. It can also be assumed that the significant psychological and physical pressure of the investigation was another important reason for the accused to confess. The case concerning the rape of the aforementioned Genya Bromberg is particularly notable in this regard. Her face-to-face meeting with her abuser lasted more than 3.5 hours. This is quite long compared to the meetings of the accused with other witnesses in the case, which were all between 1.5 and 3 hours. The record of the meeting does not appear very long, however. It shows that the main subject covered at that particular meeting was the rape, not Fedorov’s other crimes, which leads us to assume that the investigator took time and effort to get Fedorov to confess to having committed rape. Considering the final “narrative” of the accused, the investigator succeeded. The record of the interrogation demonstrates that, answering the investigator’s questions during the face-to-­ face meeting, the accused made use of phrasing that the investigation needed, highlighting the threats and coercion that he had used with Genya.63 Thus, the face-to-face meeting resulted not only in a full confession to the rape of Genya by Fedorov but also its linguistic expression in a form that the Soviet investigation would find the most satisfactory. Later, he also decided to avoid conflict with the investigation and used similar

 AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18,894, t. 2, ark. 38 zv.  AUSBU u Dnipropetrovskii oblasti, spr. 18,894, t. 2, ark. 247. 63  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 284, ark. 52 zv. 53. 61 62

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phrasing about coercion and the defenselessness of the victim during the trial, where he was eventually found guilty of raping Genya.64 At the same time, there were cases in which, during court hearings, the accused denied their own confessions of rape given during the pre-trial investigation, calling them untrue and saying they were provided under torture. For example, the indictment of the former police officer of Polonne village, Rivne oblast, Pavlo Savytskyi, stated that he pleaded “fully guilty,” including raping a 17-year-old Jewish girl, Nehama Schmidman. However, at the Military Tribunal hearing on September 20, 1945, the accused suggested: “During the investigation, I confessed because they beat me a lot.”65 In the additional month-long investigation, the only witness who testified about the rape of Nehama by Savytskyi and two other police officers only confirmed his testimony. In the second indictment, therefore, Savytskyi was still charged with rape.

Conclusion A number of Soviet war crimes trials and pre-trial investigations concerned sexual violence carried out during the Holocaust in Ukraine. The issue of sexual violence during the Holocaust was raised by a variety of Soviet justice actors at their own initiative. It was brought up even when investigators disregarded testimony and showed no interest. Some, such as Holocaust survivors, did this in order to achieve justice for themselves or their Jewish friends, relatives, acquaintances, and loved ones. Revenge was likely a powerful driving force motivating them to speak up about sex crimes perpetrated by locals. Similar feelings could have motivated non-­ Jewish witnesses to testify, especially those Gentile women who also suffered sexual abuse by the defendants. One can assume that both groups of witnesses—Jewish and non-Jewish—were unsatisfied with the fact that perpetrators were not always held accountable for their wartime crimes, pretending to be “good Soviet citizens” after the war despite their previous collaboration with the Nazis and the benefits they had gained from it. In addition, some witnesses may not have felt safe having a sex offender “next door,” in their communities or surrounding areas. In contrast, the accused raised the issue of sexual violence perpetrated by local Nazi

 AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 284, ark. 33, 67, 69 zv.  AUSBU u Rivnenskii oblasti, spr. 284, ark. 30.

64 65

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helpers to divert attention away from their own crimes and demonstrate their loyalty to the Soviet authorities and their willingness to cooperate. All testimonies concerning sexual violence during the Holocaust indicated its gendered nature. No evidence was found in the cases analyzed concerning the victimization of Jewish men. All victims were girls or women at the time of the war, many underage. On the one hand, this supports the argument that most victims of sex crimes during the Shoah in Ukraine as well as in other occupied territories were Jewish women. On the other hand, it indicates that the sexual victimization of Jewish men may have become a taboo topic after the war. At the same time, it should be highlighted that all perpetrators of sexual violence mentioned in the analyzed sources were men. While it is possible that certain exceptions occurred, they would not be enough to overturn the gender pattern of victims and perpetrators. This is not surprising, as women in the occupied country were virtually excluded from the military and administrative structures involved in Nazi genocidal policies, and therefore had no opportunity to commit sexual violence against Jewish men. In contrast, men could abuse their power and perpetrate violence against Jews of both sexes. Another gendered aspect of Soviet war crimes trials connected to the issue of sexual violence was that the absolute majority of participants in the legal process, including investigators, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges, were men. Thus, the pre-trial investigations and the trials present us with a mostly masculine view of women’s wartime experiences. These powerful men, in positions of authority, relied on their education, experience, and cultural ideas of gender roles to identify what the testimony about sexual violence should involve and who it had to come from to consider it worthy of attention and for official charges to be filed. This, in turn, led to the lack of established case law concerning wartime sexual crimes. There are evident discrepancies in the interpretation of sexual violence in different cases. In some cases, evidence of these offenses was documented but they were not prosecuted. In others, witness testimony led to active questioning of the accused on this subject, which resulted in rape charges. In some cases, judges avoided direct phrasing and used euphemisms like “torment” (izdievatelstvo) instead. A significant obstacle to the investigation of sexual war crimes was the vague testimony given by witnesses, who were unable to recall the details, circumstances, or names of the victims. However, it was very difficult for the Soviet investigation to ignore the testimonies of the victims, as well as other Jewish witnesses who were held alongside them in captivity. The

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courage of these witnesses and their persistence in emphasizing the sexual victimization of Jewish women led to some of those accused in the 1940s being convicted of sexual violence, not only rape but also attempted rape. It is still more impressive that some of these cases included no testimony from the victims of rape themselves. The accused were found guilty based on the testimony of witnesses who saw the rape take place or heard about it. Furthermore, some court decisions clearly establish the ethnicity of the victims, lending visibility to the gendered suffering of Jewish women during the Holocaust. Ironically, it was the highly politicized nature of Soviet war crimes trials that became an important factor contributing to the prosecution of local perpetrators in connection with sexual violence, which went hand in hand with ethnic violence. Rape fit well with the image of a local “traitor” accomplice constructed by the Soviet propaganda, depicted as a “fascist sellout” prone to the most heinous crimes against humanity, including rape, even if rape did not constitute that type of crime from a legal standpoint.

Bibliography Dumitru, Diana. 2014. An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies. In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 142–157. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Glowacka, Dorota. 2021. Sexual Violence against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-So-Silent) Silence. German History 39 (1): 78–99. Hájková, Anna. 2013. Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Signs 38 (3): 503–533. Hicks, Jeremy. 2013. ‘Soul Destroyers’: Soviet Reporting of Nazi Genocide and Its Perpetrators at the Krasnodar and Kharkov Trials. History 98 (332): 530–547. Kidron, Carol A. 2009. Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology 50 (1): 5–27. Kudryashov, Sergey, and Vanessa Voisin. 2008. The Early Stages of ‘Legal Purges’ in Soviet Russia (1941–1945). Cahiers du Monde Russe 49 (2/3): 263–295. Moodrick-Even Khen, Hilly, and Alona Hagay-Frey. 2013–14. Silence at the Nuremberg Trials: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and Sexual Crimes against Women in the Holocaust. Women’s Rights Law Reporter 35, 43–66.

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Nikolskyi, Volodymyr M. 2003. Represyvna diial’nist’ orhaniv derzhavnoi bezpeky SRSR v Ukraini (kinec’ 1920-ch-1950-ti rr.): Istoryko-statystychne doslidzhennia. Donetsk: Un-tu. Penter, Tanja. 2008. Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953). Cahiers du Monde Russe 49 (2/3): 341–364. Prusin, Alexander V. 2003. ‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (1): 1–30. ———. 2018. The ‘Second Wave’ of Soviet Justice: The 1960s War Crimes Trials. In Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays across Disciplines, ed. Norman J.W. Goda, 129–157. New York: Berghahn Books. Sorokina, Marina. 2014. People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR. In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 118–141. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

PART III

The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues

“The Alienation Lacks Any Legal Basis”: The Fate of Jewish Property in Postwar Hungary Borbála Klacsmann

In 1944, during and after the ghettoization and deportation of Hungarian Jews, extensive confiscations took place. Even though the Hungarian government tried to control this process as well as the redistributions, much depended on the local conditions. In many cases the Financial Directorate organized (semi-illegal) auctions and Jewish goods were granted to non-­ Jews in need by the municipality leadership. The local non-Jewish population often looted the ghettos or the sealed Jewish houses. Upon their return, survivors had to find their property without the help of the state or the local administration, which obviously had a major impact on their reintegration into society. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how Jewish properties were handled by the various institutions and ways in which the property transfers affected the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors.

B. Klacsmann (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_10

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In order to gain a deeper understanding of these issues, case studies found among the municipality documents of Pest County1 are analyzed through a microhistorical approach. Due to the nature of these sources, some of the stories are fragmented: several institutions and committees participated in both the confiscation and the redistribution, and a major portion of their documentation was lost or destroyed, thus making it impossible to fully reconstruct the cases. Therefore, the aim of the analysis is not to provide a specific account of where the Jewish properties ended up, but rather how various parties reacted in connection to their handling. The preserved documents themselves provide a glimpse into the postwar situation and the turning points of Jewish–non-Jewish relations, thus allowing the case studies to build a patchwork-like picture of early restitution, complementing relevant historical research on the subject. While on the international level researchers have paid increasing attention to the (postwar) fate of Jewish property as well as early restitution,2 in Hungarian historiography they have remained largely neglected topics. Literature so far has mainly tackled the political background of the restitution3 and the postwar legal regulations.4 All of these works approach the issue from above, giving little or no voice to the survivors themselves  The territory and name of Pest County, the county surrounding the capital in central Hungary, changed significantly in the twentieth century: until 1950, it was called Pest-Pilis-­ Solt-Kiskun County and its territory encompassed most of today’s Pest and Bács-Kiskun Counties. The sources used in this chapter are exclusively from towns in today’s Pest County. 2  See, for instance: Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, eds, Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007); Anna Wylegała, “About ‘Jewish Things’: Jewish Property in Eastern Galicia during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 44, no. 2 (2016): 83–119; Eric Le Bourhis, “Dispossession as Practice: Riga, 1939–1942,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 65, no. 3 (2018): 120–50; Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3  János Botos, A magyarországi zsidóság vagyonának sorsa 1938–1949 (Budapest: Magyar Napló, 2015). 4   Herbert Küpper, “A zsidóknak járó kárpótlás, jóvátétel Magyarországon és Németországban”, Magyar jog 44, no. 7 (1997): 385–97; Stephen Roth, “Indemnification of Hungarian Victims of Nazism,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: Fifty Years Later, ed. Randolph L. Braham and Attila Pók (New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1997), 733–57; Ágnes Peresztegi, “Reparation and Compensation in Hungary, 1945–2003,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: A European Perspective, ed. Judit Molnár (Budapest: Balassi, 2005), 677–84. 1

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and thus covering up a great variety of unique experiences with a generalized narrative. This study aims to challenge this macrohistorical narrative by digging into the micro level and thus revealing how different those milieus were to which the survivors returned after the war. All of the cases have one thing in common: the protagonists are (former) neighbors—Jews and non-Jews who used to live side by side. Both during and after the war, the local committees and administrative leadership were made up of town residents who were first-hand witnesses of the unfolding genocide, as well as the struggles of the survivors. Inevitably, they were aware of and sometimes partially responsible for the fate of Jewish property, or they themselves were also beneficiaries of the property transfer. This obviously had an effect on how they handled the pleas of the Jews. In certain cases, civil servants were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to democratic values or were genuinely concerned with the situation of the survivors, so they helped them as much as they could. Others, however, rather tried to avoid taking even the slightest responsibility for the persecution by adopting a “neutral” attitude, which facilitated the maintenance of the new ownership status quo. These behavioral patterns were strongly connected to the government’s contradictory attitude toward the restitution and the lack of a firm central directive. Therefore, the case studies analyzed here are the “imprints” of a national policy that hesitated to provide justice to the survivors, while at the same time local characteristics unfold within them. Thus, they are adequate for illuminating what is termed the “exceptional normal” by Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann5: individual situations that are not necessarily representative, but still contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of major historical events.

Historical Background By the beginning of the twentieth century, Hungarian Jews achieved great economic success due to complex social, historical, and economic circumstances, which led to their leading role in the evolving capitalist economy 5  Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, “Introduction: Toward a Microhistory of the Holocaust,” in Microhistories of the Holocaust, ed. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann (Oxford, New  York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 4.

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in the Kingdom of Hungary.6 From 1919, after the lost war and the dissolution of Austro-Hungary, the politicians of Regent Miklós Horthy’s regime saw the possibility of releasing social tension surrounding the wealth of the Jews. At the end of the 1930s, the domestic and foreign political situation provided the opportunity to achieve this: the first two anti-Jewish laws (1938, 1939) restricted the participation of Jews in intellectual and economic occupations, first to 20, then to 6%, while the fourth anti-Jewish law (1942) confiscated forest and agricultural estates, and forbade Jews from obtaining these. In 1944, approximately 800,000 Jews lived in the territory of Hungary; they made up 5% of the population.7 Due to the above-mentioned laws, thousands of them lost their jobs and land, and gradually some of their more valuable possessions (such as radios and bicycles) too. After the German occupation of Hungary (19 March 1944), the process of confiscations accelerated. On 16 April the newly appointed government of Döme Sztójay obliged Jews to declare all of their assets worth more than 10,000 Pengő by 30 April.8 Ghettoization started after a confidential decree had been sent to the authorities on 7 April, according to which Jews were allowed to bring up to 50 kg of personal belongings to the ghettos. Therefore, when the first ghettos were set up in mid-April, Jews were obliged to leave most of their valuables in their houses; the local authorities locked up Jewish homes and shops. According to the Kassa list 6  On the topic of the economic status and the wealth of Hungarian Jews, see: Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, Hullarablás: A magyar zsidók gazdasági megsemmisítése (Budapest: Hannah Arendt Egyesület—Jaffa, 2005); Yehuda Don and László Varga, “The Private Jewish Real Estate in Hungary in 1944, Before Deportation: Quantitative Evaluation,” in Küzdelem az igazságért: tanulmányok Randolph L.  Braham 80. születésnapjára, ed. László Karsai and Judit Molnár (Budapest: Mazsihisz, 2002), 113–43. Historians agree that the Jews owned a considerable portion of Hungarian national wealth before the Second World War. In this respect, calculations vary: Kádár and Vági’s estimation is 20–25 per cent (Kádár and Vági (2005), 27), whereas Dániel Bolgár puts the figure at 7–8 per cent (Dániel Bolgár, “Mítoszok a zsidó jólétről: a Horthy-­kori statisztikáktól a mai magyar történetírásig”, Múltunk 60, no. 4 (2015): 161–2). 7  József Kepecs, ed., A zsidó népesség száma településenként (1840–1941) (Budapest: KSH, 1993), 32, 47. The territory of Hungary changed significantly from 1938: as a result of the two Vienna Awards (1938, 1940) Hungary regained Upper Hungary and Northern Transylvania. In 1939 Hungarian troops occupied Carpatho-Ruthenia and in 1941 part of the former Southern regions. The above data apply to the country with the expanded territory. 8   Decree no. 1600/1944 ME.  See: Magyarországi rendeletek tára (Budapest: Pesti Könyvnyomda, 1945), 447–56.

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(the data for those 137 deportation trains that passed through Kassa/ Košice, registered by István Vrancsik),9 almost 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 14 May and 8 July 1944. In the resulting social void, appropriating leftover Jewish properties became possible immediately. Even though the government tried to keep the redistributions under control, and even established a commission for this purpose, in practice several actors were involved in the process.10 The authorities processed Jewish properties quickly: inventories were made; money and jewelry were deposited in the Hungarian National Bank; and the Financial Directorate or the municipality leaderships redistributed other movables, such as clothes and furniture, often to those in need.11 Civil servants, military personnel, gendarmes, and the nobility, as well as ordinary citizens, applied for real estate and other goods. In many cases, the local population looted the closed-off houses and ghettos.12 Róbert Győri Szabó, expert in minority politics, has called this phenomenon “institutionalized robbery,” as all levels of the state apparatus and society were involved.13 Historians estimate the number of Hungarian Holocaust survivors at approximately 150–200,000. Most of them survived in Budapest, while approximately 60–70,000 returned from deportations or military labor service.14 These people were penniless due to the confiscations, lootings, and war damage. They carried a life-long trauma and lacked a social network as most of their family members and friends had perished in the Holocaust. The economic and social reintegration of the survivors proved to be an enormous problem for the Hungarian government. First, a non-­ discriminatory legal background was an essential step to make restitutions 9  Randolph L. Braham, A népirtás politikája: A Holocaust Magyarországon, II (Budapest: Park, 2015), 1655–7. 10  For the sake of centralization, several decrees were introduced. See, for instance: decree 2120/1944 ME for utilizing Jewish shops (Magyarországi rendeletek tára (1944), 1049–52), decree 2650/1944 ME for regulating certain questions concerning Jewish valuables (ibid., 1488–91). 11  Krisztián Ungváry, A Horthy-korszak mérlege (Pécs, Budapest: Jelenkor—Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, 2012), 562, 559, 584–9. 12  Braham (2015), I, 616; Ungváry (2012), 562. 13  Róbert Győri Szabó, A kommunizmus és a zsidóság az 1945 utáni Magyarországon (Budapest: Gondolat, 2009), 121. 14  Tamás Stark, Zsidóság a vészkorszakban és a felszabadulás után 1939–1955 (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 1995), 76; Braham (2015), II, 1485.

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possible. The Provisional National Government annulled the former anti-­ Jewish laws in January 1945, when the ceasefire agreement with the USSR was enacted as Act V of 1945.15 Afterward, several decrees and laws regulated the restoration of rights. For instance, in 1946, a decree ensured the right for survivors to reclaim their confiscated properties, while the new, non-Jewish owners were obliged to report on the property they had obtained as a result of the redistributions or lootings.16 Act XXV of 1946 on “the condemning of the persecution of Jewry” confirmed the annulment of anti-Jewish laws and stated that all unclaimed properties were to be given to a fund, which would then support survivors and institutions aiding them. However, this fund would not have been created had it not been for the Paris Peace Treaty, which prescribed that the Hungarian government must provide all Hungarian citizens with basic human rights regardless of their ethnic background, language, or religion. The treaty, enacted as Act XVIII of 1947, also obliged the government to return properties confiscated due to the owner’s religion or origins after 1 September 1939, or if that was not possible, to give compensation instead.17 None of the above-mentioned laws, however, concerned the personal losses of the Jews, such as murdered relatives, damaged health, and so on, nor did they tackle the question of responsibility, or when they did, they pushed it onto the Germans and the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian extremist anti-Semitic party.18 Moreover, despite the legal regulations, restitutions were mostly withheld, for several reasons. First and foremost, after the war and the robbery committed by the German army and then the Red Army, the economic circumstances of the Hungarian state did not allow for an extensive financial aid operation; inflation grew to a historical peak.19 Political will for arranging restitutions was also lacking, as ­politicians were afraid that it would incite anti-Semitism.20 The economic recovery of the country was more important for the Soviet authorities and the Hungarian radical political forces than the restitution of Jewish valuables, 15  See the text of the law: Jogtár, https://net.jogtar.hu/ezer-ev-torveny?docid=94500005. TV&searchUrl=/ezer-ev-torvenyei%3Fpagenum%3D42 (accessed 5 January 2021). 16  Decree 300/1946 ME, Magyar Közlöny, 26 January 1946, 2–3. 17  Gergő Bendegúz Cseh, “Az Országos Zsidó Helyreállítási Alap létrehozásának körülményei és működése”, Levéltári Közlemények 65, no. 1–2 (1994): 122. 18  Küpper (1997), 386. 19  Győri Szabó (2009), 57–8. 20  Braham (2015), II, 1494; Botos (2015), 71.

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and they also wanted to retain the support of those lower social classes that had greatly benefited from the redistribution of Jewish property.21 In many cases, malversations happened as the local representatives of political parties had also claimed Jewish valuables or houses for party offices.22 Additionally, those who had received Jewish properties often sold them or invested money in them before the original owner returned, and therefore considered them their own property. As mentioned, many of the new owners belonged to the lower social strata, and even though in most cases they were aware of the origins of these items, they were not willing to surrender their newly acquired valuables, many of which, such as cattle or agricultural equipment, often made their everyday lives much easier. When discussing Jewish property, it must be taken into consideration that Hungarian economy—and especially agriculture—was in a devastating state after the war. The economic performance was on a pre-First World War level, lacking manpower, equipment, and livestock; the structure of economic production was destroyed. Under such circumstances the state had to intervene in market mechanisms.23 One such measure was the obligation of participation in productive work, which included working agricultural lands. In order to facilitate economic reconstruction (especially in agriculture), the government introduced decree no. 600/1945 ME, the basis for land reform. Estates larger than 1000 acres were expropriated and agricultural lands were reduced to a maximum of 100 acres; 60% of these lands was redistributed to claimants as smallholdings, while the rest remained the property of the state, municipalities, or cooperatives.24 The achievements of the land reform were ambiguous. It certainly reinforced the idea of private property and it was an important step in the rearrangement of national economy; however, the majority of the new small farms were unviable. Moreover, since the land reform took place in spring 1945, most of the Holocaust survivors lost their lands and could not claim a new one. In 1945, the Hungarian government set up the Government Commission for Abandoned Properties (Elhagyott Javak Kormánybiztossága), which functioned under the control of the prime minister. The tasks of the  Braham (2015), II, 1493–4; Botos (2015), 67, 72.  Cseh (1994), 120. 23  Ignác Romsics, Magyarország története a XX. században (Budapest: Osiris, 2005), 305. 24  Zsuzsanna Varga, “Földreformok a II. világháború után Közép- és Kelet-Európában”, Történelmi szemle 57, no. 4 (2015): 589–591. 21 22

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institution were to provide (partial) restitution to the survivors and to control property issues in general. According to the founding decree, it was supposed to handle “abandoned” properties that had remained without an heir, that is, the properties of deported Jews, German-friendly civil servants or Arrow Cross members who had escaped at the end of the war, and later the wealth of those German families who were relocated to Germany between 1946 and 1948. Additionally, the Government Commission was responsible for helping people who had lost their livelihood, and bringing home the deported.25 It had the right to put the original owners into possession; if they could not find their own properties, it would provide them with other “abandoned” goods, and it also mediated in the case of disputes between original and new owners. In practice, however, the commission’s activities narrowed down to handling the “abandoned” properties only. It neglected its duty to help the survivors mainly because this task was enormous enough by itself, and the overly bureaucratic institution had no capacity for anything else. Its work was also hindered by political agendas: the ever-stronger Communist Party tried to win supporters by interfering in the cases, which resulted in maintaining the new status quo of property rights. Thus, the Government Commission did not succeed in organizing the restitution of the survivors.26 With the lack of state support, most survivors had to try to get their property back on their own initiative, struggling with the political, economic, and social interests of the government, of institutions, authorities, and private individuals. As outlined in the following case studies, besides political directives, the inner functioning of communities (Jews, non-Jews, local functionaries, and so on) and the attitude of various institutions also influenced whether restitution took place or not in a given town or village.

 Magyarországi rendeletek tára (1945), 54.  On the history of the Government Commission, see: Kálmán Kardos, “Az Elhagyott Javak Kormánybiztossága” Levéltári Híradó 10, no. 2 (1960): 53–64; and Borbála Klacsmann, “Elhanyagolt kárpótlás: Az Elhagyott Javak Kormánybiztossága és a magyar zsidók kapcsolata (1945–1948)”, Századok 153, no. 4 (2019): 715–30. 25 26

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Case Studies The Auctioning of the Properties of Jews from Ócsa In March 1945, the főszolgabíró, leading civil servant of the Alsódabas district, wrote to the municipal leadership of Ócsa, asking them to send him documentation about what had happened to the property of the local Jews: When the above-mentioned [Jews] were deported from there due to the measures of the authorities, various valuables remained in Ócsa. The municipality prefecture was supposed to take inventories of these goods and safeguard them. It came to my knowledge that these goods had been publicly auctioned by the locals before the arrival of the Russians. The alienation lacks any legal basis. Please send me the protocols of the auctions and the list of the new nominal owners.27

The letter testifies to the postwar transition in the administrative field: the front reached Ócsa on 2 November 1944; therefore the auction took place at least four months before the főszolgabíró wrote his letter. During this time, the previous municipal leadership left and new civil servants were appointed. After the főszolgabíró’s letter, intensive correspondence followed between various levels of administration. First, the town’s notary sent an answer to the főszolgabíró. From this reply, the local history of the Holocaust unfolds: In the spring of 1944, individuals of the Israelite faith were settled in Ócsa, as a partial ghetto and they were moved in with local Israelites. In the course of the moving, those arriving placed their properties in the houses of their fellows. On 29 June 1944, when the Israelites were brought to a central camp, the valuables of those living here and of those Israelites who had moved in, had been left in the houses, which were closed off by the ­authorities and remained sealed and untouched until the authorities took inventories in July 1944. The inventories were not taken by the municipality leadership but by the leadership of the local excise office, ordered by the Financial Directorate. The representatives of the municipality only took the role of official trustees.28 27  Hungarian National Archives, Pest County Archives (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Pest Megyei Levéltára, MNL PML) V.1083 Db, 420/1945, report on Jewish properties; letter of the főszolgabíró, 9 March 1945. 28  Ibid., letter of the notary, 14 March 1945.

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Before the Holocaust, 65 Israelite and 13 converted Christian Jews lived in Ócsa29; the town was a regional center of the district and served as the location for the first step toward ghettoization when Jews from the surrounding villages were collected there, as mentioned in the letter. The Jews were then taken to a transit camp and were deported at the beginning of July. The municipal leadership took care of the leftover valuables until the Financial Directorate took inventories. The notary then explained that the local gendarmerie and the excise officers guarded the Jewish goods. The municipality is aware that the inventoried Jewish goods were partially sold at a public auction. The excise office was commissioned by the Financial Directorate to organize the public auction, and therefore the municipality leadership could not intervene and did not intervene. The auctioning authority took proceedings about the auctions and their results. I report that according to my knowledge the municipality received a copy of the list of abandoned houses from the excise office; however, these documents could not be found after the ravage; the copies of the auction protocols were not sent to the municipality, the excise office reported directly to the Financial Directorate about its result, therefore we cannot provide the Főszolgabíró either with the inventories or with the protocols.30

The notary then wrote to the excise office and asked them to send the auction protocols and the list of new owners. The whole case could have come to an end with this, but he received no answer, even upon writing a second letter a week later. Finally, at the end of April he received a message from the leader of the excise office. According to that message, at the beginning of April the officer had sent a request to the Financial Directorate to hand out the documents, but received no answer. On 23rd of this month, I personally went to Budapest to hasten the case, but I did not receive a meaningful answer as the [responsible] officer was absent. On 25th, I will dispatch another courier; until then, in order to avoid the harm of the inhabitants concerned, I approve the opening of the sealed documents on my own responsibility […]. The auctions were held in the synagogue and the houses of Ede Táfler and Dr Imre Lusztig.31

 Kepecs (1993), 220.  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 420/1945, letter of the notary, 14 March 1945. 31  Ibid., letter of Gábor Morvai excise officer, 24 April 1945. 29 30

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The excise officer’s cooperation did not facilitate the solution of the problem, because the Financial Directorate was not willing to help. On 4 May 1945, the notary wrote again to the főszolgabíró, letting him know that “the Financial Directorate of the Budapest District did not allow the handing out of inventories and auction proceedings written about the auctioning and transportation of Jewish properties to depository. However, they approved that those concerned can take a look at them.”32 This decision is parallel to that brought in the case of the Jewish community of Pestszenterzsébet. According to that decision, the Financial Directorate “cannot hand out the inventories of the Jewish valuables due to the decree of the Minister of Finances;” it only provided the survivors with the option to view the documents.33 This pattern is the result of the government’s controversial attitude toward the restitution: despite the laws ordering Jewish property to be given back, the highest authority, the Minister of Finance, prohibited the Financial Directorate from handing out the auction protocols and thus hindered the restitution. After the war, 23 Jews returned to Ócsa. Their property had been sold when they were deported to the Nazi camps, and even though the local authorities and the főszolgabíró tried to investigate what had happened to it, the Financial Directorate, the institution that handled the administration of the auctions, did not provide them with the proof they needed to claim their valuables. It is important to note that despite its role in the confiscation, the Financial Directorate operated continuously during and after the war—whether with the same or different personnel is questionable. Without the auction protocols, even if the survivors were able to find their goods, they were not able to prove to the authorities that they had belonged to them. Obviously, this was not of interest to the Financial Directorate, which had profited from the confiscation. On the other hand, those who had bought the Jewish goods (probably underpriced) likely also wanted to keep them. The interests of these two parties preserved the status quo of ownership. If a new, non-Jewish owner had to return a certain valuable to a survivor, the directorate would have had to pay back the amount paid for it at the auction.

 Ibid., letter of the notary, 4 May 1945.   MNL PML XXIV.101-i/IX, 22029/1945, request of the Jewish community of Pestszenterzsébet, 18 August 1945. 32 33

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Claiming back the goods confiscated from the Jews of Ócsa was hindered not only by the “missing” auction protocols but also by the fact that after the liberation, the administrative vacuum was exploited by the local inhabitants, who plundered closed-off buildings in which the leftover Jewish valuables were stored. In relation to another case, the notary described that “the municipality was liberated on 2 November 1944, when the [Israelite] temple, used as a storage room, was opened partially by the Russians, partially by settlers from other towns and the mob broken loose, and they took the objects found there.”34 This narrative—the statement that “settlers from other towns” and the “mob” committed the looting—deprives the perpetrators of their personality, thus rendering them a faceless mass, distancing the writer from the events and at the same time lifting the responsibility from the locals. Thus, the survivors were left without any property, and their chances of getting it back were almost non-existent. The fact that they could see their goods in the houses of their non-Jewish neighbors obviously did not contribute to the restoration of good relations between Jews and non-Jews. Aladár Frank’s Land Property Tibor Frank, a Holocaust survivor, was still working his deceased father’s land in the spring of 1947, for the third consecutive year, even though legally the land did not belong to him. In order to change this situation, he sent a letter to the municipal leadership of Nógrádverőce (today Verőce), in which he wrote the following: My father, Aladár Frank was deported on 7 May 1944, as a result of which he lost his life in Auschwitz. My father’s property was a […] ca. one-acre land, which was given to the Social Welfare Cooperative of Balassagyarmat in 1943, due to my father’s Jewish origin, in accordance with the fascist laws. Above-mentioned cooperative further sold the land in a way that even in the summer of 1946, in the absence of the owner, I, the undersigned Tibor Frank, who had also returned from deportation, work on it.35

Even though the land did not belong to Frank in a legal sense, he still handled it as his own, while the new owners neglected it. The fact that the  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 2471/1946, emptying the synagogue of Ócsa, 18 June 1946.  MNL PML V.1081 Db, 466/1947, Tibor Frank’s letter, 15 April 1947.

34 35

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Social Welfare Cooperative had given the land to others rendered his situation even more difficult. Tibor Frank therefore asked the municipal leadership to hand the estate back to him. He justified his request with the following arguments: As I have mentioned, nobody manages the land and it is being worked by me, therefore it was not used for public weal; and none of the cases enumerated in the 3rd article of §68 of decree 5600/1945 FM is relevant. As a justification to my claim, let me state that due to the fascist laws I did not only lose my father, but his and my material possessions perished completely; the equipment held at the estate was destroyed, the fruit trees were stolen, therefore I can get only a small amount of compensation if I get back at least the land.36

Impressively, Tibor Frank managed to find his way through the legal chaos concerning Jewish property. Decree 5600/1945 FM regulated that those who had lost their estates due to their Jewish origins had to get them back unless they had been distributed and redeemed during the 1945 agrarian reform.37 Frank also mentioned the confiscations and the harm that befell him during the Holocaust, and as he saw it, the restored land would have been a small compensation for the damages, which also reflects that he clung to the family property emotionally. This was a usual feature of survivors’ claim letters as many of them justified their claim by describing the persecution and atrocities they had faced during the Holocaust. The destruction of Frank’s properties—even the fruit trees were stolen!—shows how completely the Jews were robbed of their belongings. In certain cases, even the building materials of houses were looted as a result of which homecoming survivors only found the ruins of their homes. As Emanuela Grama noted in her chapter in this volume, quoting Dan Diner, the disappearance of the physical and material presence of the Jewish community went hand in hand with the obliteration of the memory of these communities.38 The notary of Nógrádverőce forwarded Frank’s letter to the county’s Land Registry. He attached his own letter, in which he described how the land had been sold:  Ibid.  Magyarországi rendeletek tára (1945), 273–87. 38  Emanuela Grama, “A Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania”, this volume, 255–78. 36 37

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The cooperative sold [parts of the estate] in 1944, partially to István Debreczeny, partially to vitéz39 Károly Rácz. István Debreczeny was the director of the National Office of Architecture in Balassagyarmat; today he works in Baja in a similar office; the other customer, vitéz Károly Rácz does not reside in Budapest at the moment (either in the West or he is a prisoner of war). […] The municipal leadership recommends giving back the land property to the son of the owner, Tibor Frank.40

According to the letter, the cooperative had sold part of the land to two men who did not take care of it: Debreczeny was transferred to a faraway city, while Rácz most probably escaped the approaching Red Army or fled to the “West” (i.e., to the territory of Austria or Germany) to avoid being called to account. In August 1947, the Land Registry brought a final decision in the case: Frank got back 2354 square meters (slightly less than half of the original estate) with the justification that no one worked the land apart from him. Thus, the Social Welfare Cooperative lost its ownership rights to this piece of land. As for the sold parts, the Land Registry rejected the claim, since they were not communal but private property, and therefore only the National Land Registry was entitled to give another estate in exchange for them.41 This decision was in line with the policies of the 1945 agrarian reform, whereby large estates were partitioned and distributed to claimants and the land properties of war criminals and Arrow Cross members were confiscated for the same purpose. This is likely what happened to Károly Rácz’s piece of land too. Both Act VI of 1945 and the above-mentioned decree 5600/1945 FM, regulating the reform, paid special attention to the condition that landowners must cultivate their estate, which was perceived as being in the interests of the nation. If they failed to do so, the local Land Claiming Committees (the executioners of the reform) or the Land Registry were entitled to confiscate the land and give it to someone else. This may be a clue to the fate of István Debreczeny’s portion of land. This is only one aspect of the restitution of real estate, however. The whole picture is much more complex, with similar difficulties to the case of movables. During the redistributions, many non-Jewish families moved 39  The Order of Vitéz (Vitézi Rend) was a Hungarian order of merit founded in 1920. It was awarded as a state honor in the Horthy era, from 1920 to 1944. 40  MNL PML V.1081 Db, 466/1947, letter of the notary, 6 May 1947. 41  Ibid., decision of the Land Registry, 16 August 1947.

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into Jewish houses and were not willing to move out. The municipal leaderships or the local Housing Offices (which were usually made up of the municipality’s civil servants) often upheld the previously made decisions in regard to these houses. Moreover, as the notary of Pilis noted, another obstacle often emerged: During the inventory-making, in most cases it becomes clear that the deceased had real estates apart from those listed in the death certificate; and it must be determined under the most impossible circumstances, what kind of wealth the deceased had left. In Pilis, the register has not been kept for a long while, the cadastral estates […] were burnt according to the orders of the [previous] notary who escaped […]. The municipality has a land-tax cadaster, which had been written decades ago, since then many changes took place […] so that this cadaster cannot be used either. In many cases we must turn to the neighboring land-owners.42

As a result, many survivors were left without any written proof of their estates, and it was up to the benevolence of the non-Jews who had received their houses or the civil servants whether or not they got them back. While Tibor Frank was among those lucky survivors whose case was supported by the authorities, the story of his father’s land also provides insight into the consequences of the persecution. After the deportation, the locals dug out and stole even the fruit trees, and the land was then given to a cooperative. Even though the land was wanted and bought by non-Jews during the redistribution, in the end it was left neglected and abandoned, only cared for by the original owner. The Shoes of József Bernstein In May 1945, the widow of József Bernstein, a shoemaker from Újpest, tried to get the price of upper leathers that her late husband had made and then given to Sándor Biczó, a shoemaker from Ócsa. The two men had had an agreement, but after the deportation of the Jews, Biczó appeared to back out of it. For Mrs. Bernstein, the only way to solve this problem seemed to be a plea to the local National Committee, one of the boards set up by the Provisional National Government, whose task was the reorganization of  MNL PML V.1094 Db, 663/1945, letter on the inventory-taking.

42

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the local government and public administration. Even though these committees were made up of members of democratic parties and trade unions, and they were entitled to control public administration, their roles and responsibilities were not clear-cut.43 This had a major impact on the outcome of Mrs. Bernstein’s case. Originally, Dr. József Bernstein was a lawyer; he was forced to choose another occupation due to the anti-Jewish laws, which restricted Jewish presence in intellectual professions, including legal occupations.44 However, as is evidenced in his widow’s letter, he was struggling even with the new vocation: “He carried on his trade under the name and with the trade license of Géza Fónagy Nagy, due to the restrictions of the anti-­Jewish laws.”45 This means that Bernstein was helped by a non-Jewish “Strohman” (also called “Aladár” in Hungary), a Christian acquaintance who, either out of friendship or in the hope of profit, took the Jewish business under his name and undertook the leading role, while in reality the Jewish tradesman continued his work and thus managed to avoid the restrictive measures.46 Mrs. Bernstein continued her letter: My husband was arrested by the Arrow Cross in Budapest on 5 January 1945, he was deported to an unknown place and there is no news about him. I was left alone with three small children, the oldest is three-and-a-half, the youngest is one year old. I am not provided for; I do not even have a relative who could help. I can only protect myself and my family from poverty and starvation if I continue my husband’s trade.47

As the letter states, József Bernstein and his family managed to avoid being deported either by going into hiding or by spending 1944–1945  in Budapest, like many Jews from the countryside. However, the father was taken away by members of the Arrow Cross, leaving the wife and children alone. Decree 7590/1945 ME, which secured the right of widows of Holocaust victims to continue their spouses’ trade, was issued only at the 43  On the functioning of the National Committees in Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County, see: Gábor Balázs, “A nemzeti bizottságok működése Pest megyében” [The Functioning of National Committees in Pest County], https://adoc.pub/balazs-gabor-a-nemzetibizottsagok-­­mkdese-pest-megyeben-1-be.html (accessed 28 April 2021). 44  See: Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, Page of testimony of Dr. József Bernstein. 45  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 1107/1945, letter of Mrs. József Bernstein. 46  Braham (2015), I, 152. 47  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 1107/1945, letter of Mrs. József Bernstein.

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end of August 1945. The same decree would have ensured that Mrs. Bernstein did not get into the situation she described in her letter: My husband made an agreement with Sándor Biczó, a tradesman from Ócsa, under whose terms he gave Biczó finished upper leathers for the making of 4000 pairs of summer shoes, with the purpose that Biczó would prepare those, using the wooden soles he had produced, and deliver them for a pre-determined price per piece. Biczó did not comply with the agreement, and he did not deliver even one piece of shoe, even though I know that he continued his trade, and he uses the upper leathers which are our possessions and which were taken over only for the purpose of assembling [the shoes]. The summer shoes he makes are given to someone else and he uses the income for his own purposes. Since the liberation I tried to exhort Biczó to respect my grave situation and comply with his commitment; I called to his attention that it is not right that a person like me, afflicted by the old system, is being damaged by him and he takes the bread out of the mouths of my three little children. Biczó did not give a sign of life and he did not give an indication that he had the intention of at least giving back the upper leathers as he took them—if he does not do the job he undertook. He did not even reply the letter of my lawyer.48

The situation described by Mrs. Bernstein was not unique after the war: anti-Semitism was socially and politically accepted under the previous regime, which enabled non-Jews to profit from the disadvantageous situation of the persecuted, without any feeling of guilt. This was likely the reason behind Biczó’s behavior. He ignored Mrs. Bernstein’s pleas and was not willing to give back the products that had been given to him nor was he willing to negotiate with her. Instead, he sold the finished shoes and kept the income. The National Committee put Mrs. Bernstein’s request on the agenda on 8 May. According to the protocol, they made the following decision: Since the committee is not competent, it does not approve the complaint and request of Mrs József Bernstein to press Sándor Biczó to comply with her civil rights demands. In order to settle the affair out of court, it calls the local government to ask Sándor Biczó to sort the case; if he does not confirm this within 8 days, the committee will order the complaining party to bring the case to court.49  Ibid.  Ibid., decision of the National Committee, 31 May 1945.

48 49

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According to Gábor Balázs, the legal status of the National Committees was not defined clearly. In 1945, decree 1030/1945 ME forbade them from taking a role in public administration, yet they still participated in organizational tasks.50 Thus, it is understandable that Holocaust survivors perceived them as a competent body that would attend to their restitution cases. The committee still dismissed Mrs. Bernstein’s request, precisely because they did not feel entitled to proceed. Instead, they urged an out-­ of-­court agreement or a lawsuit. On 6 June, Sándor Biczó sent a short letter to the National Committee: “We have a claim for 102,000 P[engő] from Bernstein’s business in Újpest; I am going to start a lawsuit against them.”51 Consequently, the outcome of the case was decided. However, because Biczó did not share any details about this debt, his letter seems rather like a bluff. Even more so because he was the person who, taking advantage of the postwar administrative chaos, moved into the building of the local synagogue and was not willing to move out despite repeated warnings from Jewish organizations, the local government, and the Ministry of Social Welfare.52 His behavior in this other case, as well as the fact that according to the registry of district court documents he was involved in numerous lawsuits with local Jews after the war, also indicates that he was either an anti-Semite or a sly individual, who used legal loopholes to his own advantage. Finally, the National Committee wrote to Mrs. Bernstein: According to your request, we called him [Biczó] to settle your civil rights issue without bringing it to court, because we are not competent in the case after all. I inform you that Sándor Biczó told us that he countersued your company at court, and thus an attempt for a peaceful solution became unsuccessful.53

The case of Mrs. Bernstein and Sándor Biczó is an example of non-Jews receiving Jewish valuables as a result of the persecution and confiscations, and refusing to give them back to the survivors, thus risking legal  Balázs (accessed 2021), 3.  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 1107/1945, letter of Sándor Biczó, 6 June 1945. 52  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 2471/1946, emptying the Israelite temple and the cantor house. On the fate of the synagogue of Ócsa, see: Borbála Klacsmann, “‘Jogcím nélkül használja’: Az ócsai zsinagóga története” [“He Uses It Without Being Entitled”: The History of the Synagogue of Ócsa], Újkor.hu, http://ujkor.hu/content/jogcim-nelkul-­ hasznalja-az-ocsai-zsinagoga-tortenete (accessed 13 March 2020). 53  MNL PML V.1083 Db, 1107/1945, letter of the National Committee, 9 June 1945. 50 51

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consequences, or themselves taking legal steps. Unfortunately, the local National Committee’s attempt at reconciliation also failed, and due to their unclear position and responsibilities in the administrative field, they were unable to take more definite action for the sake of Mrs. Bernstein.

Conclusion Although the case studies analyzed in this chapter do not cover the whole range of restitution cases, they provide insight into the complexity of the various issues surrounding Jewish property. Contrasted with the grand narratives of early restitution in Hungary, these sources prove that there was no unified, central procedure for survivors to reclaim their goods, as not one but several institutions and committees handled the “abandoned” properties. This also demonstrates that every level of both society and administration participated in and profited from the confiscations. Moreover, the property transfer went hand in hand with a transfer of money, which rendered restitutions even more difficult. The postwar situation reflected the contradictory attitude of the government toward the survivors. For instance, the above-mentioned Act XXV of 1946 condemned the anti-Jewish measures and acknowledged the right to restitution, but it also denied any responsibility of the state and society in the Holocaust. This placed the survivors in a disadvantaged position. Given that according to law a “third party” was responsible for the persecution, the state was not morally obliged to provide restitution. Lacking government support, the success of the survivors in reclaiming their goods depended on local factors, namely the benevolence of non-­ Jewish neighbors, civil servants, and committee members. Certain motifs of Hungarian restitution are very similar to those of other Central European countries. The non-Jewish population of all of these countries took part in the property transfer, and thus the returning survivors found looted houses or estates owned by non-Jews. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, despite the laws regulating restitution, a rift remained between theory and practice, just like in Hungary, and local “people’s councils” (národní výbory) often obstructed the restitution.54 The Slovak political leadership ignored the central restitution laws as they

54  Eduard Kubů and Jan Kuklík, “Reluctant Restitution: The Restitution of Jewish Property in the Bohemian Lands after the Second World War,” in Dean, Goschler, and Ther (2007), 228.

