The prosperous life of the Jews of Eastern Galicia ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Unlike the neighboring countries—the Russian Empire and Romania—the Jews of Austria-Hungary, of which this region was then a part, enjoyed in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century full civil rights and were not subject to particular persecution. The ethnic composition of the population of Eastern Galicia (the territory of the present-day Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions and almost the entire Ternopil region of Ukraine) was highly diverse: among the inhabitants of Lemberg (later Lviv), its principal city, in 1910 slightly more than half were Poles, almost one-fifth were Ukrainians, and nearly one-third were Jews. A similar picture was observed in other cities and towns of the region.
In 1914, immediately after the declaration of war, Eastern Galicia became a theater of military operations—the Russian army advanced rapidly here to the east and already on August 21 captured Lviv. Soon Russia established the Galician General-Governorship on the occupied territory. On September 27, a Jewish pogrom was carried out in Lviv by Russian Cossacks; several dozen people were killed. In the summer of 1915, German-Austrian troops drove the Russians out of Eastern Galicia; in the spring and summer of 1916, the latter once again occupied its eastern part during the Brusilov Offensive, but this time they were unable to reach Lviv.
In the summer of 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to fall apart; both Ukrainians and Poles laid claim to Galicia, which quickly led to the outbreak of the Polish-Ukrainian War. On November 1, Ukrainian units seized the main cities without a fight (the empire, living out its final days, declared neutrality), but within a few days armed clashes began. Having captured Przemyśl, Polish troops then attacked Lviv and, after prolonged fighting, took it on November 22, “celebrating” this event with another Jewish pogrom that claimed dozens of victims.
Most of Eastern Galicia nevertheless remained under the control of the newly proclaimed West Ukrainian People’s Republic. These lands changed hands several more times until in July 1919 they were fully occupied by Poland. A couple of years later they were officially incorporated into the new Polish state in accordance with the Treaty of Riga of 1921 between Poland and Soviet Russia.
It is not surprising that the Jews of Eastern Galicia, beginning in August 1914, tried, whenever possible, to leave the region. Many refugees (not only Jews, however) headed for the imperial capital of Vienna—at that time this largest city had the third-largest Jewish community in Europe; many of the fugitives had relatives and friends there. Only the officially registered Jewish refugees receiving state assistance numbered in the tens of thousands.
Among those who fled to Vienna “until better times” was a married couple from Eastern Galicia, to whom a boy was born on March 13, 1915. His father was Dr. Abraham Hahn (as the common German and Ashkenazi surname Hahn was subsequently transliterated into Ukrainian and Russian), a Lemberg lawyer, and his mother was Perl Mendelson. As witnesses to the registration, clearly relatives are listed: Abraham Mendelson, a lawyer from Drohobych, and Emil Hahn, also a lawyer from Lemberg, with the same Viennese address indicated for all four. Perhaps it was more convenient for them to live together, or perhaps because of the refugee crisis it was difficult to find housing, although at least one of the families could hardly be called needy: Perl’s father, Hirsch Mendelson, was a co-owner of the oil-refining enterprise in Hubychi (then a suburb of Drohobych) “Kornhaber, Erdheim, Mendelson and Gottesmann.” The boy was named Ludwig.
Although until the second half of the 1910s Abraham (later he became Alfred) Hahn continued to be listed as a lawyer at the courts in Lemberg, Stanisławów (later Ivano-Frankivsk), and Halych, the family remained in Vienna until 1919, when the situation changed again: in the overcrowded capital of the small country that remained of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, resources became catastrophically scarce; hyperinflation, a housing shortage, epidemics, and then famine led in 1919 to a genuine humanitarian crisis. Refugees from Eastern Galicia began returning to their homeland, especially since after these territories came under Polish control the situation there appeared to have stabilized.
The Hahns moved to Drohobych, the center of business activity in the region, which had only recently been turbulent and was beginning to revive again under the new authorities. Since the mid-nineteenth century, so-called “mountain wax” (ozokerite) had been extracted in the vicinity of the town of Boryslav nearby, and later oil began to be pumped; at first, the overwhelming majority of wells, oil refineries, and other enterprises in the industry were owned by local Jews. Oil extraction and the complex system of its trade required appropriate legal support, which is why there were many lawyers and notaries in the city, most of whom were also Jews. The need for these services remained later as well, when the oil business was first bought up and consolidated by Poles and then eventually nationalized. Thus, the Hahn family’s choice of Drohobych as their new place of residence was not accidental—especially since the family of the oil magnates, the Mendelsons, originated from there.
