The Nadworna Massacre

Nadworna in inter-war Poland (now Nadvirna in Ukraine) was and still is a pleasant if unremarkable little town in the foothills of the Carpathians on the banks of a swift-flowing river, the Bystrzyca. Other than being the centre of an agricultural district, its main industries were a large timber mill and an oil refinery incongruously controlled by Italian interests in pre-war Poland. My uncle Emil (Milek) Mannheim, the husband of my father’s older sister Eugenia (Genia) was the chief engineer of this refinery and as a child I several times spent parts of both summer and winter holidays there—the skiing was just right for kids and summer was good for swimming and hiking. The Mannheims’ only child, my cousin Tania, was two years older than me, and as I was also an only child we were very close.

While they were horrendous in some respects, I took the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the subsequent Soviet occupation in my stride; at nine years old my life retained a certain normality: school followed holidays, and by the time of the summer holidays of 1941, our lives were sufficiently settled for my annual trip to Nadworna to be resumed. Uncle Milek remained at his post running the refinery, Tania and I swam in the Bystrzyca, hiked and bickered, and two more members of the family joined us: my widowed paternal grandmother Caroline, whose estates were confiscated by the Soviets, and my father’s youngest sister Rachel (Rela), a rather beautiful, talented and recently married twenty-three-year-old. The Soviets were conspicuously present and an officer’s family commandeered half of the Mannheims’ two-storeyed house, but our personal relationships with the Russians were quite pleasant.

This relatively normal existence (if you except the ever present threat of deportation to Siberia or Kazakhstan or arrest by the NKVD) was shattered on June 22, 1941, when Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union and quickly occupied its western parts. The Red Army offered no resistance in Nadworna and failed to sabotage the refinery efficiently, but found time to print leaflets with the message in Ukrainian: “Zgladimi z lica zemli fascistic psiw!” which translates: “We shall wipe the fascist dogs from the face of the earth!”—which they did after four years of titanic struggle.

Nadworna was not situated on a major strategic route and the German mechanised units just passed through, shortly after the long columns of the retreating horse-drawn vehicles of the Red Army left. Before retreating, the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB and the principal instrument of internal terror, killed all the political prisoners in their hands. Even in little Nadworna (population about 6000) there was an NKVD prison, where about eighty prisoners were killed and buried in a shallow grave in an area known as Bukovinka (beech forest) on the outskirts of Nadworna, a location suitable for mass graves as it was dotted with extensive earthworks used by the Austrian army in the First World War. When the local Ukrainians discovered this grave a few weeks later, they rounded up a couple of hundred of Nadworna’s Jews, including my uncle Milek, and forced them with great brutality to disinter the bodies and clean them up. The Ukrainians chose to blame Jews for Soviet atrocities, and a pogrom resulted, with several deaths. However, my uncle Milek observed that some of the victims of the NKVD were in fact Jews: they were circumcised.

After a short period of chaotic rule by armed Ukrainian gangs, the Hungarian army allied with Germany occupied this area, which was quite close to the Hungarian border. The Hungarians did not bother Jews or anybody else, but unfortunately departed after a few weeks. While they were in control, the Hungarian regime deported (essentially chucked over the Carpathians) some thousands of Hungarian Jews whom they did not consider to be Hungarian citizens—they were people of Polish-Jewish parentage. About 2000 of these poor people, burdened only with what they could carry, turned up in Nadworna, swelling its Jewish population to about 4500. The local Jews billeted these refugees in their homes and fed them. In our place landed an upper-middle-class family who spoke excellent German as well as Hungarian, but not Polish. They were a middle-aged married couple with three handsome strapping sons aged between eighteen and twenty-nine.

After the Hungarian army departed, the Germans set up a civil administration headed by a “Landesrat”, sometimes also called “Landeskommissar”, a sort of a chief public servant. This middle-aged and somewhat bewildered German recruited a few Jews as his advisers and helpers (after all, the Jews were educated and spoke German). His principal adviser was a physician, Dr Schall, an in-law of Milek’s and a close friend of our family. This was to save my life. 

We continued to live fearfully, but not dramatically, until October 6, 1941. The day dawned like any other, except that I noted a group of Ukrainian youths being led down the street by a few armed and helmeted SS men: the first SS I had ever seen. They were, as I discovered decades later, members of Reserve Police Battalion 133 commanded by SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Kruger and operating from Stanislawow (now Ivano-Frankovsk). The young Ukrainians were loudly repeating in Ukrainian, “We have nothing to fear, we have done nothing!”, but the SS men paid no attention. We had no idea what this was all about, but they were in fact loaded onto a truck and taken to Bukovinka to dig mass graves for us, after which they were simply let go.

