Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (86 page)

The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Galicia is difficult to gauge. It may have encouraged the new Emperor Charles to seek a separate peace. Some soldiers, infected by the revolutionary bacillus, threatened to mutiny; most simply demanded to go home. Many of them, while marching off, turned against their imperial rulers less in the name of international revolution than in that of national liberation. Czech and Slovak regiments demanded a Czech-Slovak state; Croats and Slovenes aspired to a new Yugoslavia; Poles talked about a Polish Republic; and Ukrainians about a free Ukraine.

The ferment came to a head in October 1918. The Central Powers were now falling back in disarray on the Western Front, and the emperors in Berlin and Vienna were facing calls for abdication. In Galicia, the troops of the Royal and Imperial Army, together with Austrian officialdom, were melting away. Officers threw away the keys of their fortresses. Appeals to Vienna went unanswered, and in any case Vienna seemed to be issuing no orders. Kraków was left in the hands of the local garrison. Lemberg was handed over to a division of Ukrainian Riflemen. In west Galicia, a Polish Liquidation Committee declared itself guardian of all ex-imperial assets. In east Galicia, a ‘West Ukrainian Socialist Republic’ was surfacing in parallel to an Austro-German Republic in Vienna. On 11 November the Emperor Charles declared that he was withdrawing from government, and absolved all officials from their oath of office. Unlike the German Kaiser, he did not abdicate but withdrew to his country house at Eckertsau to await developments. After four months, he left for Switzerland, and the Empire just petered out. Ironically, since the emperor had also been king of Galicia and Lodomeria, the helpless kingdom petered out with it. After months of huge confusion, it was joined to the reborn Polish Republic, whose head of state, freshly released from his German prison, was Józef Piłsudski.

Galicia’s afterlife lasted at the most for one generation. The kingdom itself was never restored, but the multinational community which it had fostered lived on under a succession of political regimes and was not definitively broken up until the Second World War. In 1918–21, the partition of Galicia led to violent conflicts. The Poles of Lemberg rebelled against the West Ukrainian Republic within a week, drove the Ukrainian troops out by their own efforts, and then, calling on military assistance from central Poland, freed the whole of Galicia from Ukrainian control.
⁶⁷
They then embarked on a political campaign to ensure that all of the former Galicia be awarded to the Polish Republic. At the same time, the territory became embroiled in a wider war between Poland and the Soviet Republics. In spring a 1920 it provided the base for Piłsudski’s march on Kiev in the company of his allied Ukrainian armies. That summer, it was the scene of a Bolshevik invasion, headed by the fearsome
Konarmiya
of ‘Red Cossacks’. In the autumn, following Poland’s decisive victory over the Red Army at Warsaw, it returned in its entirety to Polish rule.
⁶⁸

In the 1920s and 1930s, reunited and forming a composite part of inter-war Poland, the former Galicia enjoyed a brief period of respite. West Galicia, centred on Kraków, returned to its historical name of Małopolska. East Galicia/West Ukraine, centred on Lemberg (now Lwów), was given the unhistorical name of ‘Eastern Little Poland’. As in late Austrian times, the Poles held the reins of power. Administration and education were strongly Polonized, and for the first time illiteracy was largely abolished. In several easterly districts, substantial numbers of Polish settlers, usually war veterans from 1920, were given grants of land to strengthen the border areas. Loyalty was maintained by a relatively benign regime, by a strong military presence, and by fear of the neighbouring Soviet republics, where political, social and economic conditions were infinitely more oppressive. Refugees reaching the former Galicia from Lenin’s ‘Red Terror’, from Stalin’s forced collectivization or from the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 left little doubt in people’s minds about the horrors of the ‘Soviet paradise’.

The problems encountered by Galicia’s non-Polish minorities, which were to be a favourite topic of Communist propaganda in the decades that followed, have often been exaggerated. The Jews did encounter a certain measure of discrimination, especially during the Polish–Soviet War. But stories of widespread pogroms, though oft repeated, were dismissed by successive international inquiries. The notorious ‘Lemberger Pogrom’ of November 1918 turned out to be a military massacre in which three-quarters of the victims were Christian.
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The Ruthenians/Ukrainians, too, encountered painful episodes. Rural poverty continued to afflict the villages of so-called ‘Polska B’, that is, the poorer, eastern part of inter-war Poland. Though the constitution guaranteed the equality of all citizens, Ukrainian language and culture were never put on an equal footing with Polish. In 1931 a rural strike was countered by brutal pacifications from the Polish military; in 1934 the murder by Ukrainian terrorists of the Galician-born minister of the interior, Bronisław Pieracki, provoked harsh repressions. Even so, none of these ordeals bore any resemblance either to the atrocities in progress across the Soviet border or to the catastrophes that were about to strike.

