Furious Angels
Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles in the Summer of 1941
A Book Proposal
by
Marco Carynnyk
Represented by The Spieler Agency
154 West 54th Street / Room 135
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Contact John F. Thornton
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Proposal Contents
Overview
3
The Book
4
The Author
9
The Book’s Table of Contents
10
Chapter Sample
From Chapter 9:Avengers
All Monstrous and Hellish
11
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 2
Overview
In the weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 a swath of
regions extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic witnessed a horrendous set of double
murders. As the Wehrmacht advanced, the Soviets emptied their overcrowded prisons
by slaughtering the inmates. Within days pogroms erupted in these same regions.
German soldiers stood by and watched, or in some cases pitched in to help, as enraged
civilians beat and killed Jews. The pretext was a new version of an old stereotype: Jews
were all Communists and thus responsible for the crimes of the Soviets.
Although these atrocities have hardly been a secret—they figure in hundreds of
survivors’ testimonies and in Soviet and German military and security-service reports—
no one has given a complete account of them.
Furious Angels addresses this gap by looking at the town of Zolochiv in western
Ukraine, where the NKVD killed some six hundred prisoners in late June 1941 and a
pogrom in early July claimed more than a thousand Jewish lives. Drawing on archival
research, published sources, and interviews with survivors, the book sets itself three
objectives: to analyze how the people who lived in Zolochiv have remembered these
events; to offer a new explanation of the pogroms—they were not spontaneous
outbursts of ethnic hatred, as most commentators argue, but were planned by senior
officers of the Wehrmacht’s 17th Army and high-ranking members of the Organization
of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN—and to shed new light on a little understood phase
of the Holocaust: the origins of the Final Solution in the summer of 1941.
Combining history and cultural analysis and borrowing the techniques of creative
nonfiction to make the dramatic story immediate, Furious Angels will appeal to a wide
range of readers—from general readers interested in mass violence, the Second World
War, and the Holocaust to historians and students of eastern Europe to members of the
three communities most directly affected by its findings: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 3
The Book
What Happened in Western Ukraine in the Summer of 1941
When the Wehrmacht occupied the town of Zolochiv, sixty-five kilometers east of Lviv,
on July 1, 1941, townspeople discovered the remains of 649 inmates at the local prison.
Unable to evacuate its prisoners to the rear and unwilling to release them, the NKVD, as
the Soviet secret police was known then, had slaughtered them. Two days later a savage
pogrom broke out: aided by German soldiers, a mob dragged Jews to the prison and
handed them over to SS men, who forced them to dig up the remains of the NKVD
victims with their hands and then cut them down with machine guns.
Left : A crowd gathers outside Lacki Prison in Lviv after the discovery of murdered prisoners.
(Beit Lohamei Haghetaot.)
Right : In the yard at Lacki Prison. The men standing against the wall are Jews who have been
rounded up to exhume and lay out the corpses. (Bundesarchiv Koblenz.)
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 4
The two sets of murders in Zolochiv were not isolated incidents. Historians have
listed forty-seven places in the western regions of the Soviet Union where the NKVD
executed its prisoners and have estimated that there were 15,000 to 40,000 victims.1
Victims of the pogrom in Lviv. Lacki Prison is visible in the background in the photograph on the
left. (Beth Lohamei Haghetaot, Israel.)
The pogroms were on a similar scale. By one count, thirty-five took place in western
Ukraine in June–July 1941, by another, fifty-eight. They caused between 12,000 and
35,000 casualties. These numbers should not be disparaged. As many Jews were killed
in the first five weeks of the German-Soviet war as in the first twenty-two months after
the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. The Final Solution was being
implemented. The Holocaust was approaching its deadliest stage.2
1 Krzysztof Popinski, “Ewakuacja wiezien kresowych w czerwcu 1941 r. na podstawie
dokumentacji ‘Memorialu’ i Archiwum Wschodniego,” in Zbrodnicza ewakuacja wiezien i aresztów NKWD
na kresach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w czerwcu–lipcu 1941 roku, eds. Andrzej Skrzypek, Izabella
Borowicz, and Antoni Galinski, 73–7 (Warsaw: Glówna Komisja Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi
Polskiemu and Instytut Pamieci, 1997); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1996), 624; Aleksandr Gur'ianov and Aleksandr Kokurin, “Evakuatsiia tiurem,” Karta
(Riazan, Russia) 6 (1994), http://www.hro.org/editions/karta/nr6/evaku.htm; Krzysztof Popinski,
Aleksandr Kokurin, and Aleksandr Gurjanow, Drogi smierci: Ewakuacja wiezien sowieckich z Kresów
Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w czerwcu i lipcu 1941 (Warsaw: Karta, 1995), 144–5; Oleh Romaniv and Inna
Fedushchak, Zakhidnoukraïns'ka trahediia 1941 (L'viv–New York: Naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka,
2002), 63.
2 Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 631; Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien
1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: R. Oldenbourg
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 5
I start the story of these killings in September 1939, when the Red Army occupied
eastern Poland, and follow it to its climax twenty-one months later, when Germany
seized this land for its own. But to provide the necessary background and to explain
how the Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles of Zolochiv responded to the Soviet and German
occupations and how they have remembered them, I range through time from the
twelfth century to the twenty-first and across Europe from Moscow to Kyiv, Warsaw,
and Berlin.
The Plan of Work, Length, and Illustrations
My methods in this book are rigorous. I have combed archives and libraries and tracked
down witnesses on this continent and in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and Israel, and I
have compiled a working bibliography that lists more than six thousand sources. But
important research still needs to be done.
I plan to start it by spending a month at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives in Washington. (The
USHMM has awarded me a grant for this purpose.) From there I want to go to New
York for a week or two at the YIVO Institute, the New York Public Library, and the
Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University.
Afterwards I’ll go back to Zolochiv for several weeks to spend time walking about,
talking to people, and getting a better sense of what the town was once like and what it
is like now.
From Zolochiv I want to move on to do archival research in Lviv, Kyiv, Warsaw,
Moscow, Berlin, and Jerusalem and to interview key witnesses in Chicago, Denver, and
Vancouver.