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were concerned that the restitution would induce social discontent.55 The Commission for Finances precluded access to auction proceedings, a pattern that resembles the decision of the Hungarian Minister of Finance.56 The Polish government also labeled Jewish property “abandoned” and sanctioned its restitution: only the owners or their heirs could claim them; more distant relatives were excluded.57 Researchers have revealed a range of actions displayed by non-Jews who possessed Jewish property. As happened in Hungary, many of them were not willing to hand the properties back, stating for instance that the previous owners had lost them and their right to them during the war58; some had sold them, while others turned to violence when the survivors attempted to reclaim a property.59 Thus, Hungarian restitution fits into a broader regional context, where, due to historical, social, and economic factors, many Jews never got back their original properties or compensation for them. In this respect, similarly to other Central European countries, postwar Hungarian society was also a “no neighbors’ land” where local non-Jews witnessed and participated in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors and the material assets of the Jewish community became prey to confiscation, robbing, and looting. Both processes resulted in long-term consequences both on a social and economic level. Finally, even if the survivors managed to get their valuables back, they often lost them again during the communist era. As Michael Berenbaum pointed out, the “Aryanization” of Jewish properties constituted a part of a long confiscation process, which continued after the war through the lack of ­restitutions, having a serious impact on the lives of Holocaust survivors.60 This also contributed to the unprocessed trauma of the Holocaust in Hungarian society. 55  Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 103, 111. 56  Ivica Bumová, “The Jewish Community after 1945: Struggle for Civic and Social Rehabilitation,” in Holocaust as a Historical and Moral Problem of the Past and the Present, ed. Monika Vrzgulová and Daniela Richterová (Bratislava: Dokumentačné stredisko holokaustu, 2008), 268. 57  Dariusz Stola, “The Polish Debate on the Holocaust and the Restitution of Property,” in Dean, Goschler, and Ther (2007), 244. 58  Ibid., 246. 59  Wylegała (2016), 112–14. 60   Michael Berenbaum, “Confronting History: Restitution and the Historians,” in Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy, ed. Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford (New York, London: New York University Press, 2006), 43–9.

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Kádár, Gábor, and Zoltán Vági. 2005. Hullarablás: A magyar zsidók gazdasági megsemmisítése [Robbing the Dead: The Economic Annihilation of Hungarian Jews]. Budapest: Hannah Arendt Egyesület – Jaffa. Kardos, Kálmán. 1960. Az Elhagyott Javak Kormánybiztossága. Levéltári Híradó 10 (2): 53–64. Kepecs, József, ed. 1993. A zsidó népesség száma településenként (1840–1941). Budapest: KSH. Klacsmann, Borbála. 2019. Elhanyagolt kárpótlás: Az Elhagyott Javak Kormánybiztossága és a magyar zsidók kapcsolata (1945–1948). Századok 153 (4): 715–730. ———. ‘Jogcím nélkül használja’: Az ócsai zsinagóga története. Újkor.hu. http:// ujkor.hu/content/jogcim-nelkul-hasznalja-az-ocsai-zsinagoga-tortenete. Accessed 13 Mar 2020. Kubů, Eduard, and Jan Kuklík. 2007. Reluctant Restitution: The Restitution of Jewish Property in the Bohemian Lands after the Second World War. In Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe, ed. Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, 223–239. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Küpper, Herbert. 1997. A zsidóknak járó kárpótlás, jóvátétel Magyarországon és Németországban. Magyar jog 44 (7): 385–397. Le Bourhis, Eric. 2018. Dispossession as Practice: Riga, 1939–1942. Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 65 (3): 120–150. Peresztegi, Ágnes. 2005. Reparation and Compensation in Hungary, 1945–2003. In The Holocaust in Hungary: A European Perspective, ed. Judit Molnár, 677–684. Budapest: Balassi. Romsics, Ignác. 2005. Magyarország története a XX. században. Budapest: Osiris. Roth, Stephen. 1997. Indemnification of Hungarian Victims of Nazism. In The Holocaust in Hungary: Fifty Years Later, ed. Randolph L. Braham and Attila Pók, 733–757. New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. Stark, Tamás. 1995. Zsidóság a vészkorszakban és a felszabadulás után 1939–1955. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete. Stola, Dariusz. 2007. The Polish Debate on the Holocaust and the Restitution of Property. In Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe, ed. Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, 240–255. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ungváry, Krisztián. 2012. A Horthy-korszak mérlege. Pécs, Budapest: Jelenkor – Országos Széchényi Könyvtár.

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A Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania Emanuela Grama

Introduction Writing about the nationalization of property launched by the communist regimes in postwar Central and Eastern Europe, historian Dan Diner argued that this material loss “erased the memory of the communities.” He pointed to the multiple temporalities of loss that accompanied this process of memory erasure: “Not just memory about the legal rights to private property, bound to mere objects—no, this went far further, to encompass memory of times past, tethered to longue-durée prewar events as well as court-durée traumatic events during the war.”1  Dan Diner, “Memory and Restitution: World War II as a Foundational Event in a Uniting Europe,” in Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe, ed. Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 15. 1

E. Grama (*) Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_11

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The situation of the ethnic Germans in postwar Romania adds more nuance to Diner’s argument, by raising new questions about the relationship between memory and property: what happened when a political regime used a (partial and conditional) property restitution to neutralize the collective memory of loss and disenfranchisement? How did the members of that community respond? And to what extent was that limited attempt at restitution itself strategically forgotten by the ethnic Germans? This chapter focuses on a lesser-known story of the communist government’s attempt to “win back” some of the ethnic Germans living at that time in Romania. In March 1954, the Romanian authorities decided to return the houses and some of the land to ethnic Germans, assets that the state had confiscated in 1945 as a form of retribution (alongside other forms of punishment, including the disenfranchisement of the entire German community and the transportation of many adults from this group to labor camps in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1949). However, the restitution of houses and land was conditional on the ethnic Germans’ agreement to join the collective farms. At that moment, the Party authorities found themselves at an impasse in their pursuit of collectivization, as many peasants were still unwilling to give up their land. The Party still believed that they could use more subtle forms of persuasion rather than sheer coercion. (They would change their minds by the end of the 1950s.)2 However, the partial and conditional restitution eventually backfired; many ethnic Germans regarded it as a gesture that came too late and offered too small an incentive. The communist government, however, viewed it as a magnanimous gesture toward an ethnic community, many members of which had openly supported Nazi Germany before and during the war. The communist leaders therefore felt they had repaired their “mistakes” and did not consider it necessary to issue an official apology to Romania’s Germans for the material, physical, and symbolic losses that the latter had suffered in the aftermath of the war. Even if the communist government initially opposed the mass emigration of Romania’s Germans, they eventually changed their minds, due first to West Germany’s

2  In 1962, the Party officials in Romania declared that the collectivization was accomplished. See Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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diplomatic pressure and, later on, the increasing appeal of gaining hard currency in exchange for emigration visas for the ethnic Germans. In what follows, I first discuss the postwar disenfranchisement of Romania’s Germans. The second section focuses on the shift in the attitude of the Romanian communist leaders toward this ethnic group, illustrated by their attempts to make amends via a partial restitution, contingent on the ethnic Germans joining the collective farms. The third and fourth sections discuss the ethnic German diaspora’s push for mass emigration out of Romania, and the Romanian government’s initial unwillingness to give in to these pressures, motivated in part by their seemingly genuine conviction that they had done everything they could to keep “their Germans.” The fifth and final section shows the long-term implications of the Romanian communist leaders’ unwillingness to offer an official apology for the traumatic marginalization endured by the ethnic Germans in the aftermath of the war.

Postwar Disenfranchisement and Property Confiscation In 1940, Romania entered World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. During that time (1940–1944), Nazi Germany declared Romania’s ethnic Germans to have a privileged status over other ethnic groups, as members of the Deutsche Volksgruppe in Rumänien (German Ethnic Group in Romania), an organization that became “an instrument of Third-Reich policy in this geographical area.”3 In May 1943, Romania signed an agreement with Nazi Germany, which stipulated that all male ethnic Germans aged 17  years or above were to enroll in the German troops; approximately 63,000 of Romania’s ethnic Germans enrolled voluntarily in the Waffen-SS.4 In August 1944, the Romanian government switched sides by joining the Allies, emerging on the side of the victors at the end of the war. Consequently, the postwar Romanian government (formed of a coalition of parties, including the Communist Party) treated the ethnic Hungarians

3  Ottmar Traşcă, “Andreas Schmidt and the German Ethnic Group in Romania (1940–1944),” Euxeinos (2015): 16–19, here 19. 4  Paul Milata, Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009).

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and Germans then living in Transylvania as “presumptive enemies.”5 The government formed the Office of Administration and Supervision of Enemy Properties (Casa de Administrare și Supraveghere a Bunurilor Inamice, CASBI), which confiscated the assets of ethnic Hungarians and Germans, as well as of other Romanian citizens who were viewed as “enemies,” (alleged) Nazi collaborators, those who fled during or at the end of the war (absenteiști, in Romanian), and others. The CASBI was dissolved in 1948, once the communist government began the nationalization process by confiscating the private property of all Romanian citizens and acquiring it as state property. During the last phase of the war, the Allies had agreed on the resettlement to Germany of all the ethnic German inhabitants of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in the hope of preventing massive retaliation against them by the local populations.6 The Romanian government, however, chose not to expel Romanian citizens of German descent. The communist authorities discussed such a plan, but nothing came of it.7 Instead, the ethnic Germans became a source of free labor for the Soviets, with those deemed able to carry out hard labor being sent to the coal mines in the Donbas region (Ukraine) in the Soviet Union. Under a decree signed directly by Stalin, in early January 1945 the Romanian authorities began the removal of most ethnic Germans (men aged between 17 and 45 and women between 18 and 30) living in the territories liberated by the Soviet army, deporting them to the Soviet Union, where their labor was intended to speed up the rebuilding of the devastated postwar Soviet economy.8 People who fell ill were sent back to Romania, but those who could work remained in the camps until the end of 1949, when they were released.9 Most deportees returned to Romania, while a smaller group was sent to Germany and a few remained in the Soviet Union. Of the approximately 30,000 5  Stefano Bottoni, Transilvania roșie: Comunismul român și problema nat ̦ională 1944–1965 (Cluj-Napoca: Kriterion, 2010), 67. 6  Ana Siljak, “Conclusion,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 327–36. 7  “Raport Final,” Comisia Prezidenţială Pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România, Bucureşti (2006), 543, footnote 6. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ media/documents/article/RAPORT%20FINAL_%20CADCR.pdf (accessed 23 June 2021). 8  Ibid., 544. 9  The first transport of ethnic Germans returning from the Soviet Union occurred as early as October 1945. “Raport Final” (2006), 544.

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Transylvanian Germans sent as forced labor to the Soviet Union, around 2700 died in the camps, and a much smaller group passed away soon after their return. In parallel, between March 1945 and January 1947, the state revoked the ethnic Germans’ Romanian citizenship, thus depriving them of political rights and welfare benefits, and confiscated the property (including land and houses) of all ethnic Germans labeled “collaborationists.” This category included not only those who had held active positions in the former German Ethnic Group and those enrolled in the German armies, including their families, but also other ethnic Germans who had been members of this organization simply by virtue of their ethnic background. By early 1947, a total of approximately 465,000 hectares of land, most of it containing fertile soil, was confiscated from 143,000 Germans from Transylvania and Banat.10 In addition to this land, the state nationalized the property of 64,050 poor and relatively poor peasant families of German origin, including 56,430 houses.11 More than half (32,248 families), however, were allowed to continue living in their houses as tenants, paying rent to the state, and without being required to share their residence with others. Another 15,799 families had to share 6949 houses with the families of colonists (in general, two or three families lived in each house).12 These colonists were people whom officials purposefully brought to villages in Transylvania and Banat from the impoverished eastern parts of Romania. Most of the colonists were poor and landless, fleeing the country’s eastern regions, especially following the 1946–1947 famine in the eastern region of Moldova. They became the major labor force for the new collective farms that many of the local villagers were initially reluctant to join.13 Obviously, this created further friction between locals and newcomers, a friction that the local authorities exploited for their own interests: they used the colonists to tear into the local social fabric and antagonize  Ibid., 546.  Arhivele Nat ̦ionale ale României (hereafter ANR), Fond CC al PCR, Cancelarie, File 3/1954, 42. This number comprised the German population in all of the villages in the Banat and Transylvania regions. It did not include the property of rich peasants, or the houses of ethnic Germans living in urban areas. 12  ANR, Fond CC al PCR, Cancelarie, File 3/1954, 42. As all but one of the archival references in this chapter are from the same archival fund (Fond CC al PCR, Cancelarie), I will henceforth cite only the file and page numbers. 13  Kligman and Verdery (2011), 393–4. 10 11

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v­ illagers, pitting them against each other, with an eye to pressuring them to give up their land and join the collective. The subsequent resettlement of peasants in 1951—when the communist authorities transferred a significant number of ethnic Germans from the Banat region (neighboring the Yugoslav border) to the much poorer southern region of Bărăgan— generated even more discontent.14 At least in the initial phases of the postwar era—that is, before 1948, when the new communist regime launched the nationalization of assets and the collectivization of agricultural land—the ethnic Germans’ loss of property stood as an additional boundary between themselves and the other citizens of Romania. At times, the sudden loss of their previous economic status created new frictions across ethnic lines, especially as some Romanians were not afraid to express their joy at the misfortune of their German neighbors. The memory of such schadenfreude continued to trigger strong sentiments among some ethnic Germans decades after the events, as illustrated by the stories shared with me by some older interviewees. In October 2005, I talked at length with Frau Weber, an elderly lady who had lived in Sibiu all her life, and despite the pressures of her children, chose not to emigrate to Germany. In 1945, she was 10  years old. She lived with her brother and her mother, a war widow, in their house in Sibiu. She remembers a large family of Roma with six children coming to live with them as tenants: “We all had to cram into the house.”15 Nonetheless, she and her family were among the lucky ones, as they were not expelled from their former home. She also commented on the psychological effects of property loss: It was a sad time, with the houses being taken away. Some Romanians would say, out of jealousy: well done, [the Germans] deserved to have their houses taken away! But then, after the state nationalized everything, and also took the Romanians’ land [during the collectivization], then they had to work together because they had to live.

Frau Weber’s comment captures not only the initial sentiment of ostracization and active rejection that some Germans experienced upon the loss  Smaranda Vultur, Germanii din Banat prin povestirile lor (Iași: Polirom, 2018).  Interview with Frau Weber (pseudonym), born 1935, conducted in Sibiu in 2005 by Emanuela Grama. 14 15

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of their property, which further reinforced ethnic divides, but also the shift in those interethnic divides and the emergence of a new sentiment of empathy and relative solidarity when Romanians also had to confront the nationalization of their assets. 16 However, following Stalin’s death in March 1953, things began to change. In their meetings, some of the Communist Party leaders began to admit—albeit not publicly—that the Romanian government had made a mistake by punishing the Germans as a collective and that it was time to put the recent past behind them and start anew. In September 1953, the Politburo decided to grant full political and economic rights to those whose citizenship had been revoked in 1945, including the ethnic Germans, on the condition that they had not received any other citizenship and that they had not committed any crimes.17 In 1954, the government also passed a decree specifically endorsing the restitution of the houses that had been previously expropriated from ethnic Germans and Hungarians. However, this decree made the restitution of the Germans’ houses and land, which had been confiscated in 1945, contingent on the Germans forming or joining collective farms.

Conditional Restitution as Alleged Reparation Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Party secretary and de facto government leader, admitted that the restitution of the houses and small parcels of land that the German peasants had previously owned was an attempt to rectify the Party’s previous misdeed. “The collective expropriation was a mistake!” he said. He continued: “There was no class distinction taken into account.”18 By that, he emphasized that the expropriation was applied to the entire German group, regardless of differences in class and wealth. The overall purpose of the restitution was to “attract” those ethnic Germans who were still officially unemployed, and who had mostly found work as day laborers on someone else’s land, in some cases on the very land they had owned before 1945. These landless people were not dependent on the state, but they did depend on other people to find labor. This 16  See Ville Kivimäki, Peter Leese, eds, Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II (Palgrave, 2022), on the negotiations of loss among different groups in the aftermath of the war in Europe. 17  Decree 80/1954 on 17 March 1954. File 10/1954, 5. For detailed instructions on how to apply the decree, see File 3/1954, 76–87. 18  File 3/1954, 29.

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was exactly the type of labor exploitation that the regime wanted to abolish.19 In fact, the end goal of this partial and conditional property restitution was to speed up the collectivization of land in the countryside. In March 1949, the communist government had launched the collectivization of agriculture via a decree that confiscated all plots bigger than 50 hectares. The decree made those estates, including everything they contained (houses, animals, machinery), state property.20 Some of the activists that the Party sent out to the countryside to “persuade” peasants to join the collectives resorted to violent measures, including beatings, torture, deportations, and even killings. Moreover, the quotas imposed by the center were unattainable, especially since the peasants in a collective had to first give part of the harvest to the state before they could use it for their own households. However, such drastic measures triggered increasing resistance among the peasants, who sought out various ways to sabotage collectivization. Confronted with this resistance, the communist government switched to a less violent and oppressive path toward collectivization. Given the widespread resistance of Romania’s peasants to give up their land (which many of them had only just acquired through the 1945 agrarian reform), the collectivization process was moving at a snail’s pace; between 1949 and 1953, only 10 percent of the land was collectivized.21 From 1953, the central authorities sought out new “methods of persuasion” that would improve the relationship between the state authorities and the peasants, but still insisted that “there should be no coercion.”22 Between 1953 and 1956, the collectivization was rather stagnant, and the government chose to focus on building a network of state farms. (In the state farms, the land was owned by the state, and the workers were state employees. In the collective farms, the villagers pooled together the land they owned and worked as a collective.) The government did not give up, however. They continued to seek new solutions to bring other peasants into the collectives. The already-­ dispossessed ethnic Germans appeared as the perfect target. Dej  File 3/1954, 29.  “Raport Final” (2006), 428–9. On the history of the collectivization in Romania, see Kligman and Verdery (2011). 21  Kligman and Verdery (2011), 103. 22  File 3/1954, 23–4. 19 20

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optimistically declared that “the German peasants will form collectives with the land from the state reserve, will receive their houses back, will be financially helped by the state to organize those collective farms, and you will all see how beautifully they will work.”23 He set the order of priorities straight: the German peasants received land in order to form collective farms, while the restitution of houses depended on their specific situation. “If we give them land, they will build a house. The most important thing—and the one that concerns the state—is that the land be used for work, and that collective farms be formed with the Germans.”24 He proposed that 89,306 hectares of the state’s land reserve be redistributed to the German villagers to build new collective farms.25 That is, the government was willing to give land to the ethnic Germans only if they used it to form their own collectives. In 1948, 74 percent of Romania’s Germans had been living in rural areas. The government turned to them with the hope that their dire economic situation would make them more willing to form collective farms when other peasants refused to do so. However, the communist leaders portrayed it as a form of reparation for the loss inflicted on this ethnic community between 1945 and 1949. To be entitled to receive their houses back, they had to have been poor or relatively poor at the time of the expropriation (in 1945), not have acquired another house in the meantime, and, most importantly, they had to have joined or planned on joining the collective farms.

Testing the Terrain In 1953, the Politburo appointed one of Dej’s closest allies, Alexandru Moghioroş, to supervise the restitution. Moghioroş was a key actor in the Party establishment: he was vice president of the Council of Ministers and president of the Agrarian Commission, which was in charge of collectivization. As a staunch supporter of total and speedy collectivization, he had pushed for a coercive approach that was met with a wave of protests and peasant rebellions.26 Though he remained a true believer in the use of

 File 3/1954, 32.  File 3/1954, 31. 25  File 3/1954, 29. 26  Kligman and Verdery (2011), 201. 23 24

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force, he tried to comply with Dej’s directive that “there should be no coercion.”27 Before the Politburo made their final decision, Moghioroş wanted to test the waters by conducting a random survey in a few villages, to gauge peasants’ attitudes about a possible restitution. He commissioned a group of political cadres to visit some villages with a large German population and talk to them. But the cadres were to pretend that they had no idea about such a decree. Moghioroş told them: “You will discuss this decision with the party leadership [in each region]. However, down in the countryside this issue should appear as a proposal that comes directly from you.”28 He was adamant in his orders: the cadres had to be very careful not “to make any noise, any publicity around this issue,” and cautioned them to “carefully assess the situation, don’t fool yourself that everything would go smoothly.”29 In Moșna, a village in the county of Mediaș, a region with a large German population, the cadres initially summoned ten peasants whom they thought they could recruit as local supporters.30 Those ten, however, rejected the proposal to join the collective farms, asking instead to receive the land back to work it on their own. They explained that they would be unable to work in the collective because they were too old or ill to meet the norms imposed on such farms. Giving up on their plan to make use of these peasants, the cadres convened a larger meeting, in which 85 German villagers participated. Of these, 15 were already part of a collective farm, 20 worked in state farms and factories, and 50 were eligible to receive land and houses under the September 1953 decree. Those who were already in the collective and employed in the state farm welcomed the proposal to receive their houses back, while those who were unemployed remained “passive.” They explained that if they decided to join the collective, they would have “nothing to eat until the harvest, whereas now they work today and eat tomorrow.” Others asked to receive their land to work it on their own for at least a year, to acquire some supplies, and only thereafter would they be willing to bring the land into the collective. Of those 50 people, only one agreed to join. Overall, the cadres concluded that the  File 3/1954, 23–4.  File 8/1954, 5. 29  File 8/1954, 8. 30  This was not a village as such, but a commune, that is, the smallest territorial division that generally included a set of neighboring villages under a common administration. File 3/1954, 46. 27 28

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German peasants would rather work as sharecroppers and have no obligation to the state than become part of the collective farm.31 The cadres also visited another village, in the Arad region in western Romania. The village was home to 225 German peasant families, of whom only 4 had joined a collective farm. The majority were working either as sharecroppers on land owned by other people, or as gardeners cultivating vegetables on plots of land around their houses and selling them at nearby farmers’ markets.32 All of them continued to inhabit their former houses. They paid rent to the state, but no other taxes, which paradoxically put them in a better economic situation than the Romanian and Hungarian peasants who had to pay taxes to the state. The cadres summoned 12 of the “most honest” German peasant families to an initial meeting, asking them their opinion of the land restitution proposal. The peasants “were puzzled and reserved, viewing the proposal with much pessimism.” Some of them responded to the proposal to join collectives by saying that “they would not be able to look in the eyes of those [neighbors] who in 1945 walked in on them, taking their livestock and machinery from their own courtyards”—a comment alluding to broader instances of local looting, in which some villagers simply took what they thought they deserved from the homes and lands of their richer neighbors, leading to long-lasting mutual resentment and mistrust. The cadres noted in their report that most of the peasants were “under the influence of the former kulaks,” and that it was “the weak work of the local cadres” that had led to this skepticism about collectivization.33 If the reactions of the ethnic Germans in these villages were to be an indicator of the overall reaction of the German peasants, they definitely were not the reactions that the government officials expected. Instead of being overjoyed about receiving their property back, these Germans were rather disinterested in this proposal, especially if it came with the condition of joining the collective farms. When he returned to the Politburo just one week later, however, Moghioroş chose to present a much rosier picture than what the cadres had encountered on the ground. He declared that “the majority of German villagers surveyed welcomed the proposal to

 File 3/1954, 47.  File 3/1954, 48. 33  File 3/1954, 49. 31 32

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receive land, and agreed to form collectives.”34 Based on his report, in January 1954 the Politburo decided to pass the decree.35 The decree became official in March 1954, and the restitution began immediately afterward.36 However, as much as the Party leadership promised a swift restitution, the process turned out to be much more convoluted. By January 1956, in the Stalin region (including Brașov and Sibiu counties where most of the Transylvanian Germans lived), out of a total of 23,000 only 5070 houses were given back. The restitution process continued at a snail’s pace. In 1958, in a meeting with Gheorghiu-Dej and other central officials at the national women’s conference, a representative of the German women’s organization addressed the unresolved problem of the restitution of houses in the same region (Stalin county). She complained that many families living in the houses that used to belong to the Germans did not want to leave those houses and have them returned to the former owners, despite the fact that these tenants were assigned other residences, or plots to build new houses. Gheorghiu-Dej promised that he would look into the matter and expedite the process. However, a top Party official of German ethnicity commented that “the Romanian houses are not like [German] houses; this is why [the Romanian tenants] don’t want to move out.”37 This comment captured a whole set of more subtle distinctions, grounded in a history of not only aesthetic preferences, but also of economic privileges and distinct property rights that Transylvania’s Germans had benefited from during previous centuries (before 1918, when Transylvania became part of Greater Romania). In general, the houses built and inhabited by the ethnic Germans were larger residences of a particular architectural style, with one or two stories and an interior courtyard. In urban areas, they were often part of the historical core of the cities, and were therefore much coveted locations. Their post-1945 inhabitants, mostly Romanian, did not want to relinquish them so easily because they wanted to benefit from the symbolic capital and local prestige that those houses continued to exude in the absence of their former owners.  File 8/1954, 3–4.  File 10/1954, 4. 36  Decree 81/1954 on 18 March 1954. File 10/1954, 6–7. 37  ANR, Fond CC al PCR, sectia Organizatoric, File 32/1956, 9, cited in Hannelore Baier, “Die deutsche Minderheit in Rumänien 1953–1959,” in Zwischen Tauwetter und Neostalinismus. Deutsche und andere Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1953–1964, ed. Rudolf Gräf and Gerald Volkmer (Munich: IKGS, 2011), 107–17, here 116. 34 35

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Despite the slow pace of the houses’ restitution, Party officials genuinely believed that Romania’s ethnic Germans would view the Party’s decision as a magnanimous gesture of reparation that would solve “the Germans’ situation” and make them feel at home again in their country of birth. This sentiment is reflected by a comment made by Nicolae Ceauşescu, then a powerful Politburo member and the future Party leader, in a closed-door meeting of the Politburo in 1960. He declared that “we just recently solved the case of the Germans, we took measures.”38 In reality, the restitution process continued to drag on for years, remaining a point of contention among the many parties involved: the central authorities who promised but then did not deliver; the local authorities who sometimes did not have, or did not want to give a new residence to the tenants; the tenants themselves who sometimes wanted to remain in those houses; and, of course, the former German owners who still had not received their houses back. At some point, however, the wave of petitions for restitutions began to recede, replaced by another flood of requests, this time for travel documents. Romania’s Germans wanted to leave, and more and more of them began to submit their emigration documents. It turned out that many of Romania’s Germans no longer wanted their houses or land back; instead, they wanted to leave their country of birth and begin a new life in West Germany.

External Pressures: Romanian Émigrés in Federal Germany When the Federal Republic of Germany officially came into existence in 1949, it launched a decade-long project of national rebuilding, aimed especially at welcoming and integrating the ethnic Germans who had lived and/or were originally born in other countries. While after 1950 the ethnic Germans coming to Germany were no longer considered Vertriebene or expellees, they still benefited from special privileges as resettlers (Aussiedler), a status designating persons of German descent who had remained outside the borders of West Germany after 1945, and especially in the territories of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Soviet Union, 38  Minutes of the Politburo meeting of 10 February 1960, ANR, Fond CC al PCR, Cancelarie, File 10/1960, 17. I am grateful to historian Hannelore Baier for sharing a copy of this archival document with me, and to Narcis Tulbure in Bucharest for verifying the archival reference.

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the so-called Soviet bloc.39 A series of legal measures instituted by the government of Federal Germany between 1950 and 1955 enabled ethnic Germans to apply for emigration from their countries of origin as a “repatriation” to West Germany, and, upon their entry, entitled them to a wealth of different forms of support from the German state intended to speed up their social and economic integration.40 Such privileges enticed many ethnic Germans in the communist bloc to seek emigration to West Germany, and equally bothered the communist governments, who searched for various justifications to prevent “their” Germans from emigrating. In 1956, the Romanian Red Cross and its West German counterpart signed an agreement to facilitate the reunification of families separated during the war (children and parents, spouses, and the elderly).41 However, this agreement remained relegated to the status of humanitarian collaboration, as it was not ratified by the governments of the two countries. Given that no official diplomatic relations existed at that time between the two countries, the Romanian authorities did not feel pressured in any way to fulfill this undertaking. Consequently, the emigration of some ethnic Germans continued at a very slow pace. According to West German newspapers, the Romanian government ostensibly allowed emigration for family reunification, but at a pace West Germany found unsatisfactory: 112 Germans from Romania arrived in West Germany in 1956 and 245  in 1957, out of the total of 8432 who invoked family reunification to apply for emigration.42 Meanwhile, the West German government found itself under increasing domestic pressure from its own politicians to redefine its relationship with Germans in Eastern Europe, including ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union, Romania, and also those still living in Poland and Czechoslovakia  By immigrating under the title of Aussiedler (“out-settlers”), these persons immediately received German citizenship and generous financial assistance. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, “Second-Class Citizens? Restricted Freedom of Movement for Spätaussiedler Is Constitutional,” German Law Journal 5, no. 7 (2004): 761–89. 40  Ovidiu Oltean, “From Privilege to Restrain: The Migration of Ethnic Germans from Romania and Poland,” http://migrationcenter.ro/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ Raport_cercetare_The-migration-of-ethnic-germans-from-romania-and-­poland_Recasting_ Migrants_Voices_report-­1.pdf (accessed 14 June 2021). 41  File 109/1973, 33. 42  Newspaper clipping of an article published in Die Welt, 23 November 1957 (no title mentioned). Open Society Archives, Fond HU OSA 300-60-1, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: Romanian Unit: Subject Files, Archival box 186/2, “Ethnic Minorities: Germans, 1951–1962,” Item 3588/1958. 39

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despite the mass expulsions that had taken place at the end of war. In 1954, the same year the Romanian Politburo began the restitution of houses to ethnic Germans, signaling its attempt to reconcile with Romanian Germans and to encourage them to become part of the socialist society, Heinrich Zillich, the leader of the Transylvanian émigrés in West Germany, declared at the annual meeting of the Association of Transylvanian Germans (Saxons) that “the inevitable erasure of Transylvania’s Germans can only be stopped through their resettlement [Umsiedlung] to Germany.”43 A well-known novelist and former member of Romania’s Nazi Party during the war, Heinrich Zillich, had been elected president of the Association in 1952.44 Under his leadership, the Association became the main advocate of emigration as the only means to preserve the ethnic identity of Transylvania’s Germans.45 The leaders of the Association wanted to use the memory of the distinct marginalization and subsequent suffering and humiliation following their 1945 disenfranchisement to persuade Romania’s Germans that they could no longer aim to remake their homes in a country that had rejected them, and that emigration was the only option.46 They began lobbying the Ministry of Refugees to class the Romanian citizens of German descent who left during the war, or followed the retreating German armies, in the same category as “expellees,” Germans who had been forced out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.47 In December 1956, Zillich went to Bonn to persuade West German officials to consider a potential trade 43  Heinrich Zillich (1954), cited in Michael Fabi, “Das Hilfskomitee der Siebenbürger Sachsen und evangelischen Banater Schwaben im Ringen um ‘Bleiben oder Gehen?’,” in Grenzen leben  – Grenzen überwinden. Zur Kirchengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts in Ost-­ Mittel-­Europa, ed. Christian-Erdmann Schott (Berlin: Lit, 2008), 55–89, here 64. 44  The Association (Der Verband) was established in 1949, but in 1950 it became Die Landsmannschaft der Siebenbürger Sachsen. I will refer to the organization as the Association. Cristian Cercel, “The Deportation of Romanian Germans to the Soviet Union and Its Place within Transylvanian Saxon Memory Discourses in Germany in the 1950s and the 1960s,” New Europe College Stefan Odobleja Program Yearbook 2012–2013 (2014): 49–82. 45  Fabi (2008). 46  However, not everyone viewed mass emigration as the only solution. The Aid Committee, the other main organization of Romania’s ethnic Germans in Germany, coordinated by the Lutheran Church and the Red Cross, strongly opposed mass emigration, believing that it would lead to the disappearance of the Lutheran Church in Romania. 47  Pierre de Trégomain, “‘Renversements sémantiques’: Mémoire des expulsions chez les Saxons de Transylvanie,” in Fuite et expulsions des Allemands: transnationalité et représentations, 19 e–21e siècle, ed. Dominique Herbet and Carola Hähnel (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2016), 89–102, here 94.

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agreement with Romania if the latter allowed the emigration of the 8500 Romanian Germans who had submitted their request for family reunification with their relatives in the West.48 The pressure placed by the authorities of Federal Germany on the Romanian communist government played a key role in the Romanian officials’ change of heart about their initial strong opposition to emigration. Although Romania initially refused to tackle the emigration proviso, viewing it as “a problem that had nothing to do with economic affairs,” unofficially the government tried to find a compromise.49

The Ethnicization of Emigration: Romania’s Germans and Jews Between Stereotypes and Foreign Policy In closed-door meetings, Romanian communist government officials debated the emigration policy, thus revealing the issue’s higher stakes. Given their pursuit of stronger diplomatic relations and economic exchanges with the countries beyond the Iron Curtain, the Party leaders were also increasingly concerned about their international image, especially in the eyes of Western states and the mass media. A report issued in early May 1958 and classified as “strictly secret” noted the discrepancy between the large number of emigration requests waiting to be resolved and the small number that had been resolved so far. By May 1958, the Romanian state had a total of 36,816 outstanding requests for emigration, of which 8426 were for Federal Germany (plus 26,302 for Israel and 2088 for other Western countries). However, between January and April 1958, the authorities had approved fewer than one thousand emigration requests: 555 for Federal Germany, 55 for Austria, and 321 for Israel.50 The Romanian central authorities knew that emigration was an incendiary topic, that the complaints of those who were waiting for months and even years for their visas were reaching organizations in the West, and that this would justify the Western mass media’s portrayal of Romania as “a

48  Letter from Zillich to Josef Trischler, 23 December 1956, cited in de Trégomain (2016), 94. 49  File 15/1958, 11. 50  “Notă,” Direct ̦ia Treburilor CC al PMR, no. 338, 9 May 1958, in Gavriil Preda and Petre Opriș, România în Organizat ̦ia Tratatului de la Varșovia. Documente (1954–1968), vol. I (Bucharest: Institutul Nat ̦ional pentru Studiul Totalitarismului, 2008), 281.

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prison of people.”51 They decided that the emigration issue had become “a state problem,” which they had to solve as soon as possible before it exploded. In early May 1958, the Romanian government decided to approve the emigration requests, but with major caveats. First and foremost, they made a distinction between Romanian Jews who wanted to leave for Israel, and all other Romanian citizens who applied for exit visas. Specifically, those who requested emigration to Israel were given much more leeway than those intending to leave for Federal Germany and other states. Whereas the latter were allowed to apply for emigration under an exclusive rubric of “family reunification,” in which “family” was strictly narrowed down to immediate relatives (spouses, adult children, or parents), those who intended to emigrate to Israel could invoke a much broader understanding of “family reunification,” including distant relatives. In addition, those who were “old, sick, or jobless” could also apply for emigration to Israel.52 In regard specifically to the ethnic Germans who applied for emigration, Romanian officials emphasized that emigration for “family reunification” in either West or East Germany should be “approved only on the basis of reciprocity with these states, taking into account those who want to return to Romania for family reunification.” However, what exactly “reciprocity” meant in this particular situation was not clear. The note following the statement mentioned that “approvals of emigration requests for Federal Germany must be used with an eye to normalizing our relations with Federal Germany.”53 A general rule that would apply to anyone who submitted emigration requests was that they would have to give up ownership rights over “movable and immovable goods,” which were to remain in the country. They were to be immediately excluded from Party membership and “positions of responsibility,” which in fact could include a wide range of jobs, from engineers to teachers, meaning that they could easily become jobless or able to find only unskilled work in a factory. Particularly for ethnic Germans, Party organizations and other local authorities were to discuss each application and attempt to persuade them to change their minds, especially when their emigration plans were not “strictly linked to family 51  As the then Minister of Propaganda, Leonte Răutu, declared in the Politburo meeting of 10 February 1960. File 10/1960, 19. 52  “Notă,” Direct ̦ia Treburilor CC al PMR, 9 May 1958, in Preda and Opriș (2008), 277. 53  File 15/1958, 11.

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reunification.” For those whose application was to be approved, they were to receive not passports, but travel permits that would allow them to travel exclusively to the country of destination. In addition to giving up the ownership of their former property, which they (forcefully) “donated” to the Romanian state, they were also to relinquish their Romanian citizenship, and would never be allowed to return to Romania. The requests for emigration visas were also to be processed gradually, so as to avoid creating the impression of “an emigration campaign.”54 Just a few years earlier, the same communist officials had strongly opposed the Romanian Jews’ emigration. As Gheorghiu-Dej noted in a Politburo meeting in February 1960, the Party leadership held “interminable discussions” about the emigration, about whether or not “to let them go.” Gheorghiu-Dej himself later admitted that he had opposed the emigration, but that he struggled “in vain” because no one wanted to listen.55 In 1954, Petru Groza, former prime minister and de facto president of Romania, shared a letter with the vice president of the Council of Ministers, a letter that he had received from an Israeli citizen whom he had met in the past. The letter writer pointed out that the “international press and the citizens of Israel are distraught about the fate of the Jews in Romania,” who were arrested on the mere accusation of being “Zionists,” an accusation that the author of the letter thought to be senseless and a terrible injustice. Groza annexed a short note to the letter, mentioning that this was just one of the many letters that he had been receiving. He also suggested that “comrade Dej” see the letter.56 By 1958, central officials had convinced themselves that allowing emigration to Israel to resume was the best solution for everyone. This shift in attitude became apparent at a meeting in which the Politburo leadership rallied behind Dej’s new pro-emigration agenda, and harshly berated one Politburo member for his opposition to the Romanian Jews’ emigration. They justified their views by emphasizing that, in contrast to the Romanian citizens who wanted to emigrate elsewhere, the Jews now had their own state.57 The same officials also did not shy away from sharing their barely concealed antisemitic views that the Jews were “former businessmen,

 File 15/1958, 11.  File 10/1960, 19. 56  File 166/1954, 1–2. 57  File 10/1960, 35. 54 55

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hucksters, and déclassé elements, whose presence in the country only contributes to an atmosphere hostile to the [communist] regime.”58 Another factor that likely made them change their mind about the emigration of the Romanian Jews was their interest in supporting the Communist Party of Israel, whose leaders had already made their position clear. In the same meeting in early 1960, Gheorghiu-Dej mentioned a conversation that he had had with “comrade Mikunis” (Shmuel Mikunis, a leader of the Israeli Communist Party). According to Dej, Mikunis told him: “It would be foolish to stop them! They have close relatives, fathers, mothers, children [there]. You can’t stop them.” When sharing this story with other members of the Politburo, Gheorghiu-Dej alluded to his broader hope that the communists would come to power in Israel as well. As he put it, “they would not escape socialism; socialism would come after them!”59 However, the Romanian authorities were less willing to do the same for Romania’s Germans. Such unwillingness stemmed from the opposing stereotypes that they associated with the Jews and the Germans, respectively. In this closed-door meeting, Party leaders described the Jews as being a mostly urban group, a mix of well-educated people who wanted to reunite with their families, or former businessmen who were of “no use” to the communist regime. However, they did not extend the same flexibility to the ethnic Germans, despite their thousands of requests for exit visas. This is because Party officials viewed the ethnic Germans as “peasants,” and thus implicitly as a valuable resource.60 More importantly, government officials considered that they had “solved” the Germans’ situation by the restitution decree of 1954. As Leonte Răutu, a powerful Politburo member, put it succinctly: In the case [of the ethnic Germans], we made a mistake. After August 23 [1944, when the Romanian state abandoned their former alliance with Nazi Germany and joined the Allies, E.G.], there were specific circumstances. We took their houses and land from the working [German] population, and we had to repair that mistake. We did not take such measures with the Jewish population.61

 Ibid, 18.  Ibid., 28. 60  Ibid., 17. 61  Ibid., 19. 58 59

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In short, the Romanian communists gave up any hope of reforming the Romanian Jews, but wanted to hold on tight to Romanian Germans. Believing that the former mistake was remedied and forgotten, they were relying on the ethnic Germans to become part of the socialist nation as loyal Romanian citizens. But the ethnic Germans did not feel the same. In 1960, the same year that Party officials congratulated themselves on how deftly they had repaired their “mistake,” the county deputy of the Banat region, where many ethnic Germans lived, reported to the central Politburo that 4700 houses formerly owned by German peasants remained unclaimed and empty, six years after the decree.62 Central officials did not know what to do with the houses; the county deputy reported that the local authorities had attempted to sell them but no one wanted to buy them as they were too expensive.63 No longer interested in these houses, or in their former village life, the former owners had abandoned them to move elsewhere, likely to a city. And this internal migration would be only the first leg of a more radical uprooting that many ethnic Germans viewed as the end goal: their emigration to West Germany.

Epilogue Eight years (1948 to 1956) may not seem like a long time, historically speaking, but for Romania’s ethnic Germans these years entailed a radical redefinition of their sense of belonging, their social and economic status, and their vision of “home.” By 1954, the Romanian authorities eventually acknowledged the economic loss, marginalization, and suffering that they had inflicted on the Germans as an ethnic group. They tried to fix what they called “a mistake” by offering the Germans their houses and some of their land back, but only on the condition that they become part of the collective farms. The communist regime in postwar Romania hoped that the conditional restitution of houses and land would function as the incentive to persuade ethnic Germans to believe in and belong to the socialist society. However, the dispossession had already solidified a collective mistrust of the state, a sentiment that only increased during the 1960s. The form and location of “home” as a symbolic place of belonging and ethnic identity-­ making became a key currency of negotiation between the  File 20/1960, 8.  File 20/1960, 3.

