Mark Maldis Reveals Secrets of the Criminal Genocide in Holobut

STONE FROM THE HEART

"If you are my friend, go to Holobut. Find the grave and erect on it a large stone, on which you will cause to be engraved these words: "Here lies Natan Rosen, father of Jacob. He was killed by Hitler's men. May he rest in peace. Shalom."

This fragment of "Holobut", the story by Adam Zielinski, was for 60 years the only memorial to the tragedy of the Jews of Stryj. Not long ago, their Golgotha was memorialized by a stone engraved with the above-quoted citation. The author's literary request, distinguished with a "Literary" prize, was fulfilled.

"Such a small town is Stryj" - so were titled the recollections of Jerzy Jan Szulc. But when he presents me with his book, describing the last years of the war, he claims that this is the first time he has heard of Holobut. And yet, Stryj is a such small town, and yet, Holobut was not quite 10 kilometers away. Maybe Szulc simply doesn't remember, because in those days he was not much more than 10 years old? He was a contemporary of Zielinski, but he lived on the other side of the Stryj ghetto wall.

Before the war, the difference in nationalities didn't cause much of a problem for the young residents of this town. Poles, Jews and Rusini, as the Ukrainians were called, went to one school. They studied only religion separately; some of them went to hear the Roman Catholic priest, others to the Orthodox priest, the rest were taken by the Rabbi. But among the older people the differences were more visible.

In today's Stryj there is the town historical museum, to the recent revolution. I look through old postcards and photographs somewhat shyly displayed in the museum's showcases. In them the entire charm and variety of that border town can be seen. On the oldest postcards, royal imperial soldiers parade the streets. The town was under Austrian domination for more than 100 years. On the stores - signs in Polish and German. From the period between the wars - postcards with descriptions only in Polish, and the same streets, marketplace and church. This image is complemented by photographs from albums that miraculously survived the war's conflagrations, and by photographs from the communist years. These albums are not yet exhibited, but when one asks… "Look through them," says one of the museum staff. Jews in corkscrew curls and smocks, Polish soldiers marching on Nov 11^th, boyish wagon drivers on the marketplace, members of the Society for Ukrainian Culture in shirts with ribbons in front of their homes in Stryj - the lazy life of this small Polish border town between the wars is frozen in frames. That atmosphere is found at Julian Stryjkowski's (a native of Stryj); the town had an influence on the creations of Kornel Makuszynski (also born in Stryj) and Adam Zielinski (in Stryj from the age of 3). Their creations revive the old postcards and photographs, the only problem being this: Who in today's Stryj knows this literature?

Near the entrance of the local park there are huge posters with photographs of "famous Stryjans". Among several dozen family names there is not one of the three above-mentioned. The Ukrainian- and Russian-sounding names tell me nothing. The women from the local museum wrinkled their brows when I mentioned names: Makuszynski, Stryjkowski, Zielinski. "No, we don't know them," they say. "And Holobut?" I ask. "Do you have anything concerning the fate of the Jews in Stryj; after all,

THAT ISN'T LITERATURE,

those are tragic facts?" "No, we don't have anything. After all Holubut isn't Stryj, it's a village," one of the museum staff earnestly explains. "And there aren't any more Jews here." "What happened to them?" I ask. "Well, you know, the war," another of the museum staff spreads her hands helplessly and then starts to unpack her lunch, intimating with this gesture that there is nothing more to add on this topic.

Before the war, 12,000 Jews lived in the district town of Stryj, which had a total population 35,000. Several thousand Stryjans described themselves as Ukrainians, there were several hundred Germans, several score Hungarians, a group of Armenians, Bulgarians, Russians - a typical eastern Galician mix of nationalities. Today this town is decidedly Ukrainian. Memorials of Bandera and Stecki emphasize this even more strongly, mostly for those from Poland. Area Poles number around one thousand. Some of them belong to the Association for Polish Culture in Stryj; members and non-members meet weekly in the recently restored church of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, which was founded at the end of the 15^th century.

Of the Stryj Synagogue only ruins remain, so several dozen local Jews gather in private homes. Most are retired, but they are learning Hebrew with the hope of traveling to Israel. Among them, there is only one native-born Stryjan - Joseph Israelowicz Foer; the others moved here after the war.