Verlag, 1996), 67; Andrzej Zbikowski, “Local Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Occupied Teritories of Eastern
Poland, June–July 1941,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the
Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock,
177 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 177; Aharon Weiss, “The Holocaust and the Ukrainian Victims,” in
A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. Michael Berenbaum, 110 (New
York: New York University Press, 1990); William J. Vanden Heuvel, “The Holocaust Was No Secret,” New
York Times Magazine, December 22, 1996, 30–31.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 6
Once I’ve completed this last stage of the research, I will sort out my documents,
books, articles, interviews, and photographs, and sit down to finish writing the book. I
can submit it eighteen months after a contract is signed.
The manuscript will come to between 75,000 and 90,000 words. If the book is
illustrated, I can provide high-resolution scans of hundreds of figures—maps,
antiquarian postcards, and photographs of the sites where the atrocities were
committed, as well as my own pictures of the people and places I write about. I include
a sample chapter in this proposal.
The gate to the Zolochiv castle in the 1920s.
From Aleksander Czolowski and Bohdan Janusz,
Przeszlosc i Zabytki Województwa Tarnopolskiego (Tarnopol, 1926), plate xl.
The Larger Questions the Book Poses
In addition to worrying out the historical record in Furious Angels I ask some political
questions. Totalitarianism deprived the countries of eastern Europe of their memory.
Only now, slowly and painfully, are they beginning to understand the cataclysms they
lived through. Only now are they admitting that the pogroms of 1941 occurred and
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 7
recognizing that the Holocaust obliterated their Jewish communities. Yet if a society is
to consolidate democracy, if it is to engage its own future, thinkers agree, it must
produce an honest and thorough account of its past. Why, I ask, have Ukraine, Poland,
Belarus, and Russia kept putting off that accounting?3
The “metahistorical” questions I raise are as difficult as the political ones. The
rhetorical figures and stereotypes that I keep encountering in Polish, Ukrainian, and
Jewish accounts reflect what Timothy Garton Ash calls “the nationalism of the victim.”
One of the many things that Poles and Jews have in common, he writes, “is a reluctance
to acknowledge in just measure the sufferings of other peoples, an inability to admit
that the victim can also victimize.”4
Marginalized cultures—and the Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish cultures of the
regions I am writing about were all in varying degrees marginalized—compile accounts
that valorize victimhood and become narratives of racial or ethnic superiority. Thus the
narrative in each of the three collective memories that I am studying both ignores the
experience of the other two groups and demonizes them as persecutors. We are victims
of history, victims of the iniquity of our neighbors, the survivors say again and again.
We have a claim on the conscience of the world.
Why, I ask, have professional historians accepted these accounts as the basis of their
own narratives? Is history in the old sense of a sequence of more or less agreed upon
facts still possible? Isn’t all history, as some thinkers are now suggesting, a fiction, a
structured story? Can we claim to know the past? Or must we resign ourselves to the
notion that we can only attempt to decipher the narratives we hear?
Furious Angels, then, is not just an account of an episode from the Second World War
and the Holocaust in eastern Europe. It is also a book about how Poles, Jews, and
Ukrainians have imagined themselves and one another. And about how we all allow
unarticulated assumptions to contour our most compelling memories.
3
4
Jan Gross, “The Burden of History,” East European Politics and Societies 13 (spring 1999): 287.
Timothy Garton Ash, “The Life of Death,” New York Review of Books, December 19, 1985, 32.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 8
The Author
Born of Ukrainian parents in Berlin, Marco Carynnyk is a writer, editor, translator, and
historical researcher. As a writer he has published poetry, articles, and essays on
literature, film, and twentieth-century history and politics that have been translated into
half a dozen languages. His historical studies are concerned with the famine of 1933 in
Ukraine, Soviet and Nazi repressions in the 1930s and 1940s, and Jewish-Ukrainian
relations.
As an editor and translator, Carynnyk has published translations of the filmmaker
Alexander Dovzhenko and has lectured on Dovzhenko at the Venice Biennale, Harvard
University, and the Dovzhenko Studio in Kyiv. Other major translations by Carynnyk
include fiction, poetry, and Soviet dissident memoirs. Publishers with whom he has
worked include the MIT Press, Helen Wolff at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Support for the writing of Furious Angels has come from the Memorial Foundation
for Jewish Culture in New York, the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the
Ukrainian Studies Fund at Harvard University, and the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Carynnyk presented excerpts from the work-in-progress at a conference in Warsaw
sponsored by Yad Vashem in September 1999 and at the 22nd International Conference
on Jewish Genealogy in Toronto, Canada, in August 2002. He is a citizen of the United
States and lives in Toronto.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 9
The Book’s Table of Contents
Beside the Castle Wall
One
Through the Remembered Gate
1
Landsleit
2
Mappers
3
Wizards
4
Seekers
5
Acolytes
Two
Into the Pits
6
Liberators
7
Millenarians
8
Scapegoaters
9
Avengers
Three
Out of Earth and Clay
10
Exterminators
11
Escapers
12
Accomplices
On Second Avenue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 10
Chapter Sample
From Chapter 9: Avengers
All Monstrous and Hellish
Zolochiv, Thursday, July 3, 1941
Shlomo Wolkowicz was sitting down to breakfast when a soldier and two civilians
swooped in.
“You’re Jews, aren’t you? Come with us!”
It was half past eight in the morning, and Shlomo’s aunt Betty was making
breakfast. His uncle Hermann had stepped out the back door into the vegetable garden
to pick cucumbers for the table.
Refusing to obey was out of the question. The soldier had a rifle, and notices had
gone up in the town the day before: all Jews were to report the next morning to the
square in front of the town hall. Failure to comply would mean being shot.
Shlomo and Betty threw on jackets. Betty took her eighteen-month-old daughter in
her arms, and all three followed their captors. Hermann, who had heard what was
happening from the back door, remained out of sight.
Outside another civilian had rounded up several neighbors, one of them a girl
named Dora who had been showing interest in Shlomo.
Shlomo, Betty, and Dora trudged through the streets of the town. “I think we’re
going to the castle,” Betty said after ten minutes.
She was right. First the castle on the hill came into sight, then the gate and the steps
that led up to it.1
1 Shlomo Wolkowicz, Das Grab bei Zloczow: Geschichte meines Überlebens. Galizien 1939–1945 (Berlin:
Wichern-Verlag, 1996), 43–4.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 11
Shlomo was a sojourner among the people of Zolochiv. He had been born in
Yahilnytsia, 125 kilometers to the southeast. Tobacco grew in the surrounding fields,
and Shlomo’s father had owned a cigarette factory when this land was part of Poland.
