Authors: Anna Reid
Borderland (23 page)
A spectacle such as we could never have dreamed of awaited us. A huge heap of men, one lying on top of another, lay helpless on the floor of the room. Militiamen with truncheons in their hands moved among them. At first I thought that the men on the floor must be corpses and that we had been fetched to carry them out . . . In this confused state I reached for the foot of one of them in order to draw him out of the heap. As I did, a savage blow on the head stunned me, and I toppled among the bodies.
31
Later – how much later Leon couldn’t tell – the survivors were ordered to get up and go outside. Having been forced to perform physical jerks for the amusement of the guards, they were lined up with their hands behind their heads and marched through the streets to the town’s hockey-pitch:
Thousands of men were lying here in rows. They lay on their bellies, their faces buried in the sand. Around the perimeter of the field searchlights had been set up. Among them I caught sight of German officers standing about. We were ordered to lie flat like the others. We were pushed and shoved brutally, this way and that. My father was separated from me, and I heard him calling out in despair: ‘Let me stay with my son! I want to die with my son!’ Nobody took any notice of him.
Now that we were all lying still, there was a hush that lasted for a moment or two. Then the ‘game’ started. We could hear the sound of a man, clearly one of us, stumbling awkwardly around, chased and beaten by another as he went. At last the pursued collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. He was told to rise. Blows were rained down upon him until he dragged himself to his feet again and tried to run forward. He fell to the ground again and hadn’t the strength to get up. When the pursuers were at last satisfied that the incessant blows had rendered him unable to stir, let alone run, they called a halt and left him there. Now it was the turn of the second victim . . .
32
Night fell, and Weliczker sank into oblivion. But
the welcome state of unconsciousness passed all too quickly. I came to, and was startled by a painful stab of dazzling light . . . We sat up, one beside the other, so close we could not stir. Directly in front of me sat two men with shattered skulls. Through the mess of bone and hair I could see their very brains. We whispered to them. We nudged them. But they did not stir. They just sat there, propped up, bulging eyes staring ahead. They were quite dead.
33
The Lviv massacre – dubbed the ‘Petlyura action’ in revenge for Sholem Schwartzbard’s assassination of the Ukrainian Civil War general fifteen years earlier – went on for three days, killing over 2,000 people.
34
Over the next weeks, as the Einsatzgnippen swept on east, similar atrocities took place all over the country. One of the first towns to fall was Schulz’s Drohobycz, a pretty little place known for its frescoed wooden churches. On 14 July a member of the local Einsatzkommando, SS Sergeant Felix Landau, recorded the events of the day in his diary:
We drive a few kilometres along the main road ‘til we reach a wood. We go into the wood and look for a spot suitable for mass executions. We order the prisoners to dig their graves. Only two of them are crying, the others show courage . . . Slowly the grave gets bigger and bigger. Two are crying without let-up. I let them dig more so they can’t think. The work really calms them. Money, watches and valuables are collected. The two women go first to be shot; placed at the edge of the grave they face the soldiers. They get shot. When it’s the men’s turn, the soldiers aim at the shoulder. All our six men are allowed to shoot. Three prisoners have been shot in the heart.
The shooting goes on. Two heads have been shot off. Nearly all fall into the grave unconscious only to suffer a long while. Our revolvers don’t help either. The last group have to throw the corpses into the grave; they have to stand ready for their own execution. They all tumble into the grave.
35
Just over a month later the Einsatzgruppen reached Uman, where notices were posted telling Jews to report for a census. Twenty-four thousand men, women and children duly assembled, and were taken in trucks to a square in front of the city airport, where ditches had already been dug and sacks of lime laid out. ‘One row of Jews,’ wrote Erwin Bingel, a Wehrmacht lieutenant who witnessed the scene, ‘was ordered to move forward and was then allocated to the different tables where they had to undress completely and hand over everything they wore and carried. Some still had jewellery which they had to put on the table. Then, having taken off all their clothes, they were made to stand in line in front of the ditches, irrespective of their sex.’ SS soldiers and Ukrainian militiamen marched down the lines with automatic pistols. Infants, wrote Bingel, were ‘gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of the pistol-butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead’.
