Bloodlands (44 page)

Hitler’s express decision to kill all the Jews of Europe raised the association of Jews and partisans to a kind of abstraction: Jews were supporters of Germany’s enemies, and so had to be preemptively eliminated. Himmler and Hitler associated the Jewish threat with the partisan threat. The logic of the connection between Jews and partisans was vague and troubled, but the significance for the Jews of Belarus, the heartland of partisan warfare, was absolutely clear. In the military occupation zone, the rear of Army Group Center, the killing of Jews began again in January 1942. An Einsatzkommando painted Stars of David on their trucks to broadcast their mission of finding Jews and killing them. The leaders of Einsatzgruppe B resolved to kill all the Jews in their zone of responsibility by 20 April 1942, which was Hitler’s birthday.
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The civilian occupation authorities in Minsk also followed the new line. Wilhelm Kube, the General Commissar of White Ruthenia, met with his police leaders on 19 January 1942. All seemed to accept Kube’s formulation: while Germany’s great “colonial-political” task in the East demanded the murder of all Jews, some would have to be preserved for a time as forced labor. Killing actions in Minsk would begin in March, directed against the population that remained
in the ghetto during the day while the labor brigades were outside the ghetto at work.
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On 1 March 1942 the Germans ordered the Judenrat to provide a quota of five thousand Jews the following day. The ghetto underground told the Judenrat not to bargain Jewish blood, which the Judenrat was probably not inclined to do anyway. Some of the Jewish policemen, rather than aiding the Germans to make their quota, warned their fellow Jews to hide. When the quota was not delivered on 2 March, the Germans shot children, and stabbed to death all the wards of the Jewish orphanage. They even killed some workers returning home. In all they murdered some 3,412 people that day. One Jewish child who escaped the bloodshed was Feliks Lipski. His father had been killed as a Polish spy in Stalin’s Great Terror, disappearing as people did then, never to be seen again. Now the boy saw people he knew as corpses in ditches. He remembered shades of white: skin, undergarments, snow.
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After the failure of the action of early March 1942, the Germans broke the Minsk underground, and accelerated the mass murder of the Jews. In late March and early April 1942, the Germans arrested and executed some 251 underground activists, Jews and non-Jews, including the head of the Judenrat. (Kaziniets, the organizer of the underground, was executed that July.) At around the same time, Reinhard Heydrich visited Minsk, and apparently ordered the construction of a death facility. The SS set to work on a new complex at Maly Trastsianets, outside Minsk. Beginning in May 1942, some forty thousand people would be killed there. The wives of German officials remembered Maly Trastsianets as a nice place to ride horses and collect fur coats (taken from Jewish women before they were shot).
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Some ten thousand Minsk Jews were killed in the last few days of July 1942. On the last day of the month, Junita Vishniatskaia wrote a letter to her father to bid him farewell. “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive. Farewell forever. I kiss you, I kiss you.”
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It was true that Germans sometimes avoided shooting younger children, instead throwing them into the pits with the corpses, and allowing them to suffocate under the earth. They also had at their disposal another means of killing that allowed them to avoid seeing the end of young life. Gas vans roved the streets of Minsk, the drivers seeking stray Jewish children. The people called
the gas vans by a name that had been used for the NKVD trucks during the Great Terror a few years earlier: “soul destroyers.”
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The girls and boys knew what would happen to them if they were caught. They would ask for a tattered bit of dignity as they walked up the ramp to their death: “Please sirs,” they would say to the Germans, “do not hit us. We can get to the trucks on our own.”
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By spring 1942 the Jews of Minsk were coming to see the forest as less dangerous than the ghetto. Hersh Smolar himself was forced to leave the ghetto for the partisans. Of the ten thousand or so Minsk Jews who found Soviet partisan units, perhaps half survived the war. Smolar was among the survivors. Yet partisans did not necessarily welcome Jews. Partisan units were meant to defeat the German occupation, not to help civilians endure it. Jews who lacked arms were often turned away, as were women and children. Even armed Jewish men were sometimes rejected or even, in some cases, killed for their weapons. Partisan leaders feared that Jews from ghettos were German spies, an accusation that was not as absurd as it might appear. The Germans would indeed seize wives and children, and then tell Jewish husbands to go to the forest and return with information if they wished to see their families again.
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The situation of Jews in the forests slowly improved over the course of 1942, as some Jews formed their own partisan units, a development that the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement eventually sanctioned. Israel Lapidus formed a unit of some fifty men. Sholem Zorin’s 106th Detachment counted ten times as many, and raided the Minsk ghetto to rescue Jews. In individual cases Soviet partisan units provided diversions that allowed Jews to escape from the ghetto. In one case, partisans attacked a German unit on its way to liquidate a ghetto. Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew who worked as a translator for the German police in the town of Mir, smuggled weapons into that ghetto, and warned its inhabitants when the liquidation was ordered.