In 1937 Shlomo went to Lviv to study at a Jewish gymnasium. He graduated days before
the war broke out. When the Germans attacked, Shlomo and four classmates
volunteered for the Red Army. They were turned away: they were too young, and the
army didn’t know whether it would be putting up a fight or fleeing. The five young
men set off for the east on foot. Shlomo would stop over with his uncle and aunt in
Zolochiv and then continue on his way home.
The travelers soon realized that they had chosen a difficult route. The road from
Lviv to Zolochiv was a path of retreat for the Red Army. Every half hour or so Shlomo
and his companions had to scramble off the highway and seek shelter in the wheat
fields. German planes were flying over, just meters above the ground, firing round after
round from their machine guns. And when there were no planes, disabled tanks and
trucks blocked the road.
Shlomo couldn’t understand the Red Army’s panic-stricken flight. “Were they really
incapable of holding up the Germans even for a few days to give the rear a chance to get
organized?” he would wonder. “I saw Russian women leaving their homes in their
nightdresses, running to catch up with the army trucks. It seemed as if each soldier and
officer was acting independently, with no thought for anyone else. Soldiers told me that
the officers had been the first to flee, abandoning their command posts.”2
Orest Horodyskyj traveled this road nine days after Shlomo Wolkowicz. His mood
was different—the young Jew was fleeing for his life; Horodyskyj was part of the
invading forces, drafted less than a month earlier as an interpreter for the staff of the
17th Army—but his impression of the highway was much like Shlomo’s. “The whole
length of the road was littered with smashed tanks, artillery, and first-aid trucks,” he
wrote in his diary. “Soviet soldiers were buried beside the road, and a rifle thrust into
2
Ibid., 36.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 12
the ground, sometimes with a helmet placed on top, marked the grave. Dead horses lay
in the fields, decomposing in the heat and filling the air with a terrible stench. Every
traveler placed a handkerchief over his nose. Columns of German soldiers and
equipment jammed the road. Sometimes we had to wait a hour before we could
advance a bit.”3
Shlomo and his companions broke through to Zolochiv on June 29 and learned they
wouldn’t go any further: the town was surrounded. Shlomo found his uncle’s house,
got a meal and a bath, and went to bed. The next day the Luftwaffe began bombing and
machine-gunning the Soviet troops in the town. Shlomo and his uncle’s family took
shelter in the cellar. When the bombing ended hours later, Shlomo went out into the
street. His aunt and uncle’s house was still standing, though some of its doors and
windows had been blown in, but all around were only funnel-shaped pits.4
That night machine-gun fire resounded and Soviet tanks rumbled east. There was
silence for half an hour, and then the noise of tanks resumed. But these tanks carried the
German cross, and German helmets protruded from the turrets. It was two o’clock in
the morning—four o’clock, according to another account—on Tuesday, July 1, 1941, and
the 295th Infantry Division and Waffen-SS Division Viking had occupied Zolochiv.5
For the Jews of Zolochiv the situation was ominous. One of the first acts of the
occupation authorities was to forbid them to leave the town. Then the town’s most
prominent Ukrainian citizens set up a committee and issued a proclamation charging
Jews with the deaths of the Ukrainian prisoners at the NKVD prison.6 And late in the
afternoon on July 2, the auxiliary police that sprang into action when the Wehrmacht
arrived posted placards throughout the town: all Jews were to report to the town square
for work at eight o’clock the next morning.
3 Orest Korchak-Horodys'kyi, “Iz shchodennyka voiennoho perekladacha: Skhidnii front 1941–43”
(unpublished ms.), 23.
4 Wolkowicz, Das Grab, 38–9.
5 Samuel Lipa Tennenbaum, Zloczow Memoir 1939–1944: A Chronicle of Survival (New York:
Shengold, 1986), 166; Szloyme Mayer, Der Untergang fun Zloczów (Munich, 1947), 6.
6 Jan Kulpa, untitled ms., ZIH, 301/5879: 1; Mayer, Der Untergang, 7; Philip Friedman, “UkrainianJewish Relations during the Nazi Occupation,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 12 (1958–9): 273 n. 25.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 13
Shlomo and his uncle hadn’t heard about the order not to leave town or the
Ukrainian committee’s proclamation, but they discussed the order to report for work
and after some hesitation—no one knew its purpose, although everyone understood
that the decision to obey or disobey it was a weighty one—decided not to go.
Samuel Tennenbaum had got up early that morning and was watching the market
square from his window as Shlomo, Betty, and Dora were trudging to the castle. Samuel
had seen the notice that Jews were to assemble at the square, and he and his wife Lina
had talked about whether they should go. Lina was sure that women wouldn’t be
harmed. They should go, she said, and the men should stay away.
In the end, only the women and a few older men went to the square. A German
officer addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker. He announced that Jews would
have to observe a curfew. Any Jew who disobeyed would be shot. At the end the officer
ordered the crowd to disperse.
The Tennenbaums were relieved. The worst was over. Samuel was fond of the joke
that was making the rounds in Jewish circles. Ukrainians had caps with two visors—
one with a five-pointed star and the other with a swastika. To serve changing masters
all they had to do was to turn their caps around. Wasn’t the violence of the first two
days of the occupation the work of Ukrainians who were retaliating for the atrocities the
NKVD had committed? Weren’t Ukrainians faithful lackeys to the Germans, and
wouldn’t the Germans—civilized people, the nation of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller—put
them in their place?7
The worst wasn’t over. Anna Ulrich would recall that the morning began with
Germans and Ukrainians entering Jewish apartments and taking the men and young
women away to clean up the streets and bombed buildings.
At one o’clock Anna saw Germans and Ukrainians driving crowds of Jews toward
the prison and beating them with whatever was at hand—rifles, sticks, iron bars, or
7
Tennenbaum, Zloczow Memoir, 113–4, 175, 179.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 14
rocks. Wounded people lay all along the road to the castle.
Anna made her way unrecognized to a cousin’s apartment. She was stupefied by
what she had seen in the streets and could not understand what was happening.
At one point several youngsters—boys no more than fifteen years old—entered the
apartment with the cry, “Go to work! The general is calling you!” Then another cousin
arrived, horror-stricken, and said that Germans had been at his apartment, stealing and
plundering, and he had made use of their distraction to escape. The boys led Anna’s
two cousins, men in their forties, into the street.
