Ukraine Nationalists Attack Jewish Tillers in Villages of Galicia

A wave of anti-Jewish terrorism has broken out in the villages of Eastern Galicia, conducted mainly by the Ukrainian youth of the country. The chief sufferers are Jewish farmers.

The usual excuse given for anti-Jewish excesses is that the Jews are traders living on the work of the Christian peasants. In the present case, however, this excuse does not apply, for the Jews who are being attacked are not traders, but farmers, tilling their own land. The peasants now have their own cooperative stores, and handle most of the trade themselves.

One of the worst centres of the terror is the Snatin district. Here the peasants declared that the Jews had no right to engage in farming and should keep to trade. A crowd stoned a number of Jewish farmers, uprooted their fruit trees, fired their hay stacks and their barns. In a number of cases Jewish farmers have been shot without the slightest provocation, and there have been numerous cases of farm buildings being fired and crops deliberately destroyed.

CAN FIND NO BUYERS

These are but a few examples of what is happening. The position of the Jewish farmers in these districts has become an unbearable one, and many go about in fear of their lives. In the village of Okopi-Pogojelsk, the whole Jewish community returns thanks to God every morning for being still alive. Many of the Jewish farmers, realizing the impossibility of the existing state of affairs, have made up their minds to sell their farms and return to their towns. But the peasants refuse to buy their fields, hoping that the Jews will sooner or later be forced by the terror to leave, and that they will then get their farms for nothing.

The perpetrators of these acts of terror are not Poles, but the younger sections of the Ukrainian population, who have lately developed strong Nazi tendencies, and who are thus trying to give expression to their Ukrainian nationalism. The older and more responsible members of the Ukrainian population are powerless. They have lost their influence over these young nationalist rowdies, and are powerless to stop them. The latter, indeed, consider the attempts of the Ukrainian leaders to check them a betrayal of the cause of Ukrainian nationalism, and become more and more violent in their activities. Meanwhile the influence of Hitlerism is growing from day to day.