At exactly 11 a.m. all hell broke lose: numerous trucks disgorged what appeared to be hundreds of helmeted SS men carrying their “ein-und-dreitzigs” (also known as “Schmeisers”) the thirty-one-shot machine pistols, around their necks. Guided by uniformed Ukrainian militiamen, they went from house to house and herded all the Jews out. They must have been helped by local Ukrainians, who were the only ones who knew where the Jews lived. We were totally bewildered and shocked as our family of six (Milek, Genia, Tania, Grandmother Caroline, Rela and me) was marched down the main street to the soccer field in front of the main church of Nadworna. The very large field appeared from a distance to be covered by bundles of clothing, but in fact they were the Jews of Nadworna, made to kneel and get up over and over again—there must have been at least 1000 people on the field by the time we arrived. The SS surrounded the field and some Ukrainian militiamen kept belting people at the edge of the crowd with long sticks rather like the “laths” carried by police in India and Nepal. To one side stood their commanding officer, Hans Kruger—shiny boots, gleaming Totenkopf (skull-and-bones) insignia and well-fitting uniform—Hollywood gets this right about the SS. With him was an Alsatian dog which kept attacking (not very ferociously) the closest Jews.

We joined the crowd and were made to kneel and get up repeatedly (God only knows why), while more and more Jews were herded onto the field. After a while, trucks began to load groups of Jews about fifty at a time and drove off—they were loaded from the front of the field, while we were close to the back. Suddenly, we heard a loud yell—“Schall! Schall!” and “Micka! Micka!”—the latter being the diminutive name of Mrs Schall, who was Milek’s sister. Seconds later, one of the Ukrainian militiamen next to Kruger yelled out, “Mannheim! Mannheim!” and the six of us ran towards Kruger. Next to him stood Dr Schall, white as chalk, and the German Landesrat, who appeared only slightly less bewildered and terrified. It transpired later that the Landesrat wanted to save Schall, who in turn tried to save his immediate family and us. When Micka and her six-year-old daughter failed to appear after a few minutes, Kruger turned to us and harangued us to help the Landesrat, who could only interject numerous “Jawohls!” (Yes indeed!). A couple of armed SS men escorted us to our house and told us to stay put, which we certainly did. We had absolutely no idea what was really going on. We just scraped together a meal and tried to sleep.

Next morning, Mr Miedzic, a Ukrainian foreman in the oil refinery, a decent man and a long-time loyal subordinate of Milek’s, turned up to see if we were still here and told us what had happened: the trucks took their loads to Bukovinka where the Jews were made to strip naked and were machine-gunned into the freshly dug mass graves. Earlier that morning, Miedzic had walked to those graves, which were yet to be covered, and identified people we knew in the top layer of corpses. The trucks kept going back and forth between the soccer field and Bukovinka till the last load went to their deaths at 11 p.m., at which time the aktion (a dreaded word all Holocaust survivors know well) ceased abruptly, and the last 200 or so people still on the soccer field were simply left behind unharmed. One version of this is that the aktion was planned to take exactly twelve hours (trust the Germans); another version states that Reserve Police Battalion 133 simply ran out of machine-gun ammunition.

Of the roughly 4500 Jews in Nadworna about 2500 died on that day. Micka Schall and her little daughter were never dragged out of the crowd: either they got there after we left or they were too fearful to heed the life-saving call. Of the five Hungarian Jewish refugees in our house (they were caught apart from us) only the mother survived: she lost her husband and her three sons on that day. 

The story of what became known as the “The Nadworna Massacre” is but a tiny detail, a mere brushstroke in the picture of the Holocaust: Christopher R. Browning’s magisterial book The Origin of the Final Solution (2004) devotes but one short paragraph to it on page 349. A more detailed discussion is given by Dieter Pohl in the Shoah Resource Center document Hans Kruger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia). For those with a strong stomach, the extermination of the estimated 1,500,000 Jews outside the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek and Chelmno is covered in the extraordinary book by Father Patrick Desbois The Holocaust by Bullets (2008).

Back to the tiny brushstroke: what became of the dramatis personae? Extraordinarily, my uncle Milek and I survived the Holocaust after (especially in my case) a quite amazing run of good luck and close shaves; but the four women in our little group were murdered. The three younger women volunteered for slave labour in Germany under fake Aryan identities but did not get past Stanislawow where they were denounced by a Ukrainian schoolgirl who recognised Tania. My grandmother Caroline, who separated from the younger women as she felt she was a less convincing Ukrainian, lasted on Aryan papers as a cook on an estate until she was denounced and shot in 1944.

Hans Kruger, whom I remember vividly, was a real horror who reportedly enjoyed his “work”. He was captured in Holland at the end of the war, but as his activities in Poland were unknown, he was released in 1948. He lived and prospered in West Germany and became so confident that he started to participate in right-wing German politics. However, his past caught up with him in 1959 and eventually he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a German court in 1968 after a trial lasting for two years during which he indulged in numerous anti-Semitic outbursts. He was released in 1986 and died in 1988.