The Palace on the Ikva

Abstract

Mist from the marshy flood plain of the Ikva River was draping Dubne when the first tank trundled toward the town at five o’clock in the morning on Monday, 18 September 1939. An officer dressed in a leather jacket poised in the tank’s open turret. Two small boys with flowers in their hands clung to the sides. The Ukrainian who surveyed the spectacle noted that the tanker had a swarthy complexion and that the boys were Jews. The nameless menace, the abomination that so many people in Poland’s eastern borderlands, the fabled Kresy Wschodnie, had both dreaded and craved, was bodying itself in flesh. The slant-eyed barbarians were breaching the walls, and Jews, themselves a treacherous alien race, were inching the gate open from within and sending their children out to herald the invaders.