Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen? And what if, in spite of your efforts to find out whether the event took place or not, you arrive at an impasse of uncertainty and cannot be sure if the story someone told you on the terrace of a café in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk was derived from a little known but verifiable historical event or was a legend or a boast or a groundless rumor passed on from a father to a son? Even more to the point: If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your mouth drops open in wonder and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?
Circumstances led me to Ukraine in September 2017. My business was in Lviv, but I took advantage of an off-day to travel two hours to the south and spend the afternoon in Ivano-Frankivsk, where my paternal grandfather had been born sometime in the early 1880s. There was no reason to go there except curiosity, or else what I would call the lure of a counterfeit nostalgia, for the fact was that I had never known my grandfather and still know next to nothing about him. He died 28 years before I was born, a shadow-man from the unwritten, unremembered past, and even as I traveled to the city he had left in the late 19th or early 20th century, I understood that the place where he had spent his boyhood and adolescence was no longer the place where I would be spending the afternoon.
Still, I wanted to go there, and as I look back and ponder the reasons why I wanted to go, perhaps it comes down to a single verifiable fact: The journey would be taking me through the bloodlands of Eastern Europe, the central horror-zone of 20th-century slaughter, and if the shadow-man responsible for giving me my name had not left that part of the world when he did, I never would have been born.
What I already knew in advance of my arrival was that before it became Ivano-Frankivsk in 1962 (in honor of Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko), the 400-year-old city had been known variously as Stanislawów, Stanislau, Stanislaviv, and Stanislav, depending on whether it had been under Polish, German, Ukrainian, or Soviet rule. A Polish city had become a Hapsburg city, a Hapsburg city had become an Austro-Hungarian city, an Austro-Hungarian city had become a Russian city in the first two years of World War I, then an Austro-Hungarian city, then a Ukrainian city for a short time after the war, then a Polish city, then a Soviet city (from September 1939 to July 1941), then a German-controlled city (until July 1944), then a Soviet city, and now, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a Ukrainian city.
At the time of my grandfather's birth, the population was 18,000, and in 1900 (the approximate year of his departure) there were 26,000 people living there, more than half of them Jews. By the time of my visit, the population had grown to 230,000, but back during the years of the Nazi occupation the number had been somewhere between 80,000 and 95,000, half Jewish, half non-Jewish, and what I had already known for several decades by then is that after the German invasion in the summer of 1941, 10,000 Jews had been rounded up and shot in the Jewish cemetery that fall and by December the remaining Jews had been herded into a ghetto, from which 10,000 more Jews had been shipped off to the Belźec death camp in Poland, and then, one by one and five by five and twenty by twenty throughout 1942 and early 1943, the Germans had marched the surviving Jews of Stanislau into the woods surrounding the city and had shot them and shot them and shot them until there were no Jews left—tens of thousands of people murdered by a bullet to the back of the head and then buried in the common pits that had been dug by the murdered ones before they were killed
A kind woman I had met in Lviv took charge of organizing the trip for me, and because she had been born and raised in Ivano-Frankivsk and still lived there, she knew where to go and what to see and even went to the trouble of enlisting someone to drive us there. A young lunatic with no fear of death, the driver barreled down the narrow two-lane highway as if he were auditioning for a stuntman's job in a racing-car movie, taking inordinate risks to pass every car in front of us as he calmly and abruptly swerved into the other lane even as oncoming cars hurtled toward us, and several times during the trip it occurred to me that this dull, overcast afternoon on the first day of autumn 2017 would be my last day on earth, and how ironic it was, I said to myself, and yet how terribly fitting, that I should have come all this way to visit the city my grandfather had left more than a hundred years ago only to die before I got there.
