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The Shoah in the East, by contrast, was not discreet. The victims were publicly assembled, albeit often at first on the pretext of being sent to a labor camp or to Palestine. The mass murder then took place in full view of the victims’ neighbors, the curious, and soldiers or civilians who happened to be there.
I’m always astonished by the ease with which killers can recount having participated in murders.
I’ve read many depositions, but Friedrich’s held my attention because he explains in concrete detail how he had the grave dug. The measurements were transmitted to him over the phone; his only responsibility, it seems, was to select the site for the murder. “I got the order to have a large hole, eighty meters [ninety yards] long, four meters [thirteen feet] wide, and three meters [ten feet] deep, dug before six in the morning. The location was my choice. With the help of the chief of the Voronovo rayon,12 I sent messengers to neighboring villages to conscript the Poles, ‘every last one.’
When I give a presentation in a university or community here in the United States, the same question arises quickly and frequently: “Weren’t the ‘requisitioned’ collaborators?” It’s not so simple to explain that requisition was part of daily life in Soviet villages and that people were not given a say in the matter.
The requisition of villagers is the hidden face of the Einsatzgruppen, the special German mobile units. The Germans could be so mobile thanks to an immobile local population that was always there to do their dirty work.
“There was a rich Jewish merchant who owned several businesses. He said, ‘Why are you taking me to the ghetto? Kill me here!’ So, they killed him along with his family: his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law. They took the bodies to the Jewish cemetery where they threw them in a ditch. I saw all this. I was right there. The police let us watch.”
“So, these Jews were killed right before the others were locked up in the ghetto?” “Yes. All their goods were pillaged by the villagers. They had horses, cows, sewing machines. People took everything.” The imprisoning of Jews in the ghetto of Rokytne went hand in hand with their neighbors’ looting of their houses.
“Did the villagers also take furniture?” “Yes, each took what he needed. People came with wagons and loaded them up with furniture. Sometimes, they even took the doors.” Pillaging—or, more precisely, the carving up of Jewish households—happened not just publicly but as a collective act by the people of the village. You can’t load a horse-drawn wagon up with furniture in a small town without everyone being aware of it. The phrase resonated in my head: Half the village came to barter.
“Did you go into several houses to see what was inside?” “Yes, we did the rounds of the village.” “So, during the three days that the Jews were shut up in the ghetto, the villagers emptied their houses?” “Yes, people took everything…. I didn’t follow the column to the ditches. I saw them leave, and I went into the houses. I thought I might find a watch, a knife, or some other useful object…. I went with a few other boys. And then we joined up with the Jews.”
The collective act seems to have abolished any sense of personal guilt.
It should be noted that in this village a single German, in one long afternoon, killed more than seven hundred Jews!
Andreï’s intact memory of the killer brings fully to light the fracture in humanity that is genocide.
He did however relate one instance of revolt by the last of the Jews; a refusal to obey that was punished with horrific violence. Here again, he speaks without restraint. “He had chosen five Jews to fill in the ditch with dirt, but they refused. So the German caught one of the Jews with a spade and tore open his stomach. His guts spilled out and the other Jews tried to stuff them back inside…. Then he shot them.”
There were women, children, and old people…. They were dirty from the coal dust in the wagons, and the police told them they would be taken to the baths. They brought them to the hose that they used to fill the locomotive and they turned the water on. It was minus thirty-five degrees. Some people froze on the spot.”
I saw the Germans drinking eau-de-vie. They took drinking breaks between shooting. They had planned everything; they had brought a jug full of eau-de-vie on their carts. They would go up to the cart and take turns drinking their alcohol from a tumbler.”
When Aizik’s mother learned that Ivan, the son of the family where she had sent her own child for safety, was digging a ditch, she ran to the farm to question him. “Ivanko,3 they’ve forced you to dig a ditch? A ditch for us? What ditch have you dug?” Such an awful question. The scene described by Anna was surreal. This wasn’t the first time a witness had told me about Jews leaving the ghetto to ask, “Is the ditch for us?”
