Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (22 page)

After the revolution, however, Odessa seemed mainly a place of departure. Chaim Bialik, the great pioneer of Hebrew poetry, left in 1921, hounded by Bolshevik authorities for his allegedly “chauvinistic” views on national identity. Eight years later, Leon Trotsky—the old schoolboy from St. Paul’s who had gone from revolutionary prophet to disgraced enemy of Stalin—boarded the steamer
Ilyich
in the dead of winter, an ice-breaker clearing the way through the frozen harbor. The city he had known as a child was the last bit of Russia he ever saw. As a major cultural center, with long-standing ties to Western forms of art and music, Odessa was an obvious target for labeling as a den of spies and wreckers. The university, founded originally by Richelieu as a haven for scholars on the imperial frontier, was denuded of professors thought to harbor views unfriendly to the Soviet state. Writers who had taken refuge on the seaside as a balm to the imagination were targets of vicious state campaigns against dilettantism and formalism in literature. In the era of Stalin, a hundred Babels, lesser known but similarly products of Odessa’s vibrant cultural scene, fell from grace and ended up in prison camps, or worse. According to official statistics, at least 19,361 Odessans—peasants, workers, intellectuals, soldiers, and government officials—were arrested from 1937 to 1941 and charged with a host of crimes, from sabotaging the economy to spying for foreign powers. A third of them were shot.
²⁶

Yet the makings of the new “Old Odessa,” celebrated by Babel and mythologized by Eisenstein, were already in place. It reached its apogee after the Second World War. Odessa eventually became, as it had never quite been before, a real somewhere, a place that average Soviet citizens understood as having a distinct identity, its own brand of nostalgia, and a permanent station in the pantheon of beloved and heroic Soviet cities. The Odessa steps would come to be called the “Potemkin steps”—not after Catherine’s imperial partner and one of the city’s founders, nor even after the mutinous battleship, but rather after Eisenstein’s film.

When later filmgoers saw the staircase in
Battleship Potemkin
, they were not looking at history but past it, into the realm of creative and usable myth. Brave revolutionaries, good-natured
goniffs
, and comic schlemiels defined a city at the center of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera,” as close as that classless society could come to a Mediterranean playground for holiday-making workers and Communist Party bosses. The arresting irony is that much of this happened only after the city’s most distinctive community—its Jews—had been brutally erased.

The murderous professor: Gheorghe Alexianu (center), governor of Romanian-occupied Transnistria, at work in his office in the former palace of Count Mikhail Vorontsov, ca. 1941. Behind him is a portrait of Romania’s wartime leader, Ion Antonescu.
From the journal
Transnistria
, courtesy of the State Archive of the Odessa Region.

E
verything changed the day Stalin’s secret police decided to blow up their own headquarters. The multistory building across from the entrance to Alexandrovsky Park was well known to average Odessans. It was a place best avoided. People who were called there for a conversation with the NKVD sometimes never returned.

At 5:35 on the afternoon of October 22, 1941, a massive explosion leveled the building’s right wing and damaged adjacent structures. Plenty of people had reason to celebrate. Not only was the ominous headquarters now gone, but under the rubble lay representatives of the army and security forces of Romania, the Nazi ally that had taken control of the city just a week earlier. The commander of the occupation troops, General Ion Glogojanu, was killed, along with eighty-eight other military and civilian personnel, including a number of German naval officers. The cause was determined to be a remote-controlled or time-activated mine, probably planted by NKVD agents once the Romanian military staff had selected the building as their headquarters a few days before the blast.
¹

The building had been swept for explosives once before, and intelligence officers had warned of the likelihood of sabotage.
²
In fact, exactly the same thing had happened to the German headquarters in Kiev only a few weeks earlier. The Kiev explosion prompted one of the most notorious massacres of the Second World War, the shooting of more than thirty-three thousand Jews by German SS and Ukrainian guards in the ravine at Babi Yar.
³
Odessa now followed suit. As the bodies of army personnel were being pulled from the debris, officers sent repeated telegrams to central command detailing the destruction as well as the brutal response that was already being carried out. “I have taken steps to hang Jews and Communists in public squares in Odessa,” reported General Constantin Trestioreanu, Glogojanu’s successor as head of the 10th Infantry Division and commanding officer in Odessa.
⁴
It was the beginning of the devastation of Odessa’s Jewish community.

