Pokusch

Rediscovering family history in a town in Ukraine: although 70 years have passed, it seems that there, time has come to a standstill. An emotional journey through East Galicia and the past.

My father was born in East Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, but later belonged to Poland, then Russia, then the German Reich, and finally, became part of the Soviet Union. Today it is located in Ukraine. My father was a Polish uhlan (lancer), my grandfather still an imperial soldier in the service of the Austrian Emperor. After the Shoah, my father refused to ever go back again. All that he had left were stories of amazing adventures. Many of them were completely incredible. He was incredible. I always admired and adored him, and since he died, hardly a day goes by when I do not miss him. Is it really him that I miss, or just a wistful fantasy that I've concocted about my father, who died much too young? Am I glorifying and idealising him? Do I perhaps want to be the same kind of father to my children as he was to me? I have already become a grandfather myself, and it has become increasingly important to me not just to have a feeling about my father, but also to have objective proof of whether he really was the way I've always seen him. I even felt guilty about my recurring longings to know for sure if what he had told me were just stories, or whether he really was the hero that he had always been to me. I was also afraid to find out the truth. I didn't want to discover anything that could blemish the picture I had of my father, or taint my love for him in the slightest - but I also wanted to be sure, to put an end to the flashes of doubt in the logical part of my brain, one way or the other.

My Journey

I flew out in the summer of 2012 - initially to Lemberg, which is now called Lviv. There followed an odyssey over hill and dale, a two-and-a-half hour journey along roads that hardly deserve the name, jolting from one pothole to the next until I finally found my way to Stanislau (Stanisławów), known today as Ivano Frankivsk. About 150 km further on lies Yablonica, the East Galician shtetl, my father's small village in the Carpathians, which is now called Yablunytsia. Before my trip, I had arranged with Ms Flys, a local historian and museum officer, and Halya Petrosanyak, a poet from Stanisławów, that they would accompany me on my journey of discovery, acting as interpreters and giving me the benefit of their intimate knowledge of local matters. Thanks to the two of them, when Halya picked me up to take me to Stanisławów, I already knew where we would find the synagogue and the land which formerly belonged to my family in Yablonica. I also knew that my family had owned a whole hill, made up of woods and land, which my family and another family had inherited in common. As Halya later informed me, she is a Hutsul, and also grew up in a village not unlike my father's shtetl. My father always spoke very contemptuously of the Hutsuls and Ruthenians, and their primitive, uneducated, violent, drunken and sanctimonious hatred of the Jews...

From Stanisławów to Yablonica

Stanisławów currently has about 200,000 inhabitants, and appears to be a free city in a post-communist sense, but is sleepy, completely non-westernised and certainly unmodernised. Traces of the past remain, as if frozen in time. The city has barely changed - very few shops, and no advertising or other symbols of a prosperous market economy. I booked into a rather odd hotel right next to the synagogue, renovated by a Jew who moved into the "Jew-free" city after the war, and run on strictly kosher principles, despite the fact that, except for people like me in search of the past, it has almost no Jewish guests, unsurprisingly. The walls are adorned with "Stürmer"-like caricatures, the bitter irony of which is probably lost on most of the guests. My first stop was to visit the rabbi, a Lubavitcher, who told me of many destroyed graveyards, and of at least a few commemorative stones erected as reminders of the executions. Today, there are perhaps three dozen Jews in Stanisławów, formerly home to around 35,000. Out in the middle of nowhere, where there are hardly any Jews, the rabbi has kosher meat on the table - imported from Vienna, no less. Now that's something I really approved of - ultimately, we are unbeatable! In Yablonica, Ms Flys, who I had also involved in my research, advised me to make use of the Catholic feast day that was just taking place: "All the old people will be there, so we will be able to talk to them". Passing the Orthodox Church, we arrived at the Greek Catholic church and the cemetery, where a dense crowd, made up mostly of women, had the Sunday sermon raining down upon it through loudspeakers. We attempted to find someone who was willing to talk to us among the traditionally and festively-attired Hutsuls, who my father had so despised. Conversations came to a rapid halt, with something along the lines of "Whatever happened, happened, and we don't want to talk about it". Worried that the people nearby would overhear the conversation, or at least our attempts to hold a conversation, they turned away from us so quickly that we had no opportunity to ingratiate ourselves with them. Only then did I realise then how complex the forms of oppression are in these villages. Of course I knew about the oppression and persecution of the Jews, but what only then became clear to me was the perfidy - the fact that our oppressors, these Ruthenians and Catholics who liked to look down with so much passionate hatred on us Jews, had experienced a long history of oppression themselves - first by the Poles, and then the Germans, the Hungarians and the Russians. This touched something in me, and didn't make it easier for me to deal with my feelings.

