Book Review: A Touching Memoir of the Holocaust in Ukraine

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Honor, by Nataliia Mariichyn, Leon Buchwald, and Susan McClelland (Astra Young Readers, New York, 240 pg., $19.99 USD, $25.99 CDN)

 This is an unusual memoir that moves forward and back between modern Ukraine’s troubles and those of that country’s tragic past during the Second World War. It recounts a tale of two individuals -- a Ukrainian teen in the early 2010s and a Jewish boy in hiding in Nazi-occupied Ukraine -- whose lives are entwined through a box of letters.

It’s true that of the writing of Holocaust memoirs there is no end. But that’s not a critique, it’s as it should be. The Holocaust was the greatest Jewish tragedy since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago.

A collaborative project of Nataliia Mariichyn, the late Leon Buchwald, and author Susan McClelland, Honor, published this year and intended for younger readers, falls into the category of people who were saved by friends or neighbours. It is narrated by Nataliia, who is a Ukrainian teenager in Ivano-Frankivsk living in an independent Ukraine in 2013-2014, when she comes across a pile of letters from World War II that had been saved by her grandmother, Katherine.

Written by Leizer (Leon) between 1941 and 1945, the letters are interspersed with reactions by Nataliia, who would go on to tell this story. Certain scenes and dialogues have been recreated using Leizer’s letters, as well as personal recollections from both Leizer’s and Nataliia’s families, including her grandmother and great-aunts. It is now a Canadian story.

Eliezer Buchwald was born in Stanislawow (now Ivano-Frankivsk) in what was then Poland, in 1929. He was the youngest of three children. His sister Shloma, the eldest, was four years older, and brother Zelig, two years older. His father, a merchant, was well respected by the Christian farmers in the region around Tlumacz.

World War II began in September 1939, and Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin; the part they lived in was annexed by the Soviet Union. In 1941, however, Hitler’s armies invaded the USSR. “Nazis were now marching toward Russia, and we were right in their path,” Leizer wrote. Some villagers in the area painted white crosses on their doors so Nazis would know when they arrived that they were not Jews. “People who had always said hello now looked down at their shoes, pretending we were not there.”

Leizer and Shloma escape into the forests as the Nazis arrive, but their mother Berta and Zelig are captured. She manages to escape, but Zelig is never seen again. Leizer, Shloma and their mother eventually find refuge in a cave: “We lived the winter of 1942 in darkness.” During these harrowing years, several Jewish families sought refuge in the extensive gypsum caves of Western Ukraine. One of the most notable shelters was Priest’s Grotto, a labyrinthine cave stretching over 124 kilometres.

Leizer leaves the cave at one point and is betrayed and captured by German soldiers but manages to escape. He saw only one viable solution. He had to go to their pre-war neighbor, a farmer. “There was nowhere else for me to turn.” He returns to his old home and the Ukrainian farmer who knows him allows him to stay and pretend to be his own son. Eventually Shloma and Berta join him.

“As he’d promised, Shloma and I worked the farm, tilling the soil for planting. We wore the farmer’s son’s old clothes. Shloma tucked her hair under a hat and from a distance, even I thought she was a boy. The farmer’s wife made us two meals a day. She often sat with Mameh while Shloma and I were in the fields. The farmer reiterated the Nazis were looking for me, even now offering a reward for anyone who turned me in.”

He and his wife “are angels who were put on our path,” Mameh said several times that winter. “Honor them like angels. Leizer, if we ever get out of here, if the war ends, and we have freedom again, remember the farmer and his wife.” When the war ended, the farmer smiled. “I will never forget you,” he said to Leizer, with a warm smile. “You are my second son.”

Nataliia’s grandmother Katherine’s own memories begin to return. “Leizer managed to outwit his captors, you know. My father said he was very hard to catch. Leizer became a man long before his childhood ended. Good people did bad things to him and his family during that time.”

It turns out that Nataliia’s great-grandfather Grigoriy Palivoda and his wife Mariya were the couple who saved them. “The Nazis were looking for Leizer,” Nataliia’s grandmother tells her. “I knew where he was hiding. I always did, but I told no one. He became my secret. For the longest time, I didn’t know that my father and mother even knew he was there.”