In one of the least-known episodes of the Holocaust, at least 220,000 Jews were killed in or en route to a string of ghettos and concentration camps established in portions of Soviet Ukraine and overseen by the Romanian state.
⁵
Some of the victims came from the city of Odessa and its hinterlands; many more were from other territories Romania conquered when it joined the Germans in invading the Soviet Union in 1941. The Romanian zone of occupation, located between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers, was known officially as Transnistria, the equivalent of other administrative units established as part of the Nazi “New Order” in eastern Europe, from the General Government in Poland to the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. The horrors in Transnistria and its capital city, Odessa, had analogs in the more extensive and well-documented atrocities committed in the infamous death camps of occupied Europe and at the hands of the German military, local police, and Einsatzgruppen, the notorious mobile killing squads of the Reich.

But the twist was that this brutal episode of Holocaust-era genocide occurred outside the territories held by Germany. The major perpetrators were not the leather-coated battalions of the Waffen-SS, nor were the atrocities committed at purpose-built industrial killing facilities such as Auschwitz. Responsibility for the Holocaust in Odessa and Transnistria rested squarely with Romania, the only country during the Second World War besides Nazi Germany to administer a major Soviet city. By the end of the war, the Romanians had largely emptied Odessa of what remained of its Jewish population. One of Europe’s greatest centers of Jewish life and culture had become, in the language of the Nazis, almost wholly
judenrein
.

The fortunes of the city and its inhabitants were uncertain at the outset and dangerously predictable as the war wound on. A host of wrenching decisions—whether and when to evacuate, when and how to make peace with the occupying troops, whether to report to the newly established ghetto—determined the difference between victimization and survival. The unmaking of the city’s enormous Jewish community—a third of the city’s population by the outbreak of the Second World War—depended equally on the decisions of a small number of Romanian officials, whose own dark stories became entwined with the history of the city they briefly controlled.

W
HEN
R
OMANIA
entered the Second World War, there was little doubt as to where its sympathies would lie. The country’s ruler, the capricious King Carol II, had already declared a royal dictatorship, suppressed political parties, and organized a youth movement of arm-raising loyalists based on Mussolini’s legions. Romanian society, too, had responded to the stirrings of the far right across Europe. The country had spawned its own indigenous fascist movement, the Iron Guard, which combined Orthodox Christian radicalism with seething antisemitism and a millenarian cult of death.

These developments formed the background to the rise of Ion Antonescu, the person who took the title of
conduc
tor
—the Romanian equivalent of führer—and ruled both Romania and its occupied territories throughout the war. Stately and soldierly, with the martial bearing of an old war veteran and conservative patriot, Antonescu had little time for the enthusiasms of his sovereign, Carol, or the rug-biting nationalism of the Iron Guard. In fact, he might never have come to power had it not been for the peculiar strategic circumstances in which the Romanian state found itself by the 1940s. The key issue was real estate.

During the First World War, Romania had sided with the Allies, and the reward for being among the winners was the acquisition of new territories at the postwar peace conferences. Among the lands newly attached to the Romanian state was a province, Bessarabia, that had previously belonged to Russia. (Bessarabia’s regional capital was Kishinev, the site of the infamous pogrom of 1903.) The Russian Empire’s successor, the Soviet Union, never fully accepted these territorial losses, and underground Communist propagandists worked to whip up local populations against their new Romanian rulers. Bolshevik-inspired uprisings in Bessarabia fizzled or were suppressed by the Romanian military, gendarmerie, and secret police.

The Soviets eventually embarked on a new plan for wrenching Bessarabia away from the Romanian kingdom. Under the secret terms of a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939—the Soviet Union arranged for Bessarabia to be apportioned to Moscow’s sphere of interest. The borderlands of eastern Europe were now effectively carved into fascist and Communist realms. In June of 1940, Stalin acted on the terms of the accord and demanded the immediate annexation of Romanian territory. King Carol, devastated by the ultimatum and more concerned with romantic trysts than the affairs of state, had little choice but to acquiesce. The Romanian army withdrew in disgrace behind its new frontiers, just as further territories—a slice of Transylvania in the north and a section of the Black Sea coastline—were grabbed by Romania’s other neighbors, Hungary and Bulgaria. Carol, shame-faced and politically spent, abdicated in favor of his son, Mihai.

