Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (23 page)

After June of 1941, as refugees began arriving in the city from the countryside, the stories of burned villages and on-the-spot shootings might have seemed too fanciful to believe. For many families, banking on the devil they didn’t know rather than the one that was painfully familiar must have seemed the smarter choice. Plenty of people had personal memories of the anti-Jewish violence of 1905; a few could even remember the pogrom of 1871 or 1881. Given the choice between abandoning a home and property to another round of looting by one’s neighbors in Odessa or staying put and dealing with the new occupiers, the latter was not an obviously ludicrous option. “Under the Germans, it’s going to be very, very bad for us. We’ll suffer. We’ll live with humiliation,” a friend said to the memoirist Saul Borovoi. “But to become a refugee—that means certain death.”
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Even when evacuations from Odessa began, people still had to negotiate the shoals of Soviet bureaucracy. In the countryside, villagers could load up the oxcart and head eastward, but for city-dwellers there were only three options: hike out by foot; try to find a truck or train that was not already packed with military personnel, which required a special ticket; or seek a berth aboard evacuation ships leaving from the harbor, which also required a special pass that gave priority to Communist Party officials and state administrators.

Those who managed to get out of the city safely were faced with the prospect of finding shelter, remaking their lives and professions, and reuniting family members separated in the flight from the Axis armies. Some ended up as far afield as Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia. Displaced and parentless children were enrolled in specially constructed orphanages. Adults were assigned to refugee camps and shared housing with comrades from other occupied and besieged Soviet cities, conditions that lasted for the next four years or more. The evacuees made the best of their plight. Writers exchanged drafts over scarce cigarettes and vodka. Scholars read papers on obscure themes before learned audiences drawn from across the Soviet Union. Directors crafted documentaries and melodramas—which is why so many Soviet movies of the era feature the Tashkent Film Studios in the title sequences, an unlikely Soviet Hollywood constructed amid Muslim domes and minarets on the Central Asian plains.
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It was the beginning of the creation of an urban diaspora that carried the values, culture, and proclivities of Odessa throughout the Soviet Union and beyond.

But in the late summer and autumn of 1941, Odessans were making monumental decisions about staying or leaving with little knowledge of what lay ahead, either in the city itself or in some unknown resettlement facility. One Holocaust survivor, Boris Kalika, recalled being dragged down to the port by his mother to catch a Soviet ship. Crowds pushed toward the docks. Luggage lay in piles on the quay. In the melee twelve-year-old Boris, small and frightened, was separated from his mother and sister. He eventually tired of searching for his family and simply walked back to his apartment building, where he remained, in the care of Russian neighbors, until the occupying forces rounded up the city’s Jews later in the year. He was briefly interned in the Odessa ghetto and was moved out of the city toward a Romanian-built camp at Domanevka. Lithe and golden-haired, he managed to slip away from the guards and survived the rest of the war by going from village to village, portraying himself as a Russian orphan. It was only after the war had ended and the Romanian troops withdrew that he was at last reunited in Odessa with his mother, who had spent the war years as a refugee in the Soviet east. His sister, however, had died in uncertain circumstances during the chaotic evacuation of the city in 1941.
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K
ILLING
J
EWS
was not a primary goal of the Romanian soldiers and gendarmes as they headed east, but it was a side project pursued with some of the zeal, if none of the organization, of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. Antonescu’s government had enacted a range of antisemitic laws in Romania, and murderous rampages had already taken place there, most infamously a pogrom and forced deportation in the northeastern city of Ia
i that left thousands dead. But there were no large-scale removals of Jews from Romania proper to the death camps overseen by Reich officials. Antonescu eventually rebuffed German pressure to deport the country’s large Jewish community, and at his postwar trial he still maintained that his actions had always been intended to save Romanian Jews, not to massacre them. But Romania’s actions in the reannexed Bessarabia, as well as farther east in the occupied territory of Transnistria, were another matter entirely.

Systematic attacks on Jews had already occurred in the city from the first hours of the occupation. The German Einsatzgruppe D, especially its subunit Sonderkommando 11b, entered Odessa with Romanian forces in mid-October.
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Prominent Jewish community leaders were murdered, and Jews were ordered to register with the local authorities, presumably to provide lists of names and addresses for future operations.
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But the bombing of the military headquarters unleashed a new and less regulated round of violence. Mass hangings and large-scale shootings took place throughout the city and the suburbs, initiated by the occupation forces and then expressly ordered by Ion Antonescu himself.

From October 22 forward, Antonescu sent telegrams that detailed a clear course of action. Two hundred “Communists” were to be killed for every dead Romanian or German officer and one hundred for every ordinary soldier. All “Communists” in Odessa were to be made hostages, as well as “a member of each Jewish family,” all of whom were to be killed in the event of a second major terrorist incident.
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In a further elaboration, Antonescu gave a checklist of measures:

A handwritten version of the order survived. Subsequent communication with command headquarters confirmed that the order had been carried out.
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The use of the general term “Communists,” as well as the particular antipathy toward Bessarabian Jews, reflected one of the critical dimensions of Romania’s policy in Odessa and elsewhere: the lines between Communist, Jew, partisan, refugee, and simple inconvenience were hazy and often nonexistent. The orders issued by the occupation authorities were at times grotesquely vague. On October 23, Trestioreanu instructed the units under his command to hang “at least 100 Jews” each—presumably with full permission to hang even more.
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These actions were always known by the Romanians as
represalii
—reprisals—and they were aimed almost exclusively at Jews. The intended targets, of course, were Soviet agents, partisans, and their sympathizers, but those were categories difficult if not impossible to assess with any clarity.