The book juxtaposes the stories of the war with Nataliia’s recollection of what was happening in Ukraine in 2013-2014 as pro-democracy Ukrainians struggled, in the Maidan protests, to free themselves of the pro-Russian kleptocrats running the country. It makes for an interesting contrast.

Following liberation, Leizer, Shloma, and Berta lived in the Tlumacz area for several months and then were able to move west to a Displaced Person’s camp in Germany. While there, Shloma met Yitzchak, whom she had known prior to the invasion, and they married. Leizer and his mother immigrated to Montreal in the fall of 1948, and Shloma and her husband arrived not long after. Shloma adopted the name Lucia upon arriving in Canada. Berta changed her name to Bryna, and Leizer changed his name to Leon Buchwald. A personal note: Miriam Buchwald Gordon, daughter of Leon and his wife Toba, whom he met after the war and who was also a Holocaust survivor, is a friend of mine.

Leon Buchwald died on May 30, 2018. He never returned to Ukraine. In the spring of 2022, Leon and Lucia’s descendants, including their children and grandchildren, sponsored Nataliia’s relocation to Canada to escape the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Nataliia great-grandparents are now among the 2,673 Ukrainians who, as of 2023, have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Ukraine is among the countries with the highest number of individuals recognized for their courageous actions during this dark period in history. This story, like others, captures both the cruelty and humanity of ordinary people caught up in situations not of their making.

American Inequality Today

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited an unhoused population of “771,480 people -- or about twenty-three of every 10,000 people in the United States,” an increase of 18 per cent from the previous report. The United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in homelessness, driven by the nation’s affordability crisis.

But recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the U.S., factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms, or doubled up with other people, might be as much as six times higher. From 2023 to 2024, families with children experienced the largest year-over-year increase in homelessness of any group. Among the 130,000 people homeless in New York each night, around three-quarters of those in shelters were in families, including some 45,000 children.

Today, there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Yet America’s richest earn in hours what ordinary workers – not the homeless -- earn over lifetimes. The ten richest people in the country increased their wealth by $365 billion last year.

As Matt Egan writes for CNN, the 2024-2025 growth, from April to April, accounted for roughly a billion dollars a day in growth for the top ten. “By contrast,” he notes, “the typical American worker made just over $50,000 in 2023.” To put that in perspective: according to Oxfam, it “would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 U.S. workers at median earnings to make that much money.” In fact, 60 per cent of Americans live pay cheque to pay cheque.

A 2022 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 10 per cent of Americans hold 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, with the top one per cent grabbing 27 per cent for themselves. America’s billionaires are now collectively worth a record six trillion dollars. Their wealth has more than doubled since the passage of the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.

The analysis comes from Americans for Tax Fairness, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for wealthy Americans to pay their fair share. Given such a situation, “inequality” no longer feels like a strong enough word for what we see.

Not surprisingly, U.S. households have been accumulating debt at a staggering rate.  Total household and nonprofit organization debt did not pass the two trillion-dollar mark until the mid-1980s, but now total U.S. household and nonprofit organization debt has surpassed the 20 trillion dollar mark.  Household debt alone accounts for approximately 18 trillion dollars of this total.

Yes, unemployment figures seem low. But much of this is simply definitional trickery. More than 100 million U.S. adults that do not have jobs are considered to be “not in the labour force.” When a U.S. adult is not working, they are put into one of two buckets.  For years, government bureaucrats have kept the number of Americans that are “officially unemployed” at a very low level, while the number of Americans that are dumped into the bucket labeled “not in the labour force” has just kept increasing.

During the Great Recession, the number of Americans that were considered to be “officially unemployed” plus the number of Americans that were considered to be “not in the labour force” never exceeded 100 million.  Today, the number of Americans that are considered to be “not in the labour force” alone exceeds 102 million.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. They can replace any particular worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasised in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. The oligarchs are not confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Former vice-president Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her 2024 campaign. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations, though this looks modest compared to Republican Donald Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call those in hostile nations like Russia “oligarchs.” Most people have heard Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase describing democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in his famous 1863 Gettysburg Address. Has this been replaced by government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class?

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt, but it’s far down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest, or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards. The rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this reality.