What determines the size of the graves and their shape? In short, who are the architects and the master builders of the common graves in the villages?
We don’t lack for testimony by neighbors of the diggers and the diggers themselves. Some, from their farmyards in the early morning hours, saw their neighbors leaving the village shouldering shovels. Others, children at the time, questioned their fathers when they returned home in the evening, tired from digging all day. Some actually dug. Sometimes they dug several graves. Most of them, all these years later, can remember the dimensions of the graves with precision. Very few, however, mention the presence of an overseer.
These absences, these gaps in memory, when they recur in a number of witnesses, often point to a significant enigma. Recurring silences tend to suggest a very real “unknown,” something nobody wants to remember.
As far as I know, only four diggers have addressed the issue of the grave planning with any clarity. The first, Stepan, questioned on April 5, 2007, near Kamen-Kashyrskyi in Volhynia, Ukraine, remembers a German who paced out the perimeter of the gravesite. Our exchange took place in his house, out of the cold:
“The police came to my house and told me to go dig in that place. They gathered us together, about twenty of us, took us there, and gave us the dimensions they wanted. There were Germans and there were police. It was the Germans who showed us what we had to do…. They put posts at the corners of the grave we were supposed to dig. It was a place where pine trees grew that we used in construction. They placed pieces of this wood at the corners. They had an interpreter who translated for us what we were to do.”
“Did they measure with their steps or with a measuring stick?”
“They measured with steps … There must have been five or six of them.”
“Did they come by car?”
“Of course. First, the police took us there and then the Germans arrived. The police supervised us while we dug until we were done…. The Germans came to show us what to do and then left. But the police stayed.”
For the first time, I was getting the profile of a person, or rather several. A German, or rather several German surveyors, showing up in a car. Givers of orders. Accompanied by an interpreter who was anonymous but nonetheless came from the local police, the polizei,2 as they call them there, who stood watch over the diggers and made sure the work was done.
Rarely asked questions are the ones that don’t get answered. On that day, I had dared to ask some new questions. And I was rewarded with some sibylline answers. It was as though the witness did not want to remember.
A year later, another digger, Oleg, who was also Ukrainian, seemed to have taken part in a very similar scenario.
January 2, 2008
Oleg: “Of course! A German officer came. He measured the grave out with his paces. I know because I dug it. He had marked it all out…. The Germans came from the district of Vyssotsk,3 and they ordered us to dig the grave. There were twenty of us, maybe more. We were told to bring our shovels.”
“How did the Germans measure the grave?”
“They measured it with their steps. He did it himself. He paced it out on the ground and planted stakes to mark the grave.”
“So he already knew how big to make the grave before he got there?”
“Yes … We worked in tandem, some shoveled the dirt out of the hole and others moved it off to the side … with shovels…. We had to throw it to either side, since the hole was so deep. They didn’t tell us, but we knew it was for the Jews…. There were a lot of us, we dug it in one day.”
So the “German,” as the diggers call him, didn’t delegate the marking out of the gravesite to anyone, not to the local police, not to the conscripted labor. It was as if tracing out the grave was too important to the criminal machine to be entrusted to subordinates.
Does this mean that the “German” had the size and volume of the grave in his head before he requisitioned the conscripts? Even before coming to the village in question? I began to think so. We mustn’t forget that the grave is not only a tomb but also a killing machine. A number of the Jews would be buried alive there.
Again, in Oleg’s account, posts or stakes are planted in the four corners.
January 7, 2009
Iosif, a third digger, in Bibrka, a small town in western Ukraine, remembered that the outline of the grave was drawn with shovel marks in the ground.
“Who gave you the dimensions?”
“The Germans. It was a German from the Gestapo. He stood off to the side while we dug the grave…. He had paced it out. The grave was deep: it must have gone down about two meters [six feet]. He simply measured four meters for the length and four meters for the width, and he drew them with his shovel. That’s what we dug. It took an hour to an hour and a half. It was easy to dig because it was a sand quarry. It’s about a kilometer [about half a mile] from here, near the brickyard.”
“The German,” as the three diggers call him, appears to be a giver of orders, more a surveyor than an architect.
We don’t always know what it is we’re unaware of. If Denis Peschanski is right about the Smiley method, I have to keep looking and looking.
The 10 percent will surely never be completely resolved, and this stimulates our appetite to investigate, in the archives as well as in the villages. The unknown 10 percent, so resistant to discovery, drives my search.
The villagers’ description of the giver of orders allows us to do little more than sketch a profile; yet the sketch is enough to confirm that such a person existed. He existed, and the local police followed his orders.
Why, then, do the diggers and their neighbors say so little? I see only one possible reason. Maybe, when they recall the German, the diggers can’t forget that they knew the terrible secret before the rest of the village: in the spot where they were digging by order of the German, the Jews, their neighbors who were locked up behind ghetto walls, would soon be murdered. A German doesn’t come to a Russo-Soviet village to order the digging of a potato silo!