Ex-Galicians who became prominent after 1918 were legion. They included Wincenty Witos, peasant politician and premier;
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Stefan Banach, mathematician;
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Karel Sobelsohn, ‘Radek’, Bolshevik;
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Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad), Muslim convert;
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Michał Bobrzyński, historian;
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Martin Buber, philosopher;
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Joseph Retinger, a ‘Father of Europe’;
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Omelian Pritsak, Harvard orientalist;
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Joseph Roth, Austrian writer;
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Bruno Schulz, Polish writer and artist;
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S. Y. Agnon, Israeli novelist;
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Władysław Sikorski, general and politician;
⁸¹
Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg, Polish officer;
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Rudolf Weigl, microbiologist;
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Ludwig von Mises, economist;
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Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist;
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and Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter.
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Space permits only one of these diverse figures to be described. The highly eccentric career of Leopold Weiss (1900–92) was prompted by circumstances that were fairly common among educated Galicians. Weiss was born in Lemberg to a family of liberal Jewish professionals, who took religious tolerance for granted. His father, the son and grandson of rabbis, had broken with tradition to become a lawyer; and, though the young Leopold’s parents gave him a standard Talmudic education, they took great care not to press religious views on him. The result, he said, was a feeling that they lacked any real conviction. Hence, when he arrived in Palestine in the 1920s he parted company with his Zionist colleagues from Galicia, made friends with Arabs, converted to Islam, and took the name of Muhammad Asad. He was the author of
The Message of the Qur’an
(1964), one of the best-known introductions to Islamic teaching for foreigners. After living for a time in Saudi Arabia and befriending King Saud, he married a Saudi wife, and moved to British India, eventually serving as Pakistan’s first ambassador to the United Nations. In 1939 he was arrested by the British as an enemy alien. His parents, who had stayed in Lemberg, perished in the Holocaust.
⁸⁷

In 1939–45 the former Galicia belonged to the slice of Europe which suffered greater human losses than anywhere in previous European history. The Polish Republic was destroyed in four weeks in September 1939 by the collusion of Hitler’s Wehrmacht with Stalin’s Red Army. By the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 28 September, the land and people of the defunct Republic were divided between German and Soviet zones of occupation. The southernmost stretch of the dividing line ran along the River San (along the old border between west and east Galicia). Then the killings and deportations began. In the German zone, Kraków, renamed Krakau, was made the capital of the SS-ruled General Government; Oświe˛cim, renamed Auschwitz, saw the installation of the Nazis’ largest concentration camp. In the Soviet zone, Lemberg (now Lvov) became the headquarters of a brutal Communist regime enforcing Stalinist norms. Up to a million people – Poles, Ukrainians and Jews – were condemned either to the Soviet concentration camps of the Gulag, or to exile in the depths of Siberia or of Central Asia.
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In the middle years of the war, 1941–4, following Hitler’s reneging on the Nazi–Soviet Pact and ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the area of German occupation was extended far to the east. East Galicia, now
Distrikt Galizien
, was added to the General Government, and Nazi policies for reconstructing the racial composition of their
Lebensraum
swung into action. Virtually all Galician Jews were murdered, either shot in cold blood or transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Sobibor.
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Slightly later, part of the Ukrainian underground launched a programme of ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered.
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The Waffen-SS raised only one division of Ukrainian volunteers in the former Galicia, the XIV Waffen-SS
Galizien
, exclusively for military duties against the Soviet Union;
⁹¹
two or three Waffen-SS divisions were typically raised in each of many other occupied countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary. On the other side, scores of Ukrainian divisions fought in the Red Army. The clandestine Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA) duly launched a desperate campaign to defend its homeland simultaneously against both Hitler and Stalin. They, their dependants and their sympathizers were annihilated.
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In 1944–5 the Red Army returned with a vengeance. The Stalinist authorities were determined to uphold the frontier-line agreed with the Nazis in 1939, and hence to perpetuate the division of the former Galicia. What is more, they ruled that the remaining Polish population was to be concentrated to the west of the line, and Ukrainians to the east. Vast tides of fugitive humanity flowed back and forth. Recalcitrants were driven out of their homes. The Poles of east Galicia/eastern Małopolska/
Distrikt Galizien
, now labelled ‘repatriants’, were packed onto trains and dispatched from Soviet territory. Almost the entire surviving Polish population of Lemberg was sent to Wrocław/Breslau, the capital of Silesia, where it replaced the expelled German citizenry.
⁹³
This was social engineering on an unprecedented scale.

The districts adjoining the new Polish–Soviet frontier were hit particularly hard. One example must suffice. Ustrzyki Dolne lay on the bank of the River San. Its multinational Galician make-up had stayed intact till 1939. A Jewish majority predominated in the town, though there were also some Poles and a few Ruthenians. One of its prominent Jewish citizens, Moses Fränkel, had been a long-serving mayor. In the surrounding mountainous countryside, a Ruthenian Lemko peasantry lived alongside an old German rural colony. None of these groups survived the war. The Poles of Ustrzyki were deported en masse by the Soviets in 1939, almost all of them dying from maltreatment or the Siberian cold.
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The Germans, by Nazi-Soviet agreement, were forcibly sent to the so-called ‘
Warthegau
’ to replace expelled natives.
*
In 1942 the Jews of Ustrzyki were rounded up by the Wehrmacht, marched to a temporary transit station, and then sent to the extermination camp at Sobibór. This only left the Ruthenian Lemkos, who were rounded up and dispersed by the Communist authorities in 1946–7 in an act of ethnic cleansing called ‘Operation Vistula’, launched on the pretext of rooting out the remnants of the wartime Ukrainian underground.
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By that time, Ustrzyki was a ghost town, emptied of all its pre-war inhabitants. The mountain villages were deserted, the houses had been torched and razed, the orchards had turned wild; the fields, untended, were overgrown. All that remained were a few ruined churches and synagogues, and the vandalized tombstones of the cemeteries.
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The former east Galicia, forcibly Ukrainianized, now formed part of the Ukrainian SSR. The former west Galicia, artificially Polonized, belonged to the Polish People’s Republic. The new Soviet– Polish frontier reduced contacts to a minimum. The Ustrzyki district was finally restored to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1951.