Shalom Schwarzbard Papers

Shalom Schwarzbard was born on August 18, 1886 in Izmail, Bessarabia, then part of the Russian Empire (today, Ukraine). He was the son of Yitskhok and Khaye (née Vaysberger) Schwarzbard. Soon after Shalom's birth, the family moved to Balta, where they joined his father's brother Shmuel, and his father opened a small grocery store. Shalom's younger brother Shmuel was born in 1888. Another brother, Meyer, born in 1891, died in infancy. Shalom's mother died soon after, and his father eventually remarried. Schwarzbard's family was pious and Hasidic. As a boy he attended a traditional heder and, for a time, a Talmud Torah school. At around the age of 12 he began a five-year-long apprenticeship with a local watchmaker in Balta, and learned the watchmaker's craft.

In the early 1900s Shalom Schwarzbard became active in the radical socialist movement, at first in Balta and then in the nearby town of Kruti, where he found work after finishing his apprenticeship. During the pogroms that accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1905, he returned to Balta, where he helped organize a Jewish self-defense unit. Afterwards he had to flee from authorities and went to Volochysk, where he continued socialist agitation. He was arrested and served several months in prison. After his release he traveled into Austria-Hungary, spending time in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Lemberg (Lviv, Ukraine), Budapest, and Vienna, and later also resided in Switzerland. During these wanderings his political perspective evolved from one of socialism to anarcho-communism. In 1910 Schwarzbard settled in Paris, where his brother Shmuel was also living. There he worked in various watchmaker workshops.

Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Shalom Schwarzbard joined the French Foreign Legion. On August 24, 1914, just before his departure for training in Lyon, he married Anna (née Render), whom he had known since 1910. In March 1916, he was seriously wounded in the trenches in central France, and spent the next year and a half recovering. He was later awarded the Croix de Guerre.

In 1917, following the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Schwarzbard and his wife returned to Russia. He visited his father in Balta, and in the face of anticipated pogroms, helped organize a self-defense effort. He then settled in Odessa. By the end of the year his father passed away. In fall 1917, after the October Revolution, he joined the Red Guard in Odessa, in an effort that led, in early 1918, to a short-lived workers' soviet. In spring 1918, he was part of the anarchist "Roshal" battalion (named for the young Bolshevik leader Semyon Roshal who had just been murdered, in December 1917), which formed in response to a Romanian offensive on the city and disbanded under the subsequent German occupation. In spring 1919, after the German defeat, Schwarzbard briefly worked for the Bolshevik regime in Odessa, and in June of that year joined the International Division, an anarchist self-defense unit, departing in July for the Kiev region, where over a two-month period he witnessed the aftermath of the pogroms that had recently taken place there.

During the Ukrainian civil war of 1917-1921, while Ukrainian forces fought for the national independence of the Ukraine against the Bolshevik armies and Polish territorial claims, chaos and lawlessness were rampant in the Ukraine. The widespread pogroms that took place there during this time shocked the public with their extent and brutality. Pogroms were perpetrated by armed groups including the Ukrainian National Army, led by Simon Petlyura; the anti-Bolshevik White Army, under Anton Denikin; and independent local groups. According to conservative estimates, 50,000 Jews were killed in the waves of violence. Victims and their relatives, as well as public figures concerned with the events, held Simon Petlyura ultimately responsible for these atrocities, charging that he had done little to stop the violence. A Ukrainian socialist leader and journalist, Petlyura became the minister for military affairs in the Ukrainian Central Rada, or parliament, in mid-1917, and later he was a member and then the chair of the Ukrainian Directorate, which existed from 1918 to 1920.

In 1920 Shalom Schwarzbard returned to Paris, where he made his living as a watchmaker; he opened a shop at 82 Boulevard de Ménilmontant. He was also active in the French and Jewish labor movements. In 1925 he was naturalized as a French citizen.

Schwarzbard remained preoccupied with the suffering he had witnessed in the aftermath of the pogroms. After learning that the exiled Ukrainian leader Simon Petlyura was residing in Paris, he decided to take justice into his own hands. On the afternoon of May 25, 1926, Schwarzbard walked up to Petlyura on the street and shot him several times; Petlyura died at the hospital shortly after. Schwarzbard took responsibility for the assassination, which he considered to be an act of justice.

Both Shalom Schwarzbard and Simon Petlyura immediately became public symbols. Schwarzbard was called a Jewish national hero, and appeals were made to Jews all over the world to contribute financially to his defense. Publicly recognized personalities such as Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein volunteered to testify on Schwarzbard's behalf. The former Prime Minister of Hungary Mihály Károlyi prepared an analysis of the Jewish problem in Central Europe, which he supplied to the defense. Simon Petlyura became a martyr to the Ukrainian nationalist cause, and his death unified the hitherto divided Ukrainian émigré community. Many Ukrainian émigrés believed that Shalom Schwarzbard was a Bolshevik agent who had carried out the assassination under orders from Moscow.

Following his arrest, Schwarzbard was held in the prison La Santé, in Paris, for nearly a year and a half, until his trial, which took place October 18-26, 1927. He was represented by the prominent French attorney Henry Torrès. Torrès concentrated on presenting the story of the pogroms and demonstrating Simon Petlyura's responsibility for them; Schwarzbard was acquitted.

After his release from prison, Shalom Schwarzbard attended many meetings and gatherings around the world at the invitation of various Jewish organizations, where he spoke about Jewish self-defense and the pogroms in the Ukraine. He also became active in organizations of the veterans and victims of the First World War. He had long hoped to emigrate to Mandate Palestine but was unsuccessful in obtaining permission.

Schwarzbard's first published work was a book of poetry, Troymen un virklikhkayt (Dreams and Reality), which he published in Paris, in 1920, under the pen name Bal-khaloymes (the Dreamer). Later, he published various writings in the Yiddish press, including serialized versions of his memoirs. His memoirs finally appeared in book form in two volumes, In krig mit zikh aleyn (In War with Myself), in 1933, and In'm loyf fun yorn (In the Course of Years), in 1934, both published at the initiative of a group of Schwarzbard's friends, by the publishing house of M. Ceshinsky, Chicago.

On March 3, 1938, Shalom Schwarzbard died suddenly in Cape Town, South Africa, while on a trip there, and was buried at the Maitland Jewish Cemetery. In 1967, under the auspices of a committee in Israel, Schwarzbard's remains were disinterred and brought to Israel, where he is buried in the cemetery of Moshav Avichail, near Netanya.

References

Friedman, Saul S. (1976). Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura. New York: Hart.

Johnson, Kelly (2012). "Sholem Schwarzbard: Biography of a Jewish Assassin." Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Available online at the Harvard Library digital repository, dash.harvard.edu.