"I survived only because I was mobilized into the Red Army at the beginning of June of 1941," says Joseph Foer. "Together with it, I retreated from Stryj after the aggression of the Germans. If I had stayed, I probably would have died in Holobut, as did all my family."

Adam Zielinski's father, lawyer Karol Zielinski JD, moved from Drohobycza to Stryj at the beginning of the 1930s. Educated in Vienna, he belonged to the town's elite. Although he was of Jewish ancestry, he did not participate in the life of the local Jewish community. Indifferently religious, his left-wing convictions emphasized his ties to Polish culture. During the Soviet occupation of the town, he removed himself from social life, in which he had so actively participated before 1939. When the Germans seized Stryj, he was one of the first of their victims; he was murdered in Holobut.

The staircase of the pre-war apartment building on Post Office Street in Stryj was devastated. Adam Zielinski and I slowly climb to the first floor 2^nd story. Zielinski is here for the first time in 60 years. Every few steps he stops and touches the walls. Before the door on the first floor he says: "It was here." But he is afraid to ring the doorbell. Finally, I do; a young Ukrainian opens the door.

"May we?" I ask. "This gentleman lived here before the war..." "Please do," I hear, and am surprised that they allow us to enter so easily.

The more-than-100 m² (1056 ft²⁾, former lawyer's apartment is now divided among three families. They have no idea who lived here before; they didn't interest themselves in that. In broken Russian, Zielinski explains himself, though the post-war tenants feel that there is nothing inappropriate in our visit. They are themselves curious about the fates of the former tenants.

"Here was a bedroom; here, my room; here, the father's office," Zielinski shows me. "It was here that he was arrested. That was in September of 1941, right after the first scores of Jews in Stryj were shot, {m. in.} student Bronk Kerher, Dunkl, Buchtbaun and engineer Szaker. That was called the

"ACTION AGAINST COMMUNISTS."

During that September - probably the middle of the month - they came to this apartment," remembers Zielinski. "They came to arrest my father. I remember that moment exactly. In fluent German, Father asked what the matter was. It was true that as a lawyer he defended communists, too, but he didn't belong to any party. He had been an officer of the Austrian army during World War I; from the Italian front he was carried out wounded and medalled. These medals he showed Hitler's men. They threw them in his face, and they kicked me painfully, as I had attached myself to my father's legs.

That was the first, large organized action against people of Jewish ancestry in Stryj. Those arrested were mostly the educated people and people of some standing in town - about 1,000 persons. They were driven on foot to the synagogue, some to the grounds of the Ukrainian militia on Bator Street. For three days they were held outdoors; it rained, and they stood in the mud on cobblestones. They were given no food; they were not allowed to sleep; physical needs they had to carry out where they were. The remaining residents were not allowed to go near this group.

Jacob Sobel, resident of Stryj, remembers that one of the German policemen, by the name of Garber, asked who of the Jews knew how to pray aloud. He promised that whoever presented himself wouldn't be beaten anymore. Kudish spoke up and, on the orders of Garber, climbed onto a barrel, put on a tallith, took up a prayer book, and began to pray aloud. But the Germans didn't stop beating the Jews. After a little while they the Germans neared the barrel on which Kudish stood, ordered him to throw himself to the ground where he was covered to the elbows in mud, and then they kicked him to death.

Sobol described this scene in three years after the war while being deposed before a committee of the Jewish Historical Institute. Zielinski sees it to this day, probably as if standing next to his father. That lately elegant lawyer, to whom almost half the town had bowed, had looked like a beggar who doesn't even rule over his own movements. That was a shock to his only, teenage son. He also couldn't quite understand why so many people laughed, pointing with their fingers at his father and his fellow sufferers. When after three days he was able to secretly reach his father, his father only said, "Remember to study." And those were the last words that Adam Zielinski heard from his father. The column of Jews was led in the direction of Holobut in November 1941.