36
A week later, Bingel saw two more massacres in Vynnytsya. The first, he estimated, killed 28,000 people, the second, in the town park, another 6,000.
In Kiev, the killing began on 27 September, just eight days after the city’s surrender. Ordered to report for ‘resettlement’, the city’s Jews were taken out to the suburbs, to a steep wooded ravine known as Babiy Yar. The mouth of the ravine forms a precipice; men, women and children were driven towards it in columns, and machine-gunned by SS men and Ukrainian militia from the opposite bank. In two days, according to the records of Einsatzkommando in charge, 33,771 Jews went to the Yar. The earth shovelled into the ravine when the operation was over did not cease moving for some time after.
Through October, the slaughter continued. Four and a half thousand Jews were killed at the port of Kerch; 14,300 at the Crimean capital of Simferopol; 17,000 at the Volhynian town of Rivno, where those who refused to undress beforehand had their eyes put out. In Ivano-Frankivsk militiamen surrounded the Jewish district and marched its occupants, beaten and bleeding, to the newer of the town’s two Jewish cemeteries – the same place I stood fifty-four years later with Moishe-Leib. Here the Jews were ordered to undress, hand over their valuables, and line up beside three large ditches. The German stormtroops together with the Ukrainian police took up their stations beside the machine guns,’ remembered a survivor. ‘Fifteen of the storm-troops shot, and fifteen others loaded the guns. The Jews leapt naked into the graves. The bullets hit them while jumping . . .’ By the time the shooting stopped, the ditches were overflowing. ‘All around lay the dead, strangled, trodden underfoot, wounded. Those of us who remained alive felt ourselves to be infinitely unfortunate.’
37
On 23 October came the turn of Odessa, home to one of the largest and most flourishing Jewish communities in the world. Six days after the city’s capture by the German and Romanian armies, a bomb exploded in Romanian headquarters, killing several officers. The next day, Romanian soldiers herded 19,000 Jews into a fenced square near the port, where they were sprayed with gasoline and burned alive. Another 16,000 were marched to the nearby village of Dalnik, where they were tied together in groups, pushed into anti-tank ditches and shot. When this method proved inefficient the Romanians drove the remainder into four large warehouses and machine-gunned them through holes in the walls. Three of the warehouses, containing women and children, were then set on fire, and the fourth demolished with artillery fire. The rest of Odessa’s Jews were sent to concentration camps – Dumanovka, Bogdanovka, Atmicetka and Vertugen – sixty miles to the north, where they died, along with tens of thousands of others from central Ukraine and Moldova, of disease, starvation, cold, and in more mass executions.
The recorded examples of Ukrainians hiding or helping Jews are inspiring, but not, relative to the size of the slaughter, very numerous. Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, the aged, semi-paralysed head of the Uniate Church, sheltered fifteen Jews in his episcopal palace, arranging for another 150, mostly children, to be hidden in nunneries and monasteries. Early in 1942 he wrote to Himmler protesting that ‘Ukrainian auxiliary police are being forced to shoot Jews’, and in November of the same year he issued a pastoral letter under the title ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which was read out from pulpits all over the country. At the other end of the scale a professional burglar, Leopold Socha, hid twenty-one Jews in the Lviv sewers, which he knew well having used them to stash stolen goods. For fourteen months he brought food every day – including a bottle of vodka to celebrate Stalingrad – and arranged for the weekly laundering of their clothes. He produced a Jewish prayerbook, and provided potatoes instead of leavened bread every Sabbath. Of this group, eight left the sewers and were captured immediately, one drowned, and one fell ill and died; the remainder emerged safely above ground on liberation, to be greeted by Socha and his wife with cakes and vodka. Elsewhere woodsmen, peasants, priests and ex-servants to Jewish families hid escapees in attics, under cowsheds and in hen-coops. For the rescuers, of course, discovery meant death: German reports list around a hundred such executions in Galicia alone between October 1943 and June 1944.
38
But on the whole, as in the rest of occupied Europe, gentiles treated the slaughter going on around them as a sideshow to their own predicament. The
Sunday Times
correspondent Alexander Werth, visiting newly liberated Uman in March 1944, remarked that ‘the Ukrainians in the town did not talk much about it: they seemed to look upon it as rather a routine matter under the Germans’.
