Artistic Forms of Shaping Ukrainian National Identity by Leon Getz

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of shaping Ukrainian national identity in artistic works of autobiographical nature, created at the time of life crisis and oppressive sociopolitical situation, using Leon Getz as an example. Getz (1896–1971) was a painter who was raised in a Polish-Ukrainian family in Lviv but made a decision to identify nationally with the Ukrainian minority, oppressed both in pre- and postwar Poland. After WWII, he was subjected to surveillance by the Polish Security Office because of his Ukrainian identification. That led him and his wife (also a Ukrainian) to attempt suicide—unsuccessful in the case of the artist, fatal in the case of his wife. Getz wrote down his memoirs twice: the first time in the 1930s, the second time after his wife’s death in the 1950s. The first memoirs expressed his loneliness in an environment dominated by Poles, and they were drawn up openly, though for the author’s needs only. The second memoirs presented his personal tragedy and were kept in secret because the Security Office sought to intercept Getz’s notes as documents incriminating the officers. However, the author hoped to make the text public in the future. The subject of the analysis is constituted by memoirs read in the context of the artist’s other personal documents and works. They present the formation of his Ukrainian national identity as the chosen one and at the same time as the one that, in his opinion, was related to his and his wife’s tragedy. I interpret these memoirs in two different but complimentary ways: first, as life writing at the time of a man’s personal life crisis and, second, as life writing in a situation of oppression by the authoritarian and after WWII totalitarian state, under surveillance by the Security Office, whose moves put the very subjectivity of an individual in crisis. Both interpretations highlight the process of building Getz’s self-identification not as a discovered preexisting nationality, but as a deliberate—and nonobvious—choice of national path. The article is based on Getz’s unpublished memoirs and works, which are held in archives in Cracow (Poland) and Rome (Italy).

Introduction

Leon Getz was a Ukrainian painter who came from a mixed Polish-Ukrainian family living in the city of Lviv. Although he is quite famous in the artistic and academic circles in Ukraine nowadays, in Poland he remains almost unknown. An exception to this rule constitutes contemporary exhibition projects held in Sanok, ¹ the Subcarpathian town where the artist worked as a drawing teacher since 1925 and combined his teaching duties with his art and museum work. Despite Getz’s limited fame, his masterpieces—and not only his paintings but also his writing—deserve attention for both their artistic values and their interesting susceptibility to different interpretations. First, Getz’s works can be perceived as a difficult entanglement of Ukrainian and Polish cultural elements, as this Ukrainian painter not only lived in pre- and postwar Poland but also thematically linked many of his works with Polish locations of particular importance to him. He painted Sanok’s landscapes, ² drew Cracow’s streets, ³ and additionally, in 1966, donated 446 of his drawings to the Presidium of the National Council and the Historical Museum of the City of Cracow. ⁴ Second, Getz’s works can be interpreted as a manifestation of strengthening of Ukrainian identity and growing aversion to the Polishness of the artist who consistently collaborated with the Ukrainian artistic and intellectual circles and experienced oppression on the basis of nationality, first in the Second Polish Republic, then in the Polish People’s Republic (Hakh, 2016). Third, finally, some of Getz’s works, especially his late autobiographical writing, may be seen as a testimony to the painter’s life crisis in a deeply oppressive situation, particularly in the totalitarian state of postwar Poland.

In the following parts of the article, the above-mentioned interpretive directions enable me to present Getz’s Ukrainianness not as a discovered preexisting nationality but as a deliberate choice and a construction of national self-identification in progress. Getz’s biography turns out to be an indispensable context for exploring these phenomena. The artist grew up in a Polish-Ukrainian home in Habsburg Galicia, therefore under conditions where different patterns of affiliations, also polylateral ones, could have occurred. After 1918, he lived in Poland, the country that had ambitions to be a nation state and pursued them in violent ways. These circumstances made choosing and constructing Getz’s identity a difficult and nonobvious task. They also make him a fascinating subject for microhistorical investigation. ⁵ Despite many idiosyncrasies in Getz’s biography, his case allows for insight into the common and divided histories of Ukrainian and Polish nationalisms. It sheds light on choosing a national identity as a process that may follow a peculiar, unusual path, on one hand, and be very consistent, on the other. This, in turn, elucidates the picture of a larger process, which is the nationalization of the Polish and Ukrainian communities, especially their intelligentsia, in the 20th century.

The sources of the article comprise Getz’s particular artistic works and his unpublished memoirs held in the Archive of the Main Chancellery of the Basilian Order of St. Josaphat in Rome (Italy) and the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance in Cracow (Poland). The additional source and context for Getz’s works are the files of the Polish People’s Republic Security Office, which surveilled the artist and collected thousands of documents about him, currently disclosed and located in the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, the branches in Cracow and Rzeszów (Poland). In fact, memoirs run the risk of unintentionally adopting a retrospective bias and protagonist’s optic for analysis. Secret files, moreover, present a story of life from a particular political and bureaucratic perspective. They are propelled by metanarratives about enemy’s influence, sabotage, or betrayal and provide such negative accounts on their subjects that they become akin to “hostile unauthorized biographies” (Lewis 2003, 383) or “incriminating biographies” that wrote targets into mythologies “over which they had little control” (Capp 1993, 5). ⁶ However, memoirs provide a unique insight into their authors’ worldviews. As Fabian Baumann (2023, especially 12–13) proves, they can be read as products of active self-memorialization and shed light on the evolution of East-Central European intelligentsia toward clear national identities. The files, in turn, analyzed critically and with the empathy that was lacking in their creation, can be comprehended as “file stories,” (Glajar 2016, 57)—that is, series of microhistories that can be used to forge a narrative, also about oneself. Such methodological approaches provide inspiration for the interpretation of sources by and about Getz in this article.

