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This chapter, written in the language of those who perished, is dedicated to their memory. The Jews of Drohobycz and Borysław were ordinary people. Even those who were wealthy, the intellectuals, the mine owners, and the lawyers would have been embarrassed to give the impression that they were assimilated. This would not have been appropriate for honest people. They spoke a simple, vibrant Yiddish at home and in the street, in the cafés, and in the Zionist clubs. It was a people's Yiddish, a rich language, homey, good humored, and to be truthful, a little peppery. The so-called upper classes were not arrogant and did not consider themselves superior. They were part of the Jewish community. Perhaps this was a special characteristic of the Drohobycz and Borysław Jews.

I left Drohobycz-Borysław a half a century ago. I was a young, deeply religious, khasidic boy. I tore myself away from my pious home to venture into the big world where everyone passionately believed in the world of Biblical Judaism. This was the romantic spirit of the Haskalah,^[1] the Enlightenment, which had loosened the conservative traditions of the houses of prayer at the turn of the century. With a heavy heart, I left my parents, my family, my friends, my environment, small-town life, the society and habits to which we were tied and went to Vienna to study. As a result only a pale memory remained of my comfortable world, its lifestyle, its atmosphere, its unique fragrance. But a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, before the great tragedy that befell the Jewish world, I was once again in Drohobycz.

Coming to Poland as an emissary from Israel, I went to Drohobycz to fulfill the commandment of Kibbud Av,^[2] to honour one's parents. I visited my elderly father, my brother and his family, my sister, and my former friends. My brother's daughter was about to begin studying at the University of Jerusalem after Sukkot. She already had a school diploma. She was counting the days while preparing for departure: studying grammar, sewing dresses, writing her thoughts into a small, young girl's diary. Her father was filled with a strong faith and the profound teachings of the rabbis and sages. Nothing had changed for him. He knew that these times represented the suffering preceding the coming of the Messiah. He was waiting.

The marketplace in Drohobycz was still filled with Jews, who had already left the market stalls. It was stifling, very hot, disordered, as if an eclipse of the sun was anticipated. The sky was dark with black smoke from the conflagration that would soon overwhelm the world. You could already smell burning. In the open doorways of shops, Jewish merchandise was dried up. The Jewish merchants stood, as former generations did, in the houses where their fathers and grandfathers stood, but now, I believe, they had suddenly forgotten that not long ago they used to earn money in their shops and had made a living. Now they stood there, despondent, and shrinking into themselves. The merchandise on the shelves was dusty, caps were faded, and the metal cash registers rusty. There were no customers in sight; troublemakers with sticks were keeping watch. For days and weeks, no one was spending; there was not one złoty in the shops. Banks had suspended credit. The usual worries about making money had shifted to having necessities.

No one knew exactly what to expect at this time, but everyone was frightened. Men could not even think.

[Page 195]

Their heads were filled with the chaos they learned from newspapers and the radio: Berlin London, Rome, Washington, Moscow. In the meantime, their wives found courage and managed the businesses. If a peasant from Mrażnica or Tustanowice were lost, he would be afraid to enter a Jewish store. If an airplane flew above, total silence would descend on the marketplace. People whispered to one another; a dead body lay nearby. Women sighed, wrung their hands, and howled silently

A nearby radio screeched. The noise spit out a lava stream of world news: speeches, notes, marches, ultimatums by the Führer. In earlier times, those who lived a simple life did not need to worry about world news. The world was distant; it did not touch the scattered periphery. Now, the world's rage reached even the most distant town. The sound of a radio could slice into the brain. Puzzled, a dog would bark at the radio. He could no longer stand the noise. But he barked triumphantly back at it: “Führer!”

This was July in Drohobycz in 1939. It was the same in every city or town in Poland. Evening fell and fear increased. Iron clubs hacked down the doors of the shops. The market was dark. I went into the Rabbi's house of study where I had spent my childhood years. The courtyard was empty; it welcomed me with old, silvery greetings. The religious books in the cupboards were orphaned, the long tables empty. No one would come here again. Everyone was sitting at home, awaiting his fate. In the Zionist society, some young people sat, dreaming about a chess club. They tossed around chess terms and someone hummed a tune that once had been joyous. The picture of Theodore Herzl underneath a wrinkled blue-and- white flag mourned with wide open eyes. Some time ago, the enlightened people (Maskilim) of the city, the intellectuals, the clever business people, young lawyers, members of the houses of study with religious doubts, and worldly, young students used to come here. One of these knew all of Darwin by heart and had a long essay to prove that G-d is nature. He used to correspond with Max Nordau^[3] and denied divine providence. Drohobycz had a tradition of audacious know-it-alls.

