-Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. “I saw that that the windows of these ruined houses were stuffed with rags or boarded up. In these unheated kennels were human beings, whole families, starving, usually sick because all kinds of epidemics were raging….” One hundred years a bitter war was raging throughout Europe. One of the most devastated regions was the borderland of Galicia. Here the massive armies of Tsarist Russia clashed with those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Imperial Germany. The front surged back and forth. Refugees streamed in all directions. Towns were looted and burned to the ground. Villagers were taken hostage. Exiled. Lynched. And raped. Into this devastation the influential Jewish-Russian writer S. Ansky was sent to organize relief for devastated Jewish communities. Ansky, born Shloyme Zanvel ben-Aaron Rappaport in Belarus, lived from 1863 to 1920. He is best known for his classic drama The Dybbuk. One of Ansky’s greatest contributions was the archive of Jewish folklore he collected during ethnographic expeditions in the Pale of Settlement before the First World War. These songs, stories, and superstitions recorded a culture already on the brink. A culture hit by the forces of emigration, persecution, and modernity. And now war. […]

– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Let’s take a moment to consider “dark tourism.” The concept is elastic, and quite multi-faceted. And it has a distinguished historic pedigree. Evidently there are assertions that Thomas Cook, yes the Thomas Cook that founded the famous international travel agency, took people to see public hangings in England with some of his very first tour groups in the 19th century. And there is even an academic Institute for Dark Tourism in England that promotes ethical research. Research into a social scientific understanding of sites of death and disaster. And how these sites have, or can, become tourist sites, whether appropriate or inappropriate. The world offers so many options for dark tourism: the horrifying, like now visitor-thronged concentration camps; the easily accessible, like Ground Zero at the 9/11 memorials in Lower Manhattan; the far-flung and harder to reach, like the haunting ruins of lovely ancient Armenian churches in the isolated reaches of what is now northeastern Turkey. Reflecting on those ruins brings up uncomfortable questions on what happened to those people who once worshipped in those churches. There is also the edgy. People are usually impressed when you’ve told them you were able to […]

“How are we to explain the fact that today many people all but yearn for a world destroyed by their fathers and grandfathers?” The Austrian writer Martin Pollack poses uncomfortable questions in his work. But then he hails from a less than comfortable background. Pollack’s powerful book, The Dead Man in the Bunker, carries the subtitle “Discovering My Father.” It is the story of a man found murdered in 1947 in the mountains between Austria and Italy. The murdered man is not what his papers claim him to be. The dead man is in fact Dr. Gerhard Bast, a highly ranked SS officer who commanded death squads in Eastern Europe and was former head of the Gestapo in the Austrian city of Linz. And this man had an affair with a married woman that led to the birth of a son, Martin Pollack. Pollack grew up knowing nothing of the circumstances of his father’s death or his involvement in Nazi atrocities. Pollack’s grandparents were ardent and unrepentant Nazis. But Pollack himself escaped their influence thanks to his mother, who sent him to a boarding school in the mountains. There he met the children of people who had been displaced by […]

-Written & Narrated by Peter Bejger Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal. In today’s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined—and more importantly, who has the power to define them—shapes the political climate. And the resulting political climate can force citizens to confront unpleasant ethical choices. These fundamental issues were tackled by the American historian Marci Shore in her recent inaugural address to the Lviv Media Forum 2017. Dr. Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale University in the United States. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. She also wrote Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, and translated Michal Glowinski‘s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons. She writes frequently for the international press on European cultural and intellectual history. Dr. Shore has devoted the last few years of her academic work and journalism to Ukraine. She is the author of the forthcoming book on the Maidan called The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. This book, as well as her recent talk in […]

Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. The revelation came in California. “We went to one of the redwood parks. I was looking at redwood trees, sequoia trees, and I saw them and I remember just thinking about how much those trees have seen. If only they could talk. I started to think a thousand years back. What have they seen? That’s when the idea of planting and creating memorials came to mind.” That is Julia Korsunsky, the Executive Director of Remember Us.org. RememberUs.org is a public charity in Massachusetts. Their mission is to educate the public about the devastating consequence of genocide, to honor and commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust, and to promote peaceful coexistence, inclusiveness, and cross-cultural interactions. Auschwitz and other concentration camps have become notorious global symbols of Nazi atrocities. But during the Second World War in Ukraine Jews were most often placed in front of firing squads and massacred. RememberUs.org has launched what is called the MARS Program to maintain, aid, restore, and support commemorative events at the mass killing sites. Originally started as a family project, RememberUs.org has grown into an active and far-reaching group of volunteers. And they run multiple educational activities both […]