Anna sat in the apartment and listened to the noise. She could hear shooting and
screaming. She wanted to go find out what had happened to her husband, but the
family’s Polish nanny, who had come back from town in tears, unable to say anything
except “Judgment Day!,” wouldn’t let her leave. Then she related that the Germans
were murdering Jews. Only the weeping of small children broke the silence in the room.
Anna walked over to the window. A Jew, his face bloody, his clothes in shambles,
was stumbling along the street, staring ahead with unseeing eyes.
As the day proceeded, Anna kept going to the window in the hope of seeing
someone coming home. Then a Jewish woman from a nearby building arrived.
Germans had come to her place. They had terrorized people by brandishing their
revolvers and ordering them to stand facing the wall while they plundered their
jewelry, watches, and rings. Jews were still being killed in the town, the woman said.8
Boleslaw Kopelman was teaching at the medical institute in Lviv when the war
broke out. He fled east, got as far as Zolochiv, and started working at the hospital there.
When the Germans arrived in the town, he would write, Ukrainians were brought in
from the villages and given arms, and the slaughter began. Kopelman and the sixty
other people on the hospital staff were taken out into the yard to be shot. But the
shooting was so inept that he managed to escape. As he went through the city, he saw
8 Anna Ulrich (Szolder), “Pogrom Zydów w Zloczowie 3.VII. 1941 r.,” and Anna SzolderUlreichowa, untitled ms., ZIH, 301/3285 and 301/3550.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 15
Ukrainians armed with shovels and hoes standing in entranceways and beating, and
sometimes killing, Jews who were being driven to the castle. So many Jews had been
beaten and shot, as another witness would put it, that the blood transformed the road to
the castle into a quagmire.9
Salo Altman also saw men and boys armed with axes, hatchets, shovels, iron bars,
and hammers. They were storming Jewish houses and dragging their occupants into the
streets. People who had been friendly neighbors just the day before were now enemies.
They lured Jews into their homes only to hand them over to the mob. Street urchins tied
a rabbi to a motorcycle. His tongue hanging out, the old man tried to keep up but in the
end fell and was dragged along, mutilated and unrecognizable. A Ukrainian pulled two
Jewish acquaintances away from the mob and asked them to fetch some strong rope.
Trusting the Ukrainian, the men went home and returned with ropes. Their
acquaintance thanked them and then turned them over the mob, which hanged them
with the ropes they had brought.10
Thinking that he would be safer in a big city than in a small town, Józek Schwadron
fled to Lviv when the Germans invaded and took refuge with the Jewish family that
had given him room and board when he was attending a trade school in the city. He
learned what had happened to his father and brother only when he came back to
Zolochiv in mid-July.
Boys, the youngest no more than ten or eleven years old, had put on blue-andyellow armbands and were chasing grown men, Schwadron’s mother told him. Two of
the boys came to the Schwadrons’ house.
“Come on, they need you to work, “ they said as they grabbed Józek’s father.
Józek’s mother was holding him back. “Come on, let’s go! Let’s go!” the boys
shouted as they pulled the old man away.
9 Boleslaw Kopelman, ZIH, 301/801, 1; Chaim Schöps, ZIH, 301/4991, 1.
10 Salo Altman, “Haunting Memories,” in Sefer kehilat Zlots'ov, eds. Baruch Karu and I. M. Lask ([Tel
Aviv]: 'Idit-Irgum yotse'e Zlots'ov, 1967), columns 37–9.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 16
People were standing on both sides of the street with sticks and shovels in their
hands. Józek’s father ran through the gauntlet. He was beaten to death just outside the
castle.
Józek’s brother Jakub escaped from the procession to the castle. “They chased him
all the way to our summer cottage,” says Józek, “and killed him there.”11
Joseph Schwadron, Del Ray Beach, Florida, February 2002. (Photo by author.)
A Zolochiv Jew named Szymon hid from the pogrom with his family. “We knew
that the Ukrainians were chasing Jews to the castle in order to make them dig up the
prisoners the Russians had murdered before they escaped,” Szymon told his
biographer. “Many unsuspecting Jews reported voluntarily for the work. One of them
was Mr. Eisen, the owner of the ritual bath. Armed with a spade, he set out. He was
convinced that it was only a question of digging up graves. A Ukrainian friend saw him
and asked that he go home and bring him something to eat. Eisen went home, got a
sandwich, and went back. Another group caught him, and he never returned. He hadn’t
11 Joseph Schwadron, interview by author, Del Ray Beach, Florida, February 18, 2002.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 17
realized that his Ukrainian friend had wanted to save him.”
“The murderers were our neighbors the day before. Why did they hate us so?”
Szymon would wonder. “Everyone has enemies, and murderers are always among us–
but so many!”12
The entrance to the Zolochiv castle, early July 1941, corpses of NKVD victims dug up from two pits in the orchard laid out
for identification. From Sigrid Wegner-Korfes, Weimar–Stalingrad–Berlin:
Das Leben des deutschen Generals Otto Korfes (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1994), 97.
A line of Jews was moving toward the gate when Shlomo, Betty, and Dora reached the
prison. As the Jews mounted the steps SS men swung truncheons at their heads, then
forced them to wipe away the blood before pushing them inside.
When Shlomo approached, he stood before the SS men with his head raised. They
looked at him in confusion and then shouted, “Go on!”
In the yard guards—ten SS men and and ten Ukrainian policemen—herded the
women and children toward the wall and ordered the men to jump into a pit. Down at
the bottom Jews were struggling to drag out the corpses in it and to arrange them
around the rim so that they could be identified.
12 Barbara Just-Dahlmann, Simon (Stuttgart: Radius-Verlag, 1980), 66–7.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 18
A window at the Zolochiv castle, later bricked up, through which NKVD men threw the bodies of
their victims to the ground below. (Photo by author.)
Jews digging up remains of NKVD victims in the orchard outside the Zolochiv castle,
early July 1941. (Archiwum Wschodnie, Warsaw.)
More Jews were arriving. Soldiers and civilians were searching the Jewish quarter
for persons who had not shown up and bringing them to the castle. The guards kept
going over to the gate to meet the new arrivals and to drive them to the pit.13
J
13 Boll, “Zloczów, July 1941,” 70.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 19
The day was hot, and the stench from the corpses was making people faint, but the
guards paid no attention. From time to time they ordered one of the Jews to climb out.