This was Drohobycz on the eve of panic. Drohobycz and its neighbour Borysław were almost one city: a bustling urban centre of work and plenty, of energetic workers in the oil industry, the main source of revenue in the province. The Jews of Borysław grew up in busy, winding streets, soaked in deep mud. The mud puddles flooded the roads with slime, a shiny, gray grease like sour cream mixed with crude oil, which bubbled up out of the ditches. This muck lingered from after Sukkot^[4] until Passover. It never dried up. And perhaps it was supposed to be like that. It was like a coat-of-arms for the city. There was always a sharp, biting smell in Borysław. You could walk only on narrow, unsteady, wooden boardwalks, which were suspended on nothing and were always shaky.

A blue fog hovered around the tall, blackened, wooden, oil derricks. It came from the nearby Carpathian mountains. On the slippery steps, Jews and landowners jostled with miners in leather jackets, workers, shopkeepers, young school children, hired help, peasants, porters, and the so-called łepaks,^[5] who soaked up the crude oil that sprayed out of the well with bunches of grass, then squeezed the oil out into cans and pots and sold these meager treasures to the smaller refineries.

That's how people lived in Borysław during those years after I left. The city was the financial support of Drohobycz-Borysław. The Jews, generally workers and craftsmen with strong shoulders, calloused hands, thick jackets, and tall boots were not middle class. Many decades before, people in Borysław and its surrounding villages worked the land. According to a folktale, a Jew by the name of Schreiner^[6] discovered a kind of black water in his field. The water had ignited and was burning. The Jew was shaken. He took this water to Lemberg^[7] to show everyone this amazing substance. After that, he dug more broadly and deeply, and others who saw this did the same.

[Page 196]

This marked the beginning of crude oil exploitation in Borysław and the surrounding area. Later, companies arrived; they brought their own technicians and trained oil workers from their western Galician mines and began to develop the petroleum industry in the Drohobycz-Borysław province. After my grandfather's death, they excavated crude oil in his fields in Borysław. Then my uncle, my grandfather's oldest son, a tall, bent Jew, who was a miner and a learned person, would come home every first and fifteenth day of the month from the administrative office of the McGarvey^[8] refinery. He would bring a large leather bag filled with packages of pink and blue Austrian bank notes. These were handed out to the partners, according to the number of shares they owned. It was bright in the house when the colored packages appeared. We children were certain Emperor Franz Joseph, who descended from King David, sent us that treasure each month.

By that time, our family had already moved from Borysław to Drohobycz. My father wanted to be close to the Rabbi of Drohobycz, to be able to sit at his Sabbath table, to live properly, and to ensure that young boys would follow their religious studies in the Rabbi's house of study. As it turned out, there were two rabbis in the city, whose centre was lit with gas lamps. They had great disputes with one another. Each believed that he alone could bring redemption and each considered the other to be an ignoramus. All this was part of Drohobycz life. My father took care that the boys would not play in Borysław's mud puddles which might make the Khasid's long coats dirty, even all the way up to their velvet hats. He did not want to embarrass them in front of non-Jews. Under these hats were blond-white sidelocks curls.

The Jews of Borysław were very proud, probably because many of them worked the land. They lived on the land and worked it honestly. Possessing their own land made them feel secure. Everyone minded his own business. If at any time a Mazur,^[9] who had once worked the fields, would pester a Jew, he would get a direct response on the spot. When a Borysław Jew rose a little in society, he would remove his thick jacket and muddied boots, get a city haircut, and wear a suit. A modern wig would be made or his wife and for his sons, haircuts with a part. Now one could walk through Drohobycz, like a mensch. They would send their young sons to the best teachers and in the evenings they brought Kandel, the teacher, to teach German and Polish. This teacher was an angry, unlearned person, with a clipped beard and a silk hat. He would ask his students to take dictation and then smack the young boys' trembling fingers with a sharp ruler. It almost felt like school. The boys studied both German and Polish with Kandel, a sort of mix of the languages that was all his own. They called the teacher professor. Only later did Jewish fathers begin to send their children to the Polish gymnasium.

