Pogromshchik

It’s based on a book written in the 70s called ‘Pogromchik’ by the late Dr. Saul Friedman, (former head of a Holocaust Studies Program at Youngstown State University, Columbus, OH). The term 'Pogrom' originated in Russia and refers to massacres that took place against people in the Jewish community going back many centuries. The largest number of pogroms that occurred were in Ukraine after World War I in the year 1919. A ‘pogromchik’ is a person who commits pogroms.

Ukraine declared its independence after World War I and was headed by a man named Simon Petlura. He was only president for a short time but had to flee the country because it was taken over by the Communists and soon afterward incorporated into the Soviet Union. Petlura first fled to Poland but eventually ended up in Paris, where he ran a small Ukrainian newspaper focusing on the Ukrainian community in exile.


In 1926, a Russian Jew and French Army veteran named Sholom Schwartzbard, whose family was murdered during the Ukrainian pogroms in 1919, went up to Simon Petlura on the street in Paris, and shot him seven times, killing him.


My screenplay is about Schwartzbard’s trial in Paris in 1927. Schwartzbard was defended by a prominent attorney named Torres. He ended up putting Petlura on trial in effect by claiming that since Petlura was the president of Ukraine, he was responsible for the progroms that occurred there. Evidence was presented that Petlura knew about the pogroms and encouraged them. The French prosecutor maintained Schwartzbard was a Soviet agent and that Petlura was only a figurehead, and had no control over 'bandits' who were not authorized by the Ukrainian Army to commit the massacres. Schwartzbard was acquitted by the French Jury.