39
In Kharkiv he interviewed a ‘buxom young lady barber, with rouge, lipstick, manicure and perm’, who described Jews being driven wailing through the streets, pushing prams and wheelbarrows. ‘I could understand their wanting to send the Jews away somewhere,’ she told him, ‘but to kill them all in that awful way, that was going a bit far, don’t you think?’
40
Oliynyk remembered Jews from the local ghetto being shot on market days, while peasants from the neighbouring villages looked on. ‘People grew so accustomed to these atrocities,’ he wrote, ‘that they would go home and tell their families all about them.’ The children learned to play at ‘shooting Jews’. ‘One group of boys’, Oliynyk wrote, ‘would stand at the edge of the ditch, and the others would aim at them. After the call “fire” the “Jews” would fall into the ditch . . . priests had to go to great lengths to make the children give up this horrible game.’
41
Although in general Oliynyk’s parishioners condemned the Jewish massacres, they were much angrier about the massacre of Ukrainians by the NKVD: ‘Germans were killing their own race enemy while the
moskali
did this to their brother Ukrainians . . .’
42
Jewish escapees to the forests – like the 2,000 people who fought their way out of the Volhynian town of Tuczyn in September 1942 – were often betrayed by local peasants, in exchange for a little sugar or a few cigarettes. Others were killed by Ukrainian and Polish partisans, who, according to Weliczker, ‘hated the Jews just as much as they hated the Germans’.
43
(Yet others, paradoxically, survived the war attached to partisan units as doctors or tailors.) Gentiles who did hide Jews were scared of reprisals from neighbours. Weliczker, who spent the last months of the war huddled with twenty-three others in a cellar under a Polish farmer’s barn, remembered his rescuer begging them not to come back and thank him because ‘it would go hard for him if it were known that he had hidden Jews’.
44
‘When they’ve finished with the Jews,’ Oliynyk’s parishioners wondered, ‘will they I begin on us?’
45
It was no idle fear – Slavs too were Untermenschen. For Erich Koch, the knout-wielding head of Reichskomissariat Ukraine, Ukrainians were ‘niggers’ fit only for ‘vodka and the whip’. ‘If I find a Ukrainian worthy of sitting at the same table with me,’ he once remarked, ‘I must have him shot.’
46
Himmler wanted the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be ‘decimated’;
47
Göring thought the solution was to kill all Ukrainian males over the age of fifteen and ‘send in the SS stallions’.
48
Hitler himself, visiting advance headquarters near Vynnytsya, instructed that Ukrainian education should be restricted to ‘one single sentence: the capital of the Reich is Berlin’.
49
Ukrainian nationalists had had high hopes of Germany, believing it might back an independent Ukrainian state. In the 1930s the Nazis had provided a haven for leaders of the underground group OUN, encouraging its terrorist campaign in Poland. And in 1939 they released Bandera, leader of OUN’s radical wing, from a Polish prison, allowing him to join in the training of Ukrainian troops in readiness for the invasion of the Soviet Union. By 1941 the Ukrainians seem to have believed that a declaration of Ukrainian independence would be welcomed by Germany, or at least accepted as a fait accompli.
They were wrong. Though some senior Nazis – among them von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Ostministerium – did indeed advocate establishing a Ukrainian puppetstate as a buffer against Russia, it was the Untermensch philosophy that won out. The first sign that the Germans regarded their Ukrainian alliance as no more than a marriage of convenience was the débâcle known as the ‘Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine’. In October 1938, just after the Munich agreement, Germany encouraged OUN-led Ukrainian nationalists in Transcarpathia, a sliver of ethnically Ukrainian territory attached to eastern Czechoslovakia, to declare autonomy. This they duly did, winning reluctant recognition from the tottering Czechs. But when Germany overran Czechoslovakia the following March, it allowed Transcarpathia to be taken over by Hungary. As the Hungarians marched in, the Ukrainians proclaimed complete independence and sent a telegram to Hitler asking for acceptance as a German protectorate. No help came: the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine lasted exactly twenty-four hours.