Fathers

We saw a very old-looking man coming down the hill. As I later discovered, he was a little younger than me. He wasn't much more talkative than the others had been, but he did point out some houses at the bottom of the hill that his parents had told him about, the former "Jewish houses", and referred us to another man, who this time, really was old. His name was Mazalak, and he was born in 1930. I asked him about my father and my family. Engelstein? He didn't know the name, which may well have been because it was not normal to use surnames in the village. In the end, I asked him if he had ever known any Jews. Like a shot, he replied: "Pokusch and Ksil." My heart skipped a beat. My father's nickname, which I had previously mentioned to no one, was Pokusch. My father also told me that he was known as "the tall one" among the Jews because he was the biggest in the family, and in Polish, "Pokurcz" means "tiny", whatever the connection may be. Ksil was his brother, Karol. "Pokusch saved my father's life!" exclaimed Mazalak, and burst into tears. That was the most important thing that he remembered about my father, but a lot had happened before that. Mazalak's father worked in road construction. In 1942, in Vorokhta, when the Germans, with the assistance of the local people, began shooting both the local Jews and those who had been deported from Hungary, he said the right thing at the right time: "Don't go into your house. They're shooting Jews." – which was exactly what my father had told me. My father and his brother fled. With the aid of forged papers, they made their way through Romania, finally ending up in a Hungarian concentration camp, whence they also escaped with aid of a countess who considered herself to be Polish. The story of this time alone would enough to fill several books, but I kept it brief in order to resume the thread in Yablonica, whence my father, his brother and my aunt had returned, following an incredibly adventurous trek by foot, because they thought the end of the war was near, and they would have an improved chance of survival and better living conditions under the Russians. Unfortunately, they got their timing wrong: when they got there, the Russians still hadn't arrived, and they were trapped once again. That had been the decisive moment, as Mazalak explained: "Vasylyna Tynkaljuk hid Pokusch in a hole in the ground."

Vasylyna

We went in search of the woman who Mazalak had spoken about. We went into the house that he showed us, which was actually more like a hut, and found an old woman. Vasylyna Motruk (born Tynkaljuk) was living there with her only son, an alcoholic. She was lying in bed and could barely still hear. When we asked her about hiding Jews, two men and a pregnant woman, she immediately shouted "Pokusch!" and pointed in the direction of the hole in which they had been buried for six months. Vasylyna began to cry and sing psalms. The old woman was the foster child of the couple that had once saved Pokusch and the others. The way she told the story, when Pokusch begged her foster mother Kateryna Mysjuk to save him, she first answered: "I will have to ask Mychailo, my husband", but then Vasylyna's foster parents gave her the task of digging a hole in the ground, between an apple tree and a pear tree. At the time, this meant that they were also putting their own lives at risk - they had no doubt that their neighbours would have reported them immediately if they had found out, and that the Gestapo would have made short work of them. They took food to the people hiding underground only at night, taking it to the apple tree in a bucket, pretending that they were going to fetch water. They were terrified that they would be shot, but they risked it anyway. For six months, my father, his brother and his brother's pregnant wife were almost never able to leave the hole in the ground - only at new moon, under cover of darkness. I wanted to see the hole. Vasylyna's son offered to show it to us, but she didn't want him to at first. "People will talk." She was still scared. In the end, we went to see it. The remains of the earth pit were still recognisable, and the apple tree was still standing. I asked: "Did my father ever pay them back for their help?" Yes, he did, said Vasylyna: he later gave the family a house, land and money. After that, Vasylyna married a man serving with the anti-Russian UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), who was later sentenced to 25 years in Siberia. The whole family spent the next ten years in hard labour in Siberia. Then he was pardoned, and the family returned. When they got home, they were denounced as traitors or Russian pigs and the house which Pokusch had given them had been destroyed. After that, they built the hut where we had found Vasylyna as an old woman with her son. Her husband left her for a younger woman, shortly after their return from Siberia. "I owe my long life to Pokusch," she told me without any sign of the bitterness which she would have been entitled to feel, "he prayed for me."