In 1925, ten-year-old Ludwik (as his name was now written in the Polish manner) entered the King Władysław II Jagiełło Gymnasium in Drohobych—the most prestigious secondary educational institution in the city. The gymnasium had eight grades, and instruction was conducted in Polish—the state language. At the same time, more than half of the students were Jews. For example, in the 1928/1929 academic year, out of 498 students, 267 were Jews, 194 were Roman Catholics (that is, Poles), and 35 were Greek Catholics (that is, Ukrainians). In 1933, when Ludwik graduated from the gymnasium, out of 429 students these groups numbered 223, 171, and 34 respectively. And in the city’s population, which in the 1930s did not reach 40,000, Jews constituted 40–45 percent, Poles about one-third, and Ukrainians about one-quarter (the very small proportion of Ukrainians among the students is explained by the fact that a Ukrainian gymnasium named after Ivan Franko also operated in the city).
There were Jews among Ludwik’s teachers as well—the most famous of them was the self-taught artist and Polish-language writer Bruno Schulz, whose work was noted by contemporaries but gained real fame several decades after his tragic death during the Nazi occupation of Drohobych. Schulz taught drawing and manual training at the gymnasium.
After graduating from the gymnasium, Ludwik followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Lviv University; at the same time, he also studied at the Academy of Foreign Trade. He frequently traveled to Drohobych on weekends and holidays—besides spending time with his family, he participated there in the activities of a “general Zionist student organization” called “Hatikvah” (“Hope”). In general, numerous Zionist organizations, movements, and circles of every orientation and for every age group—from socialists to right-wing revisionists—operated in Eastern Galicia. “Hatikvah,” apparently, was a local Drohobych organization—we were able to find references to it in the memoirs of other residents of Drohobych, but this name does not appear anywhere else. Like other similar organizations, according to Hahn’s testimony during interrogations in 1946, “Hatikvah” engaged in the study of the history of Palestine and Zionism, recruitment of new members, and the organization of “cultural events.” Rejecting accusations of political Zionist activism, Hahn claimed that “Jewish students and graduates” joined the organization in order to “spend time culturally and fill their time with playing chess, cards, reading newspapers, and listening to the radio.” However, like any other youth or “academic” Zionist association of that time, “Hatikvah” was supposed above all to prepare its members for departure to Palestine. Evidently, this is what it did: at least two of Hahn’s classmates, who were also members of the organization, left for Palestine as early as 1934.
Hahn’s plans to become a Polish lawyer were not destined to be realized—he had barely received his diploma in the summer of 1939 when, on September 18, German troops entered Drohobych. However, a week later they left the city, and on the same day it was occupied by the Red Army in fulfillment of the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Soon all enterprises were nationalized and personal property confiscated; all forms of civic activity and self-organization were banned: all independent press, political and youth associations (including Zionist ones). Shortly thereafter, mass arrests and deportations began of representatives of the “intelligentsia” professions, politicians, civil servants, public figures, and well-to-do citizens—among them many Jews, especially well-known Zionists.
However, the newly qualified lawyer Hahn managed to survive. He took a position as an accountant in the regional financial department (under the new authorities Drohobych became a regional center), and was soon promoted to chief accountant.
At the end of June 1941, Hahn evacuated eastward together with the financial department, leaving in Drohobych his father—his mother had died back in 1933—and possibly his wife (we do not even know her name—only that she was killed by the Nazis in Warsaw in 1943). In the Zaporizhzhia region he was appointed an accountant at Gosstrakh, and already in August he was drafted into the army—into construction troops. He was hospitalized at least twice, and in 1943 he was demobilized for health reasons. After being discharged from a hospital in Yerevan, he once again found work as an accountant—in the housing and maintenance unit attached to a rear garrison. Finally, in April 1945, at the summons of his first employer, the Drohobych regional financial department, he returned to his native city. Drohobych had been liberated almost a year earlier. As throughout the Nazi-occupied territory of Eastern Galicia, almost all local Jews who had not been deported by the Soviets in 1939–1941, not drafted into the army, or not evacuated after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, were shot in a nearby forest or sent to death camps: of the approximately 17,000 who had remained in the city, fewer than five hundred survived. Abraham/Alfred Hahn, who was killed in 1942, was not among the survivors; however, Ludwik’s cousin survived, having, according to him, hidden for two years in an underground bunker together with her husband, the region’s chief surgeon.