The ditch was rectangular, with a dirt staircase at each end so the Jews could get into the ditch rapidly from both sides at once. The Jews were supposed to lie down head to toe, making two lines down the ditch and leaving an aisle in between. The shooters circulated in the aisle, shooting the Jews from left to right. “There were three shooters. They relieved one another…. At the beginning, the shooters were outside the ditch; then they went down into the ditch to shoot. Here is the ditch!”
“The heads faced one way, the feet the other. Then the next group lay facing the opposite direction. The shooters walked here, between the two rows of bodies, shooting in their heads.” “What uniforms were they wearing?” “The SS ones with the skull.”
Before Rawa Ruska, I was under the illusion that the Shoah had taken place in secret. But no, our research showed us that the genocide of the Eastern Jews happened not in secret but in broad daylight, in the presence of local witnesses.
The Jews were not led to graves but shot right on the spot. The night before, women had been raped by the police and then shot. The police bragged about the number of women they had abused in this manner and tried to outdo one another.
Is this how we explain and interpret the silence of 3,900 Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian witnesses about the night preceding the shooting of the Jews? The extermination machine is not just for killing. It authorizes all forms of cruelty so long as they don’t interfere with the strict timing on the day of the genocide.
All of a sudden, the Kommandant of our ghetto and another German appeared at the corner. My father didn’t have time to take off his hat. I myself didn’t have a hat on. The German came up to my father and asked him: ‘Why didn’t you take your hat off?’ In the meantime, my father had taken off his hat and tried to explain to the man, ‘I didn’t see you coming.’ The German answered him, ‘I’m going to teach you how to see.’ He took out his pistol and shot my father on the spot, merely because he hadn’t taken off his hat. The German laughed. He said to me, ‘Now you’ll know Die Mütze muss man
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She was very pretty; she wore a very long braid. I can remember it well. Her braid went all the way to her waist and was very thick. She was walking in the street. The Germans captured her. One of them tore off her dress and her underpants, threw her on the ground and started to rape her. Of course, she started screaming. Her mother came out of the house. I saw it. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had never seen a rape before. Her mother ran out of the house screaming. She was running toward her daughter when one of the Germans who was there shot her.”
Germans went into the ghetto on the days of the Aktion to rape the young Jewish girls and, if the families resisted, they were murdered on the spot. The Germans chose a family, raped, stole, and then killed.
The words of the Bousk villagers began to reverberate in me. They recalled sexual slaves imprisoned by the Gestapo, selected by the Germans, then shot by a neighboring unit from Sokal; by the end of the year, most of them were pregnant. The guards standing outside the ghettos of Brest, in Belarus, recalled that the Germans went in every night to rape young girls, in full view and in full knowledge of all.
This brief passage in Alfred Metzner’s testimony, spoken with no particular emphasis, comes back to haunt me: “The night before, the women had been raped by the police and then shot. The police bragged about the number of women they had abused in this manner.”
“They forced the Jews to line up along the steps that had been made on either side of the ditch. They fired with a machine gun, and all the Jews on one of the steps fell. Then they shot the Jews on the other step. This way, they all fell headfirst toward the middle. I can’t talk about it. It’s extremely hard. Can you imagine, for the child that I was! It was a nightmare. After having seen all this, I couldn’t sleep or eat or do anything at all…. There were some mothers who had babies in blankets in their arms. They were told to put them down around the ditch; they did it. That’s when Dioma,
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For my part, I have always refused any religious interpretation of the Shoah. Perhaps this is thanks to my roots in French secularism, but more likely it is the inherited determination of my grandparents; we didn’t theologize about Nazism, we fought it.
The Germans often inverted the Bible to explain their crimes. I can recall a small town south of Ternopil, called Monastyriska. The Christians in this town had been informed about the arrest of the Jews. They were told to get wooden crosses to affix to the lintel of the doors to their farms. Wherever there was a cross, the Germans would not enter. Wherever there was no cross, the Germans would enter, pillage, arrest, and kill the Jews. An inverted Jewish Easter!
