Customer Reviews

Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine

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For a long time Galicia was a 'hotbed' of nationalism and this book shows the ramifications of that. I am from a city that is, according to the author, part of Galicia but it is not one of the cities he traveled to and wrote about in the book, sadly. I would have been quite interested to read his take on what happened to this city after the war, etc.

Overall, as another reviewer has said, the book is at times repetitive. What readers will notice is that for the most part in practically every city Ukrainians partook in the pogroms or murders of Jews from the beginning days of the German occupation. Few, on the other hand, tried to save Jews. One can argue that they had no time to save Jews as they were looking out for themselves, yet that does not go a long way in explaining why so many were implicit in their deaths.

Today all the memorials erected to commemorate the suffering and death of the Jewish people are overlooked or forgotten about, in their place have sprung up dozens of monuments to Ukrainian nationalists, many of them guilty of mass murder and anti-Semitism. It should be mentioned that during the Soviet era the Holocaust was not mentioned, the Soviets did not want to single out any one group of people (commendable in some respects but not realistic or to a degree honest) and most of the memorials do not mention which group died but rather you will find them saying that so many 'Soviet citizens' died/were murdered, etc. It seems that it will be a long while, if ever, before Ukraine and Ukrainians can come to grips with their past in regards to WWII and the Holocaust.

Overall the book is an interesting read because one can get a glimpse of the exact same thing happening in every village/town/city, one after another. It is not a natural phenomenon, I'm sure to a degree it is part of a state sponsored program to erase the Ukrainian past during WWII in regards to the Holocaust and replace it with heroic nationalistic characters like Stepan Bandera.

As the world has come to learn about each and every depopulated Palestinian village and record their names and the Nakhba (All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, or Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Award, Middle Eastern Studies Association)) it is interesting to learn how Europeans, the same Europeans who value every inch of Palestinian history, obliterated, destroyed and crushed the Jewish history of eastern Europe, in this case Galicia. The book tells how the Jews were first destroyed and then their history, through neglect, communistic anti-semitism and finally Ukrainian nationalism, was forgotten and pushed aside. This is one of the few testaments to a vanished people. While German Jewry has been done justice in numerous important publications (The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933), there has been comparatively little interest in the Yiddish civilization and the Jews of the Pale of Settlement or Galicia. Outside of the Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry and Synagogues Without Jews this history has simply vanished. This is such an important book not only for Jews whose ancestors came from these places but also for all the Jews whose roots are in Eastern Europe and Russia, and for Europeans who might one day want to recall this vanished people who once lived among them.

A very sad book that describes a hidden history that, while most recall the holocaust, few can see the physical traces of the once vibrant, warm, loving communities that were crushed under the Nazi boot and then erased to make way for modernity.

Seth J. Frantzman

I was prepared to like this book better, as I have a strong interest in Jewish life in Eastern Galicia (present-day West Ukraine) and have traveled in this area. I agree with the author's main theory that for present-day Ukrainians to truly memorialize Jews who are no longer among them, they would need to deal with the role some Ukrainians had in the massacre of the Jews. So instead they memorialize Ukrainian nationalists. I found the book somewhat repetitive, with the situation being roughly the same in each place the author visited. It also wasn't clear why the author picked these particular places to visit and not others. I hope this upcoming book on one particular village will be better, as it will allow him to go more in-depth.

This book explained the extremely said situation of the erasure of Jewish heritage in the Ukraine. It is quite thorough on the towns that were visited. It is a must read for anyone with roots in the former Galicia.

Good book for those who want to know more about the history of Western Ukraine and/or specifically Jewish history of the area. Covers mostly WW 1 to the end of WW 2, so it' pretty depressing.

Professor Omer Bartov's holocaustic travelogue in the Western Ukraine has been published just when the US Congress is about to pretend that the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did not happen, lest Turkish nationalism be offended. Bartov has visited the Western Ukraine, once called Eastern Galicia, where all memory of centuries of Polish rule and Polish and Jewish habitation has been virtually ignored and erased.