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socialist regime, the émigré communities, and Western political actors, especially West Germany, as more and more of Romania’s ethnic Germans began to envision making a new “home” elsewhere. By the mid-1960s, some ethnic Germans had become more hopeful for a more flexible communist regime, but many would eventually give up on those hopes, focusing instead on emigration as the only possible route to a dignified life. After Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Nicolae Ceauşescu shrewdly maneuvered his way to power, becoming the new Party leader with an allegedly revisionist agenda. When, in 1968, Ceauşescu summoned well-­ known journalists and writers of German ethnicity to a special meeting, he aimed to signal that his presidency marked a new beginning, far from the Stalinist style of leadership imposed by Gheorghiu-Dej. At the start of the meeting, he declared that the Central Committee wanted to have “a free discussion, with no agenda,” where “everyone could say what they think, if they have anything to say.” “If not,” he said nonchalantly, “then we can adjourn the meeting and enjoy a glass of wine.”64 Little did he know that the meeting would last almost the entire day, as German officials and intellectuals took him at his word and brought up complaint after complaint that they had kept bottled up for years, even decades.65 Time and again, they talked about the ethnic Germans’ unacknowledged deportation to the labor camps in the USSR, about the absence of the history of the German minority from the official historical narrative, and of the fact that German youth were ashamed of their ancestry. They mentioned “the mistrust and aloofness shown by the local authorities to the German population, especially in the countryside.”66 Others pointed out that both officials and ordinary citizens frequently used the term “fascist” to refer to the ethnic Germans. Paul Schuster, a well-known German-language writer, brought up the example of an encounter he had in Viseu, a multiethnic village in northern Romania. When he went there to give a public reading to the local Germans, a local official had no qualms about saying directly to his face: “Here comes Hitler’s son, to hold a literary evening for those idiots!” Schuster noted that “the farther the provincial town, the harsher those insults are, and the more defenseless and thus the sadder and more afraid the offended feel.”67  File 113/1968, 2.  File 113/1968, 71. 66  File 113/1968, 3. 67  File 113/1968, 22. 64 65

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Arnold Hauser, a Saxon writer and editor of the main German-language literary review Neue Literatur, chose to confront Ceauşescu directly about the official silence around the 1945 deportation to the USSR by saying: “Beloved comrade Ceauşescu, … why don’t you [officially, E.G.] address the deportation of Romania’s Germans in one of your speeches? As a whole, this was an ill-judged action, we know that.”68 When Ceauşescu replied, “Do you think that it would solve anything anymore?,” the speaker insisted: “Perhaps in the head and hearts of the people.” To this, Ceauşescu responded, “It might muddle other issues. … You will need to write that not all of the German population supported Hitler. This issue must be demonstrated with facts, [and] must be publicly highlighted in press. But the deportation issue is now behind us.”69 At the end of the meeting, he re-emphasized his position: “Amends have been made to put things in order, to reinstate justice. I believe it is time to put those issues behind us, because they belong to a period that we don’t want to happen again.”70 Ceauşescu’s remarks signaled an exclusively material approach to justice. The central authorities reasoned that if they had returned the houses to their original German owners, the “mistake,” as they called it, would be repaired. However, the representatives of the German intelligentsia tried to convey to Ceaușescu and the Party leadership that material amends were not enough. If they wanted to keep Romania’s Germans in the country, state officials needed to perform an act as critical as the material restitutions: to openly acknowledge the state’s mistreatment of this ethnic group at the end of the war. In other words, property restitution did not implicitly lead to reconciliation. The traumatic memory of the postwar persecutions (justified as retribution) that the Romanian government launched against all of Romania’s ethnic Germans could not be simply whitewashed with promises of material amends. What Ceauşescu did not say at this meeting was that the Romanian government had already started the process that would become known as “the selling of Romania’s Germans,” whereby Federal Germany agreed in secret to pay for the emigration visas that Romania issued to the ethnic Germans. In fact, this process had begun in 1963, with Gheorghiu-Dej’s  File 113/1968, 11.  File 113/1968, 12. 70  File 113/1968, 86, 87. 68 69

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approval, when the Secret Police (Securitate) had negotiated with a lawyer commissioned by Federal Germany to issue exit visas in exchange for hard currency. According to the then Minister of Internal Affairs, Alexandru Drăghici, who coordinated the secret negotiations with Federal Germany, the purchase of exit visas within just one year (1965) had brought the hefty sum of approximately 6 million dollars to the state budget.71 After the exchange had been halted for a few years, it resumed in 1968, under Ceauşescu’s leadership. The exchange—ethnic Germans against millions and millions of Deutsche Marks, alongside luxury cars and other German products—would continue, marked by different moments of renewed or stagnant negotiations, throughout the existence of the communist regime. In 1978, Romania and West Germany ratified a family reunification agreement for the remaining German population, with Romania agreeing to allow 11–13,000 ethnic Germans to emigrate each year in return for hard currency (allegedly intended to reimburse the state for educational expenses).72 Between 1950 and 1989, more than 200,000 ethnic Germans would eventually leave Romania for Federal Germany, leaving behind their houses that ceased to be “homes” and the country that, to many of them, ceased to be a “homeland.”73

Bibliography Bachman, Ronald D., ed. 1989. Romania: A Country Study. Washington, DC: GPO for the Library of Congress. Baier, Hannelore. 2011. Die deutsche Minderheit in Rumänien 1953–1959. In Zwischen Tauwetter und Neostalinismus. Deutsche und andere Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1953–1964, ed. Rudolf Gräf and Gerald Volkmer, 107–117. Munich: IKGS. Bottoni, Stefano. 2010. Transilvania roșie: Comunismul român și problema națională 1944—1965. Cluj-Napoca: Kriterion. Cercel, Cristian. 2014. The Deportation of Romanian Germans to the Soviet Union and Its Place within Transylvanian Saxon Memory Discourses in

71  Florica Dobre et al., Act ̦iunea “Recuperarea.” Securitatea şi emigrarea germanilor din România (1962–1989) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2011), xxxvii. 72  Ronald D. Bachman, ed., Romania: A Country Study (Washington, DC: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1989). Available at http://countrystudies.us/romania/. 73  Some authors talk of approximately 210,000, while others estimate it to be around 236,000.

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Germany in the 1950s and the 1960s. New Europe College Stefan Odobleja Program Yearbook 2012–2013: 49–82. Comisia Prezidenţială Pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România. 2006. “Raport Final.” Bucharest. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/ files/media/documents/article/RAPORT%20FINAL_%20CADCR.pdf. Accessed 23 Jun 2021. de Trégomain, Pierre. 2016. ‘Renversements sémantiques’: Mémoire des expulsions chez les Saxons de Transylvanie. In Fuite et expulsions des Allemands: transnationalité et représentations, 19e–21e siècle, ed. Dominique Herbet and Carola Hähnel, 89–102. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. Diner, Dan. 2007. Memory and Restitution: World War II as a Foundational Event in a Uniting Europe. In Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe, ed. Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg. New York: Berghahn Books. Dobre, Florica, Florian Banu, and Luminița Banu. 2011. Acțiunea “Recuperarea.” Securitatea şi emigrarea germanilor din România (1962–1989). Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică. Fabi, Michael. 2008. Das Hilfskomitee der Siebenbürger Sachsen und evangelischen Banater Schwaben im Ringen um ‘Bleiben oder Gehen?’. In Grenzen leben – Grenzen überwinden. Zur Kirchengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts in OstMittel-Europa, ed. Christian-Erdmann Schott, 55–89. Münster: Lit. Klekowski von Koppenfels, Amanda. 2004. Second-Class Citizens? Restricted Freedom of Movement for Spätaussiedler Is Constitutional. German Law Journal 5 (7): 761–789. Kligman, Gail, and Katherine Verdery. 2011. Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Milata, Paul. 2009. Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS. Cologne: Böhlau. Oltean, Ovidiu. 2017. From Privilege to Restrain: The Migration of Ethnic Germans from Romania and Poland. Cluj-Napoca: RCCMS. http://migrationcenter. ro/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Raport_cercetare_The-migration-ofethnic-germans-from-romania-and-poland_Recasting_Migrants_Voices_ report-1.pdf. Accessed 14 Jun 2021. Preda, Gavriil, and Petre Opriș. 2008. România în Organizația Tratatului de la Varșovia. Documente (1954–1968). Vol. I. Bucharest: Institutul Național pentru Studiul Totalitarismului. Siljak, Ana. 2001. Conclusion. In Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in EastCentral Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, 327–336. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Traşcă, Ottmar. 2015. Andreas Schmidt and the German Ethnic Group in Romania (1940–1944). Euxeinos: 16–19. Vultur, Smaranda. 2018. Germanii din Banat prin povestirile lor. Iași: Polirom.

The Fate of Property in the Kočevje (Gottschee) Region during and after the Second World War Mitja Ferenc

Introduction When speaking about Kočevje (in German, Gottschee), I refer to that part of Slovenia which up to 1941 was inhabited by the Gottschee Germans, or Gottscheers (Fig.  1). They lived essentially in a cluster surrounded by the Slovene-speaking population and were one of the oldest German ethnic groups outside Germany or Austria, and after the First World War the only agrarian German-speaking group in the territories otherwise inhabited mostly by Slovenes. The beginnings of their settlement in this area are associated with the House of Ortenburg, which brought in German colonists from Carinthia and eastern Tyrol

M. Ferenc (*) Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors' Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_12

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G E R M A N Y

DR

I TA LY

AV

A

BA

NO

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NA state border of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

border between the Drava banovina and the Sava banovina Germans

Fig. 1  German settlements in the Drava Banovina before the Second World War. Source: M. Ferenc, Nekdanji nemški jezikovni otok na Kočevskem, 24

in the fourteenth century, mostly for economic reasons.1 In this chapter, I discuss the fate of the Kočevje region and its German-speaking population as a consequence of occupation and war that started with the destruction of Yugoslavia in 1941. In April of that year, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria attacked, dismembered, and occupied Yugoslavia within a matter of days. In disentangling the layers of cause and effect, I show how the shadow of these events continues to hover over today’s Slovenian society. The issue of the Kočevje Germans was hardly addressed before 1991, when Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Only since then has extensive research been conducted in archives both in Slovenia and abroad, research that includes topographical surveys of the landscape, that is, assessment using technological tools such as 3-D laser scanning (Lidar) in order to rediscover and determine what was lost: property boundaries of the 1  Ivan Simonič, Zgodovina kočevskega ozemlja. Kočevski zbornik. Razprave o Kočevski in njenih ljudeh (Ljubljana: Družba sv. Cirila in Metoda, 1939), 51; Erich Petschauer, “Das Jahrhundertbuch”: Gottschee and Its People through the Centuries (New York: Gottscheer Relief Association, 1984), 34, 35.

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land, villages, houses, gardens, forests, roads, and other infrastructure that vanished and/or was remodeled after the resettlement of the population in 1942.

Toward the Point of No Return: The Situation Before the War With the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, Germans became a minority in all successor states, with the exception of Austria. According to the 1921 population census, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was populated by half a million people who identified German as their mother tongue. They were the largest minority, but lived scattered across various regions of Yugoslavia, lacking shared traditions or connections, with different social structures as well as different economic, cultural, and political development. Most of them lived in Vojvodina (63 percent), with others in Croatia (25 percent), Bosnia and Herzegovina (4 percent), and Slovenia (8 percent). The Germans in the Slovene territories were thus among the smaller minority groups. However, in terms of economy and social life, they were the best organized, harboring a rich cultural and political tradition.2 According to the Austrian population census of 1910, 106,377 people who used German as their language of communication lived in the Slovene lands that would become part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918. Just over a quarter of these lived in the region of Carniola, and here mostly in Ljubljana and in the Kočevje region.3 There was a significant difference between Kočevje and other ethnic Germans in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. While the latter were mostly urban dwellers belonging to the privileged bourgeoisie, the Gottschee Germans were mostly peasants. Thus, between late imperial times and the outbreak of the Second World War, their number decreased due to economically 2  Dušan Biber, Nacizem in Nemci v Jugoslaviji 1933–1941 (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva, 1966), 11–15; Janez Cvirn, Trdnjavski trikotnik: politična orientacija Nemcev na Spodnjem Štajerskem (1861–1914) (Maribor: Obzorja, 1997); Janez Cvirn, “Nemško (avstrijsko) in slovensko zgodovinopisje o Nemcih na Slovenskem (1848–1941),” in “Nemci” na Slovenskem. 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak (Ljubljana: Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete, 1998), 23–52. 3  Spezialortsrepertorium der Österreichischen Länder. Spezialortsrepertorium von Krain Bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1910. VI.  Krain (Vienna: Verlag der deutschösterreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1919).

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motivated emigration, as did the rest of the village population in the Slovenian lands. As the Kočevje region was mostly blanketed in forests, and agriculture could not provide sustenance for the entire population, for centuries many had resorted to peddling instead. As peddlers (referred to as havzirarji, from the German word Hausierer), they engaged in small trade in wooden wares, dried fruit, or fabrics, going from door to door and from village to village. Given that about half the male population was involved in peddling, agriculture was left mainly to the women. As mostly poor people, the Gottscheers toward the end of the nineteenth century joined the increasing number of emigrants from northern Yugoslavia, particularly to the United States. They even outnumbered those emigrating from other parts of the Slovene lands. By 1936, the Kočevje region had lost one-fifth of its population within five decades, leaving only 17,200 people, and by 1941 this number had decreased further to 12,500. Thus, even before the outbreak of the Second World War, the area was characterized by many abandoned farms and depopulated villages. By this time, almost one in four houses outside the main town of Kočevje was uninhabited (930 out of 4248).4

Occupation and Resettlement Following the attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Slovene territory, the Drava Banovina, was divided among four states. The southern part (Dolenjska and Notranjska) was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy and was referred to as the Ljubljana province (Provincia di Lubiana). The Prekmurje, the Banovina’s northeastern part, was occupied by Hungary. A small area (nine villages) was allocated to the newly established Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). And the Germans took possession of what they called the “occupied territories of Carinthia and Carniola” (Besetzte Gebiete Kärntens und Krains) and Lower Styria, intending to annex both to the neighboring Austrian lands of Carinthia and Styria. Formally, such annexation never materialized, for various reasons, not the least of which was the massive partisan armed resistance that began within weeks of the destruction of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, under orders, the heads of the civil administration (Chefs der Zivilverwaltung, 4  Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja (Institute for Ethnic Studies, INV), Minority Institute, f. 142, Nationality Cadastre of Gottschee Villages; Janez Šumrada and Tone Ferenc, “Kočevarji,” in Enciklopedija Slovenije, vol. 5 (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1991), 179–81, 180.

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CdZ) in both Carinthia and Styria introduced German law to Slovene occupied areas and governed them as if they had been annexed. The German occupiers’ plan was to deport the Slovenian population en masse (220,000 to 260,000 people), to settle large numbers of Germans, and to encourage a speedy and thorough Germanization of the land, including among those Slovenes who were not expelled. Again, due to varying circumstances, including, notably, the partisan uprising, the plan was carried out only partially. The number of Slovenes deported to the socalled Altreich, to Croatia, or to Serbia, was in the end around 80,000. The Gottschee Germans, particularly their leaders, had been looking forward to Kočevje’s incorporation into the German-occupied territory and were deeply disappointed to find themselves in the Italian-occupied area. The Nazi authorities, who resettled large numbers of Germans from Europe’s German-occupied territories to the Reich, also envisioned such resettlement for Kočevje’s small German community.5 They planned to create a German “bulwark” toward the Slavic southeast by settling the Gottschee Germans, as well as Germans from elsewhere (Dobruja, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Bosnia), in the area situated along the rivers Sava and Sotla.6 This stretch of land was about 100 kilometers in length and 10 to 15 kilometers wide, and saw the expulsion of the bulk of its Slovene population (about 37,000 people) to the Altreich, the NDH and to Serbia.7 The governments of the German Reich and the Kingdom of Italy reached an agreement on the resettlement plans for the Province of Ljubljana on 31 August 1941 in Rome.8 Article 1 of this agreement stipulated that German citizens and ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia (Volksdeutsche) were to leave for the Reich or the German-occupied areas, and hence become German citizens, forfeiting their Italian citizenship. Questions related to their property were to be regulated by the German resettlement society (Deutsche 5  Foreign Office Library London, Photocopies of Documents Issued by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, doc. H297846, Minutes of the Ministers’ Conference in Vienna, 18–19 April 1941. 6  Tone Ferenc, Quellen zur nationalsozialistischen Entnationalisierungspolitik in Slowenien 1941–1945/Viri o nacistični raznarodovalni politiki v Sloveniji 1941–1945 (Maribor: Obzorja, 1980), doc. 21, Vorschlag des RKFDV über Ansetzung von Umsiedlern in den neuen Südostgebieten vom 17.4.1941. 7  Ferenc (1980), docs. 115, 157, 160, and 161. 8  The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, Branch II (AS-II), Deutscher Umsiedlungs­ bevollmächtigter Laibach (DUB), folder (f.) 1234, Vereinbarungen zwischen der Deutschen Reichregierung und der Italienischen Regierung über die Umsiedlung der Deutschen Staastsangehörigen und Volksdeutschen aus der Provinz Laibach, 31 August 1941.

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Umsiedlungs-Treuhand GmbH, DUT), the organization that managed property issues of deported and resettled Germans in other occupied regions too. Those who moved would be allowed to bring their movables with them, along with farming tools and one-third of their livestock. Ninety-five percent of the Gottschee Germans opted for resettlement, and along with various measures that placed them under pressure or threat, the influence of Nazi ideology played an important role in these decisions. The great majority of them (over 11,500 people) boarded 135 trains between 14 November 1941 and 22 January 1942 and were resettled to Lower Styria, to the stretch of land between the rivers Sava and Sotla which had been largely emptied of its Slovene population (Fig. 2).9 The DUT took possession of anything the resettled Gottschee Germans had been forced to leave behind and sold it to the Italian Agricultural Real Estate Institute “Emona” (Istituto agricolo immobiliare “Emona”), a state agency founded on 30 November 1941  in Ljubljana, but administered from Rome, and forming part of the agreement between Berlin and Rome. “Emona’s” principal function was to assess and then administer, value, and liquidate the real estate in towns as well as the rural and forested areas of the Italian-occupied Province of Ljubljana that had belonged to the resettled Germans, and thus it was principally responsible for the Kočevje region. It was the DUT’s Italian counterpart.10 Nazi Germany’s concern for the cultural heritage of the Gottschee Germans amidst the raging war and amidst plans to destroy their lives was remarkable. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, was founder and head of the Berlin-based research institution of the SS, Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe, later simply Das Ahnenerbe, infamous for its task of researching the space, spirit, deeds, and heritage of northern race Indogermanism and, among other 9  National Archives Washington (NAW), Deutsches Auslandsinstitut Stuttgart, Microcopy (T-81), roll 306, Abschlussbericht über die Erfassung der Deutschen in der Gottschee und im Gebiet der Stadt Laibach durch die Einwandererzentralstelle des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 8 December 1941; AS-II, fonds Branch Office of the Commissioner for Strengthening the German Culture Brežice (DDV Rann), f. 693, T-81, roll 306, an overview of Sturm transports from Kočevska from 14 November 1941 to 22 January 1942. On the Gottschee Germans’ resettlement, see Hans Hermann Frensing, Die Umsiedlung der Gottscheer Deutschen: Das Ende einer südostdeutschen Volksgruppe (Munich: R.  Oldenbourg, 1970) and Tone Ferenc, Nacistična raznarodovalna politika v Sloveniji v letih 1941–1941 (Maribor: Obzorja, 1968). 10  Tone Ferenc, “Problemi ponovne poselitve Kočevske med vojno,” Kronika 43, no. 3 (1995): 49–68, 50.

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today’s state border

linguistic area

immigration area of the Germans along the rivers Sava and Sotla

Fig. 2  The Kočevje region and the settlement area of the Germans along the rivers Sava and Sotla. Source: M.  Ferenc, Nekdanji nemški jezikovni otok na Kočevskem, 31

things, the systematic engagement in art looting. As early as 14 July 1941, during the preparations for the resettlement of the Gottschee Germans, Himmler ordered the establishment of a cultural commission of the Ahnenerbe located at the office of the German Resettlement Plenipotentiary in the Province of Ljubljana (Deutscher Umsiedlungsbevollmächtigter für die Provinz Laibach) to see to the protection and transfer of possessions labeled as cultural heritage to the new location. Later, this transfer was also stipulated in Article 6 of the agreement between Germany and Italy. The elaborate cultural commission consisted of eight workgroups (Arbeitsgruppen), covering the areas of peasants’ houses, customs and folk beliefs, dialects and linguistic geography, folk poetry, art history, history, film, as well as registers of births, deaths, and marriages. It reached its goals only partially, but managed to produce 6 kilometers (four reels) of film documenting the resettlement between 1 and 6 December 1941, along with 106,000 photographs of registers of births, deaths, and marriages, as well as other archival materials. Among other matters, it relocated two “typical Germanic” wooden

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houses and auxiliary buildings to the town of Brežice (in German, Rann) in the new settlement area, gathered ethnographic materials and transferred them from the museum in Kočevje to that in Brežice, and relocated libraries.11

Kočevje After the Germans’ Relocation A few dozen villages were left completely depopulated after the resettlement. In total, about 5000 Slovenes and 500 Germans remained in Kočevje. The Italian occupying forces and their real estate agency “Emona” sought to make long-term profits through the repopulation of the countryside and the expeditious sale of houses in the town of Kočevje. They sought to rent out farms to Slovenes, particularly to those arriving in the Province of Ljubljana from the German or Hungarian occupied areas. In this way, the Italian High Commissioner for the Province of Ljubljana, Emilio Grazioli, intended to solve the problem of their accommodation and sustenance.12 However, fewer people were interested in renting than expected. By mid-April 1942, 747 families had concluded a tenancy agreement.13 These, however, were mostly peasants who maintained farms in nearby areas and sought to improve their economic position by expanding their agricultural land.14 After the resettlement, it took a few months before in June 1942 the Executive Committee of the Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta), the Slovene branch of the Yugoslav partisan resistance formed within weeks of the beginning of the occupation (in July 1941), and the General Staff of the National Liberation Army of Slovenia moved into the abandoned region, making the village of Stari Breg the center of the first Slovene territory liberated from Axis control. This brought “Emona’s” feeble resettlement endeavors to a grinding halt. The agency then contemplated colonizing the fertile parts of the Kočevje region with Italians and letting 11  Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (PA AA Berlin), NS 21, Bd. 223, Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Kulturkommission (der Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft Das Ahnenerbe) beim Deutschen Umsiedlungsbevollmächtigten für die Provinz Laibach, erstattet durch: Prof. Dr. Hans Schwalm, SS-Hauptsturmführer. 12  AS-II, fonds Istituto agricolo Emona (Emona), f. 1216, the study “Colonizzazione del territorio di Kočevje,” 20 March 1942. 13  AS-II, Emona, f. 1216, A Report about Populating the Kočevje District, 15 April 1942. 14  AS-II, Emona, f. 1216, Reports Written by the President of the Commission for the Resettlement of Kočevska, Ciro Moseri, between 26 January and 16 May 1942.

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the rest become overgrown with forests, given that Italy had a huge need for timber.15 Nothing came of this as the war proceeded to prevent it: Kočevje became the location of the Italian army’s struggle against the partisans. When the territory liberated by the latter was extended to cover a large part of the Province of Ljubljana, the Italian army organized a concerted offensive with the aim to destroy the bulk of the partisan units, restore military posts, and reinstall Italian administration in the countryside. They set ablaze and demolished the empty houses of the Gottschee Germans, preventing the partisans from setting up camp in these buildings. But at the same time this also meant an end to “Emona’s” plan to bring in settlers to work the land and the forests. The agency’s plans for when the offensive was finished16 and for after the war’s end17 became very modest, downsizing their realm of interest to three valleys and to felling trees along the roads and the railway. The war indeed went on and continued to ravage the region. A map produced by the partisan leadership in 1944 demonstrates that by then 97 villages in the Kočevje region were burnt to the ground, 17 were partly burnt down, and 21 were no longer even marked.18 After Italy’s capitulation in September 1943, the entire area, with the exception of the town of Kočevje, was quickly controlled by the partisans. The Province of Ljubljana was taken over by the German occupiers. In the town of Kočevje, the presence of the German police and the Slovene Home Guard was felt acutely. The Slovene Home Guard (Slovensko Domobranstvo, German Slowenische Landwehr) was a collaborationist military organization established by the German administration in the Province of Ljubljana, which was after Italy’s capitulation occupied by the Germans. It was established in order to fight the partisans, and was supplied with weapons and other equipment by the German administration. By way of incursions into liberated territories, the Home Guard and the German police sought to destroy the partisan movement in the Kočevje. More than any other area in the 15  AS-II, Emona, f. 1216, Appunto sul ripopolamento della Slovenia e la sua economia nel futuro, 28 July 1942. 16  AS-II, Emona, f. 1216, Giuseppe Puppini, Il nuovo orientamento politico verso la Slovenia nei suoi riflessi sull’attività economica dell’ Emona, 7 August 1942; Ferenc (1995), 61. 17  Tone Ferenc, Fašisti brez krinke: dokumenti 1941–1942 (Maribor: Obzorja, 1987), doc. 99. 18  AS-II, Presidency of the Slovene National Liberation Council (PSNOS), f. 473/1, Map of burned villages in the Kočevje region.

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Slovene ethnic territory Kočevski Rog provided a safe haven to the political and military leadership of the partisan movement, different institutions, field hospitals, pharmacies, print shops, and workshops. Immediately upon liberating the land, in June 1942, the partisan political leadership declared void any agreements between the two occupying forces and issued a decree stipulating that the Liberation Front would take over the land previously owned by the resettled Gottschee Germans, that is, the land now administered by “Emona.” They allowed their ranks and the remaining population to use (for mowing, fruit picking) the territory they controlled free of charge.19 In the spring of 1944, the partisan leadership established a Commission for the Administration of National Property (Komisija za upravo narodne imovine, KUNI),20 which managed the property of the former German population up to the liberation in May 1945 or, in part, until the Commission’s dissolution in 1947.

The Property of the Kočevje Germans after the War’s End After the war, Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans were outlawed on the grounds of collective guilt. They were held responsible for collaborating with the occupier, particularly when it came to ethnocidal measures against the Slovene population, such as mass expulsion, Germanization, mass violence, and forced mobilization into the Wehrmacht. All retributive measures taken against Yugoslavia’s Germans were orchestrated by the military and political police Department for the Protection of the People (in Serbocroatian Odeljenje za zas ̌titu naroda, Slovene Oddelek za zas ̌čito naroda, OZNA), founded in 1944 and operational until 1946. Upon the German capitulation, in May 1945 between 15,000 and 16,000 ethnic Germans are estimated to have fled from the Slovene lands across the border into Austria alongside the retreating German army and their auxiliaries from the whole of Yugoslavia—the Slovene Homeguard, the Serbian Chetniks, the Croatian Ustasha, Muslim formations from 19  Slovenski poročevalec, 16 June 1942, decree about the distribution and management of the resettled Gottschee Germans’ land in the liberated territory. 20  AS-II, Presidency of the Slovene National Liberation Council  – Commission for the Identification of the Occupiers’ Crimes (PSNOS-KUNI), f. 497/I, Decree about the Appointment of the Commission for the Administration of National Property (KUNI) with the Presidency of the Slovene National Liberation Committee (SNOS).

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Bosnia-Herzegovina, and several other groups. However, the British forces controlling southern Austria struck a deal with the Yugoslav partisans, who had been their official allies since 1943. They interned the retreating forces and then sent them back to Yugoslavia, where tens of thousands were killed, either in mass shootings, on death marches, or as a consequence of harsh treatment during internment. The Germans who had not fled but remained in Yugoslavia were targeted too, interned in camps, subjected to forced labor, expelled, or killed.21 The exact number of those killed has never been established, but it can be estimated at between 1000 and 1500.22 Kočevje was one of the killing sites of these events, and the concealed graves of thousands of victims, unknown for decades after the war, left a strong mark. The postwar retributive mass killings were a topic that was not to be addressed in public. Shortly after the events, the federal authorities in Belgrade ordered the mass graves to be covered up and destroyed.23 As was the case in the other Yugoslav federal republics, in Slovenia too concentration camps for the ethnic Germans were established, something that was silenced throughout the existence of socialist Yugoslavia. The OZNA set up a central camp for Germans from all Slovenian lands in Strnišče pri Ptuju, and several others were located in Hrastovec near Sv. Lenart in Slovenske Gorice, Brestrnica and Studenci near Maribor, Teharje

21  On the fate of Germans in Yugoslavia, see works by Vladimir Geiger, for example, Geiger, “Represija nad pripadniki nemške manjšine na Hrvaškem, v Bosni in Hercegovini ter Vojvodini, 1944–1948,” in Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 53, no. 1 (2013): 122–36; Geiger, “Skica za povijest Nijemaca i Austrijanaca u Bosni i Hercegovini, s posebnim osvrtom na njihovu suď binu tijekom Drugoga svjetskog rata i u poraću,” Hercegovina: Casopis za kulturno i povijesno nasljeđe 26, no. 1 (2015): 286. See also Božo Repe, “‘Nemci’ na Slovenskem po drugi svetovni vojni,” in “Nemci” na Slovenskem 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak (Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, 1998), 170; and Zoran Janjetović, Between Hitler and Tito: The Disappearance of the Vojvodina Germans (Belgrade: Self-published, 2005), 249–86; Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien 1944–1948. Die Stationen eines Völkermords (Munich: Donauschwäbisches Archiv, 1998); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, Band V. Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Jugoslawien (Munich: dtv, 1984); Leidensweg der Deutschen im kommunistischen Jugoslawien, II, Erlebnisberichte über die Verbrechen an den Deutschen durch das Tito-Regime in der Zeit von 1944–1948 (Munich/ Sindelfingen: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, 1993). 22  Repe (1998), 145–72, 158. 23  Mitja Ferenc, “Zakon o prikritih vojnih grobiščih in pokopu žrtev in urejanje prikritih grobišč in morišč,” in Nemoč laži. Poročilo 4 Komisije Vlade RS za reševanje vprašanj prikritih grobišč 2011–2018, ed. Jože Dežman (Ljubljana: Družina, 2018), 64–109, 101.

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near Celje, and also in Kočevje.24 The final goal was collective expatriation. The first to be expelled, in an unorganized, retributive manner, were those Germans who had remained in the stretch of land between the rivers Sava and Sotla, the place where more than 11,000 Kočevje Germans had been resettled in 1941–1942 and more than 37,000 Slovenes deported. Of the latter, those who had survived began to return to their homes. The manner in which these “wild expulsions” happened was similar across many parts of Europe.25 The second concerted wave of expulsions between September and November 1945 was organized by the OZNA and targeted those who had been interned in the mentioned camps. These people were mostly transported by train to Austria. The third and largest wave took place between December 1945 and June 1946 and systematically encompassed almost all remaining Germans in Slovenia, close to 10,000 people.26 The British and Soviet administration in Austria opposed the uncontrolled admittance of these German expellees, because Yugoslavia was not among the countries that had been (partly ex post facto) allowed to expel their German population by virtue of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference (these were Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary). Also, the allies in Austria did not wish to create the logistical problem of having to accommodate the expellees, who had to return to Yugoslavia’s internment camps. It is not certain, but it can be assumed that the majority of the remaining Gottschee Germans were expelled in the first of the three waves described above. The most important legal basis for the Yugoslavs settling scores with their German population was the Decree on the Transfer of Enemy Property into State Ownership that was adopted by the presidency of the Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Serbocroatian Antifašističko v(ij)eće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije, Slovenian  AS-II, Repatriation Staff, f. 132, Instructions issued by the OZNA, 26 June 1945.  See, for example, Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 95–115. 26  The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, Branch –I, Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia (AS-I), Materials Concerning Germans in Slovene Ethnic Territory. A List Containing 5433 expelled Germans; Tone Ferenc, “Nemci na Slovenskem med drugo svetovno vojno,” in “Nemci” na Slovenskem, 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak (Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, 1998), 125–42. 24 25

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Antifašistični svet narodne osvoboditve Jugoslavije, AVNOJ) on 21 November 1944.27 It stipulated that German property (that of the German state, citizens, and people of German ethnicity) in Yugoslavia was to be confiscated and its ownership transferred to the new Yugoslav state. By the end of 1945, the authorities had issued 20,293 confiscation orders, 7345 of which pertained to Kočevje, encompassing 2774 farms.28 The total value of the confiscated property has never been convincingly established.29 Why did the Yugoslav authorities in Kočevje confiscate the property of the Germans, rather than of the Italian state agency “Emona” that had purchased it in 1941 from the German Reich? The AVNOJ presidency flatly declared void all legal transactions undertaken by the occupying forces, and thus also the contract between the DUT and “Emona.”30 The Yugoslavs, however, confiscated the property of the Kočevje Germans relying on the list of people who had opted for resettlement published in a book by the German plenipotentiary for resettlement in July 1942.31 Ida Retelj Röthel, born in Stare Žage in 1932, belonged to one of the few families who opted against resettlement, stayed in the Kočevje region, and supported the partisans in their fight against the German occupiers. She describes well how the existential pressure, when faced with resettlement, split up families. Being ethnic German meant, at the war’s end, being targeted by the retributive accusation of collective responsibility for the Nazi crimes. The motif of “collective guilt” was given more importance by the  The Official Gazette Uradni list (Ur. l.) of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFJ), No. 2, 6 February 1945, Decree on the Transfer of Enemy Property into State Ownership issued by the Presidency of AVNOJ, on State Administration of the Property of Absent Persons and on the Confiscation of Property Forcefully Appropriated by the Occupying Forces. 28  Nikola Gaćeša, Agrarna reforma i kolonizacija u Jugoslaviji 1945–1948 (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1984), 78–9, 362. 29  Jože Prinčič, “Podržavljenje nemške imovine na slovenskem ozemlju po drugi svetovni vojni (1945–1955),” in “Nemci” na Slovenskem 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak (Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, 1998), 245–70, 268. 30  Ur. l., DFJ, No. 4, 13 February 1945, Decision on the Repealing and Nullity of All Legal Provisions Enacted by the Occupation Forces and Their Collaborators during the Occupation; on the Validity of Decisions Issued during That Time; on the Repealing of Legal Provisions Which Were in Force at the Time of the Enemy Occupation issued by the Presidency of AVNOJ. 31  Verzeichnis der Volks- und Reichsdeutschen Umsiedler, die auf Grund des Abkommens vom 31. August 1941 aus der Provinz Laibach umgesiedelt wurden, https://gottschee.de/ Dateien/Dokumente/Web%20Deutsch/Umsiedlungsverzeichnis/nachname.php?b=A. 27

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new regime than the fact that among the Germans there were also those (few), like her family, who had refused to be instrumentalized by the Nazis and had supported the liberation front: When the Gottscheers decided to leave, my father said that our family would not go anywhere because it was not known how everything would end. People assured him that they were going to greener pastures, saying that things could not get worse if they left these forests and stones. My sister Hana was the only member of our family who insisted on going, and she went. She joined others who left for the outskirts of Brežice, where the locals had been expelled from their homes that were then inhabited by the Gottscheers. […] Mother and father hated the Germans very much, even though they knew that they were of the same descent, and would offer their last slice of bread to the partisans. When we slaughtered a pig, my father gave half the meat to the partisans. […] My parents were disappointed after the liberation. Old and sick, without means to support themselves, they applied for welfare benefits, but received nothing. […] I can only stress that the Gottscheers who did not fall for Hitler’s propaganda and stayed in their homes did not get any recognition for having collaborated with the National Liberation Army. Nevertheless, we were happier than those who left for uncertainty and now visit their overgrown fields and ruins of their former homes […].32

The process of confiscation took a peculiar twist when it came to property owned by those Germans who had emigrated to the United States before the war and obtained US citizenship. Many of these still had immovable property in Kočevje, and the confiscation decree did not extend to them. However, Yugoslavia and the United States resolved the issue by way of an agreement in July 1948. Yugoslavia deposited 17 million dollars at the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States in Washington, DC, where people could file compensation claims. Their property was then transferred into state ownership, making the United States effectively complicit in a communist nationalization scheme.33 The reasons with which the new Yugoslav authorities justified the nationalization of German property ranged from ethical and moral, national and security arguments to ideological and economic ones. A 32  Marija Makarovič et al., Črmošnjiško-poljanska dolina in njeni ljudje. Kočevarji staroselci in Slovenci iz preteklosti v sedanjost (Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU, 2005), 499, 502. 33  For more on the subject, see Mitja Ferenc, “Die Beschlagnahme des Eigentums der Gottscheer Deutschen,” Südost-Forschungen 72 (2013): 133–57.

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dominant argument was compensation for damages incurred during the occupation years. But by distributing land confiscated from Germans (particularly in Vojvodina) among people who had none, the authorities gained sympathy among peasants, who were the majority population. Confiscation of German property posed little risk, as such collective punishment was seen by many as justified, while a general nationalization implied a high risk, as it would have caused huge dissatisfaction among the populace. There were a host of other legal provisions that curtailed the Germans’ rights further. Property issues were touched on by the Agrarian Reform and Colonization Act of August 1945, according to which confiscated German property was either to be given to colonists or to remain under state ownership.34 The Confiscation Act and the Implementation of the Confiscation Act,35 adopted in June 1945 and July 1946, respectively, finally defined the confiscation procedure. It foresaw expulsion and property confiscation, but also loss of Yugoslav citizenship. The latter was implemented de jure on 4 December 1948, with the coming into force of the Citizenship of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia Act.36

The Slow and Partial Filling of the Close-­to-Total Void The situation in Kočevje at the war’s end was dire: of a total of 176 settlements, half had been abandoned and most of them were not repopulated. Two-thirds of what had been 3945 houses were either damaged or demolished, a number almost twice as high as the Slovene average. In July 1945, party executives carried out a census which brought forth that, although the residential buildings in Kočevje represented 1.9 percent of all houses in Slovenia, the number of those that had been damaged or demolished amounted to 14.4 percent.37 Industrial plants were scarce here, and these too were either demolished or severely damaged. There was no talk of rebuilding what had been demolished, as this superseded the available  Ur. l., DFJ, No. 64, 28 August 1945.  Ur. l., DFJ, No. 40, 12 June 1945. 36  The Official Gazette of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FLRJ), no. 105; cf. Repe (1998). 37  The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia (AS), Ministry of Finance (MF), f. 122, Census Taken on 15 July 1945  in the District of the Executive District People’s Committee of Kočevje. 34 35

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Fig. 3  The village of Dolenja Topla Reber before September 1937. Source: Kočevje Regional Museum

manpower, financial means, and construction materials. Hence, only those villages that were easily accessible and damaged were considered for reconstruction in 1945–1946. Burnt-down villages were assigned for mowing and pasture, and what was left of them fell into complete ruin soon after (Figs. 3, 4, 5).38 The resettlement (colonization) of Kočevje on estates formerly owned by Germans was an important element of the economic revival of the area. Soon after the war, the Yugoslav authorities embarked on an agrarian reform, and Kočevje played an important ideological role because, as a report by the Section for Agrarian Reform and Colonization at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry specified in March 1946, here “combatants will densely populate villages that were abandoned by Germans.”39 Accordingly, who expressed interest in settling in the area was examined 38  AS, MF, f. 4, Proposal Concerning the Administration and Distribution of State Property in Kočevska, 22 October 1945. 39  AS, MF, f. 7, The Implementation of the Agrarian Reform in Slovenia, Report Produced by the Section for Agrarian Reform and Colonization, 15 and 27 March 1946.

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Fig. 4  The village of Dolenja Topla Reber in 1992. Source: Mitja Ferenc

politically—in that particular month, for example, only about half of those (540 out of 1060) were deemed suitable.40 In spring 1947, following repeated postponements of the colonization, the People’s Republic of Slovenia’s Ministry of Agriculture decided that Kočevje was suitable solely for forestry and agriculture, that is, for the implementation of a state-owned farm that would engage in animal husbandry, particularly cattle and sheep production. This Agricultural Forestry Estate Kočevje (Kmetijsko Gozdarsko Posestvo Kočevje) was later renamed several times, hence I refer to it simply as the region’s state-owned estate.41 Settlement 40  AS, MF, f. 49, The Implementation of the Agrarian Reform in Slovenia, Report by the Section for Agrarian Reform and Colonization at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, 16 March 1946. 41  Historical Archives Ljubljana (ZAL), District People’s Committee of Kočevje (OLO Kočevje), box 15, fasc. 451, Proposals for Establishing an Agricultural Holding in Kočevska and Decisions Associated with Plans for the Establishment of an Agricultural Holding in Kočevska.

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Fig. 5  Well and ruins of a house in Gornja Topla Reber in 1990. Source: Mitja Ferenc

was allowed only to state employees or adherents to farming cooperatives, which were modeled after those in the Soviet Union and founded alongside the state-owned estate. Originally 13 cooperatives had been planned, of which only 5, with 393 members, were actually established.42 Kočevje was thus to become a model socialist agricultural region; it also became a site for internment camps, both for POWs and for politically “unreliable” people. Following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, secret military bases were built in each Yugoslav republic, including Slovenia. Here, the remote and deserted Kočevje came in handy. About 200 square kilometers were closed off and became a restricted military area. Those who worked in the cooperatives were faced with poor working conditions, and within a few years most decided to merge with the state-­ owned estate, which at least guaranteed a regular monthly paycheck. The land confiscated from the Kočevje Germans came to be managed by two 42  AS-I, Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia, f. 21, Report by the Commission about the Situation in Agricultural Farming Cooperatives in the Districts of Kočevje and Črnomelj, 5 August 1949.

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enterprises, the mentioned Agricultural Forestry Estate Kočevje, and from 1953 onward also by the State Estate Snežnik (Državno Posestvo Snežnik) in the restricted area of Kočevska Reka. Privately owned land was scarce. Elsewhere in Slovenia, as in Vojvodina, the dispossessed German residential and auxiliary buildings, or land, were granted to colonists free of charge.43 In Kočevje by 1960 there were 1142 farms, totaling only 3959 hectares in size. As many as 71 percent of the peasants did not own any land, as compared to a mere 10 percent in Slovenia as a whole.44 After the war, Kočevje’s population density was the lowest in Slovenia and differed greatly from the republic’s average. In the subsequent decades, the number of who settled here more permanently rose slowly, with many coming from other Yugoslav republics, mainly Croatia.45 From 1953, the state started to allow the purchase or building of houses on rented land and created more favorable conditions to do so. As in other areas of society, combatants of the national liberation war, family members of fallen combatants, and disabled veterans were given priority.46 Yet, even today, Kočevje has not caught up with prewar population levels. In addition, more than half of the region’s inhabitants live in the town of Kočevje, while the countryside remains sparsely populated. The year 1953 also marked the moment when Yugoslavia cut diplomatic ties with the Vatican (it would resume them only in 1966), and in the following years all extant churches and chapels in Kočevje were destroyed. This was an act immediately motivated by the anti-Catholic spur of the moment, and it helped that a large part of Kočevje was a closed-off military zone, while the rest had been modeled in a strictly ideological sense. However, given that nowhere else in Slovenia were churches targeted in a similar way, it is quite obvious that the regime had few qualms about targeting the remnant sacral structures, signs of Kočevje’s German culture. In later years, church buildings that had not been destroyed were used as barns or storage facilities, and finally left to

 ZAL, OLO Kočevje, box 15, fasc. 451, Economic Plan for Kočevska, 23 March 1947.  Savezni zavod za statistiko, Popis stanovništva 1961 (Popis 1961), Vol. XV, Poljoprivredno Stanovništvo. Rezultati za Naselja (Belgrade: Savezni zavod za statistiko, 1966). 45  Popis 1961, Vol. VI, Vitalna, etnička i migraciona obeležja. Rezultati za opštine (Belgrade: Savezni zavod za statistiko, 1967). 46  AS, MF, f. 97, map 35/1. 43 44

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ruin.47 As a result, today only 23 out of formerly 123 churches in 17 parishes are preserved, all of which are located in the surroundings of Kočevje town, where villages were repopulated after the war.48 Chapels and shrines experienced a similar fate, with only one-tenth of more than 400 still existing. The majority of the formerly 39 cemeteries were either razed to the ground or had German gravestones removed.49

Conclusion: The Void that Persists Research shows that at the end of the nineteenth century forests covered 41 percent of Kočevje, in 1972 82 percent, and today over 90 percent. Simultaneously, as described above, the population after 1945 was focused in the town of Kočevje and its surrounding villages. Elsewhere in the region, the decrease in the rural population was much more prominent than in other parts of Slovenia.50 Traces of the former German-inhabited villages are often hard to find. These can consist of fruit trees, which are slowly swallowed up by the forest, remains of concrete-­ clad wells, often featuring the date of construction and owners’ initials, or foundations of buildings, whose ruins otherwise were mostly removed. German surnames are still featured on the portals of a few houses.51

47  AS, The Government of the Republic of Slovenia (VRS), 1730, fasc. Political Commission of the Executive Committee of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, Minutes of Sessions held in 1953 and 1954; AS, VRS, box 1671, The Communication of the Diocesan Curia Addressed to the Commission for Religion, dated 22 December 1953, 17 February 1954, 13 February 1954, Memorandum Sent by the Parish Administrator Anton Pogorelec to the Kočevje District People’s Committee, 8 February 1954. 48  Mitja Ferenc, Kočevska: izgubljena kulturna dediščina kočevskih Nemcev/Gottschee: das verlorene Kulturerbe der Gottscheer Deutschen (Ljubljana: Ministrstvo za kulturo, Zavod Republike Slovenije za varstvo naravne in kulturne dediščine, 1993), 79–85. For details on each village, see Mitja Ferenc and Gojko Zupan, Lost Gottschee Villages in Slovenia: The Gottschee Germans Used to Live Among Us. Parts I, II, III. Historia, 26, 27, 28 (Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, 2018–20). 49  Mitja Ferenc, Gojko Zupan, and Mateja Bavdaž, Pokopališča in nagrobniki kočevskih Nemcev/Friedhöfe und Grabsteine der Gottscheer Deutschen/Cemeteries and Tombstones of the Gottscheer Germans (Ljubljana: Zavod za varstvo kulturne dediščine Slovenije, 2002). 50  Milan Ciglar, Raziskave o posledicah izpraznitve gozdnate kulturne krajine, prikazane na primeru Kočevske, Strokovna in znanstvena dela, 64 (Ljubljana: Inštitut za gozdno in lesno gospodarstvo pri biotehniški fakulteti v Ljubljani, 1978); Milan Ciglar, “Propad in ponovno porajanje kulturne krajine na Kočevskem,” Varstvo narave 7 (1973): 5–24. 51  Mitja Ferenc, Kočevska  - pusta in prazna. Nemško jezikovno območje na Kočevskem po odselitvi Nemcev (Ljubljana: Modrijan, 2005), 659–63.