Choosing an Identity within a Mixed Family

Getz was born on April 13, 1896, in Lviv, at that time the capital of the crown land of Galicia, which constituted part of the Habsburg Monarchy. He came from a family with a complicated genealogy. His grandmother was a Pole and Roman Catholic, his grandfather was a Ukrainian but one “who served in the palace of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Morawski” ⁷ as well as “in the liberation ranks of Poland and took part in the [January] uprising [in 1863–1864].” ⁸ Getz’s mother, Józefa Harapin, came from a Greek-Catholic but Polish-speaking family and referred to her nationality as Polish. In turn, his father, Leon Getz senior, became entrenched in Ukrainianness in the Eastern Galician countryside where he—as an illegitimate child—was given away by his mother for upbringing. However, he had served in the Resurrectionist Congregation, a Roman Catholic clerical religious institution, for some time until he discovered that he had no priestly vocation. ⁹ Leon Getz junior, the eldest son of Józefa and Leon Getz senior, spoke fluent Polish and Ukrainian and was brought up in both cultures, but ultimately identified himself as Ukrainian in terms of nationality.

The complicated genealogies of many Galician inhabitants, like the origins of Getz, ensued from the multigenerational coexistence of people of different languages, religious denominations, and cultures in the same region. Mixed marriages were no exception in Habsburg Galicia, especially in its eastern part between the San and Zbruch rivers. The marriages of Roman Catholics and/or Polish native speakers, on one side, and Greek Catholics and/or Ukrainian native speakers, on the other, were particularly widespread, much more so than after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918. This is evidenced by the statistics. In Lviv, between 1910 and 1911, there were more than 300 mixed marriages of the type described above. They constituted 17% of all marriages concluded in the Galician capital in 1910 and only half a percentage point less in 1911. ¹⁰ This means that approximately every sixth Lviv married couple in that period can be regarded—based on denomination and Umgangssprache—that is, language of daily use criteria ¹¹—as Polish-Ukrainian.

The issue of bringing up children born from mixed marriages of that kind was regulated by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith’s decree Ad graves et diuturnas, commonly referred to as Concordia, concluded by Roman and Greek Catholic bishops in 1863. According to the decree, such children were to be raised in the rites of their parents according to gender. Thus, a clear division was envisaged: a daughter would follow her mother’s religious, cultural, and eventually national footsteps, a son—his father’s footsteps (Nabywaniec 1998). In mixed families, however, there were phenomena unforeseen by the decree. On one hand, they embraced an intense cultural osmosis that blurred religious, cultural, and national divisions within a family. Such blurring of divisions could result in “national indifference” (Zahra 2010) of family members or—more often—in their national ambivalence ¹²—that is, fluidity of their national self-understanding usually manifesting as bilingualism and openness for subsequent intercommunal marriages that transcended ethnic borders. On the other hand, in mixed families there could occur identity polarization of relatives, particularly representatives of the following generation raised in different traditions. Fabian Baumann, studying the split within the Kievan Shul’gin/Shul’hyn family in the late imperial Russia, shows this phenomenon as an example of the bifurcation of the Little Russian patriotic intelligentsia into self-defined Russians and Ukrainians (Baumann 2023, especially 98–204). Young, especially educated Galicians coming from one family, just like related inhabitants of Dnieper Ukraine, sometimes made different identity choices, including those unforeseen by Concordia, or underwent religious and consequently national conversions. Perhaps the most famous example confirming this rule is the case of the Szeptyckis/Sheptytskyis. The older of them, Andrei Sheptytskyi, became the metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church. The younger, Stanisław Szeptycki, was the commander of the Polish Legions and the minister of military affairs of the Second Polish Republic. The former became a Ukrainian, the latter a Polish patriot. They were natural brothers, the grandchildren of the Polish playwright Aleksander Fredro; they grew up in the same environment and in the same house. ¹³

Historians of Habsburg Galicia are increasingly paying attention to a factor that complicated processes of national identification of the province’s inhabitants—namely, the fact that within the life of a single individual different identity phases could repeatedly follow one another or even exist in parallel. Individuals and groups in Galicia could therefore identify with various imagined communities, and their identifications could create “identity hierarchies” that consisted of miscellaneous elements, primarily a sense of belonging to a local, then to the regional, imperial, and finally national community. These components merged into unstable constellations and in certain situations manifested more, less, or disappeared. Such was the case of the Ruthenian writers in the first half of the 19th century, who used different languages and manifested variable national feelings (see Magocsi 2002, especially 41; Sosnowska 2008, especially 171–176). Another example consisted of the dwellers of Drohobych, who during the 1911 Viennese parliamentary elections expressed affiliations that did not conform to the lines of national and political divisions between Galician Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews at that time (see Wierzejska 2020).

This important finding does not change the fact that in the province dominated by the Poles in the epoch of Galician autonomy and ruled by them in the interwar period, instabilities and ambivalences of Galicians’ identities were most often resolved in favor of the Polish affiliation. Statistical data clearly indicate that the most common were conversions from Greek Catholicism to Roman Catholicism, widely regarded as a basic element of assimilation into the Polish nation. ¹⁴ With reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, experts from the field of social studies, for example Sadowski (2008, 52), point at individual strategies, which apply to “investing in one’s own identity, including the national identity (especially when it is not fixed), in order to achieve the most optimal conversion of the national identity to other profits (like position, power or money, etc.).” This principle sheds interesting light on the fact that Galicians with an undefined or unstable identity chose Polishness more often than other national identifications. That tendency stemmed from various pressures and in the 1920s and 1930s also from the ideological campaign to strengthen Polishness in the region, but it also occurred spontaneously in one’s hope to improve or maintain social and professional position.