Antonescu soon stepped onto the stage. The new Romanian king was still in his teens, and Antonescu emerged as the older, more capable guardian of state interests. A lifelong soldier and former war minister, Antonescu had flirted with the Iron Guard in the 1930s and shared some of the movement’s ideals, including its deep antisemitism. But even liberal politicians saw him as the one person with the stature and authority to lead the country out of the crisis created by Soviet-German rapprochement. He soon replaced Carol’s old royal dictatorship with a military one, a “National Legionary State” that drew on the message and symbolism of the Iron Guard (even though the uncontrollable movement itself was eventually outlawed). In November of 1940, Antonescu met Hitler for the first time in Berlin and, as the leader of a smaller and embattled state now seeking protection from the very country that had helped carve up Romanian territory earlier in the year, committed Romania to the German cause.

Romania had been a friend of Britain, France, and Russia in the First World War, but the calculation of national interest was different this time around. When Germany reneged on the terms of its nonaggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Romanians joined the Nazi armies trudging eastward, hoping to recover the provinces that Stalin had grabbed exactly a year earlier. The military operation was widely popular with average Romanians, who saw the Soviet “rape” of Bessarabia and other districts as a crime that demanded revenge. German armies, trailed by their Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian allies, surrounded and then cut off the major cities of the western Soviet Union in grand pincer movements. The Red Army, stunned at the attack, collapsed before the invading forces. In the north, Lithuania, Latvia, and Belorussia came under Nazi control within a week. Soviet forces had been pushed out of western Ukraine in a week more.

As a major port, Odessa was an object of Axis strategic planning as well as a prize difficult for the Soviet forces to give up. It was one of the few Soviet cities to experience aerial bombardment on the first night of the invasion. By late summer of 1941, the city was effectively cut off, surrounded by the German 11th Army and the Romanian 4th Army, with only the sea as a means of supply and escape. For over two months, the city lay under siege, enduring daily artillery barrages from the Axis lines and responding with nightly counterattacks from Red Army defenders.

The situation might have remained in stalemate had German forces not continued their lightning advance to the north and east, overrunning Kiev and pressuring the Soviet naval base at Sevastopol. Faced with the prospect of massive losses in the Soviet heartland, the Red Army took the decision to abandon Odessa and fall back to the east. The Romanians, by prior agreement with the Germans, became the first forces officially to enter the city in mid-October, in creaking transport trucks and on loping horses, to find the port wrecked and a population only a fraction of its prewar size.

E
STIMATES VARY
as to how many Jews in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union managed to escape before the advancing Axis armies. Just over five million Jews resided in the former Pale of Settlement at the time, and anywhere from several hundred thousand to over a million may have followed the retreating Soviet army eastward.
⁶
The 1926 Soviet census, the last reliable one conducted before the war, counted just over 433,000 people in Odessa, of whom around 158,000 were Jews. But there may have been as many as 233,000 Jews living in Odessa on the eve of the Axis invasion, as refugees flooded into the city to escape the German and Romanian armies.
⁷

The Soviet evacuation of the city through the summer and early fall of 1941 removed perhaps a third or more of Odessa’s population, a group that may have contained an overrepresentation of Jews given the professions that had priority for removal: clerks, administrative personnel, doctors, and others. On one estimate, 80,000 to 90,000 Jews remained in the city when the siege finally succeeded in routing the Red Army, that is, still roughly a quarter of the city’s total inhabitants.
⁸
In the late autumn of 1941, the mayor of Odessa estimated the figure at 50,000—out of a remaining city population of perhaps 300,000—probably as accurate a number as one can find at the start of Odessa’s Holocaust.
⁹

For many Jews—as well as their non-Jewish neighbors—how to respond to the invasion was an excruciating conundrum. In retrospect, the decision to stay in one’s own apartment and ride out the conflict was a gigantic mistake. But home had a magnetic pull, even in a time of growing danger. In a worldly and strategically important port such as Odessa—which lay directly in the path of the invaders—Jews still had little inkling of the atrocities already being committed elsewhere, especially in occupied Poland and Belorussia. After all, the Soviet Union had signed a peace pact with the Nazis close to two years earlier, and Stalin’s propaganda machine had worked assiduously to portray Germans in the best-possible light.