|
 |
Volhynia
Copyright © 2000 JewishGen Ukraine SIG. All Rights Reserved |
| Home | Reviews of Books about VolhyniaHave you read an interesting book that touches on Volhynia? Send the title, author, publisher, place and year of publication, and a brief review of the book to us for inclusion on this page. Or, if you want to recommend a book but don't have the time to write a review, send in the title and other information and we will include the book on our Suggested Sources about Volhynia webpage. Unless otherwise indicated, all books listed below are written originally in, or have been translated into, English. Table of Contents
1920 Diary In Russia at the end of WWI, the Bolshevik Red Army was locked in a civil war with the remnants of the Royalist White Army and with various nationalist groups. In 1920, having finally gained the upper hand over the White armies, the Bolsheviks faced a new threat from the newly reconstituted Poland. Trying to conquer territory that they had last ruled 150 years before, Polish armies marched eastward into Rusia. The Poles made rapid advances, eventually taking Kiev in May of 1920. To counter the Poles in Ukraine, the Red Army brought up its powerful Cossack First Cavalry Army. By the summer of 1920, Bolshevik forces managed to push the Poles back through Volhynia into Eastern Galicia (to within five miles of Lvov) and behind the borders of Congress Poland, advancing west of Bialystock. Polish resistance stiffened, however, and with armaments supplied by Western nations the Poles turned back the Russians. By September the Poles had once more advanced as far east as Rovno. Isaac Babel was an army correspondent with the Red Army's First Cavalry Army, attached to the Political Department of the Sixth Division, filing stories for the Army's daily newspaper, the Red Cavalryman. In addition to his official duties, Babel kept a personal diary, which was later a source of material for his most famous literary works, a group of short stories collectively titled Red Cavalry. 1920 Diary reflects Babel's simultaneous admiration of the Cossacks' daring and his disgust at their cruelty. Despite the efforts of the political officers, the Cossacks were notorious for slaughtering prisoners, for plundering each town, and for attacking and raping the townfolk. Another source of unease was the uncomfortable position of a Jew in the Red Army, where anti-Semitism was officially counter-revolutionary, but where deep-seated bigotry still remained -- especially among the Cossacks. While not necessarily keeping it a secret, Babel kept his Jewishness quiet. Sometimes, when asked point-blank if he was a Jew, he would say only that his father was Jewish. Babel was also troubled by the conflict between his belief in the value of socialism and the brutality of his army toward the people it was ostensibly intended to liberate. A major theme that runs through the Diary is Babel's reaction to the plight of the unfortunate people in each town, primarily Jews, caught between the two armies. In town after town, Jews were robbed, raped and murdered, first by one army and then the other. Babel describes in detail some of the worst of these events that occurred in Komarow and Berestechko, and at one point draws a parallel between the destruction caused by Bohdan Khmelnytsky's army (see the book review for Abyss of Despair) and the First Cavalry Army: "Unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, now that whole story -- Poles, Cossacks, Jews -- is repeating itself with stunning exactitude, the only new element is communism." The value of 1920 Diary for Jewish genealogists who are researching their families from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia is its first-hand account of the conditions endured by the people during a period whose history is not well known in the West. The Diary contains entries that Babel made in a number of towns, including (from Volhynia) Dubno, Khotin, Berestechko, and Kovel, as well as (from Eastern Galicia) Brody, Laskow, Adamy, and Sokal. A true diary, and not a narrative, each entry consists of impressions and shorthand descriptions -- intended to jog the writer's memory rather than to convey complete descriptions to another reader. Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939 by the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) and shot eight months later; his papers were burned. The Diary, however, had been left at a friend's house in Kiev and survived. Excerpts were finally published for the first time in 1987. I obtained this book from the library at the University of California at Davis, call number DK 265.7 B28 1995. -- Mark Heckman (Apr 1998)
Abyss of Despair (Yeven
