Interview with Prof. Omer Bartov

Prof. Omer Bartov, one of the leading historians of the Holocaust will be visiting Wellington in May. His latest book, Erased[1], deals with the vanishing traces of Jewish Galicia in present-day Ukraine. Steven Sedley discussed with Prof. Bartov the broad issues raised by this book.

Sedley

You found that Holocaust scholars were more concerned with the manner in which Jews were killed than with the manner in which Jews lived and died.

Bartov

My point was really that much of Holocaust history was written with a view to explaining how the Nazi regime had planned and perpetrated their genocide. In this kind of history Jewish responses to genocide and their experiences during the Holocaust appear rather irrelevant, and Jewish life before the Holocaust is of no interest. Consequently the Jews appear merely as the byproducts of a genocidal process; their existence become of interest only at the moment in which it is terminated.

Sedley

You wanted to know how ‘people who lived side by side for generations were transformed into killers and quarry’.

Bartov

In the case of Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived before the Holocaust and where most of them were killed, Jewish life was not conducted in isolation from non-Jewish groups. People lived in multiethnic and multi-religious communities and interacted with each other in the marketplace, in schools, in the professions, in agriculture, and so forth. For at least half a millennium Jews and Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Romanian, Hungarians, and others, lived side by side. In the Holocaust neighbors turned against neighbors in a series of communal massacres across Eastern Europe, in which friends and colleagues murdered each other and inherited the victims’ property and places of work. This was the communal aspect of the genocide initiated by the Nazi State. We know little about it, yet half of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust died in their own towns in mass public massacres.

Sedley

To get answers to your questions you visited Galicia, where your mother was born, from where she moved to Palestine in 1935. There is no place called Galicia now on the map of Eastern Europe. You describe it as a ‘borderland’.

Bartov

Galicia is part of the “borderlands” of Eastern Europe, the vast area that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans, which was ruled by the great multiethnic empires before World War I and was then cut up into many nation states after the collapse of the Russian, Austrian, and Turkish empires. Inhabitants of Eastern Galicia, which is now in Western Ukraine, still refer to themselves as “Galicians”; but they often have very little idea of the complexity of that society before the Holocaust. Now this area is almost purely ethnically Ukrainian; before World War II it had a large Jewish and Polish population.

Sedley

‘80% of world Jewry today can trace their roots to the 18^th Century Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. 44% of these lived in Ukraine and Ruthenia. Are Ruthenia and Galicia interchangeable terms?

Bartov

Ruthenians was the name given to people who lived in the territories of medieval Rus’, a kingdom that was later swallowed up by Poland, Russia, and Austria. From the late 19^th century the Ruthenians were increasingly seen as members of the larger Ukrainian nation. The term Ukraine, which means borderland, was a recent invention. The Russians, for their part, preferred to see the Ruthenians as “Little Russians,” in order to justify their rule over large parts of what became Ukraine.

Sedley

You describe Galicia as ‘the land of great rabbis and yeshivot (advanced schools of talmudic learning), of miraculous tales and vibrant community life’. All this was lost and only remembered in the tales of Y.S. Agnon and other Yiddish writers.

Bartov

Galicia and neighboring Podolia were lands in which large numbers of Jews lived for several centuries. The Jews were the backbone of economic and urban life in these territories, along with the Polish and ethnic German minorities, while the majority of the peasants were Ukrainians. As a result of wars and devastation, as well as general economic decline, Hasidism emerged in these lands, adding a spiritual dimension to economic vibrancy and craftsmanship. With the rise of Jewish nationalism some of the greatest Yiddish and Hebrew writers, scholars, and intellectuals emerged in Galicia and Podolia, along with other Jews who wrote in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and German, and have become part of the Jewish and non-Jewish cultural heritage of Galicia and Podolia. Among them are Y. S. Agnon, Emanuel Ringelblum, Joseph Roth, and Bruno Schulz.

