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

Erased is likely to surprise readers familiar with Omer Bartov's previous works on the Holocaust and its perpetrators. In contrast to those works, this one is highly personal; as he explains in the introduction, it is the product of a middle-aged man whose childhood memory subtly directed him "to look back and listen to the inner voice of his past, to ask the questions that had never been posed: where, when, why, how?" These questions induced him to travel to what was for him "a white space on the map": the towns of eastern Galicia, including his parents' hometown of Buchach (Buczacz). This was, he writes, "a journey into a black hole that had sucked in entire civilizations along with individuals and never-to-be-met family members, making them vanish as if they never existed" (pp. ix–x). Thus, we are presented with a narrative about the victims of the Holocaust, the places in which they were murdered, the neighbors who collaborated in their destruction, and the erasure of their existence and culture in present-day Ukrainian Galicia. In telling his "story of discovery" (p. ix), Bartov moves seamlessly between personal observations and penetrating analysis.

The book is part history, part travelogue, part biography, and part contemporary Ukrainian politics of national identity. In this respect, Erased belongs to the growing body of literature about the East European borderlands during the interwar period. It bears a striking resemblance to Modris Eksteins' Walking Since Daybreak (1999) and Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place (2003). Both authors traversed the borderlands in their quest to comprehend the interethnic violence and nation-building experiments of the early twentieth century. As Eksteins puts it, in these lands "the Holocaust was a state of mind . . . before it was Nazi policy." More specifically, though, Bartov endeavors both to recover the lost memory of "Jewish Galicia" and to critically explicate the selective memory of "Ukrainian Galicia."

The book's large middle section, "Travels in the Borderland," is divided into twenty subsections corresponding to the towns the author visited. Each entry follows roughly the same format: a short history of the town is followed by descriptions of the arrival of the Germans in June or July 1941, mass shootings and ghettoization, and the eventual deportations to Bełżec and the Janowska concentration camp. The repetition does not diminish Bartov's message as the reader follows in his footsteps from one town to the next. On the contrary, it helps to convey a powerful sense of the "black hole" that swallowed the victims and dehumanized the perpetrators.

Against the background of centuries of Jewish life, these matter-of-fact sketches of horrific destruction serve to underscore Bartov's principal concern: Ukrainian society's collective denial of complicity in the Holocaust, with its manifestations ranging from selective memory of the past to deliberate distortion and falsification of history. Already in L'viv, the first stop on his journey, Bartov notes the sparse identification and description of remnants of Galicia's Jewish past (synagogues, schools, cemeteries, and so on). Indicative of this "poverty of memory and the selective marginalization of the past" (p. 24) is an exhibit at the city's Museum of the History of Religions. While the exhibit includes some Jewish cultural artifacts and depictions of shtetl life, "the ultimate fate of Jews," Bartov notes, "is not mentioned anywhere in the gallery" (p. 26); and while a brochure refers to Jewish life before "the homicide in the flames of the Holocaust," there is not a word about "who it was that lit the 'flames of the Holocaust' and helped stoke them or helped themselves to the property of those devoured by them" (p. 20).

In most of the towns Bartov visited, almost all traces of the Jewish past have disappeared. All that remains are decrepit synagogue buildings and utterly untended cemeteries; the cemetery in Zolotyi Potik, Bartov's mother's birthplace, now serves as a goat...