Being a Jew became a surrogate for being an enemy of the state, and certainly was a category easier to identify from personal documents, public records, and routine intelligence-gathering from neighbors and coworkers. Ease of bureaucratic identification, combined with the deeper antisemitic equation of Jews with social undesirables and hidden enemies, was the driver of Romania’s policy. For Antonescu and his subordinates, the occupying troops were simply using lethal force to respond to pervasive partisan activity and discourage Odessans from engaging in further underground attacks. If it was relatively easy to survive the war as a Jew inside Romania, Jews in the occupied lands were placed in a very different category—that of Russian-speaker, crypto-Communist, and likely subversive.

The scale of these operations was staggering. Besides the hangings and indiscriminate shootings immediately after the explosion, thousands of Jews were rounded up by Romanian security forces with the assistance of SS units and executed in the port, in military buildings on the outskirts of the city, and in sheds in the nearby settlement of Dalnik. The poles supporting overhead electric lines that serviced the city’s trolley system were used as makeshift gallows, with lines of bodies stretching out into the suburbs.
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Meanwhile, SS Sonderkommando 11b was given the task of finding Jews who might still be hiding in the city and dispatching them to Romanian killing squads outside town.
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Mass shootings with rifles and machine guns, immolations with blazing oil and gas, and the bombing of buildings packed with Jewish citizens—precisely the ghoulish symbolism Antonescu had ordered—were carried out in the weeks following the bombing. “The chaos and the horrifying sights that followed cannot be described,” noted a contemporary account. “Wounded people burning alive, women with their hair aflame coming out through the roof or through openings in the burning storehouses in a crazed search for salvation.”
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Estimates based on witness reports, postwar trials, and limited survivor testimonies give a figure of at least twenty-five thousand people killed in Odessa and Dalnik during this period—that is, perhaps around a third of all Jews who were living in the city when it came under Romanian control.
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These massacres were carried out according to written orders passed down the Romanian chain of command. As such they were part of the “Holocaust by bullets,” as one historian has called it—the mass murder of civilians in ditches, old buildings, and tank traps across Ukraine and other parts of the western Soviet Union. That was the way in which millions of Jews and others experienced the war, even though this version of the Holocaust is usually overshadowed by the impersonal, mechanized killing in death camps such as Auschwitz.
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The Romanians did not create extermination facilities, but they did construct an array of camps and ghettos in Transnistria to which the remainder of Odessa’s Jews—and many other Jews and Roma (Gypsies) from Bessarabia and Transnistria itself—were eventually sent.

A
S WITH MUCH
of Romanian policy, the confinement of Odessa’s Jews to a ghetto was an inconsistent and disorganized process—a fact that produced horrific cruelties as well as possibilities for escape or evasion. Some Jews were forcibly moved to the Slobodka neighborhood, just beyond the city center, as massacres were winding to a close. Some were allowed to return to their homes, but soon men and boys were required to report to the local prison, with a sweep throughout the city picking up any who had not registered. Then, in mid-November of 1941, officials in Transnistria ordered all Jews to report to a hastily arranged ghetto. The policy was only loosely enforced. Soon women, children, and the elderly were allowed to return to their homes, many of which had already been ransacked or seized by their neighbors.
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It was also possible for men to sneak back into other parts of the city (the ghetto was a neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings, not a walled enclosure) and for other Odessans to visit them there or in other detention facilities. One secret agent reported to Romanian authorities how easy it was to take food to a Jewish neighbor in the municipal prison, whereas that would have been impossible, she said, under Stalin.
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The full confinement to the Slobodka ghetto seems to have come later in Odessa than in other parts of Transnistria. Before the late summer of 1941, Romania’s practice had been to kill Jews on the spot or to deport them to the east, across the Bug River into German-occupied Ukraine. But the resulting chaos—with disorderly columns of Jews being pushed across the river and then back again by German soldiers unprepared to handle the influx—was meant to be squelched by an agreement signed on August 30, which formally awarded Romania control of Transnistria. The agreement set out Romania’s responsibility for dealing with Jews on what was now defined as its own territory. Jews were to be “concentrated in labor camps and required to work” until military operations ceased, at which point they would be “evacuated” to the German-controlled east.
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In Odessa the creation of the ghetto was probably a matter of timing: with the bombing of the headquarters and mass killings that followed, it took months from the time of the initial invasion for the authorities to devise concrete plans. In mid-December Antonescu gave the order definitively imprisoning Odessa’s Jews in the ghetto—the first time in history that Jews were fully restricted from living in whatever part of the city they could afford.