Metzulah) Three hundred years before Hitler, Jews in Poland and Ukraine suffered an attack unprecedented in its brutality and scale, and exceeding anything experienced until the 20th century Holocaust. Beginning in 1648, and continuing until the mid to late 1650s, Ukrainians led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky waged a revolution against Polish rule. In every town they entered, however, not only did the Ukrainians attack the Poles, but they massacred all the Jewish inhabitants. Tens -- perhaps hundreds -- of thousands of Jews were slaughtered in the most horribly cruel ways. Abyss of Despair is a first-hand account of this tragedy. Rabbi Nathan Hanover was born in Ostrog in the 1620s, when it was the leading city of Volhynia and a major center of Jewish scholarship. He later moved to Zaslaw, from whence he fled in 1648 when Khmelnytsky sacked the town and killed most of the Jews there. He managed to escape west, wandering with his family to Germany, Holland, Italy (Abyss of Despair was published in 1652 in Venice), and Wallachia, where he became the Rabbi of Iasi and Focsani. By 1670 he was Dayan of Brod, in Moravia, where he was killed by Hungarians who were in revolt against the Austrian Empire. In the course of his life, Hanover produced several major scholarly works, ranging from Abyss of Despair to books of prayers, sermons, and even a four-language dictionary: Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, and Italian. Abyss is considered to be the most authentic, as well as popular account of the events of that period. Hanover describes the harsh oppression of the Ukrainians under Polish rule, the details of the revolution, and the politics of that time. He also puts a human face on the suffering, describing how some Jews converted, but how many resisted at the cost of their lives. Hanover also includes a final chapter in which he describes some of the details of the (normal) life of jews in the Kingdom of Poland. Valuable not only for the historical events that it relates, this translation includes a fascinating account of Hanover's life, an introduction that gives the historical background of the times, and a foreward that explains how the effects of the Khmelnytsky-led pogroms contributed to the development of Hasidism and the Haskalah. Hanover relates the events in a large number of towns, including (using the spelling in the book) Ostrog, Zaslaw, Lviv, Nalevaiko, Pawliuk, Nemirow, Tulczyn, Polannoe, Miedzyrzecze, Konstantynow, Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk, and Zamosc. Few books from this time and place are as accessible as this translation of Abyss. Jewish Genealogists whose ancestors come from Volhynia will appreciate the insight it gives into Volhynian Jewish life in the 17th century. I obtained this book from the library at the University of California at Davis, call number DS 135 P6 H313 1983. -- Mark Heckman
The Blaze: Reminiscences of
Volhynia, 1917-1919 Sophia Kossak-Szczucka was a member of the Polish landed gentry that had controlled large estates in Volhynia for hundreds of years. Even after the partition of Poland, and the takover of Volhynia by Russia, these Poles had maintained their position. According to Kossak, the Russians generally settled in the larger towns, but the Poles, "by strength of facts, of tradition, of their possession of the land, and through a common conviction [were] the real owners and masters of the country." Kossak's recollections of idyllic country life sound disturbingly like those given by American slave-owners in the antebellum South. She describes a situation where everyone knew their place and the peasants didn't resent the Polish feudal rulers. The Poles' privileged position, however, was threatened by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and by the nationalistic currents set loose by WWI. In her book, Kossak recounts the many dangers that threatened her and her family during the time between the revolution and the establishment of a Polish nationalist army after the end of WWI. Kossak vividly describes the dissolution of the Russian army during a time when no government was in control of the huge empire. Army units chose to support the Kerensky government, the Bolsheviks, or different nationalist movements, often dissolving into banditry. The Ukrainian peasantry, goaded by the Bolsheviks or by simple opportunism, took advantage of the upheaval to sack the estates and settle old scores with the landowners. Kossak's family lived in an estate in Novosyelitsa, about 8 miles south of Starokonstantinov, and her account of the attacks, seiges, and eventual plunder of the estate is genuinely gripping. Eventually forced to flee the estate, and depending on the current political situation and strength of local Polish forces, her family fled at various times to Antoniny (about 16 miles west of Starokonstantinov) and to Starokonstantinov itself. Along the way, her family was at the mercy of a series of governments of varying strengths, led at different times by Bolsheviks, local strongmen, Ukrainian Nationalists or the German Army. The attitude of the different governments toward Poles ranged from the benign to the viciously hostile. Anticipating the situation during WWII that Shmuel Spector describes in his book (also reviewed on this webpage), there was a situation where each ethnic group was at odds with every other group. Kossak mentions Jews only in passing. She describes with some bitterness how many Jews