Omer Bartov - 23 Jan

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Contents

To my familyWai-yee, Raz, Shira, and RomThe rock of my existence and the fountain of my soulAnd in memoriamYehudit (Szimer) Bartov, 19241998Hanoch (Helfgott) Bartov, 19262016I closed my eyes, so that I would not see the deaths of my brothers, my fellow townsmen, because of my bad habit to see my city and its slain, how they are tortured by their tormentors and how they are killed in wicked and cruel ways. And I closed my eyes for yet another reason, because when I close my eyes I become as it were master of the universe and see what I wish to see. And so I closed my eyes and called upon my city to stand before me, with all its inhabitants, with all its houses of prayer. I put every man in the place where he used to sit and where he studied and where his sons and sons-in-law and grandsons satfor in my city everyone came to prayer.SHMUEL YOSEF AGNON, THE CITY WHOLE , 1973

Note on Place and Personal Names

The region discussed in this book was populated by several ethnic groups and ruled over time by different regimes. As a result, the names of places and individuals may differ substantially depending on the language and time period. For the sake of consistency, I have generally used the Polish version of place names, since they were also officially used for most of the period covered by this book, while providing in parentheses the alternative (usually Ukrainian, at times German) version when first mentioned, and keeping the original version when citing documents. For this reason I have generally kept the name of Buczacz (Ukrainian: Buchach ) in its Polish spelling. But where there exists a conventional English spelling for known places, such as Warsaw, I have preferred that to the Polish Warszawa . Many Ukrainian individuals appear in Polish documents with the Polish version of their names, but whenever the Ukrainian name was known I have chosen to use it. Words in Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hebrew are transliterated more or less according to conventional transliteration rules, apart from those names and terms already known in English spelling. Thus Moscow and not Moskva , Kiev rather than Kyiv , Dniester instead of Dnister or Dnestr , and Dnieper rather than Dnepr or Dnipro . I have normally transliterated the guttural equivalent of ch in the Scottish word loch as kh for all these languages apart from where other conventions already apply. Thus Pinchas rather than Pinkhas , and cheder rather than kheder . I have left out the soft signs from transliterations of Ukrainian and Russian for ease of reading. With a few exceptions, titles of books and articles written in languages not using Roman letters have been translated.

The authors mother, grandmother, and sister in Tel Aviv, 1979.

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

The authors mother as a child in Buczacz, late 1920s.

T ell me about your childhood, I said.

We were standing in my mothers kitchen in Tel Aviv. She was wearing a simple dress under a large apron. A diminutive, energetic woman, her still-ample curly hair dyed brownish-red, her face lined from the strong Middle Eastern sun and years of hardship. She was in her element in the large kitchen, the most important space in an apartment to which my parents had moved a quarter of a century earlier, just a couple of years before I left home and joined the army.

It was summer 1995, and she was making chicken soup. My seven-year-old son was playing next to us. Up to that day, I had never asked about her life in Eastern Poland, before her parents moved the family to Palestine in 1935. She was seventy-one. I was forty-one. I had only a vague idea of her youth. I turned on the tape recorder.

I was born in Komierzyn [Ukrainian: Kosmyryn], a little village on the banks of the Dniester River in Polish Podolia, which is now in Ukraine. All the inhabitants of the village were Ukrainian. My fathers father managed the estate of Graf [Count] Potockis widow there. He lived on the estate. There was a rather large house there. I dont know how old I was at the time, perhaps four or five, so to me it appeared huge. It was a two-story house, and the grafina [countess], as she was called, lived there, along with the grafs sister and their sons. There was a huge courtyard, horse stables, cowsheds, and a large barn. My grandfather lived in a single-story house. There were Grandfather and Grandmother and the sons. I was born in the village. Soon thereafter we moved to Potok Zoty. Then we moved to Buczacz.

Today Buczacz (pronounced Buchach) is a shabby post-Soviet backwater. Poor, derelict, depressed. In 1919 it had about thirteen thousand inhabitants. It currently has the same number. But its setting is enchanting: perched on several hills and intersected by a winding stream. Back when my mother lived there it was a quaint little town, and thats how she remembered it. She retained only fragments of her past, not unlike the bits and pieces of languages from that world she had kept somewhere in her headYiddish, Polish, Ukrainian, German, and the Russian in which she would sing to me as a child. She gently pulled little strands of recollections and affectionately wove them into her own fabric of childhood. She had been a teacher for decades. She had a good, strong voice and enunciated every word clearly.

We all lived in one house with Grandfather. The house had two units; we lived in one unit, on the right, and in the left unit lived Grandfather and Grandmother and my fathers sister, who later married. The house was on a hill and was linked to the street by a stone staircase. And I remember the streetit led to the train station.

She never alluded to the fact that the street on which her house was located soon witnessed the deportation of thousands of the citys Jews, who were led along it, humiliated and beaten, to that very same train station, whence they were transported in inhumanly crowded cattle cars to the Beec extermination camp. Of the family that stayed behind, both hers and my fathers, not a single member survivedall of them murdered. That too she didnt speak about in such terms. But our conversation must have evoked deeply suppressed memories in her because not long after, my mother began speaking about taking a trip back to Buczacz.

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