04/27/2026
Havighurst Center Memo: April 27, 2026
Today from 11:40-1:00 in Harrison 302, our fifth and final speaker in the spring colloquium series, “Democracy in Post-Communist Eastern Europe,” welcomes University of Florida Professor of Political Science Michael Bernhard. His lecture is entitled “Paradoxes of Democratic Accountability in the Age of Democratic Backsliding.”
A Lawyer, a Baker, and a Wartime Conversation in Dubno, Ukraine
Stephen Norris
In September 1939, just a week after the Germans invaded Poland and before the N**i Party established their General Government in occupied Poland, a Warsaw-based lawyer named Raphael Lemkin decided to flee eastward. Days later, Lemkin found himself in a house near Dubno, Ukraine, which had recently been occupied by the USSR.
Lemkin’s journey from Warsaw to Dubno had been a harrowing one. The clear blue skies, he wrote in his memoir, meant that “the weather was on the side of the N**is.” The lawyer had to walk at night, guard from other refugees stealing the scant items he had packed, and disguise himself as a peasant. At the new border between occupied Polish and occupied Ukrainian lands, Lemkin escaped death only after skeptical Soviet border guards believed his subterfuge.
Lemkin intended to go to Wolkowysk (now Vawkavysk) to meet his parents there. He had to travel further east than expected because of the occupations taking place in 1939-40 in the wake of the N**i-Soviet Pact and subsequent German and Soviet invasions of Poland and the Baltics. He ended up in Dubno at a baker’s house.
Several hours after arriving at the home and after having taken his first bath since leaving Warsaw, Lemkin and his host started a conversation. Lemkin had been born in 1900 to a Jewish family in present-day Belarus, then part of the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. In Dubno, he was about 250 miles from Wolkowysk where he grew up. The Jewish baker had lived near Dubno his entire life.
The two Jewish men discussed the circumstances of Lemkin’s arrival. The baker expressed surprise that so many Jews were fleeing eastward from the N**i occupation, telling the lawyer that “there’s nothing new in the sufferings of Jews, especially in time of war.” The baker recounted how his grandfather told stories about Cossack atrocities in the 19th Century and how his father had helped the family survive the German occupation of Dubno from 1915-18 in the Great War. “The main thing for a Jew to do” the baker concluded, “is not to get too excited, and outlast the enemies.”
Lemkin countered that the N**is were different and that their form of anti-Semitisim was not like previous examples of anti-Semitism the baker had witnessed. “This is a different war,” the lawyer retorted, “it is not a war to grab territory so much as to destroy whole peoples and replace them with Germans.” Lemkin urged the baker to take more seriously this new, awful form of warfare mixed with hateful ideology. He wanted the family to flee when they had the chance.
After the conversation ended, Lemkin went to bed but was unable to sleep. He understood that “many generations spoke through this man [the baker]” and that his host could not believe the danger posed by the N**is because “it went against nature, against logic, against life itself, and against the warm smell of bread in his house, against his poor but comfortable bed.” The baker, the lawyer from Warsaw realized, “had a private, bilateral covenant with God,” a “contract for life and righteousness.”
Lemkin stayed with the baker and his family for two weeks. He also spoke with the baker’s son, who did not share his father’s views, telling the young man that changing the thinking of many generations at once was a difficult task. The lawyer counseled the baker’s son that “the instinct of life is a very good advisor” and that Jewish residents of the village had engaged in self-defense in the past.
In November, Lemkin’s host told him that the first train headed north in weeks would leave the next day. The lawyer took leave of the family, knowing that the confusion generated by the establishment of political control in the newly-occupied Soviet territories offered him a small window to get out. He traveled to Wolkowysk and stayed with his parents for one day. There, in his childhood home, he also reflected more on the baker’s viewpoint as well that of the baker’s son. “So strong was the desire to be protected by the memories of my past to forget the sad framework of this present,” he would later write, that he closed off the outside world for a time. He also saw in his parent’s eyes the same sentiment as the baker from Dubno.
Lemkin left, making his way first to Wilno (now Vilnius), then to Sweden, and eventually to the United States. In Washington, D.C., less than five years after fleeing Warsaw, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book drew on his experiences in 1939 and 1940, including his stay at the baker’s house. It introduced the word Lemkin had coined for the crimes he escaped – “genocide” – for the first time.
At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, which Lemkin attended, he learned the fate of Dubno’s Jewish community. Between July 22 and August 22, 1941, German units and local collaborators executed over 1000 Jewish residents of the town. N**i occupying forces established a Dubno Ghetto on April 2, 1942. By the end of October 1942, just three years after Lemkin stayed with the baker and his family, N**i authorities liquidated the Ghetto and declared the town “Jew free.” The baker and his family did not survive.
Lemkin’s parents also did not survive the genocide: 49 members of his family died.
April is Genocide Awareness Month: April 14 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. In his recent history, 1942: The Year World War II Went Global, Peter Fritzsche referenced Lemkin’s stay in Dubno. It prompted me to pick up Lemkin’s autobiography, Totally Unofficial, to read the full story summarized above.
Further Reading
Yad Vashem’s Entry on Dubno’s Jewish History:
https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/untold-stories/community/14622285-Dubno
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe is available through HathiTrust:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005077436&seq=11
Chernobyl 40 Years After
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Reactor #4 explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR.
PBS reported on the 1986 event and the 2022 occupation of the plant by Russian forces:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/inside-chernobyl-40-years-after-the-worlds-worst-nuclear-disaster
The Economist podcast “The Intelligence” put out an episode on Chernobyl that featured Serhii Plokhy, our guest at Friday’s event co-sponsored by Lane Public Library:
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40
The New York Times republished photographs from the Chernobyl disaster in yesterday’s edition:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/world/europe/40-years-ago-a-nuclear-catastrophe-at-chernobyl.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d1A.CNWk.91c1mOkRKU9Z&smid=nytcore-android-share
Lizzie Johnson’s latest article in The New Yorker tells the heartbreaking story of a Chernobyl widow:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-ukraine/a-chernobyl-widows-tragedy-forty-years-later
The Kyiv Independent’s coverage of commemorations:
https://kyivindependent.com/world-marks-40th-anniversary-of-chornobyl-disaster/
Recent News About Former Center Guests
Artem Chapeye, the author of the Havighurst Center’s spring book club choice, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, just had his novel The Weathering appear in English translation by Daisy Gibbons. You can read an excerpt through the link below as well as read a recent interview with Chapeye.
https://mailchi.mp/sevenstories/weathering-d2c-416?
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/04/16/localised-universalities-an-interview-with-artem-chapeye-and-daisy-gibbons/
Dmitry Muratov, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and 2022 Annual Havighurst Lecturer, gave a bombshell interview with a French newspaper on April 11 that has been translated into English:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/16/novaya-gazetas-dmitry-muratov-cruelty-has-become-a-form-of-patriotism-a92510
The European Parliament named its first-ever list of laureates for the European Order of Merit. Two recent Center guests, L**h Walesa and Oleksandra Matviichuk (who delivered the 2024-25 Annual Lecture), received the award:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260306IPR37520/president-metsola-announces-first-laureates-of-the-european-order-of-merit
Ganev on the Bulgarian Elections
Read Center associate and professor of political science Venelin Ganev’s analysis of last week’s Bulgarian elections:
https://sites.miamioh.edu/havighurst/2026/04/26/is-bulgarias-newly-elected-leader-the-next-orban/
Jews began to settle in Dubno in the early 16th century. During the uprising of Bogdan Chmielnicki (
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