Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies

Abstract

This article analyzes events in the East Galician town of Buczacz during World War II on the basis of wartime and postwar accounts by the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish inhabitants of the town. The article argues that such testimonies should be treated as historical documents and that they are valuable in reconstructing the events of genocide and communal massacre during the German occupation of Eastern Europe both because they provide different insights into these events from those available in official documentation and because they “save” from oblivion events that cannot be found at all in other documents.