The first action in Bolechów

On Tuesday 28 October 1941 two vehicles arrived from Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) in Bolechów (Bolekhiv), a small town in the foothills of the Carpathians between Stryj and Dolina: one carried officers of the German Security Police, the other Ukrainian policemen. According to survivors’ accounts, the Germans, each paired with a Ukrainian policeman, went round the town with a list of names drawn up in the local town administration. In this way about a thousand Jews were detained – rabbis, doctors, merchants, the well-off and the educated – and locked in the hall of the Catholic House. For a whole day and night they were beaten, tortured and humiliated there. The following afternoon lorries took them to the Taniawa forest outside the town, where a pit had already been dug. According to witnesses, about 800 people were shot there, some of them buried alive. It was the first of the actions in which the Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliaries murdered almost all the Jews of Bolechów between 1941 and 1943.

The exact number of victims is not known. Survivors spoke of about a thousand detained and 800 shot in the forest, and various tallies give between 800 and almost a thousand killed, counting those who died in the Catholic House itself. The German historian Dieter Pohl, author of the standard study of the crimes of the Security Police post in Stanisławów, writes more cautiously of “several hundred” Jews shot by a detachment from that post, and dates the execution to 29–30 October. Survivors’ accounts give the arrests as 28 October and the shooting as 29 October.

Bolechów in the autumn of 1941

Bolechów lay in the pre-war Stanisławów Voivodeship. It was an old Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian town, known for its saltworks and tanneries; in the 19th century Jews made up the majority of its inhabitants. Around 1940 about 3,000 Jews lived there, and their number grew during the war because the Germans resettled Jews from surrounding villages and small towns in Bolechów. After the Soviet invasion of Poland the town found itself in the Ukrainian SSR; at the beginning of July 1941 the Germans occupied it, and on 1 August it became part of the District of Galicia of the General Government.

The area in which Bolechów lay came under the Security Police post in Stanisławów, headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger. Three weeks earlier his men had murdered the Jews of Nadwórna, and on 12 October between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews in Stanisławów itself, on the day that became known as Bloody Sunday. After that the Germans set about murdering the Jews in one small town of the region after another: on 16 October in Delatyn and Jaremcze, then in Bolechów, and in the following weeks in Rohatyn and Kałusz.

In the Catholic House

The action in Bolechów was aimed at the people who led the community, and was intended to break it. Those detained at first thought they were being conscripted for labour. Once they were in the hall of the Catholic House, they were ordered to kneel with their faces to the floor. The account given after the war by Rywka Mondszajn describes more than nine hundred people crammed into the hall, people suffocating in the crush, and others killed on the spot with gunshots and clubs. The rabbis were singled out for particular abuse. Rabbi Landau was forced to make a speech in praise of Germany, and Rabbi Horowitz was murdered in a cruel manner. The rabbis were led out of the hall in the afternoon and were never seen again. The bodies of 29 people killed in the Catholic House were later taken to the Jewish cemetery.

The prisoners were held without food or water until the afternoon of 29 October. Then they were taken to the Taniawa forest. A plank was laid across the pit, and the condemned stepped on to it one after another; when shot, they fell into the pit. According to accounts by survivors and local inhabitants collected years later, some of the gunmen were Ukrainian policemen from Bolechów and the surrounding area.

The names of most of the perpetrators remained unknown. The survivors remembered some of the Gestapo men from Stanisławów, but also local Ukrainian policemen who had been their neighbours before the war. The German post in Stanisławów numbered only about 25 officers, and in every such action it relied on the Ukrainian auxiliary police and on the local administration, which supplied lists, carts and men to dig the pits. The crimes in the Stanisławów region, including those in Bolechów, were the subject of German investigations from the 1960s onwards, first by the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund and in the 1970s also in Munich. In 1968 Krüger was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Jews in the Stanisławów region, but most of those who carried out the actions in the small towns never stood trial.

The Holocaust by bullets

It is sometimes said that crimes and testimonies from Bolechów, rediscovered in 1996, led to the research of the French priest Patrick Desbois into the German method of extermination known as “one bullet – one Jew” in 1941–1942. This does not match what is known of Desbois’s work. His research began in 2002 in Rawa Ruska, where his grandfather had been held as a prisoner of war; in 2004 Desbois co-founded the organisation Yahad-In Unum, which has since been seeking out witnesses and mass execution sites in Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR. No connection between his work and any discoveries in Bolechów in 1996 has been confirmed. Nor is “one bullet – one Jew” a term used by historians. Desbois described the phenomenon as the “Shoah par balles” – the Holocaust by bullets, that is, extermination through mass shootings near the victims’ homes, as distinct from extermination in gas chambers.

The memory of the crimes in Bolechów was revived above all by the American writer Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006). Over five years Mendelsohn reconstructed the fate of his grandfather’s brother, Shmiel Jäger, his wife and four daughters, murdered in Bolechów, tracking down survivors scattered around the world and testimonies collected by Yad Vashem. In 1957 survivors from Bolechów also published a memorial book of the town in Haifa.

Place in the war

The action of 28–29 October was only the beginning. In the months that followed Jews from the surrounding area were resettled in Bolechów, and from 1942 a forced labour camp operated there. The second action came at the beginning of September 1942: according to testimonies, Ukrainian policemen and local auxiliaries began killing even before the Germans arrived. About 1,500 people died, among them, according to accounts, 600–700 children, and about 2,000 were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp. The last Jews, who had been working in German enterprises, were shot in the Jewish cemetery in 1943. According to the survivors’ own tallies, 48 Jews from Bolechów survived the war.

Bolechów was one of several hundred towns and small towns in the former eastern borderlands where the Holocaust followed a similar course. First, in the autumn of 1941, the elites and entire communities were murdered on the spot, in forests and cemeteries; then the rest were deported to extermination camps or shot when the ghettos were liquidated. Such crimes were committed that autumn from Babi Yar near Kiev to Galicia. Their witnesses were the victims’ neighbours, and for decades the graves remained unmarked. Today a monument to the victims of the October 1941 action stands in the Taniawa forest.