When historian Bernard Wasserstein was around nine years old, in 1957, his mother told him about Krakowiec, the “small town in Ukraine” his father’s family had come from and gone back to. At the time, he writes, it was located “smack on the border between Poland and the Soviet Union” – though, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, it “emerged, as if from a cloud, just inside the newly independent republic of Ukraine”.
Wasserstein became fascinated by the place and, alongside his major study of 20th-century Europe, Barbarism and Civilization, ambitious books on Israel/Palestine and many other aspects of Jewish history, has long tried to “assemble a biographical dictionary of every single person in recorded history who had ever lived” there. He has now distilled this somewhat madcap project into a compelling history, which pays tribute to his ancestors while raising issues that remain tragically relevant today.
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”. In the inter-war years, “simmering national animosity between Poles and Ukrainians... rose increasingly to the surface”, and Jews found themselves “caught in the middle”. Both the USSR and then Germany took over the town during the second world war and, by early 1944, “a complex war of all against all was being waged in which the [Ukrainian Insurgent Army], the Polish Home Army, German security forces and Soviet partisans all battled for supremacy”.
It is here that Wasserstein’s family takes centre-stage. His grandfather Berl, the son of a baker, was born in Krakowiec in 1898. Probably to escape military service as well as poor prospects, he moved to Holland and later Germany. He established himself in Berlin and set up a business involved in the manufacture of raincoats. But on 28 October 1938 he and his son Addi were suddenly arrested. The Polish government had announced measures designed to prevent Polish Jews living abroad returning home, so the Nazi regime took a preemptive decision to expel them. Since the Poles didn’t want to let them in, this led to chaos on the border, with thousands held in an improvised detention camp.
Berl had no desire to move back to a backwater where there were still no paved roads or pavements. Yet when the Germans and Poles reached a deal allowing Polish Jews the temporary right to return home, he had no realistic alternative but to take his wife and daughter to Krakowiec.
Though they managed to escape a ghastly massacre of more than 4,000 local Jews by hiding in a hut on the edge of town, they were later betrayed by the man who had hitherto protected them. Meanwhile, Berl’s son (and the author’s father) Addi was permitted to return to an increasingly hostile Berlin, where he simply went to a travel agent and bought a train ticket for Italy. He later found his way to Turkey and then Palestine after securing the unexpected help of the superior general of the Jesuit order, a Polish patriot who happened to have fond memories of childhood holidays near Krakowiec.
Alongside this touching personal material, Wasserstein’s book vividly traces how what was once a Polish town became “a predominantly Jewish one” by around 1800 and is “now almost entirely Ukrainian”. Today, he prays that “the people of Ukraine will surmount this terrible ordeal” and welcomes the fact that “the violent hostility” of past Polish-Ukrainian relations has been “replaced by an outpouring of neighbourliness and hospitality from Poles as millions of Ukrainians sought refuge from Russian attacks on civilian targets”.
But he is also keen that our justified disgust at Putin shouldn’t blind us to the darker aspects of Ukrainian history. It is disturbing that a school and a huge statue in the former marketplace 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”. Among its many other virtues, this book is a sharp reminder of the dangers of turning history into a simplistic morality tale.
• A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To by Bernard Wasserstein is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
