In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

  Most of the people who were requisitioned told us they had been under the orders of either a staroste or a soltous. However, as I began asking more pointed questions—“Was it really the staroste who came in person to knock on your door on the morning of the requisition?”—some of the villagers answered, no, it was the desiatnik.4

  I consulted the people working with me who spoke fluent Russian and Ukrainian and were familiar with rural Soviet political structures. They told me that a desiatnik was a figure dating back to the seventeenth century who traditionally obeyed the staroste; his name derived from the number ten, desiat. There was a desiatnik for approximately every ten households. The structure came into focus: the Germans put starostes, sometimes called soltous, in power. Beneath them were the desiatniks, sometimes also called the dejourny.

  Our investigations and interviews continued from village to village, from region to region, and from country to country. The deeper we went, the more opaque and less heterogeneous the situation seemed. In a single district comprising several villages to this day, half of the inhabitants well recalled a staroste and one of these infamous desiatniks. The latter was often a neighbor, an older man put in charge of carrying out the requisitioning of milk, eggs, and meat, in the name of the staroste.

  Yet in the next village, when I asked, “In your village, during the war, were there desiatniks?,” the farmer would show with a shake of her head that she had never heard of such a person, before, during, or after the war.

  “So who requisitioned you then?” I asked.

  “The police, the polizei, the Germans, the staroste.”

  After having interviewed more than 3,800 witnesses, we met in Paris, at Yahad headquarters, to reflect. Given witnesses who did not at all remember the same administrative structures from during the war, how were we to understand what actually happened? It became clear that we needed historians to answer the following questions: In 1941, when German units took over in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, what kind of rural governments were in place? How did the Germans structure the administration of the occupied villages?

  The questions were crucial. In each account of an execution or the construction of a ghetto, the witness is only able to refer to local authorities. So we decided to organize a forum in Paris in which to reflect on this issue. We invited several historians, some of whom specialized in the Nazi occupation. We also invited scholars of the history of the Soviet Union, tsarist Russia, and its neighboring countries.

  Our goal was to answer the following questions: Who was in power in the typical Soviet village when the Germans arrived in 1941? Who did the Germans find at the administrative level? Who did they then put in charge? And who was installed in their place once the Soviet Union took back command?

  Who came to get the peasants to dig the ditches? Who gave the recruitment order at the town hall? Who knocked on the peasants’ doors? Was this kind of requisition a German creation or a continuation of a Soviet tradition? Was it a rupture or not?

  I understood that any discussion of the requisition directly raised two questions: that of the public nature of the executions and that of the participation, voluntary or forced, of the peasants. Those requisitioned were the crimes’ first spectators, not only passively, but also through their actions; without the requisition, there would have been no helping hands in the villages on the days of the shootings, no shovels, no wheels, no wagons. The availability of labor and materials allowed the Germans to appear suddenly at dawn with their convoys of military vehicles and guns and to leave again the same evening for their base.

  The requisition of villagers is the hidden face of the Einsatzgruppen, the special German mobile units. The Germans could be so mobile thanks to an immobile local population that was always there to do their dirty work.

  As the Germans took over the Soviet territories, they put in place their own men in the town halls almost systematically. These German municipal authorities were usually called staroste, which in Russian can mean both “elder” and “he who will govern the group.” The staroste became the point person on the lowest rung of the administrative ladder, charged with relaying the orders of the occupying power. His role was tragically crucial on the day of the execution of the Jews, his mission being to find and furnish “the help.”

  It was an old Soviet, Andreï, originally from Rokytne in the Rivne region of Ukraine, who gave me the clearest explanation of the work of the staroste, his staff, and the desiatniks. The interview was conducted by Alexy.

  I can still see Andreï, corpulent in an armchair and proudly wearing a dark green jacket covered in Soviet medals.

  “In this village I’m telling you about, the staroste was named by the Germans. Then the staroste appointed the desiatniks to go to people’s houses to collect a sort of tax. The desiatniks didn’t have any power. They received orders, which they then transmitted to the population: what had to be given, where, when…. As for me, I was asked to provide meat for the front. ‘Organize a requisition of meat. Make sure people bring us their livestock as well as their reserves.’ So, having done what we were told, we were able to go back to the desiatniks, and we said to them: ‘We went to every house asking: what livestock do you have? How many head? How many could you give for the army?’ With our help, the desiatniks were able to collect the livestock, thirty-six head in all…. I remember that everyone knew they were desiatniks. They didn’t have a chief; they were under the command of the starostes. The staroste was in charge of the entire village, whereas the desiatniks worked only in small neighborhoods, usually the ones in which they themselves lived. Each had a specific number of villagers for which they were responsible. The staroste called the desiatniks…. There was also a staff that went to get the desiatniks. This staff was made up of villagers called for service on any particular day. One day, it was the turn of two people, the next day, two different people.”

  Andreï thus broke the local administration down into three categories: the staroste, the rotating staff of villagers, and the desiatniks, who carried out orders on a street or neighborhood level. To these we must add the polizei, an omnipresent auxiliary militia, present even in the smallest villages. Clearly, in the collective memory, the municipal administration is perceived as a potential requisitioning force at any moment: of food, clothes, wagons, and also labor.