were enthusiastic Bolsheviks early on, but how later Jews were often victims of "Bolshevik" governments, as well as of all the various Ukrainian nationalist governments. In one passage Kossak describes a major pogrom in Starokonstantinov with horror and sympathy for the Jewish victims. This book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about the relationship between the different ethnic groups in early 20th century Volhynia, a relationship that had probably persisted relatively unchanged for several hundred years. Although Kossak mentions the names of many of the people with whom she came in contact, there is no name or location index and most people will find that the work has little direct genealogical value. Its chief use for genealogists is the historical context it gives to the lives of our ancestors from the area. I obtained this book from the University of California Northern Regional Library Facility (UC NRLF). The call number is DK511 V7K62, and the inventory bar code number is B 3 283 942. -- Mark Heckman
Childhood in Exile Shmarya Levin was a well-known author and Zionist leader. In a series of three autobiographical books, Childhood in Exile, Youth in Revolt, and The Arena, he traced his life from his childhood in Russia to his emigration to America, and to his eventual settlement in Eretz Israel. In this book, the first in the trilogy, Levin describes his life as a cheder boy in the 1870s. Although his childhood was spent in the town of Swislowitz, near Babrusk in what is now Belarus (possibly the modern town of Swisloch?), those of us whose families came from Volhynia will nevertheless find this book of interest. For one thing, life for the Jews of Swislowitz, a small town in a heavily forested region, was probably not much different from the life of Jews in Volhynia. The economy of Swislowitz, furthermore, was closely tied to that of Ukraine. Finally, there are not many books that describe Jewish village life in this period with the kind of immediacy that Levin's first-hand account does. The chief focus of the book is Levin's experiences with a number of different teachers as he advanced from learning his alef-bet to studying Talmud. His early teachers used "traditional" methods -- primarily frequent beatings -- to help their students retain what they were taught, but the teacher who Levin remembers most fondly was his teacher at the cheder mesukam, or, "new and improved cheder," who used much more enlightened teaching techniques. Because cheder students spent 10 to 12 hour days at the cheder, it is understandable why his memories of school occupy the greater part of the book. Throughout the book, however, Levin interweaves with his school experiences his observations and memories of customs, holidays, memorable characters from the town, the passing of the seasons, poverty, and relations between the Jews, non-Jews, and the Russian government. Relations between Jews and non-Jews, in Levin's memory, were generally good. Pogroms, he says, were unheard of until after the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877-1878, when Russia was prevented by Great Britain from conquering Constantinople. The British Prime Minister at that time was Disraeli. "After all her victories Russia emerged from the war almost empty-handed. Her Byzantine dream remained as far from realization as in the pre-war years. The chief responsibility for this rested with one man -- the Jew Disraeli; and within three or four years the wave of pogroms passed over Russia!" I especially liked Levin's description of how the town celebrated Purim, including the reading of the Scroll of Esther and the production of the Purim play. Levin's prose was both detailed and poetic, as he brought the town to life in my mind's eye. I obtained this book from the library at the University of California at Davis, call number DS 151 L44 A33 1975. -- Mark Heckman (May 1998)
The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews,
1941-1944 This book describes the situation of the Jews in the western two-thirds of Volhynia before and during the Nazi conquest. The area covered is the part of Volhynia ruled by Poland between the World Wars, including the major cities and towns of Kovel, Vladimir-Volynski, Lutsk, Dubno, Rovno, and approximately 275 other towns and villages specifically mentioned in the book. Spector has used original non-Jewish sources, including German, Soviet and Polish records, in addition to memorial books and extensive testimonies from survivors, to describe the unfriendly and sometimes harsh Polish rule, the relatively brief Soviet Occupation, and the increasingly horrible steps in the Nazi occupation that led to the final extermination Aktionen. These steps began with a series of decrees that, over the course of time, isolated the Jews as much as possible from the rest of the population, used them for forced labor, and stripped them of their posessions and livelihoods. Next, Jews were forced into ghettos. The final step was liquidation of all the people in the ghettos. Unlike the Jews in Central Europe, the Jews of Volhynia