Blood and Fury: A Historical Memoir of the 1919 Pogroms in Ukraine, Russia

By Hannah Weiner

A Historical Memoir of the 1919 Pogroms in Ukraine, Russia as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old Jewish girl. 

The pogroms perpetrated by the Cossacks, the White Guard, and the Red Guard during the Ukrainian and Russian Revolution foreshadowed the atrocities of the holocaust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barany Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944841072

Book preview

Path to Freedom

Moldova

Ukraine

Pograbisht = Pohrebyshche, Vinnyts’ka oblast

Sadigu = Sadhora = now closest to where Chernivtsi is

(Chisinau?)

Benderra = Bender

Sadigu

Zegovka = Dzyhivka, Vinnyts’ka oblast

Yampole = Yampil, Vinnytsia

Romania

Chernovitz = Czernowitz

Bukavina = Province of Bukovina (Divided between Ukraine and Romania)

Yass = Iasi = Jassy

Sarakov = Soroca

In Bassarabia = Bessarabia, a region

Belz = Balti (now in Moldova, but used to be in Romania)

Chernovitz = Chernivets’ka oblast

Cheder or Chederlunge = Ceadir-Lunga (now in Moldova)

Kishenev (in Bessarabia) = Kishinev = Chisinau (now in Moldova)

Bucharest

America!

Prologue

About ten years after our mother died, I was visiting my Aunt Clara in New York City. She was our mother’s younger sister, closest to our mother in age. Before I left her apartment, she handed me a large and bulky packet of paper and said, I think you will find this interesting.

When I returned home to Berkeley, where I lived with my husband, I opened the packet and started reading the handwritten manuscript printed on mimeograph paper. The handwriting was faded and difficult to read. I recognized the handwriting as my father’s. As I continued reading, I realized that this was not my father’s writings. He wrote light hearted stories, not this description of brutal murders and townspeople fleeing in fear.

Who wrote this? I asked myself. The names of the towns meant nothing to me.

With the description of my mother’s mother dying of pneumonia, which I had previously known, I realized that this manuscript was my mother’s! It was the story of her life in Ukraine as a young girl in the years 1917 through 1921. She was only twelve when these pogroms began, but as the oldest girl in the family, it fell upon her to care for her three younger sisters while her father struggled to find food and safe hiding places.

The more I read, the more distraught I became until I finally stuffed all the papers back into the envelope and shoved it back into the closet for another ten years.

If it hadn’t been for the French film and TV producer, Claude Lanzmann, the manuscript might still be sitting in my closet. With his magnificent film, Shoah I realized I had to honor our mother and bring her story out into the open. If participants in Lanzmann’s film were able to face the camera and describe the atrocities they had suffered and witnessed, then I could be strong and honor our mother and tell her story.

My father, who was still alive at this time, told me the original manuscript was written in Yiddish, her native tongue, shortly after she arrived in America. She wrote this memoir in the early 1930’s in an attempt to purge herself of these horrible memories. In 1933, shortly after my father and she married, my father translated this memoir into English. She insisted the English translation maintain the Yiddish inflections. Unfortunately, the original Yiddish manuscript has vanished.

I considered many methods as to how to bring this painful Memoir to the public. Finally, I chose the following method: (This was before computers were in everyone’s home.) I read the manuscript into a tape machine and had it transcribed from that recording. It was a laborious job, especially since so many words were obliterated or too faint to read. I was able to decipher many words only because I was very familiar with my father’s handwriting.

I then proceeded to send copies of this manuscript, now called Hannah’s Memoir, to my sister and our cousins, the children of my mother’s siblings.

Most of my cousins did not have much knowledge of the past hardships their parents had suffered and were very interested in this family history.

My younger sister, Elisa, on the other hand, told me that she had been given the manuscript to read at a very young age. She, too, was haunted by the events described in the Memoir.

We shared the feeling that these stories mattered and needed to be told.

As horrible as these pogroms were, they were only a foreshadowing of future atrocities perpetrated in Europe.

—Sheba E. Sweet

BLOOD AND FURY

A Historical Memoir of the 1919 Pogroms

in Ukraine, Russia

1917-1920

HANNAH WEINER

Preface

This brief record of how human cruelty became rampant is the outcome of my inability to forget. I am not alone in remembering the brutality of these long and breathless days; still, I am the one who found peace in crying out for the many whose existence in the years of calm has been a continued silent sorrow. I did not seek to write a book, but to find the words for the memories troubling the mind, the expression for the blood that keeps weeping in my veins. I confess the horror that possessed me as I remembered and wrote and kept asking Truth itself: Could such things be possible?

