1915 Diary of S. An-sky

A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front

S. A. An-Sky, Polly Zavadivker

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780253020451
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253020536
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The WWI diary of the Russian Jewish activist and author of The Dybbuk presents "an unforgettable portrait of life, culture, and destruction" (Eugene Avrutin,  author of Jews and the Imperial State).
By the outbreak of World War I, S. An-sky was a well-known writer, a longtime revolutionary, and an ethnographer who pioneered the collection of Jewish folklore in Russia's Pale of Settlement. In 1915, An-sky took on the assignment of providing aid and relief to Jewish civilians trapped under Russian military occupation in Galicia. As he made his way through the shtetls there, close to the Austrian frontlines, he kept a diary of his encounters and impressions.
In his diary, An-sky describes conversations with wounded soldiers in hospitals, fellow Russian and Jewish aid workers, and Jewish civilians living on the Eastern Front. He recorded the brutality and violence against the civilian population, the complexities of interethnic relations, the practices and limitations of philanthropy and medical care, Russification policies, and antisemitism. In the late 1910s, An-sky used his diaries as raw material for a lengthy memoir in Yiddish, published under the title The Destruction of Galicia.
Although most of An-sky's original diaries were lost, two fragments are preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Translated and annotated here by Polly Zavadivker, these fragments convey An-sky's vivid perceptions and enlightening insights.

S. An-sky’s 1915 Diary

ONE

Winter 1915

Galicia

JANUARY 1, ROVNO¹

The new year was born in profound melancholy. Neither desires nor hopes, as though you were standing before a corpse. I spent the day in a miserable state. At night I went to the “Yiddish Theater.” They were offering a senseless operetta, Khontse in America. The most untalented of the untalented performed. But the theater was packed and the audience was in ecstasy.

Met a friendly military doctor, Kon, whose wife is working as a nurse in the field hospital. They invited me to visit the hospital tomorrow and see how it was set up.

JANUARY 2

I didn’t feel well. At night I went to the hospital. A huge hospital with many beds, superbly equipped. Clean, spacious. There are paintings of battle scenes plastered across all of the walls. A number of wounded Austrians are lying on beds mixed in among the Russians.

“But how did you get along with the Austrians, don’t you quarrel?” I asked a wounded Russian.

“Why should we quarrel? All of us are cursed,” he replied with profound sorrow.

I went to the dressing station. They were dressing wounds on 218 Austrians who had just arrived. The wounds are something terrible. The entry wound is small; the exit wound is huge. These are our hollow-point bullets. Upon striking a target, they begin to spin in all directions.

They showed me a man who had been stabbed by a bayonet eleven times. He is recovering.

There was an Austrian lying on the dressing table whose leg had been amputated at the knee. The leg was exposed in preparation for bandaging. The bone was sticking out, with a chunk of nervously twitching red meat. Nothing so terrible about it. Meat. But then, a hand, from which all the skin between the fingers and wrist had been ripped away, made an impression on me? That isn’t a piece of protruding flesh, but a wound surrounded by the body’s healthy parts.

JANUARY 3

I visited the hospital again. Such suffering! The dressing of wounds alone elicits so much agony. Here, for example, is someone who was “lightly wounded”: the bullet tore through the flesh of his leg, scrotum, and flesh of the other leg. Gauze must be drawn through the whole wound.

I walked among the beds. There was a wounded Austrian lying on a bed. He was no older than a boy, with a red button-shaped nose and swollen eyes. He has a broken leg and a gunshot wound in the chest. And apart from that he has a broken jaw and his lower teeth were knocked out. He talks in a feverish manner and his speech is not altogether intelligible. He addresses the nurse like an offended child, complains. The bed is too hard; it chafes his sides. And the food. . . . They are supposed to serve him different food, it seems.

“Yes, yes,” the nurse consoles him, “you’ll get milk, kasha.”

“I’m not allowed to eat the meat that you give all of them,” the wounded boy goes on, ignoring her. “The doctor said. But I am allowed to eat cutlets. And they should be made with onion—with onion! Viel Zwiebel, viel Zwiebel.² Doctor’s orders . . .”

A few hours later his wounds were dressed, and it seems that when the nurses bandaged his leg five days ago they put in a splint that was too long, and it left a palm-sized sore on his side and nearly punctured his stomach. And here with such injuries, with a splint eating away at a festering wound, he thinks about viel Zwiebel—even alleges that the doctor prescribed them. He must have associated the relief of his misery with this favorite food.

Had dinner with Dr. Kon. His wife told me that Andre, a local marshal of the nobility, is organizing a medical transport to Galicia and would probably agree to take me with him. Mrs. Kon promised to find out about it tomorrow and put in a word on my behalf.

I came back to the hotel at about eight o’clock and found a telegram from Naidich³ in Moscow: “Come to Moscow. Demidov’s division departs for Kiev and beyond on January 7. There is a spot for someone.”

Can it be that my affairs are finally falling into place and my ordeals will come to an end?

I left for Moscow at eleven o’clock at night. An announcement was hanging in the train station: “Reward for capture of spies: 10 to 150 rubles, and gratitude from His Majesty and country.”

JANUARY 4

There was a lieutenant riding in the train with me who was just returning from a post at the Prussian Front.⁴ He was quiet, modest, as are most of the heroes who have been in combat. He recounted many interesting things.

