Massacre of the innocents

I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties in the trenches; the second world war and the German conquest of Europe; day and night bombing; Stalingrad and the Holocaust. But I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about the tragedy in Galicia in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Nazi genocide, much of the killing took place between neighbour and neighbour: Jews, Poles and Ukrainians destroyed each other with increasing ferocity and brutality between 1914 and the 1940s. The beautiful city of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia, with its Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish shrines, ended as a gigantic ruin.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the Israeli novelist, dedicated his last book, The City Whole, published posthumously in 1973, to his home town Buczacz:

I closed my eyes, so that I would not see my brothers, my fellow townsmen, because of my bad habit to see my city and its slain.