Jeffrey Veidlinger - In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust

Frontispiece to Khurbn Proskurov

The massacre in Proskuriv was not an isolated event. Between November 1918 and March 1921, during the civil war that followed the Great War, over one thousand anti-Jewish riots and military actionsboth of which were commonly referred to as pogromswere documented in about five hundred different locales throughout what is now Ukraine, and which was at the time contested territory between Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and multinational soviet successor states of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

This was not the first wave of pogroms in the area, but its scope eclipsed previous bouts of violence in terms of the range of participants, the number of victims, and the depths of barbarity. Ukrainian peasants, Polish townsfolk, and Russian soldiers robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, stealing property they believed rightfully belonged to them. Armed militants, with the acquiescence and support of large segments of the population, tore out Jewish mens beards, ripped apart Torah scrolls, raped Jewish girls and women, and, in many cases, tortured Jewish townsfolk before gathering them in market squares, marching them to the outskirts of town, and shooting them. On at least one occasion, insurgent fighters barricaded Jews in a synagogue and burned down the building. The largest of the anti-Jewish massacres left over a thousand people dead, but the vast majority were much smaller affairs: more than half the incidents resulted only in property damage, injury, and at most a few fatalities. The numbers are contested, but a conservative estimate is that forty thousand Jews were killed during the riots and another seventy thousand subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks. Some observers counted closer to three hundred thousand victims. Although that higher figure is likely exaggerated, most historians today would agree that the total number of pogrom-related deaths within the Jewish community between 1918 and 1921 was well over one hundred thousand. The lives of many more were shattered. Approximately six hundred thousand Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation and set off alarms around the world.

I HAD ALWAYS thought that the Holocaust was simply inconceivable before it happenedthat it was beyond the ability of humans to imagine, to predict, or to prepare for. My father, whose story of survival informed my early knowledge of the Holocaust, emphasized how normal everything seemed before. He lived an upper-middle-class life in Budapest, enjoying fencing lessons and family vacations at Lake Balaton, until the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Likewise, the most famous victims of the Holocaust had their first encounters with genocidal antisemitism only several years into the war. Anne Frank went into hiding in July 1942, and the Gestapo discovered her secret annex in August 1944. Elie Wiesel reports that he first heard rumors of massacres as early as 1941, but it was not until May 1944 that he was deported to Auschwitz from the Sighetu Marmatiei ghetto, which had been set up a few weeks earlier. Many popular portrayals of the Holocaust similarly emphasize the suddenness and unexpectedness of what took place. When I bring my students to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, for instance, they enter the exhibition in a large open space filled with Jewish ritual objects and photos of everyday Jewish life in Europe, testifying to a vibrant, rooted existence. Then, turning a corner, they encounter a massive portrait of Adolf Hitler looming over a long hallway that descends into the next exhibit room. The impression is that Hitler appeared out of the blue, with no hint of the coming apocalypse.

But the evidence is clear that the murder of six million Jews in Europe was not only conceivable but feared as a distinct possibility for at least twenty years before it became a reality. On September 8, 1919, for instance, the