The Authoress

The First Victims

The town of Pograbisht in the Ukraine stood still with fear. A paralyzing, depressing, slowly overpowering, and deadening fear bordering on panic. There were rumors, stories, whispers of Jews that had been murdered on the highways. A peasant came to tell that here and there, on open fields and in forests, lay dead and rotting the bodies of Zhides, the Jews. And once, when it was known for certain that on some field in the outskirts of the town there lay a few murdered Jews, residents risked their lives and went out to bring them to our cemetery and give them a decent burial.

I was a young child then when they brought the first two victims from the highway into our town.

I remember as if it were yesterday. My young friend, a neighbor’s girl, came running into my house, calling me in a shrill and terrified voice to come out into the street.

Hannah! Hannah! Come quick and you will see something.

As I ran out of the house, my eyes met the following scene. On a wagon covered with rocks and canvas, and from which came a foul and sickening odor there sat two Jews in silent despair. Women surrounded the wagon, wailing, sobbing, tearing their hair, and shrieking wildly. Their gestures, their faces, their voices in an uncontrolled outlet of grief terrified me to the inmost depth of me. I felt as if my soul were a leaf in a tempest. Others held back the widows and the orphans who clung to the wagon wanting to hold on until their bodies became too stiff with exhaustion. The wagon dragged itself slowly toward the cemetery. Heads hung low. So helpless, so forlorn, so lifeless were the living, knowing nothing but fear and sorrow. The melancholy rumble continued for a while, faded upon the ear, and the scene remained in my memory.

Near me I heard a hurried mumbling, a passionate jabbering full of tears and terror. An old woman was praying. It was a voice far more excited and anxious than that heard in the women’s section in the synagogue on the Holy Days.

Lord of the Universe, I heard her praying, Return not into us our souls as we entrust them unto Thee this night when going to sleep. Take away from us, oh, Great God, our lives, through any way that You wishest, but surrender us not into the hands of murderers.

Her prayers were in vain. At the first pogrom both she and her only daughter were brutally and savagely violated and destroyed.

From the day when they brought the first victims from the roads into town, all out-of-town travel stopped. Especially men. The women dared more or less to venture forth attired in peasants’ clothes and steal themselves from one town into another. They brought back with them some necessary provisions and such goods that were in demand. Fortunate indeed was the one who was blessed with an appearance not strikingly Jewish. With a coarse, rough, and weather-bitten face, a clumsy, heavy, and boorish bearing. And, if his accent was in tone with his entire makeup, and if he could cross himself knowing a few words to say on his knees, he was an enviable person.

At that time my father Shlomo, who was formerly a wholesale merchant of dry goods traveling in many large cities to purchase the goods to supply most of the stores in town, stayed at home for fear of his life. And my mother would not allow him to leave for the nearest hamlet. She would rather herself, at times, sneak her way into a nearby town, bring some goods, and sell it. And from this, and what we had from before, we eked out an existence.

One day, my mother had arranged with a baal-aguleh, a driver, to take her to a neighboring town. She knew of some goods she could buy there and had a market for it. The hour of his calling for her came and the driver didn’t show up. We waited, waited, and still no driver came. One of us went in search of him and brought back the disappointing news that he had already left with a wagonload of passengers, leaving my mother behind. He either could not or did not want to take my mother along.

This angered us much, and my mother was very disheartened at it. We could not help feeling bitter about it, but tried to forget it and forgive him.

The next day they brought the mutilated bodies of the driver and one passenger into town. My mother’s doom had not yet been sealed. She had to suffer for some time longer and die a more broken and miserable woman. She had to live on, nay to hang on, until suffering and sorrow drained all energy and life, leaving a tired heart to beat too rapidly with anxiety and fear until it spent itself and became silent and cold.

Tales Told by the Refugees

Days passed by and the times became more precarious, more uncertain. Our lives were unsafe, and danger more threatening. The dead bodies found on the outskirts of the town increased in number. Some were slaughtered on the roads, some were thrown out of the racing trains, and some who dwelt in surrounding villages were murdered by their neighbors.

The talk of certain bands grew and grew and occupied us with terror. Bands that besiege a Jewish town to massacre, plunder, pillage, burn and destroy, to desecrate, violate, and make knee deep in blood.

Jewish families began fleeing from the villages into the towns, from the very small towns into the larger ones. Tales began to circulate. Tales full of horror, one more terrible than the next. The panic grew. The fear grew. The despair grew. Talk. Talk. Talk. Everywhere people stood in bunches, talking, talking, talking. Horror all the time.

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