Bloodlands (38 page)

 

In late August 1941, the coordination of the German forces was on display at the mass shooting of Jews in the southwest Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi. Here the war itself had created a problem of Jewish refugees.

Hungary, a German ally, had been allowed to annex subcarpathian Ruthenia, the far eastern district of Czechoslovakia. Rather than grant the native Jews of this region Hungarian citizenship, Hungary expelled “stateless” Jews to the east, to German-occupied Ukraine. The influx of Jews into a German-controlled territory strained limited resources. Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police
Leader for the area, took the initiative, likely so that he could report a success to Himmler at a meeting on 12 August. He flew in personally to make arrangements. The Germans chose a site outside Kamianets-Podilskyi, and forced Jewish refugees and some local Jews to march there. The Jews were shot in pits by Order Police Battalion 320 and Jeckeln’s personal staff company. Some 23,600 Jews were killed in the course of four days, from 26 to 29 August. Jeckeln reported the number by radio to Himmler. This was by far the largest massacre yet carried out by the Germans, and it set a pattern for those to follow.
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The Wehrmacht aided and abetted such shooting operations, and sometimes requested them. By late August 1941, nine weeks into the war, the Wehrmacht had serious concerns about food supplies and the security of the rear. Murdering Jews would free up food and, according to Nazi logic, prevent partisan uprisings. After the mass shooting at Kamianets-Podilskyi, the Wehrmacht systematically cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen and the police forces in the destruction of
Jewish communities. When a town or a city was taken, the police (if present) would round up some of the Jewish men and shoot them. The army would register the surviving population, noting the Jews. Then the Wehrmacht and the police would negotiate over how many of the remaining Jews could be killed, and how many should be left alive as a labor force in a ghetto. After this selection, the police would proceed to a second mass shooting, with the army often providing trucks, ammunition, and guards. If the police were not present, the army would register Jews and organize forced labor itself. The police would arrange the killings later. As central directives became clearer and these protocols of cooperation were established, death tolls among Jews in occupied Soviet Ukraine roughly doubled from July to August 1941, and then again from August to September.
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In Kiev in September 1941, a further confrontation with the remnants of Soviet power provided the pretext for the next escalation: the first attempt to murder all of the native Jews present in a large city.