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Tuvia Bielski, also a Jew, probably rescued more Jews than any other partisan leader. His special gift was to understand the perils of partisan warfare between Stalin and Hitler. Bielski hailed from western Belarus, which is to say from the part of northeastern Poland that the Soviets had annexed in 1939 and then lost to the Germans in 1941. He had served in the Polish Army, and thus had some
military training. He and his family knew the woods well, probably because they were small-time smugglers. Yet his tactical sense was not reducible to any particular experience. On the one hand, he understood his goal as rescuing Jews rather than killing Germans. He and his men generally tried to avoid combat. “Don’t rush to fight and die,” he would say. “So few of us are left, we have to save lives. To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans.” On the other hand, he was able to work with Soviet partisans, when they appeared, even though their task precisely was to kill Germans. Although his mobile camp was largely composed of women and children, he was able to secure recognition of his status as a partisan leader from the Soviets. By rescuing rather than resisting, Bielski saved more than one thousand people.
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Bielski was an anomaly within a Soviet partisan movement that was ever larger and ever more subordinate to Moscow. When 1942 began, there were (by Soviet reckonings) perhaps twenty-three thousand partisans in Belarus; the number probably doubled by the time that the Central Staff was established in May, and doubled again by the end of the year. Partisans in 1941 had scarcely been able to keep themselves alive; in 1942 they were able to attain specific objectives of military and political value. They laid mines and destroyed railroad tracks and locomotives. They were supposed to keep food from the Germans, and to destroy the German administration. In practice the safest way to attack the German occupation structure was to murder unarmed participants in the civilian administration: small-town mayors, schoolteachers, landowners, and their families. This was not an excess, this was the official policy of the Soviet partisan movement through November 1942. Partisans sought to gain full control of territories, which they called “partisan republics.”
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Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasants from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch houses and fields. If they could not reliably get grain, they could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew
that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet citizens. The Germans swept mines by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return.
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The Soviet leadership was not especially concerned with the plight of Jews. After November 1941 Stalin never singled out the Jews as victims of Hitler. Some partisan commanders did try to protect Jews. But the Soviets, like the Americans or the British, seem not to have seriously contemplated direct military action to rescue Jews. The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value human life very cheaply. Jews in ghettos were aiding the German war effort as forced laborers, so their death over pits was of little concern to authorities in Moscow. Jews who were not aiding but hindering the Germans were showing signs of a dangerous capacity for initiative, and might later resist the reimposition of Soviet rule. By Stalinist logic, Jews were suspect either way: if they remained in the ghetto and worked for the Germans, or if they left the ghetto and showed a capacity for independent action. The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.
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Jewish men who did make it into the partisans “already felt liberated,” as Lev Kravets recalled. Jewish women generally had a more difficult time. In partisan units the standard form of address to girls and women was “whore,” and women usually had no choice but to seek a protector. This is perhaps what Rosa Gerassimova, who survived with the partisans, meant when she recalled that “life was actually unbearable, but the partisans did rescue me.” Some partisan commanders, Jews and non-Jews, did try to protect “family camps” for women and children and the elderly. Children who had the good luck to be in family camps played a version of hide-and-seek, in which Germans hunted Jews who were protected by partisans. This was true in their case; yet while the partisans saved some thirty thousand Jews, it is unclear whether their actions on balance provoked or prevented the killing of Jews. Partisan warfare behind the lines drew
German police and military power away from the front and to the hinterland, where policemen and soldiers almost always found it easier to kill Jews than to hunt down and engage partisans.
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In the second half of 1942, German anti-partisan operations were all but indistinguishable from the mass murder of Jews. Hitler ordered on 18 August 1942 that partisans in Belarus be “exterminated” by the end of the year. It was already understood that the Jews were to be killed by the same deadline. The euphemism “special treatment,” meaning shooting, appears in reports about both Jews and Belarusian civilians. The logic for the two undertakings was circular but nevertheless somehow compelling: Jews were initially to be killed “as partisans” in 1941, when there were not yet any truly threatening partisan formations; then once there were such partisan formations, in 1942, villagers associated with them were to be destroyed “like Jews.” The equivalence between Jews and partisans was emphasized over and over again, in a downward cycle of rhetoric that could end only when both groups were simply gone.
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By the middle of 1942, the number of Jews was in rapid decline, but the number of partisans was in rapid ascent. This had no effect on Nazi reasoning, except to make the methods for dealing with Belarusian civilians ever more similar to the methods of dealing with Jews. As partisans became difficult to target because they were too powerful, and as Jews became difficult to target because they were too scarce, the Germans subjected the non-Jewish Belarusian population to ever more extraordinary waves of killing. From the perspective of the German police, the Final Solution and the anti-partisan campaigns blurred together.