Return to Drohobych, Ukraine. Bruno Schulz and the graves of the female soldiers

Many people believe that the town of Drohobycz is a literary invention of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the author of one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century, "Le botteghe color cannella" (Einaudi, 2016), a book which, as Bohumil Hrabal wrote, “enters the realm of genius”. In fact, it really does exist. It was a prosperous town in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, in the province of Lviv, home to the region’s largest synagogue. Between the two world wars it belonged to Poland, then to the Soviet Union; today it is part of Ukraine. Bruno Schulz, as the French critic Maurice Nadeau succinctly put it, “was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew”.

Since the end of the last century, a ‘Schulzfest’ and an international conference dedicated to him have been held there every July. First economic difficulties and then the war had brought it to a halt. This year, they have organised it again to send a message of ‘normality’ – that life and culture continue despite the bombs. And so, after 28 years, I returned to Drohobycz, invited to speak about Bruno Schulz and his fiancée, the Jewish philosopher and poet Debora Vogel, who encouraged him to start writing and who was also murdered by the Germans. For logistical reasons, we were staying in a small town a few kilometres away, Truskavec’ (Truskawiec), once famous as a holiday resort set amongst the woods and a health spa renowned for its thermal waters. Until the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in 2014, it was a favourite destination for Russians, who had funded the construction of hideous, gigantic hotels – now, of course, empty and flanked by the steel skeletons of other ambitious, half-finished buildings. The only tourists are melancholic Ukrainian women with children and elderly people drinking from those waters that reek of sulphur. The only men, apart from the staff at the local establishments, are people who have lost limbs. At ten o’clock in the evening everything comes to a halt because the curfew begins at eleven, and then an unreal silence descends, reminiscent of what Schulz wrote in a short story: ‘A July night! The fluid substance of twilight, the living, sensitive, shifting matter of darkness, ceaselessly intent on shaping forms of chaos and immediately ready to cast them aside!’

The festival opened with a conversation with the historian Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s leading intellectuals and editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, who was interviewed by the popular Ukrainian poet and musician Serhij Zadan, a volunteer in the 13th Khartiia/Chartija Brigade of the National Guard, which he co-founded. Topic: Ukraine and Poland: past or future? Zadan began by asking what Schulz’s status as a writer would be if he were alive today. “Certainly some would say he is a great Polish writer, because Schulz wrote in Polish, but there would also be those who would tell him: ‘Fuck off to Israel’. It’s a bitter joke, because history does not follow a spiral but a circle, and we keep repeating the old mistakes,” argued Michnik. But what he wanted to say at that moment was something else: “After the war, the Communist Party resorted to the ideology of ethnic nationalism. It was first and foremost an anti-German nationalism, but also an anti-Ukrainian one. When I listen today to the statements made by politicians on the Polish right and by President Karol Nawrocki, I get the impression that those emotions linked to that convergence of fascism and Bolshevism are resurfacing in the Polish psyche. I am saying this right here, in a Ukrainian city, to make it clear that Poles do not identify with the Polish president’s statements when he withdrew the honour from Zelensky. It is a disgrace and a dishonour for Polish democracy.” Zadan noted that many Ukrainians perceive Europe and Poland as distinct entities and harbour separate grievances towards Europe and Poland. Michnik concluded: “We must look to the future without distorting the past. It is, however, a bizarre idea to expect Ukraine today – a victim of a massacre – to apologise for what happened in Volhynia, when there was no Ukrainian state and citizens of the Second Polish Republic, of both Polish and Ukrainian nationality, were massacring one another. One can debate who bore greater blame, but it is absurd not to realise that the UPA was the only organisation of the time to openly declare its desire for an independent Ukraine. Yes, there were all sorts of people, including fascists; in any mass movement of this kind, there are all sorts of people. To exploit all this to fuel an emotional conflict today is a suicidal move. It is not the first time in our history that the Polish elites have acted in this way. Sometimes we have conflicting interests – economic ones, for example – and this is important, but in politics there are issues that are more important and fundamental. Ukraine’s anchoring to Europe, to the Western world, is a fundamental issue.” Michnik received loud applause, with just one moment of silence, when he said: “I am against Putin but I am not anti-Russian; I love Chekhov!”

Thus, even at a festival in a country invaded by the Russians, dedicated to a writer from the interwar period who was murdered in the street by the Germans, it was impossible not to notice the resilience of the Ukrainian people, with aspects that were even somewhat surreal. The Ukrainian speakers at the conference, who understood Polish perfectly, spoke exclusively in Ukrainian (the sole exception being the conversation between Michnik and Zadan, which inevitably required an interpreter). The same was true of the venue staff, whom we addressed in English: they understood, but replied in their own language. Without that pride, the Ukrainians might not still be there, holding out against the Russians. And it is striking to see how, every day at nine o’clock sharp, everything comes to a standstill and the loudspeakers chime out the seconds of a minute’s silence ‘dedicated to the fallen heroes’, followed by the national anthem sung by people in the streets. And the yellow and blue flags flying above almost every building entrance. And the photos of fallen soldiers grouped beneath structures supporting white plastic doves. In the centre of Drohobych, just behind Schulz’s ‘cinnamon-coloured shops’ street, there is a lawn where plaques bearing the names of fallen female soldiers are stuck into the ground. Since the start of the Russian invasion, over five thousand Ukrainian civilian women and girls have already been killed, whilst more than 14,000 have been wounded. Tens of thousands of women serve in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The exact number of female soldiers who have fallen is not made public. The plaques dedicated to Ukrainian female combatants who have fallen at the front bear their first name, surname, dates of birth and death (some dates date back to 2017 and 2018) and always the same phrase: ‘Mum, don’t cry. I’ll bloom in spring’.