They forced him to kneel and rained down blows upon him until he lost consciousness,
then kicked him back into the pit. Friends or relatives who tried to help suffered a
worse fate. The guards drove knives into them, gouged out their eyes, cut off their ears
and tongues, and left them to die.14
Victims of the NKVD laid out near the pit in the yard of the Zolochiv prison, early July 1941.
(Archiwum Wschodnie, Warsaw.)
German troops were pouring through Zolochiv on their way east, and columns of tanks
and trucks stopped at the prison so that the soldiers could go inside to see the victims of
the “Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities.” Some soldiers could not take the sight and left. A few
fainted from the heat and stench. A commission made up of doctors and military judges
questioned relatives about the arrests of the victims and wrote reports.15
14 Wolkowicz, Das Grab, 43–5.
15 N. Zolochivs'ka, “Rozstrily u Zolochevi—Mohyly zakatovanykh u Zolochevi,” Zolochivshchyna,
ed. Boliubash, 536.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 20
Bruno Brehm, an Austrian writer and an officer with the Fortieth Army Corps, was
one of the Wehrmacht soldiers who visited the Zolochiv castle. “Thousands of flies
buzzed above the eight or ten long rows of corpses that were laid out here,” he would
write in an autobiographical novel after the war. “Between them, women crept along,
bent over, looking for their husbands and sons among the dead.”16
Another soldier who stopped at the castle was armored infantryman Hans Kessel.
He saw a hooligan armed with an iron bar killing Jews who had just been allowed to
say a prayer and were still kneeling. The killing, Kessel had heard, was an act of
vengeance because Jewish commissars had murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians
who had wanted to welcome the German liberators.
NKVD victims in the foreground, Jews in the background.
(Dokumentat ionsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands, Vienna.)
16 Bruno Brehm, Aus der Reitschul’!: Ein autobiographisches Roman (Graz, 1951), as quoted in Musial,
“Konterrevolutionäre Elemente,” 213, and Boll, “Zloczów, July 1941,” 282 n. 104.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 21
As Kessel was bringing out his camera from under his motorcycle coat, a military
policeman came up and said that he if he didn’t get out immediately the policeman
would confiscate the camera and report him. Taking photographs was forbidden here,
and involvement by the German armed forces was not appropriate because this was a
Ukrainian affair.17
Corpses of Jewish victims stacked up in the yard of the Zolochiv castle, early July 1941.
(Zentralstelle im Lande Nordrhein-Westfalen für die Bearbeitung von nationalsozialistischen
Massenverbrechen bei der Staatsanwaltschaft Dortmund.)
Taking pictures forbidden? Involvement by German forces not advisable? Salo
Altman saw it differently. Many German officers, he would write, watched the pogrom
with calm cynicism, clicking their cameras all the time. A few months later Altman
came across photographs in an illustrated German weekly. One of them showed
women weeping over a pile of corpses at the castle. “Ukrainian women mourning
husbands murdered by Jews,” the caption said. Altman was certain that one of the
women was the daughter of Jewish friends.18
17 Guido Knopp, Der verdammte Krieg: Das Unternehmen “Barbarossa” (Munich: C. Bertelsmann,
1991), 130.
18 Altman, “Haunting Memories,” column 42.
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One soldier even brought a film camera, and one day the producers of a television
documentary would discover his footage.
The clip they show in their film, less than a minute long, begins with a long shot of
the castle.
Then, in the yard, a German soldier, his back to us, observes civilians who are
moving around a pile of corpses.
Wehrmacht soldiers stand in a circle. A civilian wearing a cap and a coat that comes
down to his knees is swinging an iron bar, beating a man who is trying to get away. The
encircling soldiers don’t let him out. The man falls to the ground. His persecutor
continues flailing him.
Another pile of corpses.
Two men, a boy trailing behind them, are hustling a man to a pit.
The first man sits up. His face is bloodied.
A German soldier steps forward. Corpses lie piled up on the ground behind him.
The soldier gives the camera a calm, blank look.19
Dusk was falling. The SS men unfolded the bipods on their MG-34 machine guns, set
them up at the edge of the pit, and pointed the muzzles down below.
The Jews in the pit panicked. There was nothing they could do, no way to escape.
They would all die.
The command “Feuer!” and salvos of 7.9 mm Mauser bullets ended the silence. Cries
of “Shma Israel” echoed from the prison walls.
“Death was more or less normal, a resignation,” a survivor of the genocide in
Rwanda observed. “You lose the will to fight.”20 Shlomo was only seventeen. He hadn’t
19 Tina Mendelsohn and Jochen Trauptmann, Der Skandal und die Wehrmachtsfotos: Auf den Spuren
einer umstrittenen Ausstellung, Filmhaus Berlin and Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk, 2000. Zolochivs'ka,
“Rozstrily,” 536, says that Germans filmed the scene in the Zolochiv prison yard. Musial, Rozstrelac
elementy kontrrewolucyjne, 162, writes that a German soldier, apparently not a member of one of the
propaganda companies that were assigned to film and photograph events at the front, shot the footage.
20 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be killed with Our Families: Stories
from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 22.
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lost the will to fight. He didn’t want to die. He doubled up like a jackknife and buried
his head between his knees.
The pogrom at the Zolochiv castle as recorded by a German soldier’s motion-picture camera.
(Courtesy of Filmhaus Berlin and Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk.)
The German army had been aware of what was going in the town and at the castle.
“The situation in Zolochiv is unpleasant,” the intelligence officer of the 295th Infantry
Division noted in the division’s log on July 3. The corpses of nine hundred Ukrainians
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 24
murdered by the Russians were lying at the castle. Jews and Russians were digging
them up with their bare hands. And Ukrainians were shooting Jews and Russians,
including women and children, in the town and at the castle.21
Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, first general staff officer of the 295th
Infantry Division, was disturbed. Son of a pastor and an anti-Nazi who had already
taken part in a plot against Hitler, Groscurth would get into trouble with his superiors
for filing complaints about massacres of Jews. But he knew the army. If he wanted the
town’s military commandant to do something, he would have to put his case in terms
that the commandant would understand: the pogroms could get out of hand and
endanger German security. The commandant agreed. He instructed Colonel Otto
Korfes, commanding officer of the 518th Infantry Regiment, to reestablish order. Korfes,
who would later make himself out to be the hero of the incident, the savior of the Jews
of Zolochiv, couldn’t be bothered to go the castle. Instead he sent a subordinate, Major
Eitel-Friedrich Patzwahl.22
A shouted command rose above the sound of the gunfire. The shooting stopped.
