Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (19 page)

Neither of these nationalist proclamations, the Ukrainian or the Jewish, should be understood to express the desires of the nation concerned, or even for that matter the convictions of the authors. With the destruction of the Polish state and the advance of German power, an alliance with Nazis could seem logical, at least to radicals who expected the old order to collapse anyway. Of course, those who issued such appeals did not intend to be used by the Nazis but rather to use them for their own purposes, however unrealistic this calculation might have been. Even the expressions of ideological sympathy need not be taken too literally: Some Ukrainian nationalists had once been communists, and Lehi would shift towards a pro-Soviet orientation a few years later.

Every method of changing the world has advantages and disadvantages. Different tactics generate different needs. A group that chooses legions, as Jabotinsky was still urging Jews in Palestine to do, gambles that the occupying empire will win the war and will then owe something to the oppressed but supportive minority after the victory. A group that chooses terror needs the occupying empire to be destroyed, but almost always lacks the strength to carry out such a deed itself. Therefore it has an objective need for an outside backer. This need for help was the political resource available, in theory, to the Germans.

These Jewish and Ukrainian offers of collaboration with Nazi Germany had to fail, and did fail, and in a certain way failed together. In making their offer to Hitler, Ukrainian nationalists were revealing the political resource, a vulnerability that Hitler did exploit up to a point: the desire for a state. Because German forces really were going to enter lands inhabited by Ukrainians, it was possible for the German leadership to turn the desire of Ukrainian nationalists for a state towards their own purposes. With Jews in Palestine, matters were entirely different. No German troops would enter Palestine; and even if they had, they would have encountered an Arab rather than a Jewish majority. Insofar as the Germans wanted to exploit a local political force, it was far simpler for them to direct Arab nationalism against both the British and the Jews, as had been their practice already in the 1930s.

The Nazi leadership could reconcile, after its own fashion, the Jewish and the Ukrainian nationalist appeals. Hitler did favor the elimination of Jews from Europe, as Stern understood. But he had no desire to create a Jewish state, even beyond Europe, even as a way to draw Jews away from Europe. Germany was willing to use Ukrainians, as Ukrainian nationalists hoped. But that was only because the Germans were intent upon conquering Ukraine. The Nazis opposed Ukrainian statehood and would imprison the Ukrainian nationalists who declared independence. Insofar as Ukrainians collaborated with Germans, it would be as local administrators and policemen, with no political authority. It was precisely the murder of Jews that would become the Nazi substitute for political activity in Ukraine (and elsewhere). In 1941, the Nazis would tell aspiring political collaborators that the liberation to which they could contribute was liberation from the Jews, and that any future political cooperation would depend upon participation in this project. Thus Berlin addressed its Jewish and its Ukrainian problems together, twisting political aspirations toward racial murder and thereby beginning a murderous Final Solution.

In 1940, the application of Soviet power in eastern Europe during the German conquest of western Europe drove the Jews into an impossible position. Jews suffered as much or more than any other group under Soviet rule. They lost much from the end of Polish law, which was the basis of the commerce by which many made a living and of the property rights that gave their urban existence a foundation. They lost the communal autonomy that they had enjoyed under Polish rule and the associated rights to practice religion, run schools, and maintain contacts with Jews around the world. Jews were deported to the Gulag in large numbers in April and June 1940. The Jews of the second group were refugees of the German zone of Poland who imagined that the war would end and that they could return to their homes and businesses in places then occupied by the Germans. They thus declined Soviet citizenship, unaware that what they were being offered was a choice between that and the Gulag.

In the first half of 1940, when eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets but Lithuania was still an independent state, Jews fled from the enlarged USSR to Lithuania in the tens of thousands. Along with the large-scale attempts of Jews to return from the Soviet to the German occupation zone and the mass refusal by Jews of Soviet passports, this was another very strong sign that most Jews did not actually wish Soviet rule for themselves. The NKVD reported that Jewish refugees were particularly hostile to Soviet rule. But the Jews’ options were narrowing. The German victory over France in June 1940 meant a long war and thus no immediate prospect for the restoration of Poland. The Soviet occupation of Lithuania that same month destroyed the possibility of shelter within a neighboring and relatively supportive state. Judging from how Jews voted with their feet, the general order of preferences had been (1) Lithuania, (2) Poland, (3) the Soviet Union, and (4) Nazi rule. As of summer 1940, the possible rulers of east European Jews were reduced to two: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Since emigration was for most east European Jews all but unthinkable—Palestine and America being closed—their mental geography was now limited to these two options.

With the wider world unattainable, with conventional states destroyed, with Nazi Germany on the march, Jews had no choice but to see the USSR as the lesser evil. For most of them, this was indeed a choice between varieties of evil. The joke among Jews in Łuck was that the life preserved by Soviet power was life imprisonment. As one Galician Jew remembered, already under the Soviet regime “fathers of families had become like loosely hanging limbs. The framework of their lives was torn away; their families became unsteady; their desire for society disappeared; and the authority of Jewish conscience crumbled.” The special Nazi enmity to Jews put them in a different position from all of their neighbors under Soviet power in 1939 and 1940, who could at least imagine that a German invasion would put Soviet repression to an end. The combination of a German threat and a Soviet reality left Jews doubly vulnerable. Given their greater fear of Nazi Germany, Jews could seem like the collective ally of the Soviet power that had in fact just dismantled their traditional communities and deported or killed many of their most active men and women.

