In Memory of the Shtetl

(Foreword by Abraham Weissbrod, 1945)

The khurbn of Polish Jewry is a bloody inscription in the martyrology of the Jewish people. Every city and shtetl in Poland where once Jewish life pulsated became, during World War II, the site of the greatest tragedy and martyrdom.

The Jewish cities and towns have died out.

They were destroyed and buried along with their Jewish lives, even along with their Jewish cemeteries. Now one cannot find even a trace or memory of a Jew in the small Polish towns. Only the tattered remnants of the khurbn, dispersed and wandering among strangers, in search of a home and a future, know the horrible details of towns which became slaughterhouses. Every individual who survived is a major living witness to the monstrous crime of the extermination of the Jews. Every individual shtetl is a monument for all time: a document of tragedy and sacrifice. Each collapsed hut, each foot of earth, each stone stained with Jewish blood shouts and asks: “WHY?!”

If and when we ever learn the tragic sum of the total destruction of the Polish-Jewish shtetl, each town would still have its own specific history: retain its individual path of pain, reflecting the diversity within the overall martyrology. The human suffering of that time is So boundless that when one attempts to recount it today, it seems to many almost inexplicable and unbelievable.

Today, as I detail the tragedy of a small shtetl in Galicia, I find myself motivated by two considerations:
1. Based on my own experiences and on materials I have gathered, I wish to describe the end of Jewish life in the average Galician shtetl because as soon as Hitler planted his boot on Galicia, events involving the Jews followed a similar pattern. I also wish to describe, in this book, the Jewish struggle in the Galician shtetl the battle and its end.

I wish to relate how a Jewish community once flourished in Skalat where later the people were subjected to so much suffering and how they died - to the very last. The great tragedy of this little town must be set down objectively: free of exaggeration, embroidery or self-aggrandizement. In telling the brutal truth, one must also relate errors and weaknesses. This, however, should not be considered a desecration of the memories of our martyrs but should be viewed as an effort to provide an accurate illumination which will serve as a moral warning for present and future generations.
2. I intend this description to serve as a monument to the murdered Jewish people of Skalat. There will be far less written about Skalat, its environs and approximately 5,000 Jewish inhabitants than about Warsaw, Kaunus (Kovno) or Vilnius (Wilno). The Skalat Camp and its four hundred prisoners is not as notorious as, for example, Treblinka, Auschwitz or Majdanek, but the fate of this small community, in its crushing and silent tragedy is, in its smaller way, just as inexplicable and equally horrible. The destruction of any such town requires deep psychological insight and profound penetration into the metaphysics of suffering and death.

*****

A divine mystery, a bloody specter, envelops the past of my shtetl. As we memorialize our martyrs their spirits rise, commanding us to remember and demanding: DO NOT FORGET US!

My shtetl died.

I am now far from my home but I still hear the pitiful sobs rising from the mass graves I still hear the last gasps of my father, of blessed memory, in one of those graves, who gave up his innocent soul amid all the other martyrs: relatives, friends and companions of my town. I still hear the echo of their sacred final cry: Shmah Yisroel! ^[4] It is an echo that drives one to madness.

My account of the sorrowful history of the life and death of my shtetl is but the anguished cry of the thousands who perished there. How weak, though, are words when compared to the sacrifice of the martyrs. The Jewish shtetl is no more. All that is left is memory. Therefore let this modest work stand in place of a tombstone for my vanished home, Skalat, and in memory of all the martyrs. May they finally find peace in their graves.

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