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Samuel mentioned a verse of the Bible that made it all the more impossible for him to shovel the earth. The act of filling, even when forced, contributes to—or rather is inscribed in—the criminal act. The shooters shoot. The pushers, sometimes with leather gloves, sometimes with the heels of their boots, push the bodies of the dead and wounded Jews into the graves. The fillers bury both the dead and the living. Thus the filler is a conscript physically associated with the murder, more precisely with the very act of killing. And not all fillers would feel young Samuel’s pain.
Living today in a city like Paris, we tend to think of Jew, polizei, and grave filler as separate beings, or at least as clearly distinct from one another. But above all, they were simply neighbors. Sometimes it would turn out that the filler knew the polizei who guarded the Jews leading up to shooting, as well as the Jewish family with all its children who waited, naked, beside the ditch. They were all, or rather they had all been, neighbors. And not just for the past few weeks or even years, but quite often for generations. Only the Germans, foreigners arriving by truck or car from the big
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In fact, Mykola’s father hadn’t been directly conscripted by the police; he had put himself forward to replace one of his sons, “It was the polizei who came to get him. They wanted to take my oldest brother, but my mother started to cry and persuaded them to take my father instead. She guessed that it was to bury the bodies and she didn’t want my brother to be traumatized by the blood and the cadavers. The police accepted and took my father.
I cannot end this chapter without sharing a final memory of Mykola’s of a young Jewish girl, sitting on top of a pile of bodies, screaming in Ukrainian: “I want to see my mommy! Take me to my mommy’s house!” The little girl cried out in Ukrainian and not in Yiddish, because around the grave, Ukrainians were all she saw.
The father was a pharmacist, and they had a little girl, Ziouta. The daughter and mother hid with one family, and the father hid somewhere else. The people hiding them denounced them. When the Germans went to get them, the girl took poison that her father had given her and died on the spot, but the mother didn’t have time to take the poison. They put little Ziouta’s body on a cart and the mother walked beside it. They took them to the cemetery and buried both of them there.
Ievhenia and Berta, two women, one Ukrainian and one a German civilian; one cried for her coat as she watched the ghetto burn and the other complained because she couldn’t find her fur coat after the liquidation. Neither one worried about the Jewish tailor or seamstress. As for Mr. H and Mr. K., they were looking for watches they were having repaired as well as other objects.
Apparently, people can sometimes recall a lost item with greater emotion than they can summon for the victims of murder. On a day of genocide, a person can not only prove indifferent to the murder of her neighbors but seemingly motivated by one interest only: her own.
Even sixty years hence, the laws put in place during the genocide seem to determine the feelings of guilt and innocence of the neighborhood. Law, even the law of a genocidal dictatorship, would appear to trump conscience. Human beings are quite adept at telling themselves that if something is legal, they can’t be guilty.
Nazi criteria for establishing Judaism and in particular the criminal criteria for those who were half Jewish: “It is crucial to note that a person was considered Jewish and was shot if he was related to a Jew up to three generations inclusive, in cases where the husband and wife were of different nationalities. I know of the following example: A Jewish woman who was married to a Ukrainian, their daughter who was also married to a Ukrainian, who herself had a daughter married to a Ukrainian … were all shot as Jews. A man or woman married to a Jew who was of another nationality was not shot.”
I had often said in lectures that there can be no killers without cooks. I didn’t quite know how right I was.
“When the column turned and saw the ditch, a general outcry resounded, from women and men alike. No yelling, no insult, no beating or kicking could stop it. The deep cries of the men and the sharp, strident cries of the women mingled with the tears of children who wanted to be held. The screaming would die down briefly only to start up again even louder. It lasted for one hundred to two hundred meters, until they arrived at the site of the ditch.”
Zaloga mentions a person whom very few witnesses recall: the counter. He draws a cross in a notebook for every five Jews killed. The counting of victims that takes places beside the ditch will allow the mobile units to make an accurate report to Berlin.
“Not far from the ditch stood the chief of police, Lieutenant Reich, and the chief of the SD, whose name I don’t know, the two directors of the shooting, who, under the approving eyes of the regional kommissar, Reindel, gave the orders throughout…. With evil smiles on their lips, smoking cigarettes the whole time, they encouraged their subordinates, who were excited by the smell of blood, and laughed to see the blows connect as they rained down on the heads of the terrified Jews.
“I can still remember the Aktion at Sdolbunov on October 13, 1942. I saw the way Wacker opened the door and pulled someone out. It was an old woman, with a small child in her arms, who tried to defend herself, saying, “Leave me, Herr Kommissar!” Wacker grabbed the child by the legs, swung him around several times and then hit his head against the doorpost. It sounded like an exploding tire. When the child was dead, the inhabitants of the house came out without any resistance, completely resigned. I heard how Wacker said to his comrades: ‘It’s the best method, we just have to understand this.’”
Sleaze comingles with horror. Starting on the day after the execution, certain villagers were dressed as Jews! In his deposition, Zaloga isn’t shy about naming the girlfriends who benefitted from the Germans’ favors and who wore, for all to see, the scarves of the women murdered by their beaux. Zaloga resumes his narrative, explaining that some of the requisitioned people, especially the ditch fillers, were also rewarded with clothes.
German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst. This is where, on May 9, 1945, the surrender of the Third Reich to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union was signed. The signing room appears intact: sober tables, simple blue tablecloths each decorated with four small flags, and, displayed in metal cases, the yellowed pages of the surrender that put an end to one of history’s most abominable and massive crimes: the Second World War.
If the Nazis couldn’t keep themselves from raping Jewish women despite their insane ideology of blood purity, what can we think today of those who butcher, burn, and shoot in the name of Islamic purity? They are nothing more than criminals driven by insatiable appetites, the most powerful of which appears to be an idolatry of themselves, which seems, when it becomes criminal, the source of such pleasure that it demands to be preserved and perpetuated on film.
If certain Nazi executioners divided up the furs of Jewish women before shooting them,1 what are we to make today of the thefts of goods by the Islamic State from conquered peoples? Purity does not exist among contemporary genocidal criminals either.