Sedley

You quote the director of European Art Collection at the L’viv Art Gallery:

‘I was able to realise how an entire people could have disappeared – the Phoenicians, Copts, Assyrians and others. … There was a tragic experience in the 20^th Century, when there was an attempt to destroy the Jewish people. As a result Jews disappeared almost entirely from the territory of Eastern Europe’.  You took exception to this.

Bartov

I took exception to this statement because it distances the “disappearance” of the Jews from the relatively recent past, in which Ukrainians took an active part in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors and subsequently erased all traces of their existence and destruction. Ukrainians today refuse to confront that past and are engaged in a process of erasing both the physical traces of past Jewish existence and their memory by rewriting history with the Jews left out.

Sedley

The reminders of the past that you found describe ‘Ukrainians as the main victims of totalitarianism, prejudice, and violence since time immemorial, but especially under Nazis and Communism’.

Bartov

The conundrum in which newly independent Ukraine finds itself is that many of those who can now be glorified as the nation’s freedom fighters were also collaborators of the Nazis in the murder of the Jews. Hence Ukrainians prefer to remember themselves as victims rather than as collaborators and perpetrators. This is not to say that Ukrainians did not also become victims of both Nazi occupation and communist oppression, but rather that they prefer to associate Jews with their oppressors rather than to remember them as their own victims.

Sedley

You say that ‘the distortion of the past can also serve as a tool for inverting guilt and responsibility’.

Bartov

People and nations who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it; and the refusal to come to terms with past evil is invariably accompanied by presenting oneself as victim. The claim of victimhood has served in the modern era as the greatest license for criminality.

Sedley

It is noteworthy that ‘Those who saved Jews were ostracized because their actions served as an implicit condemnation of those who did not do good, were complicit in evil, or profited from crime’.

Bartov

Most Jews who were hiding from the Germans were denounced by their neighbors; most Jews who survived the Holocaust were hidden by their neighbors. For many Ukrainians, the act of hiding Jews was shameful, because it was unpatriotic, since Ukrainian nationalists called for a Jew-free Ukraine; it was also seen as profitable, since Jews had to pay for being sheltered. Admitting this after the war was therefore dangerous because such people were both suspect of having enriched themselves and because they betrayed the national cause.

Sedley

‘Yesterdays extermination is perpetuated in today’s oblivion’.

Bartov

Not only were the Jews physically murdered but also their memory has been washed away, even as each town and village in Ukraine has a nearby, unmarked mass grave filled with the bones of its former Jewish residents.

Sedley

‘The urge to remember and commemorate is tightly bound with the need to suppress and forget.’

‘The origins of collective violence invariably lie in repressing memory and reconstructing the past.’

There is a ‘distorted connection between glory, heroism and martyrdom, on the one hand, and betrayal, treason, and criminality on the other’.

Bartov

The pasts that people want to forget are pasts that they would rather eradicate from the historical record; but history has a tendency to come back, just as repressed individual memories tend to return, often in a distorted and terrifying way. Hence one cannot build a healthy future on the eradication of a murderous past; one must confront and come to terms with it lest it haunt and infect future generations.

Sedley

Erased is not a book just about the Jews of Galicia. It touches on the nature of historical narrative and its place in determining the national identity of a people. This is just as important when you talk of the place of the Holocaust in the Zionist historical narrative, or closer to home, the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in the New Zealand historical narrative.

Bartov

The Holocaust was an event with some unique features, such as the extermination camps and the fanatical determination to murder every single Jew under German rule. But it has also many similarities with other genocides and crimes against humanity. One of them is that it infected both the victims and the perpetrators with all the weight of a trauma that must takes generations to be overcome. The Holocaust plays a major role both in Israeli and German politics and culture; I assume that countries such as New Zealand, with its own record of colonialism and oppression, must also contend with the traumatic memories of violence and destruction of people and cultures.

Prof. Omer Bartov gave seminars and a public lecture at Victoria University and at the Wellington Jewish Community Centre for the Wellington Holocaust Research and Education Centre. In May  2009.