How many little Olgas, in thousands of Eastern villages, believed on the day of the crime that they were witnessing the Last Judgment? Is it possible that in Western Europe, certain Catholics likewise perceived the raids, the camps, the trains bound for Auschwitz as an act of response by God himself? Was not Séverine Drumont, the wife of Edouard Drumont, the all too well-known pseudo-Catholic author of the anti-Semiitic tract La France Juive [Jewish France], the guest of honor at the exhibit on the Jews organized in Paris by the Vichy regime?
Since meeting Olga in Medzhybizh, I now frequently ask the witnesses I am interviewing, the neighbors, “Did you make the sign of the cross when the Jews passed in front of you in their columns? Did you make the sign of the cross while the Jews were being shot?” The answer comes, simple and implacable: “Of course!”
‘Once our trucks were full of Jews, we still didn’t know where we were supposed to go. On each of our truck steps was an SS guard with a loaded submachine gun ready to fire. We started to drive once the three trucks from the Stickel, Charlottenburg Company were full. We went down Judenstraße, to Lembergstraße, then we turned right down Lublinerstraße. After two kilometers [a mile], we turned off to the left, behind a small forest, and took a dirt road. We kept going until we got to an old Russian anti-tank ravine. At the edge of the ditch was a large number of SS with submachine guns, and here
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The drivers, for their part, said nothing. Their silence intrigues me. It is obvious that they knew. Throughout all of our research, we have met very few people who transported Jews. The diggers, the fillers, even the sellers of stolen clothes will speak. Why do the transporters stay quiet? From experience, what usually engenders silence is the theft of belongings. Were the drivers compensated? Did they partake in pillaging at the time of the arrests? Or did they rob the Jews they carried? How to find out … ?
I went to the river because I had left some fishing lines out, when suddenly I saw the corpse of a little boy in the water. He was kneeling, naked, his head in the water. All you could see was his back. I had seen the bodies of Russian and German soldiers before, but I had never seen a dead child. I didn’t dare to touch him with my hand, so I turned him over with my foot, and I saw that it was my friend Sergueï.”
“Sometime later in the village, a handwritten announcement began to circulate. It said: ‘Citizens, if you discover the body of a German soldier, you must inform the Kommandantur. If you find the body of a Russian soldier, you must bury it. However, if you find the body of a Jew, do not touch it!’ Then two or three weeks later, the bodies of the Jews started coming to the surface of the water. That’s how we knew they shot them in the river. When the other boys and I came to swim, we saw the bloated bodies floating. We saw our neighbors, Katia and Aunt Dounya. We pushed the bodies as far away as
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“The ditch was ready and the plank, too. They brought the Jews to the cemetery and started the shooting right away, ordering them to move one by one with a ‘Noch einmal, Schneller, Feuer,’3 faster toward the ditch to be shot.” “So, they were slaughtered one by one?” “Yes, yes.”
So, in Novozlatopol, the German police would go early in the morning before the shootings to requisition a Ukrainian village musician. They dragged him from his farm and forced him to play his bouben, next to the police headquarters, beside the common graves that had just been dug. He was made to play in a futile attempt to mask the noise of the guns firing. He played loudly while the young Ukrainians requisitioned to guard the Jews hit tin cans to drown out the screams.
“So, when the men were taken away, the Jewish women and children stayed in their houses?” Maria replied, “Yes, they stayed quietly in their homes, as if none of this was their concern. There were quite a few mixed families; a lot of Polish and Ukrainian women were married to Jews and had children with them. These women got favorable treatment, and nobody harmed them, but the children of mixed couples were considered Jews and were exterminated.”
As they approached the valley, the Jews went through a barricade, manned by the Germans, which prevented them from crossing back, like a fish trap. Then they had to leave their baggage, their jewels, their clothing. Every Jew—man, woman, child—was murdered by a person armed with a gun. More than thirty thousand victims saw their killers, while each killer looked into the eyes of each of his Jewish victims. In broad daylight. Thirty thousand personal crimes.