Within two weeks he took up a position as an accountant in the office of the district plenipotentiary of the Polish government for evacuation matters. How did this happen? Some explanation is required here.
In September 1944, the so-called Lublin Agreements were signed between the governments of the Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian SSRs (part of whose territories had belonged to Poland before 1939) on the one hand, and the Polish Committee of National Liberation—a temporary pro-Soviet executive authority of Poland, transformed in 1945 into the “Provisional Government of National Unity”—on the other. The agreement with the Ukrainian SSR stated that the parties undertook immediately
“to proceed with the evacuation of all citizens of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, and Ruthenian nationality residing… in the districts of Poland… who wish to move to Ukraine, and of Poles and Jews who held Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939 and reside in the Western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, to the territory of Poland. Evacuation shall apply only to those among the aforementioned… who have expressed their desire to evacuate and with respect to whom there is agreement of the Government of the Ukrainian SSR and the Polish Committee of National Liberation. Evacuation is voluntary, and therefore coercion may not be applied either directly or indirectly. The desire to evacuate may be expressed either orally or in writing.”
Thus, while the right to resettle from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR arose simply on the basis of nationality, resettlement in the opposite direction was permitted only to Poles and Jews, provided that they had held Polish citizenship prior to the Soviet occupation of the relevant territories in 1939 and, at the time of the signing of the agreement, resided “in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR.” Looking ahead, it should be noted that despite the principle of voluntariness declared in the agreements, resettlement from Poland to the USSR became de facto compulsory for hundreds of thousands of people—primarily Ukrainians and Belarusians.
There were many who wished to leave in the opposite direction, especially among Jews: most deported Poles who had survived mass repressions left the USSR either with Anders’s Army in 1942 or later with Polish units that fought as part of the Soviet Army. Jews, however, were accepted there extremely reluctantly. As noted above, tens of thousands of Polish Jews were deported in 1939–1940 to the Russian North and the Urals. The majority of those who managed to survive there under extremely harsh conditions—forced to perform menial labor in an unfamiliar cold climate, amid constant malnutrition, lack of hygiene, and epidemics of typhus and other diseases—after the amnesty of 1941 headed to Central Asia (especially to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and other cities of Uzbekistan) in hopes of southern abundance and warmth. There they were joined by hundreds of thousands of other refugees—most of whom were also Jews evacuated from the Nazi-occupied western territories of the USSR. As a result, the settlers’ hopes were not fulfilled—due to the enormous influx of population, living conditions turned into a real hell, as surviving witnesses recount in detail in their memoirs. After the war, almost all of them remained in Central Asia—they were not put on trains—and, of course, seized the opportunity to leave for Poland, from where many hoped to continue on to Palestine or the United States. At the same time, some refugees had started families in the USSR—the agreement specifically stipulated the right of departure for close relatives as well.
The Lublin Agreements initially concerned only former Polish citizens physically located on the territory of Ukraine. Their provisions were extended to all such persons “residing on the territory of the USSR” only on July 6, 1945, in a new agreement between the USSR and the Provisional Government of Poland; the right of close relatives to resettle “regardless of their nationality” was also confirmed. The completion of resettlement in both directions was planned for the end of 1945—which, of course, proved entirely unrealistic; the main phase of mutual repatriations stretched until the summer of 1946. It is estimated that between 1944 and 1949 about 230,000 Jews arrived in Poland from the USSR.
The practical implementation of the evacuation was entrusted to a newly created institution of chief plenipotentiaries and chief representatives: the former operated in a foreign country, while the latter acted in their own, appointing district plenipotentiaries and representatives. It was to the office of such a district Polish plenipotentiary in Drohobych, Kazimierz Griglaszewski, that Ludwik Hahn obtained employment. He worked in this position for just under a year: on April 26, 1946, Hahn was arrested.
In the warrant for arrest, against Ludwig—as his name once again began to be written in Soviet documents—Hahn, two charges were brought: that he, “using his official position, systematically for large monetary bribes illegally registers and provides fictitious exit documents to citizens of the USSR who do not have the right to leave for Poland,” and that he, “without having the authority to do so, acquired fictitious invitations, which he sent to citizens of Jewish nationality in various cities of the Soviet Union, with the aim of ensuring the illegal transfer of these citizens from the eastern regions to the western ones, with their subsequent departure to Poland.”
