By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — On May 25, 1926, on the Rue Racine in Paris, the 47-year-old former prime minister of the government of the former Ukrainian People’s Republic, Simon Petliura, was approached by the 40-year-old owner of a watch repair store, Sholom Schwartzbard, who asked him in Ukrainian: “Are you Mr. Petliura? Defend yourself! You are a bandit!” Petliura raised his cane with his right hand. Schwartzbard shot three times, “This is for the pogroms, for the murders, for the victims!”Schwartzbard lost 13 members of his family in the pogrom in the town of Proskurov.
Petliura was killed, the assassin was arrested. A trial began. Henri Torres, a socialist and lawyer of Jewish origin, was Shwartzbard’s defense counsel. He asked the journalist and writer Bernard Lecache to come to the sites of the pogroms to gather testimony.
Abraham Bernard Lecache was born in Paris on August 16, 1895. He was the son of Jews originally from the Ukraine. His father was a Parisian ladies’ tailor. After the end of World War I, Lecache became politically active, took part in the revolutionary movement, and in 1917 he welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In 1921 he joined the French Communist Party and was a member of the editorial board of that party’s newspaper, L’Humanité.
In 1923 Lecache was expelled from the French Communist Party for membership in a Masonic lodge. In 1925 he published Jacob. This novel depicts the split of a Jewish family: the children, abandoning the age-old traditions of their people and the faith kept by their parents, begin a new life free of any traditions. They represent the assimilated Jewish big bourgeoisie, prospering in the depths of modern society.
In 1927 Lecache founded the League Against Pogroms, which the following year, became the International League Against Antisemitism, and in 1979, became the International League against Racism and Antisemitism. He was the president from 1927 to 1968.
During a trip to Ukraine, Lecache visited the site of the biggest anti-Jewish pogrom organized by Petliura’s army on Saturday, on February 15, 1919, in Proskurov. At the time, the city had about 50,000 inhabitants, half of whom were Jews. Based on subsequent investigations, court records and other documents, French writer Henri Barbusse, winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, wrote a short story “While We Celebrated Victory” (referring to the victory in World War I in 1918).
Barbusse wrote: “The case took place on February 15, 1919. The Jewish quarter is characterized by extreme poverty. A horrifying picture: lying only corpses and corpses, – stabbed with bayonets, chopped, curled up in death spasms; children and infants, some with severed heads, others – with heads smashed like an egg, on a brick corner. The streets were strewn with the bodies of the dead. Many corpses lay one on top of another: children, girls, young men were forced to lie down directly on the bodies of their parents and with one blow – with a saber or cleaver – nailed them to the floor. The exhausted, choppe- up father of the family was forced to watch his wife, daughters and granddaughters being raped, raped and then killed. The Proskurov pogrom lasted 3 hours, 1800 people were killed, and 3.5 thousand to 4 thousand suffered. No plea moved the executioners; they said: ‘Dirty Jews!'”
In Proskurov, Lecache met my stepfather’s father, Fayvel Deigen. He could not study at the Russian university because of the numerus clausus, meaning “the number is closed, a method of discrimination against Jews in tsarist Russia in university admissions. Deigen went to France to study, and with an engineering degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse he returned to Russia, soon to become Soviet, and settled in the Ukrainian town of Proskurov.
Fayvel knew French and assisted Lecache in collecting testimonies from the families of the pogrom victims. He would walk with Lecache down the main Alexander Street of the city and help him take testimonies from the relatives of the victims. Many years later, he told me about that exciting meeting. He keenly felt his mission to help the avenging Jew who punished the murderer of the Jewish people.
After three months of investigation, Lecache published the results in February and March 1927 in a Parisian newspaper Le Quotidien. A week before the trial of Petliura’s murderer began, on October 11, 1927, the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then living in Paris, placed the following statement in the Russian-language Parisian newspaper Latest News: “Petliura was the head of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian army for two years and more; almost all this time the pogroms continued; the head of the government and the army did not suppress them, did not punish the guilty and did not resign. So, he accepted responsibility for every drop of Jewish blood spilled. This is so clear that no excuses will help. This is not only my view of the duty and responsibility of the head of the government and the army, but also the view of every literate person.”
The preparation for this trial took 17 months. Nobel Prize winners Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein spoke in Schwartzbard’s defense. After confessing to the murder, Schwartzbard claimed, “I killed the murderer.” The French court agreed with the arguments of the defense: the accused wanted to avenge his parents, for the victims of the Petliura pogroms in Ukraine. Schwartzbard was acquitted and released on October 26, 1927.
Between 1927 and 1933, Lecache published three novels united by one theme: the suffering of the Jews of Russia and Ukraine during the Civil War. The trilogy was called Au pays des pogroms (In the Land of Pogroms), its first part Quand Israel meurt (When Israel dies) was published in 1927. The second part, Les Porteurs de Croix (Bearers of the Cross), appeared in 1930 and dealt with the struggle of Jews for the right to live in Palestine. The last part Les Ressuscités (The Risen) is devoted to the struggle against antisemitism. The author named his parents’ homeland of Ukraine as the country of pogroms.
While participating in the political struggle in France, Lecache was actively engaged in journalism. In 1933 he was among the organizers of the anti-racist and anti-Nazi newspaper Le Droit de vivre (The Right to Life), in which he published articles in defense of Jews persecuted, especially in Nazi Germany, called for a boycott of Hitler ‘s regime, tried to unite all anti-fascist forces in France. Lecache’s anti-fascist activities attracted the interest of the general public. The Nazis also paid attention to it. Since 1932 they singled out Lecache as an object of their attacks and threats.
Lecache wrote in the newspaper Le Droit de Vivre (December 1938): ‘It is our task to organize the moral and cultural blockade of Germany and disperse this nation. It is up to us to start a merciless war.’ The German press quoted Lecache’s articles as proof of the existence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Germany.
In 1942, Lecache was stripped of his French citizenship by the Vichy government. Throughout World War II, he was a member of the French Resistance. He became one of the leaders of the underground under the name of Captain Lecache. After the end of the war he was awarded the highest military awards of France Medal of the Resistance.” the Order of the Military Cross and the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
In the post-war years Lecache continued his activities in defense of the Jews, and after the formation of Israel he was one of the fiery preachers and defenders of the Jewish state. In September 1946, he published an article in which he wrote: “Although I have never been a zealous partisan of Zionism, the spectacle of present developments in Palestine has aroused in me the closest solidarity with the halutzim of Eretz Yisrael. I feel as never before the necessity of making a common front with them against the dangers now threatening them.” He was referring to the anti-Jewish activities of the Nazi ally Hadj Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and “a great war-criminal to boot.”
Lecache died in Cannes on August 14, 1968.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.