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Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, by Bartov Omer., New York, Simon & Schuster, 2018, 416 pages, $18.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1451684537
Omer Bartov’s book provides the complete history of the Jews in the small border town of Buczacz in Galicia, which belonged at different times to Poland, the Habsburg Empire, again to Poland, then to the Soviet Union, and now to Ukraine. Although a significant part of the book is devoted to the Holocaust of Jews in Buczacz, the earlier history of the Jewish community and Jewish Christian relations is very important for understanding the roots of the violence and the behavior of the local gentile population during the Nazi occupation of the town.
Jews settled in Buczacz in the 16th century, when town belonged to Poland. In 1772 Galicia was annexed by the Habsburg Empire, and Buczacz was under Austrian rule until the collapse of the empire in 1918. The population of the town was always multiethnic: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians lived there. As Bartov shows, Jews and gentiles lived in the town together and apart. Ukrainian and Polish nationalists blamed Jews for exploitation of the local Christian population and for the poverty and drunkenness of the peasants. Bartov points out that, “While Jews were relatively better off than the peasants … the vast majority of Jews in Buczacz, as in the rest of Galicia, were poor” (28). Many Jews from Galicia immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
During the First World War, “Buczacz was swept into the carnage early on, when once again it found itself in the path of invading armies” (38). Russian troops organized anti-Jewish pogroms, killed Jews, raped Jewish women, and expelled Jews from their homes and burned them. During the occupation of Galicia, the Russian military administration blamed Jews for supporting the Austria-Hungary government...