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Fig. 6  Cemetery in Stari Log in 2002. Source: Mitja Ferenc

Even though the majority of cemeteries were leveled or their German gravestones removed, those in Koprivnik, Zajčje Polje, Stari Log (Fig. 6), Kočevske Poljane, Novi Tabor, Mozelj, and Livold have been largely preserved. They are the most important material remnants of the German population today.52 In the extensive forests of the region’s highest mountain, the Goteniški Snežnik, in the former military restricted area, a lone shrine has survived, with an inscription in German: “Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe, aber die Liebe ist die Größte unter ihnen!” (Faith, hope, and love, love being the greatest among them). The postwar retributions, sanctioned by the AVNOJ presidency’s decree of November 1944, allowed for the prosecution of Germans in Slovenia/Yugoslavia and the confiscation of their property on the grounds of collective guilt for the Nazi crimes. In Kočevje, which had been largely emptied of its population by the German occupiers in 1941–1942, this meant that the scar of the Nazi’s resettlement scheme never healed. The shadow of this “void that persists” extends far into post-socialist times. In November 1991, newly independent Slovenia passed a law that  Ferenc et al. (2002), 17.

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sought to remedy the injustice experienced by people whose property was nationalized by way of the postwar social and ideological revolution.53 The return of confiscated property, however, was contingent upon Yugoslav citizenship at the moment of confiscation, something the resettled and then expatriated Germans did not possess. The Constitutional Court of Slovenia in 1997 partly annulled the principle of collective blame as issued by the AVNOJ presidency in November 1944.54 Slovenia’s ethnic Germans were thus given an opportunity to prove that they had not been complicit with the occupiers. If they were able to prove this, they could obtain Slovene citizenship and, consequently, the right to reclaim their confiscated property. This Constitutional Court decision resulted in Austria reproaching Slovenia for pursuing a “discriminatory denationalization” scheme. It was in discord with contemporary legal principles and also “un-­ European,” they argued, to force a person to prove their innocence rather than vice versa, to act upon the premise that an accused person is innocent until their guilt is proven. Slovenia rejected this reproach. It based its attitude and action on international conventions and laws, such as the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law, issued by the League of Nations in 1930. If reference back to an era in which population resettlements internationally were deemed a legitimate means to prevent conflict seems anachronistic at best, a look at the European Convention on Nationality of the Council of Europe of November 1997, another document to which Slovenia referred, teaches us that little has changed since 1930, as the words are repeated almost identically. The experience of the Second World War, with its millions of deportees and expellees, has not changed the vague assumption one finds in these two conventions. In 1930, Article 1 confirmed that it “is for each State to determine under its own law who are its nationals. This law shall be recognised by other States in so far as it is consistent with international conventions, international custom, and the principles of law generally recognised with regard to nationality.”55 In 1997, Article 3 (Competence of the State) of the European Convention reads: “Each State shall determine under its 53  The Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia, Denationalization Act, No. 27/91, 29 November 1991. 54  The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia, Decision U-I-23/93, 20 March 1997. 55  The Hague Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law, The Hague, 12 April 1930, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3b00.html.

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own law who are its nationals. This law shall be accepted by other States in so far as it is consistent with applicable international conventions, customary international law and the principles of law generally recognised with regard to nationality.”56 While this is not the place to engage with international law or with the question of whether Slovenia’s Constitutional Court is acting on solid grounds, it is quite clear that the tiny minority of Gottschee Germans was literally ground to death by the catastrophic “age of extremes.” Their 600-year history ended in 1942. What came afterward has left little or no chance to remedy or heal.

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Ferenc, Mitja, and Gojko Zupan. 2018–20. Lost Gottschee Villages in Slovenia: The Gottschee Germans Used to Live Among Us. Parts I, II, III. Historia, 26, 27, 28. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete. Ferenc, Mitja, Gojko Zupan, and Mateja Bavdaž. 2002. Pokopališča in nagrobniki kočevskih Nemcev/Friedhöfe und Grabsteine der Gottscheer Deutschen / Cemeteries and Tombstones of the Gottscheer Germans. Ljubljana: Zavod za varstvo kulturne dediščine Slovenije. Ferenc, Tone. 1968. Nacistična raznarodovalna politika v Sloveniji v letih 1941–1941. Maribor: Obzorja. ———. 1980. Quellen zur nationalsozialistischen Entnationalisierungspolitik in Slowenien 1941–1945/Viri o nacistični raznarodovalni politiki v Sloveniji 1941–1945. Maribor: Obzorja. ———. 1987. Fašisti brez krinke: dokumenti 1941–1942. Maribor: Obzorja. ———. 1995. Problemi ponovne poselitve Kočevske med vojno. Kronika 43 (3): 49–68. ———. 1998. Nemci na Slovenskem med drugo svetovno vojno. In “Nemci” na Slovenskem. 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak, 99–144. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete. Frensing, Hans Hermann. 1970. Die Umsiedlung der Gottscheer Deutschen: Das Ende einer südostdeutschen Volksgruppe. Munich: R. Oldenbourg. Gaćeša, Nikola. 1984. Agrarna reforma i kolonizacija u Jugoslaviji 1945–1948. Novi Sad: Matica srpska. Geiger, Vladimir. 2013. Represija nad pripadniki nemške manjšine na Hrvaškem, v Bosni in Hercegovini ter Vojvodini, 1944–1948. In Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 53 (1): 122–136. ———. 2015. Skica za povijest Nijemaca i Austrijanaca u Bosni i Hercegovini, s posebnim osvrtom na njihovu sudbinu tijekom Drugoga svjetskog rata i u poraću. Hercegovina: Časopis za kulturno i povijesno nasljeđe 26 (1): 265–297. Janjetović, Zoran. 1993. Leidensweg der Deutschen im kommunistischen Jugoslawien, II, Erlebnisberichte über die Verbrechen an den Deutschen durch das Tito-Regime in der Zeit von 1944–1948. Munich/Sindelfingen: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung. ———. 1998. Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien 1944–1948. Die Stationen eines Völkermords. Munich: Donauschwäbisches Archiv. ———. 2005. Between Hitler and Tito: The Disappearance of the Vojvodina Germans. Belgrade: self-published. Makarovič, Marija, et al. 2005. Črmošnjiško-poljanska dolina in njeni ljudje. Kočevarji staroselci in Slovenci iz preteklosti v sedanjost. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU. Nećak, Dušan, ed. 1998. “Nemci” na Slovenskem (1918–1955). Kratek oris. Ljubljana: Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete.

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Petschauer, Erich. 1984. “Das Jahrhundertbuch”: Gottschee and Its People through the Centuries. New York: Gottscheer Relief Association. Prinčič, Jože. 1998. Podržavljenje nemške imovine na slovenskem ozemlju po drugi svetovni vojni (1945–1955). In “Nemci” na Slovenskem 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak, 245–270. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete. Repe, Božo. 1998. ‘Nemci’ na Slovenskem po drugi svetovni vojni. In “Nemci” na Slovenskem 1941–1955, ed. Dušan Nećak, 145–172. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete. Service, Hugo. 2013. Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simonič, Ivan. 1939. Zgodovina kočevskega ozemlja. Kočevski zbornik. Razprave o Kočevski in njenih ljudeh. Ljubljana: Družba sv. Cirila in Metoda. Spezialortsrepertorium der Österreichischen Länder. Spezialortsrepertorium von Krain Bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1910. VI.  Krain. 1919. Vienna: Verlag der deutschösterreichischen Staatsdruckerei. Šumrada, Janez, and Tone Ferenc. 1991. Kočevarji. In Enciklopedija Slovenije, vol. 5. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1984. Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. 5: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Jugoslawien. Munich: dtv.

Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010) Sabine Rutar

Introduction “On 10 December 1955 I saw Anica again, and I was reborn … oh, dear Antonio, it is not only you that was born in Piran. Piran … is also my birthplace.” These words are spoken by Veljko, an old man in his 80s, to Antonio, approximately the same age, in a key scene in the 2010 film Piran  – Pirano, the directorial debut of the acclaimed Slovene writer Goran Vojnović. The film’s central questions are: Who can claim property in Piran, the tiny coastal town in northwestern Istria, in today’s Slovenia,

S. Rutar (*) Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_13

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and who can claim that the town itself belongs to them? And how are these inclusive rather than exclusive questions?1 In this chapter, I analyze how an apartment in Piran’s historic city center serves as a cinematic plot device to make a statement about complex property issues in the Istrian peninsula. The film is not a legal drama about a returnee’s attempts to get his house back. Rather, it is a drama about belonging to a place to which one cannot truly return. Consequently, property is understood here as going beyond its mere materiality: I analyze property as embedded in social relationships and practices, which are interrelated and which transform over time, thereby (re)defining what property is. The film Piran – Pirano uses as an artistic device the interplay between the still nature of material property (an apartment) and the turmoil, destruction, and reconstruction that surround it.2 As the film unfolds, the two old men reminisce about pivotal moments at the end of the Second World War, in which their lives became inextricably entangled. Piran  – Pirano is a film about violence, loss, and pain, about living in a “No Neighbors’ Land,” about living without the dead as much as about living with the dead. It is a film about the social voids created in the northeastern Adriatic by the upheavals of the twentieth century. In Piran, these led to the departure of more than 90% of its ethnic Italian inhabitants—who either had long-lasting roots in the region or had come to settle there during the 20 years of fascist reign—in the decade after the war. In 1945, Piran had a population of little more than 5000. In 1956, it had barely 3600, despite the arrival of new settlers. In 1945, the ethnic Italian component had been more than 80%; in 1956, it was just below 16%.3 What happened when all those people left? The film relates this history by having one emigré return, more than 60 years later. 1  I sincerely thank Pamela Ballinger, Katja Hrobat Virloget, Anna Wylegała, and Miha Zobec for their critical reading of earlier versions of this chapter. All translations of quotes are mine. 2  I refer here to anthropological works in the vein of Chris Hann, “Property: Anthropological Aspects,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D.  Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 2nd ed., 153–9; and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie Wiber, eds, Changing Properties of Property (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). 3  Aleksej Kalc, “The Other Side of the ‘Istrian Exodus’: Immigration and Social Restoration in Slovenian Coastal Towns in the 1950s,” Dve Domovini/Two Homelands 49 (2019): 145–62, here 149–50; cf. Guido Crainz, Il dolore e l’esilio: L’Istria e le memorie divise d’Europa (Rome: Donizelli, 2005), 75. Crainz gives a good overview of the region’s twentieth-­century history.

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Piran – Pirano is Goran Vojnović’s first feature film; when he created it, he was 30 years of age. The letter ć in his name—which is not part of the Slovene alphabet—reveals the child of inner-Yugoslav migrants. He was born in Ljubljana, his mother is from Pula, on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula (in Croatia), his father from Visoko, a small town near Sarajevo (in Bosnia-Herzegovina).4 His is an intimate, subtle, and very locally rooted film about an apartment which symbolizes the way in which history took place: how a place has stayed in place, but has changed completely. Vojnović shows great capacity for capturing how the void, the “No Neighbors’ Land,” unfolded in Istria at the war’s end, and how it was subsequently filled with new, different lives, and what this process did to the people who found themselves in the midst of it. In an interview in 2018, Vojnović confirmed that Piran – Pirano was appreciated most by the people in coastal Slovenia as well as by Italians beyond the nearby state border, in Italy, who had a family history of emigration from Istria.5 Otherwise, in Slovenia, the film was rather ill-­ received.6 While Vojnović, in the interview, admits that he posed himself too difficult a task in his first feature film and partially failed in crafting it, he cannot help but point out that it did win awards. At the 13th Festival of Slovenian Film in the Istrian town of Portorož (It. Portorose), it won the award for best screenplay (by Vojnović), best editing, and best female actor (Nina Ivanišin as Anica).7 At the Festival for East European Film in Cottbus, Germany, it won the Dialogue Prize for Intercultural Communication, annually bestowed on the film which best interprets interculturality (or lack thereof). And at the Southeast European Film

4  Tanja Petrović, “Who Is Goran Vojnović?,” in Ugrabljena ljubezen/Oteta ljubav/ Abducted Love, ed. Oto Luthar et al. (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2011), 68–73, interviews Vojnović about his own place and properties as an artist who grew up in Slovenia and who still lives there today. 5  “Vse vojne Gorana Vojnovića,” Mestna Knjižnica Kranj, 7 September 2018, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmm0IIxued0. 6  For example, critic Marcel Štefaničič saw in it a misguided attempt to replicate the “sterile, static, impersonal, boring aesthetic” of Slovenian films in the 1980s. “Piran  – Pirano, Goran Vojnović 2010,” Mladina, 7 October 2010, https://www.mladina.si/51962/ piran-pirano/. 7  “13. Festival slovenskega filma, Portorož, Slovenski Filmski Center,” n.d., https://www. film-center.si/sl/film-v-sloveniji/festival/108/13-festival-slovenskega-filma-portoroz/.

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Festival in Paris, awards were received by the production house Arsmedia and by Mustafa Nadarević (old Veljko) as best actor.8 “I was born in this house” (Sono nato in questa casa), Antonio says, returning after some 60 years. How do you appropriate a place, when you were driven from it—or to it, like Veljko was? Antonio fled the bullets of the partisans; Veljko joined those very partisans in Bosnia after his mother and sister were murdered, and on 1 May 1945 was among those who liberated Piran. A few days later, he deserted after disobeying the order to shoot dead those citizens of Piran whom the partisans grabbed, in an escalating furor of violent revenge on fascism, turning their victims into “summary culprits, because their role was symbolic rather than personal,” as Triestine historian Elio Apih put it.9 Veljko’s refusal to arbitrarily execute (innocent or not so innocent) citizens, Antonio among them, earns him five years in Yugoslav prisons and four more in labor brigades. In 1955, he is released. Piran has emptied; Antonio’s apartment is ransacked and filled with thick dust and debris. On the square in front of the house Veljko meets Anica, the young Slovene partisan who shared his fate during the war. Looking back some 60 years later, he realizes that this re-encounter made Piran his second birthplace: Anica became his wife; he could start over.

Piran/Pirano, Istria: Film and History The town of Pirano, at the northwestern end of the Istrian peninsula, became part of Habsburg Austria in 1797, after belonging for half a millennium to the Venetian Republic. After imperial Austria’s demise as a consequence of the First World War, Piran, as the wider region, became part of Italy with the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo.10 During the Second World War, when Italy capitulated in September 1943, the town was occupied by the Germans, as were the whole of Istria and the Littoral, including Trieste. On 1 May 1945, Piran was liberated by Slovene/Yugoslav 8  “Piran – Pirano še žanje nagrade, Izlet potuje naprej,” RTV Slovenija, 7 November 2011, https://www.rtvslo.si/kultura/film-in-tv/piran-pirano-se-zanje-nagrade-izlet-potuje-­ naprej/270048; “Filmu Piran  – Pirano dve nagradi na filmskem festivalu v Parizu,” Cosmopolitan, 19 April 2011, https://cosmopolitan.metropolitan.si/samo-zate/ filmu-piran-pirano-dve-nagradi-na-filmskem-festivalu-v-parizu/. 9  Elio Apih, Trieste (Bari: Laterza, 1988), 166. 10   Cf. Maura Hametz, Making Trieste Italian, 1918–1954 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005).

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­ artisans. A few weeks later, it was put under Yugoslav military command, p which remained in place until the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia was signed in February 1947.11 The film takes place in the six weeks between the liberation and the formal set-up of a military administration—hence, in the short period of total power vacuum, when 20 years of a brutal fascist regime and a year and a half of even more brutal German occupation had come to an end.12 In 1947, Piran became part of the Yugoslav-administered Zone B of the provisional Free Territory of Trieste. In 1954, it became part of Titoist Yugoslavia, a decision based on a Memorandum of Understanding stipulated in London, which was finally ratified by the Treaty of Osimo between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1975.13 Sixteen years later, in 1991, Piran became part of now independent Slovenia. It is in this last country that film protagonist Veljko, 60-odd years after he first arrived in Piran, asks himself: Do I belong here? His wife Anica died a short time ago, and Veljko visits her grave almost daily, talking to her. Does he want to be buried here too? One day—Veljko is at home listening sentimentally to Bosnian music— the doorbell rings. An unknown elderly man presents himself as Antonio Bartole and seeks entrance. Ending the ensuing plurilingual attempts to make himself understood, he draws the floor plan of the apartment on a piece of paper, thereby proving to the increasingly baffled Veljko that he knows the place by heart. When Antonio points to an old photo on Veljko’s sideboard and says “Anica,” revealing that he knows Veljko’s deceased wife, they recognize each other. During the decade that the Istrian peninsula passed from Italian to Yugoslav sovereignty, anywhere between 180,000 and 225,000 individuals departed, an extended process which in Italian collective memory is known as the “exodus.” People had various motivations to leave, and their emigration was conditioned by their means as well as by the moment they 11  Cf. Vid Vremec, Raul Šišković and Jože Hočevar, Slovenska Istra v boju za svobodu (Koper: Lipa, 1998), 378–81; Mario Bonifacio, La seconda resistenza del Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale italiano a Pirano d’Istria nel dopoguerra (1945–1946) (Trieste: Irsml Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2005). 12  Claudia Cernigoi, Storia e memoria al confine orientale (Trieste: La Nuova Alabarda, 2019), gives an excellent overview of the historical events and their multiperspectival interpretations by scholars on the one hand, and the narratives constructed by collective and political memorialization on the other. 13  Cf. Jože Pirjevec, Borut Klabjan and Gorazd Bajc, eds, Osimska meja: Jugoslovansko-­ italijanska pogajanja in razmejitev leta 1975 (Koper: Annales, 2006).

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chose to take action. Apart from the mass emigration of ethnic Italians, émigrés also included those who objected to Yugoslav sovereignty and/or to the new socialist order, or saw their existential economic connections with Trieste compromised, and among these were many Slovenes and Croats. In the film, Antonio’s escape from the partisan bullets by swimming more than 20  km from Piran toward Trieste takes place in May 1945, in the immediate turmoil after the liberation from German occupation. His account of his uprooted, restless life, however, represents a metaphor for the whole protracted process of mass emigration.14 I wish to emphasize that all numbers, all attempts to quantify ethnicity, need to acknowledge that national identification was neither clearcut nor fixed in wartime Istria. Neither language use nor self-identification is unequivocal, and surnames had been changed, by force or by circumstance, more than once. Population censuses always carried the politically induced imprint of those who designed them and carried out the count, and must be read accordingly.15 Approximately 70% of those who emigrated from Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste were ethnic Italians; the rest were mostly Slovenes. Given that the Italians lived mainly in coastal towns, such as in Piran, the process was particularly disruptive here. However, while the “Istrian exodus” has become part of the broader historiography of population displacements in twentieth-century Europe, the filling of the postwar social “void” has received little scholarly attention. The Italian population of Istria was particularly vulnerable not only because they were collectively labeled as fascist but also because the Yugoslav authorities acted against “class enemies.” Most members of the wealthy and middle classes saw themselves as ethnically Italian, which is illustrated well in the film. Over 14,000 people left the small stretch of today’s Slovenian coastal region between the end of the war and October 1954, when the London Memorandum was stipulated. Especially in the early postwar years, between 1945 and 1950, many departed in illegal ways—in the film, young Antonio does just that.16

14  Kalc (2019), 146–47; cf. also Pamela Ballinger’s chapter in this volume; and, comprehensively, Katja Hrobat Virloget, V tišini spomina: “Eksodus” in Istra (Koper/Trieste: Založništvo tržaškega tiska, 2021). 15  Mila Orlić, “Né italiani né slavi: State- e Nation-building jugoslavo nel secondo dopoguerra in Istria,” Contemporanea 22, no. 4 (2019): 561–84. 16  Kalc (2019), 150–51.

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Fascism was strong in Pirano, and it destroys Antonio’s family.17 His father is an ardent fascist, whom he loathes. He is killed by the partisans in the days after the liberation. Fascism also destroys Veljko’s family. Whether his mother and sister were killed by the occupying forces (that is, Italian fascists and/or German Nazis), by Croatian Ustasha (who, under the occupiers’ control, governed the Independent State of Croatia, of which Bosnia was a part), or by Serbian Chetniks, he never knew.18 Piran’s cinematic end of the war displays all the ambivalences of the historical situation. The 20 years of fascist violence (the so-called ventennio), the years of occupation and war, as well as the revengeful Yugoslav power grab meant that violence and displacement were experiences ingrained into Istrian life worlds. As elsewhere, this included not only state-directed forms of violence but also what in Holocaust Studies has been referred to as “intimate violence,” that is, the violence of neighbors against neighbors.19 The chance to settle private scores was taken by many.20 Piran – Pirano leaves little doubt that the Yugoslav partisans liberated Piran from German occupation and from Italian fascism. People cheer, rejoice, sing, celebrate. It is Veljko’s doubtful and isolated wandering through the town that signals the looming terror. The film peaks when Veljko refuses to obey the order to kill at random and escapes together with Anica and Antonio. In panic, Antonio chooses the sea route and sets out to swim to Trieste. Anica and Veljko do not join him; they await their fate on the beach. When the fellow partisans find them, the commander orders his men to “put him in prison so that he is safe from the bullets.” Reminiscing, old Veljko ponders: “God knows why they didn’t kill us. 17  Bonifacio (2005), 9–10, gives a brief overview of fascist violence in Piran since 1921, which “fractured the hitherto peaceful history of the municipality of Pirano” (9). 18  Cf. Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–1942 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2005). 19  Cf. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 20  Cf. Cernigoi (2019); Hrobat Virloget (2021); Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018 [2003]); Raoul Pupo, “Logiche della violenza politica nei dopoguerra del ‘900 nell’Adriatico orientale: Una ricognizione preliminare,” Storia e problemi contemporanei 74 (2017): 15–40; Nevenka Troha, “Relations between the Yugoslav Authorities and the Ethnic Italians in the Koper District, 1945–1954,” in Grenzland Istrien/Borderland Istria, ed. Sabine Rutar, thematic issue of Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 8 (2006): 175–90; Ivica Pletikosić, “‘Č iščenje’ v Piranu (1945–1948),” Acta Histriae 10, no. 2 (2002): 465–92.

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[…] They took us back to Piran, they let her go and I spent five years in prisons. Five years in prison, and four more years in labor brigades.”

The Apartment The film takes place in the apartment that once belonged to Antonio’s family and now belongs to Veljko’s. The apartment symbolizes property and questions it at the same time. Most scenes were shot with very little light and in a rather static manner.21 Importantly, the window has a view onto one of Piran’s larger central spaces, Piazza vecchia (Old Square), which would change its name after the war and today is still called First-­ of-­May Square (Prvomajski trg), in reference to 1 May 1945, the day of Piran’s liberation from the Nazis and the fascists—a very apt setting. For centuries the square had been a central place in Venetian Piran (hence Old Square). Significantly, the old name has survived among the locals, and not only in Italian, which is testament to how historically grown identities can hardly be wiped out with one violent stroke of the brush.22 While the apartment’s property is negotiated throughout the film, it is never made clear who actually owns it, and how such ownership may have changed. The apartment is the prime location for Antonio and Veljko’s encounter and the unfolding of the story. When Antonio rings the bell, Veljko opens the door and sees a visibly emotional stranger. They have no common language. When Antonio draws the floor plan of the apartment on a piece of paper, he proves to Veljko that he is in fact no stranger at all. Taking advantage of Veljko’s astonished bafflement, Antonio enters the apartment. He walks around lost in his memories, and it is as if Veljko has vanished even though he stands right next to him, alarmed but increasingly curious. Finally, Antonio looks at Veljko and says twice: Casa mia (My home). The two words are unequivocal even to those who do not understand Italian. They send Veljko into an angry fit: “This is my home! Not your home! My home! […] I have lived here for more than 50 years with my wife … […] Listen, Italy is over there! Get out of my house!” 21  Cf. Susannah Radstone, “Cinema and Memory,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 325–42, here 328, on memory’s “metaphorical alignment with the still, as opposed to the moving image […] relatively immobile camerawork” in which “shots often resemble still photographs from a family album.” 22  Cf. “Piran,” in Enciklopedija Slovenije, vol. 8, ed. Dušan Voglar and Alenka Dermastia (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1994), 344.

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Moments later, they recognize each other, and this is followed by the first flashback scene, taking the story back to 1945. Here, young Antonio and his father Ettore are in the apartment. Ettore hectically gathers jewelry and other valuables from drawers, and it is clear that this is a wealthy bourgeois family. Antonio begs him: “You cannot leave me here. The Germans are retreating—it is too dangerous.” Full of hate, he watches his father’s frenzied efforts to escape with at least some of his property: “Sell everything!” He makes a desperate and half-hearted attempt to stop him. But after a moment of tender hesitation, Ettore goes, without a word, without turning back. Antonio bursts out: “Fascist swine!” He retreats into the apartment, forlorn and fearful. Then, for the larger part of the film, the apartment is the location of a sequence of further encounters, as if it were a stage in a theater. All involve Antonio, who never leaves his place. First enters a group of partisans looking for Antonio’s father, whom they obviously know, as they call him the “big black bastard.” Antonio, in a panic, hides in a corner. The men behave carelessly, but not destructively, and leave a few minutes later. Next enters Anica, the only female partisan whom the film introduces in more detail.23 Recognizing her, Antonio comes out of hiding. What follows is a long monologue, as Anica remains silent. She stares at the young Italian, haunted by images of how the fascists brutally killed her family. Antonio assures her that he is no fascist. He reminds her that they went to school together. Finally, Anica attacks him, still without a word, and attempts to strangle him. When he realizes that she is serious, he frees himself, repeating again: “I am no fascist! The fascists killed my mother!” Anica, visibly disturbed by pain and despair, is still mute. Antonio tries again: “Anica, don’t you recognize me? I know you, I know who you are.” Only when he relates an episode from school that involves his mother does Anica finally speak. “Your mum had the longest fingers in the world,” she says in Italian. The ice is broken. The two end up making love, and when Anica looks at Antonio and smiles before she falls asleep, it is clear that he has managed to bring her back into touch with life. Some 60 years later, Antonio still harbors Anica’s smile in his heart; in fact, they made each other feel alive again. Unsurprisingly, however, the next morning, Anica

23  Cf. Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), on the partizanka’s “journey from the revolutionary icon par excellence […] to the oblivion in the present” (6).

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wakes up horrified. Antonio, her gentle and friendly former classmate, so seemingly easily interfered with her vow to take revenge on all Italians. Finally, it is Veljko’s turn to enter the apartment. He is sent by the commander to guard Antonio’s mother’s piano. Astonished to find his fellow partisan Anica together with a young Italian in what he knows is the apartment of a fascist, he furiously chases Antonio out. This is the moment when Antonio leaves forever the house in which he grew up. After that, Anica and Veljko are silent. When they finally speak, it is to realize their shared fate: Anica: “Did they really kill all your family? […] Why didn’t you shoot that Italian if they really killed everybody?” Veljko: “Why would I kill him?” Anica: “Revenge.” Veljko: “And what then? What if I killed all of them? What? I ask you, what? I don’t know who killed my family, and where they dumped them. Even if I killed all Germans, all Italians, all Ustasha, all Chetniks, it wouldn’t bring back my mother and my sister alive from those waters.”

He falls silent, realizing that for the first time he has said out loud what happened to his family. The audience understands why he would never swim in the sea. Veljko sobs quietly, but the scene lasts only a brief moment. The other partisans enter loudly and suddenly—they have come for the piano. With the removal of its most valuable piece of property, everybody leaves the apartment for good. It only appears once more at the end of the film, in 1955, when four men inspect the ransacked rooms. This is the moment when the London Memorandum enabled the people of the Free Territory of Trieste to opt for either Yugoslav or Italian citizenship and choose their country of residence accordingly. Between 1955 and the end of February 1957, when the legal time frame expired, another wave of emigration hit the coastal region of today’s Slovenia, when more than 10,000 people opted for Italian citizenship. Of these, about 29% were ethnic Slovenes, and a slightly lower proportion were Croats, in spite of the authorities’ efforts to discourage the emigration of non-ethnic Italians. By then, since the war’s end, almost 24,400 people had left the region— almost 53% of the population of 1945. Migration within and to the region had started immediately, trailing the emigration flows. In the early postwar years, people moved from the wider hinterland to the coast, replacing

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those who left. These were administrative employees as well as employees of the newly established political, social, and cultural institutions, importantly among them: teachers, to re-establish the education system that had been destroyed by the fascists; personnel in theaters, libraries, banks, and public health services; as well as engineers, technicians, architects. Importantly, the economy was to be revived in a way that cut short its traditional dependence on Trieste. The film’s 1955 scene is thus set at the moment when an increased influx of people arrived from other regions of Slovenia and wider Yugoslavia—almost 12,500 between 1955 and 1956 alone, thus exceeding the number of departures by 21%, and another 7000 by 1959, totaling almost 20,000 people. Piran, however, would not return to its 1945 size before 1961, when it once again reached a scarce 5500 inhabitants.24 One of these immigrants triggered by the London Memorandum of 1954 is Veljko, the former partisan. He had spent the decade since the war’s end in prison and labor brigades. Entering the apartment, he is silent, while the other three men comment in a rather unimpressed manner: “It is like in a museum here.” “The whole town is like a museum. There is nobody anywhere.” Veljko finally utters a horrified “I won’t stay here” and runs out. On the square, he recognizes Anica as one of two women walking by. They will make the apartment their home. It is never revealed how they were able to do this, and of course it is quite improbable that they would have ended up living in this very apartment. But the metaphor works. When Antonio returns some 60  years later, it turns out that he has brought with him his testament. Veljko reads it with the help of his chatty neighbor Mira, who speaks Italian: It says: ‘My name is Antonio Bartole. I was born in Piran. My mother was a pianist, my father a teacher. Both died during the war’ … he lived in Trieste, got engaged, but his fiancé moved to America. […] He now lives by himself, in Milan. He doesn’t have anyone to give his belongings to. And all that he wishes for is to stay in Piran, his place of birth. To die in Piran: Morire a Pirano.

Neighbor Mira is neither puzzled nor sufficiently surprised by the testament or its contents, thereby personifying the tacit knowledge of the local population: “Where did you get this?” Veljko answers dismissively: “I  Kalc (2019), 151–3.

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found it in the closet”—as if by listening to Antonio’s testament he had witnessed the unleashing of a skeleton. The scene aptly encapsulates what Dan Diner has called the multiple temporalities of material property loss, which in many places was accompanied by a process of memory erasure of both the legal rights to private property and the times past.25 While Mira translates the testament for Veljko, the camera returns to Antonio, in the apartment, looking at Anica and Veljko’s wedding photograph. Veljko, who only a few days before had thought about going back to his native Bosnia to die, upon hearing Antonio’s final wish—morire a Pirano—runs back to his apartment, shouting (in Bosnian): Hey, you will not die here! […] What if I went back to Bosnia to die in one house, just because I was born there? What if everybody just knocked on somebody’s door, like you did to me? What if everybody went to somebody’s house to die there? What would happen? World War Three would happen!

Having over-exerted himself, Veljko ends his fit of rage by clutching his chest. He stumbles backward, panting. The two old men look at each other. Veljko sighs heavily, then goes to fetch some spirits and two glasses. Antonio accepts. Veljko says, in Bosnian: “Many years have passed. Very many. Many things have happened. My whole life has happened.” Afterward they sit, drink, and tell each other their memories—one speaking Italian, the other Bosnian.

Piran as Property The film contains several scenes of belonging and “othering” that concern the town of Piran. Whose is it? At the beginning, before Antonio even appears, Veljko confesses: “I think I do not belong to this place.” He is talking to two old friends over a game of chess. One, Dimče, was born in Macedonia, thus impersonating a postwar inner-Yugoslav migrant; the other remains more vaguely defined. Italians clearly are the “other” to all three. Dimče mocks Veljko, suggesting that if he decided not to be buried in Piran’s cemetery, “some Italian might lie down next to Anica.” The 25  Dan Diner, “Memory and Restitution: World War II as a Foundational Event in a Uniting Europe,” in Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe, ed. Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 9–23, 15.

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conversation then turns to the question of whether Veljko is a true Piranese. He asks: “Do you think anybody is buried up there who has never swum in the sea?,” inviting more mockery. His friends insist: “Are you a Piranese, or aren’t you?” Veljko is now convinced: “Of course I am! And a truer one than you! Truer than all of you. It was me who liberated this town! And if I don’t want to bathe in the sea, I don’t want to bathe in the sea!” The friend still teases: “But what kind of Piranese is that, who has never swum in the sea?” There is an interesting linguistic twist in his question. He speaks Slovene, but uses the Italian word for the town’s citizens, Piranese (Slovene would be Piranc ̌an). As is observable in the persistence of old street names, the now dominant local language, Slovene, has retained the centuries-old Venetian, that is, Italian, word for the locals. At this question, Veljko snaps at them: “That you all may drown in that sea of yours!” both othering himself and placing a finger on the very wound that has haunted him for decades. Antonio never returned to Piran after his escape. The film makes it quite clear that he has never filled the void left by losing his parents, as a consequence of both fascism and the revenge of the Yugoslav forces, and by being forced out of his home. It is not clear whether he ever found out that his father was executed by the partisans. He searched for him in Trieste’s displaced persons camps for a long time,26 even preventing himself from following his love Olga, a Polish woman, to “America.” Antonio bases his property rights concerning Piran on his birthright. What triggers his return is being alone: he does not have anyone to whom to leave his property. He does not come to Piran to reclaim his lost property, the apartment, but to reattach to the only place he ever felt to be his home. The film’s artistic device of having the two men meet in the one place that they both feel is theirs is a well-crafted metaphor for the history of displacement as a consequence of the Second World War.27 Both lost their family and their home. Veljko found a new one, and it happens to be the one Antonio lost. Both have lived displaced lives. Yet Veljko chose not to return to Bosnia: “In 1954 they told me I could return home, to Bosnia. But what home? I said I’d never return there alive.” Veljko, the 26  Cf. Pamela Ballinger, “Trieste: The City as Displaced Persons Camp,” in Grenzland Istrien/Borderland Istria, ed. Sabine Rutar, thematic issue of Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 8 (2006): 153–74. 27  Cf. Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im ­modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

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former partisan, joined the many who came to Istria from broader Yugoslavia to fill the emptied Istrian towns. He had paid dearly for his refusal to kill arbitrarily, but might in fact have survived only because his partisan commander decided to send him to prison. Otherwise he would have faced execution. None of this prevents him, some 60 years later, from perceiving himself as a true Piranese citizen because he was among those who liberated the town from the Nazis and the fascists.

The Languages Spoken It is the properties of language that make Piran – Pirano such an intimate, nuanced, and local endeavor: Slovene, Italian, and Bosnian, and not just the standard languages but including dialects and local variants. Language is used ambiguously—one moment it seems to be a barrier, the next it implies a comprehensive plurilingualism as Piran’s everyday normality. Most importantly, the two old men who drink together and reminisce about their entangled, yet departed lives have no common language—but they do understand each other. That mutual understanding is possible is one of the messages the film sends to the region’s still forcefully divided memoryscape, characterized by traces of the past “inscribed in its materiality.”28 The trilingual stage is set when Veljko’s daughter Nina visits with her husband Roberto and their children Monica and Mauro—the scene is a metaphor for the linguistic realities of the northeastern Adriatic region today. Nina speaks Slovene with Veljko, who answers partly in Bosnian, partly in Slovene. Mauro, the grandson, first speaks in Italian. Nina tells him in (cleaned up) Venetian dialect to give grandpa the present they brought: a CD of Bosnian folk tunes, downloaded from the internet. Both children now address their grandfather in Slovene. Roberto, the Italian husband, is mute until he stiffly shakes hands with Veljko and articulates a “Na svidenje” (goodbye, in Slovene) with an awful accent, making a polite effort. It is not clear whether he is an Istrian Italian or an Italian from Italy, but the latter seems more likely. The neighbor Mira, who comes to greet Nina and the children, chats away merrily in Slovene, but when she bumps 28  Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe,” in Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 1–15, here 8; cf., comprehensively, Hrobat Virloget (2021).

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the door into Roberto quite naturally apologizes with an “O dio, mi scusi” (Oh God, I am so sorry). In the whole film, bi- or plurilingualism is a property exclusively of the Slavs, while the Italians know nothing but Italian—a rather faithful depiction of the (historical) reality. When Antonio presents himself to Veljko in Italian, the latter interrupts him: “Speak Slovene, this is Slovenia, and we speak Slovene here.” The fact that Piran by law is a bilingual Slovene–Italian town makes this self-­ defensive nationalism of an old Bosnian even more awkward. When Antonio does enter the apartment, Veljko immediately switches to Bosnian, in which he continues to address Antonio for the remainder of the film. When Yugoslavia was destroyed in the wars of the 1990s, “naming its language” became a problem. Serbo-Croatian became Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin, or BCSM. The collective term used by people in the successor states of Yugoslavia today, when they address their language(s) without wishing to nationalize it, is the word naški, which is short for “our language” (naš jezik), the suffix -ki being the one that characterizes linguistic adjectives (slovenski/Slovene, bosanski/Bosnian, etc.). Slovene, however, is quite different from Serbo-Croatian and its successors and is not usually included. When it is, the term naški obtains an even more comprehensively Yugoslav meaning. This is what Veljko does in the film: when Antonio asks him for a glass of water, he says “acqua” and then confirms “yes voda, voda.” This is the only word he says in Slovene, and it is the same in Bosnian. Veljko grumbles: “Ah, so you do know naški when you need it,” thus avoiding having to choose whether the word voda is Slovene or Bosnian.29 Connected to this is the flashback scene in which Veljko meets Anica again in 1955. It is a scene about the loss of linguistic properties. It is also a statement about how the ethnic and thereby linguistic “cleansing” failed. The newly arrived Yugoslav population were quite ignorant about Piran’s half-millennium of Venetian history. In the film, Veljko is in the square while the other three men stand on the apartment’s balcony. One of the two women seen nearby greets the other in Italian: “Anica, finally! I’ve waited quite a bit for you!” Hearing her name, Veljko turns around. When 29  Cf. Ranko Bugarski, “What Happened to Serbo-Croatian?” and Milorad Pupovac, “Language Imprisoned by Identities; or, Why Language Should Be Defended,” both in After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land, ed. Radmila Gorup (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 160–68 and 169–84.

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the women approach the public fountain, one of the men on the balcony shouts in Serbo-Croatian: “Comradesses, that fountain is not working!” Anica’s friend replies in Venetian dialect: “What did you say, boy?” The man is puzzled: “What did she say?” They even discuss whether she might be speaking Spanish and greet her with a silly “Señorita, arrivederci!” to which she replies: “I don’t understand you!”

The Piano In the present, there is no piano in the apartment. Where it once stood, there is a table. Antonio, lost in his memories, stops at the table and says “Here was the piano.” He pretends to press piano keys on the table’s rim, playing a silent tune. Veljko is incredulous: “How do you know that a piano stood here?” Antonio remembers how he sat next to his mother when she played and how he had to be very quiet so as not to disturb her. It is this memory that makes him say those two very virulent words: Casa mia. In the flashbacks to 1945, the piano represents two property functions. “What, this fucking fascist had his own piano?!” one of the partisans observes upon entering the apartment. The commander responds: “His wife was a piano teacher. A good woman. She died some time ago. Laura … […]. He was a fascist drunkard. He taught the children about Mussolini. He beat kids and never protected his wife.” On the one hand, the piano is a symbol of (Italian) bourgeoisness and wealth, something the Slovene partisans are envious of. On the other hand, the instrument brings forth something like positive neighborliness, as Antonio’s mother is remembered benevolently, and pitied. The Slovene partisans agree with Antonio in their judgment of his mother and father. It is the piano—and the memory of Antonio’s mother—that finally brings Anica to speak up during her encounter with Antonio. He opens the piano’s lid: “For four years, nobody has touched this piano. They forbade my mother to play the music she loved. And that is why she died.” He plays cautiously—without making a sound, much like old Antonio does at Veljko’s table. The scene is the prelude to their lovemaking, and thus the piano is the central device for humanity, for humans making contact with each other beyond ideological and ethnic stereotypes. Later it is revealed why the partisan commander was fond of Antonio’s mother. His fiancé Petra was a pianist, too. She died under circumstances that are not explained, probably at the hands of the local fascists. He is torn between an urge to take revenge and common sense. At one moment,

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he returns to the apartment, sits at the piano, and strikes some disharmonic tunes, his face tight with pain and rage. He later orders Veljko to guard the piano, to make sure that nobody touches it, “not our guys, nor theirs.” After Antonio is forced to leave the apartment by Veljko, he is quickly captured by the partisans. The commander extends his fond memory of the mother to the son, looking at Antonio’s hands: “Pianista, huh?” He then engages in a twisted effort at revenge, when he carves a piano keyboard onto a table rim with his knife and orders: “Suonare!” (Play!). Antonio, in mortal fear, raises his hands and plays the simulated keyboard silently—this is the third scene symbolizing how Antonio’s memory of his mother was silenced. Again, a metaphor for how humanity was lost, on all sides. The commander finally reveals what haunts him: “My Petra used to play that way. I joined the partisans hoping I could get her a real piano. If I hadn’t done so, she could still be alive.” The piano finds its new place beneath a photograph of Tito at the partisans’ headquarters. Antonio is forced to play, and his tune accompanies the commander’s explanation to Veljko:30 Before we found you, there in the woods, we had a messenger boy, Drejc. He was quick as lightning. His schoolmate betrayed him, and the next morning the fascists killed him. He was 12. If we want to get rid of all fascists and traitors, those who are innocent will also have to die. […] Why are you looking at me? It was not us who started this war! It was not us who made the rules! Do you understand? The fascists did! It was not me who made up this shit!

Looking at a group of prisoners, the commander asks Veljko: “What would you do with these fascists if you were in my place?” Veljko answers: “How should I know? I see them for the first time! […] They’re all the same to me. You are all the same to me.” This dialogue is the prelude to the film’s climax. The partisans, who have quickly gone from liberators to execution squad, drag the prisoners into the courtyard, Antonio included. The commander is nowhere to be 30  Music as a mnemonic trigger is used in many films, not least in those on the Holocaust, where, for example, Jewish camp inmates are forced to play music, but the coercion becomes a means of survival. Cf. Deb Waterhouse-Watson and Adam Brown, “Playing for Their Lives: Music, Musicians and Trauma in Holocaust Film,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 29, no. 1 (2015): 1–16.

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seen and the situation escalates quickly. A moment later everybody is shot dead except Antonio. Veljko has fired into the air. Partisan Miha, decidedly the most impulsive and bloodthirsty among the partisans, is furious, threatens, and finally shoots at him, missing by a few inches. The others turn on Miha: “What’s wrong with you? […] What, now we start to kill each other?” Miha discovers Anica standing round a corner and points his gun at her: “Come here! What are you looking at?” While the others try to calm Miha down and prevent further shooting, Antonio seizes the moment of confusion, grabs Anica, and they run. Veljko, after a second of hesitation, follows. The three run for their lives: the Italian antifascist, the Bosnian partisan, and the Slovene female partisan. All the while, the commander sits at the piano, now his piano, playing an awkward tune.

Family Graves Old Veljko is introduced to the audience crouching by his wife’s grave in Piran’s cemetery. “Remember?” he complains, “We had a deal that I would be the one to go first.” Later, he says to his daughter Nina: “You know me … and graves,” when she urges him to agree to buy the plot next to Anica’s in order to build their family grave. Veljko is wrapped up in his thoughts about going back to Bosnia now that his wife is gone, and tells her to leave him out of it. During the war, graves were a matter of the moment, if at all. The scene that introduces young Veljko in 1945 has him walking with his fellow partisans in the Karst mountains, in Piran’s hinterland. They carry a body, a friend of Veljko’s, possibly a Bosnian too. They are looking for somewhere to bury the fallen comrade, and it is Veljko who decides on the place. When asked by the commander “Why here?” he responds: “It’s the smell.” His chief asks: “It smells right? What, does it smell of Bosnia?” When Antonio is chased from his apartment by Veljko, he runs until he reaches Piran’s cemetery. He stops at the grave of his mother, who died in 1942, as the gravestone reveals. Breathless and helpless, Antonio lies down on the cold stone, cowering like a child, shivering, yearning for comfort. Later, after Antonio’s escape by sea, Anica and Veljko cower on the beach, equally helplessly. They speak about how to deal with loss and the need to mourn: Anica: “Veljko, I am a partisan and a communist. I don’t believe in God. But I’d like to say a prayer for him [Antonio].”

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Veljko shrugs. Anica: “I prayed also for my family. I need to do something. It makes it easier.” Veljko: “One prayer is as good as no prayer. Pray.” A bit later, she asks: “Do you think they will shoot us?” Veljko: “How should I know? … But if they do, I’d like to be buried at an unknown place.” Anica: “Why?” Veljko: “All mine are somewhere where nobody knows. If I’m buried like that too maybe we’ll be together again.”