On 19 September 1941 the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South took Kiev, several weeks behind schedule, and with the help of Army Group Center. On 24 September, a series of bombs and mines exploded, destroying the buildings in central Kiev where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. Some of these explosives were on timers set before Soviet forces withdrew from the city, but some seem to have been detonated by NKVD men who remained in Kiev. As the Germans pulled their dead and wounded from the rubble, the city suddenly seemed unsafe. As a local remembered, the Germans stopped smiling. They had to try to govern the metropolis with a very small number of people, dozens of whom had just been killed, even as they prepared a continued eastward march. The Germans had a clear ideological line to follow: if the NKVD was guilty, the Jews must be blamed. At a meeting on 26 September, military authorities agreed with representatives of the police and SS that the mass murder of Kiev Jews would be the appropriate reprisal for the bombing. Although most of the Jews of Kiev had fled before the Germans took the city, tens of thousands remained. They were all to be killed.
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Disinformation was the key to the entire operation. A Wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered the Jews of Kiev to appear, on pain of death, at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city. In
what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions, the Jews were told that they were being resettled. They should thus bring along their documents, money, and valuables. On 29 September 1941 most of the remaining Jewish community of Kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location. Some Jews told themselves that since Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, was the following day, they could not possibly be hurt. Many arrived before dawn, in the hopes of getting good seats on the resettlement train—which did not exist. People packed for a long journey, old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food. Having been assembled, the more than thirty thousand people walked, as instructed, along Melnyk Street in the direction of the Jewish cemetery. Observers from nearby apartments recalled an “endless row” that was “overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks.”
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The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the checkpoint, if no earlier, many of the Jews must have wondered what their true fate would be. Dina Pronicheva, a woman of thirty, walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots. Immediately all was clear to her; but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them. Instead she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the Germans demanded valuables and clothes. A German had already taken her mother’s wedding ring when Pronicheva realized that her mother, no less than she, understood what was happening. Yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her—“you don’t look like a Jew”—did she try to escape. Such plain communication is rare in such situations, when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening, and the human spirit strives toward imitation, subordination, and thus extinction. Pronicheva, who had a Russian husband and thus a Russian surname, told a German at a nearby table that she was not Jewish. He told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete.
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Thus Dina Pronicheva saw what became of her parents, her sister, and the Jews of Kiev. Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or by shots fired overhead, in groups of about ten, to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten: Pronicheva remembered that people “were already bloody as they went to be shot.” They had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses
already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirty-six hours. People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and then all was black. Some people died thinking about others rather than themselves, such as the mother of the beautiful fifteen-year-old girl Sara, who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter. Here there was, even at the end, a thought and a care: that if she saw her daughter shot she would not see her raped. One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it, and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761. Since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres, and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand, the count is what remains.
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At the end of the day, the Germans decided to kill Dina Pronicheva. Whether or not she was Jewish was moot; she had seen too much. In the darkness she was led to the edge of the ravine along with a few other people. She was not forced to undress. She survived in the only way possible in that situation: just as the shots began, she threw herself into the gorge, and then feigned death. She bore the weight of the German walking across her body, remaining motionless as the boots tread across her breast and her hand, “like a dead person.” She was able to keep open a small air hole as the dirt fell down around her. She heard a small child calling for its mother, and thought of her own children. She began to talk to herself: “Dina, get up, run away, run to your children.” Perhaps words made the difference, as they had earlier when her mother, now dead somewhere below, had whispered to her. She dug her way out, and crept away quietly.
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Dina Pronicheva joined the perilous world of the few Jewish survivors in Kiev. The law required that Jews be turned in to the authorities. The Germans offered material incentives: money, and sometimes the keys to the Jew’s apartment. The local population, in Kiev as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, was of course accustomed to denouncing “enemies of the people.” Not so very long before, in 1937 and 1938, the main local enemy, denounced at that time to the NKVD, had been “Polish spies.” Now, as the Gestapo settled in to the former offices of the NKVD, the enemy was the Jew. Those who came to report Jews to
the German police passed by a guard wearing a swastika armband—standing before friezes of the hammer and sickle. The office dealing with Jewish affairs was rather small, since the investigation of Jewish “crimes” was simple: a Soviet document with Jewish nationality recorded (or a penis without a foreskin) meant death. Iza Belozovskaia, a Kiev Jew in hiding, had a young son called Igor who was confused by all of this. He asked his mother: “What is a Jew?” In practice the answer was given by German policemen reading Soviet identity documents or by German doctors subjecting boys such as Igor to a “medical examination.”
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Iza Belozovskaia felt death everywhere. “I felt a strong desire,” she remembered, “to sprinkle my head, my whole self, with ashes, to hear nothing, to be changed into dust.” But she kept going, and she lived. Those who gave up hope sometimes survived thanks to the devotion of their non-Jewish spouses or their families. The midwife Sofia Eizenshtayn, for example, was hidden by her husband in a pit he dug at the back of a courtyard. He led her there dressed as a beggar, and visited her every day as he walked their dog. He talked to her, pretending to talk to the dog. She pleaded with him to poison her. Instead he kept bringing her food and water. Those Jews who were caught by the police were killed. They were placed in cells of the Kiev prison that had held victims of the Great Terror three years before. When the prison was full, the Jews and other prisoners were driven away at dawn in a covered truck. Residents of Kiev learned to fear this truck, as they had feared the NKVD black ravens leaving these same gates. It took the Jews and other prisoners to Babi Yar, where they were forced to disrobe, kneel at the edge of the ravine, and wait for the shot.
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Babi Yar confirmed the precedent of Kamianets-Podilskyi for the destruction of Jews in central, eastern, and southern Ukrainian cities. Because Army Group South had captured Kiev late, and because news of German policies spread quickly, most Jews of these regions had fled east and therefore survived. Those who remained almost always did not. On 13 October 1941 about 12,000 Jews were killed at Dnipropetrovsk. The Germans were able to use the local administrations, established by themselves, to facilitate the work of gathering and then killing Jews. In Kharkiv, it appears that Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C had the city administration settle the remaining Jews in a single district. On 15 and 16 December more than 10,000 Kharkiv Jews were taken to a tractor factory at the edge of town. There they were shot in groups by Order Police Battalion
314 and Sonderkommando 4a in January 1942. Some of them were gassed in a truck that piped its own exhaust into its own cargo trailer, and thus into the lungs of Jews who were locked inside. Gas vans were also tried in Kiev, but rejected when the Security Police complained that they disliked removing mangled corpses covered with blood and excrement. In Kiev the German policemen preferred shooting over ravines and pits.
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The timing of the mass murder was slightly different in occupied Soviet Belarus, behind the lines of Army Group Center. In the first eight weeks of the war, through August 1941, Einsatzgruppe B under Artur Nebe killed more Jews, in Vilnius and in Belarus, than any of the other Einsatzgruppen. But the further mass murder of Jews in Belarus was then delayed somewhat by a military consideration. Hitler decided to send divisions from Army Group Center to aid Army Group South in the battle for Kiev of September 1941. This decision of Hitler’s delayed the march of Army Group Center on Moscow, which was its main task.
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Once Kiev was taken and the march on Moscow could resume, so did the killing. On 2 October 1941, Army Group Center began a secondary offensive on Moscow, code-named Operation Typhoon. Police and security divisions began to clear Jews from its rear. Army Group Center advanced with a force of 1.9 million men in seventy-eight divisions. Then the policy of general mass murder of Jews, including women and children, was extended throughout occupied Soviet Belarus. Throughout September 1941 Sonderkommando 4a and Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe B were already exterminating all Jews of villages and small towns. In early October that policy was applied to cities.
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