A few days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the hitherto Soviet-occupied city of Bialystok in northeastern Poland – one of the most important and vibrant Jewish centers in the region with a Jewish population of sixty percent – was occupied by a unit of the German Wehrmacht and Police Battalion 309. A pogrom atmosphere against the Jewish population prevailed immediately; within just a few hours, the violence escalated and finally culminated in a massacre. Hundreds of Jewish men, women and children were forced into the large synagogue in the center of the city, which was set on fire with gasoline and hand grenades. Outside, members of the police battalion, inebriated and equipped with machine guns, kept the building surrounded, in order to prevent any escape. More than 2,000 Jews lost their lives on that day in Bialystok.
A new teaching unit developed by the German Desk at the International School for Holocaust Studies is dedicated to this massacre and its contextualization. It reveals that the individual layers of the story can only be unfolded through an examination of the personal choices and actions of individual actors involved. For example, there is the story of Josef Bartoszko, the "Shabbesgoi," who lived right across the street from the synagogue and during the massacre helped the trapped Jews escape by giving hand signals from his window. He is one of the few examples of gentile residents of Bialystok who actively tried to protect their Jewish neighbors, while a large part of the non-Jewish population welcomed the Germans and sometimes even supported them in their murderous actions.
Not only does the unit feature the victims and local rescuers, it also takes a look at the perpetrators: For instance, Police Lieutenant Buchs, whom witnesses later reported had actively taken part in the burning down of the synagogue and had "grinned constantly" while doing so. This contrasts with the behavior of an unnamed Wehrmacht officer who, according to witnesses, apparently tried to contain the violence by shouting at one of the policemen that "he should let the defenseless civilians go, against whom no war was being waged."
This illustrates that even among the perpetrators there was room for individual agency, as opposed to claims by protagonists that they were unable to do anything but "follow orders." The differentiated examination of individual actors and their respective decisions and actions on that day thus raises questions: How was it possible that such a murderous dynamic could develop within just a few hours? What prompted Polish citizens to hand over their fellow Jews to the German perpetrators? Why was there anyone among the German perpetrators who decided – openly or secretly – to stay away from the murderous events?
Only a few hundred of Bialystok's more than 50,000 Jews survived the Shoah. Desperate and traumatized, they endeavored to build a new life after the war, scattered all over the world. Almost sixty years later, in 1999, one of the survivors, Ben Midler, who by then lived in the USA, admitted: "It is still not easy for me to laugh." The struggle that survivors had to return to life after the war stands in sharp contrast to how the perpetrators continued to live. After the war, a large number of them were able to resume their prewar existence virtually without rupture. Only a few were sentenced to prison in a trial in 1968, and by 1973 all of those convicted had already been released. In view of this, when looking at the aftermath of the massacre, the teaching unit also addresses the question of why so few of the perpetrators were willing to take responsibility for their own actions on that fateful day.
New Research Publication on Persecution and Murder
In 2019 and 2020, the first three volumes of the series "The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945" were published by the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in association with De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Through a thematically comprehensive selection of documents, the series – produced for teachers, researchers, students and other interested parties – illustrates the contemporary contexts, dynamics and stages of the political and social processes that led to the Holocaust. Authentic testimonies by persecutors, victims and onlookers, the vast majority of which appear for the first time in English, are furnished with academic annotations. Further volumes are set to be published by the end of 2021.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 95.
