Travel Notes

In 2009, Richard Fellman visited Bilohiria (Lechowitz) Ukraine while stationed in Uzhhorod National University on a Fullbright Fellowship. Richard M. Fellman is a retired lawyer, Nebraska State Senator, County Commissioner, and adjunct professor of political science at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. His grandfather left Lechowitz for the United States in the late 1890s. His great-grandparents operated an inn and tavern known locally as "the Jew's Inn." His report follows.

“It was late October, 2009. The tops of the Carpathians had snow, but the fields were bare, except for the green tips of winter wheat just poking above the earth. The trees were in full fall colors, from deep gold and yellow to the red of the sumac.

Emotions grabbed me, for I was riding on the road my grandfather must have taken when he left Lechovitz to take a train west to a seaport and on to America. A large current-model truck loaded with freshly-harvested sugar beets passed us going the other way. Then a horse and wagon. The wagon had to be a hundred years old. Then came a two-wheeled buggy, with one horse, not two, and two men sitting and talking to each other. Then a horse-drawn wagon crossed our path. The wagon’s one sign of modernity was that its wheels were not wooden, but old automobile wheels and tires mounted on old car axles attached to the underside of the carriage. The beets in the wagons were spectacular in size.

The road from Shepetovka has a total width of about a lane and a half, enough for two cars to pass if each of them drives with half a car off the road. Today the road is partially paved, but covered with potholes. The road is almost impassable. Still the road continues in a straight line towards Biligoria with almost no bends. It has a thick growth of bushes and trees on both sides stretching from the edge of the roadbed on each side. Tall trees dominate, over-reaching nearly to the center of the road, forming what seems like an umbrella.

We were driving on the road to Lechovitz in late October. The map no longer said Lechovitz. It said Biligoria. It was Lechovitz when the Fellmans lived there, and the Gendlers nearby. Lechovitz, which is how all the Fellmans spelled it, was spelled the same way by Martin Buber in his wonderful and well-regarded two-volume work, Tales of the Hasidim, when among the famous rebbes he told the tales passed on by Rebbe Mordechai of Lechovitz and his disciples. After World War II, the Soviets changed the village’s name from Lechovitz, which they claimed sounded too Polish, to Biligoria, which means “white mountain” in Russian. I’ve now been there, and I assure the reader there is no mountain anywhere near the village. Nor does anything seem especially white.

I was there, in the village my grandfather left in the mid-1890s when he won a medal for marksmanship in the army of the czar, and went home to tell his mother Chavah goodbye, and then left, never to return.

One display was a memorial to World War II, the Great Patriotic War, and the men who fought in the war, some of whom were Jewish. One exhibit held my total interest. It was a duplication of a typical village family home at the turn of the century. It was one large room with a fireplace at one end, and a large bed at the other end. A smaller bed was near the center of the cabin. In front of the fireplace was a large table, with dishes, cups, and plates. In the middle of the table was a large samovar. My grandmother Esther (Roitman) Wine Fellman had a similar samovar which she proudly displayed in her home as an heirloom her mother had brought to America from Russia.

The woman then asked if we wanted to see what the Nazis did, and we quickly said we did. A block past the Jew’s Inn, a road led out of the village, out into the countryside. We were in farm land, the rich black soil of farm land in Ukraine, flat prairie land. “In the summer of 1941,” she said, “the German Army occupied the village of Lechovitz. The German commanders ordered all the Jews of Lechovitz and the Jews of the surrounding villages and shtetls, some 3,000 in all, to move to the outskirts of Lechovitz. On top of that hill, there was once a castle of a Polish nobleman, many years ago. As you can see, it is totally destroyed, but in 1941 there were still tunnels and remnants of old buildings remaining. The Jews were herded into this area and ordered to live here, in the tunnels and old, broken buildings.”

She then led us toward to edge of the ground and pointed to the deep crevice which seemed to encircle the area. “This,” she said, “was a moat when the building was a castle. The water came from the river. The water was long gone, and there had been no water for many years. But the Nazis built a fence outside the area of the moat, put up guard towers, and had police dogs encircling the area closed by another barbed wire fence. The Jews were held inside here, with little food, little water, and no real shelter from the elements. Then, in what I think was the middle of the summer, the Nazis marched the Jews back down the road, through the town, past the other side of Lechovitz, along a country road, and in to a cleared area in the woods. It was there they were killed.”

We drove that path. Everyone in the area would have seen soldiers with weapons marching civilians from the old castle enclosure and towards the center of the village.

We entered a heavily wooded area, a beautiful forest of autumn colors. And from the road there was not a road but a wide, muddy trail. We walked. We were quiet. If the guide was correct, then this was the path taken by the Jews of Lechevitz and the surrounding areas when the Nazi guards marched them into the forest to be killed. The Holocaust Museum report claims that civilian guards, local Ukrainian police, assisted the Nazis in the killing.

After walking a half mile or a little more, we reached an opening in the forest. The open area was about the size of a small playground. It was flat, surrounded by tall pines. One could look skyward, past the tree line, and see open sky. Below that everything darkened. We stood on the road, looking towards the open field. We saw a fence surrounding the field, erected a few years earlier, said our guide, by family members of those who once lived in Lechovitz, family from Israel, she thought.

The field where the killing took place was a few feet lower then the road. The guide explained that the Jews were lined up on the edge of the road and shot. When the fence was installed, workmen found human bones just a few feet below the surface. There were no known survivors except one woman who was in hiding.

The Red Army and partisans drove out the German army and their collaborators in early March, 1944. The terrible war was over for Lechovitz. The Jews of Lechovitz, except for a very few, were no more."