Next to the Jewish mine owners, there were many Jews in Boryslaw who worked for others. The workers created a union called Yad Charutzim (Federation of Master Craftsmen). They drew up regulations and conditions and mediated with the landowners to include a chapter about salaries, as well as four cups of wine for Passover and the need for a few Rheinish gulden^[10] to marry off a daughter. In general, the workers were poor but upstanding people, among them teachers of religious studies and Jews who recited psalms regularly, who would wake up early for Torah studies, then pray, then recite psalms, all before going to work. In the house of study, they would be the ones who would be called up during the Torah reading on ordinary days.

It was said that many wealthy people, who were called up during the Torah reading, did not forget that they had once been “nobodies” and remembered to be generous to the poor. Who does one's money really belong to? Sudden wealth came from here and there, from one day to the next; the feverish ups and downs of those who dug for oil – buried or not buried – made Borysław Jews generous. It made them take a skeptical look at wealth which might be mine today and yours tomorrow. Could one be born with money? Only a fool could believe this?

[Page 197]

A wealthy person might have been poor yesterday, the beggar could be a magnate tomorrow, so no one held himself higher than another. With such brotherly behavior, even teachers did not consider themselves superior to the uneducated. Who does the Torah belong to? In Drohobycz-Borysław, respect contained a trace of teasing and confidence. Maybe there was a whiff of natural folk humor in this.

The Drohobycz-Borysław Jews would sit in a café and behave there as in a pub. There they bought and sold shares in mines, negotiated with quarters and eighths of a percent.^[11] If it was a mine that was productive, then they would wait for a gusher. If digging brought nothing, they would travel to the Czortków Rebbe for his intervention.

Brokers and boors, uninspired writers and people with innovative ideas, matchmakers and grandchildren of rabbis, artists who came from Lemberg to exhibit and then pass a plate around to collect money – all these circulated around this wealth. And there were other discriminating paupers who would take only “proper” donations – and if they were not, then they wouldn't take them at all. So, a charitable Jew might endorse a cheque in the bank for a good friend, and then have no choice but to pay it himself. Besides that, they bought shares in Palestine and supported a Hebrew teacher who taught girls to recite El Hatzipor^[12] on Chanukah evenings.

At night, fires would break out in Borysław's oil fields; their fiery glow reached all the way to Drohobycz. The Mazurs would ring the bells of the tall, wooden gas towers. Sleep would be interrupted with terrified fathers' screams, “Save us!” The flames flapped at the bed linen in which sleeping children were carried to their neighbours, and they tried in vain to put out the flames with barrels of water.

Along with the brotherliness, big-heartedness, abundance, simplicity, closeness to the earth, and folk wisdom, here and there intellectual refinement and artistic expression also bloomed. The famous painter Maurycy Gottlieb,^[13] the Bible illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien,^[14] the modern man of letters Schultz,^[15] all these were children of Drohobycz in different time periods. There were Maskilim (enlightened people) in Drohobycz who wrote, in Mendelssohn's German,^[16] a poetic world-exploration à la Klopstock^[17] and Aaron Żupnik^[18] published a patriotic, weekly journal Drohobyczer Zeitung in German, using the Hebrew alphabet. In these pages, young writers who needed a door to the bigger world could practice their craft. Some dreamers from the houses of study were searching in Friedrich Schiller's^[19] Die Sendung Moses (The Mission of Moses)^[20] and popularized his philosophical hymn of the Glocke (Bell),^[21] as if they were reciting the weekly Torah portions. They also read the Galician philosopher Reb Nachman Krochmal^[22] and floundered around in the depths and fire of modern literature.