"I still hear those last words of my father," says Adam Zielinski. "I steered my whole life by them. After the war, I graduated the Warsaw Jagiellonian University. In 1956 I emigrated to Vienna, defended my doctorate and, when I stood on my feet financially, started to do that of which I had always dreamed - to write.

AND I WROTE OF HOLOBUT,

because it constantly gave me no peace. It didn't give me peace - the fact that the whole world forgot about that place; after all, several score thousands of people were murdered there."

"After all, I saw with my own eyes," remembers the hero of the story by Zielinski, "the entire road to Holobut, where they were taken, covered with innumerable cigarette holders, fountain pens, eyeglasses, notebooks, briefcases, hats, pillboxes, vests, and even single shoes, obviously lost along the way… The closer to Holobut, the more things along the road! It was hard for them to walk, so to ease their way, they threw away everything, that could be dropped. When they understood where they were being taken, they even threw away money! So much that the attentive ones gathered it up, those who watched the march from the sides of the roads, silent as though turned to stone. And in Holobut, traces of the ill-fated ones was lost."

The small forest near Holobut, cut through with ravines, is today a place where one rids oneself of trash: old pieces of metal, rusty wires, plastic and cardboard packaging, old clothes, or, rather, their remains. It isn't the normal dumping of garbage, but whatever is unneeded at home is thrown away here. Earlier, clay was taken from here and taken to a nearby brickworks. But when the Soviets came in 1944, an officer of the NKWD forbade the taking of clay. Thanks only to this unknown NKWD person, the remains of the Jews put to death were left in Holobut. Whenever there is a rainy period, the rain water washes the remains. A reporter from Austrian television almost fainted as I led her through the ravines during a rain shower. She stepped on a human skull. Zielinski stood as if turned to stone as a local fellow told him,

HOW THE JEWS WERE SHOT.

But in 1941, rifle butts of the torturers chased him from the convoy of those being led to Holobut. He didn't know what would happen to his father, but he knew already that he and his family were now like animals good for hunting. After the arrest of his father, he and his mother had to leave their apartment. In a metal container left over from army gas masks, they were able to bury some boyish treasures in the basement: a diary, photographs of parents and classmates from school. "That is the only thing left to me from those times," says Zielinski, as we are in the basement of the house in which he lived over 60 years ago. Along with the current residents of his former home, we dig, but don't find anything.

Zielinski well remembers the time when, after his father was taken to Holobut, he returned secretly to this apartment. It was two days after they had been told to leave this place with whatever they could carry in their hands. No one had yet taken the apartment, but someone had already ransacked it. The walls had been ripped open, tiles from the floor had been torn up, feathers from blankets flew everywhere. Neighbors were looking for valuables. Almost all Jewish homes in Stryj looked like this. At that time it had been a shock. After 60 years he lived through a second shock; it appeared that after so many experiences he would no longer be surprised at anything.

As we stare at the country road leading from Holobut to the nearby forest, we see an old fellow riding a bicycle. We stop him. I ask, gesturing in the direction of the forest: "Do you, sir, know what happened here during the war?" "I know; Jews were shot." "And how, sir, do you know that?" "I saw exactly that. I was grazing cows in these pastures then; I was 13 years old."

The three of us go in the direction of the first young grove; we climb onto a small mound beyond which is hidden a ravine overgrown with trees, and we listen: "Do you see that ravine? There are Jews buried here," says our guide, Theodore Wasylewicz Janyszyn. "There are nine such ravines, and there are bodies everywhere. They lie shallowly, because there wasn't time to bury them. They were lightly covered with earth, so that after the executions, the earth moved for a long time, as if in waves, because the bullets didn't kill everyone at once, and the wounded were buried with the dead.

Janyszyn gestures with his hand, as if wanting to imitate ocean waves. "The earth moved like this after every execution," he repeats. "The Germans - the officers sat at tables and smoked cigarettes, and the soldiers shot people by the score for half a day - trrrach - and the next." This time Janyszyn tries to imitate the sound of gunfire salvos. "Trrrach, and the next," he repeats, dispassionately.

"What kind of a day was it when those first were brought? Did the sun shine, or did it rain? Did the Jews walk or did they run? Were they dressed or not?" While asking, Adam Zielinski unconsciously imitates our witness; he points to the sky, to his clothes, he runs in place, as if with these motions he wanted to wear off his agitation.