It will take more than 60  years and Antonio’s return to make him understand for good that this is not his fate. At the film’s end, Veljko calls his daughter. He speaks Bosnian: “I have thought about what we were talking about. About the grave. Find out about it.”

Conclusion, or Mnemonic Properties The film Piran – Pirano engages with a broad notion of neighbors. They are not only the people living next door or the people you know in town, from school, from church. They are also the “other” who lives nearby, the ethnic other, the social other, the friend with a shared migrant background, maybe even the other “over there,” in Italy. Thereby, the notion of “void,” of “no neighbors’ land,” is also a broad one, both diachronically and synchronically speaking. Created by the war and its aftermath, it proves very persistent. Veljko met Anica again in 1955 and chose never to go back to his native Bosnia. But the loss continues to haunt him. He tried twice to return, even borrowed money to buy the train ticket, but each time failed to depart at the last moment. In 1984, he denied Anica her wish to go to the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. And yet after her death he feels estranged. The void clearly never left him. Antonio too has harbored the void left by his escape from Piran. He actually does what Veljko only thinks about: he returns to his birthplace. There is an unanswered question in the film about why he never returned earlier—only a vague hint at the unbearable. When Yugoslavia existed, it might have felt unsafe, but even after its dissolution he did not venture to Slovenia for many years. Anica is the one who heals a part of both of them. This can certainly be seen as cliché-ridden, or kitschy. But then, why would love and human

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connection be regarded as kitsch? Antonio’s version is by far the sadder one, as he idealizes the one short moment he and Anica had together. His memory of her ultimately upholds his link to Piran, together with the memory of and love for his mother. Veljko also loses Anica in 1945. But ten years later they meet again, right beneath Antonio’s apartment, in which they will build their life together. This is another silence in the film, as it never hints at how or why they moved into this apartment, of all places. What did they actually think about living in somebody else’s property, and a property of a person they both knew? Anica had even gone to school with Antonio, and had an intimate relationship with him. One might think that, ultimately, she, or both she and Veljko, truly gained their moment of private, silent, almost unconscious revenge—through property seizure. The motif of revenge is a red thread throughout the film. Does revenge help someone to overcome loss, pain, traumatic experiences of violence and displacement? Anica tries to engage with it. When encountering her former schoolmate Antonio, she realizes how her hatred of Italians is not so easily collectivizable as she would wish. Antonio has no opportunity for revenge. His return some 60 years later is not motivated by the need to make good on his expropriation. Veljko is the one who refuses to take revenge and deserts in order to avoid committing a crime. Why is Vojnović’s engagement with the historical properties of the region courageous? Slovenian society today is even more divided over the memory of the Second World War than it was in 2010, when the film was released.31 In the last 20 years, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia have engaged in a fierce and harmful competition over who was perpetrator and who was victim during the war.32 In 2004, the year that neighboring Slovenia joined the EU, Italy instated a national holiday, the Giorno del Ricordo (Remembrance Day), which intends, among other things, to make (Italian) fascist violence pale compared to the crimes of the (Yugoslav) communists.33 In reaction, since 2005, Slovenia has celebrated the “Day 31  Oto Luthar and Heidemarie Uhl, eds, The Memory of Guilt Revisited: The Slovenian Post-­ Socialist Remembrance Landscape in Transition (Göttingen/Vienna: V&R unipress, Vienna University Press, 2019); Maruša Pušnik and Oto Luthar, eds, The Media of Memory (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2020). 32  Borut Klabjan, ed., Borderlands of Memory: Adriatic and Central European Perspectives (Oxford et al.: Lang, 2019). 33  Raoul Pupo et al., “Giorno del ricordo e divulgazione storica,” Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’ 800 e del 900 2 (2021): 305–35.

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when the Coastal Region Returned to Its Motherland” on 15 September, the day of the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1947. A recent attempt to change the word vrnitev (return) to prikljuc ̌itev (incorporation, or annexation) did not receive sufficient votes to be made national law. The change would make the name historically correct, as the region had never been a part of the “motherland” (Yugoslavia, now Slovenia) before, and thus in 1947 could not be “returned.”34 Vojnović sneaks a forceful, yet not so easily detectable metaphor of resistance—and of Yugoslavia, of Slovene–Bosnian relations—into his film. During a night scene in the camp, the partisans sit by the open fire, singing. Female voices dominate, which is peculiar, given that all except Anica are shown to be men. These voices belong to members of the Ljubljana-based women’s choir Kombinat, whose repertoire focuses on “songs of resistance from around the world.”35 To Piran – Pirano, they contribute the “Bilećanka,” a partisan classic written for the occasion of 1 May 1940. The composer was the Slovene Milan Apih, an internee in a concentration camp in the Herzegovinian town of Bileća. The interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia maintained a prison for political opponents here, mostly (at the time illegally operating) communists.36 In Piran – Pirano, when the partisans take over on 1 May 1945, the crowd that gathers on the square carries banners with slogans such as “Vogliamo la Yugoslavia” (“We want Yugoslavia,” in Italian), “Smo Slovenci” (“We are Slovenes”), and “Živel Tito” (“Long Live Tito,” both in Slovene). A man speaks in Italian and asks the “Piranese citizens” to “welcome our communist Yugoslav friends. Let’s celebrate together under the beautiful red flag of the revolution!” In another scene, a man paints “W Tito” on the wall of a narrow passageway, through which three other men pass, carrying different flags: the Soviet one, the Yugoslav one, and the Italian one adorned with a red star. As Rolf Wörsdörfer aptly put it, “Slovenes, Croats and Italians had probably never been closer to each 34  “Enajstega septembra bodo v Idriji praznovali praznik, ki pri nas ne obstaja,” Siol.net, 7 September 2021, https://siol.net/novice/slovenija/enajstega-septembra-bodo-v-idriji-­­ praznovali-praznik-ki-pri-nas-ne-obstaja-560817. Anna Wylegała has written about the analogous phenomena in Poland in her intriguing Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019). 35  Cf. the choir’s website at https://kombinatke.si/kblog/o-nas/. 36  Cf. the performance of the “Bilećanka” by Kombinat on their YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmZhlcQGvY.

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other than during certain moments of their fight against the German occupier.”37 If in Italy the focus of remembrance had been as much on this joint antifascist legacy as it has been on the communist crimes, on self-­ victimization and downsizing fascist crimes, and if in Slovenia (and Croatia) the plight of the Istrian refugees and emigrants had received a more differentiated acknowledgment, the “burden of the past”38 might have been somewhat alleviated by now. Instead, the northeastern Adriatic borderland is but one of many in Europe where contentions about the properties of history abound. Majda Širca, in her account of the role that Piran has played in Slovenia’s cinematic history, aptly sums up Vojnović’s metaphor of property: “‘Piran – Pirano’ is a film that tells us all that Piran is, why it is what it is, and why it is how it is. […] Why the contemporary history of Piran is schizophrenic, full of traumas and stories of deportation. […] At her [Anica’s] grave mourns the one who, in this history, is the winner: the former partisan, who [however] today has been expropriated of everything, except his memories—and his grave.”39

Bibliography 13. Festival slovenskega filma, Portorož, Slovenski Filmski Center. (n.d.). https:// www.film-center.si/sl/film-v-sloveniji/festival/108/13-festival-slovenskegafilma-portoroz/. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Apih, Elio. 1988. Trieste. Bari: Laterza. Ballinger, Pamela. 2006. Trieste: The City as Displaced Persons Camp. In Grenzland Istrien/Borderland Istria, ed. Sabine Rutar, thematic issue of Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 8: 153–174. ———. 2018 [2003]. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Batinić, Jelena. 2015. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press.

37  Rolf Wörsdörfer, Krisenherd Adria 1915–1955: Konstruktion und Artikulation des Nationalen im italienisch-jugoslawischen Grenzraum (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 407. 38  Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, eds, The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (Bloomington/IN: Indiana University Press, 2020). 39  Majda Širca, Piran v filmu: Koprodukcijski c ̌asi Slovenije (Piran: Obalne galerije / Gallerie costiere, Ljubljana: Slovenska kinoteka, 2014), 45; cf. Radstone (2010) for an apt display of the research field on memory films, trauma films, and cinema as prosthetic memory.

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Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Melanie Wiber, eds. 2006. Changing Properties of Property. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bonifacio, Mario. 2005. La seconda resistenza del Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale italiano a Pirano d’Istria nel dopoguerra (1945–1946). Trieste: Irsml Friuli Venezia Giulia. Bugarski, Ranko. 2013. What Happened to Serbo-Croatian? In After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land, ed. Radmila Gorup, 160–168. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cernigoi, Claudia. 2019. Storia e memoria al confine orientale. Trieste: La Nuova Alabarda. Crainz, Guido. 2005. Il dolore e l’esilio. L’Istria e le memorie divise d’Europa. Rome: Donizelli. Diner, Dan. 2007. Memory and Restitution: World War II as a Foundational Event in a Uniting Europe. In Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe, ed. Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg, 9–23. New York: Berghahn Books. Dulić, Tomislav. 2005. Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–1942. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. Enajstega septembra bodo v Idriji praznovali praznik, ki pri nas ne obstaja. Siol.net, 2021, September 7. https://siol.net/novice/slovenija/enajstega-septembra-bodo-v-idriji-praznovali-praznik-ki-pri-nas-ne-obstaja-560817. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Filmu Piran – Pirano dve nagradi na filmskem festivalu v Parizu. Cosmopolitan, 2011, April 19. https://cosmopolitan.metropolitan.si/samo-zate/filmu-piranpirano-dve-nagradi-na-filmskem-festivalu-v-parizu/. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Hametz, Maura. 2005. Making Trieste Italian, 1918–1954. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Hann, Chris. 2015. Property: Anthropological Aspects. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, 2nd ed., 153–159. Oxford: Elsevier. Hrobat Virloget, Katja. 2021. V tišini spomina:“Eksodus” in Istra. Koper/Trieste: Založništvo tržaškega tiska. Kalc, Aleksej. 2019. The Other Side of the ‘Istrian Exodus’: Immigration and Social Restoration in Slovenian Coastal Towns in the 1950s. Dve Domovini/ Two Homelands 49: 145–162. Klabjan, Borut, ed. 2019. Borderlands of Memory: Adriatic and Central European Perspectives. Oxford et al.: Lang. Kopstein, Jeffrey S., and Jason Wittenberg. 2018. Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Luthar, Oto, and Heidemarie Uhl, eds. 2019. The Memory of Guilt Revisited: The Slovenian Post-Socialist Remembrance Landscape in Transition. Göttingen/ Vienna: V&R unipress, Vienna University Press.

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Orlić, Mila. 2019. Né italiani né slavi: State- e Nation-building jugoslavo nel secondo dopoguerra in Istria. Contemporanea 22 (4): 561–584. Petrović, Tanja. 2011. Who Is Goran Vojnović? In Ugrabljena ljubezen/Oteta ljubav/Abducted Love, ed. Oto Luthar et al., 68–73. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC. Piran. In Enciklopedija Slovenije, vol. 8 (Nos-Pli), ed. by Dušan Voglar and Alenka Dermastia, 344. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1994. Piran – Pirano, Goran Vojnović 2010. Mladina, 2010, October 7. https://www. mladina.si/51962/piran-pirano/. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Piran – Pirano še žanje nagrade, Izlet potuje naprej. RTV Slovenija, 2011, November 7. https://www.rtvslo.si/kultura/film-in-tv/piran-pirano-sezanje-nagrade-izlet-potuje-naprej/270048. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Pirjevec, Jože, Borut Klabjan, and Gorazd Bajc, eds. 2006. Osimska meja: Jugoslovansko-italijanska pogajanja in razmejitev leta 1975. Annales: Koper. Pletikosić, Ivica. 2002. ‘Čiščenje’ v Piranu (1945–1948). Acta Histriae 10 (2): 465–492. Pupo, Raoul. 2017. Logiche della violenza politica nei dopoguerra del ‘900 nell’Adriatico orientale: Una ricognizione preliminare. Storia e problemi contemporanei 74: 15–40. Pupo, Raoul, et al. 2021. Giorno del ricordo e divulgazione storica. Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’ 800 e del 900 2: 305–335. Pupovac, Milorad. 2013. Language Imprisoned by Identities; or, Why Language Should Be Defended. In After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land, ed. Radmila Gorup, 169–184. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pušnik, Maruša, and Oto Luthar, eds. 2020. The Media of Memory. Schöningh: Paderborn. Radstone, Susannah. 2010. Cinema and Memory. In Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, 325–342. New York: Fordham University Press. Širca, M. 2014. Piran v filmu: Koprodukcijski časi Slovenije. Piran: obalne galerije/ gallerie costiere and slovenska kinoteka. Ther, Philipp. 2011. Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2016. Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe. In Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, 1–15. New York: Berghahn Books. Troha, Nevenka. 2006. Relations between the Yugoslav Authorities and the Ethnic Italians in the Koper District, 1945–1954. In Grenzland Istrien/Borderland Istria, ed. Sabine Rutar, thematic issue of Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 8: 175–190. Vremec, Vid, Raul Šišković and Jože Hočevar. 1998. Slovenska Istra v boju za svobodu. Koper: Lipa.

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Vse vojne Gorana Vojnovića, Mestna Knjižnica Kranj. 2018, September 7. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmm0IIxued0. Accessed 1 Feb 2022. Waterhouse-Watson, Deb, and Adam Brown. 2015. Playing for Their Lives: Music, Musicians and Trauma in Holocaust Film. Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 29 (1): 1–16. Wörsdörfer, Rolf. 2004. Krisenherd Adria 1915–1955: Konstruktion und Artikulation des Nationalen im italienisch-jugoslawischen Grenzraum. Paderborn: Schöningh. Wylegała, Anna. 2019. Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in PostWar Poland and Ukraine. Berlin: Peter Lang. Wylegała, Anna, and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, eds. 2020. The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

PART IV

Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration

“The Matter of Four Screws”: Holocaust Commemorations in (Post-)Soviet Russia (the Case of Rostov-on-Don) Irina Rebrova

When will all crimes be prayed for? After all, it seemed the time had come. Will you answer, Zmievskaya Balka? You are Babi Yar’s sibling. —Evgenii Evtushenko1 1  Evgenii Evtushenko, “Storozh Zmievskoi Balki” [Watchman of Zmievskaya Balka], http://www.evtushenko.net/novoe-stihotvorenie-evgeniya-evtushenko-storozh-­­ zmiyovskoj-balki.html (accessed 11 May 2020). Often published in English under the name Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Evgenii Evtushenko (1933–2017) was a well-known Soviet and Russian poet, and one of the politically active authors during the Khrushchev Thaw. All quotations are translated from Russian by the author. Babi Yar, mentioned in the poem, was a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, where in September 1941 the Germans killed more than 33,000 Jews.

I. Rebrova (*) Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_14

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In 2013, Russian director Yurii Kalugin made a documentary film dedicated to the history and memory of the mass killings of Jews in the occupied city of Rostov-on-Don. It was in fact his second film on the topic, made almost 20 years after the first one. He symbolically called it Suffering of Memory [Stradanie pamyati].2 The film has not been screened on central Russian television channels as it was a private initiative of the filmmaker and did not receive any government support. Nonetheless, it was screened during Holocaust commemoration evenings in several Russian cities including Rostov-on-Don, and in Israel, with the support of representatives of local Jewish communities. It is also available online, which has gradually increased the audience. One part of the film covers the lawsuit that took place in Rostov-on-Don in 2012.3 Rostov’s lawyer Vladimir Livshits, a representative of the second generation of Holocaust survivors in Rostov-on-Don, filed a lawsuit, in which he claimed the city authorities for the illegal dismantling of a plaque from the memorial complex in Zmievskaya Balka (a ravine on the outskirts of Rostov-on-Don, a site of mass graves of Nazi victims, mainly Jews) in November 2011. The plaque stated that the memorial in Zmievskaya Balka was the largest Holocaust memorial in Russia. In 2004 the plaque had been legally installed on the museum building, which is part of the memorial complex erected on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Victory, in May 1975. Kalugin titled this part of the film “The Matter of Four Screws,” quoting one of Livshits’s speeches in court: We [the members of the Jewish community] did not raise the question of changing the name [of the memorial complex] or its status. It was only a quadrangular piece of stone with the information that the Jews were killed here. Nothing more. The issue price turned out to be four screws.4

The active work of representatives of the Rostov Jewish community to search for the names of Holocaust victims continues.5 Recent publications 2  Stradanie pamyati, directed by Yurii Kalugin (St. Petersburg, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=QRsMA1J65RQ&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQR sMA1J65RQ%26feature%3Dshare&nomobile=1 (accessed 2 May 2020). 3  Ibid., 30:00–35:29 min. 4  Ibid., 31:40–31:55 min. 5  Inna Shvartsman, ed., Kniga pamyati: martirolog zhertv Kholokosta: Rostov-na-Donu, Zmievskaya Balka, 1942 god (Rostov-on-Don: Rostovskaya evreiskaya obshchina, 2014); Vladimir Raksha, Istoriya memoriala v Zmievskoi Balke, https://www.holocaust.su/history (accessed 12 May 2020).

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by local researchers and academic historians focus on the history of Nazi killings of Jews in Rostov-on-Don and their mass burials on the outskirts of the city in Zmievskaya Balka.6 Most of these studies are devoted specifically to the Holocaust history in Rostov-on-Don, with little attention given to the other groups of victims who were also buried in Zmievskaya Balka (e.g., Soviet prisoners of war [POWs]). At the same time, Holocaust remembrance in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in Rostov-on-Don has become a subject of interest for a few local publicists and historians, who focus on commemoration from a top-down perspective rather than exploring memories of war from a bottom-up perspective.7 As I will show in this chapter, the lawsuit that took place in Rostov-on-Don demonstrated the complexity of the Soviet legacy regarding the memory of all “peaceful citizens as victims of the fascist invaders of the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union” and the reluctance of the regional authorities to acknowledge the full complexity of the history of World War II and to criticize the Soviet memory concept. This chapter aims to analyze the functioning of Holocaust memory throughout postwar history, using the case study of one Russian city with a historically large Jewish population in its demographic structure. State memory of the Great Patriotic War (the official term used for the Eastern Front in World War II in the USSR and today’s Russia), “in a Soviet way,” excluded specific groups of Nazi victims. All “peaceful Soviet citizens” were remembered throughout the Soviet era as “victims of fascism.” This term has been changed to “civilians” in contemporary Russia, with little attention given to the specific victim groups.8 The grouping of all victims under the collective category of civilians has caused memory conflicts in contemporary Russia among Jewish communities, local historians, and 6  Evgenii Movshovich, Ocherki istorii evreev na Donu (Rostov-on-Don: ZAO “Kniga,” 2011), 134–69; Christina Winkler, “Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 105–30; Maris Rowe-­ McCulloch, “The Holocaust and Mass Violence in the German-Occupied City of Rostov-­ on-­Don, 1941–1943” (PhD diss., Department of History, University of Toronto, 2020). 7  Christina Winkler, “The Holocaust on Soviet Territory—Forgotten Story? Individual and Official Memorialization of the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don,” in Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus, ed. Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 241–63. 8  See, for example, the results of the ongoing federal project “Bez sroka davnosti” (“Without limitation period”), which is realized all over the Russian Federation since 2018. Official website of the project “Bez sroka davnosti,” https://безсрокадавности.рф/ (accessed 1 September 2022).

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public figures who are trying to restore historical justice using accessible archival sources. The example of the dismantling of the plaque in Zmievskaya Balka and the subsequent reaction of representatives of the Jewish community in the form of initiating a lawsuit is the most visible manifestation of the legacy of the Soviet practice of remembering war victims. Despite the installation of a new memorial plaque, memory conflict is still not settled in Rostov-on-Don. A comprehensive study of this case will extend the findings to the state level and improve understanding of the current memory culture of World War II and its victims in the Russian Federation.

Zmievskaya Balka: The Fate of the Jews in Rostov-on-­Don in 1942 Rostov-on-Don is the largest city in Southern Russia, with a population of more than 1.1 million according to data for 2020.9 It is also known as a gateway to the North Caucasus, the most multi-ethnic region of Russia. Founded in 1749 on the banks of one of the main Russian waterways, the river Don, Rostov-on-Don has become a major industrial, economic, and cultural center and an important transportation hub in Southern Russia. After the fall of the Russian Empire, the social and demographic map of the new country, the USSR, changed. In the first decades of the Soviet Union, Rostov-on-Don remained the third city in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), after Moscow and Leningrad, in terms of the number of Jewish residences, despite various actions taken against Jews by the Soviet government, such as the closing of Jewish schools, synagogues, and prayer houses, mass arrests of members of the Zionist movement in the 1920s, and the repressions of the second half of the 1930s.10 According to the All-Union Population Census of 1939, 27,053 Jews out of a total population of 510,212 lived in Rostov-on-Don,

9   “Gorod Rostov-na-Donu,” official website Goroda Rossii, https://gorodarus.ru/ rostov-­na-donu.html (accessed 13 May 2020). 10  For the history of the Jewish community in Rostov-on-Don, see Movshovich (2011); Mikhail Gontmakher, Evrei na donskoi zemle: istoriya, fakty, biografiya (Rostov-­on-­Don: Rostizdat, 2007).

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which accounted for 5.3%.11 Throughout the North Caucasus, Rostov-­ on-­Don was the city with the strongest and oldest Jewish community in Southern Russia before World War II. During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied Rostov-on-Don twice. The first occupation of the city lasted only one week, from 21 to 29 November 1941. This caused the evacuation of enterprises and people, including Jews, into the deep rear after the recapture of the city by the Soviets. At the same time, uncontrolled streams of refugees from the western regions of the USSR into the North Caucasus continued until the summer of 1942. This makes it difficult to calculate the number of people, as well as the ethnic composition, and in particular the number of Jews, remaining in Rostov-on-Don when it was occupied for the second time in the summer of 1942. The lack of demographic statistics on the eve of the occupation in almost every Soviet settlement is one of the main factors involved in scholarly debates on the number of Nazi victims, and especially the number of Holocaust victims, on Soviet soil. According to the German command, 200–300,000 people remained in Rostov-on-Don by November 1941, among whom were up to 50,000 Jews.12 By August 1942, between 16,000 and 35,000 Jews remained in the city according to various historians and local researchers.13 A further reason for the impossibility of establishing the exact number of Holocaust victims in the USSR (and particularly in Rostov-on-Don) is the negligent work of the “Extraordinary State Commission on Reporting and Investigating the Atrocities of the German Fascist Occupiers and their Accomplices and the Damages they caused to Citizens, Kolkhozes, Public Organisations, State Enterprises of the USSR” (abbreviated in Russian Chrezvychainaya gosudarstennaya komissiya, hereafter the ChGK) in the 11  All-Union Population Census of 1939, Russian State Archive of the Economy [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki], f. 1562, op. 336, d. 966–1001 “The national composition of the population in the USSR and its republics, regions, and districts,” d. 256–427 “The national composition of the population of districts, district centers, cities and large rural settlements.” Online access: http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_nac_39_ ra.php?reg=1441 (accessed 13 May 2020). 12  Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, No. 16 (14.8.1942), in National Socialism, Holocaust, Resistance and Exile 1933–1945, Online Database, De Gruyter, Document-ID rk1355, http://db.saur.de/DGO/basicFullCitationView.jsf?documentId=rk1355 (accessed 10 May 2016). 13  Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 288; Movshovich (2011), 140; Winkler (2016), 106.

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liberated Soviet territories.14 This commission was originally intended to collect evidence of Nazi crimes to be presented at the International Court of Justice after the war. Excavations of mass graves, including Jewish victims, were carried out according to eyewitness statements, but only approximate calculations of the numbers of victims were made. Moreover, the final ChGK reports often refer to “peaceful Soviet citizens” rather than specific groups of Nazi victims. This allowed some local historians to increase the number of Holocaust victims to all “peaceful citizens.” That is, the lack of initial accurate quantitative data regarding human losses, the language used in the Soviet paperwork, and the absence of full lists of victims’ names (in most cases) on Soviet soil caused debates between historians and local researchers, as well as memory conflicts, as in the case of Rostov-on-Don. Without intending to clarify the exact number of Holocaust victims in Rostov-on-Don,15 I will provide a general picture of the mass killings of Jews in Zmievskaya Balka based on available Soviet wartime sources, primarily the ChGK files and postwar eyewitness accounts used in the trials against Nazi perpetrators in West and East Germany. The second occupation of Rostov-on-Don started on 24 July 1942. The city fell into a zone of German military administration until 14 February 1943. On 4 August 1942, the first “Appeal to the Jewish population of the city of Rostov” was published on behalf of Sonderkommando 10a Einsatzgruppe D. It ordered the mandatory registration of all Jews in the city aged 14 years and older up to 10 August.16 On 9 August 1942, the second “Appeal to the Jewish population of the city of Rostov” was announced. It ordered all Jews to go to six designated gathering points in various areas of the city on 11 August.17 The Jews who arrived there were mainly forced to walk in 14  “Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ‘On the Formation of the ChGK on Reporting and Investigating the Atrocities of the German Fascist Occupiers and their Accomplices and the Damages they caused to Citizens, Kolkhozes, Public Organisations, State Enterprises of the USSR,’ November 2, 1942,” in Russian State Archive of SocioPolitical History [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii], hereafter RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 79, l. 15–20. The decree was published: Pravda, November 4, 1942; Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, November 7, 1942. 15  For a detailed history of mass killings of Jews, see Winkler (2016). 16  A photocopy of the Appeal was published in Movshovich (2011), 143. 17  A photocopy of the Appeal was published in Movshovich (2011), 144; State Archive of Rostov Region [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rostovskoi oblasti], hereafter GARO, f. R-3613, op. 1, d. 1, l. 2; Staatsarchiv München, Staatsanwaltschaft, 35308/32.

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columns of about 200 people toward the village of Vtoraya Zmievka, situated 5 km north-west of the city. There they were shot at the edge of a sand quarry or in pits on the outskirts of a grove that had been dug by Soviet POWs over the previous days.18 Members of the regional ChGK defined the sites of mass graves in the liberated Rostov-on-Don in Zmievskaya Balka on the basis of eyewitness accounts from 1943 to 1944. A sand quarry in Zmievskaya Balka was marked on the city plan as early as the 1910s. In the mid-1930s, a railway crossed its territory. In the pre-war years, the village of Vtoraya Zmievka was founded on the slope along the country road from the Zoo through the bridge to the botanical garden. A grove was planted on the northern side of the road.19 It was this territory that became the site of mass graves for Jews and other Nazi victims’ groups during the city occupation. The ChGK members determined: More than 15,000 people were buried in three graves in the sand quarry; about 10,000 Jews—men, women and children—were shot and buried in the grave in Zmievskaya Balka at the edge of the grove 500 meters to the east of the village of Vtoraya Zmievka; about 150 people were shot and buried in the grave in Zmievskaya Balka to the north of the country road leading to the village of Vtoraya Zmievka and 250 meters to the west of the railway line leading to the Khapry station; and about 2000 people were buried in four graves on the western edge of the grove between the villages of Zapadnyi and Vtoraya Zmievka.20

According to general inspections of the grave sites and approximate calculations, the ChGK members concluded that “more than 27,000 people of the city’s civilian population—men, women, children, and [Soviet] POWs—were killed and buried on the outskirts of Rostov-on-Don.”21 This figure included all Nazi victims’ groups and became the official number for the human losses suffered in Rostov-on-Don. It referred to the 18  “Dokladnaya zapiska NKGB po Rostovskoi oblasti o zverstvakh i zlodeyaniyakh fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v g. Rostove-na-Donu v period ego okkupatsii,” 18 February 1944, in State Archive of the Russian Federation [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii], hereafter GARF, f. R-7021, op. 40, d. 14, l. 5. 19  Lyubov’ Voloshinova, “Istoriya i sovremennost’ Zmievskoi Balki,” Donskoi vremennik 21 (2013): 212. 20  “Act No. 1231 of November 2, 1943 for the city of Rostov-on-Don,” in GARO, f. R-3613, op. 1, d. 30, l. 10. 21  Ibid.

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“civilian population,” with Jewish victims counted at 15–18,000.22 There is no exact data on the number of Jews in the city after the war, but according to the All-Union Census of 1959 only 0.6% of the inhabitants of the whole Rostov region, or 20,864 individuals, were registered as Jews according to their passports.23 Acknowledgment of all “peaceful citizens” as victims of “fascism” has been entrenched in Soviet postwar memorial culture; the number of different victim groups has not been researched, and names of all victims have not been recognized.

Zmievskaya Balka as a Memorial Site for “Peaceful Soviet Citizens” The relationship between a state and its memorials is not one-sided. On the one hand, official agencies are in a position to shape memory explicitly. On the other hand, once created, memorials take on lives of their own, often stubbornly resistant to the state’s original intentions.24 Using the example of the historical evolution of the memorial sites in Zmievskaya Balka, I will trace the conflict of interests between remembering communities25 and the official state position in the commemoration of Nazi victims in the Soviet period. The process of memorialization of the site of mass graves in Zmievskaya Balka began immediately after the city’s liberation. The trend across the Soviet Union during the first postwar decade was to erect temporary commemorative signs and modest obelisks at the sites of mass graves of Red Army soldiers and sites where civilians were killed. The creation of the first monuments in Southern Russia was initiated either by relatives and friends of war victims or by proactive citizens, including local historians.  Ibid.; “Act No. 1 of February 17, 1943 for the city of Rostov-on-Don,” in GARF, f. R-7021, op. 40, d. 1, l. 2a. 23  All-Union Population Census of 1959, “The national composition of the population of the regions of RSFSR.” Online access: http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_nac_59. php?reg=57 (accessed 17 January 2021). 24  James E.  Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 3. 25  Remembering communities are not controlled by the authorities and yet have the power to create memorials and to organize commemorative meetings. For more on this concept, see Jay Winter, “Remembrance and Redemption. A Social Interpretation of War Memorials,” Harvard Design Magazine 9 (1999): 1–6; James V.  Wertsch, “Collective Memory,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V.  Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119. 22

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Almost immediately after the mass killings in Zmievskaya Balka, the site became a place where the few Jews who had survived in hiding and those who returned from the evacuation commemorated their murdered relatives. It is known that a Jewish family erected a small stone in the mid-­1940s. The stone included a memorial plaque to commemorate the Ostrovskii family (a 36-year-old mother, her 11-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son), who were “brutally tortured by fascist monsters on August 11, 1942.” There is no official information about this memorial apart from one private photo which shows a group of soldiers with medals on their uniforms and women with children surrounding the memorial in the field (Fig. 1). This photo became part of the archival collection of the Rostov-­on-­Don Jewish community. It is impossible to establish the exact location where this monument was installed, as it was not preserved. The Jewish community possesses another photograph dated 1970, in which

Fig. 1  The first private monument to remember Holocaust victims at Zmievskaya Balka, mid-1940. Source: https://www.holocaust.su/history?pgid=jwlyocb0-­9 da27d6a-­3923-­4dce-­80b0-­929ed9af3beb

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Fig. 2  The second private monument to remember Holocaust victims at Zmievskaya Balka, 1970. Source: https://www.holocaust.su/history?pgid=jwlyo cb0-­46080d2c-­0da7-­46c0-­8003-­c83eeabbcf8a

can be seen a small obelisk surrounded by a fence. It is unclear whether these two private photographs depict the same monument. It is possible that the first postwar memorial stone was replaced by a small concrete obelisk with no personal inscription (Fig. 2). The Jewish community organized commemorative ceremonies in Zmievskaya Balka on the Remembrance Days, 11–12 August, in the early postwar years. But the Soviet government forbade any activity by the Jewish community of Rostov-on-Don to commemorate Holocaust victims in Zmievskaya Balka. Aleksandr Baikov, representative of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults in Rostov-on-Don under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, prevented members of the rather weak postwar Jewish community from carrying out any acts to commemorate Holocaust

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victims. In 1949, he noted that people of different ethnicities, atheists, and people of other faiths had been buried in Zmievskaya Balka and suggested that the Jewish community should not carry out commemorative ceremonies at the mass grave.26 The process of state control over communities of believers occurred in parallel with the development of state ideology toward the Great Patriotic War. After 1950, according to Baikov’s reports, “there were no commemorations at the mass grave,” but members of the Jewish community persisted for some time in preserving the memory of Holocaust victims in Rostov-on-Don. In the 1950s, the head of the Jewish community approached Baikov several times with a request to allow the erection of a monument to the Jews who had been killed and to organize fundraising for this purpose among the local Jews. Permission was never granted, for the same reason mentioned above that Soviet people of many different ethnicities had fallen victim to the Nazis. However, Baikov did allow members of the Jewish community to visit the mass grave on the Remembrance Days and to place a wreath there in 1956. He also recommended that the Rostov Executive Committee should erect a more significant monument at the killing site.27 From the late 1950s, the size of the Jewish community in Rostov-on-­ Don sharply decreased under the influence of the state policy against Jews.28 Many Soviet Jews tried to hide their Jewishness by taking Slavic names, faking the nationality information in their Soviet IDs, and not following religious traditions in public. After the death of the rabbi Meir Shai in 1960, no new rabbi was appointed.29 When the municipal government decided to build a memorial complex in Zmievskaya Balka in the mid-­ 1970s, the authorities completely suppressed the commemorative activity of Rostov’s Jews. Soviet functionaries tried to control and suppress any form of public religious activity in every possible way, whether it was

26  GARF, f. 6991, op. 3, d. 823, l. 78–79. For more details, see: Semen Charnyi, “Rol’ evreiskikh obshchin yuga Rossii v sokhranenii i memorializatsii pamyati o Kholokoste (na primere Rostova-na-Donu),” in Istoriya Kholokosta na Severnom Kavkaze i sud’by evreiskoi intelligentsii v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny: materialy 7-i mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaya Rossiya,” ed. Kiril Feferman (Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” 2013), 111–12. 27  GARF, f. 6991, op. 3, d. 823, l. 190; d. 825, l. 129; d. 828, l. 83–85. 28  See: Gennadii Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR: ot nachala do kul’minatsii, 1938–1953 (Moscow: Materik, 2005). 29  Charnyi, “Rol’ evreiskikh obshchin,” 116.

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fundraising for the erection of a monument or carrying out commemorative ceremonies, including Holocaust remembrance. The memorial in Zmievskaya Balka was erected on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Victory, in May 1975. But already after the city had been liberated, this area was marked with modest monuments. At first, as mentioned above, the initiative came from the local Jewish community members. Simultaneously, however, the Rostov district administration also erected monuments near the site. None of these monuments have been preserved and it is not possible to determine the exact place of their erection, but many archival documents and photos in private collections can help to trace their history. According to an official monument certificate from 1949, a modest monument was erected close to the killing site by the order of Rostov-on-Don City Council several months after the liberation of the region, on 25 May 1943 (Fig. 3). It was a 2.8-meter-high concrete monument commemorating over 10,000 victims of the Nazis and had the inscription: “To the victims of the Nazi terror of 1942–1943.” On the western side of the monument was another plaque that read: Do not cry over the corpses of fallen soldiers, do not sing grave verses over them, do not desecrate their ashes with a tear, dead men do not need any songs or tears, give them better honor, walk without fear over dead bodies, carry their banner forward.30

The certificate includes a photo of this monument with a red star on its top. Postwar monuments erected in the early years after the war all over the USSR had classical forms (an obelisk, a tall pylon, or a truncated pyramid between 1.5 and 5 meters high), were made of stone, metal, or concrete, painted white, and crowned with a five-pointed red star.31 The same monuments were erected for fallen Red Army soldiers and civilian victims, meaning there was initially no difference in architectural representations in memory of war heroes and victims. The first official monuments were used to mark a site as meaningful without any specification of that meaning and

30  “Monument Certificate at Vtoraya Zmeevaya Balka, Zheleznodorozhnii District,” in GARO, f. R-4096, op. 1, d. 93, l. 42–42a. 31  For more about this period of monument erection in the North Caucasus, see: Irina Rebrova, Reconstructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 100–5.

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Fig. 3  The first official monument to remember “Victims of the Nazi terror of 1942–1943” at Zmievskaya Balka, 1943. Source: GARO, f. R-4096, op. 1, d. 93, l. 42a

developed simultaneously with the commemorative initiatives of the Jewish community. In 1958 a new official monument was erected in the Zmievskaya Balka area (Fig. 4). The date was not accidental. In 1954, the USSR became a member of UNESCO, which meant international authorities now had an influence on the process of memorialization.32 Commemoration of the Great Patriotic War thus became a concern and point of honor for the state. The Soviet memorial culture of war heroes and victims was elaborated in this period. The construction of grandiose memorial complexes 32  “UNESCO in Brief – Mission and Mandate,” UNESCO official website, http://www. unesco.org/new/en/unesco/about-us/who-we-are/history/ (accessed March 23, 2020).

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Fig. 4  The second official monument in the Zmievskaya Balka area, 1958. Source: Molot, 1958, 13 May

became a common practice throughout the country, reaching its peak in the mid-1960s and 1970s. The new monument in the Zmievskaya Balka area had a form of monumental sculpture of two soldiers, one bareheaded, clinging to the staff of a red banner, the other frozen in mournful kneeling, clasping a weapon of revenge in his hands. The inscription on the pedestal read: “1941–1945. Eternal glory to the heroes who fell fighting for the freedom and independence of our Motherland. From the workers of Zheleznodorozhnyi District of the City of Rostov. 9 May 1958.”33 This new memorial (already the fourth if we count two small private obelisks and one official one of 1943) commemorated “about 10,000 Soviet POWs, partisans and peaceful citizens.” The figures of soldiers stressed the  “Ob otkrytii pamyatnika v poselke Vtoraya Zmievka,” Molot, May 13, 1958.

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glory of the Soviet soldiers’ victory and highlighted Soviet POWs and “peaceful citizens” as the main victims in occupied Rostov-on-Don. Indeed, the mass graves in Zmievskaya Balka contained the bodies of hundreds of Soviet POWs, who were forced to dig the graves several days before the mass killings of Jews. They became the first Nazi victims at this site. Silencing the other victim groups, both in the visual representations and in the inscription, in the first decades after the war became an obstacle for the restoration of justice in the future. The above-mentioned private photo from 1970 shows a small obelisk surrounded by a fence and members of the Jewish community. The 1958 monument is behind it (see Fig. 2). This means that both memorials— official and private—were preserved at least until the mid-1970s. The coexistence of two commemorative initiatives at one killing site was a distinctive feature of the remembrance of war victims in Soviet times. These two monuments were erected near the highway. In the early 1970s, in accordance with the master plan for the development of the city, plans were made to connect Mechnikov Street with the Western Industrial Area via the city highway. The new highway was supposed to go through the mass graves of 1942. By 1973, only part of the road was built, with a new railway crossing and access to Dovatorov Street. Local authorities proposed to erect a memorial to the “Victims of Fascism” between the highway and the railway. During the construction of the new memorial complex, both monuments, which had apparently been constructed on the other side of the highway, were dismantled.34 The Soviet monuments of the 1970s acquired some new features and meanings. By the 20th anniversary in 1965, when Victory Day became a holiday once again, many monuments were being erected in honor of the heroism and glory of the Red Army and the Soviet people. New memorial complexes had to show that the war was won by all Soviet people, and through this form of remembrance, consolidate and reinforce loyalty to the Communist regime. As they were now official state projects, the “expressing subject” became the city or town as an administrative unit. The “expression” was directed outside, its content alienated and impersonal and now with a governmental, ideological character. Such “administrative” monuments were constructed to be shown to higher authorities.35  Voloshinova, “Istoriya i sovremennost’,” 213.  Natal’ja Konradova and Anna Ryleva, “Helden und Opfer. Denkmäler in Rußland und Deutschland,” Osteuropa 4–6 (2005): 349–50. 34 35

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Fig. 5  Memorial complex to the Memory of the Victims of Fascism (Zmievskaya Balka), 1975. Source: Irina Rebrova, 2017

The new memorial complex in Zmievskaya Balka (Fig. 5) was one of the exceptions, a state monument erected at almost the exact killing site; it was not in the city center and no reburials from other mass graves near the new monument were carried out. At the same time, the monument’s form and symbolic expression reinforced the official Soviet memory politics. With each new monument, the total number of victims given by the authorities increased—from 10,000 to 27,000—but the reluctance of the region’s authorities to recognize this place as the largest Holocaust site within modern Russia resulted in a 2012 lawsuit, as discussed below. The final ChGK report for Rostov-on-Don fixed 27,000 “peaceful Soviet citizens” as Nazi victims during the second city’s occupation. The new memorial complex thus remembered all victims according to the official wartime report. It was officially named a “Memorial to the Memory of the Victims of Fascism (Zmievskaya Balka),” following the canons of Soviet memorial policy. In its name and inscriptions, there was no mention of Jews as the principal Nazi victim group. The authors of the project defined the grave site of thousands of people as the spatial and compositional center of the memorial complex, which is preserved in the form of a deep

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crater, with all the main elements of the memorial complex oriented towards it. A pedestrian alley leads from the “Hall of Sorrow” [zal skorbi], which is the name of the museum building, down the slope to the lower platform with the “Eternal Flame.” This alley has a ring shape and symbolizes the “Death Road” [doroga smerti], the road along which men and women, old people and children went to the execution site. Five commemorative pylons symbolizing the five years of the war, 1941–1945, were placed in front of the alley, alternating with low-rise granite headstones of mass graves. The “Memorial Square” [ploshchadka pamyati] with a bowl of “Eternal Flame” and a sculptural composition “Victims of the Shooting” [zhertvy rasstrela] are located in the geometric center of the memorial complex.36

A permanent exhibition about the “Nazi atrocities in occupied Rostov-­ on-­Don” was displayed in the Hall of Sorrow during Soviet times. As the years passed, the war witnesses grew old, private memories were overshadowed by memory policy actively promoted by the state, and the Soviet euphemism “peaceful Soviet citizens” was taken by most citizens of the USSR as a given. Memory on particular victim groups, including Jews, was completely erased from the public sphere, becoming a personal and family tragedy of survived relatives.

Zmievskaya Balka as the Largest Holocaust Memorial Site in Post-Soviet Russia After the USSR collapsed, the memorial in Zmievskaya Balka fell into neglect and disrepair. Black marble from the Hall of Sorrow was plundered, and the sculptural composition required restoration. The embodied “memory in stone” of these monuments lay unclaimed in a context of rapid ideological and political unraveling during the transitional period of the 1990s. At the same time, the Jewish community of Rostov-on-Don was revived,37 and many archival materials were declassified. Evgenii Movshovich, a native Jew of Rostov-on-Don who survived the Holocaust 36  Anatolii Zubkov, Kolokola pamyati: o tekh, kto pal za mir, za zhizn’, za schast’e nashe (Rostov-on-Don: Rostovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1985), 30–32. 37  The Jewish community was revived and registered as a legal organization in 1991. Interview with Mikhail Potapov, head of the Jewish community in Rostov-on-Don, in author’s archive, code 13-MEM-RO-01, 27 February 2013, Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

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thanks to his timely evacuation to Western Siberia,38 studied the history of Rostov’s Jews.39 He was the author of the text of the first commemorative plaque that appeared on the façade of the museum building in Zmievskaya Balka in 2004 in accordance with a decree of the Mayor of Rostov-on-­ Don. It reads: “On 11–12 August 1942, more than 27,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis here. This is the largest Holocaust memorial in Russia.”40 The commemorative plaque remained in place for seven years and survived scheduled refurbishment works in 2009. Moreover, the city’s Cultural Department registered the memorial complex “In Memory of the Victims of Fascism” in Zmievskaya Balka as “the largest Holocaust monument in Russia” in its renewed registration document of 2010.41 However, the plaque was removed in November 2011 by the order of representatives of the city’s Cultural Department. It was initially placed in the museum in Zmievskaya Balka, where it lay forgotten for a few years. Nobody knew exactly what it was: an artifact or an ownerless object, which no one had the heart to throw away. The plaque is currently part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust of the Memorial Synagogue at Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow.42 Simultaneously, in November 2011 a second plaque was installed on the façade of the museum building in Zmievskaya Balka. It reads: Here, in Zmievskaya Balka in August 1942, more than 27,000 peaceful citizens of Rostov-on-Don and Soviet POWs were killed by the Hitlerite occupiers. Among those killed were representatives of many ethnicities. Zmievskaya Balka is the largest site in the Russian Federation of the mass killing of Soviet citizens by fascist invaders during the Great Patriotic War— it is a historical monument of regional importance. The memorial complex “In Memory of the Victims of Fascism” in Zmievskaya Balka was erected in 38  Interview with Evgenii Movshovich, in author’s archive, code 13-X-PO-04, 27 February 2013, Rostov-on-Don, Russia. 39  Movshovich (2011). 40  Decree of the Mayor of Rostov-on-Don, 20 September 2004. For the text of the decree, see: Yanina Chevelya, ed., Zmievskaya Balka: vopreki (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2013), 232. 41  “Appendix No. 2 to Preservation Order No. 115-10 for the cultural heritage object of regional significance ‘Memorial complex to the memory of the victims of fascism in Zmievskaya Balka 1942,’” 17 August 2010, l. 3. Provided by the Cultural Department of Rostov-on-Don. 42  Interview with Aleksandr Kozhin, Chairman of the Rostov department of the AllRussian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture, in author’s archive, code 16-MEM-RO-02, 7 September 2016, Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

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1975 according to the project of a creative team consisting of: architects: R.I. Murad’yan, N.N. Nerses’yants, sculptors: N.V. Avedikov, E.F. Lapko, B.K. Lapko. It was renovated in 2009.