So, it seems clear: at Babi Yar, hunger, thirst, cold, and the killers’ need for rest were taken into serious consideration in the planning of the crime. On such blood-soaked days, one might have thought that the human extermination machine would forget to eat, drink, or rest. Such was not the case. Those who organized the mass shootings seem never to have sacrificed the comfort of their staff.
It is virtually impossible today to imagine the pain endured by men and women being beaten as they were marched to their death simply for being Jewish while their neighbors’ children ran up and down beside them, more likely than not just to watch the show. It is difficult to visualize this coexistence, the juxtaposition of the mass murder of one part of the village and the curiosity it excited in the children of the same village, a curiosity that would be banal were it not focused on a crime of genocide.
We know from the history of the Cambodian genocide how many children and young adolescents were party to the killings. Anti-Semitism and racism have a repulsive effect on the conscience of young human beings. Was Vladimir from an anti-Semitic family? Maybe, because he said on several occasions, “But they were only half-breeds!”
But I cannot shake off this other thought: it appears that when you live near the scene of a genocidal crime and you know precisely who is, and who is not, at risk of being killed, and that you are not part of the targeted portion of humanity, you can stay close and watch the crime without experiencing much stress. Furthermore, those who commit the genocide never stop repeating, through every means at their disposal—posters, radio—exactly who it is they are going to kill. So, neighbors who have understood that they run almost no risk because they are not targeted not only sleep easily but are
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“Yes, they started shooting very early in the morning. I remember that it was freezing, and from time to time we would go into the house to get warm, then go back out onto the roof again. Surrounding the village was an anti-tank ditch that the Jewish women had dug over two weeks at the beginning of the war. They shot the Jews in front of this ditch. I saw with my own eyes the way the Germans made them take off their clothes. The winter was harsh, and they were all red with cold.”
Some of the Jews had been part of the kolkhoz for a long time. Others had arrived recently from western Ukraine as refugees from the war. They had tried to flee the Germans at the beginning of the occupation and thought they were safe in this Jewish village lost in the steppes. But that was not the case. Nowhere in our research had we found even the smallest hamlet where the Germans didn’t turn up to murder the Jews.
The church of a neighboring village became a storage site for the possessions of the murdered Jews, a warehouse for the clothes of the dead. For Germans, coming from a country deeply marked by Christianity, the local church had become a warehouse for goods stolen from murder victims. It was perhaps irrational, but when I heard this, I thought of German centurions: Gott mit uns (God with us)!
Édith D., the young teacher, had already witnessed other Judenaktion. On this day, her school wasn’t closed and she hadn’t been warned that another massacre would take place right next to her schoolyard. So she watched and let the children see what she called the process of an execution: the ditches dug, the guards, the undressing of the Jews, of women and children, their placement at the edge of the ditches, the shots, the deaths. She didn’t decide to bring the children inside until the Jews started to scream. It was as though the cries broke through the “process” for her and her students.
First of all, it is barely believable, barely comprehensible, that an execution would be planned next to a German primary school. Unbelievable that the killers didn’t ask for the school to close. Also unbelievable that the children and their teacher watched as though unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle of the murder of the Jews.
the Germans, including the shooter, knew that the children from the Klevan School were there, on the hillside less than a hundred yards away, watching. All the spectators that day were young students. The principal himself didn’t go to the shootings, nor for that matter did any of the teachers. Yet he had, perhaps involuntarily, mandated that the children of his school go watch their neighbors be murdered, like at a show.
However, the fillers were not entirely like the other conscripts. Each of them was confronted not only with the bodies of murdered Jews but also with Jews who had survived the shooting and were in agony, or who had simply been thrown alive into the grave and were trying, most often in vain, to extract themselves from the mass of bodies, blood, and sand. This is what immediately affected me upon meeting them. Their shovels full of dirt were, in fact, murderous.