were not shipped to extermination camps like Auschwitz. Instead, the entire ghetto population of a town would be herded from the ghetto and marched outside of town, where they would be shot and buried in mass graves. But, while the vast majority of the Jewish population died from disease, starvation, and murder, some Jews escaped to survive in the Volhynian forests. Some Jews would escape from the ghetto before it was liquidated, some would hide as long as they could in the ghetto and escape later, some even survived being shot and ran to the woods. Because the Germans had limited manpower to murder the Jews, the extermination actions took place over a period of months. Word of the exterminations at one town would spread to towns not yet liquidated, giving some people a short time to prepare their escape. While mass escapes occurred, most attempts were organized among small groups of friends. Spector describes many plans for escape and resistance all over the region, not all of which were successful. Even more tragically, many people, including some heads of the Jewish Councils, resisted the escape plans of others, for fear that the Germans would punish the people who remained. Most of the people planning to escape or resist were young, and they had to face the real danger that their own parents, grandparents, and younger siblings would die of starvation, without anyone there to help them obtain food. As a result, escape and resistance plans were sporadic, limited in scope, and made on extremely short notice. Once someone managed to escape to the forest, they still had to contend with the problem of staying hidden while finding food. These problems would be bad enough, but the escaped Jews also had to contend with a hostile Ukrainian population that, when it found Jews, would often either kill the Jews immediately or turn them over to the Germans. The survival rate of escapees was abysmally low. The relations between the different ethnic groups is one of the most interesting subjects covered by the book. Before the war, relations between Jews and Poles were far from warm. The Polish government had issued a series of laws that curtailed Jewish economic, social, and educational life. Jewish-Ukrainian relations were even worse. The Ukrainians dreamed of having their own state and hated both the Jews and the Poles. When the Soviets occupied the area in 1939, many Jews were active supporters and joined the local militias and provisional governments that disarmed and arrested Polish police and officials. Right after the Soviet retreat, and before the Germans had established strong control of the area, many Ukrainians and Poles staged pograms against the Jewish population. The German Einsatzgruppen, units whose job it was to exterminate Jews, often encouraged these pogroms. Other German military units were alarmed by these actions, as they front lines were still not very far away and the disorder caused by the pogroms could have disrupted the Wehrmacht's ability to fight. They shut down the pogroms. There are a number of cases, early in the occupation, where the Jews actually turned to the Germans for protection from the Ukrainians. When the Germans conquered the area, they worked very closely with Ukrainian nationalists. Short of manpower, the Germans were very happy to recruit Ukrainians as police, para-military forces, and local government officials. These Ukrainians, in turn, used their new authority to harass and murder Jews and, after the Jews were gone, Poles. Eventually, a situation existed where the Germans controlled the large towns, but armed Ukrainian partisans controlled the countryside. The large Ukrainian partisan formations would kill any Jews they found, along with Poles and Czechs. A number of Jews who escaped the extermination actions managed to find safety in Polish and Czech towns, where they helped defend against the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, Soviet partisans had established themselves in Northeast Volhynia, and were in a constant struggle with the Ukrainians. There was a situation described as "every group against every other." (There were a few "righteous Gentiles," though, who helped save individuals and small groups of Jews from the carnage, and Spector describes these people as well.) Some of the escaped Jews set up their own partisan units, which would try to defend other Jewish survivors and to punish those who attacked the Jews. Many of the Jewish partisan units were eventually absorbed into the Soviet partisan formations. While anti-Semitism was not unknown among the Soviet partisans, the senior Soviet officers enforced a strict discipline that usually protected the Jews from serious abuse. Once the war was over, most of the surviving Jews from the region eventually went west to Poland, and from there to Israel and the United States. Most Jews now in Volhynia, Spector says, come from farther east in Ukraine and Russia. This book was adapted from Spector's doctoral dissertation, and he often spends considerable time explaining his analysis of his sources and how certain population