Pogrom Accounts

 

First-hand pogrom accounts are difficult to find.  While the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has a number within their archives, few have been translated into English.  We are attempting to gather what we can and will add them here as we get them.  Please let us know if you have one you’d like to contribute.  It’s important to gather, preserve, and share these accounts lest these massacres be forgotten.

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Shalom Shalom in Yiddish

Feiga Shamis' original letter

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My Father’s Escape from Pre-Shoah Anti-Jewish Massacres in Ukraine

Samuel Levin – Contributed by Richard Levin

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The Slaughter of the Jews

Elias Heifetz (1921)

 

The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine:  Authoritative Statements on the Question of Responsibility for Recents Outbreaks Against the Jews in Ukraine

Julian Batchinsky, Dr. Arnold Margolin, Dr. Mark Vishnitzer, and Israel Zangwill (1919)

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Bratslav Pogrom Account

Mitrofan Trublaevitch

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Murder of a Race

Minutes of a meeting of the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee on October 12, 1919

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Additional Resources

 

Information about the pogroms can be hard to find, though the Wikipedia entries are quite good.  Here's a list of sources we've been compiling.  We'll update this as we come across new material.

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• Abramson, Henry. A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard UP for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard U, 1999. Print.

• An-Ski, S., and Joachim Neugroschel. The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I. New York: Metropolitan /Henry Holt, 2002. Print.

• An-sky, S.A. 1915 Diary of S. An-sky. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2016. Print.

• Astashkevich, Irina. (2013) The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1917-1920: an Alternate Universe. Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. 3562247)

• Avrutin, Eugene M. Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expeditions. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2009. Print.

• Babelʹ, I., Carol Avins, and H. T. Willetts. 1920 Diary. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.

• Babelʹ, I., Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine, and Cynthia Ozick. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.

• Bartov, Omer. Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.

• Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Print.

• Budnitskiĭ, O. V. Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 2012. Print.

• Coben, Lawrence A. Anna's Shtetl. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Print.

• Cooper, Lisa. A Forgotten Land: Growing Up in the Jewish Pale; Based on the Recollections of Pearl Unikow Cooper. Penina Press, Israel, 2013. Print.

• Dekel-Chen, Jonathan; David Gaunt; Natan M. Meir; Israel Bartal; eds, Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2011. Print.

• Gilbert, Martin. The Jews of Russia: Their history in maps and photographs. National Council for Soviet Jewry of the United Kingdom and Ireland, London, 1976. Print.

• Gruber, Ruth Ellen. Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to East-Central Europe. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999. Print.

• Gusky, Jeffrey, and Judith Miller. Silent Places: Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Duckworth, 2003. Print.

• Ham, Paul. 1914: The Year the World Ended. London: Transworld Publishers, 2013. Print.

• Joshua M. Karlip. The Tragedy of a Generation. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 2013. Print.

• Magocsi, Paul Robert and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Print.

• Meir, Natan M. Kiev Jewish Metropolis: A History 1859-1914. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010. Print.

• Melamed, Efim. "Immortalizing the Crime in History...: The Atrocities of the Ostjudisches Historisches Archive (Kiev-Berlin-Paris, 1920-1940)", The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937. Boston: Leiden, 2012, 373-386. Print.Mendelsohn, Richard, and Milton Shain. The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008. Print.

• Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: U of California, 2002. Print.

• Ostroff, Sherry V. The Lucky One: A Memoir of Life, Loss and Survival in Eastern Europe. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016. Print.

• Prusin, Alexander Victor. The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.

• Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Print.

• Roskies, David G. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. The Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Print.

• Sandler, David Solly. The Ochberg Orphans and the Horrors from Whence They Came: The rescue in 1921 of 181 Jewish orphans by Isaac Ochberg the representative of the South African Jewish community, from the horrors of the ‘Pale of Settlement.’ Publisher: Author. 2011.

• Segal, Joshua L. A Field Guide to Visiting a Jewish Cemetery: A Spiritual Journey to the Past, Present and Future. Nashua, NH: Jewish Cemetery, 2005. Print.

• Solomon, Alisa. Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2013. Print.

• Stone, Norman. The Eastern Front, 1914-1917. New York: Scribner, 1975. Print.

• Wulf, Linda Press. Night of the Burning. London: Bloomsbury Children's, 2007. Print.

• Zavadivker, Polly. (2013). Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II. UC Santa Cruz: History. Retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48x3j58s.

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Here's a link to a book published by OS Ostrovsky in 1926.  It appears to be propaganda material put out by the Soviets in conjunction with the Sholom Schwartzbard trial. The Soviets wanted to deflect blame for the pogroms away from their troops and onto Ukrainian forces. A copy of the book can be seen at YIVO in New York City. This is a digitized copy, and many of the photos have been removed because they are very graphic. If you put the link into a Google search bar and click the "translate this" button, you will get an English version.

Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook

Diary of Anne Kahan

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