"The first group I remember exactly; the sun was like today. It was good weather," Janyszyn explains dispassionately. "The Germans led the Jews to the edge of the ravine, ordered them to stand in a single line, and trrrach… The first ones were dressed. But the next ones - and they executed people here for two years - they were ordered to undress before the execution." "Why?" I ask. "Because the local residents dug up the earth at night and searched the bodies for valuables," explains Janyszyn. "But even with naked bodies they still dug, looking for gold teeth, earrings, rings."

"I feel worse now than when I saw our plundered apartment in Stryj," says Zielinski. He goes to a tree growing by the ravine, where his father was shot, and breaks off a branch. "This tree grew out of clay fertilized by his blood," he says. And I remember a thread from the story by Zielinski in which one of the residents of Holobut is amazed at his neighbor: "The field adjoining the village is mine! Kociubinski's adjoins the forest. Now look: on mine, it's barely, barely green. But on his? As if bewitched! Bush by bush.  Just spit, for surely the devil is hiding there…".

That field, in the imaginations of the author's tale, was fertilized with the

DUST OF THE MURDERED

Jews. To me, literature based on facts mixes itself here with facts taken from literature. Adam Zielinski, after his escape from Stryj, hid himself in Lwow under the name Kociubinski. At the time, he didn't know that this was the name of a Ukrainian writer who today has a street named after him in Lwow.

There was an uprising in the Stryj ghetto in the spring of 1942, even though the Jews had already earlier been forced to leave their homes and to move to a designated quarter in the town. According to various estimates, there were about 15,000 Jews crowded there from Stryj as well as the surrounding countryside and villages. The history of the Stryj ghetto didn't live to see a historical monograph written about it. Its history must on principle be pieced together from the countless reports written right after the war and from today's memories of the last witnesses of those events.

In the year following the first action against the Stryj Jews a second followed. At 6:00 German police, together with the Ukrainian militia, invaded the ghetto. For three days roundups and assaults continued, in which the Jewish militia did not play an honorable role, helping the Germans and Ukrainians in catching out their fellow countrymen in hiding. Armed with wooden cudgels or horsewhips, they were supposed to keep order. They were directly subordinate to the self-ruling Jews in the ghetto. But they were hated by its residents as much as the Germans were, and maybe even more. "I feared the Jewish Militia the most, because I saw how they beat our children with whips for flogging," declared Hedda Stols just after the war - a small resident of

THE STRYJ GHETTO.

550 Jews were killed on the spot, 5,000 more were loaded into wagons, 150 in each, and taken to the extermination camp in Belzc. One of these "passengers" was Adam Zielinski. But he was able to escape. Wrapped in bandages, old sweaters and wearing three layers of trousers - anything to absorb the shock of the fall - he jumped from the train. The captors didn't notice, didn't shoot, even though earlier attempts at escape had always been accompanied by gunfire.

Zielinski returned to Stryj nights, walking the length of the train tracks. In the ghetto he hid himself with his mother, and so they lived through the next action. The scenario was similar to that of the previous month: the ghetto surrounded at dawn and people pulled from homes, beaten; inhuman cries and shots. Zielinski, his mother and several families hid themselves in previously-prepared bunkers - several dozen persons, including small children. A description of this drama is found in the story of Sydoni Ebner, in the Jewish Historical Institute. "Because they couldn't go out to perform bodily functions, they sat in their own filth. The parents of a 3-year-old boy gave him sleeping draughts so he could endure. Despite this the little boy cried, withering from thirst. His parents then moistened his mouth with urine. A panicky fear gripped the people, for the child moaned, and from outside came sounds of walls being knocked at. This time the mother stopped the child's mouth with the palm of her hand. When she removed it, the child was no longer breathing."

"That episode was well known in the ghetto," says Zielinski. "The mother of that child went mad. I myself decided not to wait for the next action. We escaped to Lwow."

The ghetto in Stryj was liquidated in August of 1943. Every few months it was convulsed by a new action of extermination. As a result, some of its inhabitants were annihilated in Holobut, and some were directed to Belzc.