Shlomo lifted his head. Bodies, some blown to pieces, were lying around him. Those
who were still alive were moaning in agony.
A German officer was ordering the women to leave. Major Patzwahl had arrived at
the castle. Instead of stopping the killing, he was making sure that the women and
children did not see what was being done to the men.
21 BA-MA, RH 26–295/16/60, Tätigskeitbericht Ic/295.ID, July 3, 1941. See also the very similar
entry for July 3, 1941, in BA-MA, RH 26–295/3, Kriegstagebuch 295.ID.
22 On Groscurth’s attempt to prevent the killing of Jewish children in the town of Bila Tserkva in
August 1941 see Saul Friedländer, “The Wehrmacht, German Society, and the Knowledge of the Mass
Extermination of the Jews,” in Crimes of War, eds. Bartov et al., 17–30. Philipp-Christian Wachs, Der Fall
Theodor Oberländer (1905–1998): Ein Lehrstück Deutscher Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000), 291.
BA-MA, RH 26–295/3, Kriegstagebuch 295. ID, July 3, 1941. Sigrid Wegner-Korfes, Weimar–Stalingrad–
Berlin: Das Leben des deutschen Generals Otto Korfes: Biografie ([Berlin]: Verlag der Nation, 1994), 88–91,
attempts to relate these events, but her account is based on her father’s confused, contradictory, and selfserving memoirs and must be treated with caution. Boll, “Zloczów, July 1941,” 71, is more careful, but
still lends too much credence to Korfes’s account. Korfes’s and Patzwahl’s positions and ranks are given
in BA-MA, RH 26–295/23, “Kommandeure, Adjutanten und Ord.-Offiziere der 295. Division.” I have not
been able to establish the town commandant’s name.
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Shlomo hoped he could get out with the women. He crawled over to Betty and Dora
on the other side of the grave and whispered his plan to them.
Betty thought he was being foolhardy. Dora encouraged him. “There’s no other way
out,” she said.
Betty threw her silk scarf to Shlomo, and he tied it over his head.
The blank stares Betty and Dora gave him made it clear that this wouldn’t work.
He glanced over at the Germans who were checking women as they left. One of
them seemed to be looking straight at him. Shlomo took off the scarf and crawled back
to the other side of the pit.
Jews exhuming corpses in the pit in the Zolochiv yard, early July 1941.
From Sigrid Wegner-Korfes, Weimar–Stalingrad–Berlin:
Das Leben des deutschen Generals Otto Korfes (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1994), 97.
Betty and Dora looked around as they moved toward the gate. Their eyes met
Shlomo’s. They made a silent farewell.
The surviving men in the pit could still see the women and children when the order
“Feuer!” came again.
Shlomo doubled up once more. He felt a blow to his back. A man who had been shot
had fallen on him and was pushing him down into the mud and blood. Soon Shlomo
was beneath of a mound of bodies.
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The shooting went on. Shlomo tried to force his way out of the tangle of limbs and
slippery flesh. When the Germans finished, they would fill in the grave. What would
become of him then? But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t get out. He lay at the bottom of
the pit, immersed in the muck of the bodies that had lain there before him, immured by
the fresh bodies above him, praying for a bullet to release him. He lost consciousness.
And then, at six in the evening, thunder and lightning struck, and a torrential rain
fell. The killers stopped shooting. They picked up their machine guns and ran for
shelter.23
A Polish woman who calls herself Katarzyna D. had been watching the scene at the
castle. She saw at least three mass graves, she would recall. Each one contained several
dozen corpses. The corpses were brought up, washed, and laid out in rows. Relatives
identified some victims and with permission from the Germans took them away for
burial. Most of the victims had bullet wounds in the head, neck, and chest. A few had
stab wounds—Katarzyna is certain that Soviet bayonets caused them—on their backs,
chests, arms, and buttocks. Some showed signs of torture: smashed-in faces, missing
teeth, broken limbs. Two women—everyone who saw them agreed that they were
nuns—had had their breasts cut off. Some corpses were fresh, others black and bloated.
Katarzyna would have nothing to say about the Jews who had brought up the corpses.24
Yaroslava Khmil went to church with her family the Sunday when the war began. In
peacetime she would have had dinner with her grandparents after the service. But that
Sunday they all went home and Mama served dinner.
In the evening the children went to bed. During the night they heard a commotion.
The light was on, and armed NKVD men were standing over them. Yaroslava heard
Mama weeping when Daddy was being taken away. The children ran outside. Their
23 Wolkowicz, Das Grab, 48–50. Ulrich, “Pogrom Zydów,” 4, recalls that the shower began at about
six o’clock.
24 Testimony of Katarzyna D. at the Okregowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni przeciw Narodowi
Polskiemu w Lodzi, S 5/91/NK, as cited in Musial, “ Konterrevolutionäre Elemente,” 163, Rozstrelac elementy
kontrrewolucyjne, 146.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 27
mother begged that Daddy be allowed to put on better clothes and tried to give him
bread for the road, but the NKVD men wouldn’t allow it. They pushed Mama to the
ground. The children helped her get up, and the five of them ran after Daddy, crying
and screaming, as the NKVD men pushed them away with their rifles.
The next morning Yaroslava’s mother, aunt, and Kateryna, a neighbor’s wife, set out
for Krasne and Zolochiv to look for their husbands. They found them when the
Germans opened the castle. Yaroslava’s mother recognized her husband by his
underpants, which she had sewn, and his boots. His arms were twisted out of joint, and
one leg was broken. His body was scalded. His eyebrows and hair were gone. His
mouth was open, and his tongue had been torn out.
Like Katarzyna, Yaroslava would have nothing to say about Jews. What happened
to them was not part of her story.25
When Maria Rogowska heard that the Germans had discovered three graves at the
castle, she ran the seven kilometers from the village of Pochapy to Zolochiv. Her father
was a Polish landowner who had managed to hold on to his land during the campaigns
to collectivize agriculture, but three days before the war began the NKVD arrested him
for not paying his farm levy. Soldiers hustled him into a wagon, and as it rattled away
and Maria ran after it crying, one of them pointed his rifle at her. “I’ll kill you!” he
hissed. After that Maria’s only hope was that the Germans would advance rapidly, the
inmates at the Zolochiv prison would get out, and her father would come home.