Although Galicians, especially those from mixed families, usually favored Polishness, Getz, as a relatively young man, made a choice of Ukrainian national identity, whereas his other four siblings opted for a much more plausible Polish identification. ¹⁵ The artist’s choice of identity means that he consciously determined his national affiliation, not by discovering and politicizing a previously existing nationality but by choosing a certain national path. It also means that Getz consistently constructed his identity. Having decided to support a particular national project, he kept fashioning himself as an unambiguous member of the selected imagined community (see Sadowski 2008, 47; Baumann 2023, 4). ¹⁶ The nodal points on this path are determined by certain events in Getz’s life and his artistic works, which are discussed further. They allow us to trace the roots and the recurrent confirmations of the artist’s national decision.

Toward the Terrible Tragedy

After graduating from a departmental school, where his artistic talent was recognized, Getz trained—according to his father’s will—to be a bricklayer, but he was deeply dissatisfied with that job. He was given a helpful hand by Ivan Levinskyi, a professor at Lviv Polytechnic, architect, owner of a design and construction company, and one of the founders of Ukrainian modernism in Lviv. Levinskyi first assigned the uncommonly talented apprentice to his workshop to make drawings and estimates. ¹⁷ Then, he introduced the apprentice to Aleksander Nowakowski, a painter educated in Odessa and Cracow, who opened a painting school in Lviv in 1923 but had begun training Getz as an artist-painter on a one-on-one basis a few years earlier. ¹⁸ Getz met many more helpful people on his educational path; he had a lot of luck and, above all, talent. Ultimately, he graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow in 1924. Although his home city, Lviv, appreciated the just-graduated professional painter as an artist, ¹⁹ it did not offer him a job. Therefore, he took up work as a drawing teacher in Sanok, a town on the San River that had lain in the former Eastern Galicia before 1918, and then became part of the Lviv Voivodeship in independent Poland. He left Sanok only in July 1944, escaping from the Red Army.

After World War II, Getz returned to Cracow, the city in southern Poland where his sister Olga lived before moving to Gdynia. Getz married a Ukrainian woman, Maria Drymałyk, in 1948 and started working as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts under the rector Zygmunt Radnicki in 1950. In the meantime, he became an object of interest of the Security Office of the Polish Peoples’ Republic, as Poland was officially referred to at that time. The artist had already been arrested earlier, in January 1946, on suspicion of organizing the Ukrainian Central Committee in Sanok and collaborating with Germans during the occupation. ²⁰ He was imprisoned in the Rzeszów castle jail and even threatened with a death sentence, but finally he was released from prison on April 17, 1947. ²¹ However, in 1953 his life situation deteriorated sharply. First, Getz started having problems at work, then—on March 18—he was arrested again. Afresh he was accused of collaboration, subjected to brutal interrogation, and finally forced to sign a pledge to denounce representatives of the Ukrainian national circle in Cracow. As it turned out, Maria, who was trying to save her husband from the Security Office, was forced to do the same thing at the same time. These events marked for Getz and Drymałyk the beginning of what the artist would always call a “terrible tragedy.” ²² The spouses could not come to terms with the surveillance of their own milieu and, simultaneously, were unable to free themselves from the oppressive obligations, so the thought of the only—in their opinion—way out of the trap—that is, joint suicide—seized them. They decided to take that step on May 12, 1953. They turned on gas, took a few pills of barbituric acid, Maria said, “Za Ukrajinu i jeji wolu,” ²³ then they both fell asleep. He woke up. She did not. She was buried in Rakowicki Cemetery in Cracow on May 19. He spent 142 days in a psychiatric hospital. And although he married again (to Anna Meckaniuk in 1955 ²⁴) and returned to his work and social life, he seemed to never reconcile with what had happened to him and Maria. Until his death, on December 16, 1971, he also remained under the scrutiny of the Security Office. No longer, however, as an informant but as a target.

The Art from the Riflemen’s Trenches

The process of strengthening of Getz’s Ukrainian identity over the course of his life is reflected in his artistic work, especially autobiographical work from the later period of his life crises, which is why it is crucial for understanding that process. The artist’s Ukrainianness was initially formed in his family home in Lviv during his upbringing and close, although difficult relationship with his father, who considered himself Ukrainian. Leon Getz senior was a mesmerizing man who despite his impulsive nature and alcohol problem had a considerable influence on the young Getz, primarily due to his artistic ambitions and acting passion. ²⁵ In his early youth, the artist’s identification was also influenced by his contact with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, including a personal contact with Andrei Sheptytskyi, the aforementioned charismatic clergyman who served as the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop in Lviv from 1901 until his death in 1944. It was Levinskyi who introduced Getz to Sheptytskyi. The latter needed a specialist to carry out a masonry work in his Lviv palace. The work included a secret task, most probably to hide part of the Metropolitan’s archive in a cache from the Russians, who occupied the city in autumn of 1914 (Maciuk 1994, 213). Getz completed the task and remembered Sheptytskyi’s ceremonial thanks as an important event in his life. Soon, his Ukrainian national sympathies intensified after he had been humiliated by tsarist troops. Later that same autumn of 1914, they arrested him for bricking up the cache in the metropolitan palace. The city’s occupying authorities held the young, increasingly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian artist in prison for several weeks, trying (unsuccessfully) to discredit him as a person who betrayed Sheptytskyi’s secret. ²⁶

All these experiences prompted Getz to join the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS) in 1915. The USS Legion was a military unit formed in August 1914 from members of different Ukrainian paramilitary organizations in Galicia as part of the Austro-Hungarian Army. It brought together Ukrainian soldiers who were not only well armed and trained but also relatively educated ²⁷ and thus the most ideologically driven to the Ukrainian national and state-building case of all Ukrainian troops in the Habsburg forces (see Lazarovych 2016, 15–50).