The Jewish and Ukrainian questions are only a faint suggestion of the political resource that Soviet occupation delivered to Nazi Germany. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Lehi were fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities. An infinitely greater political resource arose when the Soviet Union destroyed entire nation-states, such as Lithuania and Latvia. Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream.

Lithuanians and Latvians had enjoyed statehood between the wars, but lost it as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In this respect the Lithuanian and Latvian position was like the Polish one. Yet unlike Poland, which had been divided and destroyed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union together, Lithuania and Latvia were occupied and eliminated by the Soviet Union alone. Lithuanians and Latvians, unlike Poles, could therefore imagine a German liberation from Soviet power. Poles experienced a simultaneous double occupation, Lithuanians and Latvians a consecutive double occupation. During the German occupation, Jews in Lithuania and Latvia could thus be blamed for what happened during the Soviet period—not just for local oppressions, but for an entire national calamity. This was a tragically unique situation.

Before the consecutive Soviet-German occupation, Lithuanian and Latvian Jews had little reason to expect the fate that would befall them. Interwar Lithuania was a right-wing dictatorship, but not an antisemitic one. The dictator, Antanas Smetona, warned at home and abroad against racial and religious discrimination, and he campaigned in particular against what he called the “zoological nationalism and racism” of the Hitlerian variety. His enemies on the Far Right called him the “king of the Jews.” Such people he generally had imprisoned. Not a single Jew was killed in a pogrom in interwar Lithuania. The one major case of anti-Jewish violence led to arrests, a trial, and prosecution.

By the standards of Europe in the late 1930s, Lithuania was a refuge for Jews. In 1938 and 1939, some 23,000 Jews fled to Lithuania, some from Nazi Germany, some from the Soviet Union. Among them was Rafał Lemkin, who later invented the term “genocide.” In September 1939, Germany expelled some 1,500 Jews from Suwałki, a Polish town on the Lithuanian border that was to be incorporated into the Reich. This was the second time in a quarter century that such a thing had happened: Avraham Stern’s family, and many others, had been deported from Suwałki by the Russian imperial army in 1915. These Suwałki Jews were welcomed and cared for by Lithuanian authorities. During the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, the German leadership tried to encourage Lithuania to make claims against Poland, which the Lithuanian leadership refused to do. This was all the more significant since the Lithuanian government had been claiming the city of Vilnius from Poland for twenty years. The independent Lithuanian state, unlike the Soviet Union, declined to be a German ally as the war began.

As a result of the German-Soviet victory and the destruction of the Polish state, however, Lithuania did make some territorial gains. The Soviet Union granted the city of Vilnius, taken from northeastern Poland, to Lithuania. This added about a hundred thousand more Jews to the Lithuanian population. Many Jews saw Lithuanian rule as less nationalist than Polish rule, as indeed it was, at least with respect to them. As Soviet forces withdrew from the city and Lithuanian forces entered in late October 1939, residents of the city, mostly Poles, attacked Jews. The Lithuanianization of the city that followed was directed against the Polish rather than the Jewish population. Lithuania set about making Vilnius its capital and transporting tens of thousands of ethnic Lithuanians to the city.

In late 1939 and early 1940, Zionists and religious Jews saw Vilnius, which was a major Jewish city inside what was still then an independent state, as a place of safety. Zionists fled the Soviet zone of Poland on the correct assumption that the Soviets would otherwise destroy their organizations and arrest them. For Jews seeking a refuge from the enlarging USSR, Vilnius held a special hope. The writer Benzion Benshalom recalled the mood of Jews seeking an escape from German and Soviet power: “Faces were aglow, eyes ablaze, hearts feverish. Vilna!” (Ironically, his brother was a communist.) The leadership of Betar fled from the German occupation zone through the Soviet occupation zone to Vilnius, which they then treated as their base. “Only then,” as one of them remembered, “did we breathe more freely.” In London, Jabotinsky referred to the Betar men who made it to Lithuania as the “saved.”

The position of Jews in interwar Latvia was, if anything, somewhat better. Latvia was also ruled by a right-wing authoritarian regime, but not one that was oriented to race or antisemitism. The Latvian leader, Kārlis Ulmanis, a graduate of the University of Nebraska, took for granted the multinational character of his state. The main ethnic conflict in Latvia was not between Latvians and Jews but between Latvians and Germans. Nevertheless, Germans, like Jews, served as ministers of government in interwar Latvia. The Orthodox Jewish political party, Agudat Yisrael, had some sway with right-wing Latvian governments, as did the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, with left-wing governments. Latvia, like Lithuania, passed no racist or antisemitic legislation before the war, and took in Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s. As in Lithuania there was a Far Right movement with an antisemitic stance in Latvia, and as in Lithuania it was illegal before the war.

Latvia and Lithuania were similar in that they were small countries (populations about two million and three million) with substantial Jewish populations governed by authoritarian regimes whose policies were tolerant by the standards of the Europe of the late 1930s. Their fates were brought together in June 1940, when the Soviet Union took advantage of the terms of its alliance with Nazi Germany to occupy and annex them both. Very quickly the Soviets decapitated the Latvian and Lithuanian political classes, deporting to the Gulag most of the leaders who had not already fled.