Pokusch becomes Mayor

What follows is an account of how my father managed to get into a position where he could repay Vasylyna's family after the war. After six months in the hole in the ground, he and his brother had long beards, like rabbis - or like priests, and at the time, priests were just as suspect to the Russians as the Jews were to the Nazis. Instead of having to hide the fact that they were Jews, they now had to prove that they were. In order to convince the Russian-Jewish officer who had their fate in his hands, they began to pray in Hebrew. That convinced him - and since so few credible non-Nazis were to be found in the area in 1944, the Russians made my father the Mayor of what had become a "Jew-free" Yablonica. He had often told me about this, and I must confess that I previously had moments, for which I was ashamed after this trip, when I was not sure whether it had been true or just an exciting story told by a father to his child. As I discovered, it was the truth. My father's brother and his heavily pregnant wife were now back in Hungary, and my father, the Mayor of Yablonica, went from house to house, showing the Russians who the Nazis were. He pointed out the murderers and plunderers, who were herded together at a collection point "as the Jews had been", as Mazalak remembered all too well. However, the next stop for the murdering and plundering Ukrainians was Siberia, not the place in the nearby woods where the mass shootings of Jews had occurred. Mazalak told us of the moment when his father was due to board the train to Siberia. Pokusch, my father, said: "No, not that man." He had not forgotten what "that man" had done for him - he had saved Pokusch's life, and now Pokusch had paid him back. The old man before me was in tears. My father's time as Mayor of Yablonica ended after he appeared on the hit list of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and he realised that there, alone among enemies, where he couldn't even find the graves of his own people, there was no future for him. Hidden once again by farmers, this time in a hay cart, he fled back to Hungary. The old man had confirmed what my father had told me.

The other Jews

I asked about the other Jews. There weren't any others. Supposedly, a few others had also been "hidden". "I don't know," we were often told, or "I can't remember." However, using the name "Pokusch" continued to provoke responses such as: "He was a good man" or "He was rich." Some of my fearful and hesitant informants had also become rich after the war. For saving Jews? They didn't want to say. There had been mass shootings, that much was certain, although there is not even so much as a commemorative stone to be seen. The Russians had refused to erect one, on the grounds that it wasn't Jews that had been shot there, but Soviet citizens like everywhere else. Another woman said of Pokusch: "He used to sell my mother towels on instalment." We were told that the firing squads used to go off duty at 5 pm, just as if they had been working in an office. Once, a young girl was even sent back home: "Go home, beautiful child." The rest of her family had already been executed. The only trace that was to be found of the former Jewish cemetery in Tatarov, where my ancestors were once buried, was a single large and lonely gravestone which the poor people hadn't yet taken to build their homes. This one stone was probably simply too heavy to carry. "There were shootings by the river," we were told by two old women walking a dog through where the old cemetery had been. The former Gestapo building is now occupied by an oligarch. A transformer building now stands on the site where the synagogue used to be. In Yaremche, we found an antique shop that sold Judaica, including Kiddush cups and dozens of Shabbat candlesticks. I bought two very simple ones - who knows, maybe one of my relatives had once held them in their hands. "The season is in the winter," said the shopkeeper, "I have more variety then." I thought to myself: "They are still selling the Jews today, although they already wiped them all out long ago." There, time has more or less stood still. Today, many of them are still just as they were back then - aggressive, primitive, patriarchal, and behind their inn house bravado, fearful. However, in extreme situations, some of them are still able to see beyond their belief systems and draw their own conclusions - and perhaps even to risk their own lives to save the life of a Jew.

Conclusion

I drove back home again. Rarely had I been so aware of how fortunate I was to be able to do that. I could simply return to my home, my wife, my family and my life. What I had experienced hadn't changed me, but in a way, perhaps it had. It was the most emotional and exhausting trip of my life. For a while, I was unable to sleep, beset by a mixture of unbridled anger, mourning and happiness - and by a feeling of gratitude that there are always a few people on any side who behave like real people. I have never felt like a victim. I can't stand victim stories. It wounds my pride that I am supposed to behave like a victim. I think it would be obscene to consider myself a victim, because nothing has happened to me which even remotely compares to the fate of my parents' generation. I never wanted to "decorate" myself with the suffering of my ancestors - that would be too easy. After this trip, I want to do that even less. I never want to be a victim - never!