Their former housekeeper, a Pole, helped Zielinski and his mother to escape. She gave them appropriate clothing, provided food, took them to the station, and put them on the train as her own family. But at the train station in Lwow, it was Poles who recognized them as Jews and pointed them out to the German police.

In Stryj, Judge Janicki, Mr and Mrs Bileccy and the professor of the local high school, Jan Fries, were shot for hiding Jews. In a brochure of Kamila Baranski, published in London under the title "Raiders, to their credit, passed Hasids?", she gives examples of the help given Stryj Jews; she describes the work of the organization National Army "Zegota" of Lwow and Warsaw; she also quotes facts about the hiding of Jews by Ukrainian families. In several dozen tales written after the war by surviving Stryj Jews, one can find descriptions of help lent them by Poles or Ukrainians, but one can also read how much they often had to pay.

Thanks to money sewn into his clothes, Zielinski was able to escape from prison to Butyrkach, to which he made it after the arrest at the train station, and to sneak his mother out of the Lwow ghetto. Farther was Krakow and a return to Lwow, where Zielinski hid until the end of the war, but now alone.

"What happened to your mother?" I ask, as we stand outside the old apartment building in Lwow, from which Zielinski had been able to leave only secretly for over one year. "I don't want to say," motions his hand. "No, that's already a completely different story," he rebuffs the question. So again I look in his story. "There came a time when the Germans cracked down on my mother.  At the same time, one of them forced me, at gunpoint, to watch her execution. To this day I don't remember if I reacted with a shout, with crying, or with absolute apathy…"

At writer's meetings, when he is asked about personal threads in his story, Adam Zielinski avoids unambiguous answers. This, however, always underscores the fact that this is a memorial for all those who were murdered there, the only one memorial he was able to create - literarily, he emphasizes. But he also wanted

TO MEMORIALIZE THIS PLACE,

and, in a common way, to mark some kind of suitable tablet with an inscription. He even gave money for it. But in Holobut, nothing happened. An old acquaintance from Stryj, who took up a collection toward this goal, died several years ago in Warsaw. His family, dispersed over the world, knows nothing of this matter. The last Jews of Stryj living in Israel and the USA are surprised with questions about this.

"And such a memorial should be raised," say residents of Holobut, when asked. "For innocent people are buried there," they emphasize, adding immediately, however, that whether something will be placed there or not will depend on the authorities. Igor Bogdanowicz Tumczyszczyn, the head of Holobut, is also for memorializing the place, but temporizes, "You know, there are bodies and bones all over the Ukraine, that has been our fate. Many such memorials would be needed…"

Joseph Israelowicz Foer is also "for" a memorial, but he immediately explains himself and heaps up the difficulties. "We in Stryj are few, so what can we do; after all, see here," showing clippings from the local newspaper describing how authorities in nearby Sambor did not allow Jews to renovate their cemetery.

Krzysztof Sawicki, the Polish Consul in Lwow, listens understandingly. He doesn't know the history of Holobut, but promises help. He is grateful on receiving Zielinski's book and promises to go with us if we drive to Holobut again.

"For over half a year now I go there at least once a month - alone." Foer promised to find a stone and to arrange for someone to engrave an appropriate inscription. It is settled with Zielinski that it will be a fragment of his story, the one with Natan Rosen, where it requests that a stone be erected. It shouldn't offend anyone; it is, in the end, literature.

Even though there are many stones in the Ukraine, they are, however, exceptionally expensive for foreigners desiring to purchase them. And engraving the inscription, especially in languages other than Ukrainian, is not only expensive, but also causes exceptional difficulties. "Writing in Polish isn't right," Foer warns constantly, "for if the stone is to stand, then write it in any other language, but not in Polish. Do you, sir, not remember the affair of the Orlat Cemetery of Lwow? Stryj is 80 km from Lwow, therefore the authorities here probably have the same argument. Best of all, instead of in Polish, engrave the inscription in English," Foer finally advises. "That will catch the fancy of the Ukrainians, for that is as if a symbol of a common route to Europe, an international language. That will even excite them agreeably, if you understand, sir."

