Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint

National and religious labels held no appeal for Bruno Schulz, who was born an Austrian subject of the Hapsburg Empire, lived as a Pole, and died a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. This singular writer and artist preferred to think of himself as a citizen of what he called the “Republic of Dreams.”

Prescient indeed, as the region of Galicia in Eastern Europe, where Schulz was born and lived, ceased to exist in 1945, when it was broken up and parceled out. All that remains is the distant memory of a place where Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Germans once lived alongside each other in relative harmony.