They floundered in secret and hid this passion just like a young boy who doesn't want his attraction for a girl to be discovered. They were afraid to utter a word, even to a friend. But it could happen that a Jew, a khasid, would be allowed to share the secret and became a silent patron of a lonely boy in the house of study, who was thirsty for knowledge and freedom. This was Drohobycz. The study of Khasidut^[23] and Torah learning, and strong traditions were great principles. But at that particular time, Drohobycz Jews followed a new road. They cultivated friendliness and brotherhood; they gave a warm smile to someone who was troubled. Between the wooden houses of study and non-Jewish fields, between market stalls and rich gardens, between haughty Polish landowners and downtrodden Ukrainian peasants, between pale mystics and crude boors, Maskilim, mockers, and thoughtless people, Jewish boys wrestled with their trembling youth, with fears and dreams, and ran towards far-reaching pathways.

Translator's Footnotes

1. Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement that started in Germany in the mid- eighteenth century. It advocated more integration with secular society and secular education. Return
2. Kibbud Av Va-em: Literally honouring father and mother, one of the Ten Commandments. Return
3. Max Nordau (1849-1923) was a co-founder of the Zionist Organization with Theodore Herzl. Return
4. Sukkot: a harvest festival, celebrated in the early fall. Return
5. Łepak: sometimes spelled łebak and the related word łapaczki, meaning oil snares, may have been derived from the Polish verb łapać, meaning to catch. In the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, men, usually of the poorest classes, used to scoop crude oil that would arise to the surface of the water in ditches or use reeds and grasses to soak it up. They sold it for greasing wheels, for water proofing, leather tanning, and other uses. Later, when the petroleum industry was in full swing, łepaks would collect what residue of oil they could find. Return
6. Abraham Schreiner (ca 1805-1891) was a łepak who attempted to distil the crude oil he collected. He brought a barrel of his distillate to a pharmacy in Lemberg, where a pharmacist Jan Zeh undertook the fractional distillation of the substance and created naphtha. Return
7. Lemberg was the Austrian name for the capital of the province of Galicia. After 1919, when the city was in Poland, it became Lwów. Now in western Ukraine, it is called Lviv. Return
8. William Henry McGarvey (1843-1914) was a Canadian oilman from Ontario, Canada, who brought his cable drilling system called the Canadian rig and skilled Ontario drillers to Galicia. Return
9. Mazur: a term used in the oil regions of Galicia for Poles from western Galicia. Return
10. Rheinisch gulden: another name for gulden, an Austrian coin in use in Galicia until 1899. Return
11. Schónholz's café in Drohobycz served as a stock market where shares in Galician oil wells were bought and sold. Return
12. El Hatzipor (To the Bird, ) is a poem by Khaim Bialik (1873-1934) that expresses longing for Zion. Return
13. Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879) came from a prominent family in Drohobycz that had become wealthy in the petroleum industry. He studied painting in Lemberg and Vienna and became famous for his paintings of historical works and scenes of Jewish life. Return
14. Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925) was the son of a wood turner. Lilien's artistic education was supported by wealthy patrons in Drohobycz. He worked mainly in Munich and Berlin, specializing in drawings and graphics and illustrations of literary and Biblical works. Return
15. Bruno Schultz (1892-1942) was an artist and novelist in the Polish language. He was murdered in Drohobycz during the German occupation. Return
16. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786): Mendelssohn's writings on metaphysics and aesthetics, political theory and theology, together with his Jewish heritage, placed him at the focal point of the German Enlightenment. Return
17. Friedrich Klopstock (1724- 1803) wrote poems, odes, plays, and theoretical writings on German literature, language and culture.  Return
18. Aron Hersch Żupnik (1848 -1917) published the Drohobyczer Zeitung, a German language newspaper in Hebrew letters. He was also concerned with improving education in the city and disseminating literature influenced by the Enlightenment. His newspaper was strongly supportive of the Austrian regime and monarchy, but he later became an early supporter of the Jewish nationalist movement. Return
19. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) a prodigious poet and playwright had an enormous influence on German literature. Return
20. Die Sendung Moses is an essay by Schiller. Return
21. Lied von der Glocke is a famous poems of German literature and one of Schiller's longest. In it, Schiller combines a technical description of a bell founding with comments on human life. Return
22. Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), born in Galicia, was a philosopher, historian, writer, a leader in the Haskalah movement, and a pioneer of modern Jewish scholarship. Return
23. Khasidut: a movement within Judaism founded by the Baal Shem Tov in 1736 emphasized prayer, joy, and kabbalah, (Jewish mysticism). Return

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