Fighting in the Ukrainian military formation, albeit within the Austro-Hungarian Army, became an important stage in the consolidation of Getz’s identity. As a painter, he was then active in the Press Department dealing with the cultural, educational, and ideological animation of the Legion. Together with his colleagues from the Press Department, he compiled Antolohiia striletskoi tvorchosty [Anthology of riflemen’s work]. It was a collective volume of drawings, short text forms, and music notations depicting frontline deeds and hinterland experiences of the Ukrainian soldiers during the Great War. The works were created by 26 authors—primarily painters and graphic artists (led by Getz) but also writers, poets, and musicians—all serving in the USS Legion between late 1914 and 1918. Years later, Getz explained the idea of that volume as follows: “I rendered my war period in drawings, from which one can read more than from what I write.” ²⁸ As the title page of the anthology informed, the drawings, text forms, and music notations were “collected and published // by Lev Osyp Gets—Bohdan Volodymyr Kryzhanivskyi” (Gets and Kryzhanivskyi 2021). ²⁹ They were pasted on 120 pieces of cardboard, which in turn were bound in leather, had gilded edges, and an ornate case. The handmade masterpiece was presented in the autumn of 1918 at the exhibition of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen at the National Museum in Lviv. It received praise and favorable reviews and drew attention to Getz, the author-compilator, who had no artistic training yet at that time.

On one hand, the volume was a very early commemoration, monumentalization, and heroization of the achievements of the Riflemen. On the other hand, it became a showcase of Getz’s artistic abilities and a strong proof of his Ukrainian affiliation. If defining individual national identity, apart from reflecting subjectively on one’s communal and cultural membership, means also taking a specific standpoint to define one’s position and specify one’s tasks toward a national community (Sadowski 2008, 51–52), then while working on the anthology and presenting it publicly, Getz took up such a stance for the first time. He not only expressed his worldview and ideological sympathies but also revealed his choice related to national self-identification, first to a narrow circle of colleagues with whom he created the volume and then to a wide group of representatives of the same imagined community to whom the work was addressed and whom it reached. Both effects of the anthology—the one related to the commemoration of the Riflemen’s deeds and the one related to the public expression of Getz’s identity choice—were all the more evident as the masterpiece was reproduced photographically and popularized in Galician Ukrainian circles. Moreover, many illustrations were selected from it and distributed in the form of patriotic postcards, among them a hieratic and eventually very popular drawing by Getz in which he depicted himself fatally shot in the head.

The Memorial Book from the Polish Internment Camp

The next pivotal stage in the consolidation of Getz’s Ukrainian identity was his stay in the Polish internment camp in Dąbie, the outskirt district of Cracow. He got there as a temporary but nonetheless participant in the Polish-Ukrainian Battle of Lviv on the Ukrainian side.

The battle in question broke out on November 1, 1918, shortly after the artist had come back to his family city from the Great War fronts. At stake in that fight was the statehood of Lviv and its surrounding territory: whereas Poles perceived it as an integral part of a reborn Poland, Ukrainians claimed the city as a capital of a nascent Western Ukrainian state or even a regional center of a future united Ukraine. The bloody battle was waged for three weeks on the streets of Lviv. The support of the regular army, which arrived from Cracow, secured Polish victory in the city on November 22, but it did not put an end to the violence. On the contrary, Polish triumph was followed by the three-day pogrom of Jews, perpetrated by Polish soldiers and civilians in Lviv’s Jewish quarter. ³⁰ Negotiation between Poles and Ukrainians deadlocked, and the fights spread across the whole of Eastern Galicia and transformed into a regular war between these two nations. It lasted until the summer of 1919, when units of the Ukrainian Galician Army were pushed beyond the Zbruch River by the Polish ranks. The military victory of Poles was followed by their success in the diplomatic arena at the Paris Peace Conference so that eventually Eastern Galicia became Eastern Lesser Poland and Lviv became one of the voivodeship cities of the Second Polish Republic. ³¹

Before the groundbreaking events described took place, Getz—a recent USS Legion’s soldier with the rank of corporal—had been drafted for Ukrainian military service in the Battle of Lviv with the Poles. He did not fight for long, however, as already on November 2, 1918, he was seriously wounded: he had a shot through the knee of one leg and torn muscles of the other leg. ³² He was treated in Polish hospitals: first, in a field hospital in the building of the Lviv Polytechnic where a doctor (and a major of the Polish Army) Józef Aleksiewicz saved his legs from amputation and then, from January 1919, in a hospital in Dziedzice Śląskie where he was cared for by doctor (and a Brigadier-General of the Polish Army) Michał Martynowicz. Right after his rehabilitation, Getz, the Ukrainian involved in the Polish-Ukrainian struggle for Eastern Galicia, was sent to the internment camp in Dąbie.

The Dąbie camp was located on a site of former military barracks. During the Great War, there was an Austrian camp there where prisoners of war from the Russian, Serbian, and Italian armies were held. In November 1918 after the collapse of Austro-Hungary, the captives returned to their home countries and the military facilities came under the administration of the Polish authorities, which had been established in Cracow. The interest of Poles in the Dąbie camp, like in other camps on the territory of the former Galicia (in Wadowice and Łańcut), was caused by the Polish-Ukrainian fights taking place between the San and Zbruch rivers and the influx of prisoners of war and internees from the area of hostilities. In November 1919, the Dąbie camp held 239 Ukrainian prisoners of war, 2,288 internees from what was once Eastern Galicia, and 1,274 prisoners of war from the Bolshevik army—a total of 3,801 isolated at the maximum capacity of the facility, set by the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs, of 8,000 people (Karpus 1991, 41). Compared with other camps in the revived Poland, the housing and sanitary conditions at the Dąbie camp were not among the worst. In addition to wooden ones, there were brick buildings. A hospital operated at the camp. There were washrooms and lavatories (Filar 2004, 45–46). However, the main problem there, as in other centers of this type, was the unsuitability for winter conditions: the barracks lacked stoves and fuel. As a result, the Dąbie camp was not spared by epidemics of infectious diseases, especially typhus, which took a deadly toll, with its apogee in the last quarter of 1919. ³³

