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possibly want. Not so many fine things as before, but more than enough. I could not be greedy, because in Communist Russia everything was meant to be shared equally. I had my mother, who was with me constantly. I had my father, who smiled with such great pride when I did so little as come up with a shortcut home. Hewas busy, of course, moving from job to job—for a time, he worked as a medical assistant in a doctor’s office!—but he always made time for me. I had my little brother. I had my puppy, and my canaries, and my cousins. I had friends. And so I had my fill.
    No, all was not quite right in our little corner of the world, which was now our little corner of Russia, but it was mostly okay. Not like it was, but mostly okay. And yet these things too were about to change—so much now that even a child had to notice.
     
    In June 1941, almost two years after the Germans cut short their approach into Lvov, we heard those Messerschmitt planes flying once again overhead. My parents did not talk about it, but they must have known this would happen. Once again we heard the bombs, and once again we retreated to my grandparents’ basement. This time, too, I helped with the pushing of Pawel’s stroller, laden with some of our worldly possessions. This time we expected the worst, and on June 29, 1941, when the Wehrmacht marched into the city, my parents were terrified. There was a big panic. The nonaggression pact was no more. The Russians had fled. The Jews were afraid to come out of their apartments. And the Ukrainians were dancing in the streets. This was one of the most disturbing aspects of the German occupation, the collaboration of the Ukrainians. You see, the Germans had promised the Ukrainians a free Ukraine, which was why they were so overjoyed at being liberated from Russian rule. They welcomed the Germans with flowers. The German soldiers paraded through the streets with their motorcycles, with their helmets and their boots and their black leather coats, and the Ukrainian women would walk out among the motorcade and greet the German men with hugs and kisses. Wewatched from our balcony. My father, he was very upset. Once again, he said, “This is the end for us.”
    My father did not let us leave the apartment, and he went out only when he had to work or to bring back food or supplies. The Ukrainians were ruling the streets. They were doing the Germans’ dirty work even before the Germans could set about it. This was the beginning of the pogroms that took place that summer in Lvov, in which more than six thousand Jews were killed by Ukrainians. There were orchestrated attacks, but there were also small instances and disturbances, not unlike the razor slashing meted out on my father as a young man. A thousand tiny torments, adding up to a riot of violence and torture. Young boys beating on Jewish men with sticks, pulling their beards so hard that they would bleed, following them home and looting their apartments before turning them in to the Germans, terrorizing Jewish women with impunity because they knew their misconduct would be supported by the Germans.
    In July 1941, in part to revenge the assassination of former Ukrainian leader Symon Petlyura, the Ukrainians killed more than five thousand Jews. I would later learn about Petlyura in history class. He was a famous Socialist who served as president of Ukraine during the Russian civil war. Under Petlyura, the Ukrainian government perpetrated a series of pogroms that resulted in the killing of as many as one hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews. He allowed the pogroms, it was said, because they demonstrated his people’s solidarity. Years later, Petlyura was approached on a Paris street by a Jewish man who shot him three times at close range and cried out with each shot: “This, for the pogroms. This, for the massacres. This, for the victims.” My father always believed that the pogroms of 1941 were a kind of payback for that one act of defiance, an endless