Rostov’s remembering community—represented by members of the Jewish community (mainly Jewish), public figures, and intelligentsia— expressed shock at the unauthorized replacement of the memorial plaque, which in fact violated the 2004 decree of the Mayor of Rostov-on-Don, the complete removal of any mention of the Holocaust from the text of the second plaque, and the fact that the reference to Jews was replaced by the term “peaceful Soviet citizens.” The co-chair of the Russian research and educational Holocaust Center, Il’ya Al’tman, understood this as an act of “dejudification of the Holocaust,” the main symbols of which were the permanent exhibition in the museum of Auschwitz until the late 1980s and the monument in Babi Yar of the mid-1970s.43 The Russian Jewish Congress openly expressed its position: “It was unacceptable to erase all memory of the greatest tragedy of our time from future generations. It is important to warn the descendants about the danger of Nazi ideology and its consequences.”44 Thus, the remembering community noted that Russian society was stepping backward toward Soviet times, when it was not permitted to openly mention Jews as a specific victim group. This event caused serious discussions in the press, at numerous round tables and in public debate.45 The conflict reached its peak in the spring of 2012, when Rostov lawyer Vladimir Livshits filed a lawsuit in the Kirovskii District Court against the City’s Cultural Department, the Rostov Region Ministry of Culture, and the city administration. He demanded the recognition that the removal of the first plaque was illegal. His most important 43  Il’ya Al’tman, “Mesto Kholokosta v rossiiskoi istoricheskoi pamyati,” in Pamyat’ o Kholokoste: problemy memorializatsii: materialy 6-i mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaya Rossiya,” ed. Il’ya Al’tman (Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” 2012), 19. For more about the phenomenon of dejudification of the Holocaust in Poland and other countries of the former Soviet Bloc, see: Ronald J. Berger, The Holocaust, Religion, and Politics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 163. 44  “Memorial v Zmievskoi Balke dolzhen sluzhit’ ne razdeleniyu narodov, a ikh primireniyu»,’” Novosti Rostovskoi evreiskoi obshchiny, https://www.evreirostov.ru/templates/blog/ post.asp?aid=1604992&PostID=27299&p=1 (accessed 8 May 2021). 45  See, for example: Yanina Chevelya, “Delo doshlo do suda,” Rostov ofitsial’nyi, May 30, 2012; Grigorii Reykhman, “Zmievskaya Balka: ‘svobodno ot evreev?,’” Vesti: Israil’ po-­ russki, December 22, 2011; Ellen Barry, “Protest by Jewish Group over Memorial,” New York Times, January 25, 2012.

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argument, which he repeated more than once during the almost six-­ month-­long case, was the following: The statement about the mass killing of peaceful citizens in Zmievskaya Balka without mentioning that they were Jews is a sophism, i.e., a well-­ considered and dissembled logical error based on a certain ideological approach. I would consider this kind of ideological approach to constitute a partial Holocaust denial through its understatement.46

It is notable that both sides of the lawsuit appealed to the same sources, primarily the ChGK records, but they interpreted them each in their own way. The defendants, recognizing the fact that Jews were buried in Zmievskaya Balka, appealed to the historical name of the memorial complex (“Victims of Fascism”), in other words, the burial place of “people of different ethnicities.”47 Another piece of evidence that the defendants brought to bear was the inaccuracy of the total number of Jews who were killed. However, Livshits’s claims were different. His main point was not only about the illegal dismantling of the memorial plaque but also about the substitution of historical concepts, which he considered to be a ­manifestation of antisemitism and covert Holocaust denial at the official level. This produced a vicious circle, in which unresolved problems of the Soviet era became a sticking point in recognizing all Nazi victim groups, including Holocaust victims, and in the evolution of tolerance in Russian society. Furthermore, the lawsuit and its heated discussion led to Jewish organizations being blamed for inciting ethnic hatred. Thus, in January 2012, a round-table discussion on the status of the Zmievskaya Balka memorial took place in the press center of the Interfaks-Yug news agency, with the participation of Don Cossacks who had revived their activity in the 1990s, war veterans, representatives of patriotic, ethnic, and other non-­ governmental local organizations, researchers, and local historians. Many participants were against “changing the status of the ‘In Memory of the Victims of Fascism’ memorial complex in Zmievskaya Balka as one of the biggest memorials of Russia dedicated to the tragic events of the Great Patriotic War.”48 Local radical patriotic organizations also reacted to the  From Vladimir Livshits’s statement of claim. Quoted in Chevelya, Zmievskaya Balka, 245. This thesis was repeated many times by the claimant during the legal proceedings. I am grateful to Aleksandr Kozhin for providing a video of the proceedings. 47  Aleksandr Kharchenko, “Vopros o doskakh stal delom printsipa,” Vechernii Rostov, May 25, 2012. 48  Quoted in Chevelya, Zmievskaya Balka, 281. 46

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conflict. Members of the public organization “Russian Image” [“Russkii obraz”], and the Russian national cultural group “We Are Russians” [“My russkie”], demanded that the Prosecutor’s Office investigate whether the Russian Jewish Congress had incited ethnic hatred, since “considering the Zmievskaya Balka memorial as a Holocaust site could lead to the destabilization of society, to different uncontrolled destructive actions, and even to riots.”49 The lawsuit was conducted exactly 70  years after the mass killings in Zmievskaya Balka. Many delegations from all over Russia and abroad came to commemorate the Holocaust victims in August 2012. The Rostov Jewish community organized a March of the Living,50 the documentary film by Yurii Kalugin, Suffering of Memory, mentioned in the introduction, was shown, and the international conference “Lessons of the Holocaust and Contemporary Russia,” organized by the Russian research and educational Holocaust Center, took place during the commemorative week in early August 2012.51 Vladimir Livshits lost the lawsuit. On 22 June 2012, during the proceedings, Decree No. 471 of the Rostov-on-Don administration was issued, which canceled the previous decree of 2004 on installing the first plaque. Thus, Livshits’s claims could not be satisfied because the first plaque had lost its legal status. The judgment was made in favor of the defendants. It stated: Nobody calls into question the fact that the memorial in Zmievskaya Balka is a place where peaceful citizens including Jews were annihilated. The memorial in Zmievskaya Balka commemorates all peaceful citizens, POWs, and other categories of Soviet people. In this connection, the plaintiff’s arguments that the removal of the information about the predominance of Jews among the Nazi victims in Zmievskaya Balka is tantamount to Holocaust denial by the defendants, are untenable.52  Ibid., 282.  The international campaign March of the Living was first held in 1988. Taking place annually on Yom Hashoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—the March of the Living itself is a three-kilometer walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau as a tribute to all victims of the Holocaust. International March of the Living official website, https://motl.org/ (accessed March 23, 2020). 51  For information in the media on commemorative events in Zmievskaya Balka in August 2012, see: Yana Fomina, “Vkhod na Zmievskuyu Balku 70 let spustya,” Moskovskii komsomolets na Donu, August 15–22, 2012. 52   “The judgement of the Kirovskii District Court of Rostov-on-Don on case no. 2-3201/12 of October 15, 2012.” I am grateful to Aleksandr Kozhin for providing a copy of this document. 49 50

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The judgment of the Kirovskii Court was appealed at a higher judicial level, which led to some consensus.53 On 28 April 2014, a third plaque was installed on the façade of the museum building in Zmievskaya Balka. The Rostov-on-Don Special Commission for Naming Socially Significant Sites, Preserving the Names of Famous Persons, and Memorable Events affirmed its text, which reads: Here, in Zmievskaya Balka, in August of 1942 were killed more than 27,000 peaceful citizens of Rostov-on-Don, including POWs. There were representatives of many ethnicities among them. Zmievskaya Balka is the largest place of mass killing of Jews on the territory of Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia Aleksandr Boroda, leaders of the Rostov Jewish community, representatives of regional and city administrations, and thousands of Rostov Jews including relatives of Holocaust victims attended the unveiling ceremony of the third plaque.54 However, the principal aim of Livshits, members of the local Jewish community, and many public figures “not to underline Jewish victims but to restore the ethnicity of Holocaust victims and to remind the contemporary Russian society of Nazi crimes when the object of genocide could become any people”55 was not achieved. Holocaust memory remains the private memory of remembering (mainly Jewish) communities within Russian society.56 The passive position of most Rostov citizens—the legal proceedings were open to all citizens and widely broadcasted, but no protest action was registered either in Rostovon-Don or in other cities in Russia—is a sign of indifference and implicit acceptance of the official concept of the Great Patriotic War, which does not include the Holocaust. * * *

 Interview with Kozhin.  Diana Volkova, “V Zmievke ‘primerili’ dosku,” Rostov ofitsial’nyi, April 23, 2014. 55  These are the head of the Russian Jewish Congress press service Mikhail Savin’s words. Quoted in: “Memorialu Kholokosta ne khvatilo nuzhnykh spravok,” project website of the Society “Memorial”—“Uroki istorii XX vek,” 24 January 2012, https://urokiistorii.ru/ article/2874 (accessed 23 March 2020). 56  The non-Jewish remembering communities are more visible in the Russian regions with historically little presence of Jews. See more about it in Rebrova (2020), 298. 53 54

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Scholarly definitions of certain Holocaust sites as “a negative place of memory,”57 or a “counter-memorial”58 reflect a special functional directionality. These are not merely memorials related to a historical trauma (sites for the work of mourning by survivors) but also places with a peculiar moral-pedagogical function, embodying the slogan: “Never again!”59 But such a perception of the Holocaust is characteristic of West European, Israeli, and American memory cultures. Russian memorials, whether Soviet or not, have not been oriented toward this “Never again!” narrative. They fix memories of the sites not so much as those of the Holocaust, if at all, but rather as sites of the mass killing of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” These, according to the rhetoric of Soviet and later Russian authorities, obtain the characteristics of heroic victims, without reference to the Nazi racial ideology that led to the targeted annihilation of most of those victims. The heroization intrinsic to post-Soviet memorial culture is directed inward, to the glory of the Soviet warrior, citizen, and patriot, rather than outward in an appeal to universal humanity not to repeat the Nazi crimes. The case of Rostov-on-Don illustrates this thesis very well. The replacement of the commemorative plaque in Zmievskaya Balka in 2011 became a theme of several literary works. The celebrated Soviet poet Evgenii Evtushenko also responded to the controversy over the memorial plaques in Rostov-on-Don and Holocaust remembrance in the city. He visited Rostov-on-Don in December 2014, when he read his latest poem about the Holocaust in Zmievskaya Balka. To him, the memorial site in Rostov-on-Don is “Babi Yar’s sibling.” In 1961, Evtushenko was one of the first poets who raised the curtain on the tens of thousands of Jews killed at Babi Yar. The theme of the Holocaust then entered Soviet literature and public debate for the first time, following many years of postwar silence.60 Back then, in the 1960s, Evtushenko’s “Babi Yar” became a literary revelation for the Soviet public, allowing the voices of Holocaust victims to be heard for a short time. His subsequent poem, “Watchman of

57   Reinhart Koselleck, “Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses,” in Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. Volkhart Knigge and Norbert Frei (Bonn: BpB, 2005), 21. 58  Young (1993), 9–15. 59  Koselleck (2005); Sandra Petermann, Rituale machen Räume: Zum kollektiven Gedenken der Schlacht von Verdun und der Landung in der Normandie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 26. 60  Edith W.  Clowes, “Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” Partial Answers 3, no. 2 (2005): 153–82.

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Zmievskaya Balka” [Storozh Zmievskoi Balki], did not cause a similar public response in modern Russia, but it became an event for Rostov-on-Don. This poem is a call to think about the eternal, about the price of human life, about the idea that the memory of Holocaust victims, and more broadly of all Nazi victim groups, the memory of every killed person in general, is more important than any “inscriptions” on a monument. Indeed, the problem of remembering the Holocaust victims (as well as other victim groups) is much more complex than the “matter of four screws,” as Kalugin titled the part of his documentary devoted to the lawsuit lost by Livshits in 2012. Members of Rostov-on-Don’s Jewish community have been searching for the names of Jews killed in Zmievskaya Balka for several decades. As a result of archival research by Vladimir Raksha, an archivist of the Rostov-on-Don Jewish community supported by Yurii Dombrovskii, a member of the board of trustees of the Russian Jewish Congress’s “Holocaust Remembrance” program, the names of 3361 victims have been identified. They were recorded in the Martyrology, a commemorative book of Holocaust victims.61 As of March 2017, the Rostov-on-Don list consists of 4007 names, of which 3601 were confirmed by researchers of the Hall of Names in Yad Vashem. In 2021, the colleagues from the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center revised these lists and confirmed about 2200 names of Holocaust victims.62 The local Jewish community planed to engrave the verified names on the commemorative pylons at the memorial complex in Zmievskaya Balka in summer of 2022 to commemorate the 80th Remembrance Days, but it was not realized by September 2022. Acknowledgments  This contribution is based on pp.  128–37 of Chapter 4 (“Between Official Ideology and Private Memory: Is Zmievskaya Balka the Largest Holocaust Site in Russia?”) of the author’s book, Reconstructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (De Gruyter, 2020). I thank Leonid Terushkin, Head of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center Archive, who keeps my knowledge updated on the current situation on Holocaust remembrance in Rostov-on-Don.

 Shvartsman, Kniga pamyati.  A comment of Leonid Terushkin, head of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center Archive at the International online conference “Evacuation, the Soviet Union and the Jews: Problems, Assessments and Evidence” on 22 December 2021. 61 62

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Bibliography Documentary Stradanie pamyati, directed by Yurii Kalugin (St. Petersburg, 2013). https:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=QRsMA1J65RQ&desktop_uri=% 2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQRsMA1J65RQ%26feature%3Dshare&nomobile=1. Accessed 2 May 2020.

Secondary Sources Al’tman, Il’ya. 2012. Mesto Kholokosta v rossiiskoi istoricheskoi pamyati. In Pamyat’ o Kholokoste: problemy memorializatsii: materialy 6-i mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaya Rossiya”, ed. Il’ya Al’tman, 15–21. Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost”. Arad, Yitzhak. 2009. The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Barry, Ellen. 2012. Protest by Jewish Group over Memorial. New York Times, January 25. Berger, Ronald J. 2012. The Holocaust, Religion, and Politics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Charnyi, Semen. 2013. Rol’ evreiskikh obshchin yuga Rossii v sokhranenii i memorializatsii pamyati o Kholokoste (na primere Rostova-na-Donu). In Istoriya Kholokosta na Severnom Kavkaze i sud’by evreiskoi intelligentsii v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny: materialy 7-i mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaya Rossiya”, ed. Kiril Feferman, 110–117. Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost”. Chevelya, Yanina. 2012. Delo doshlo do suda. Rostov ofitsial’nyi, May 30. ———, ed. 2013. Zmievskaya Balka: vopreki. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks. Clowes, Edith W. 2005. Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature. Partial Answers 3 (2): 153–182. Evtushenko, Evgenii. Storozh Zmievskoi Balki. http://www.evtushenko.net/ novoe-stihotvorenie-evgeniya-evtushenko-storozh-zmiyovskoj-balki.html. Accessed 11 May 2020. Fomina, Yana. 2012. Vkhod na Zmievskuyu Balku 70 let spustya. Moskovskii komsomolets na Donu, August 15–22. Gontmakher, Mikhail. 2007. Evrei na donskoi zemle: istoriya, fakty, biografiya. Rostov-on-Don: Rostizdat. Kharchenko, Aleksandr. 2012. Vopros o doskakh stal delom printsipa. Vechernii Rostov, May 25.

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Konradova, Natal’ja, and Anna Ryleva. 2005. Helden und Opfer. Denkmäler in Rußland und Deutschland. Osteuropa 4–6: 349–350. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2005. Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses. In Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. Volkhart Knigge and Norbert Frei, 21–32. Bonn: BpB. Kostyrchenko, Gennadii, ed. 2005. Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR: ot nachala do kul’minatsii, 1938–1953. Moscow: Materik. Movshovich, Evgenii. 2011. Ocherki istorii evreev na Donu. Rostov-on-Don: ZAO “Kniga”. Ob otkrytii pamyatnika v poselke Vtoraya Zmievka. Molot, May 13, 1958. Petermann, Sandra. 2007. Rituale machen Räume: Zum kollektiven Gedenken der Schlacht von Verdun und der Landung in der Normandie. Bielefeld: transcript. Raksha, Vladimir. 2020. Istoriya memoriala v Zmievskoi Balke. https://www.holocaust.su/history. Rebrova, Irina. 2020. Reconstructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus. Berlin: De Gruyter. Reykhman, Grigorii. 2011, December 22. Zmievskaya Balka: ‘svobodno ot evreev?’. Vesti: Israil’ po-russki. Rowe-McCulloch, Maris. 2020. The Holocaust and Mass Violence in the GermanOccupied City of Rostov-on-Don, 1941–1943. PhD diss., Department of History, University of Toronto. Shvartsman, Inna, ed. 2014. Kniga pamyati: martirolog zhertv Kholokosta: Rostovna-Donu, Zmievskaya Balka, 1942 god. Rostov-on-Don: Rostovskaya evreiskaya obshchina. Volkova, Diana. 2014. V Zmievke ‘primerili’ dosku. Rostov ofitsial’nyi, April 23. Voloshinova, Lyubov’. 2013. Istoriya i sovremennost’ Zmievskoi Balki. Donskoi vremennik 21: 212–214. Wertsch, James V. 2009. Collective Memory. In Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V.  Wertsch, 117–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winkler, Christina. 2016. Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30 (1): 105–130. ———. 2020. The Holocaust on Soviet Territory—Forgotten Story? Individual and Official Memorialization of the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don. In Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus, ed. Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman, 241–263. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Winter, Jay. 1999. Remembrance and Redemption. A Social Interpretation of War Memorials. Harvard Design Magazine 9: 1–6. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zubkov, Anatolii. 1985. Kolokola pamyati: o tekh, kto pal za mir, za zhizn’, za schast’e nashe. Rostov-on-Don: Rostovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo.

New Settlers as Implicated Subjects: Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia Johana Wyss

Introduction The twentieth century was a time of “ethnic cleansing.” Scholars suggest that in Europe alone, about 90 million people from around 30 different ethnic groups were subjected to ethnic cleansing during this period.1 Cases of ethnic cleansing in Alsace, Dalmatia, Galicia, Karelia, Silesia, Sudetenland, and Transylvania, to name just a few, have been well studied and today represent a robust body of scholarship. However, less attention has been given to the question of how the void left by the “vanished 1  Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe,” in Whose Memory? Which Future?, ed. Barbara  Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 1–15.

J. Wyss (*) Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_15

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Others” has been experienced and negotiated in the places of departure in the twenty-first century. Are the “vanished Others” remembered and commemorated by contemporary populations dwelling in the “No Neighbors’ Lands”? How do the people inhabiting such places negotiate their relationship with and positionality to their homes? In this chapter, I focus on the aftermath of the German expulsion from Czechoslovakia that took place between 1945 and 1951. Based on the principle of collective guilt, the Flucht und Vertreibung (“flight and expulsion”) involved postwar mass violence against approximately 2.5–3 million Germans living in Czechoslovakia, predominantly women, children, and the elderly. The violent forced transfer was legitimized by a legal framework provided in the highly controversial Decrees of the President of the Republic issued by President Beneš (1884–1948) in 1944–45, known as “the Beneš decrees.” The decrees declared that “untrustworthy” citizens—that is, Germans (including the Jewish minority that predominantly spoke German), Hungarians, traitors, and collaborators living in the Czech lands and Slovakia—would relinquish their Czechoslovakian citizenship and their property without compensation.2 Immediately after the war, the expulsion was presented and legitimized by the Czechoslovakian government, and especially by President Eduard Beneš, as a collective punishment for the horrors of the war.3 However, the “German question” (i.e., what should be done with the sizable German minority in regard to exclusionary Czech-Slovak ethno-nationalism), to which the German expulsion provided a “solution,” had existed since the very inception of the newly created Czechoslovak state in 1918.4 Thus, it would be a mistake to see the expulsion as resulting solely from the experience of the Second World War, without deeper historical contextualization and acknowledgment of the pre-war ethno-political animosities between pro-­Czech and pro-German Czechoslovakian residents. Second, as the historian Kateřina Č apková and others have demonstrated, in Czech historiography, the taken-for-granted essentialized categories of the 2  Eagle Glassheim, “The Mechanics of Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1947,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 197–219. 3   Adrian Arburg and Tomáš Staněk, Vysídlení Ne ̌mců a prome ̌ny c ̌eského pohranic ̌ní 1945–1951 (Středokluky: Susa, 2010). 4  See Zdeněk Beneš, Rozume ̌t de ̌jinám: vývoj c ̌esko-ne ̌meckého vztahů na našem území v letech 1848–1948 (Prague: Gallery, 2002).

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German, the Jew, and the Czech, that were in fact often complex, blurry, and fluid identities, need further problematizing and critical reflection to understand the expulsion in its full complexity.5 In the Opavian case study that I present below, a person could be associated with all three categories, depending on the socio-historical context at different stages of the person’s life. However, in line with the national public memory of the Second World War expressed and manifested in Czech popular culture, which is widely accepted and reproduced locally in Opava, Opavians clearly differentiate between Germans, Jews, and Czechs, portraying Germans as the “perpetrators,” Jews as the “victims,” and Czechs as “passive bystanders/survivors” of the war. This triangulation, however, becomes problematic in relation to the postwar expulsion and persecution of Czechoslovakian Germans, and especially as regards the question of the implication of contemporary Opavian inhabitants in the historical violence of the postwar forced displacement. In providing an ethnographic account of the said triangulation, my analysis centers around two decisions taken by the town hall of Opava. The first decision was to support the erection of the so-called Jewish Memorial, as the locals call it, dedicated to the Opavian synagogue that disappeared during the Second World War. The second decision was to refuse dedication of a memorial to the German-speaking population that disappeared immediately after the war. In the Czech Republic, the triangular narrative of the Second World War using the tropes of “victims,” “perpetrators,” and “bystanders,” described above, has been challenged to some extent since 1989. However, despite numerous high-profile public apologies for the German expulsion given by individuals such as the late president Václav Havel in 1990, or by institutions such as the municipality of the town of Brno in 2015, the prevailing public attitude toward official admission of Czech past wrongdoings committed against the German Other is dismissive. Thus, remembering the vanished German Other remains a thorny issue in contemporary

5  Kateřina Č apková, “Národnostně nespolehlivý?! Německy hovořící Židé v Polsku a v Č eskoslovensku bezprostr ̌edně po druhé světové válce,” Soudobé de ̌jiny 1, no. 2 (2015): 80–101; Jan Kuklík and René Petráš, Minorities and Law in Czechoslovakia 1918–1992 (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2017).

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Czech official discourse.6 Even the question of how the event of their “disappearance” should be referred to is highly political and divisive. In Czech, the euphemism odsun (transfer) or even vysídlení (resettlement), with its technical connotation, is more commonly used than the evocative vyhnání (expulsion). Rather than being part of the official and everyday vocabulary, the notion of vyhnání is employed in various counter-­narratives and/or in artistic accounts such as the highly acclaimed novel Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch [Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch],7 highlighting the usage of physical and symbolic violence during and after the act. In this chapter, I adopt and use the English word “expulsion,” acknowledging its Czech equivalent that is in line with my own understanding of the event as both an academic and a member of the “imagined community” of the Czech nation.8 In what follows, I present the theoretical framing of my argument, employing Michael Rothberg’s notion of an implicated subject.9 I then offer a brief historical background of the town of Opava, and finally I provide empirical evidence for my reasoning. The empirical section is comprised of a localized case study that focuses on the negotiations between contemporary residents of the town of Opava, the majority of whom came to Opava after 1945, over whether to commemorate the disappeared pre-­ war populations (Czech German speakers and Czech German-speaking Jews) and thus publicly acknowledge their former presence or whether to delegate their legacy to oblivion. Despite the complexity and ambiguity of Czech, German, and Jewish identities and their intersections,10 in the official Czech national historical discourse, the “Germans” are deemed to be 6  See Barbora Spalová, “Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment between Communicative and Cultural Memory,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2017): 84–109; Václav Houžvička, Návraty sudetské otázky (Prague: Karolinum, 2005); Tomas Sniegon, “Between Old Animosity and New Mourning: Meaning of Czech Post-­ Communist Memorials of Mass Killing of the Sudeten Germans,” in Whose Memory? Which Future?, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 49–72; Johana Wyss, “Stones Do Not Forget: The Symbolic Struggle between Forgetting and Being Forgotten,” in On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Commemorating War, ed. Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin, and Niall Munro (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020), 225–29. 7  Kateřina Tučková, Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (Prague: Host, 2010). 8  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 9  Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 10  See Č apková (2015); Kuklík and Petráš (2017).

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responsible for the war and the disappearance of the Jews, as well as the postwar atrocities committed against the Germans by Czechs, as the “sinner,” as Bernhard Forchtner puts it in the context of Germany,11 is responsible not only for their sins but also for the pain inflicted upon the sinner as a punishment. In other words, as one of my Opavian interlocutors put it, “the Germans [that is, German-speaking Opavians] brought it [the forced displacement] upon themselves because they caused the war.”12 The German expulsion also meant that the expellees left behind significant material wealth. Grand and highly valuable properties—such as factories, estates, castles, apartment buildings, department stores, and so on—were nationalized by the Czechoslovakian government. Properties of lesser significance—such as smaller farms and houses, flats, cottages, and so on— were appropriated by predominantly Czech new settlers (dosídlenci) who came to the vastly emptied, post-expulsion regions, primarily the country’s borderlands that used to be known as the Sudetenland.13 The new settlers were mostly young families or unsupported individuals in search of economic betterment. The majority of them were Czechs who came from the Bohemian and Moravian inlands shortly after the end of the Second World War. In much smaller numbers, there were also some remigrants (i.e., the subsequent generation of ethnic Czechs who returned to their former country of origin) who came to Opava from Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine. Each of those remigrants too brought with them various versions of Czech ethno-national identity. Additionally, a wave of Greek and Macedonian pro-communist refugees came to Czech Silesia at the end of 1940s and the beginning of 1950s because of the Greek Civil War. Furthermore, the forced expulsion of the German-­ speaking inhabitants created a sudden abundance of unoccupied jobs that devastated all industries. In an attempt to counter these effects, the Czechoslovak government made significant efforts to accelerate the repopulation of the affected areas by the means of various administrative schemes and the offering of numerous socioeconomic benefits. The Czechization of the Silesian borderland that began in the nineteenth century further intensified during the socialist era (1948–1989). 11  See Bernhard Forchtner, “Rhetoric of Judge-Penitence: Claiming Moral Superiority through Admissions of Past Wrongdoing,” Memory Studies 7, no. 4 (2014): 409–24. 12   Unstructured interview with a male, conducted in Opava in October 2015 by Johana Wyss. 13  Jan Kuklík and Daniela Němečková, “Majetkové změny v Č SR v letech 1945–1948,” Pame ̌t ̌ a de ̌jiny 1 (2017): 3–14.

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The radical demographic changes and the loss of their German-speaking “neighbours”14 unquestionably aided the process significantly. Standard Czech became the language of both administration and everyday interactions. Furthermore, Silesian-ness, as a regional identity, became a rather opaque and archaic idea. As it currently stands in the twenty-first century, the official town’s narrative regarding the “Silesian” character of Opava, as represented by the Opavian town hall, Silesian University in Opava, and the Silesian Museum, the town has been quintessentially Czech “since time immemorial.” As such, this official historical narrative precludes the possibility of any potential Polish, German, or Silesian cultural hybridity of the region (i.e., a mixture of Czechness, Germanness, Polishness, Jewishness, or other such influences). The majority of expellees found asylum in Germany and Austria, which had been severely damaged by the war. Associations representing the expellees’ interests formed in Federal Germany (e.g., the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft [Sudetenland Patriotic Association]) as well as in Austria (e.g., the Verband der Volksdeutschen Landsmannschaften [Association of Patriotic Germans]). While West Germany supported the association’s claims for compensation for the expulsion and loss of material wealth, East Germany, being part of the Eastern Bloc, did not support any claims for compensation or restitution, nor did it encourage any dialogue with Czechoslovakia regarding the matter.15 In Czechoslovakia, the violence involved in the “solution” of the “German question,” as well as the void left by the vanished Others, was officially silenced in the historical discourse of the socialist era (1948–1989). The German Other was construed, again, as public enemy number one, this time representing the exploitative bourgeoisie and general imperialism. The fear of so-called German revanchism,16 amplified and exploited by the Czechoslovakian government,17 was particularly potent in the regions with the highest postwar population exchange, where the new settlers now occupied the properties left behind by those forcibly expelled. Only in 2015 did the Sudetenland Patriotic Association revise its charter to exclude 14  For conceptual grounding of the term see this book’s introduction by Anna Wylegała and Sabine Rutar. 15  Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 16  The idea that the Germans would come back to reclaim their property. 17  For example, see Czechoslovakian government bulletin “Německý revanšizmus—hrozba míru” (Prague: Ústav pro mezinárodní politiku a ekonomii, 1959).

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“reclamation of homeland” and proclaim that it would no longer strive for return of property.

Methods and Methodology In exploring and theorizing how contemporary Opavians remember (or not) the town’s former inhabitants, and particularly why the “Jewish” memorial was allowed to come into existence while the “German” memorial remained unrealized, I draw on empirical data that I gathered during longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in Czech Silesia between August 2015 and September 2016, as well as on several follow-up fieldwork trips between 2017 and 2020. As a social anthropologist, the primary method of data-gathering that I used in the field was overt participant observation.18 During my fieldwork, I adopted Raymond Gold’s typology of participant observer roles and consciously distinguished between different levels of involvement during participant observation.19 In the majority of social interactions, I adopted either the role of the “complete participant,” who takes an insider role and is fully part of the setting, or the “participant as observer,” who gains access to a setting by virtue of having a natural and non-research reason for being part of it. I was able to assume a “native position”20 and was usually accepted by interlocuters in both roles, as I am fluent in Standard Czech as well as in the Silesian regional language “Po Naszimu” (lit. “In our way”).21 During my main period of fieldwork in 2015–2016 and on the follow­up trips, I was involved in the reflexive practice of making anthropological

18  Paul Atkinson and Martyn Hammersley, “Ethnography and Participant Observation,” in Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (London: Sage, 1998), 248–61. 19   Raymond Gold, “Roles in Sociological Field Observation,” Social Forces 36 (1958): 217–23. 20  I was born in Opava and was thus able to pass as a “native,” although my family moved away when I was a child. I returned to Opava as a Master’s student to conduct a three-month ethnographic study in 2013, and then as a doctoral candidate in 2015/16 to conduct longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, and later as a post-doctoral researcher to conduct short follow-­up fieldwork trips lasting only a couple of weeks in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. 21  For more on the Silesian language, see Tomasz Kamusella, “The Szlonzoks and Their Language: Between Germany, Poland, and Szlonzokian Nationalism,” EUI Working Papers HEC, no. 1 (2003): 1–50; Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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knowledge through bodily experience22 of and long-term, intensive ethnographic immersion23 in the field and the community with which I was working. I was “deeply hanging out”24 and I actively participated in the everyday life of the town. I was interacting on an everyday basis with a wide range of Opavian inhabitants, constantly looking for new interlocutors to widen and diversify my social circles. For example, I became a member of a local gym and attended weekly classes, where I formed several friendships with other gym members. I also actively tried to push myself outside my comfort zone, going to SFC Opava (Silesian Football Club of Opava) matches, through which I established a connection to a right-wing group of middle-aged men. I was involved in a stay-at-home moms’ charity club, I attended Silesian German Association meetings, and I also attended weekly Sunday church services and church gatherings. In all these social environments and situations, I made a number of acquaintances and these interactions formed my ethnographic knowledge about everyday life in Opava as well as the various inhabitants of the town. Furthermore, I was able to secure an academic position as a visiting fellow at the Silesian University in Opava for the academic year 2015–2016.25 The fellowship afforded me first-hand access to the prominent social actors who have been, and are, actively involved in memory politics in Opava, including the question of Opavian German and Jewish heritage. I had regular meetings and consultations with various scholars at the university, as well as attending the Centre of Empirical Research team meetings as an external consultant. Several local historians based at the university are also recognized public figures, politicians, and members of the local government. By securing bi-weekly access to them, I was able to observe the relational dynamics between the center of local academic knowledge production that is the Silesian University, the town hall, and the regional cultural and heritage tourist industry. I began to see some of these academics not only on the university grounds but also socially in cafés and pubs, as well as in their homes with their families. From the very beginning of my involvement at the university, the university employees and my colleagues knew that I was conducting an ethnographic study on the  Judith Okely, “Fieldwork Embodied,” The Sociological Review 55, no. 1 (2007): 65–79.   Torkild Thanem and David Knights, “Embodied Immersion and Ethnographic Fieldwork,” in Embodied Research Methods (London: SAGE Publications, 2019), 54–77. 24   Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” The New  York Review of Books, no. 16 (1998): 349. 25  Not to be confused with the Silesian University in Katowice, Poland. 22 23

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construction of Silesian identity and the Opavian community and that they were part of that ethnography. In addition to participant observation, conducting interviews was a primary method of data-gathering. I conducted numerous informal interviews, unstructured interviews, and semi-structured in-depth interviews. By informal interviewing, I mean situations that lack structure and control and are difficult to audio-record.26 When possible, I took field notes about the informal interview, and later in the day I wrote more detailed descriptions of the event as part of my fieldwork diary. Unstructured interviews are characterized by minimal researcher control. The aim is to allow people to open up and express themselves in their own terms and at their own pace.

Remembering the Vanished “Others” Collective memory is continually made and remade from present perspectives and for present purposes and can be examined as an extraordinarily useful tool of identity politics because remembering and forgetting are constitutive processes of collective identity formation. Narratives about the past, and commemoration practices in particular, are always forward-­ looking, providing guidance and examples to reinforce future decisions and affiliations, create community solidarity, cope with collective trauma, and provide the group with a positive outlook for the future. Commemoration that evokes wrongdoing committed by the groups who are doing the commemorating is troubling as it directly threatens the group’s positive self-perception. Such situations can either be handled by claiming moral superiority through the “rhetoric of judge-penitence,” or the group is subject to omissions of past wrongs, involving institutional amnesia or the externalization of guilt.27 For example, as Anna Wylegała demonstrates in her paper focusing on memories of the postwar displacement of Poles and Ukrainians, empathy is all but absent in contemporary Ukrainians’ remembrance of the deportation of the previous Polish population from the town of Zhovkva (formerly in Poland, now in Ukraine).28 26  H.  Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27  Forchtner (2014). 28  Anna Wylegała, “The Absent ‘Others’: A Comparative Study of Memories of Displacement in Poland and Ukraine,” Memory Studies 8, no. 4 (2015): 470–86.

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Due to the negative biographical experience of the Ukrainian interviewees now living in Zhovkva and their problematic relations with Poles in the interwar period, as well as their negative experience of the Polish government and their Polish neighbors, their lack of empathy is rooted in a deeper sense of their own persecution.29 According to Inge Melchior and Oane Visser, identity politics and national collective narratives are reinforced by commemoration days, ceremonies, and monuments that provide the framework for interpretation and remembering, as well as both intended and unintended forgetting.30 For many people, linking their biographical memories to “official” stories provides coherence and a broader meaning and sense of belonging. Through institutionalized commemorative practices initiated on transnational, national, or local levels, groups are provided with a common framework through which to interpret the world around them. This framework guides collective remembering, as well as forgetting. As a result, those who “write history,” not only through textual but also through monumental commemorative practice, hold enormous power as the authors and purveyors of widely accepted social frameworks.31 In what follows, I argue that the struggle to publicly commemorate the disappeared German neighbor, and simultaneously the relative ease in commemorating the Jewish neighbor, is directly linked to the fact that these two disappearances relate to two different levels of implication of contemporary Opava’s inhabitants in the historical violence of forced displacements. When talking about implication, I am drawing on the concept of the “implicated subject,” coined by Michael Rothberg, that allows me to go beyond the victim–perpetrator dichotomy.32 In analyzing the historical implication of the new settlers and their vicarious responsibility for things that they have not done, one needs to start with the question of where power and privilege reside. The Opavians who repopulated the town after the German expulsion, and their offspring, did not play a direct role in the expulsion; they were not holding the guns, nor were they 29  Anna Wylegała, “Forced Migration and Identity in the Memories of Post-War Expellees from Poland and Ukraine,” in Disputed Memories in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. Tea  S. Anderson and Barbara  Törnquist-Plewa (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 177–202. 30  Inge Melchior and Oane Visser, “Voicing Past and Present Uncertainties: The Relocation of the Soviet World War II Memorial and the Politics of Memory in Estonia,” Focaal 59 (2011): 33–50. 31  Ibid. 32  Rothberg (2019).

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lynching, raping, and killing, but by appropriating the physical and to some extent also the symbolic landscape of the town, they are “folded into” the legacy of the violent history of German expulsion. As Rothberg puts it, “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes.”33 The category of the implicated subject neither refers to a human essence, nor is it a fixed and stable category independent of a given context. Similar to the reduced category of “victim” or “perpetrator,” the notion of the implicated subject is an abstraction that serves an analytical purpose in this chapter.

The Historical Context of the Town of Opava

A map of the contemporary Czech Republic, historical Sudetenland superimposed on the contemporary map in dark grey. Source: the author

 Ibid., 1.

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The historical Austro-Hungarian capital of Czech Silesia, Opava, formerly known by its German name Troppau, is now located on the Czech side of the Czech-Polish state border. Like other Upper Silesian towns and cities, Opava has been a melting pot, where Bohemian, Moravian, German, Austrian, and Polish political spheres of influence have historically converged. In 1930, 12 years after the Czechoslovakian army’s intervention that resulted in the inclusion of Opava into the newly created Republic, the national census conducted by the Czechoslovakian government showed that, of the 33,000 inhabitants of Opava, approximately 22,000 were considered by the Czechoslovakian authorities to be Germans (of which 800 were Jewish) and approximately 11,000 were considered to be ethnic Czechs (of which none were Jewish). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Opava’s main language was German, but multiple language competency and bilingualism were common. The town was part of the Sudetenland, and in 1938 was annexed by Nazi Germany following the Munich Agreement. Under the Nazi Protectorate, Opava was established as the capital of one of the Sudetenland’s three political districts, and it was treated as a German town during heavy bombing at the end of the war by American, Soviet, as well as German air forces. As part of the Nazis’ ethnic cleansing, the resident Jewish minority was exterminated; very few Jewish families managed to flee. Following the end of the war, the majority of the town’s population were forcibly expelled as “German traitors.” While the Czechs’ wartime trauma and frustrations and the desire for vengeance for the terrors of the Second World War certainly contributed to the violence committed against their “German neighbors,” it would be a mistake to neglect the role of possible quick material gains as well as the historically rooted competition and animosities between these two groups during the transfer. I suggest that neighborly conflicts and personal revenge, Czech ethno-nationalism, which has been constructed in direct opposition to the idea of “Germanness,” as well as the opportunity to obtain the considerable material wealth left behind by affluent “Germans,” cannot be underestimated. Today, of Opava’s 60,000 inhabitants, only about 80 declare themselves as belonging to the German minority, with 90 percent of them having been born before 1945. Their cultural, political, and social interests are represented by the Silesian German Association of Opava (hereafter the Association).

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Two Memorials to Vanished Others In contrast to the ongoing cultural and social difficulties surrounding the German memorial that I discuss later, the story of the Jewish memorial is relatively straightforward. Opava’s synagogue was burnt down in 1938. In 2013 a memorial was erected on the site where the synagogue once stood. The town council agreed to provide the land on which the memorial stands, and a local branch of the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva provided the necessary finances. The event was covered by the local and national press, without triggering any heated debates. The unveiling ceremony on July 17, 2013, also took place peacefully. Various speeches were given by local politicians, academics, and a rabbi, and a representative from Teva’s headquarters in Jerusalem was also in attendance. The commemoration of the synagogue and the former Jewish community was initiated by Jaroslav Duda, an influential public figure and retired academic. When I asked about his motivation to erect a Jewish memorial, he told me that, as a proud local patriot and a Rotarian (a member of Rotary International), it was his duty to cultivate the region and educate people about their history. “The synagogue was an architectural gem which should be remembered,” he stated. On the other hand, he was staunchly opposed to the idea of commemorating the expelled Opavian Germans. When asked about his reasoning, he told me that it was just “too alive.”34 In sharp contrast to the unruffled commemoration of the Jewish vanished Others, the story of the German memorial depicts a messier picture. In January 2009, the Silesian German Association of Opava sent an official letter to the town municipality asking for permission to erect a memorial stone with a commemorative plaque dedicated to the German-speaking population of Opava. As the letter read, the objective of the memorial was by no means to commemorate the expulsion alone. The Association’s goal was, at the least, to mark the fact that the town had been inhabited by German speakers for centuries, who had participated in and significantly contributed to its community. German cultural influence, as well as German speakers, was an integral part of the town’s long existence. The Association, comprising a small group of elderly native Opavians who strongly believed that the German past and cultural heritage needed to be acknowledged and commemorated by those in the present, hoped that the 34   Semi-structured interview with Jaroslav Duda (pseudonym), male, conducted in February 2016 by Johana Wyss.

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memorial would ensure that future generations recognize and address their difficult heritage, no matter how challenging that might be. The urgency with which the members of this group fought for the memorial was driven by the fact that several of them were themselves expelled as children after the Second World War and only a few months later were granted permission to return to Czechoslovakia, thus experiencing first-­ hand the violent and poorly administered removal. Now, since the majority of group members were in their 80s and 90s, they hoped that the memorial would give voice to their traumatic collective experience and their own interpretation of the town’s past, not primarily for themselves, but for posterity. As Conrad Halfar, a retired electromechanical engineer and chairman of the Association, told me during a focus group interview, present-day Opavian residents rarely realize or acknowledge that their city has been associated with Germanic culture and language since the twelfth century. The city was built and inhabited mostly by German speakers, even though Slavic speakers lived there as well, though in significantly smaller numbers. Therefore, according to Halfar, the Association wishes to educate the contemporary local population regarding something that is also part of the town’s history, namely the unrecognized German heritage. Second, he argues that those who called Opava their home, and who were forcibly removed from their homeland after 1945 because of their “being German,” also deserve respect: “Most of them did nothing wrong and did not deserve the persecution and pain inflicted upon them.”35 Of course, he reasons, to commemorate Germans publicly might be problematic at first, but sooner or later people will accept it. When I asked him about the reasons for resistance to the memorial, he explained that many people simply do not understand Opava’s past, and more importantly, many let themselves be influenced by political agitators. According to Halfar, the most vocal opponents are politically motivated, using historically rooted anti-­ German sentiments to their advantage: “People are scared, and they resent the Germans for more or less obvious reasons, and that makes them vulnerable and easily influenced.” To explain what he meant by “more or less obvious reasons” as well as “political motivation,” he offered a local example:

35  Focus group interview with Conrad Halfar (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss.

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Not far from here, there is a lovely spa town called Karlova Studánka, or Bad Karlsbrunn, as it used to be known. This town, as with many other towns in the Sudetenland, was inhabited by relatively wealthy Germans. Those Germans were expelled, and their property was taken by newcomers who, let’s face it, were often as poor as church mice. The newcomers and their descendants now see themselves as the rightful owners of the fine spa resort. They remain calm and confident until folks like Mr Lochner [local politician] and his people go around the spa town knocking on doors asking if the inhabitants really want “the Germans to come” (aby přišli Ne ̌mci) and take back their property. Mr Lochner and his gang went to all the wealthier houses in Karlova Studánka and spoke to their Czech owners. Of course, they got nervous! And it is through cases such as these that people like Mr Lochner can manipulate and intimidate citizens to vote for politicians who support the Beneš decrees or to make them actively opposed to Germans, [to] any talk of Czech reconciliation, or even inciting them to protest passionately about something as banal as a commemoration plaque for the expelled population.36

Mr Lochner (pseudonym) knows that the “right” stance regarding the divisive Beneš decrees can make or break a politician. This fact became strikingly evident, for instance, during the presidential elections in 2013 when presidential candidate Karel Schwarzenberg condemned the Beneš decrees, saying that “what was committed in 1945 would today be considered a grave violation of human rights, and the Czechoslovak government, along with President Beneš, would have found themselves in the Hague.”37 This remark formed a poignant moment in the presidential campaign, and considerably lessened Schwarzenberg’s chances of winning. In the story of Mr Lochner described above, the politician was able to use people’s discomforting memories of the former German owners to advance his own political agenda and attract more votes. During my fieldwork, I observed that the question of compensation or property restitution was highly unsettling and upsetting for my interlocutors. The fear of “German revanchism,” which was part of the socialist ideology as well as post-1989 Czech-German quarrels and negotiations regarding property restitutions, created an atmosphere of uncertainty and an omnipresent 36  Semi-structured interview with Conrad Halfar (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss. 37  Arnold Suppan, Hitler-Beneš-Tito: National Conflicts, World Wars, Genocides, Expulsions, and Divided Remembrance in East-Central and Southeastern Europe, 1948–2018 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019), 290.