Of all the countries occupied in WWII by the Nazis Ukraine was the most enthusiastic about being liberated from the Soviets and the most eager to help kill as many Jews as possible. Clearly this was the result of the weakness of Ukrainian nationalism and its perceived need to cleanse its territory ethnically of Poles and Jews whose long history there compromised the integrity of the newly nationalistic Ukrainians. Something similar could be found in Lithuania and Latvia, but what this reminds me of the most is the Turkish refusal to recognize that over one million Armenians were killed through the policies of the Ottoman government during WWI. If Bartov visited Eastern Turkey, the homeland of the Armenians, he would find denial by both Turkish officials and the indigenous Kurd population, both of which cannot accept that Armenians ever existed there.

Nationalism is a deadly poison and the Jews and Armenians have been its most notable victims. Pity, then, that Zionists also have to pretend there was no Armenian genocide lest its Turkish friends take umbrage, and that Armenians have persisted in their pro-Arab stance in the Middle East long after it had any real utility for them.

The ruling castes of the world one hundred years ago feared class warfare above all. Little did they know that nationalistic not socialist hatreds would be the most devastating for peace and security.

Bartov is a well respected scholar of the Holocaust and his visit to the new Ukrainian nation is very illuminating. Let us hope the Ukrainians some day get to feel secure enough to face the truth about what they have done in the name of their nation.

This work provides a city-by-city survey of remnants of Jewish architecture in eastern Galician towns. The properties that once belonged to the Polish expellees, often still bearing half-concealed Polish writing, are also frequently mentioned. Featured are the towns of Lviv (Lwow), Sambir (Sambor), Drohobych (Drohobycz), Stryi (Stryj), Bolekhiv (Bolechow), Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislawow), Kolomyia (Kolomyja), Kosiv (Kosow), Kuty (Kitov), Horodenka (Gorodenka), Husiatyn (Gusiatyn), Chortkiv (Czortkow), Zolotyi Potik (Potok Zloty), Buchach (Buczacz), Monastyryska (Monasterzyska), Ternopil (Tarnopol), Berezhany (Brzezany), Zolochiv (Zloczow), Brody (Brodie), and Zhovkva (Zolkiew). Surprisingly, Boryslav (Boryslaw), the city of my ancestors, is omitted.

One learns many things. Prewar Poles and Ukrainians were poorer than the Jews (p. 17); 80% of present-day Jews have their ancestry in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (pp. 16-17), and both the Ukrainian and the Jewish ("Ha-Tikvah") national anthems were influenced by the Polish national anthem. (p. 121). Approximately 1.4 million Ukrainian soldiers and 2.2 million Ukrainian civilians perished at the hands of the Nazis. (p. 67).

Omer Bartov shows bias in featuring writers that he agrees with (e. g. Gross, Michlic), while mentioning, but ignoring the findings of, historians such as Marek Chodakiewicz (p. 40, 206), who he mischaracterizes as part of "the right-wing turn in Polish politics." Bartov also repeats unsupported Polonophobic assertions, such as: "Moreover, even as Poland did courageously resist the German occupation and paid a horrendous price for its struggle, numerous Polish patriots and nationalists were also anything but displeased with the `removal' of the Jews from their country, and not a few collaborated with the effort to bring about that `removal'." (p. 205).

He recognizes the fact that "Nazis chose Poland as the site of the death camps because of Poles" has no basis in fact, but then uses his "being a victim doesn't absolve you form being a victimizer" thinking inconsistently. (p. 159). Bartov is in strong denial about the fact and magnitude of Jewish-Soviet collaboration against Poles and Ukrainians. (pp. 35-36, 40, 68, 159-160, etc.). In actuality, this collaboration was substantive, and, contrary to exculpations, was not primarily driven by Jewish fear of the Nazis. (See detailed English-language review of Przemilczane zbrodnie: Zydzi i Polacy na Kresach w latach 1939-1941 (Polish Edition)).

Bartov repeatedly discusses Ukrainian-Nazi collaboration, and condemns the glorification of the OUN-UPA, which occurs through such things as the erection of statues honoring Bandera at Drohobych (p. 53), Buchach (p. 137), and Berezhany (pp. 164-165). However, he has only a rather superficial grasp of the magnitude of the OUN-UPA genocide of Poles (p. 52, 65-66, 92, 102, 129). For details, see my Listmania: Ukrainian Fascism...

A very partisan account that will affirm some readers' prejudices but otherwise is poorly written and far from credible as an account of what happened in and between the Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian communities of Galicia before, during or after the Second World War.