Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War

I A MURDER TRIAL IN PARIS A Prosecution Begins At 10:00 a.m. on October 18, 1927, the gates swung open to the Assize Court of the Seine, the fourth of five courtrooms in the Palace of Justice's stately complex. Some fifteen hundred persons, who had clogged the entryway since early morning, pressed forward to a chamber whose wood-paneled galleries accommodated barely four hundred spectators. Nearly half of them were journalists, many from other countries. They had come to witness a murder trial. Although both the victim, Simon Petliura, and the accused, Sholem Schwarzbard, were natives of the former tsarist empire, the crime had been committed in Paris a year and a half earlier. Upon taking his seat on the dais, Presiding Judge Georges Flory informed the twelve jurors that French law permitted simultaneous criminal and civil actions. Accordingly, the victim's widow, Olga Petliura, and his brother, Oskar Petliura, were sharing in the prosecution. Judge Flory then turned to the prisoner in the dock. Sholem Schwarzbard, thirty-nine, was a pale and diminutive man, yet with the muscular physique of a bantamweight boxer. He listened impassively while the judge defined the various charges of premeditated homicide, as listed in Articles 294298 and Article 301 of France's Criminal Code. Flory explained that all carried the death penalty. How did the defendant plead? To each charge, Schwarzbard responded with an emphatic "not guilty." Hereupon the judge invited Public Prosecutor Chretien Reynaud to present the case for the state. The ensuing trial would continue for eight days. The basic facts of the defendant's life by then had been extensively described in the world press. Schwarzbard's hometown was Balta, a predominantly Jewish community in the former tsarist province of Podolia, where his parents owned a tiny grocery store. Balta's Jews intermittently were victimized by pogroms. In one of these, Schwarzbard's pregnant mother was killed. The surviving four children endured lives of acute hardship. Sholem Schwarzbard as an adolescent was apprenticed to a watchmaker in a neighboring village. During Russia's "Octobrist" Revolution of 1905, the seventeen-year-old youth was imprisoned for participating in an antigovernment demonstration. Upon his release three months later, he and his younger brother Meir fled Russia, working and often begging their way through Europe, before finally settling in Paris in 1910. There they opened a watchmaker's shop. Although the brothers soon married and assumed family responsibilities, their reaction to the outbreak of war in 1914 was characteristically uncompromising. Both immediately enlisted for military service, and both were assigned to the French Foreign Legion. Afterward, both suffered wounds in the Somme campaign, and both were awarded the Croix de Guerre. It was during his convalescence in a military hospital in February 1916 that Sholem Schwarzbard first learned of the immense tragedy that had befallen his people in Russia the year before. In December 1914, as the German army launched its offensive on the eastern front, Russia's supreme military commander, Grand Duke Sergei, classified the dense Jewish population in the tsarist borderlands as a potentially subversive element. These people, he decreed, should forthwith be transferred away from the principal battle zones. Thus began, in March 1915, a systematic expulsion of Jews from Russian Poland, Lithuania, and Courland. Ultimately, some half-million men, women, and children were uprooted and driven into the Russian interior. Wherever transportation was provided, the exiles were packed into freight cars and dispatched to inland villages on a waybill. But scores of thousands of others were indiscriminately herded eastward without a fixed destination. Often they subsisted in wagons, boxcars, even in open fields. At least sixty thousand Jews died of starvationSachar, Howard Morley is the author of 'Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War' with ISBN 9780375409141 and ISBN 0375409149.