Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
Our Two-Year Reprieve
we were in comparison to their villages. They really had nothing. I remember stories of how the Russians ran into the stores and bought nightgowns as dresses for their wives because they did not know the difference. Russian occupation was, in a sense, a reprieve from the Germans because it took another two years before Germany de- clared war on Russia and occupied our area. However, the oc- cupation of our town by the Russians caused major upheaval. They immediately proclaimed that the proletarians, the laborers, the workers were everything and that all other people were on the way out. They resented rich people. They had a campaign to eliminate the intelligentsia and the well-to-do. They pronounced that those people who had been “somebodies” were now “no- bodies.” The proletarians were now in power, and the rich peo- ple were “bloodsuckers” who had lived off the proletarians’ blood. The Russians believed that the Jewish people were underprivi- leged under the Polish government because the Jews were always persecuted and because there was a lot of anti-Semitism in Poland. In Russia, officially, there was no anti-Semitism — it was against the law. The official Russian policy was that everybody was equal. In Ukrainian and in Polish, a Jew was called Zhid, which was a derogatory term; the Russians did not allow its use. A Jew was henceforth to be called Hevrei, or Hebrew. This really bothered the local goyim — it ate them up alive that they could no longer call a Jew Zhid. Now, every time they forgot themselves, we would ask, “Do you want me to report you to the government?” They painful- ly replied, “No, no, no, excuse me, Hevrei,” which gave us great satisfaction. From the Russian point of view, the most reliable locals were the young Jewish men, rather than the Ukrainian village peasants, and when they created a militia, about 80 percent of it was Jewish. They had many good reasons for this. The Jews were better edu- cated and, because of the Zionist organizations, some (especially members of Beitar) even had some military training. The Russians
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