When an act performed by a “requisitioned worker” is described as though “automated,” habitual, without a foreign giver of orders, it seems devoid of any responsibility.
Of course, the diggers dig and the fillers fill. But the rare accounts that do describe the presence of the German architect give back a certain autonomy to the conscripts; the surveyor shows, explains, outlines the dimensions of the grave—but, without the skill of local labor, it would never be ready on time. The diggers are not mere labor. They are not simply living excavators. At the base of the hierarchy in the Shoah by bullets, everything is done by hand, everything is human.
The archives themselves say little about the German who comes out of nowhere to sketch with his steps the perimeter of a genocidal crime. However, Andrej Umansky, a researcher at Yahad from its earliest days, did find, in the German Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg,4 the transcript of a deposition that sheds some light on this enigma.
A certain Friedrich L., in 1964, twenty-three years after the fact, tells this story. He was forty-three years old when he was sent to the East.5
“I was the chief of the municipal police in the Gemeindeschutzpolizei6 in Liegnitz.7 At the end of the autumn of 1941, I was sent East.” He became the chief of the police in the small town of Voronovo8 on the Lithuanian border, with numerous local auxiliary police under his command. “From the beginning of 1942, I had between seventy and eighty-nine Schutzmannschaften9 from the local population in my precinct…. These Hiwis,10 as the volunteers were called, were dressed in old black SS uniforms with brown collars and rolled-up sleeves…. We got our orders from the regional chief of police from the town of Lida.”11
To the question of who took part in the mass executions, he answered, without apparent discomfort, “When I am asked if I participated in mass shootings or individual executions in Voronovo, I affirm it. One night in May 1942, the Voronovo police headquarters hosted a meeting in my offices. At about ten o’clock, I got a phone
call from the police bureau in Lida.”
I’m always astonished by the ease with which killers can recount having participated in murders.
I’ve read many depositions, but Friedrich’s held my attention because he explains in concrete detail how he had the grave dug. The measurements were transmitted to him over the phone; his only responsibility, it seems, was to select the site for the murder.
“I got the order to have a large hole, eighty meters [ninety yards] long, four meters [thirteen feet] wide, and three meters [ten feet] deep, dug before six in the morning. The location was my choice. With the help of the chief of the Voronovo rayon,12 I sent messengers to neighboring villages to conscript the Poles, ‘every last one.’ Very quickly, between sixty and eighty Poles showed up with their tools, and I had to send some home because there were too many.”
The search for the site is described in banal terms, as though he were choosing a spot for a picnic.
“So I went out to look for an execution site, and I chose a place eight hundred meters [half a mile] south of Voronovo, to the left of the highway that goes to Lida. It was an old Russian shooting range about thirty meters [thirty yards] from the road. The grave was done in time, as ordered.”
His explanation is terribly simple; he is given two hours before the victims are to be transported to the grave. He chooses the spot, a Russian shooting range, as if it were simply a matter of common sense. The labor itself is conscripted at the last minute.
Around eight o’clock in the morning, about a hundred German policemen, a squadron of fifteen Latvians under the direction of a Lithuanian Oberleutnant,13 and ten to twelve SD14 men arrive. This is the beginning of the massacre.
Surprisingly, according to Friedrich’s testimony, although he didn’t have to go back to the grave he had had dug, he ended up admitting, with some hesitation, that he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to return after the shootings, “to shovel.”
“I wasn’t sent to the execution site. But around twelve, I was given the order to go and fill in the grave. No, I’m contradicting myself. I wasn’t given any order. I went of my own volition. After having dug the grave, it felt like the next step. At the edge of the grave I saw a mound of clothes, from which I deduced the Jews had been forced to undress. There was also lime the commandos had brought. The grave was two thirds full. Three thousand Jews, I believe, were killed.”
Thus, the common grave was his personal project.
Friedrich’s deposition, though a rare find, still doesn’t completely deliver what I am after. In the town of Voronovo, Friedrich is ultimately still just a supervisor.
The architect, the one who calculated the measurements, the one who telephoned at ten at night, the one who gave the dimensions of a hole that could swallow up three thousand people, didn’t come in person, it seems. He simply telephoned from Lida.
Does this mean the size of the grave was calculated, then ordered from a distance, from an office? But how does the architect know from a distance the number of Jews to be killed?
The German that Stepan and Oleg saw arriving at dawn to sketch the perimeter of the grave was most likely another intermediary, one who chose the site of the crime. But, if that was the case, who was the architect?
Chapter 2
THE REQUISITIONS
New York City, July 4, 2012, Independence Day
The streets are swarming with tourists, rushing, despite the city’s crushing heat, to hit the holiday sales. The New Yorkers themselves are apparently seeking cooler weather out of town. An absence of cars in the streets gives Manhattan a certain weightlessness. The metal shutters of many stores remain rolled down and locked. Nonchalant pedestrians drift across the avenues with little caution.