Getz did not specify when he had been sent to the camp in Dąbie. In his tabulated curriculum vita, he stated that he had spent 10 months there, ³⁴ but in his memoirs he noted his release from the confinement on November 29, 1919. ³⁵ During this time, he created a remarkable work, the album Dombie 1918–9, ³⁶ which documented his and his compatriots’ life in the camp. The volume constituted a comprehensive collection of drawings, this time—unlike in Antolohiia striletskoi tvorchosty—drawn mainly by Getz but supplemented by a number of text forms written by other Ukrainian prisoners of war and internees. The drawings included primarily portraits of Getz’s Ukrainian comrades and, in addition, landscapes, genre scenes, and sketches of the development of the camp space. All Getz’s illustrations in the album bear the author’s Cyrillic signature—“Лев Ґец” (Lev Gets)—and the day’s date. They were accompanied by a few poems (for example, a lyric Z tiuremnykh sniv by Kyrylo Studynskyi, a philologist-slavist and professor at the Lviv University), short stories (for example, Ivan Korenevskyi’s “etude” Nevolia), memorial entries, and above all hundreds of signatures of the artist’s fellow prisoners, usually arranged in two columns. Getz made his drawings on various—as he recalled years later—“random papers” ³⁷ due to the lack of suitable paper for drawing. The finished illustrations were taken out of the camp by women who had to go to medical appointments to the center of Cracow. Then, the prisoners released from the camp transported the works from Cracow to Lviv. When Getz himself was released from Dąbie and returned to his home city, he collected drawings from various people who kept them. As he admitted, “fortunately not a single card was lost to me.” There were 139 of these cards, the artist pasted them on cardboard pieces and designed a “canvas-bound case” ³⁸ in which each work lay separately. This is how Dombie 1918–9 was created. Getz kept the original album in his home archive in Sanok, so when he fled the town from the Red Army in July 1944, the original—along with the painter’s many other works—was lost. Fortunately, like the other works, it was rediscovered in Vienna after the war and then found its way to Rome to the Basylianum Archive where—unpublished—it remains to this day. ³⁹

In the Ukrainian-language introduction to the album, Getz explained that as soon as he became elementarily familiar with life in the camp, he “decided to create a memorial book under the title Dombie—to record all that was in the hearts of many during the hard time of captivity.” ⁴⁰ Indeed, the volume must have been an important undertaking both for Getz and the Ukrainians from the disputed territory of the former Eastern Galicia, confined in Dąbie. The artist was clearly preparing to create his masterpiece. In parallel to working on the album, he kept a daybook serving as a place for collecting entries of the internees and artistic exercises in the form of trail sketches. ⁴¹ The Ukrainian internees, in turn, and not only Getz’s closest colleagues in the camp—that is, artists of various fields but also people of other professions—actively engaged in the creation of the album as well as the daybook-artistic exercise.

As Dombie 1918–9 is dominated by the artist’s drawings, it can be regarded as his sketchbook, a collection of images equivalent to a writer’s notebook. However, the subject matter of the illustrations, closely related to the reality and the forced inhabitants of the camp as well as the daily dates and notes accompanying the illustrations, give the work the features of a diary, half drawn with a pencil, ink, and watercolor, half written with a pen. In turn, the elaboration of the whole work post factum—including the reordering of the drawings in relation to the order of the daily dates—makes the album a masterpiece and brings it closer to a refined memoir.

As a set of dated drawings and textual forms made on random papers, Getz’s album, or Getz’s sketchbook diary, captured the everyday captivity of Ukrainians in the Dąbie camp—that is, recorded in statu nascendi the integral, though not frontal, but hinterland dimension of the Polish-Ukrainian War. In turn, as a deliberately arranged collection, Getz’s album memoir sought to commemorate the camp imprisonment of many Ukrainian artists, intellectuals, and activists as a certain very painful experience in the collective life of the national minority in the reborn Poland. After all, according to the author’s introduction, it was intended as “a priceless souvenir for every Ukrainian for years to come.” ⁴² At the same time, the album was a testimony to an important stage in Getz’s life. The painter admitted that both the daybook-artistic exercise and the album were created not only to commemorate the experience of the interned Ukrainians but also “in memory of the fact that I was sitting with you in Dąbie, in 1919,” ⁴³ where “you” referred to the Ukrainians in question. Thus, Getz inscribed himself into the misadvantage of a large group of Ukrainians persecuted for their national activities in the former Eastern Galicia on the threshold of Poland’s independence. He elevated his comrades’ and his own confinement in Dąbie to a crucial communal experience for Galician Ukrainians as well as a formative experience for himself. Once again, he therefore came out in public with his choice of national self-identification. In practice, he did so in front of a limited number of inmates but intended to do so in front of a wide publicity, as Getz hoped to distribute the album. This proved impossible due to the defeat of the Ukrainian forces in the war against the Poles and the collapse of the Ukrainian nation- and state-building project of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic.

The Memoirs of Loneliness

Getz made a life-writing effort twice. For the first time he took up the memoirist work in the mid-1930s, long after participating in the battles of the USS Legion and being interned in the Dąbie camp and after moving from Lviv to Sanok in the mid-1920s.

By that time, Getz was already a fully qualified pedagogue at the Queen Sophia State Male Gymnasium in Sanok (where he had started working on January 1, 1925). ⁴⁴ He became involved in the social life of the town, sang in a choir, and ran a library of the Ukrainian social and educational organization “Prosvita.” He was also a cofounder, member of the first board, and director (during 1931–1940) of the Museum Society “Lemkivshchyna,” established in Sanok in 1931. The institution sought to save from destruction the monuments of material and spiritual culture of the Lemkos, the ethnic group of Eastern Slavs of Greek Catholic or Orthodox rite who inhabited the Low Beskids mountain range of the Central Carpathians, where Sanok is located. ⁴⁵ Additionally, Getz continued his artistic work and became a recognized painter, at least in the former Eastern Galicia. In May 1932, he joined the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists established in Lviv. Two years later, with the help of the Association, he organized an exhibition of his paintings in the Taras Shevchenko Museum in Lviv; it was positively reviewed by both Polish and Ukrainian art critics (Levynskyi 1957).