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threat that the Germans might come and reclaim their property. Even though the Sudetenland Patriotic Association rescinded their claims for compensation and restitution in 2015, the uneasiness experienced by the contemporary owners regarding their ownership rights and the possibility of losing their previously German properties is significant. Contemporary Opavians inhabit the physical and symbolic space left behind by the vanished Others, and thus benefit from the legacy of historical violence. Because they occupy a position aligned with power and privilege and thus profit from past wrongdoing in the present, they are implicated in this context of historical violence. The idea of an implicated subject as a structural beneficiary of historical violence is present in Rothberg’s theoretical framework, in which he distinguishes between diachronic and synchronic implication. Diachronic implication refers to historical legacies of injustice and violence, while synchronic implication refers to contemporary inequalities and violence.38 The implication happens along these two intertwined and sometimes inseparable axes. Using Rothberg’s theoretical framework, I suggest that contemporary Opavians could be theorized as beneficiaries occupying a position in which it may be impossible to untangle the synchronic and diachronic temporalities, as they benefit both from the things that happened in the past and from the things that are happening in the present. As mentioned earlier, the majority of contemporary Opavians had no direct involvement in the expulsion that took place roughly 75 years ago, yet they are perpetuating this historical violence in relation to the members of the Silesian German Association, who were child victims of the expulsion, by not recognizing and silencing the members’ direct suffering.

The Unrealized German Memorial According to the Association’s journal Troppauer Nachrichten, the town hall did not reply to the Silesian German Association’s request to erect the German memorial until May 2010, 16 months after the initial letter was sent. The town municipality stated that the Germans had indeed participated in the life of the town for centuries, and that until 1945, German speakers constituted the majority population. The city could not, and of course did not even want to, deny this indisputable historical fact; however, the town’s officials stated that they could not support the Association’s  Rothberg (2019), 8–22 and 59–84.

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claim financially. The Association took this reply as positive. In fact, to provide the necessary funding for the memorial, the Association, which had never held out any hope of obtaining financial support from the town, had announced a call for donations long before. As the town agreed to the idea of a memorial (at least, that is how the reply was interpreted), several additional donors decided to contribute toward the goal, and consequently the Association managed to collect considerable funding. Most donors were descendants of individuals forcibly displaced from Opava. The three biggest donations came from private individuals living in Prague, Munich, and Australia. The Sudetenland Patriotic Association also became involved and offered its services, both financial and organizational. In July 2010, two representatives of the Association attended a meeting with Opava’s mayor, who was soon to resign. He expressed his support for the idea, suggesting the town park as a potential location for the memorial. In his opinion, as the town park was about to undergo revitalization, it would be a convenient and respectful place for the memorial. He further suggested that the town architect should be commissioned with the project. However, according to the two representatives’ accounts provided to the Troppauer Nachrichten, the mayor also stressed that it had to be clear from the memorial plaque’s inscription that it was referring only to the fact that Germans had lived in Opava, any mention of the expulsions themselves being most unwelcome. By 2012, three years after the negotiations started, it became clear that the Association had misunderstood the town’s intentions. Several members of the Association referred to events retrospectively as a cat-and-mouse game. The new mayor, Professor Dvořák, seemed approachable at first, but soon asked the Association not to bother him with the issue any longer and to communicate only with his deputy. The deputy was not opposed to the idea of the German memorial and was also willing to consider the town park as a possible place to erect it. He even publicly advocated for the memorial in the press. However, the problem now was the inscription on the memorial plaque. All parties involved had different visions of what should be inscribed on the plaque. Furthermore, the parties themselves were internally divided regarding the inscription. The Association finally agreed on a text, suggesting the following wording: In memory of Opava’s Germans who lived here since the 13th century and in the year 1945 had to leave the town. The text proved to be problematic for the city council. First of all, the council members had clearly expressed their desire that the expellees should not be mentioned. The Association, on the other hand, argued that if the

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Germans were to be commemorated, one needed to at least mention their departure, if not the expulsion. “We wanted the truth or nothing. A stone without an inscription would be just a stone,”39 said one Association member firmly. The town council asked the Association to change the text to the following: In memory of Opava’s Germans who lived here for centuries and after they lost their war had to leave the town. However, this variant was seen as unacceptable from the Association’s point of view. None of the members I talked to felt that it was “their war” that “they lost.” In their view, the Germans who had been living in Opava for centuries were Sudetendeutsche (Sudeten Germans) or Deutschböhmen (Czech Germans), not Reichsdeutsche or even Nazis, and fundamentally had nothing to do with the atrocities of the war. “Of course, there were some Sudeten Germans who collaborated with the Nazis, but so did some ethnic Czechs,” said one member of the Association to me. She continued: “People need to be punished according to their deeds, not their blood.”40 Suggestions for the inscription were changed several times, but no version was found that was satisfactory to all parties. Becoming more and more skeptical about the town’s good intentions, the Association decided to approach another authority in the city, the Roman Catholic Church. However, none of the priests in Opava agreed to allow the Association to put the memorial plaque on an exterior wall of their church. The only possibility would be to place a commemoration plaque inside one of the houses of worship. Apart from the town’s parks and churches, another option that was considered for the location of the memorial was the town cemetery, but the Association ruled out this possibility as morbid and demeaning. Desperate, the Association decided to contact their headquarters in Prague, and an Association member wrote an article about the issue in a national journal. Several Czech newspapers, as well as Czech national TV, took up the story, and the unrealized German memorial in Opava was widely debated in the media. The town hall’s reaction to the media coverage was highly negative. The situation escalated even further when the Sudeten German Homeland Association decided to send a committee to Opava to negotiate with Opava’s town council themselves. Their intervention did not bring about the desired results. 39  Recorded interview with Steffi Pospišilová (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss. 40   Recorded interview with Anna Truparová (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in December 2015 by Johana Wyss.

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After several unsuccessful attempts to set up a meeting with town hall officials to discuss the commemoration issue, I finally managed to arrange a meeting with the former mayor of Opava, a professor in history, Libor Dvořák. Professor Dvořák moved to Opava in the mid-1980s when he was offered an academic position at the Silesian Institute, Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. During an interview, he told me that his original plan had been to stay in Opava for just a few years and then move to Prague. However, in the end he decided to respect his wife’s wishes and stay permanently. He was active in the public sphere, became a politician, and helped to launch the Silesian University in Opava. He remains an influential public figure, commenting frequently on past, present, and future issues that concern Opava, Silesia, the Czech Republic, and the European Union. During the interview, I asked Professor Dvor ̌ák why the town hall officials had rejected the proposal to erect the memorial, and what his view of the memorial was. After all, I pointed out, all versions of the inscriptions that the Association suggested are correct statements, at least from a historical standpoint. Are there any discrepancies between his views as a politician and as a historian? He acknowledged that Opava had been inhabited by Germans, that its Germans had been expelled after the Second World War, and that, from a historian’s point of view, these were indisputable facts. However, he did not see the purpose of erecting a memorial stating this: Yes, a memorial with such an inscription would be truthful. And an equally truthful statement would be that this territory used to be home to Celtic tribes who were pushed out by Slavic and Germanic tribes. That’s also correct. But just because it’s correct, does it mean that we need to erect a memorial? Probably not, right? We can’t have memorials for everything. […] We discussed it, and of course there were proponents as well as opponents among the town hall officials. I was indifferent. It is, after all, a complicated issue. Nevertheless, we agreed that the memorial would simply be redundant. […] To be honest, from my point of view, it is a marginal affair, and if you had not mentioned it, I would probably have forgotten that it ever happened.41

In light of his arguments, I asked why the town had decided to erect a commemorative stone with an inscription dedicated to Opava’s Jewish 41  Recorded interview with Libor Dvořák (pseudonym), conducted in November 2015 by Johana Wyss.

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population. In his position as mayor and as a prominent historian, Professor Dvořák supported the Jewish memorial and attended the unveiling ceremony. Why is Opava’s Jewish population “worth” remembering, while the German population is not? Furthermore, I pointed out that, like the rest of Czechoslovakia, the Jews living in the Czech lands predominantly spoke German, and, until the Second World War, were considered Germans themselves. In reply to my question, he stated that nobody had opposed the idea of erecting a memorial dedicated to the synagogue at the time, so why should he have been against it? Yielding to the prevailing anti-German sentiments within the region, the town council voted to refuse to provide the land. Since then, the Association has appealed, but the town has repeated its ruling. As a result, neither the memorial nor the commemorative plaque dedicated to Opava’s German population has been erected. From the perspective of the contemporary Czech population, the rejection of the German memorial can be understood as one of the many strategies employed to deal with an uncomfortable past and undesirable memories. Throughout my fieldwork in Opava, I comprehended that the dominant population, whose families came to Opava only after the Second World War, were generally against the prospect of incorporating the silenced German memories into the borderlands’ official historical narrative. For them, Opava was quintessentially Czech, and thus remembering the German Others was neither needed nor desired. In my understanding and interpretation, this kind of collective denial, or even collective amnesia of the newcomers who came to repopulate Opava, as well as their offspring, was triggered by the communal need to build and maintain an exclusive post-1945 Czech identity for the town of Opava, replacing the pre-1945 German Troppau by erasure.

Conclusion The main difference between the “Jewish” and the “German” memorials is that they entail different levels of implication in the legacy of historical violence. The ideological legitimation of the German expulsion is based on the principle of collective guilt. According to this ideology, all ethnic Germans—men, women, and children—are inherently guilty of initiating the war, of the atrocities committed during it, such as the Holocaust, but also for the harm committed against the German Other during the expulsion. Therefore, the Germans, understood as an essentialist mono-ethnic category, are seen as solely responsible for all wrongdoings committed. If

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permitted by official authorities, a memorial stone might lead to a revision of the historical narrative, in which the “Second World War victims,” the Czechs, could also be seen as “postwar perpetrators.” Through the documentation of an ethnographic account, I have shown what and whose hopes and aspirations, as well as fears and anxieties, play a role in the negotiation of the community’s collective identity and Opavians’ collective representation of the town’s past. The prevailing social denial accompanied by an active effort to silence any elements of the German past in Opava is triggered by the need to manage Opavians’ current collective identity and self-perception and to distance them from historical implication in the past suffering and German expulsion. Remembering the previous German inhabitants revives feelings of discomfort and anxiety among Opava’s residents, which, as shown above, are often linked to fear of losing the material benefits they gained from the German expulsion. Those feelings, which occasionally come to the surface, are suppressed by committing their source to oblivion. However, rather than simply forgetting the discomforting past, talking about the “Germans” is symptomatic of memory loss and collective amnesia in Opavian Silesia; the memory is there but missing at the same time. In this particular example of a No Neighbors’ Lands, I understand the Opavians to be neither victims, bystanders, nor perpetrators, but “participants in histories and social formations that generate the position of victim and perpetrator,” as Rothberg aptly put it,42 which makes their position and their attitude toward the past challenging and complex.

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 Rothberg (2019), 1.

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Spalová, Barbora. 2017. Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment between Communicative and Cultural Memory. History and Anthropology 28 (1): 84–109. Suppan, Arnold. 2019. Hitler-Beneš-Tito: National Conflicts, World Wars, Genocides, Expulsions, and Divided Remembrance in East-Central and Southeastern Europe, 1948–2018. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. Thanem, Torkild, and David Knights. 2019. Embodied Immersion and Ethnographic Fieldwork. In Embodied Research Methods, 54–77. London: SAGE Publications. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2016. Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe. In Whose Memory? Which Future? ed. Barbara TörnquistPlewa, 1–15. New York: Berghahn Books. Tučková, Kateřina. 2010. Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch. Prague: Host. Wylegała, Anna. 2015. The Absent ‘Others’: A Comparative Study of Memories of Displacement in Poland and Ukraine. Memory Studies 8 (4): 470–486. ———. 2016. Forced Migration and Identity in the Memories of Post-War Expellees from Poland and Ukraine. In Disputed Memories in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. T.S.  Anderson and B.  Törnquist-Plewa, 177–202. Boston: De Gruyter. Wyss, Johana. 2020. Stones Do Not Forget: The Symbolic Struggle between Forgetting and Being Forgotten. In On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War, ed. Catherine  Gilbert, Kate  McLoughlin, and Niall Munro, 225–229. Oxford: Peter Lang.

We, the Perpetrators: Remembering Violence Committed by One’s Own Group in the Polish-Ukrainian Conflicts Małgorzata Łukianow

Introduction Any kind of violence committed by representatives of one’s own group is an aspect of the past that members of a given community tend to relegate to the area of collective forgetting rather than making it a significant element of group memory. In this chapter I analyze personal accounts of today’s inhabitants of Łubno and Barysh, born in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. The aim is to show how the notions of national identifications, victimhood, and perpetration act together to explain the killings, and the absence, of the gone neighbors—Poles from Barysh and Ukrainians from Łubno. Crimes committed against Poles in the village of Barysh, located in the former Buczacz county of the Tarnopol voivodship, by

M. Łukianow (*) Department of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_16

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Ukrainian nationalists, including a crime committed on the night of 5–6 February 1945, are my first case study. The second are crimes committed in the village of Łubno, where armed Poles from nearby villages murdered Ukrainians under the leadership of locals in the spring and summer of 1945. I discuss aspects of the narrative of the perpetrators—understood, however, not as individuals directly involved in or bearing responsibility for the killings. My main viewpoint on perpetration involves two concepts—Erica Bouris’s concept of the complex political victim and Erin Baines’s concept of the complex political perpetrator. Both seek to go beyond the dyad of victimhood and perpetration. Bouris singles out four major traits of the “ideal victim”: innocence, purity, lack of responsibility, and moral superiority.1 She then detangles this concept, not only claiming that the above-mentioned standard is unachievable and impossible, but, moreover, proposing a more intricate picture of victimhood. Following her claim, Erin Baines proposes the concept of the complex political perpetrator, a person who has perpetrated a crime but who nonetheless could be a victim of the same violence from which the community suffers, for example long-term violence.2 Another aspect is identifying the overlapping layers of responsibility. Using these two concepts, which demark a zone between victimhood and perpetration, I identify the notions of both victimhood and perpetration as reflected in the narratives of today’s inhabitants of Łubno and Barysh. However, collective memory requires a collective subject. To understand why a sensitive topic might be protected by the group as such, certain key notions must be investigated. First is the nature of the bond the individual makes with the group. Second is the bond between individual memories of the locals and collective memories about the past. A possible explanation for why a group protects memories of perpetration from outsiders is the idea of the reference group, originating in Charles Cooley’s sociology. Apart from the social control stemming from the group, the indicated perpetration jeopardizes its positive image, with which the individual has an affective and social bond. Evoking memories of past harms done to others targets the positive image of one’s reference

 Erica Bouris, Complex Political Victims (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007), 6.  Erin  Baines, “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 47, no. 2 (2009): 187. 1 2

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group—the group to which the individual feels related.3 This, consequently, leads to a threat to one’s own positive image, as seen through the looking glass: “the thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.”4 Implications of this bilateral bonding are especially visible during interviews, when a member of the group faces the researcher. In an interview setting, this situation works on two levels. Evoking a difficult past during a meeting with a researcher endangers not only the positive image of the group, but moreover the positive self-image of an individual who identifies with that group. In this chapter I look at evoked national identifications and strategies based upon the conflict and hatred between two nations rather than between neighbors and locals. These are mainly present in the analyzed personal accounts and, as I aim to explain, are intended to blur the perpetration of the locals and move the conflict to a supra-local level. Personal and collective memories intersect in a plethora of ways: they are mediated via various cultural sources and artifacts5; they are inhabited by various figures from national mythology6; and they supplement each other.7 In this chapter I am mostly interested in the relationship between 3  For example, Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall in their classic “Opa war kein Nazi” book argue that when studying family memory, the cognitive (the memory of an event) and emotional (the recollection) aspects cannot be separated. In their work the authors show how “uncomfortable” memories jeopardize the “authenticity” of memories and how younger generations of Germans, educated in World War Two history, tend to insist that “Grandpa was no Nazi”—sometimes disregarding the facts. See Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Excerpt from ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2002] 2011), 343–5. 4  Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner’s, [1902] 2011) (kindle edition), 183. 5  Marianne  Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Jeanette A.  Bastian, “The Records of Memory, the Archives of Identity: Celebrations, Texts and Archival Sensibilities,” Archival Science 13 (2013): 121–31. 6  Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); James Berger, “Which Prosthetic? Mass Media, Narrative, Empathy, and Progressive Politics,” Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007): 597–612. 7  Michael  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 3 (1999): 333–48.

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acts of violence and the collective memory and to explain this I am going to use Jeffrey Olick’s idea of “the violence of memory.” Olick explores the process of making sense of suffering and historicizing it. To him, memory is a form of theodicy, a way of ascribing meanings to suffering and explaining the presence of evil: “every time we offer an explanation for suffering that enables us to see how it happened and fix the problems in the name of ‘never again,’ we are retrospectively assigning meaning.”8 And it is this process of assigning meanings to past events that creates the circumstances for overwriting meanings, assigning specific dimensions to suffering and using a variety of arguments (including, e.g., bureaucratic, psychological ones) to explain past violence. In his understanding of theodicy, Olick subscribes to Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that “every theodicy is an exercise in bad faith.” Violence, as Olick describes, is more than an act of physical injury; it can be a condition or a type of order in a society. It is in the intertwining of these two that memory can explain past harms and perpetuate violence as a form of social order. Olick in his speech referred to colonial monuments in the United States, perpetuating violence through commemoration. In the case of the two villages analyzed in this chapter, I look at how violence is being historicized in memories and how the violence of memory is exercised by telling a story of gone neighbors in a way that conceals agency and relativizes victimhood. I also analyze how a researcher navigates in the field with knowledge of events that are subjected to active acts of oblivion. Furthermore, I analyze how the narrative about past acts of violence is framed and eclipsed by other events. The chapter is based upon the analysis of twelve oral history interviews, which constitute the major source base. The interviews were recorded by me and my colleagues from the research team in Barysh and Łubno in 2019.9

Łubno and Barysh: The Sites of Violence Barysh and Łubno are exemplifications of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict that might be traced back through history for centuries. While events from a distant past, such as the Cossack uprisings of the seventeenth and 8  Jeffrey K. Olick, “From the Memory of Violence to the Violence of Memory” European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 18 February 2018, https://enrs.eu/article/fromthe-memory-of-violence-to-the-violence-of-memory (accessed 1 September 2021). 9  I was involved in the research in Łubno, together with Magdalena Zatorska. The researchers working in Barysh were Marta Havryshko, Wiktoria Kudela-Świa ̨tek, and Anna Wylegała.

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eighteenth centuries from the age of the Polish Commonwealth, contribute to the animosities and cultural memory of both nations, I would like to focus on those emerging in the first half of the twentieth century, which are still told in personal stories. World War One resulted in the dismantling of multinational empires. During and after the war, experiences of struggle impacted national identities and loyalties,10 brutalized social life,11 and dashed hopes for independence. Poland was revived as an independent state after 1918, but Ukraine was not. The consequence of this was not only political but also social. Ukrainians became a minority in both Poland and the newly formed Soviet Union.12 Eastern parts of the post-1918 Republic of Poland, often called the Eastern Borderlands (pol. Kresy Wschodnie), embraced among others territories of Galicia and Volhynia and were inhabited mostly by three groups: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians.13 The national and religious structure varied, depending on town or village status, and it was common for Poles to constitute a privileged minority in terms of class membership and possession of land.14 Tensions were growing, also due to policies introduced by the Polish Republic that lowered the position of Ukrainians in the society. The outbreak of World War Two and three periods of occupation of Galicia (Soviet from 1939 to 1941; German from 1941 to 1944; Soviet again after 1944) fueled local animosities, with occupiers’ policies increasing local conflicts. The first Soviet occupation removed Polish elites by 10  “Introduction,” in Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Quincy Cloet, and Alex Dowdall, eds, Breaking Empires, Making Nations? The First World War and the Reforging of Europe (Warsaw: College of Europe, 2017). 11  Piotr Wróbel, “The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921,” Journal of Modern European History 1, no. 1 (2003): 125. 12  The border was a result of the Polish-Bolschevik war and the subsequent Ryga treaty, which ended hopes for an independent state of Ukraine, despite the military union between Polish head of state Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petlura, head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. 13  The place of Jews in local communities, the Galicia Holocaust, and memory are only partially present in this chapter, yet the picture is not complete without all three parts. For more about these trilateral relations and varied war experiences, see Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–44,” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011): 336–63. 14  An example of this situation is the agricultural reform of 1925 which became one of the sources of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The reform was accompanied by the action of Polish military settlement in the region of Galicia and Volhynia, and their purchase of land, when land was scarce for everyone. It was, however, less accessible to local Ukrainians.

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­ eporting them to Siberia and Kazakhstan and making Polish groups d more vulnerable to attacks by Ukrainian nationalists. Germans, in turn, during the occupation of 1941–1944, allowed Ukrainians to act as officers of the state and many abused their role by persecuting Poles.15 Moreover, the abuse included anti-Jewish violence and participation in the Holocaust by Ukrainian nationalists.16 Łubno is a village located in the Carpathian region, and today is inhabited by more than 1000 Poles. Before the war, three groups resided in Łubno: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. After the outbreak of the war and during the German occupation, in June 1942, the Jews of Łubno (about 10 families) were taken to the forest near Brzozów and shot dead.17 One Jewish woman, Blima Beżem, survived the war, hiding in the house of Franciszek Hryćko. During the German occupation, the former Polish head of the village was replaced by a Ukrainian, Vasyl Lazor. At the same time, the Polish underground was established. Local structures of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK)18 targeted, among others, Ukrainian pro-nationalist activists. The main organizer of the local AK group was Michał Barć, who from 1 January 1928 to 31 December 1930 was the

15  Timothy Snyder, “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 86–7; Anna Wylegała, “The Void Communities: Towards a New Approach to the Early Post-war in Poland and Ukraine,” East European Politics and Societies 35, no. 2 (2021): 407–36. 16  Rossoliński-Liebe points out that “factions of the Ukrainian diaspora invented a narrative that portrayed Ukrainian nationalists as anti-German and anti-Soviet freedom fighters who did not kill or harm any Jews during the German occupation of Ukraine.” See Grzegorz  Rossoliński-Liebe, “Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 34, no. 1 (2020): 221–40, https://doi. org/10.1177/0888325419831351 17  Adam Rząsa, “Uratowali wielu Żydów”, https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/pl/historiepomocy/wasze-opowiesci/uratowali-wielu-zydow, 11 March 2010 (accessed 17 July 2021). 18  The Home Army (Armia Krajowa) was an underground Polish army during World War Two. It operated on the territories of Poland, occupied by Germany and the USSR. It was created in 1942 as a direct successor of the Union of Armed Struggle, formed after the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939. The Home Army was dismantled in January 1945. For the controversies around its activities, particularly in relation to Jews, see Jeffrey  Blutinger, “An Inconvenient Past: Post-Communist Holocaust Memorialization,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29, no. 1 (2010): 73–94.

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manager of the local estate in Łubno.19 After moving to Błotnia (today Ivano-­Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine) in 1935, he fled the killings and violence organized by the Ukrainian nationalist underground and came back to Łubno in 1943. Tensions were growing. In 1945, a series of Polish actions began against Polish citizens of Ukrainian nationality, starting with the events in Łubno from 27 February of that year.20 On this day 20 Ukrainians were killed. On 3 March 1945, local Ukrainians were killed in Pawłokoma (located 10 kilometers from Łubno). On 7 March 1945, another 15 people were killed, with the participation of locals from nearby villages, including Futoma and Harta.21 Estimated deaths vary between 150 and 360.22 On 17 March, the so-called Dynów provocation took place. Dynów is a town in the area, which had about 2700 inhabitants in 1921.23 The NKVD24 unit disguised in the uniforms of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) attacked Dynów, then a village in which the remains of the Home Army unit were located, previously partially disarmed by NKVD units. In March 1945, the remaining Ukrainian population of Łubno was resettled to the Soviet Union. With this resettlement, the presence of Ukrainians in Łubno ended. Barysh had been a town before the war. It lost its status after the war and today is a village in the Ternopil region, inhabited by around 2500 Ukrainians. During the German occupation of Barysh, a number of local Jews were killed on site; others were deported to Buchach in 1942 and killed there. Barysh was divided into “districts,” areas inhabited by different ethnic groups. The largest area, inhabited almost exclusively by Poles, was called Mazury.25 In September 1939, the Soviets entered Barysh. German occupation, starting in 1941, marked the more visible presence

19  Paweł Fornal, “Michał Barć (1903–1979), żołnierz ZWZ-AK, informator, agent celny, tajny współpracownik UB-SB o pseudonimach ‘Andrzej’ i ‘Ba ̨k’,” Aparat Represji w Polsce Ludowej 1944–1989 1, no. 7 (2009): 451–81. 20  Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (AIPN) Rz 0057/16/1, k. 55. 21  AIPN Rz 107/772, Protokół przesłuchania swiadka ́ J. Potocznego, 28 XI 1947 r., k. 12. 22  Eugeniusz Misiło, Pawłokoma 3 III 1945 r (Warsaw: Ukar, 2006). 23   “Dynów. Historia społeczności”, https://sztetl.org.pl/pl/miejscowosci/d/207dynow/99-historia-spolecznosci/137268-historia-spolecznosci (accessed 20 August 2021). 24  Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (Eng.: The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Soviet ministry dealing with security forces and internal affairs. 25  While the name Mazury (Masurians) refers to the ethnic group, inhabitants of the former eastern part of Eastern Prussia, in the whole of Galicia/Volhynia, Poles were often called Mazurzy/Mazury.

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and activity of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, the UPA. Several attacks on Poles took place in Barysh, yet it became harder for the latter to organize self-defense after the Red Army entered Barysh. The Soviets formed so-called destruction battalions—istriebitielny batalion (IB), Soviet auxiliary paramilitary formations following the structure of the NKVD, formed by civilians under military command. In the area of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, Poles were either forcibly included into IBs or joined voluntarily because of UPA activity, either to seek revenge on the UPA or to protect their families.26 On the night of 5–6 February 1945, the Polish district of Mazury in Barysh was attacked by a group of Ukrainian partisans. Mazury was defended only by a small number of Poles, as most of those who had formerly joined the IB had been called to Buchach the day before.27 The slaughter of the population, including women, children, and the elderly, lasted a few hours. Around 135 people were killed and the area around Mazury was burned to the ground. In the following days, the remaining Poles first moved to Buchach and then were resettled to the western and northern parts of Poland.28

Outsiders Who Know Researchers entering a research field are certainly not “neutral” people in an open setting, especially when they possess knowledge that is considered by the local community to be of particular importance and sensitivity or when knowledge about lethal violence targets and jeopardizes the positive image of locals’ national identity. John D. Brewer singled out key aspects of planning and designing research on sensitive topics: identifying a topic, sampling, negotiating access, and collecting data.29 In this section, I focus on the issues related to negotiating access. Usually, when coming to a research field, a researcher tries to establish a connection with local gatekeepers—intermediaries who are aware of the structure and sensitivity of information, and know people who can tell the 26   Tomasz  Balbus, “Polskie ‘Istriebitielne bataliony’ NKWD w latach 1944–1945,” Biuletyn IPN 6, no. 16 (2002): 71–5. 27  Stanisława Puchała, Kresowy Barysz i okolice (Warsaw: Znak, 2017). 28  For more about the resettlement of Poles from Galicia to the Polish Western and Northern Territories, see Jan  Czerniakiewicz, Przemieszczenia ludnoscí polskiej z ZSRR 1944–1959, Wyd. 1 (Warsaw: Wydawn. Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej TWP, 2004). 29  John D. Brewer, “Researching Sensitive Topics,” in Understanding Research for Social Policy and Practice, ed. Saul Becker and Alan Bryman (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012), 69–73.

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researcher more about the past. This is also the purpose of the research: to deconstruct and describe the local structure of memory, its frameworks, and the positions of given actors in the field. Who remembers? Who is being remembered? Access to the memory of a post-conflict setting is often limited and protected, by local memory leaders, by the inhabitants themselves, and by the bystanders.30 A researcher is a newcomer, walking between thin lines of local power structures, and when it comes to memory, exploring the sensitivity of the local inhabitants toward the topics. One obstacle in conducting research on sensitive topics is overcoming mistrust, dissimulation, and concealment.31 However, the trust of the communities or individuals that suffered and the trust of communities whose members committed crimes are of a different kind. The notion that the researcher might possess knowledge that is protected by the local community might be helpful and inviting to the narrator, on the one hand, but, on the other, might locate the interviewer as a person to be kept at bay. One of the first choices made in Łubno was how to expose the knowledge the research team possessed regarding not only the course of events as such but also the perpetration, including names derived from archival research. One research strategy is to create a façade, suggesting that the researcher is a tabula rasa in the field, not revealing the extent of their knowledge. This approach is problematic on many levels. Using a façade for research comes with several ethical consequences, as the primary ethical principle of research is to inform the witness about the purpose of the meeting. In Łubno, for example, the researchers were signaling their knowledge by asking about the change in local relations: I: And you said, before the war Poles lived with the Ukrainians, they lived peacefully before the war. W: Yes, yes. I: And when did that change?32

30  Mateusz Magierowski, “Doing Fieldwork on Sensitive Topics: Navigating Memories of Intergroup Violence Committed by Ingroups in Contemporary Poland,” ASK: Research and Methods 1, no. 26 (2017): 83. 31  Raymond D. Lee, Doing Research on Sensitive Topics (London: Sage Publications, 1993). 32  Interview with Maria Fuchsa and Elżbieta Błaszkowska (dates of birth unavailable), recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow and Magdalena Zatorska; in this and subsequent citations, the notation I for interviewer and W for witness will be used.

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Knowledge was also revealed during an interview with Anastatia Ivantsiv, a Ukrainian from Barysh, born in 1923.33 She discussed the violence against Poles and then mistook it for the fate of the Jews from Barysh. The interviewer decided to channel the conversation back to the topic of violence committed against Poles by signaling that she knew what had happened: I: I know that many Polish women and children died that night. They say that over a hundred? W: In Mazury. I: In Mazury, yes. W: In Mazury, yes. I know, because there were Mazurians here, they lived here near us in Goliivka not far away, so we moved to Mazury. And they were very kind to us because they were neighbors.34

Another factor that places the researcher in a specific position is the duration of the field trip. A common approach toward researching sensitive topics involves long-term stays and periods of fieldwork, which often lead to more trust and openness between the researcher and the locals. While this approach has many obvious advantages, like getting to know more people who are potential witnesses of the local history, it does not always guarantee a closer relationship with the local community. In the case of difficult and “uncomfortable” memories, it is almost impossible to overcome the insider-outsider barrier. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir wrote in her book Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesa ̨du that minimal access was given by the community to her and her team during their prolonged presence in the village and during later fieldwork. At this point, the locals were already fully aware of the presence of the researchers. The notion was that the topics they wanted to discuss could disturb the local status quo regarding the past. Therefore, the longer they spent there, the more locals refused to speak to them.35 Similarly, our research had shown that interviewing the group among which the crime against others (especially close ones, such as neighbors) was committed is not time-dependent and in fact can result in fatigue and a sense of obtrusion, rather than trust and openness. 33  Interview with Anastasia Ivantsiv, born 1923, conducted in 2019 in Barysh by Marta Havryshko. 34  Ibid. 35  Joanna  Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesa ̨du (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2008), 399.

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“Because They Wanted Poland, and They Wanted Ukraine” As Timothy Snyder puts it, nationality is one of the biggest sources of biases, and this is especially valid for territories with a history of violence and ethnic cleansing. Thus, as Snyder continues, violence involves claims “enabling each side to present itself as the innocent defender of legitimate interests while portraying its opponents as savage nationalists.”36 The different interests of the two nations, not the conflict between the neighbors, are the leitmotiv of the discourse surrounding the pandemonium, both in Barysh and Łubno. Involving national actors, as well as framing the narrative of the violence as a product of chronic crises and historical circumstances, is pointed out by Baines as specific for the above-described narrative of the “complex political perpetrator.”37 The key phrase is a depersonalized and generalized, national “them.” The vivid memories of Poles from Łubno include Ukrainians cooperating with Germans. In fact, after the German occupation of Łubno began, a Ukrainian, Vasyl Lazor, became the head of the village. As remembered by the Poles, appointing a Ukrainian to this position resulted in oppressive actions against locals. For example, Adam Rza ̨sa recalled being appointed by Lazor to forced labor in Germany.38 The reason for these repressive actions was that Germans had “deluded” Ukrainians with the vision of an independent Ukrainian state, and Poles had to pay the price. Maria Fuchsa recalled: It was such a period, they always say that. The Germans seduced the Ukrainians and that was when this hatred arose. I confirm this. And then like this: first, the Ukrainians took revenge on the Poles, and then the Poles retaliated and took their revenge on the Ukrainians. It was so. It was already in the middle of the war, almost at the end. Because the Germans promised the Ukrainians Ukraine.39

 Snyder (1999), 86–7.  Baines (2009). 38  Adam and Sefania Rza ̨sa, Moja droga życiowa. Ska ̨d nasz ród. Archiwum Opozycji Ośrodka KARTA, AO II/147. 39  Interview with Maria Fuchsa and Elżbieta Błaszkowska, recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow and Magdalena Zatorska. 36 37

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The cooperation of Ukrainians (as such) with Germans during the period of German occupation, and revenge for the killing of Poles in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, were the reasons for the violence. Because the atrocities between locals were already happening, the fear that a massacre of Poles would take place in Łubno as well was predominant. As told by Celina Baran, Poles were afraid, and this drove them to violence. She was born in 1937, so her memories of the war would hardly embrace the political complexity of the situation. However, the emotional aspect is vivid in her memory: They were afraid, the Poles were afraid. They were of the Ukrainians later too [after the war], although they left, because I even remember, they threatened the Poles for coming back. […] The Poles were scared, they were just scared, my parents were also scared, we were also scared, we even ran away from the house. There was no mercy then [upon Ukrainians]. Whether one [a Ukrainian] was guilty or innocent, that’s how it was.40

The situation was becoming increasingly complicated. As Adam Rza ̨sa wrote: “Semen Kociełko, who was killed by a Pole, previously handed over a Pole from the village of Barycz41 to the Germans; A Ukrainian, the son of a village administrator, a student of a gymnasium in Jarosław, died for passing on information about the Home Army [to the Ukrainian underground].”42 The memory about Poles from Barysh, as displayed by today’s inhabitants of the village, has much in common with those described above. Many statements in the narratives refer to harms done by Poles to Ukrainians during the war. An example of such a narrative is the memory of Petro Gayda, born in 1931 in Barysh. He refers often to various forms of oppression. The aftermath of the situation also had an impact on Barysh. Gayda talks about drastic events from the past, not specifying the period: Where the [village] club is now, the Poles built a prison for Ukrainians. There, in the cellar, everything was taken away from Ukrainians, they were murdered and tortured. They were not allowed to study or live. The 40  Interview with Celina Baran (born 1937), recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow. 41  The similarity of the name to Barysh is accidental: Barycz is a village in the Carpathian region in today’s Poland. 42  Adam Rza ̨sa, “To trzeba dementować,” Przegla ̨d Polonijny 8 (1992): 11–12.

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Ukrainian had no right to possess a field, the Poles did. They were moved here, you know, so that they could reproduce here. They were given as many fields as you wanted, just cultivate it. And Ukrainians had absolutely nothing.43

Another memory is related to the wartime relations between locals (Ukrainians, Poles) and occupiers (Soviets and Germans), hardly ever Jews. In the memory of the present inhabitants of Barysh, the Poles “lived well” with the Soviets44—which in their memory is a form of treason, parallel to the Polish memory of Ukrainians collaborating with Germans. Anastasia Ivantsiv gave this as a reason for the “quarrel”: Because the fact that there in Puzhnyky, as Bandera burned Puzhnyky,45 there was a Polish wedding and there the Muscovites were with them. What about Barysh? Poles and Muscovites, as everything has already revolted, there was a quarrel with Poles and Ukrainians, the Poles helped the Muscovites.46

The importance of the national division splitting the inhabitants and setting a clear boundary becomes even more visible when looked at from a different angle. When I interviewed Celina Baran in Łubno, she suddenly—and she was the only one to do so—opened up about what exactly had happened in Łubno: I tell you, these are terribly difficult, such very sensitive situations, because Poles should not have done it. For me, as a Pole, it is even hard to talk about. They [Ukrainians] didn’t say anything bad to anyone. Even those Ukrainians, but if one was Ukrainian, why did he have to be killed? It was so shameful. Between you and me, because I experience it personally that Poles should not do this. Although we are Poles, and they were not, they were people after all.47 43  Interview with Petro Gayda (born 1931), recorded in 2019  in Barysh by Wiktoria ́ Kudela-Swia ̨tek. 44  It is likely that this refers to Poles being included into the IB. 45  On the night of 12/13 February 1945, members of the UPA group under the command of Petro Hamczuk “Bystry,” the same that had earlier killed Poles and burned Mazury in Barysh, killed about 100 people in the village of Puźniki/Puzhnyky (today non-existent), around 5 kilometers from Barysh. 46  Interview with Anastasia Ivantsiv (born 1923), conducted in 2019 in Barysh by Marta Havryshko. 47  Interview with Celina Baran (born 1937), recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow.

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The above considerations were intended to show selected examples of shifting the blame between perpetrators and victims, both of which can be defined at different levels. On the one hand, the “faults” of significant others are traced back to the time before the war. These offenses are primarily national in nature. On the other hand, they became the source of local conflicts and of hatred and murder. In the memory of the inhabitants of both Barysh and Łubno, the fault was national, and the revenge for it was local.

Blurred Vision The memories that surround stories of neighborly violence are initially blurred, out of focus. Frequently in the narratives, various murders and crimes committed against the villagers during the war overlap. Among people who were interviewed for the research are those born in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. Most often, the blurred vision was present in their stories, but for different reasons. First, there is an active process of not revealing one’s knowledge due to generalized fear. The moral sanction of “not fouling one’s nest” imposed on the memory of violence holds personal memories close. In a conversation, Khrystyna Jarosh, who was born in 1931, spoke in depth about pre-­ war relations in Barysh but much less about the actual course of events in Mazury. She revealed that her personal memory embraces “only” seeing the fire, and the rest of what she knows came from her husband. Even though she was not a direct bystander (as she presents herself), she often refused to talk, stressing continuously during the meeting: “I can’t say, I have children, I have grandchildren.”48 Another explanation for the “blurred vision” is the desire to maintain a positive image of one’s own reference group by diminishing the role of the Other, and thus the role of an event. In conversations carried out in both Łubno and Barysh, the memories about others—Ukrainians from Łubno and Poles from Barysh—are told briefly, as if their presence in the localities was marginal: there were some Poles, they lived in peace with Ukrainians, and after the war they left for Poland. However, in the interviews there are “layers” of otherness by which one might discover that in the Galician triangle of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, the relation between Poles and 48  Interview with Khrystyna Jarosh (born 1931), recorded in 2019  in Barysh by Marta Havryshko.

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Ukrainians was closer. For example, Pavlo Kubishyn, a Ukrainian from Barysh, says: “They [Ukrainians] married Poles, and it was like that with Poles. When a man took a Polish woman, he got married where the woman came from, in the [Roman Catholic] church. And with the Jews, there was no one who married.”49 From the interviews that I and my colleague recorded in Łubno, it appears that the disappearance of Ukrainians becomes “inexplainable,” and the history becomes intrinsically complicated. Sometimes, blurred memories were the result of witnessing various forms of violence for a long time, over many years. A remarkable example of such a situation is the narrative of Anastasia Ivantsiv. Her memories unfold slowly, showing bifurcation more than a continuous story, often corrected by her daughter who accompanied her during the conversation: W: [answering the question about what happened to the local Jews] Somehow someone was beaten in the woods. And my brother. He is not there, he is abroad. In the morning he saw them being carried away …. W’s Daughter: Mom, no. That’s Poles. W: But I don’t know. W’s Daughter: These were Poles, not Jews, Poles.50

Violence committed against various groups of locals was omnipresent from the very beginning of the German occupation. Yet, one might argue, the violence committed against “significant others” could be memorialized more vividly. However, Anastasia Ivantsiv remembered the fire that destroyed Mazury, part of Barysh, inhabited almost exclusively by Poles. The memory is saturated more with symbolism than with details: I closed my eyes, opened them, and the house was all red. And I say, “Stefan [husband’s name], get up, because it’s the end of the world, the final judgment.” […] As I woke up, I let one foot out of bed, and kept it until the morning, because I was so afraid to move. And we thought it was a terrible trial, that was all, the whole village was red.51 49  Interview with Pavlo Kubishyn (born 1932), recorded in 2019 in Barysh by Wiktoria ́ Kudela-Swia ̨tek. 50  Interview with Anastasia Ivantsiv (born 1923), conducted in 2019 in Barysh by Marta Havryshko. 51  Ibid.

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Blurred memories about the past are only partially representative of the narrative of the members of the group to which the perpetration is being ascribed. As proven by earlier research, memories of the victims of genocide are also fragmentary and jagged.52 Their fragmentary nature reveals the emotional load of the stories told. Emotionality in the analyzed cases concerns various periods of emotional difficulties related to the perception of events. They may refer to previous experiences, those directly related to the violence. Emotions can also be in the present, where moral sanctions cause anxiety. For this reason, blurry memories should not be viewed solely as a process of active suppression. As I show in this text, they are more complex and form a way of twisting the narrative rather than avoiding stories about the past.

Passive Acts of Disappearing Local acts of lethal violence carried out against neighbors are rarely named as such. The language that is used to describe local acts of violence usually reveals much about the moral sanction that is placed upon this memory. Inasmuch as the wording does not hide the tragedy that happened, it efficiently blurs the active agency of one’s own group. “And then, something happened, a hatred between the two nations and that’s why this turmoil happened,” said a woman from Łubno when we talked about the course of events that led to violence committed against Ukrainians.53 Celina Baran (also from Łubno) spoke of the hatred too: The Germans were banished. The Germans withdrew. And this hate, that’s how it started. Then it just started, because it was like this: the Poles were beating, the Russians had already gone, because they ousted those Germans and they left.54

It was rare that anyone, both in Poland and Ukraine, would speak about the killings. The word we came across most often was “hatred”— how the “hatred appeared” ex machina, how “the hatred erupted,” and 52  Ruth  Jaffe, “Dissociative Phenomena in Former Concentration Camp Inmates,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49, no. 2 (1968): 310–12. 53  Interview with a woman (born 1939), recorded in 2019  in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow. The interviewee was granted anonymity. 54  Interview with Celina Baran (born 1937), recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow.

