Drogobych. Bruno Schulz is murdered by Karl Günther, officer of the Gestapo.
Information about Schulz’s death was preserved in the memories of witnesses and indirect observers. However, their recollections are sometimes contradictory; written down years after the event, they contain numerous gaps, are deeply emotional, and marked by trauma on the one hand, and blandishment on the other. Today, they are often unverifiable. Is it possible to systematise the multiplicity of voices?
The most complete attempt to collect them, presented by Jerzy Ficowski* in three texts published during the three decades between 1956 and 1986, is highly figurative, biased with a personal writing design and related to its literary assumptions – for example attempts at standardising, selective content picking, fictionalising. The sources on which Ficowski based his report are often quite elusive. It is therefore possible that here – in the chaos of discourses, in unverifiable, parallel variants and not in the order of the biographical narrative – the nightmare and the polyphonic nature of this death are revealed.
There is no doubt about the date or place of the event: Schulz was shot on 19 November 1942 at the crossroads of Czackiego and Mickiewicza streets*, opposite the Judenrat* (about a hundred metres from his former family house* at the Market Square), during a murderous campaign against Jews, which Drogobych residents later called the “Black Thursday”. It is estimated that between one hundred (Michał Chajes*) and two hundred and thirty (Samuel Rothenberg*) people were killed that day in the Drogobych ghetto, and the supposed direct pretext for this Gestapo operation was a fight of the previous day, in which a Jewish pharmacist Kurtz-Reines hurt the SS-man Hübner in his finger. Panic started to spread; according to Jerzy Ficowski’s findings, the Nazis shot at passers-by without warning, “they ran into the houses after the escapees, killed those who were hiding on staircases and in apartments” . Schulz was nearby, probably headed to the Judenrat to get food. Izydor Friedman*, the writer’s friend and a direct witness of his death, recalls: “The physically weak Schulz was caught by the Gestapo man Günther who held him down, then put a revolver to his head and shot twice” .
It is mostly assumed that the identity of the murderer is by all means certain: SS-scharfürher Karl Günther appears in many independent accounts, including those from Emil Górski, Leopold Lustig, Alfred Schreyer* and Abraham Schwarz. Moreover, it has been generally accepted that Schulz’s death was a kind of retaliation on another Gestapo man, Schulz’s protector, Felix Landau, who had previously shot Günther’s protégé: a dentist, Mr Löw (Ficowski’s version ) or a carpenter, Mr Hauptman (Lustig’s version cited by Henryk Grynberg ). Günther was later publicly bragging in front of Landau: “I’ve shot your Jew!” .
However, it is necessary to add that there is at least one account that does not confirm this report. It is included in the minutes of the Holocaust reports written by the surviving Jews of Drogobych in 1946, 1947 and 1958 . All witnesses – Chaim Patrych, Moses Marcus Wiedmann, Theodora Reifler and Josef Weissmann – claim that Schulz’s murderer was not Günther, but Friedrich Dengg, a Gestapo man, whose name Ficowski for some reason ignores, although after all, he had these sources in his archive . The testimonies in the protocols also add a few other differences to the narrative that Ficowski created. However, the information is inconsistent in some respects, which was perhaps the reason why the biographer considered it unreliable.
The reports specify the time of the event differently. Emil Górski, a former student and then a friend of Schulz’s, claims that he saw Schulz before noon when he visited him at the Gärtnerei workplace at Św. Jana St. “The news of his death came to me very quickly, perhaps an hour after we said goodbye” , he declared in 1982, which would indicate that the writer had died around eleven or twelve o’clock. Another participant of these events, Alfred Schreyer, supported by Abraham Schwarz, argues that the “wild action” of the Gestapo began much earlier, certainly before nine, and Schulz’s death could have occurred “even before eight o’clock” .
The message about the alleged escape from Drogobych, apparently planned by Schulz for 19 November, is also ambiguous. Researchers tend to agree that Schulz could have had fake Aryan documents (Kennkarte) – it is believed that someone among the writer’s friends in Warsaw (perhaps the underground activist Tadeusz Szturm de Sztrem* or Zofia Nałkowska* ) must have helped him organise those, and probably the documents were delivered to Schulz from Lviv through the Home Army . A different account is offered by Harry Zeimer*, Schulz’s former pupil, according to whom the fake documents were organized by Tadeusz Wójtowicz*, a Drogobych friend from the resistance movement . The writer probably had been preparing his trip to Warsaw for several months, as evidenced by, for example, the efforts he made in 1942 to secure his manuscripts and drawings, as well as by the memories of Zeimer, who testified at Landau’s trial that some time before his death (“at the last minute”) Schulz “resigned from escaping together with them” . Ficowski believes Emil Górski, who remembered that on the day of the shooting Schulz was ready to go and visited him just to say goodbye . On the other hand, Izydor Friedman does not confirm this belief. On the contrary, he describes Schulz as a broken man, deprived already of the will to live, delaying his escape, unable to take any action .
Schulz’s body was lying on the street for almost 24 hours . However, the circumstances of the writer’s burial remain unclear. Jerzy Ficowski and Wiesław Budzyński regard Friedman’s testimony as the most reliable. In a letter to Ficowski from 1948 Friedman declares that he buried Schulz in the old Jewish cemetery in Drogobych the morning after the shooting . This would be in line with the memories of Abraham Schwarz, who – as a member of the group collecting the corpse at the command of the Germans – remembered that Schulz’s body had been left by the gravediggers, because, as people said, “someone was about to come soon, went only to pick up some cart to carry the body to the old cemetery [and then buried him next to his mother – ed. Aut.]”. Jerzy Jarzębski* expresses a different opinion. The scholar considers Leopold Lustig’s account to be more credible; Lustig claimed to have participated in “clearing” the bodies off the ghetto streets. According to him, Schulz’s remains were transported along with others to the new Jewish cemetery and buried there with the body of carpenter Hauptman (Günther’s protégé). Lustig even points to the exact place of burial: “They lay near the wall, from the entrance to the right, and there we buried them in one grave” . There is at least one more version, repeated by Wiesław Budzyński who referred the words of Dora Kacnelson, a teacher of Polish in Drogobych, but due to the lack of similar testimonies it is impossible to judge its credibility. The teacher knew a man named Hauptman (not the carpenter), who, many years after the war, claimed that he and other Judenrat workers buried Schulz’s body – almost three days after the shooting – in a collective grave opposite the synagogue, next to the old Jewish cemetery .
Regardless of the report, it should be said that Schulz’s actual burial site remains unknown today. The old Jewish cemetery was converted into a housing area in the 1950s. The new Jewish cemetery, currently completely devastated, is overgrown with wild grass and bushes. Instead of a non-existing tombstone, Schulz was commemorated with a brass plaque in 2006* at the place of his death. (jo) (transl. mw)