And I almost yielded to the logic of this reasoning. Adam Zielinski allowed himself to be persuaded, and Mrs. Irene Barcz, an enthusiast of erecting a stone in Holobut, also. But at a certain moment - stop, hullo, why should we yield to such pressure and odd arguments? We will return to the first version. The inscription should be engraved in Ukrainian, Yiddish and Polish - in that order and next to each other. For, in the end, the Jewish residents of Stryj, murdered at Holobut, were Polish citizens.

This agreement was supported by Minister Andrej Przewoznik. "We have the appropriate agreement with Ukraine in this matter; most important, however, is the goodwill of the local authorities," emphasizes the chairman of the Counsel for Preserving the Memory of Conflict and Martyrdom.

The local authorities see no obstacles: the stone may stand at Holobut - we accept the inscription - so votes the resolution of the local rural soviet. The document required a vote, it was resolved unanimously.

Eugeniusz Bielak lives and farms near Belzc. There are enough field stones at his place. There are even such as I am seeking - large, of granite. But Bielak doesn't want to sell them. Only after hearing what they are needed for does he propose that I pick out and take whichever one I want, for free. He also offers the help of his plow, and transport to Ukraine.

The one-and-one-half-ton stone engraved with a fragment of the story "Holobut" lands on the private carriage of a resident of Belzc, Zbigniew Myszkowski, the next person in the chain of those who

VOLUNTARILY HELP

memorialize the wartime drama of Holobut. The Ukrainian customs officer slowly reads through the official papers drawn up by the Counsel for Preserving the Memory of Conflict and Martyrdom "I herewith testify," Minister Przewoznik testifies, "that the holder of this document is transporting a granite stone memorializing the death of Natan Rosen as well as the residents of Stryj and its environs who were murdered by Hitler's men in the years 1941 to 1943."

"This Natan Rosen - who is he to you?" asks the customs officer. "Who is this Natan Rosen?" With a surprised question I answer his question. "He is a near, very near person to me," I explain.

"Adam Zielinski knows at least the whole world, almost everyone," Krzysztof Teodor Teoplitz told me, when I asked him about the character of the author of "Holobut". And truly Zielinski is that type of man of the world, who has acquaintances everywhere, and friends; not a few are in Poland. These last he invited above all for the dedication at Holobut. He ensured free travel and accommodations associated with the trip.

In the clearing before Holobut Forest, several dozen people gathered together. Some from Poland, some dozens from Austria, the rest from the Ukraine - our vice consul (the consul was occupied with something else) and the Rabbi came from Lwow. 10 Jews came from Stryj to say kadish, most with yarmulkahs from the Patriotic War. There were also children, local residents with flowers, there was rain and spring thaw. There were prayers, music on trumpets and pandoras as well as speeches. The last were short because the vice consul, though he did not speak, was in a hurry to return to Lwow - he was invited to an exhibition there, and there was only one bus for everyone attending at Holobut.

"Do you remember," I say to Adam Zielinski, "how we stood here in the fall of last year and listened aghast to the tales of a witness to murders? And do you remember that I told you that there would be a stone? Listening with unbelief, you dreamed: if we place that stone, then I would want it to rain, to be windy and cold. And look, you have what you wanted. There is a stone; there is wind and rain. Maybe it's not so cold, maybe the stone isn't erected exactly in the place that you wanted, there also aren't so many friends as you regularly host at home in Vienna, but…"

"But my grandson is here, there are residents of Holobut, and there is something called accomplishment," replies Zielinski. And once again I take up his story and read the ending, reflecting on the discernment of fictional literature and the truth. "It disintegrated as if a new flood were to take place… Who would withstand on Holobut field?" In the unmerciful rain I start my way back, first to town, and then… I think of Jacob Rosen and suddenly it seems that a violent storm nearby does not excuse me in his eyes. (…)"

Why didn't you erect the stone there where it was supposed to be? You forgot that you were to engrave on it those words that were wished for by my father, before they led him to the execution. Sha…

"Sha... lom. Now join in his lead, and once more we simultaneously repeat: "Shalom!"