The men grew so accustomed to cannon fire that when it was quiet they felt frightened and anxious. They got to know the places where the bombs landed because the other side always fired at specific spots. Bombs that fell at close range gave off gasses that caused terrible vomiting in some of the men. The most terrible thing, though, is that the wounded must remain in the trenches the whole day; they can only be moved at night, and sometimes not even then.

“Before their new year we wrote greeting cards on scraps of paper, freed up a shrapnel shell, stuffed it with the papers, and shot it over.⁵ The shell didn’t explode, but it seems they found the cards. But then we were angry with them because on Christmas they shot at us like the damned, so at midnight of the new year we started firing at them with all of our guns.

“Our artillery works well, but their side is better equipped. They’ll go up in an airplane, find our battery and shoot a rocket. With that rocket they can precisely pinpoint the location of our battery from a distance, within two degrees. For some reason our side doesn’t do this.

“Theft and looting are scourges of war. When the soldiers enter a city or town they start to rob the locals. I know of one case in Galicia: an officer entered a house and saw the soldiers looting. They took off running. He ordered them to stop. They disobeyed. He shot and killed two of them. The other three stopped. He ordered that one hundred lashes be given to each of them and sent them to the trenches. The medical orderlies are constantly being searched, but it doesn’t help. Sometimes they even kill our officers and rob them.

“Some of the nurses work selflessly, of course. But most of the ones in the rear behave indecently; they sleep with doctors, wreak debauchery, depravity. They aren’t called sisters of mercy, but rather ‘whores of mercy.’ ”

The lieutenant also recited the legend about the Grand Duke⁶ and Rennenkampf,⁷ how the latter seemingly wounded the former.

It seems the Grand Duke summoned his quartermasters, came to them darker than a storm cloud, and said, “If you keep secrets, I will hang you.”

One encounters strange sights. A soldier comes to ask for a stretcher so he can be evacuated on it. He was shot in the head. Another in the trenches asks for permission to go to the dressing clinic. “Where were you wounded?” “In the head,” he replies, and points to his crown. “From where did the bullet emerge?” “From the buttocks, your Excellency.”

JANUARY 5, MOSCOW

Naidich told me how simply my trip had been arranged. Igor Platonovich Demidov,⁸ a deputy to the State Duma, is stationed with a division in Galicia, in Tarnów. If I had been in Moscow a few days earlier I could have left with him. Now Igor Platonovich’s brother, Lev Platonovich,⁹ who directs the Moscow division, is sending several train cars with hospital supplies and linens to the Tarnów division. And here they are assigning me to be the plenipotentiary who is responsible for delivering these train cars. Another plenipotentiary, an assistant barrister named B. E. Ratner¹⁰ will travel with me, along with an artel¹¹ worker, who will look after the cars.

I went to see L. P. Demidov; he makes a wonderful impression, as a man of profound, sensitive, and cultured ideals, and is fanatically devoted to the cause. We arranged all of the details. I will of course pay my own way, but the committee¹² will supply my train fare. The train cars depart on the 9th, not the 7th, so I’ll have time for a trip to Petrograd.

I telephoned Nikolai Aleksandrovich Popov.¹³ He promised to connect me with Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko¹⁴ in a few days, and arrange for me to read him the play.¹⁵

JANUARY 6, PETROGRAD

I gave a report about what I saw and heard in Poland. In light of the short notice there wasn’t time to assemble a significant number of people. Bramson,¹⁶ Braudo,¹⁷ Bikerman,¹⁸ Brusilovskii, Levin, Pozner,¹⁹ and a few others were there. It seems the report made a very strong impression, especially the facts. These were my conclusions: 1) To set up as few soup kitchens as possible, and instead give more aid to each individual refugee, to help him get back on his feet; 2) To appoint two or three people in Warsaw who can manage activities there; 3) To urgently organize a large (Russian-language) newspaper in Warsaw.

S. V. Pozner told me what has been happening lately in Petrograd. The most interesting and important thing is the creation by the finest representatives of Russian literature of a league to fight for Jewish emancipation.²⁰ Gorky,²¹ Andreev,²² and Sologub²³ are its leaders and have passionately taken up the cause.

The conference of December 19 resulted merely in a declaration. The people who gathered at the conference were mostly anemic and didn’t introduce any initiatives.

At the editorial office of The Day,²⁴ I found out that all of my articles were received, and that the censor crossed all of them out, which is why they weren’t printed.

I obtained copies for the museum²⁵ of Austrian propaganda for Jews that was thrown from planes and written in Yiddish and Hebrew.

JANUARY 8

I spent yesterday and today in Petrograd; saw Sliozberg,²⁶ Vinaver,²⁷ and others. Everyone seems to believe that agitation against Jews in Poland is quieting down. A relative of Vinaver’s even reasoned that in Warsaw the Poles’ attitudes have greatly changed. But all of this strikes me as complacency.

JANUARY 9, MOSCOW

The train cars depart on the 11th.

Naidich told me a curious thing.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Rozov²⁸ as a representative of Zionism. Since Rozov wasn’t in Petrograd at the time, they invited Idelson.²⁹ In Turkey, demands were issued that Russian Jews must adopt Turkish citizenship or else face expulsion.³⁰ Because the Russian government doesn’t wish to lose the element in Palestine that has ties to Russia, the ministry asked Idelson to inform the colonists in a telegram that he advises them to become Turkish subjects. If they do so, the ministry promises to reinstate them after the war as sub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation
• Introduction
• S. An-sky’s 1915 Diary
• Notes
• Index