Poetry in a time of war. Such is the headline by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or FAZ, in its recent reporting on the dynamic annual poetry festival Meridian Czernowitz, held earlier in September in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Why war? Because the newspaper picked up the subtle influences of the war with Russia in the East on this gracious city far from the front. As international literati gathered to celebrate the word, young men in camouflage and stony faces marched under the chestnut trees. And why Czernowitz? Such was the name of this city from 1774 to 1918 when it was the capital of the Imperial Austrian crownland of Bukovina under the reign of the legendary Habsburg dynasty. In this period it became known as a “Little Vienna” due to its architectural style. And also for the fact it was the home of a growing German-speaking community and German-language university. But the city was always cosmopolitan—a center for both the Ukrainian and Romanian national movements. And in 1908 it was the site of the first Yiddish language conference. Not surprising, as nearly a third of the city by this time was Jewish. The stories […]

– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Guilt, justice, and family ties. These dramatic themes are recalled today due to the recent publication of the Ukrainian-language edition of East-West Street by Phillip Sands, a book presented by the author at this year’s Lviv Book Forum. The Ukrainian publication of the critically acclaimed book by Sands recalls a panel discussion held on the very theme of guilt, justice, and family ties back in 2014 at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv. Panel moderator Sofia Dyak noted back then that we have many accounts of the Holocaust and other atrocities, but very few of the perpetrators. Sands was joined at the panel by his two of the subjects of his book. There was Nicklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, a Nazi war criminal who was convicted of war crimes at Nuremburg and executed in 1945. He was joined by Horst von Wachter, the son of Otto von Wachter, who was the Nazi governor of Galicia and died in hiding in Rome in 1949. Sands, Frank, and von Wachter all share ties with Lviv, or, as it was known then, Lemberg. Sands’s maternal grandfather was born there […]

Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. How do you tell a story? Museums are essential places where stories about nations and cultures are told. But they are also places where the story may not fully told. Or the story may need to be retold. There has been a global boom in new museums. There are new technologies, and new ways to tell a story, especially with interactive multi-media formats. Museum visitors are no longer just passive consumers of information. This museum boom is now reaching Eastern Europe. And fresh ideas about museums are facing new challenges in rapidly changing societies in that region. History, and re-thinking history, and re-telling history, is complicated in post-communist societies. Controversial. And often painful. Recently the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv tackled the issues of museums telling, or not telling, the story. What are the challenges that Ukrainian museums face when including Jewish history into the dominant narrative of their exhibitions? A public program called “Jewish Days in the City Hall: (Un)Displayed Past in East European Museums” featured researchers and museum experts from Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Russia, and the U.S. The focus was on emerging trends in museum practices. A […]

  New initiative will help Ukraine preserve its Jewish cemeteries and heritage for future generations “As if they are trees falling in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night.” This haunting remark was made by Phil Carmel, the CEO of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative. The Initiative was launched to physically protect Jewish burial sites in Europe. And this was done most specifically in places where Jewish communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. The Initiative was set up as a German-based non-profit organization in early 2015. The goal is to protect and preserve Jewish cemetery sites across the European continent. This is done by marking cemetery boundaries and building cemetery walls and locking gates. The Initiative announced earlier this year that it is about to begin a “vast system of surveys and monitoring” of Jewish burial sites in Ukraine. The survey will entail an estimated fifteen hundred to two thousand sites. Belarus will also have its own survey. The aim of the Initiative is “to create the first ever comprehensive and up-to-date repository and listing of Jewish cemeteries across Ukraine.” The monitoring will be “backed up by a research team checking historical records of Ukraine’s Jewish […]

-Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. “I saw that that the windows of these ruined houses were stuffed with rags or boarded up. In these unheated kennels were human beings, whole families, starving, usually sick because all kinds of epidemics were raging….” One hundred years a bitter war was raging throughout Europe. One of the most devastated regions was the borderland of Galicia. Here the massive armies of Tsarist Russia clashed with those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Imperial Germany. The front surged back and forth. Refugees streamed in all directions. Towns were looted and burned to the ground. Villagers were taken hostage. Exiled. Lynched. And raped. Into this devastation the influential Jewish-Russian writer S. Ansky was sent to organize relief for devastated Jewish communities. Ansky, born Shloyme Zanvel ben-Aaron Rappaport in Belarus, lived from 1863 to 1920. He is best known for his classic drama The Dybbuk. One of Ansky’s greatest contributions was the archive of Jewish folklore he collected during ethnographic expeditions in the Pale of Settlement before the First World War. These songs, stories, and superstitions recorded a culture already on the brink. A culture hit by the forces of emigration, persecution, and modernity. And now war. […]

– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Let’s take a moment to consider “dark tourism.” The concept is elastic, and quite multi-faceted. And it has a distinguished historic pedigree. Evidently there are assertions that Thomas Cook, yes the Thomas Cook that founded the famous international travel agency, took people to see public hangings in England with some of his very first tour groups in the 19th century. And there is even an academic Institute for Dark Tourism in England that promotes ethical research. Research into a social scientific understanding of sites of death and disaster. And how these sites have, or can, become tourist sites, whether appropriate or inappropriate. The world offers so many options for dark tourism: the horrifying, like now visitor-thronged concentration camps; the easily accessible, like Ground Zero at the 9/11 memorials in Lower Manhattan; the far-flung and harder to reach, like the haunting ruins of lovely ancient Armenian churches in the isolated reaches of what is now northeastern Turkey. Reflecting on those ruins brings up uncomfortable questions on what happened to those people who once worshipped in those churches. There is also the edgy. People are usually impressed when you’ve told them you were able to […]

“How are we to explain the fact that today many people all but yearn for a world destroyed by their fathers and grandfathers?” The Austrian writer Martin Pollack poses uncomfortable questions in his work. But then he hails from a less than comfortable background. Pollack’s powerful book, The Dead Man in the Bunker, carries the subtitle “Discovering My Father.” It is the story of a man found murdered in 1947 in the mountains between Austria and Italy. The murdered man is not what his papers claim him to be. The dead man is in fact Dr. Gerhard Bast, a highly ranked SS officer who commanded death squads in Eastern Europe and was former head of the Gestapo in the Austrian city of Linz. And this man had an affair with a married woman that led to the birth of a son, Martin Pollack. Pollack grew up knowing nothing of the circumstances of his father’s death or his involvement in Nazi atrocities. Pollack’s grandparents were ardent and unrepentant Nazis. But Pollack himself escaped their influence thanks to his mother, who sent him to a boarding school in the mountains. There he met the children of people who had been displaced by […]

-Written & Narrated by Peter Bejger Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal. In today’s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined—and more importantly, who has the power to define them—shapes the political climate. And the resulting political climate can force citizens to confront unpleasant ethical choices. These fundamental issues were tackled by the American historian Marci Shore in her recent inaugural address to the Lviv Media Forum 2017. Dr. Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale University in the United States. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. She also wrote Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, and translated Michal Glowinski‘s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons. She writes frequently for the international press on European cultural and intellectual history. Dr. Shore has devoted the last few years of her academic work and journalism to Ukraine. She is the author of the forthcoming book on the Maidan called The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. This book, as well as her recent talk in […]