figures, etc., were arrived at. This sometimes makes for more "scholarly" reading than the casual reader might prefer. Overall, however, the book is an excellent and exhaustive study of a cataclysmic time in the Jewish history of Volhynia. People researching specific towns in the area will benefit from the translations and summaries from memorial books and testimonies; all references to towns are indexed. Of special interest to genealogists is the book's index of names, which includes approximately 400 names of Jews and others from the region that are mentioned in the book. I obtained this book from the University of California, Santa Barbara library, call number DS 135 R93 V63713 1990. The book is also held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) library. -- Mark Heckman
The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern
European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 In September of 1939, at the same time as the German forces poured over Poland's western border and began WWII, Soviet troops were advancing into a wide area of Eastern Europe. The Soviets occupied eastern Poland, including parts of Belarus, Volhynia, and Galicia; Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (occupied by the Romanians after WWI); and the Baltic countries. Living in these areas were more than two million Jews. Dov Levin's well-researched book covers the efforts by the Soviets to "Sovietize" the Jews in the occupied areas, and the reactions by the Jews to Soviet rule, until the German invasion in June, 1941 pushed the Soviets out. For the most part, Jews were treated by the Soviets in the same way as were their Polish, Lithuanian, etc., neighbors. Social, political, military, and other leaders were arrested and exiled. The intelligentsia were given strict guidelines about what was and was not suitable topics for the arts and scholarly research. Wealthy Jews were dealt with just as harshly as were wealthy non-Jews. When it came to matters of national and religious identity, however, the Jews were treated differently than their non-Jewish neighbors. Although the Soviets trumpeted Polish, Ukrainian, etc., nationalism, (with a very strong pro USSR slant, of course), a Soviet goal was to completely assimilate the Jews by stamping out Jewish nationalistic, spiritual, and cultural life. They did this in stages: first banning any political and religious activities, arresting and deporting or exiling community leaders, banning the teaching of Hebrew and slowly discouraging the use of Yiddish, and so on. As one Rabbi noted at the time, "The Germans will kill us, but the Soviets will kill our souls." In return, Jews who accepted the new rules were offered educational and career opportunities that had been denied them under the previous regimes. Though many Jews were promoted into official government and Communist Party posts, Levin is careful to note that the percentage of Jews in such positions was not uniform throughout the annexed areas (in Ukraine and Bessarabia, for example, Jews who had been promoted were demoted or transferred, as part of an explicit "Ukrainization" policy) nor did it even approach the percentage of Jews in the local population. German atrocities created a flood of refugees, which the Soviets attempted to handle, as Levin says, "in a constructive and humane fashion, at least in Soviet terms of the time." Unless they managed to find work, or had some special skill (such as physicians), a large proportion of the refugees were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan. A special chapter is reserved for Lithuania, which for a time served as a "Gateway to the free world." 4,000-5,000 Jews managed to obtain transit permits and leave the Soviet Union during this period. Levin argues that this was a conscious policy by the Soviets to filter out and dispose of refugees other than by the politically damaging method of arrest and exile. This book will be of interest to anyone who is researching their relatives who stayed in Eastern Europe instead of emigrating before WWII. I obtained this book from the library at the University of California, Davis, call number DS 135 P6 L47613 1995. --Mark Heckman (Dec 1999)
Troubled Waters: The Origins of
the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia This scholarly work questions the assumption that the Russian government planned and supported the 1881 pogroms. A feature of this work that may interest those with Volhynian roots is a table of dates, towns, and villages where the 1881 pogroms occurred. Volhynian localities mentioned are: Volochisk (station), Fridrikhovka, Golokhvasta, Kopachevka, Nemirovets, Poliana, and Volchkovets -- all in Starokonstantinov Uezd. I obtained this book from the shelves of the Western Washington University Library (Bellingham WA). For those who might be trying the interlibrary loan route -- the table of towns and dates (Table 4) is on pp.50-56. Be aware that dates are according to the calendar used before the Russian Revolution -- twelve days behind the "New Style" calendar, according to the author. -- Paula Kobos |
|