  During his interview, Andreï recounted the imprisonment and execution of the Jews through the lens of his own requisitions. It was full of surprises. As he began describing how the ghetto was constructed, he suddenly revealed that he had personally helped to build it. This was not the first time I noticed a witness begin generally, “The men in the village were requisitioned … ,” only to slip unconsciously into the first person, “I.”

  “The ghetto was surrounded by dense barbed wire. There was about twenty centimeters [eight inches] between the wires. The size of the ghetto was fairly large; I’d say, twenty-five to thirty meters [eighty to a hundred feet] long. The barbed wire formed a wall about three meters [ten feet] high.”

  Seventy years after the events in question, his memory of the dimensions of the village ghetto was intact. The length, the width, the position of the gate. The same was generally true for the ditches.

  “Who enclosed the area around the warehouse with barbed wire?”

  “It was the villagers. The men of the village were requisitioned to install the barbed wire.”

  We could have left it there and gone on to discuss ghetto life. But Alexy, who was experienced in these types of interviews, knew that in 1942 there was no enterprise in the village that made wooden barriers or installed barbed wire. All this work had to be done by hand, by the villagers themselves, by men and women requisitioned by the town for collective work. So, Alexy asked the question: “Who requisitioned them?”

  “The Golova5 got them together and told them what they had to do. There were at least a dozen villagers who worked on building that enclosure. They planted posts every five meters and then they put in the ba
rbed wire.”

  Alexy persisted, the way you might continue to push a door that is stuck half-open. “Was anyone in your family requisitioned to install barbed wire?”

  Finally, Andreï admitted that he himself helped to build the ghetto walls of his village. He was quite embarrassed by his answer. “Yes, me, I may have done it. Our Golova was really violent. He said his blood was eighty-five percent German and he beat people to make them obey. He came along with the polizei and he beat me.”

  “Did he show you how to plant the posts and what area to fence off?”

  “Yes, he told us we had to put posts in the ground, and he showed us where they should be using tree branches.”

  To my knowledge, this was the first time a witness not only described how the barricades and the barbed wire were put up around the ghetto but also admitted that he helped build them with his own two hands. His story continued, becoming more and more precise.

  “We cut the trees down in the forest behind the village and we made the poles.”

  “Who gave you the barbed wire?”

  “The Germans came by car and brought enormous rolls of barbed wire. Two men would take a roll of wire on a stick and unroll it. They were enormous, around fifty kilos [one hundred and ten pounds], hard to carry even when there were two of us. I think we used six big rolls. I remember that some villagers stole one to build a fence. They spent three days looking for it, and finally they found it, hidden in the valley.”

  “How did you put up the barbed wire?”

  “We unrolled it and nailed it to each post. We had rubber gloves to protect our hands, and we unrolled the wire a little at a time.”

  “Was it the Germans who provided you with the rubber gloves?”

  “Yes. They brought a big bag of gloves and we could take what we needed. The rest of the equipment, like the hammers and the pliers, we brought.”

  In rereading Andreï’s deposition, I caught my breath. They had built the enclosure for the Jewish ghetto exactly the way my family used to build holding pens for cows on the farm of my childhood. These were actions I myself had seen performed many times.

  I can still see my grandfather Émile, a forester, and his son Jacky, my godfather, going into the forest in search of young trees whose trunks were not yet too thick. We cut them down with axes and removed the bark. The fresh sap smelled good. We sawed the trunks to get them all to the same height. Then, still in the middle of the forest, we lifted them into our cart harnessed to one of our mares. We sank our posts equidistant from one another with a sledgehammer that resonated with the blows, a sledgehammer we had made ourselves, with a tulipwood handle.

  Andreï was fifteen when he was requisitioned along with the other young men of his village; he performed the same tasks I once performed. Only in my case, it was in order to build a pen for cows, horses, or sheep; in his, to enclose his Jewish neighbors.

  How many witnesses, women and men, neglected to describe these barbed-wire fences surrounding the houses in the ghetto? Up till now, I had never understood that the barbed wire of certain ghettos was attached to fresh wooden posts, cut hurriedly by the village youth.

  In 1942, in Soviet villages, the fences around stables were not made with barbed wire. Everything was built by hand, often with finely interlaced twigs forming a sort of trellis between posts. Since Andreï’s village wasn’t very far from the town of Kovel, the Germans had the rolls of barbed wire transported from Kovel by truck. The barbed wire was the only material imported from the city for the purpose of imprisoning the Jews.

  No, that’s not right. The Germans also furnished gloves.

  Rubber gloves … The Germans brought boxes of rubber gloves so the local peasants installing barbed wire in the ghettos wouldn’t cut their hands. To this day, such a detail still sounds wrong in these tiny villages. It’s hard for me to believe the Germans were sensitive to the working conditions of requisitioned villagers. I would be more inclined to believe that their concern was one of efficiency. A wounded villager slows the job down.

