Bartov - Anatomy of a genocide: the life and death of a town called Buczacz

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.