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how hatred emerged from situations in the past. This word probably most truly depicts the feelings that were present in the given locality. Yet hatred as a feeling is deprived of agency, which is also the trait ascribed to perpetrators: the “ideal victim” has no agency. In the local memory, hatred is an intergroup feeling, where negativity arises from being a member of a different national group. Furthermore, hatred is not opportunistic; it is not a sole motivation to loot, and it does not explain why people join the turmoil and mass violence. In Barysh, the narrators said that “Mazury horily” [Mazury was burning] without naming the actors. Through our research visits, we were becoming more fluent in the language of local memory, that is, how the past was told to strangers—that something ended, burned, the hatred erupted. After several encounters, we followed the language pattern and asked the interlocutors about how “Mazury was burning,” knowing that it was probably a key phrase to address the memory of this event. In a conversation Olha Kalyniuk said: W: Someone set the fire, on purpose. W’s daughter: Ah, someone set it on fire. I thought it was an outbreak? I: And the people in the village spoke about who might have done this? W: Some … I: No, no, I ask. I say, you know everything, I need to learn it. That’s why I ask. W: (pause) Yes, Ukrainians beat Poles, Poles beat Ukrainians. And so, it was.55

Another layer of this narrative reveals how the national understanding is used to frame local acts of violence. The “hatred” had a more general, supra-local character. It provides an understanding of what happened and how it can be explained. Reaching for wider narratives helps to locate individual experience and vernacular memory in a national framework of memory, a wider, more comprehensive context. The citation above also shows the possible consequences of concealing agency. Olha’s daughter was aware that sometime in the past, Mazury, the Polish “district” of Barysh, had burned down. However, what she did not know was that the place was set on fire, that it was not an accident. This gap in the local knowledge shows how gaps and blurs in local memories occur due to a 55  Interview with Olha Kalyniuk (born 1936), recorded in 2019  in Barysh by Wiktoria Kudela-Świa ̨tek.

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motivated, active process of forgetting. This type of forgetting is defined by Paul Connerton as structural amnesia.56 It stands for remembering only links that are socially important and forgetting those that are subjected mostly to oral transmission. To explore this notion of forgetting, one needs to take into consideration the generational difference as well, that the obsolescence and “bypassing” of certain elements does not break the story as such, but puts one’s own national group in a different light. Another example of hiding agency and, at the same time, sanctioning the new order after the war is the story of what happened to the abandoned buildings. In Łubno, there stood a brick-built Greek Catholic church, built in the early nineteenth century. In a conversation with Maria Fuchsa and her daughter Elżbieta Błaszkowska in Łubno, the fate of the church was said to have “ended” when it was dismantled after the end of the war by the locals, not by the course of political events: I: What happened to this [Orthodox] church? W1: They dismantled it. W2: There were no people, no one to watch over, and it ended. W1: They dismantled it for building material; I know that for sure.57

The view from the victim group appears to be quite different, and more specific. Fylyp Vasylovskyi, a Ukrainian diaspora writer not native to Łubno, described the history of the village based on second-hand accounts, specifically mentioning “Polish vandals” who demolished the church which Ukrainians had attended before the war.58 The killings and resettlements that followed established a new order, here represented by religious relations59: They had already converted to [Roman] Catholicism, even if there were such [Greek Catholic] families, everyone had already converted to Catholicism, and when these holidays appeared, they worshiped them at

 Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 59–71.  Interview with Maria Fuchsa and Elżbieta Błaszkowska, recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow and Magdalena Zatorska. 58  Fylyp T.  Vasylovskyi, “Ukraiins’ke selo Lubna i joho trahedia,” in Yaroslavshchyna i Zasiannia 1031–1947. Istoryko-memuarnyj zbirnyk (New York/Paris/Sydney/ Toronto, 1986). 59  The local divisions in Galicia were also related to religion. Poles were almost without exception Roman Catholics, while Ukrainians were Greek Catholic. 56 57

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home, but one did not get in the way of each other and they tried to respect the majority in this way, right?60

The quotation above represents much more than the situation in Łubno, and thus becomes a representation of how relations in the “No Neighbors’ Lands” were changing after the war. The destruction of material heritage of the killed and resettled neighbors is exercising another form of violence. The newly established majority—in this case, the Polish majority in Łubno—even if they acknowledged the existence of people of different faith, “did not get in the way of each other.”

The Resettlement I have identified two major factors that signify the narrative of a collective “political perpetrator”—use of the depersonalized, passive voice when speaking about the killings of the past and magnifying one’s own group’s collective victimhood—subjected to violence, killings, fear, or poverty. The final narrative I analyze in this chapter involves how the resettlements are remembered, and specifically what led to them. In his testimony, Adam Rza ̨sa told his interlocutor about Ukrainians departing from Łubno in 1945: Many leaving Ukrainians left their sites with great sadness. They were emotionally connected with this land. However, they had to come to terms with it. They were punished for their cooperation with the German occupier.61

In his account, Rza ̨sa is referring to the Vistula operation, a mass resettlement of Ukrainians (among others) mostly from the Carpathian region to the western and northern territories of Poland, annexed from Germany. However, this operation was conducted in 1947, not 1945. Among different explanations for the carrying out of this operation is that it was a collective, political punishment for the crimes committed mostly by the Ukrainian nationalist underground. However, the main reason for the resettlement was to create a nationally homogenous society in postwar 60  Interview with Maria Fuchsa and Elżbieta Błaszkowska, recorded in 2019 in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow and Magdalena Zatorska. 61  Archiwum Opozycji Ośrodka KARTA, AO II/147, Stefania and Adam Rza ̨sa, Moja droga życiowa. Ska ̨d nasz ród.

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Poland. In fact, the Vistula operation crushed the Ukrainian communities in Poland, along with their sense of identity (and consequently crashed the nationalist underground). Operation Vistula remains an important lieux de memoire, expressed not only by Ukrainians but also by Poles, and is associated with the deportation of local Ukrainians. A woman we spoke to from Łubno recalls: Well, just how it started, it’s hard for me to say what it was like. The war was ending, I don’t know in what year this deportation was, was that Operation Vistula, 1945? I know history very well, but I’m 80  years old, I don’t remember some things anymore. But I know that this Operation Vistula was probably in 1945. And if they [Poles] were chasing them [Ukrainians] away, there must have been such a ferment between them.62

“Poles to Poland,” said Anna Los-Cybenko, a Ukrainian from Barysh, when speaking about the outcomes of the violence committed against Poles in Ukraine.63 Petro Gayda describes the resettlement of Poles from Barysh, where the argument of past faults is followed by the memory of resettlement: Ukrainians were to be slaughtered by Poles because there were two thirds of them, and Ukrainians were the third. They had to clean Ukrainians as they should be. Ukrainians quickly learned this, someone reported, gathered the people, and burned all those Mazury. Because in Mazury, there were only Poles. […] And then they left for Poland. Then they gathered and left, some on horseback, some like that, they went to Buchach to the station, and there they were taken to Poland.64

Today’s inhabitants of both Łubno and Barysh are in fact depositors of many memories: memories of the resettlement and memories of the violence committed against neighbors. Those neighbors are gone today: they were either killed or resettled. The current inhabitants wield power to shape the story of how the Ukrainians from Łubno and Poles from Barysh 62  Interview with a woman (born 1939), recorded in 2019  in Łubno by Małgorzata Łukianow. The interviewee was granted anonymity. 63  Interview with Anna Los-Cybenko (born 1926), recorded in 2019 in Barysh by Wiktoria Kudela-Świa ̨tek. 64  Interview with Petro Gayda (born 1931), recorded in 2019  in Barysh by Wiktoria Kudela-Świa ̨tek.

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disappeared. The story, the alternative narrative, focuses on atrocities and the resettlement of Others.

Conclusion The memory of violence committed by one’s own group—the group that is a bearer of local or national identity—is a memory that is heavily sanctioned, morally and socially. It is blurry, because the violence surrounding it happened in a particular context, but the recollection of it proves to be difficult and troublesome for the narrators interviewed. Yet it is not the blurry explanation of a local context that distinguishes the perpetrator narrative specifically. The constellation of blame, guilt, and responsibility is what sets the border of the narrative. What is particularly astounding is how the language works to obscure the direct agency of the locals. Furthermore, the conflict is framed within the context of the conflict between two nations, Poles and Ukrainians. While this is how the story is most often told, it obscures the peculiarities of local conflicts and serves as an explanation for the violence committed in specific localities. Finally, the resettlements of Poles from Barysh and Ukrainians from Łubno are viewed as acts of violence, but committed by the resettled neighbors. Thus, the current inhabitants wield the power to shape the discourse about violent events of the past. The absent others are gone, and the current locals finally constitute the social and symbolic majority; they are responsible for communicating the memory (or not) to their descendants. Acknowledgments  The research for this chapter was funded by the research grant of the Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki, no. 0101/NPRH3/ H12/82/2014.

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Bastian, Jeanette A. 2013. The Records of Memory, the Archives of Identity: Celebrations, Texts and Archival Sensibilities. Archival Science 13: 121–131. Berger, James. 2007. Which Prosthetic? Mass Media, Narrative, Empathy, and Progressive Politics. Rethinking History 11 (4): 597–612. Blutinger, Jeffrey. 2010. An Inconvenient Past: Post-Communist Holocaust Memorialization. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1): 73–94. Bouris, Erica. 2007. Complex Political Victims. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Brewer, John D. 2012. Researching Sensitive Topics. In Understanding Research for Social Policy and Practice, ed. Saul Becker and Alan Bryman, 69–73. Bristol: Policy Press. Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Richard, Quincy Cloet, and Alex Dowdall, eds. 2017. Breaking Empires, Making Nations? The First World War and the Reforging of Europe. Warsaw: College of Europe. Connerton, Paul. 2008. Seven Types of Forgetting. Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71. Cooley, Ch. H. [1902] 2011. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s (kindle edition). Czerniakiewicz, Jan. 2004. Przemieszczenia ludnoscí polskiej z ZSRR 1944–1959, Wyd. 1. Warsaw: Wydawn. Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej TWP. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fornal, Paweł. 2009. Michał Barć (1903–1979), żołnierz ZWZ-AK, informator, agent celny, tajny współpracownik UB-SB o pseudonimach ‘Andrzej’ i ‘Ba ̨k’. Aparat Represji w Polsce Ludowej 1944–1989 1 (7): 451–481. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Jaffe, Ruth. 1968. Dissociative Phenomena in Former Concentration Camp Inmates. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (2): 310–312. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, Raymond M. 1993. Doing Research on Sensitive Topics. London: Sage Publications. Magierowski, Mateusz. 2017. Doing Fieldwork on Sensitive Topics: Navigating Memories of Intergroup Violence Committed by Ingroups in Contemporary Poland. ASK: Research and Methods 1 (26): 81–98. Mick, Christoph. 2011. Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–44. Journal of Contemporary History 46: 336–363. Misiło, Eugeniusz. 2006. Pawłokoma 3 III 1945 r. Warsaw: Ukar. Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory 17 (3): 333–348.

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———. 2018. From the Memory of Violence to the Violence of Memory, European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity. 18 February. https:// enrs.eu/article/from-the-memory-of-violence-to-the-violence-of-memory. Accessed 1 September 2021. Puchała, Stanisława. 2017. Kresowy Barysz i okolice. Warsaw: Znak. Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz. 2020. Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 34 (1): 221–240. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rza ̨sa, Adam. 1992. To trzeba dementować. Przegla ̨d Polonijny 8: 11–12. ———. 2010. Uratowali wielu Żydów. 11 March. https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/ pl/historie-pomocy/wasze-opowiesci/uratowali-wielu-zydow. Accessed 17 July 2021. Snyder, Timothy. 1999. ‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947. Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (2): 86–120. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2008. Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesa ̨du. Warsaw: W.A.B. Vasylovskyi, Fylyp T. 1986. Ukrajinske seło Łubna i joho trahedia. In Jarosławszczyna i Zasiannia 1031–1947. New York/Paris/Sydney/Toronto: Istorykomemuranyj zbirnyk. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. [2002] 2011. Excerpt from ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. In The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, 343–345. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wróbel, Piotr. 2003. The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921. Journal of Modern European History 1 (1): 125–149. Wylegała, Anna. 2021. The Void Communities: Towards a New Approach to the Early Post-war in Poland and Ukraine. East European Politics and Societies 35 (2): 407–436.

Post-1945 No Neighbors’ Lands: A Conclusion Sabine Rutar and Anna Wylegała

This book’s authors explore the history of what today is Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Their in-depth and multidimensional assessments reveal the Second World War’s dramatic damage on the ethnic, sociocultural, and material fabric of communities all over Europe and show what renewal in the war’s aftermath looked like. Villages, towns, regions, and borderlands became No Neighbors’ Lands that were horribly marked by occupation—sometimes by more than one occupying force—as well as (mass) violence, deportations, and looting. The wounds inflicted and the traumas endured have left traces and scars

S. Rutar (*) Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Wylegała Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_17

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up through the present. The authors provide detailed accounts of how the war caused far more than a disruption in the historical continuity of multiethnicity in many places. Often such multiethnicity was effectively brought to an end. But the traumatic voids engulfed all spheres of societal life. Our volume offers an array of nuanced local approaches to postwar processes of (attempted) societal renewal aimed at the repair of ties severed during the war and the forging of new bonds. How were war criminals to be brought to justice? How were property issues to be resolved? The need for justice was overwhelming, the concept of guilt complex. Incoming migrants took the place of prior inhabitants, and these sorts of population shifts shaped the evolution—privately and collectively alike—of remembrance patterns of the war’s events and consequences. Frequently forgetting, rather than remembering, seemed to be a way forward, calling to mind the famous observation by Ernest Renan in his 1882 Sorbonne lecture “What Is a Nation?” that nations are communities to a far greater extent because they forget together rather than because they remember together. The Nuremberg trials were hardly sufficient: justice was needed locally, with thousands of crimes demanding juridical redress in the whole of Europe. Many forms of guilt have never been put to trial, however, nor have they entered any mnemonic canon. One salient example is gender-­ based violence, including rape. The concept of crimes against humanity, newly defined in August 1945, has never been applied to sexual violence, neither against Jewish women nor against women of other nationalities (e.g., German and Polish women raped by Red Army soldiers). In addition, in other respects power asymmetries provided the basis for trials involving anti-Jewish violence: in such cases prewar interpersonal relations could play a role and intervene in favor of the perpetrators rather than their Jewish victims. The fates of “unwanted” groups point to an even darker side of postwar social renewal efforts. Children, for example, were often seen not as victims needing protection and possessed of a particularly weak agency on their own behalf but rather as those who had remained behind after neighbors had vanished. This attitude could be found in both Eastern and Western Europe, and the unaccommodating relentlessness characteristic of their administrative verification and naturalization processes often left a permanent imprint on the children forced to endure these bureaucratic indignities. And for Jews, antisemitism did not somehow cease with the war’s end: one finds horrific cases of postwar violence, including the

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targeting of orphaned Jewish children. The Holocaust had just happened; antisemitism persisted and was even facilitated, indeed intensified outright due to the war’s brutalization and fragmentation of local communities. Neighbors having vanished, the transfer of their property seemed up for grabs. Such transfers took place with a legally sanctioned basis—which is not the same as a basis actually corresponding to the rule of law—or via spontaneous appropriation that could include looting and theft. Property is a complex concept, as the authors show, and property transfer could be protracted and multidirectional, involving old and new owners, local institutions, and the state. What is more, the resolution of property issues after the war concerned not only material belongings. Matters of dignity, guilt, and justice were substantially connected to property to be reclaimed and decisions about restitution or its refusal. The way property transfer was dealt with also shared much in common with the new governments’ political goals, aiming as they did to change existing social stratification and alter patterns of political privilege. Property transfer was substantially administered by the state, which took property from certain groups—for example the gentry, bourgeoisie, and Jews—and gave it to others: peasants or workers or Poles. Those who had vanished had left all or most of their material property behind, and gone, too, were their professional know-how and their sociocultural capital. Doctors, teachers, peasants, landlords, factory workers, seamstresses, merchants, retailers, bankers, veterinarians, musicians, artists, and many more—so many among these groups had vanished. The authors give ample proof of the sociocultural dimensions of loss in the No Neighbors’ Lands, as reflected in material property transfer as well as in the multilayered consequences wrought by the destruction of local societal fabrics on a massive scale. Even if property was transferred in a sanctioned manner dictated by extraordinary circumstances (rather than on a proper legal basis), this process often permitted local communities to start over. Professional know-how as well as social and cultural capital was, however, utterly lost and often was insufficiently replaced. Many villages and towns never recovered to take renewed shape in any way resembling their prewar status, and material property issues proved to have protracted afterlives. Not least, the radicality of the ruptures strongly marked how the war and its aftermath have been remembered or, frequently, deliberately forgotten, pushed out of sight. The complex legacies of the communist politics of remembrance include the erasure of those who were killed, resettled, or deported. The

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failure to negotiate a politics of remembrance that would embrace all war victims—regardless of ethnicity, social position, gender, or whether their deaths were on the battlefield, in a death camp or elsewhere—remains an acute issue today. Currently, there is still much work to be done to establish a narrative that would effect such a comprehensive commemorialization and in so doing recover as many voices as possible to be articulated and heard. As the authors demonstrate, commemorating others of significance who vanished has remained a challenge. For example, it has proved difficult to overcome the Soviet categorization of “peaceful citizens who were victims of the fascist invaders of the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union.” This categorization included the Jews, who were thus remembered not as victims of the Holocaust but as Soviet citizens. Alternately, after communism’s demise the ubiquitous claim that the Holocaust receive greater mnemonic justice has led to unfortunate exercises in “victim competition,” as non-Jewish victim groups have remained less visible in comparison. Acknowledging the Slavic populations being massively targeted on the basis of the German occupiers’ racist ideology has sometimes been understood as an attempt to deny the Holocaust’s unique historical position. Another sensitive matter concerns the acts of (mass) violence committed by local populations themselves against the Jews as well as against ethnic others. The very concept of “neighbor” is dizzyingly complex, as neighbors could differ along lines of ethnicity, religion, and social status and, not lastly, their interactions were inevitably affected by all sorts of interpersonal relations, amicable, hostile, and points in between. Among those who vanished from the No Neighbors’ Lands were the ethnic German populations of Eastern Europe, whether in Silesia, in the Kočevje (Ger. Gottschee), in Eastern Prussia, or elsewhere. Several postwar governments employed a concept of collective responsibility for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany in order to target, persecute, and more often than not deport these groups. The locals, long-term residents and new arrivals alike, wanted to forget that any Germans had ever lived in these areas, and their marginalization in memory is part of an ongoing reluctance to acknowledge and remember multiethnic local histories—as doing so would entail the voicing of difficult and multilateral issues bound up with responsibility and with trauma. At the time of this writing (September 2022), the Russian invasion of Ukraine lasting for more than six months has shocked and alarmed the

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world. The events themselves and the discourses of all sides have heavily overlaid the thinking and even the semantics of how the Second World War is regarded. Beyond the incredulous sense of déja vu—literally the case with respect to Yugoslavia 30 years ago, but also as descendants of those who experienced the Second World War—we are witnessing the most massive movement of refugees in Europe since that World War’s end; we see, unfathomably, how this new mass violence is causing Holocaust survivors to die ghastly deaths; we listen to politicians abusing and distorting history in such blatant ways that even a few years ago would have seemed impossible to imagine. We are witnessing how it is becoming more difficult, literally on a daily basis, to retrieve the history of the experience of a war that ended almost 80 years ago, in the face of renewed aggressive breaches of international law, relentless warmongering and mass violence in Europe and the incessant barrage of lies, falsifications, propaganda, and censorship in the public sphere. May our book help to return to the voices of the past, to reconnect them to the present, to do justice to the experiences of the No Neighbors’ Lands, to acknowledge their complex and difficult histories, and to help understand how our times—and by this we mean the 30-year span since communism’s demise—are deeply connected to the Second World War and its aftermath.1

1  Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky expressed this connection forcefully in his memorable speech on 8 May 2022, see Address by the President of Ukraine on the Day of Remembrance of Reconciliation, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s official website, 8 May 2022, https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zvernennya-prezidenta-ukrayini-z-nagodi-dnya-pamyatita-prim-74885

Index1

A Adriatic Sea, 82, 92 Alsace, 6, 359 Alsódabas, 239 Altbacher, see Stari Breg Altlag, see Stari Log Al’tman, Il’ya, 351 Altsag, see Stare Žage Amster, Basia, 216 Amster, Donia, 216 Apih, Elio, 308 Apih, Milan, 325 Applebaum, Anne, 15 Aronowicz, Oleś, 65 Auschwitz, 44, 53, 56, 242, 351 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 54, 235 Austria, 78, 85, 244, 270, 279, 281, 288–290, 300, 308, 364

B Babi Yar, killing site, 333n1, 351, 355 Bad Karlsbrunn, see Karlova Studánka Bagrationovsk (Ger. Preußisch Eylau), 46 Baikov, Aleksandr, 342, 343 Baja, 244 Balaban, Vasyl, 219 Balassagyarmat, 242, 244 Balkans, 75 Baltic states, 8, 18, 156 Baran, Celina, 394, 395, 398 Barć, Michał, 388 Bartov, Omer, 4, 81 Barysh (Pl. Barysz), 1–2, 4, 5, 12, 21 Barysz, see Barysh Belarus, 6, 8, 18, 156, 158, 161–163, 166–168, 170, 171, 174, 407

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Wylegała et al. (eds), No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0

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414 

INDEX

Belev, Aleksandăr, 199, 200 Belgium, 17, 103–106, 108, 113–116, 121, 122, 407 Belgrade, 93n57, 97, 289 Bełżec extermination camp, 66, 132 Beneš, Edvard, 360, 373 Benussi, Andrea, 84 Berdychiv, 215, 222 Berezdivtsi (Pl. Brzozdowce), 147 Berezhany (Pl. Brzeżany), 143 Bergholz, Max, 9, 81 Berlin, 35, 48, 284 Bernstein, József, 245–249 Bessarabia, 283 Bessonov, Nikolay, 159 Bezkostnyi, Hryhorii, 216, 217 Bibrka (Pl. Bóbrka), 146, 148, 149 Biczó, Sándor, 245, 247, 248 Bihać, 9 Bileća, 325 Birkenau, see Auschwitz-Birkenau Błaszkowska, Elżbieta, 391n32, 400 Blej, Feliks, 146 Bóbrka, see Bibrka Bogner, Nachum, 56 Borme, Antonio, 97 Boroda, Aleksandr, 354 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 3, 9, 12, 281, 283, 289, 307, 308, 311, 316, 317, 322, 323 Brander, Benek, 56 Braslaũ, 161 Brestrnica, 289 Brežice (Ger. Rann), 286, 292 Brno, 361 Bromber, Genya, 211, 223 Bromer, Kazimierz, 120 Brott, Tania, 216 Broz, Josip (Tito), 19, 84, 90, 91, 321 Brzesko, 140, 141 Brzeżany, see Berezhany

Brzezina, Waltraud, 112, 113, 115 Brzezińska, Maria, 145 Brzozdowce, see Berezdivtsi Brzozów, 388 Buchach (Pl. Buczacz), 383, 389, 390, 402 Buczacz, see Buchach Budapest, 19, 180, 235, 240, 241, 244, 246 Budicin, Pino, 85, 86, 93 Bukovina, 283 Bulgaria, 6, 18, 179, 181–184, 188, 191, 192, 194, 197, 199, 202, 280, 407 Bytom, 115 C Carinthia, 279, 282, 283 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 267, 275–277 Central Poland, 15, 130 Chaikovskyi, Ivan, 216 Cheshmedzhiev, Grigor, 194, 195 Chodorów, see Khodoriv Chortkiv (Pl. Czortków), 143 Chorzów, 111 Chukiv, 216 Chyrko, Oleksandr, 211, 212, 221, 222 Ciba, Jerzy, 110, 111, 119 Clark, Katerina, 13 Cottbus, 307 Cracow, see Kraków Croatia, 9, 17, 77, 95, 281–283, 297, 307, 311, 324, 326, 407 Cyns, Jerzy, 56, 72 Cyns, Sabina, 72 Czechoslovakia, 249, 268, 269, 290, 360, 364, 372, 378 Czech Republic, 361, 369, 377, 407 Czortków, see Chortkiv Czyniewski, Józef, 144

 INDEX 

D Dadej, Janina, 137 Dalmatia, 83, 94, 359 Damiani, Alessandro, 80 Déak, István, 7 Dębicki, Edward, 155, 158, 162, 164, 167, 168, 172 Debreczeny, István, 244 Diachuk, Stepan, 219 Dignano, see Vodnjan Diner, Dan, 243, 255, 256, 316 Dnipropetrovsk, 149 Dobruja, 283 Dolenja Topla Reber, 294, 295 Dolgushin, 42 Donbas, 117, 258 Don, river, 336 Draganov, Peyo, 199, 200 Drava Banovina, 280, 282 Duda, Jaroslav, 371 Dvořák, Libor, 375, 377, 378 Dychovichnaia, Nina Ambramovna, 43 Dynów, 389 Dziewięcki, Wolf, 56 E East Germany, 29, 271, 338, 364 East Prussia, 30, 32–34, 45, 46, 48 England, 111 Eupen-Sankt Vith-Malmedy (ESM), 102 Europe Central Europe, 76, 267 Eastern Europe, 4, 6–8, 13, 14, 29–32, 36, 75–77, 79, 81, 82, 96, 101, 255, 267, 268, 410 Western Europe, 8, 75, 76, 101, 117, 169, 408 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 355 See also Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

415

F Fayonov, Menahem, 198, 199 Fedorov, Kyrylo, 211, 223 Ferber, Roman, 58n29 Fónagy Nagy, Géza, 246 France, 6, 78, 84, 91, 169 Frank, Aladár, 242–245 Frank, Tibor, 242–245 Fuchsa, Maria, 391n32, 393, 400 Futoma, 389 G Galicia district of, 132 Eastern Galicia, 2, 21, 130–132, 130n4, 134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 145, 151, 390 Western Galicia, 21, 130n4, 131, 132, 140, 145, 148 Galitskii, Kuz’ma, 37 Gayda, Petro, 394, 402 Gdynia, 111 General Government (GG), 55, 130, 131, 145 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 29, 41 Germany, 17, 33, 35, 39, 102, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 117, 121, 169, 238, 244, 258, 260, 267–270, 269n46, 279, 280, 285, 307, 363, 364, 388n18, 393, 401 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 261, 266, 272, 273, 275, 276 Ginzburg, Ilia, 215 Goldstein, Dora, 72 Goldstein, Zygmunt, 72 Goli Otok, 80, 89, 91–93 Gornja Topla Reber, 296 Górska, Anna, 58 Gottschee, see Kočevje

416 

INDEX

Grazioli, Emilio, 286 Greece, 6, 182, 195, 201 Gross, Jan T., 9, 14, 15 Gumbinnen, see Gusev Gusev (Ger. Gumbinnen), 46 H Halfar, Conrad, 372 Halpern, Joel M., 9 Harta, 389 Havel, Václav, 361 Hermannstadt, see Sibiu Herzegovina, 78, 97, 281 Himmler, Heinrich, 284, 285 Hlebów, see Hlibiv Hlibiv (Pl. Hlebów), 150 Hojoł, Józef, 62–64, 72 Holinach, Vira, 130, 130n3 Holzman, Fira, 211 Honcharenko, Olha, 220 Horodenka, 138 Horthy, Miklós, 234 Hrastovec near Sv. Lenart, 289 Hrobat Virloget, Katja, 10n24 Hrubieszów, 156 Hryćko, Franciszek, 388 Hudy, Julia, 139, 140 Hungary, 18, 186, 194, 231–250, 269, 280, 282, 290, 363, 407 Hütterott family, 93 I Indura, 169 Israel, 53, 188, 270–273, 334 Istria, 3–6, 8, 14, 17, 75–97, 305, 307–312, 318 Italy, 3, 16, 19, 77–80, 89, 90, 92, 280, 282, 283, 285, 287, 307–309, 312, 318, 323–326 Ivanišin, Nina, 307

Ivano Frankivsk (Pl. Stanisławów), 138, 145n50, 149 See also Stanyslaviv Ivanov, Petr Andreevich, 40, 41 Ivantsiv, Anastasiia, 22, 22n40, 392, 392n33, 395, 395n46, 397, 397n50 J Jadowniki, 139, 139n25 Jarosh, Khrystyna, 396, 396n48 Jedwabne, 9 K Kabaliuk, Anton, 215 Kaciczak, Stanisław, 68 Kalc, Aleksej, 10n24, 306n3, 310n14 Kaliningrad (Ger. Königsberg), 30–32, 34–37, 36n24, 39–48 Kalinin oblast, 170 Kalitsin, Yaroslav, 190, 201 Kalugin, Yurii, 334, 353, 356 Kalyniuk, Olha, 399, 399n55 Kamianets-Podilskyi, 216 Karlova Studánka (Ger. Bad Karlsbrunn), 373 Kasazov, Dimo, 189 Kassa, see Košice Kharkiv, 149, 207 Khmara, Vasyl, 135 Khodoriv (Pl. Chodorów), 140 Khrushchev, Nikita, 152 Khvesiuk, Pavlo, 215 Kideckel, David A., 9 Kielce, 15 Kiev, see Kyiv Kirovohrad oblast, 214 Klempka, Mieczysław, 62, 62n54, 63, 72 Klempka, Władysław, 62 Kliotsko, Mariia, 1, 2, 2n2, 4

 INDEX 

417

Kočevje (Ger. Gottschee), 19, 279–301, 410 Kočevske Poljane (Ger. Pöllandl), 299 Kociełko, Semen, 394 Kolbasov, Oleksii, 217 Königsberg, see Kaliningrad Koprivnik, 299 Koropets (Pl. Koropiec), 142, 142n38, 144, 145, 147, 147n61, 152 Koropiec, see Koropets Korshunova, Valentyna Hryhoriivna, 214 Korsun, Ivan, 158, 162–164, 166, 170, 171n39, 174 Košice (Hun. Kassa), 235 Koszarek, Kazimierz, 105n12, 118, 119n66 Kowcz, Władysław, 1, 1n1, 2, 5, 12 Kraków, see Kraków (Eng. Cracow) Kraków (Eng. Cracow), 15, 52–54, 54n8, 56, 58–60, 58n30, 64, 67–70, 130n4, 137, 139–142, 145 Krasnodar, 180, 207 Kronberg, Jakub, 144, 145 Kryvyj Rih, 210 Krzeptowski, Wacław, 66 Krzyżanowski, Władysław, 155, 156, 168 Kubishyn, Pavlo, 397, 397n49 Kuechler, Lena, 61, 65, 65n68, 72 Kulen Vakuf, 9 Kuraś, Józef, 71 Kushnarenko, Oleksandr, 216 Kvarner (It. Quarnero), 79, 83, 88 Kyiv (Rus. Kiev), 207, 333n1

Latvia, 36, 158, 169, 171, 407 Lausanne, 8, 76 Lazar, Berl, 354 Lazor, Vasyl, 388, 393 Lazzarini, Giuseppe, 82, 83 Leder, Andrzej, 71 Lehmann, Rosa, 13 Leningrad, 336 Leshchenko, Savva, 219 Lienfeld, see Livold Lithuania, 6, 33, 34, 36, 45, 158, 168, 169, 171, 407 Liubar, 211, 221 Liubchenko, Sofia, 212, 213 Livold (Ger. Lienfeld), 299 Livshits, Vladimir, 334, 351–354, 352n46, 356 Ljubljana, 281–287, 289n21, 298n50, 307 Łódź, 56 Lower Styria, 282, 284 Lubecko, 114n47, 118, 118n63, 118n64, 120n70 Lublin, 180 Lubliniec district, 102, 105n12, 106–108 Łubno, 21, 383, 384, 386–391, 391n32, 393–398, 393n39, 394n40, 395n47, 398n54, 400–403, 400n57, 401n60 Lukov, Pencho, 190 Lusztig, Imre, 240 Lviv (Pl. Lwów), 139–141, 145–147 Lwów, see Lviv Lypovets, 217 Lysa Hora, 215, 222 Lysak, Oleksandr, 221

L Lansberg, Lisa, 218 Łany, see Lany Lany (Pl. Łany), 135, 136n15

M Macedonia, 6, 182, 194, 316 Machauf, Janek, 57, 57n26, 58 Magris, Claudio, 92

418 

INDEX

Mala, Oleksandra, 212, 213 Malkki, Liisa, 80 Małopolska, 130n4, 139, 151 Martini, Lucifero, 89 Martynivska, 217 Marushiakova, Elena, 160 Masuria, 106 Maszkienice, 137, 137n20 Matviichuk, Fadei, 220, 221 Mechlewicz-Hinenberg, Zelda, 140–141, 141n33 Meister, Maria, 218 Milani, Nelida, 93, 93n56 Milch, Baruch, 129, 130n2 Moghioroş, Alexandru, 263–265 Monasterzyska, see Monastyrys’ka Monastyrys’ka (Pl. Monasterzyska), 145 Mori, Anna Maria, 93, 93n56 Moroz, Justyna, 145 Morvai, Gábor, 240n31 Moscarda Oblak, Orietta, 84 Moscow, 35, 36, 39–41, 43, 45, 46, 136, 158, 181, 336, 350 Mösel, see Mozelj Moskal, Klara, 216 Movshovich, Evgenii, 349, 350n38 Mozelj (Ger. Mösel), 299 Mussolini, Benito, 320 Mykolaiv oblast, 212, 217, 219 Myrcik, Jan, 105n12, 115, 115n50, 116, 116n56 N Nadarević, Mustafa, 308 Nemec, Gloria, 82, 84, 88, 93n57 Nesterov (Ger. Stallupönen), 46 Netzer, Frania, 53, 67 Netzer, Jetti, 53, 67 Neutabor, see Novi Tabor Ney-Leben, 210, 213, 222

Nógrádverőce, 242, 243 North Caucasus, 336, 337, 344n31 Nova Heorhiivka, 214 Novi Tabor (Ger. Neutabor), 299 Novohrad-Volynskyi, 174 Nuremberg (Ger. Nürnberg), 206, 408 Nürnberg, see Nuremberg O Ócsa, 239–242, 245, 247, 248n51 Opava (Ger. Troppau), 20, 361–364, 365n20, 366, 368–372, 372n35, 373n36, 375–379, 376n39, 376n40 Osimo, 3, 309 Ostrowska, Anna, 59 P Panevėžys, 169 Paris, 308 Pecher, Leya, 218, 220 Pekelis, Volodymyr, 216 Peremyshlany, see Przemyślany Peresev, 135 Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County, 18, 232n1, 246n42 Pestszenterzsébet, 241, 241n33 Pidhaitsi (Pl. Podhajce), 143, 149, 149n72 Pilis, 245 Pinchuk, Ben-Cion, 140n28, 142 Piran (It. Pirano), 3–4, 6, 12, 19, 20, 305, 306, 308–312, 315–319, 322–324, 326 Pirano, see Piran Pirogov, Semen, 146 Pirot, 182 Piskun-Oberemsky, Trofym, 222 Pistrauch, Szymon, 53, 67 Płaszów, 56 Podhajce, see Pidhaitsi Podhale, 52, 52n2, 65, 66, 71, 72

 INDEX 

419

Podkarpacie, 130n4, 136, 141 Pohorilov, Fiodor, 219 Pola, see Pula Poland, 1, 1n1, 2, 6, 8, 15–17, 21, 22, 33, 34, 45, 52, 54n7, 58, 61, 63, 71, 102–107, 110, 111, 113–115, 117n61, 121, 122, 132, 136, 137, 137n20, 139n25, 139n27, 141, 141n37, 142, 146, 146n54, 151, 152, 159, 161, 167–169, 167n28, 171, 176, 180, 182, 186, 189, 194, 199, 268, 269, 290, 325n34, 351n43, 363, 367, 387, 388n18, 390, 394n41, 396, 398, 401, 402, 407 Poliak, Raya, 215 Polish Upper Silesia, 106–108 Pöllandl, see Kočevske Poljane Polonne, 218, 224 Poltava oblast, 149 Popov, Veselin, 160 Pornul, Ivan, 212, 212n18 Portorose, see Portorož Portorož (It. Portorose), 307 Poyasok, Ivan, 218 Poznań, 145, 146 Preußisch Eylau, see Bagrationovsk Prybyn, 139 Przemyślany (Ukr. Peremyshlany), 56 Pula (It. Pola), 6, 85, 85n27, 93, 94, 307 Puzhnyky (Pl. Puźniki), 395, 395n45 Puźniki, see Puzhnyky

Rafalivka rayon, 221 Raksha, Vladimir, 356 Rann, see Brežice Rava Rus’ka, 145 Rawa Ruska, see Rava Rus’ka Renan, Ernest, 408 Retelj Röthel, Ida, 291 Rivne oblast, 211, 221, 224 Rivne (Pl. Równe), 175 Rohatyn, 141 Romania, 6, 7, 18, 19, 198, 255–277, 363, 407 Rome, 283, 284 Ropczyce, 136 Rosenbaum, Wilhelm, 68, 69 Rosenberg, Tsilya, 210, 213, 214 Rosenberg, Zinaida, 223 Rostov-on-Don, 334–356 Rovigno, see Rovinj Rovinj (It. Rovigno), 6, 17, 79, 81, 83–88, 91, 93–97 Rovinjsko Selo (It. Villa di Rovigno), 95 Równe, see Rivne Rudakov, Evgenii Vasilievich, 40 Russia, 7, 20, 31, 34, 45, 68, 158, 164, 171, 334–336, 348, 350, 352–354, 356, 407 Rybicki, Stefan, 63 Rymanów, 146 Rympel, Ludwik, 56 Rza ̨sa, Adam, 393, 394, 401 Rzeszów, 58

Q Quarnero, see Kvarner

S Said, Edward, 76 St. Petersburg, 8 Sandomierz region, 15 Sarajevo, 307, 323 Savchyns’kyi, Lev, 140 Savytskyi, Pavlo, 224 Schindel, Paya, 221

R Rabka, 16, 51–72 Rácz, Károly, 244 Raczkowska, Franciszka, 156

420 

INDEX

Schmidman, Nehama, 224 Schwarzenberg, Karel, 373 Scotti, Giacomo, 80 Sequi, Eros, 80, 89–92, 97 Serbia, 283 Sernyky, 211 Shabel’ne (Pl. Szabelne), 145 Shai, Meir, 343 Shcherbakov, Vladimir Vasil’evich, 42, 46 Shchyrets, 140 Shevchenko, Maksym, 210, 214 Shpeter, Vili, 199, 200 Shumsk (Pl. Szumsk), 215 Siberia, 2, 117, 132, 133, 144, 388 Sibiu (Ger. Hermannstadt), 260, 266 Silberberg, Róża, 57 Silesia East Upper Silesia (see Polish Upper Silesia) Lower Silesia, 1, 20, 68 Polish Upper Silesia, 102, 119 Upper Silesia (UpS), 102, 106, 108, 110, 112–114, 116–118, 120–122 West Upper Silesia, 102, 106 Silesian voivodship, 106 Skałat, see Skalat Skalat (Pl. Skałat), 141 Skopje, 189, 199, 200 Slavonia, 97 Slovenia, 3, 18, 19, 77, 280, 281, 286, 289, 290, 293, 296–301, 305–326, 407 Slovenske Gorice (Ger. Windische Bühel), 289 Snyde, Gusta, 56 Snyder, Timothy, 8, 393 Sofia, 182, 186, 187, 193, 194, 197, 212, 213 Sokal, see Sokal’ Sokal’(Pl. Sokal), 141

Sorabji, Cornelia, 9 Soviet Union, see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Spirovo, 170 Stalin, Joseph, 30, 34, 35, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 90, 91, 119, 137, 152, 164, 258, 261, 266 Stallupönen, see Nesterov Stanisławów, see Ivano Frankivsk Stanisławów voivodeship, 145n50 Stanyslaviv, see Ivano Frankivsk Stare Žage (Ger. Altsag), 291 Stari Breg (Ger. Altbacher), 286 Stari Log (Ger. Altlag), 299 Staryi Sambir (Pl. Stary Sambór), 140 Stary Sambór, see Staryi Sambir Stary Wiśnicz, 139 Stratyn, 138 Strnišče pri Ptuju, 289 Studenci near Maribor, 289 Styria, 282, 283 Sudetenland, 359, 363, 369, 370, 373 Sukhovolia, 221 Sulymko, Yakiv, 217, 218, 220 Svintsitskyi, Teodor, 149 Sweden, 111 Szabelne, see Shabel’ne Szatkowski, Henryk, 65n70 Szczawnica, 145 Szczerzec, see Shchyrets Sztójay, Döme, 234 T Táfler, Ede, 240 Tarnopol, see Ternopil’ Teharje (Ger. Tüchern), 289 Tehran, 148 Teiber, Gusta, 56, 59, 61, 72 Ternopil’ (Pl. Tarnopol), 129, 134, 138, 149, 383, 389 Ternopil’ oblast, 149, 150

 INDEX 

Terushkin, Leonid, 356n62 Theissen, Martin, 112 Tian, Dmitrii Tian, 43, 46 Tiger, Frania, 68 Tito, see Broz, Josip (Tito) Tłuste, see Tovste Todorova, Maria, 76 Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna, 15, 392 Tovste (Pl. Tłuste), 129, 130, 130n3 Transylvania, 258, 259, 259n11, 266, 269, 359 Trefilieva, Liudmyla, 214 Trieste, 3, 77, 81, 83, 90, 308–311, 314, 315, 317 Trifonov, 40, 41, 43 Troppau, see Opava Trybowski, Czesław, 67, 68 Trybus, Aniela, 117 Tsybukh, Hryhorii, 212 Tsybulskyi, Petro, 212, 213 Tsymbala, Ol’ha, 138 Tüchern, see Teharje U Újpest, 245, 248 Ukraine, 2, 2n2, 7, 8, 17, 31, 129n1, 130n3, 146n59, 147n60, 147n61, 151, 158, 160, 164, 166, 167, 167n28, 170, 171, 175n49, 205–226, 258, 363, 367, 387, 387n12, 393–396, 398, 407, 410 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 18, 20, 29, 30, 31n6, 32, 34, 39, 41, 44, 46, 48, 91, 108, 118, 132, 146–152, 150n74, 155–177, 207–209, 236, 256, 258, 259, 267, 268, 269n44, 275, 276, 296, 335–337, 337n11, 340, 342, 344, 345, 349, 387, 388n18, 389, 410 Usherenko, Riva, 220

421

V Valka, 171 Vasylovskyi, Fylyp, 400 Vatican, 297 Velikie Luki, 164 Vidzy, 166 Villa di Rovigno, see Rovinjsko Selo Vinnytsia, 149 Vinnytsia oblast, 216, 217, 219, 221 Visoko, 307 Vodnjan (It. Dignano), 85 Vojnović, Goran, 3, 19, 305–326 Vojvodina, 281, 293, 297 Volhynia, 135, 156, 167, 173, 387, 387n14, 390, 394 Vradiivka, 210, 212 Vrancsik, István, 235 Vtoraya Zmievka, 339 Vyshnivchyk (Pl. Wiśniowczyk), 134, 138 W Wagner, Eleonora, 53, 67 Wallonia, 120 Warmia, 106 Warsaw, 22, 56 Western Thrace, 6, 182, 194 Western Ukraine, 18, 134, 136, 146–148, 156, 158, 162, 167, 389 West Germany, 19, 104, 256, 267–269, 274, 275, 277, 364 Westphalia, 120 Wieczorek, Edward, 121 Windische Bühel, see Slovenske Gorice Wiśniowczyk, see Vyshnivchyk Wolik, Maria Magdalena, 114, 118 Y Yakymenko, Ivan, 134 Yalta, 8, 76 Yanovich family, 161

422 

INDEX

Yaroslavl, 39 Yastrubynove, 219 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 333n1 Yuch-Bunar, 186 Yugoslavia, 3, 6, 14, 17–19, 51, 77, 79, 79n10, 80, 84, 85, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95–97, 280–283, 288–292, 297, 299, 309, 315, 318, 319, 323, 325, 411 Yusym, Halyna, 210 Z Zagreb, 89, 90, 94, 97 Zaja ̨c, Józef, 63 Zajčje Polje, 299 Zanini, Eligio, 92 Zapadnyi, 339

Zaremba, Natalia, 135, 149 Zdebski, Mateusz, 62 Zelenskyy, Volodymyr, 411n1 Zhovkva (Pl. Żółkiew), 143, 149, 367, 368 Zhuk, Dmytro, 210 Zhytomyr, 146 Zhytomyr oblast, 211 Zillich, Heinrich, 269 Złoczów, see Zolochiv Zmievskaya Balka, killing site, 20, 333n1, 334–356 Zolochiv (Pl. Złoczów), 144 Ż Żółkiew, see Zhovkva Żurek, Józefa, 141