Getz described these achievements in Ukrainian in a two-volume personal document. The memoirist part of the text, created in the mid-1930s, was summed up and closed with the date August 13, 1935. Then, it seamlessly transformed into the diaristic part—that is, a set of daily notes, opened on September 3, 1935, and closed on July 21, 1944, with information about the presence of the Soviets near Lviv and the march of the Red Army to the West.

Regardless of his many successes, Getz revealed in the Ukrainian-language memoirs that the Sanok period of his life was difficult for him. In the interwar period, Sanok was a provincial town on the western border of the Lviv Voivodeship. Slightly more than half of its inhabitants constituted Poles, the second national group were Jews, and only the third one, much smaller than the previous two, were Ukrainians. There were no bloody ethnic clashes such as those that occurred in Lviv, especially on the November anniversaries of the battle for the city (Mick 2016, 209–258), or in the countryside of the former Eastern Galicia, primarily during the so-called pacification in 1930. ⁴⁶ However, there were strong national tensions, which intensified with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. In such a town, Getz—a teacher at a Polish school openly declaring his Ukrainian self-identification—was routinely targeted as a “Constitutive Other,” just as Jews were usually treated in the Second Polish Republic. ⁴⁷

In the aforementioned memoirs, Getz described his work at the State Gymnasium as onerous, first and foremost because he was constantly reproached for his Ukrainianness or even charged for being a Ukrainian. Dozens of anonymous letters were written against him by his Polish colleagues working at the same school as well as Sanok’s citizens, who considered themselves representatives of the titular nation in interwar Poland. He was referred to as one of the “stupid Ukrainians” who “invaded the land of Sanok”; he was attributed with a “mischievous-Ukrainian conscience” and accused of doing “anti-state actions” at school and “Judas-like behavior.” ⁴⁸ In his subsequent memoirs written after World War II, which are discussed in the next part of the article, Getz described the reality in Sanok in the 1930s to his imaginary readers, as follows.

Life between Poles and Ukrainians was unbearable and more than a little burdensome. It was enough to find out what nationality I was and at that moment the mood would spoil and become false. It was often said that I was likable only a pity that I was Ukrainian. When you add the fact that the street was defiling with words and one read entire sentences in the newspapers that offended decency, you will have a picture of my reality and environment at that time. ⁴⁹

Given such circumstances, the analyzed memoirs written by Getz in Ukrainian can be primarily interpreted as a testimony to his increasing loneliness and growing stigmatization based on nationality in the provincial conflicted milieu, dominated by Poles. The work also constituted an expression of the author’s Ukrainian national identity, consistently corroborated by him in the interwar period. This was evidenced by the various national demonstrations undertaken by Getz, recorded in the memoirs, of a rather harmless but meaningful character. They included, for example, the annual wearing of a black shirt on November 11, Poland’s Independence Day, as a sign of mourning and a reminder that Ukraine was still not free and that Ukrainians were oppressed in the Second Polish Republic just as Poles had been once oppressed under the partitions. Above all, however, the evidence of Getz’s Ukrainian identity was a vision of the projected reader inscribed in the memoirs. The memoirist notes were drawn up openly but at that time only for the author’s needs. Nevertheless, Getz began writing them with an idealistic description of such a reader. It revealed the author’s sense of marginalization but also his desire to come into contact with an environment more friendly to him in national and social terms and more open to art that did not necessarily serve ideological purposes. “My memoirs can only be read by a man who has a soul and a heart, a thinking and kindly man, a good and sympathetic man. // My memoirs cannot be read by a materialist, devoid of soul, heart and reason, indifferent to the needs and sufferings of people.” ⁵⁰ The author did not say this directly in the introduction to the memoirs, but the Ukrainian language in which he wrote them and their content left no doubt that such a reader could have been only another Ukrainian, a representative of the same national minority as Getz. In the interwar epoch, Getz confirmed his belonging to this minority and the Ukrainian national community on two levels: first, on the existential level, not in exceptional war or camp circumstances but in everyday life, which was burdensome and downright oppressive for him and, second, at the textual level by creating a textual representation of the everyday consequences of his nationality choice. On both these levels, Getz permanently built his Ukrainian self-identification—referring to Sadowski (2008, 52), he “invested” in it—despite that it did not bring “profits” in the Second Polish Republic; on the contrary, it complicated his professional life and led to social isolation.

Getz was very afraid of the Soviets—he wrote about the impending entry of the Red Army into Sanok: “game over” ⁵¹—which is why, like many inhabitants, he fled the town at the end of July 1944. The decision to go to and stay in Cracow, not, for example, his hometown of Lviv, was determined not so much by the political and military events, such as ethnic cleansing east of Sanok in Volhynia and the former Eastern Galicia during 1943–1944 or the population exchange between Poland and the USSR, which started in 1944. ⁵² It was rather decided by Getz’s fear of Sovietization and poor living conditions and, moreover, the fact that the artist was familiar with Cracow; he had a sister in this city, and soon after arriving there he met Maria Drymałyk, a woman whom he would soon call the love of his life. At the end of World War II, the manuscript of Getz’s Ukrainian-language memoirs, like many of his artworks, including the album Dombie 1918–9, were lost because the artist did not take anything with him when he left Sanok. He thought he would return to the town, but he never did. The memoirs were luckily found in Vienna and replicated the path taken by the album—to Rome to the Basylianum Archive—where they can still be found today. Until now (December 2023), however, they have not been published.