Maria smelled the stench from the opened graves when she was still a dozen meters
away. The NKVD had doused the bodies with acid and lime. Now they were
decomposing in the hot sun. At the graveside, Germans were shoving and beating Jews
who were hauling up corpses with hooks. The Jews were covered with muck, and if
they were made to lie down beside the corpses they would look just like them. “It was
all monstrous and hellish, beyond comprehension,” Maria would remember. “Terrible
25 Olena Zadorozhna, Myroslava Babins'ka, and Nadiia Hupalo, “Zolochivs'kyi zamok,” Vyzvol'nyi
shliakh, February 1995, 227–30.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 28
moans were coming from all directions. People were standing beside the corpses that
had been brought up from the pit and were pushing away the muck with pieces of
wood. They wanted to find a single beloved face among all the mutilated, scalded,
decaying faces. They hoped to identify the body of a beloved person in order to
separate it from the other bodies and to bury it.”
Unable to breathe, fearing she would faint, Maria edged away from the pit. She
stood for a long time, her eyes filled with tears, breathing in fresh air and gathering the
strength to continue looking for her father, then covered her mouth and nose with a
handkerchief and went back. Few of the searchers identified the relatives they were
looking for. The NKVD had abandoned Zolochiv in such haste that it left behind some
of its case files. Maria found her father’s file among the papers scattered on the floor in
the prison office and in the yard, but she never found his body.26
Just as many Ukrainians were certain that Jews ran the Soviet administration, so
Maria was convinced that Ukrainians had taken all the government positions and that
most of the NKVD victims were Poles, denounced to the authorities by Ukrainian
neighbors. She went to the prison for four days in a row and passed through Zolochiv
each time, but she did not see—or would not think it worth mentioning that she had
seen—a pogrom. And she witnessed Germans abusing Jews at the castle, but she did
not see—or would not recall seeing—that they killed any of them.27
Sixteen-year-old Ivan Hontar came to the castle that day with his father and cousin
Ksenia to look at the victims of the NKVD. Perhaps there was someone from their
village, someone they knew? They saw hundreds of corpses. “Corpses without tongues,
eyes gouged out, skin peeled off backs, bellies sliced open. Many people were found
dead in bricked-up rooms, their fingers chewed to the bone. Women were found with
breasts and ears cut off and scalps torn off. They were all brought out to the yard, and
26 Popinski, Kokurin, and Gurjanow, Drogi smierci,17, 29.
27 Józef Anczarski, Kronikarskie zapisy z lat cierpien i grozy w Malopolsce Wschodniej 1939–1946, 2nd
rev. ed., ed. Józef Wolczanski (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Bl. Jakuba Strzemie Archidiecezji Lwowskiej Ob.
Lac., 1998), 210–15.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 29
people tried to identify their relatives. The stench was very unpleasant.”
Ivan would recall that people who had worked for the NKVD were “recruited,” as
he would put it, to exhume the NKVD victims and that some of them were Jews. They
couldn’t do the work for long and were often replaced. But beating, torturing, or
machine-gunning of Jews? Ivan would insist that he had seen no such thing.
He would, however, remember the squall of rain that started when he was going
home. He and his cousin sat in the back of the wagon, a coat over their heads, while
Ivan’s father urged the horses on. “We rode in silence because our stomachs revolted at
the thought of what we had seen. I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat.”28
The NKVD arrested Franciszek Sandecki the night the Germans attacked and took
him to the Zolochiv prison. When the Germans came and the news of the massacre was
noised about, Franciszek’s brother Tadeusz went to the prison to look for him.
Franciszek was lying in the prison yard. His face was swollen, and his head was
twisted around, and Tadeusz recognized him by what he was wearing: one boot and a
woman’s sleeveless jerkin. Tadeusz had fashioned new soles for his brother’s boots
from an automobile tire because he couldn’t get leather, and Franciszek’s wife had
given him the jerkin when the NKVD was taking him away and she couldn’t find a
sweater for him.
Tadeusz paid no attention to the people who were digging up, laying out, and
cleaning up the corpses. He had just found his brother’s mutilated body. How could he
be expected to notice what somebody was doing to a few Jews?29
Stefan Petelycky was eighteen years old in July 1941, but he had already been a
member of the OUN’s youth wing for three years and had been hiding from the Soviet
security forces in the woods, living in a forester’s hut or moving from village to village
and doing odd jobs, sniffing out stool pigeons in the local OUN group, acting as a
courier, and building up the underground network for the coming war against the
28 Ivan Hontar, Molochnyi shliakh (Toronto, 1995), 38. Ivan Hontar, interviews by author, Toronto,
March 21 and 24, 1999.
29 Archiwum Wschodnie, Warsaw (hereafter AW), II7L and IV/163.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 30
Soviets.
When he heard about the massacre, Petelycky hurried to the Zolochiv prison with a
friend and his friend’s mother and sister. They found his friend’s cousin. He had been
beaten so badly that they identified him only by his clothes.
Inside the cells they found priests on whose chests the NKVD men had carved
crosses. The cells were spattered with blood, and there were holes in the walls as if from
bullets. In one cell a pool of blood had coagulated on the floor. Some of the victims had
had their eyes plucked out, their genitals mutilated, and their faces crushed with rifle
butts. “The stench from their putrefying corpses,” Petelycky would recall, “was
intolerable. I could not eat for three days.”30
Petelycky would not remember seeing civilians beating, robbing, or killing Jews, but
he would recall that SS troops forced Jews to dig up the corpses of the NKVD victims
and then executed them.
No Ukrainians participated in that massacre, but when we saw what was happening
to them we did nothing. We remembered all the Jews who had participated in the
Soviet administration and had betrayed Ukrainian nationalists to the NKVD. We
also held some of the Jews partly responsible for what had happened in that prison
in the final weeks of the Soviet occupation.…
It was not fair to blame all the Jews for what had happened to our people. But
you cannot imagine today what we saw in that prison yard. Think how you would
feel to see the naked bodies of your loved ones, rotting in the heat, how you would
react upon seeing how their flesh had been torn in chunks from their bodies by
torture instruments. Imagine their agonies. We did. It was not hard. We only had to
look down at the corpses at our feet.… We tried to keep our minds focussed on what
