This is a very moving book. It's by Bernard Wasserstein; it's the story of the author's own Jewish family; it's subtitled The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To; and it came out just this year.

My audio-version was nicely read by Steven John Shepherd, but -- and I never learn -- it's a history/memoir, so you often want to check back on names and dates, and that's harder to do when you're listening. Plus, you don't get the pictures, and you don't get the bibliography (which, by all accounts, is vast, mentioning 34 archives in seven countries, as well as a range of oral histories, written testimonies, doctoral dissertations, and so on).

At the time I was engaged with this book, the Russia-Ukraine war was well on in its second bloody year, and the ghastly Hamas-Israel conflict was causing mounting horror and anger around the world. All of which throws into sharp relief the family history that Wasserstein is telling.


The pictures were taken in the Jewish quarter of Budapest earlier this year. Hungary's Jews also suffered various kinds of persecution during the 1930s/40s

A Small Town in Ukraine opens with this sentence: "Berl [Bernhard] Wasserstein was arrested one morning, though he had done nothing wrong." The date was 28 October 1938, and the place was Berlin.

Berl is the author's grandfather, and he had been living in Germany for nearly two decades. The town where he was born was Krakowiec (pronounced Krah-KOV-yets), which lies 43 miles west of Lviv. Until 1918, Krakowiec was part of the Austrian empire, but after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, and a period of upheaval that lasted until 1921, the town became part of the Republic of Poland.

Berl and his family were "Ostjuden", Eastern Jews -- a group that even luminaries like Hannah Arendt seemed to be prejudiced against.

Berl Wasserstein, then, together with his family (at this point, wife Czarna and daughter Lotte), were pushed out of Germany back to their "home" country (now Poland, remember). Which didn't really want them either...

But eventually, in the summer of 1939, they returned to Krakowiec. They had had to leave almost everything behind.

Then Hitler invaded Poland, and the Germans occupied Krakowiec. They didn't stay long, though, first time round, because under the Hitler-Stalin pact, Krakowiec was incorporated into the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Then the pact fell apart, and the allies fell out. In June 1941, the Nazis were back, occupying the town, confining Jews to a small area, and subjecting them to various kinds of humiliation. In December 1942, Jews were expelled to a ghetto in Jaworow, where conditions were appalling. On 16 April 1943, those who had not already died of starvation or disease were taken into the forest, and massacred.



But this was not the fate of Berl, Czarna, and Lotte. They'd avoided being dragooned into the expulsion to Jaworow, and were sheltered for more than a year by a local Ukrainian. But in April 1944, he betrayed them to the Nazis, who shot them... This is perhaps the most gut-wrenching point of a narrative that -- while soberly written -- throbs with anguish. Why shelter people only to betray them later? We don't know... And, given that we don't know, I suppose we shouldn't judge. But still...

The story is made all the more bitter because there had been other possibilities.

Roads not taken. South Africa, perhaps. They had relatives there. The east of the Soviet Union, maybe. It wouldn't have been easy, but they might have stayed alive.

They opted to stay. Listening to the subsequent closing down of their options is nothing short of harrowing.

Addi, meanwhile -- Berl and Czarna's son, and the author's father -- had a different fate. When the family was expelled from Berlin, he managed to make it to Italy. But to move further, he needed a Polish endorsement on his passport. Which he eventually got, in quite miraculous circumstances that are an object lesson about the utter randomness of life (you can read the account here). Addi was then able to sail for Istanbul, and from there to Palestine.



The diverging destiny of the Wasserstein family members is the book's central story. But it is set within a much broader tapestry of violence. As Matthew Riesz explains: "On one level, Krakowiec is a pretty insignificant place that has never had more than 2,000 inhabitants. But it is also located within what the historian Timothy Snyder has called 'the bloodlands' of east central Europe, where shifting frontiers, competing nationalisms and hostile great powers on either side have produced more than a century of vicious conflict. During the first world war, writes Wasserstein, the town was 'bombed, ravaged, repeatedly occupied and recaptured by contending forces'."

Historian Mark Edele also draws attention in his review to Wasserstein's emphasis on this first global conflict: "That war came to Krakowiec as 'a sudden, direct, and shattering blow.' The 'unrelieved terror and carnage' it unleashed lasted not just four but seven years: it prompted the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian and the Romanov empires, and transformed seamlessly into a civil war and wars between successor states over real estate and the peoples of the fallen empires. These years left 'a residue of vicious collective suspicions and hatreds,' writes Wasserstein. 'Ordinary human relationships collapsed into dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. The people of Krakowiec were plunged overnight into a dark realm. Their world would never be the same again.'"

Unfortunately, all sides distrusted the Jews... Although the revolutionary Ukrainian state, formed in 1917 and declared independent in 1918, was theoretically committed to multi-ethnicity, the troops of the Ukrainian republic also engaged in pogroms. The Treaty of Riga, in 1921, would divide the fledgling Ukrainian state between Poland and Russia, so that Krakowiec became Polish. But throughout the interwar years, nationalist animosity divided Poles and Ukrainians, and the Jews were always caught in the middle.



In September 1939, as we've seen in the family history, Poland was invaded twice, first by the Germans from the west, and later the same month by the Soviets from the east. By early 1944, says Wasserstein, "a complex war of all against all was being waged", involving the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Polish underground Home Army, German security forces, and Soviet partisans.

As Wasserstein remarks in a different piece: "The story of Krakowiec is, in many ways, that of the region in microcosm. During World War II we witness the brutal final stage of transition from the old order to a barbarized modernity."

The upshot for the Jews was catastrophic. Edele sums up here: "When the Red Army liberated Krakowiec in May 1944, only one Jew emerged from his hiding place. Of the 104,700 Jews who had lived in Krakowiec before the war, only 1,689 survived."

This is sobering stuff, all the more poignant for being connected to figures so close to the author.

It's true that Wasserstein tells us about a brief interlude in the latter part of the 18th century (corresponding with the final years of the First Polish Republic and the beginning of Habsburg rule over Galicia) when "Krakowiec enjoyed an exceptional moment of economic growth and cultural efflorescence".

But generally, war and geopolitics seemed to hold sway over this part of the world. A Small Town in Ukraine is a devastating reminder of how lucky some of us are, with our relatively stable backgrounds, and how tough it is for other regions of the world to surmount the troubled past that is their heritage -- and how quickly things can change.


A reminder of a deportation

The book is also a lesson in the complexity of life. Wasserstein is horrified by the "terrible ordeal" currently being inflicted on Ukraine, and is encouraged that Poles have shown neighbourliness and hospitality towards fleeing Ukrainians, even though relations between the two groups were often conflictual in the past.

But he also warns us not to see things in black and white. As Riesz points out: "It is disturbing that a school and a huge statue in the former marketplace [of the town that is now called Krakovets] honour the nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych, born in Krakowiec in 1907, a man Wasserstein describes as 'a Nazi collaborator, anti-Soviet guerrilla leader and ethnic cleanser of Poles and Jews', well known, according to a member of his own unit, for his 'sadistic inclinations'. " (There's more on this issue here and here.)

In sum, this is a rich and fascinating book, which is both accessibly written and gripping. But it leaves you profoundly saddened.