The Memoirs of the “Terrible Tragedy”

For the second time, Getz undertook the task of recording his life in 1954 after the suicide of his wife Maria. Like the previously analyzed Ukrainian-language personal document, Getz’s second memoirs also transformed from the memoirist into the diaristic form. The daily notes, the first of which was dated March 12, 1955, were interwoven with the reminiscence narrative until the November 15, 1962, entry after which the author compiled more formal documents concerning his life. The fundamental difference between these two life writings was that the latter, unlike the former, was written overwhelmingly in Polish. By the time the artist began working on the Polish-language memoirs, he had been treated in a psychiatric hospital, had withdrawn from public life, was living alone in the flat on Retoryka Street in Cracow that had been his and Maria’s home, and was traumatized by the loss of his wife. He was also constantly under surveillance by the Polish People’s Republic’s Security Office. Later, his poor mental condition in which he had taken up this life-writing endeavor seemed to improve. The artist returned to work and social life and even intensified contacts with representatives of the Ukrainian minority at home and abroad but continued to write his retrospective and daily notes. Their content indicates that he still perceived his and Maria’s history as a “terrible tragedy.” Moreover, he remained a target of the security apparatus. He was therefore pursuing his autobiographical project while being in a profound life crisis and a severely oppressive sociopolitical situation.

The evidence of Getz’s deep life crisis in the memoirs written after Maria’s death was the subordination of the text—entitled in Polish Maria i moje życie [Maria and my life]—to the commemorative and consolatory function. It was a search for a way to “preserve the memory” ⁵³ of the beloved wife and to heal “from the wounds inflicted” ⁵⁴ to the husband. In his memoirs, Getz repeatedly said goodbye to Maria, paid tribute to her person and character, and recommended himself, her, and their common tragedy to the reflection and memory of prospective readers. He also placed Maria’s death in an interpretive frame of sacrifice for the community, without specifying whether it was the Ukrainian community in the Polish People’s Republic, which Maria had not wanted to spy on, or the society of the socialist Poland, in large number subjected to surveillance.

Beloved Maria. Your Leon is doing your will and noting your words so that people know what a great sacrifice you made for them. I have described our tragedy, as I could, for people of good will. Let them appreciate in the future the great burden of suffering of two hard-working persons from the lower social strata. Maybe one day they will discover this story and then, your will, Maria, will be fulfilled. Maybe fate has kept your Leon alive so that your sacrifice, Maria, will not have been in vain, without trace or echo. ⁵⁵

This way Getz bid farewell to Maria and, at the same time, sought to keep her in his own and other people’s memory. He also repeatedly emphasized that writing memoirs had a therapeutic effect on him. “I am slowly recovering from the tragedy and the harm done [to me] with the help of this book,” ⁵⁶ the painter declared and added: “I lock my memories in this book and free myself from the oppressive burden of experience.” ⁵⁷ However, his compulsive textual returns to Maria’s case call for a cautious approach to this optimistic self-diagnosis and create a field for an interpretation of Getz’s memoirs that goes in a different methodological direction—namely, trauma studies. ⁵⁸

Evidence of the fatal oppressiveness of the sociopolitical situation in which Getz found himself since the early 1950s in the analyzed memoirs was more complex than the textual manifestations of the author’s life crisis.

Getz did describe the circumstances of forcing him and Maria to cooperate with the Security Office, the terrible matrix in which they both found themselves. He also signaled that surveillance by the security apparatus continued, even though the officers declared that they would release him from the obligation to spy on the Ukrainian national circle in Poland after Maria’s death. He was to be exempted from this commitment based on a certificate of mental breakdown issued by Antoni Kępiński, ⁵⁹ an eminent Polish psychiatrist who was then working at the Psychiatric Department and Clinic of the Medical Academy in Cracow and later wrote one of his most famous works on melancholy (Kępiński 1974). However, the certificate proved ineffective and the Security Office, with varying degrees of intensity but almost all the time, kept Getz under scrutiny. This circumstance was directly related to the artist’s ongoing documentary work. Those aspects of the memoirs that displayed Getz’s arrest in March 1953 and its aftermath were of particular concern to officers, who were trying to intercept the work so that it would not incriminate them and put the Polish People’s Republic and the security apparatus in a negative light. The aspects in question are undoubtedly also of interest to scholars working on the issues of life writing and national identity. However, what they may find equally intriguing is what the Security Office functionaries did not reflect on—namely, the fact that Getz wrote his memoirs in Polish.

The memoirs under consideration constituted not only an expression of the author’s deep Ukrainian self-consciousness and ardent patriotic affectation. They were also a manifestation of his will to defend this identity and this zeal in a situation of national oppression. “The more oppressed Ukraine is, the more I love it. […] I love my nation as other nations love theirs, and I believe that I can live safely among the loving ones,” ⁶⁰ claimed Getz, and then continued, “I did not disown you Ukraine, in even the worst hour, I gave my life for you and with this I paid my duty on earth.” ⁶¹ If Getz’s declarations of a sense of strong Ukrainian identification and affiliation were sincere—and there is no reason to think otherwise given the development of his national identity—why did he not write his memoirs in Ukrainian, the language he believed to be most his own and native?