At his first interrogation, Hahn denied that he had helped anyone without the right to leave for Poland, but admitted that he had assisted numerous Jewish acquaintances who turned to him for help due to the overburdened system. This is not surprising: Ludwik, apparently, enjoyed great trust from Griglaszewski—they even lived in the same building. This allowed him to register repatriates and process exit documents (so-called “evacuation sheets”) out of turn. Hahn stated during interrogation that Griglaszewski and the chairman of the regional branch of the Union of Polish Patriots, Schneider, always signed and sealed without refusal the “invitations” that Hahn filled out and brought to them (which Griglaszewski himself, questioned as a witness, confirmed). At the same time, Hahn denied taking any bribes for this—except in two instances: when for 2,500 rubles (a relatively large sum; for example, an ordinary enterprise accountant earned about 500–600 rubles per month at the time, while Hahn’s official salary was 1,500 rubles) he registered the Ukrainian Ivantsev on the basis of a church record stating that his father was Polish, and when on another occasion he received a radio receiver from a Ukrainian married to a Polish woman in return for his services.
The investigator, attempting to catch him in a lie, asked about the origin of 60,000 zlotys discovered during a search. Hahn replied that these were “public funds intended to assist Jewish families relocating to Poland.” In December 1945, he had traveled to Poland on official business and received 100,000 zlotys from representatives of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, which operated in the country from 1944 to 1950. One of them was David Kahane, a rabbi saved during the occupation of Lviv by the Greek Catholic clergy and who later became Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army. The other, Edward Rostal, was the committee’s representative in Katowice—a region in southern Poland to which a significant portion of the evacuees were directed. According to Hahn, the committee authorized him “to engage on the territory of the USSR in providing assistance to citizens of Jewish nationality in their departure to the territory of Poland.” He had already spent 40,000, and 60,000 remained.
Hahn did not tell the investigator (and perhaps did not know himself) that at least one of his contacts—namely Rostal—was connected with “Ihud” (“Unity”), an underground organization operating in Poland, in essence the Polish branch of the “Bricha” (“Flight”) movement, which was engaged in the illegal transfer of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine. Together with the money, Kahane and Rostal gave Hahn lists of Jews (including, separately, 27 rabbis) and instructed him to contact these individuals, forward them small sums of money, and, most importantly, issue and send them “invitations” on behalf of the Union of Polish Patriots. Hahn managed to carry out these instructions with respect to ten rabbis and 50–55 other persons living in various cities (the lists were seized from him during the search and added to the case file); all of these people were relatives of Jews residing in Poland, and none of them subsequently contacted Hahn, so he does not know whether they succeeded in completing the paperwork and departing.
Hahn was questioned in detail about his connections with “Zionist” organizations; he honestly recounted his membership in “Hatikvah,” describing it as an entirely innocent youth club and noting that in 1939 it ceased to exist, and that after that he had no and does not have any affiliation with Zionist structures, although he is aware that a Zionist party legally operates in Poland, headed by Emil Sommerstein, leader of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. Hahn was referring to the Union of Zionist Democrats “Ihud,” which existed in Poland from 1944 to 1955 and had no connection to the underground “Ihud,” even though the investigation, as we shall see, deliberately or inadvertently conflates the two. Hahn became acquainted with members of the “Central Committee of the Zionist Party” in 1945 during a business trip to Poland (which he visited four times), but received no “directives” from them. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to admit to the investigators that he still considered himself a Zionist.
In May, Hahn was formally charged with committing two crimes: facilitating the illegal crossing of state borders (minimum penalty—one year of imprisonment) and accepting a bribe as a public official (maximum penalty—two years of imprisonment). At this stage, the charges concerned only the episodes involving Ukrainians whom he had helped to leave for Poland in exchange for compensation (money or a radio receiver)—in the investigators’ view, unlawfully, although Hahn maintained that they had full legal grounds to depart.
However, the interrogations continued. Hahn was methodically questioned about the people whose addresses and telephone numbers were contained in his notebooks, about acquaintances in Poland, Palestine, and other countries. It emerged that he had met Edward Rostal not in Poland but much earlier, in Yerevan, and that in the summer of 1945 he had sent him an invitation, after which Rostal even lived for some time in Hahn’s apartment and worked alongside him as a clerk in the district representation office, until he himself departed for Poland. In addition, about 80 letters were found in Hahn’s possession, which, as he explained, various people had asked him to drop into a mailbox in Poland in order to expedite delivery (these letters were seized from him before his last trip, at the Lviv airport, but were returned to him upon his return).