  As I listened to Andreï’s words, I thought, How many hammers, pliers, and posts fashioned hastily in the forest did it take to build all those thousands of ghettos in Soviet villages? How many hands put up barriers of death wrapped with how many bales of German barbed wire? How many boxes of rubber gloves were circulated?

  Andreï was the first to describe what happened simply, without narrative detour. I now understand better how hard it was for him to say what he had done. Harder than admitting to digging a ditch. Because when you dig a ditch, you can always tell yourself the hole has some other purpose: to stockpile corn, potatoes, or cabbage. But when you put up barbed wire around the houses of your Jewish neighbors, there is no room for doubt. The wire is going to shut in human beings, neighbors no less.

  He continued to speak at length, unperturbed. Sometimes he pushed the limits of decency. And then suddenly, he wasn’t talking about the requisition anymore. He was unveiling his personal initiative, his own responsibility, in the crime against the Jews.

  He told of how he had gone to barter in the vicinity of the ghetto. One day, while he was loitering just outside the barbed wire, an old Jewish neighbor called out to him, “Give me some bread!”

  To his starving neighbor Andreï replied, “If you give me your watch, I’ll give you bread.”

  “I brought him bread in exchange for his watch.”

  I had often heard of bartering between villagers and Jews shut in the ghetto, but never of such a trade!

  Today, Andreï calmly recounted the transaction, seemingly devoid of all compassion or feeling. He related everything in the same tone, from the imprisoning of the Jews in the ghetto up till their mass murder by shooting. It brought to mind a statement made by Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, as he was awarding me a prize in New York in 2008: “I would ask Patrick Desbois to suspend his moral judgment so that we can collect the greatest possible amount of proof of the shootings of the Jews by the Einsatzgruppen.” Listening to Andreï, I felt the full weight of Abraham Foxman’s words on my shoulders.

  Andreï continued with anecdotes that revealed the utter violence to which he had been both witness and accomplice. He spoke of his neighbors the way we speak of animals: “There was a rich Jewish merchant who owned several businesses. He said, ‘Why are you taking me to the ghetto? Kill me here!’ So, they killed him along with his family: his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law. They took the bodies to the Jewish cemetery where they threw them in a ditch. I saw all this. I was right there. The police let us watch.”

  Andreï is truly the worst sort of eyewitness.

  Alexy conducted the interview calmly, opening one door after another, careful not to reveal his own feelings.

  “So, these Jews were killed right before the others were locked up in the ghetto?”

  “Yes. All their goods were pillaged by the villagers. They had horses, cows, sewing machines. People took everything.”

  The imprisoning of Jews in the ghetto of Rokytne went hand in hand with their neighbors’ looting of their houses. This sort of thing wasn’t rare. To have it told so baldly, now that was unusual.

  “The Jews said to us, ‘The dark days have come,’ but we already knew this. If they were being locked up in the ghetto, it was so they could be exterminated. We guessed what was going to happen…. The police who saw us bartering with them said nothing…. Half the village came to barter.”

  The neighbors in this village of Rokytne weren’t merely spectators; Andreï wasn’t simply a docile, submissive conscript. Everyone felt authorized to commit violence, to steal, and to loot. He was no exception.

  “Did the villagers also take furniture?”

  “Yes, each took what he needed. People came with wagons and loaded them up with furniture. Sometimes, they even took the doors.”

  Pillaging—or, more precisely, the carving up of Jewish households—happened not just publicly but as a collective act by the people of the v
illage. You can’t load a horse-drawn wagon up with furniture in a small town without everyone being aware of it. The phrase resonated in my head: Half the village came to barter.

  “People from the surrounding area came too. Some Jews hid in houses. Once, I went into a house and climbed up into the attic. A Jew was hiding there. When he saw me, he attacked me with a knife, and I escaped. As I was running out in the street, I bumped into a polizei. He asked me why I was running, and I told him that a Jew had tried to kill me. The polizei found him and shot him.”

  In France, we feel the weight of the thousands of denunciation letters that landed in the offices of the French police during the German occupation. These thousands of pages, written and mailed, were thousands of hands personally aiding in genocide from the shadows. Andreï denounced a Jew in broad daylight in the middle of the street. He discovered this man because he was searching Jewish homes one after the other at the very moment that the column of Jews was being marched toward the ditches where they would die. The pillagers were escorting the killers.

  “Did you go into several houses to see what was inside?”

  “Yes, we did the rounds of the village.”

  “So, during the three days that the Jews were shut up in the ghetto, the villagers emptied their houses?”

  “Yes, people took everything…. I didn’t follow the column to the ditches. I saw them leave, and I went into the houses. I thought I might find a watch, a knife, or some other useful object…. I went with a few other boys. And then we joined up with the Jews.”

  Without wasting any time, Andreï looked for whatever he could scrounge from the Jewish houses, then ran to join the column.

  Seventy years after the fact, Andreï’s conscience seemed to feel nothing beyond the collective abandon that was authorized on the day of the shootings. The collective act seems to have abolished any sense of personal guilt.