In the introduction to the memoirs, Getz, using the third person singular, explained his choice of Polish as follows: the author “writes in the language of that land where he lives and perhaps he does well to write in Polish, thus repaying the debt of memory of the years lived in this country.” ⁶² He did not elaborate on this point, but two characteristics of the memoirs make it possible to understand the meaning hidden in the phrase ending the quoted sentence. First, although the memoirs were kept secret due to the threat from the security apparatus, the author hoped that the text would be made public in the future. Second, he had a clear vision of the intended reader of the text. This time it was not supposed to be Ukrainians but Poles addressed directly in the text as “you” ⁶³ and referred to by Getz as “brothers” ⁶⁴—with bitter irony, as they were primarily Poles who directly or indirectly contributed to his and his wife’s disastrous fate. Thus, in writing “in the language of that land,” above all the author was writing in the language of those responsible for his and Maria’s tragedy; he was writing in such a way that those responsible could not fail to hear, comprehend, and remember the tragic story. According to Getz’s reminiscences, the security officers sought to persuade him to forget about Maria’s case and diminished it as—in their words—a “mistake” ⁶⁵ that could have happened to the “young power.” ⁶⁶ Getz, therefore, decided to write about that case, which had broken his life, in the speech of Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, the canonical Polish poets, so that all Poles, including the decision-makers of the Polish People’s Republic, would understand the matter. He betrayed this goal in yet another apostrophe to the Polish addressees of the text: “Your error will be found on every page of my book. You are the beginning and the end of my sorrow.” ⁶⁷ This subversive way of “repaying the debt of memory” reveals an additional—besides the commemorative and consolatory—dimension of the painter’s memoirs—namely, the accusatory one. Maria i moje życie constituted a textual memorial to the personal drama of the certain couple, but it was also an incrimination against the Polish People’s Republic and its communist disposers of power, from the General Secretary to a prison warden. Moreover, it was an indictment of all Poles xenophobes, particularly Ukrainophobes, because, according to Getz, the crux of his and Maria’s tragedy lay in the fact that “they were Ukrainians and therefore they were abused.” ⁶⁸ “After all, we were, Ukrainians”—Getz expressed the same thought more bluntly and ironically—“and that was enough.” ⁶⁹

Getz’s memoirist work written since 1954 can be interpreted in two different but complimentary ways. If the private dimension of the text is emphasized, the memoirs can be understood as the commemorative and consolatory life writing undertaken during the time of life crisis of the husband after his wife’s suicide. If the sociopolitical dimension of the text comes to the fore, they can be read as the accusatory life writing in a situation of extreme oppression by the totalitarian state and its infiltration system, whose deadly and faulty moves put the very subjectivity of an individual in crisis. In both interpretations, the memoirs constituted a strong expression of the author’s Ukrainian national identity. According to the first interpretation, this identity appeared as a choice that Getz paid for with suffering, but which he insisted on all the more, and the memoirs—as the ultimate confirmation of the choice he made. According to the second interpretation, the identity in question seemed to be Getz’s self-image as an unambiguously Ukrainian artist and intellectual, the image inscribed in the thread of the Ukrainian national history. ⁷⁰ This thread considered the maltreatment and persecution of the Ukrainian minority in interwar and especially in postwar Poland. In such an optic, the memoirs turned out to be both self-transformative and eminently political for Getz. They constituted the product of the author’s self-memorialization and the retrospective completion of his path toward the clear national identity by life writing. ⁷¹ The former interpretation seems more obvious when reading the memoirs. However, their very history has shown the accuracy of the latter approach. The Security Office functionaries were indeed very concerned about the memoirs. They were afraid that Getz would try to send them abroad, ⁷² so they conducted operations to seize them. Still in 1971, the year of Getz’s death, they instructed an agent nicknamed “Zając” [“Hare”] to draw up a sketch of the painter’s flat, including the arrangement of the furniture. ⁷³ This task was accomplished by the agent, and the security apparatus’s documents contain such a drawing. ⁷⁴ It is difficult to say unequivocally under what circumstances the officers came into possession of the artist’s exceptionally voluminous memoirs, but it is certain that they eventually managed to obtain them. ⁷⁵ Today, the manuscript of Getz’s Polish-language work can be found in the Cracow branch of the Archive of the Institute of National Memory, together with three volumes of files produced by the Security Office.

Conclusions

Getz’s biography and his analyzed masterpieces reveal the process of formation of his Ukrainian self-identification as a chosen one. The artist chose this identity having a complex Polish-Ukrainian family background—that is, in a situation where it was possible and plausible for him to choose Polishness, not condemning him to such isolation and oppression in the Second Polish Republic and the Polish People’s Republic as Ukrainianness. Despite this, Getz opted for the latter and consistently shaped it throughout his life. Referring to the concept of “nations-in-becoming” (Palko and Foster 2021, 315) and the works emphasizing the historical process of nation making instead of its end result (the process in both its developmental and inconclusiveness similar to the creation of the self), ⁷⁶ it can be said that various deeds and achievements on the artist’s life path illuminate his nationality in becoming, his Ukrainianness in the process of forging as an (prospectively) unequivocal identity.

The volume Antolohiia striletskoi tvorchosty and the album Dombie 1918–9 show the formation of Getz’s identity in the fights of the Ukrainian military formation, the independence struggle of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the experience of repression of its participants by the Polish side. The Ukrainian memoirs shed light on the solidification of the author’s identity in the hostile environment of representatives of the titular nation in the Second Polish Republic. The Polish memoirs, in turn, highlight the author’s readiness to defend his identity and stand for it the more it exposed him to repression.

At the same time, the considered works are documents of Getz’s personal experience against the background of the collective life of the Ukrainian national community originating from the former Eastern Galicia during both the Great War and in interwar Poland and then during and after World War II. The first two volumes present the hardship of frontline and hinterland life in the wartime period for Ukrainians in general and Getz in particular. Memoirs from the second half of the 1930s show the loneliness but also the frustration of a marginalized representative of the Ukrainian national minority in the Second Polish Republic. And the memoirs written after Maria’s death provide an insight into the life situation, attitudes, and decisions of a member of this minority, who found himself in danger from the oppressive and often dysfunctional institutions of the Polish Peoples’ Republic in which he lived. In all these works, Getz’s biography is inscribed in Ukrainian national-historical narratives. Perhaps, it is most clearly visible in his Polish-language memoirs. The author, by describing his life for the last and most extensive time, retrospectively completed his self-Ukrainization, accusing the Polish state and xenophobic Poles of persecuting the Ukrainian minority and positioning himself as an unequivocally Ukrainian artist.