we were looking at, people whom we had known for years, grown up with, now
30 Petelycky, Into Auschwitz, 12.
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disfigured and defiled, lying before us like so many butchered pigs.31
And Petelycky would remember a Jew named Shmulko who had worked for the
NKVD at the Zolochiv prison and who was forced to show people where their relatives
and friends were buried, then tied to a stake and stoned to death. “He was a strong man
and so took a long time to die. I couldn’t look at what was left of him. But I also
couldn’t feel sorry for him. Before he died, he confessed to a second burial pit that
people had suspected but had not been able to find.”32
At seven that evening one of Anna Ulrich’s cousins came back, bloody from a blow to
his head. When the Ukrainian boys took him away he found himself in a crowd of Jews
who were being driven to the castle. A boy hit him on the head with a piece of iron. He
managed to get away from the crowd and make his way home, where he searched two
floors but did not find a single soul. Hearing the footsteps of approaching Germans, he
lay down on a bed as if dead. When the Germans noticed him, they looked him over,
said, “He’s quite dead,” and left. Anna’s cousin crept along side streets and after
circling around for a long time came to the door. When he got inside, he fell down and
wept. And when he finally calmed down, he kept saying, “What I saw was terrible.”33
While some German soldiers were bludgeoning Jews with their rifle butts, others
were trying to help them. If they couldn’t do much for the men, they could at least
protect their wives and children.
Ewgenia Rawicz was living with her parents on the outskirts of Zolochiv, just across
the road from an abandoned house where she and her friends often played. On July 3,
six soldiers escorted Ewgenia and the women and children from four or five other
Jewish families in the neighborhood to the abandoned house.
Ewgenia’s memories of the day aren’t clear—she was only twelve years old—and
31 Ibid., 12–13.
32 Ibid., 12.
33 Ulrich, “Pogrom Zydów,” 1 –5.
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she can’t explain why at one point the soldiers wanted to put her and the other women
and children in the cellar, but she does remember that at the end of the day, when the
town was quiet again, the soldiers allowed them all to go home unharmed.
And she recalls talk after the pogrom that Polish people must have helped the
Germans to identify Jews because the Germans didn’t know who was Jewish.
Poles, not Ukrainians?
The building at the Zolochiv castle in which the NKVD had its offices and interrogation rooms.
The pit in which Shlomo Wolkowicz and other Jews were forced to exhume victims of the NKVD
was in the corner immediately to the right of the building. (Photo by author.)
“I don't remember a lot of Ukrainian people,” Ewgenia explains. “I remember Polish
people. It was later that we started to hear, ‘Ukrainians this, and Ukrainians that.’”34
The shower had cleared the sky, and the moon was full. Shlomo lay in the pit, burning
with fever. He tried to force a gap between the bodies above him to allow some
rainwater in. He put his face to the gap and stuck out his tongue. When he had
34 Ewgenia Rawicz, interview by author, Miami Beach, Florida, February 14, 2002.
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 33
quenched his thirst a bit, he began gathering strength for the task he had set himself: to
climb out and get back to his uncle’s house.
After several hours he began to move away the bodies that were lying on him. With
one final effort he found himself on top of the corpses. He had emerged from the pit.
Grasping the shaft of a spade that he had found nearby, he covered his head with
the blade and crawled toward the sloping castle wall. Then he saw other figures rising
up from among the corpses and dragging themselves after him.
When he reached the top of the slope, he threw the spade aside and slithered down
the wet grass. He had escaped from the castle.
But he couldn’t stand. The SS men must have shot him in the legs.
Before Shlomo could decide what to do, four other Jews slid down the slope. All of
them had been wounded.
One of the four men said that he knew the way out. Shlomo and the others crawled
after him. They reached a tall fence and found a small gap in it. They removed more
boards and got through to the other side.
Shlomo tried to stand again. This time he succeeded. He could even walk. Lying so
long in the same position must have caused temporary paralysis.
The survivors met another obstacle: a stream between the fence and the road. They
jumped in and waded to the other side.
Now they were on the road that led into the town. A tall fence on their left cast a
long shadow. Shlomo thought it would be safer to keep out of sight and walk close to
the fence. His companions continued down the middle.
They were making good progress when a soldier, rifle at the ready, emerged from
the dark and called out, “Halt!”
The soldier hadn’t seen Shlomo in the shadows. He crept on, then started running
Carynnyk, Proposal for Furious Angels Page 34
through gardens and yards. He would never know what became of his companions.35
Shlomo approached his uncle’s house through the kitchen garden. The window was
blacked out by a curtain. He knocked on the door. There was no response. He tapped
on the window. Two shadows appeared. Shlomo tapped again. He whispered that it
was dangerous for him to be outside.
One of the shadows approached the window and lifted the curtain. It was Dora.
Shlomo motioned to her to open the door. Dora moved away. Then footsteps came to
the door. Someone turned the key in the lock and drew the bolt. The footsteps receded.
Shlomo went inside and locked and bolted the door behind him. Betty and Dora
were standing by the far wall, clutching each other and following every move he made.
He went up to them and asked for something to drink. The women screamed. What
was it? Had they lost their minds after seeing the horrors at the prison?
Dora spoke first. “Your aunt saw you fall, hit by bullets, just before we left. How can
you be here now?”
At last Shlomo understood. He explained how he had managed to stay alive and to
come back.
Dora stepped up and put her hand out to Shlomo, then burst into tears and hugged
him. He was flesh and blood, not a ghost.
Only then did Betty come closer. “But I saw with my own eyes how you were hit by
a bullet. Now you’re standing here unharmed,” she said. “It’s the hand of God, a
miracle!”36
35 Wolkowicz, Das Grab, 48–52. Wolkowicz does not name the four survivors he mentions here.
Altman, “Haunting Memories,” col. 41, writes that “a few people who covered themselves with dead
bodies” survived the massacre. Boll says that in addition to Wolkowicz three Jews survived, but does not
name them. I have found three names. Adam Goliger (letter to Krzysztof Popinski, July 10, 1992, AW,
IV/163) says that he survived the massacre and escaped dressed as a woman. Jan Kulpa, ZIH, 301/5879,
says that his friend Rozen was wounded in the hand but survived the massacre at the castle by
pretending to be dead and crawled out at night. Chaim Wittelsohn,“Zloczow” [sic], ZIH, 301/531: 1,
writes that he survived the massacre at the castle because corpses fell on him. Altman, “Haunting
Memories,” columns 39–40, mentions as survivors his brother-in-law Kuba, Wilo Freimann, Dr.
Sternschuss, S. Wiederhorn, and Abraham Rosen.
36 Wolkowicz, Das Grab, 53–4.
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