Examining the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920. Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Centennials offer moments for reflection. The one hundredth anniversary of a major turning point in history provides an excellent opportunity for re-evaluation and reconsideration. In the spring of 1917 the Russian Empire came to an abrupt end. The Russian Revolution consumed the former imperial capital of Petrograd. Ukraine was breaking away, and Jewish and Ukrainian political leaders in Kyiv moved boldly to set up a striking new relationship between the two nationalities. This new relationship—and its eventual failure—is examined in the book A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920, published in 1999. The author, Dr. Henry Abramson, serves as Dean at Touro’s Lander College of Arts and Sciences in Brooklyn, New York. A native of northern Ontario, he received his PhD in History from the University of Toronto in 1995. He has gone on to visiting and post-doctoral positions at Cornell, Harvard, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Abramson writes that a potential newborn friendship between Ukrainians and Jews emerged in that revolutionary year of 1917. This was a tentative rapprochement between two groups that had lived […]

Written and narrated by Peter Bejger A quiet village set amidst rolling hills, forests, and ravines. A revered monastery. And four stories of salvation. A compelling article by Oksana Sikorska in the Ukrainian journal Zbruch outlines the remarkable role of the small western Ukraine village of Univ during the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. These are stories of resilience and triumph in the face of daunting odds and incredible danger. In the 1930s Univ had a little over a thousand souls and a village school. And by the time of the German occupation in 1943, a little boy was peering out a window from the attic of the schoolhouse onto the world outside. To leave the attic was to invite disaster. Most of the local Jewish population had already been deported and/or killed. Public signs posted everywhere warned that anyone assisting Jews would be executed. This boy, Roald Hoffman, who was to become the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, found shelter in the one room schoolhouse, which was also the home of the village schoolteacher Mykola Dyuk and his wife Maria. What is even more astounding is that Roald’s mother, two uncles, and an aunt were also […]

Franko and Jabotinsky: Setting the stage for cross-cultural understanding between Ukrainians and Jews -Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Two writers, two politicians. Two outstanding public figures. And two intriguing viewpoints on the historic challenges of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. The Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko passed away in 1916. The Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky was from a generation younger. Both made vital contributions to the creation of their respective national states of Israel and an independent Ukraine. But both did not live long enough to see their national dreams come true. Wolf Moskovich, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, compares and contrasts the lives of these two men in a fascinating essay. The essay was one of the contributions to an international conference and subsequent book on Ivan Franko and the Jewish issue in Galicia by the Vienna University Press. There is no evidence Franko and Jabotinsky ever crossed paths, though both met intellectuals they knew in common. Professor Moskovich traces some remarkable similarities in both men’s life stories. Both men ran for an elective political office before the First World War, Franko for the Habsburg Austrian parliament, and Jabotinsky for the Imperial Russian Duma. And both were defeated by […]

Today, two perspectives on loss and memory. “I close my eyes and I can hear the bells…ringing; each one rings differently. I can hear the splash of the fountains on the Marketplace, and the soughing of the fragrant trees, which the spring rain has washed clean of dust. It is coming up to ten o’clock and the place is so quiet that I can recognize the people going past by their footsteps as they hurry home for dinner. I recognize the footsteps of people who ceased to walk this earth long ago. There’s no one but shades clacking their heels on the well-worn pavement slabs.” So writes the Polish author Jozef Wittlin, conjuring up his native city of Lviv in his essay My Lwow, which he wrote in exile in New York in 1946. The essay has been recently translated into a whimsically lyrical English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in a haunting new book entitled City of Lions. Wittlin was fortunate to escape. He was in Paris at the outbreak of World War II. After the collapse of France he managed to escape via Portugal to the United States and continued writing. He passed away in 1976. Wittlin was […]