Photo Credit:

While Petlura had issued Order #131, which forbade further pogroms, he did so only after many months of mass murder. A number of historians, including Simon Dubnow, nearly went apoplectic at the mere suggestion that Petlura somehow wasn’t ultimately responsible for the pogroms perpetrated under his command. The bottom line is that more than 50,000 Jewish murders attest to the fact that the Butcher of the Ukraine, as Petlura came to be known by Jews, had fully earned his moniker.

* * * * *

Advertisement




Schwartzbard returned to Paris in 1924 and became a French citizen; Petlura arrived in Paris that same year and directed the activities of the government of the Ukrainian National Republic in exile. Petlura also founded Trident, a viciously anti-Semitic Ukrainian weekly. A furious and revenge-bent Schwartzbard shadowed him for six months. Walking around Paris with Petlura’s photo in one pocket and a handgun in another, he had several opportunities to kill him but refused to do so because Petlura was in the company of his wife and children.

Schwartzbard finally confronted the Butcher of the Ukraine alone on May 25, 1926 on the Boulevard St. Michel in the Latin Quarter. He approached and asked in Ukrainian, “Are you Mr. Petlura?” When Petlura did not answer but raised his cane as if to ward off a common beggar, Schwartzbard pulled out his gun and shot him five times, proclaiming “For the pogroms, for my brethren, for the Jewish people,” and then fired two more bullets into Petlura after he hit the pavement.

According to Schwartzbard, “When the policeman told me Petlura was dead I could not hide my joy. I leaped forward and threw my arms about his neck,” and when the gendarme, Roger Mercier, asked Schwartzbard if he was the shooter, he replied, “I have killed a great assassin.”

Schwartzbard’s abiding pride in his act may perhaps be best illustrated by a letter he wrote to his wife, Anna, while sitting in prison for eighteen months awaiting trial; he told her he wanted his father’s tombstone to be inscribed: “Sleep in peace, great Jewish heart. Your son has avenged the holy and innocent blood of your Jewish brothers and of all your people, Israel.”

France brought joint criminal and civil actions against Schwartzbard. The prosecution, led by Paul Reynaud, charged him with premeditated murder and sought the death penalty. Reynaud argued that Petlura was not responsible for the pogroms and alleged, without any evidence, that Schwartzbard was a Soviet agent who, as part of a grand Bolshevik conspiracy, had been sent to Moscow specifically to be trained to carry out Petlura’s murder.

Schwartzbard’s defense was led by famous French left-wing lawyer Henri Torres, the grandson of Isaiah Levaillant, who had founded the “League for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights” during the Dreyfus Affair. In one of those fascinating historical coincidences, Torres also later served as counsel for the defendant in another world-famous Jewish case when he represented Herschel Grynszpan, who was charged with the November 1938 shooting death of Ernst vom Rath, assistant secretary to the German Embassy in Paris. The Nazis used the killing of vom Rath as a pretext for Kristallnacht. (No trial was held because the French Vichy government turned Grynszpan over to the Germans.)

After the Grynszpan affair, Torres had to flee France. He waited out World War II in the United States before returning to France, where he later served as a minister in Charles de Gaulle’s government.

In the Schwartzbard case, Torres had planned to call some 85 defense witnesses, including Albert Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, Leon Blum (later elected premier of France), H.G. Wells, and Sinclair Lewis, all of whom had volunteered to testify. However, employing a carefully calculated but very risky strategy, he decided not to call most of the witnesses he had prepared for Schwartzbard’s defense, choosing instead to base most his case on a short closing argument in which he evoked the French Revolution, reviewed the history of the 19th century pogroms of the Jews and their communities, and characterized Schwartzbard’s life as one dominated by pogroms and the murder of his family:

The French Revolution first gave emancipation to the Jewish people. The Jews have always been grateful to France. Don’t darken that feeling. Not only the fate of Schwartzbard but the prestige of France rests with you…. Schwartzbard’s fatherland is France, he shed his blood for her, but he did not forget the persecuted brethren of his race…. Let this man be free who bears on his forehead the stigma of the tragedy of a People! You hold today in your hands, Members of the Jury, the prestige of this Nation and the destiny of thousands of human lives that is attached to the verdict of France.

Torres’s strategy worked beyond his wildest dreams. Only a few decades after the notorious Dreyfus Affair which stained French justice, the French jury openly wept at accounts of the pogrom which, in the jury’s mind, became the actual crime being prosecuted. In essence, the trial was turned into a political case against the Ukrainian government and Petlura became the defendant. Though Schwartzbard not only confessed to the murder but visibly exulted in it, the jury, after only 32 minutes of deliberation, acquitted him by a 9-3 vote (unanimity was not required under French law), ruling he had acted as any reasonable Jew would have under the circumstances.

Advertisement

1
2
3
4
SHARE
Previous articleNetanyahu-Liberman Meeting Successful
Next articleBDS Spreads Anti-Semitism Across U.S. Campuses
Saul Jay Singer serves as senior legal ethics counsel with the District of Columbia Bar and is a collector of extraordinary original Judaica documents and letters. He welcomes comments at at [email protected].