How, in my lectures in the United States, in modern American culture, will I be able to communicate the reality of the Soviet requisition and the truth of who was requisitioned in the occupied territories? Today, many of the young Americans I meet barely know what a kolkhoz or a sovkhoz1 was. So how to explain?
I decided to reread and watch again interviews of two villagers who were requisitioned: two men who could not have been more different. The first was Ivan, a living memory riveted to a body. During the war, he performed the gravest acts. The second was Gregory, whose family saved several Jews and received recognition from the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.
When I give a presentation in a university or community here in the United States, the same question arises quickly and frequently: “Weren’t the ‘requisitioned’ collaborators?” It’s not so simple to explain that requisition was part of daily life in Soviet villages and that people were not given a say in the matter.
Ivan. I revisit an interview conducted by Alexy Kosarevskyi, a Ukrainian member of the Yahad team, in Volhynia, on May 1, 2012. Alexy warned me: This witness is totally unique, he speaks without taboos, and he acted during the war with virtually no scruples. Moreover, he was requisitioned many times on the days of shootings. I decided to follow Ivan in his account in full consciousness of his lack of moral restraint.
Ivan has a distinctive appearance. His thick white mustache gives him the air of an artist, and he wears big Soviet glasses that are round and very thick.
Even though the interview was conducted in his own house, he never took off his large hat, which he kept pulled down quite far over his head.
The interview took a long time. The video was interminable, the transcript twenty-eight pages long. It took place in the small town of Ozeriany, not far from the city of Kovel in northwest Ukraine. I listen. I watch. I talk to Alexy. It’s nauseating.
It’s nauseating because Ivan, a Ukrainian born in 1927, had a hand in everything—from the construction of the ghettos where the Jews of his village were confined to the decontamination of their common grave in the aftermath of the murder.
It’s nauseating because, according to Ivan’s account, there was no possibility of escape. He presents the story of the shootings and of his own participation in them in minute detail. He captures them the way the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey captured the movements of a galloping horse. Ivan was subject to many requisitions throughout the process of the extermination of the Jews in his town. He gives the precise names of the materials used, describing the acts performed with a simplicity and a roughness so basic and without veneer that he projects you into the materiality of events sixty years in the past. This is all the more surprising in that, at the time, Ivan was just fourteen.
“Requisitioned.” This term beats like a metronome throughout Ivan’s long deposition. Who is Ivan? He is among the many requisitioned people whom we have questioned in Russia, Belarus, Moldavia, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. But what are we talking about when we use the word “requisition”? What does it mean to be requisitioned on the day of the shooting of one’s Jewish neighbors? What does it mean coming from the mouth of a young Soviet peasant who lived under the German Fascist occupation?
Requisitioning is very often one of the hidden faces of the military occupation of a country. In France, we well know that houses, apartments, and town halls were requisitioned to house German military and police. But property was not the only thing requisitioned. People were, too. Bus drivers were requisitioned to transport Jews on the days they were rounded up and also to drive them to an internment camp in the south of France or toward the Drancy transit camp.
Requisition wasn’t solely the prerogative of the Germans; the Communist underground in Bresse commandeered our barns. Food, especially flour, was frequently requisitioned by the Resistance. We were of course on the side of the Resistance, but perhaps not to the extent of giving them all our flour! A person whose home or goods have been requisitioned sees himself as dispossessed of the right to make everyday decisions. His life is a series of struggles and attempts to diminish the diverse pressures exerted by the occupation as well as by the Resistance.
Requisitioning could also arise when the local administration placed refugees
fleeing the bombardment near the front lines in one’s home. This happened to my family. We housed Alsatians. I remember them coming off the train, when it was still functioning in those days, at the tiny station of Villegaudin at a spot called “Les Quatre Chemins,” the four roads. My whole family recalls that among them were nuns wearing cornettes.
Requisitioning during an occupation often affects the daily lives of common people. It is a forced cohabitation, a breach of the sanctity of one’s home.
Having grown up with my own often-told family stories about requisitioning, I wasn’t very surprised, upon visiting Ukrainian farms for the first time, to hear our translator Svetlana tell me in French what the peasants were recounting. They had experienced multiple requisitions, not only from German units but also from the local administrations. However, the Soviet requisitions were different from the ones I knew about. In France, we are used to a unified, centralized administrative system. Every commune has its mayor, its municipal government, its rural guards. Each French department has its prefect, its police, its police stations. From one village to the next, the structures and nomenclature are virtually the same.
As French people, we tend to project similar structures onto other countries and take centralization for granted, especially in authoritarian regimes. But in the immense rural territory of the former Soviet Union, there was no single system.
When the peasants first told me about a staroste2 installed by the Germans during the occupation of Rawa Ruska, I immediately imagined that this person must be the equivalent of a mayor. Other farmers recalled not a staroste but a soltous,3 also put in power by the Germans.
In Broad Daylight Page 3