In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

  While he may have been conscripted by force to build the ghetto, he himself was responsible for trading a piece of bread for a watch. And no one forced him to raid Jewish homes with his friends, while the Jews themselves were being marched to their death in a common grave.

  The appetite for gain is rarely so explicit in the testimony of a witness to genocide. We will never know the principal motivation for these criminal acts: the desire to steal the possessions of the dead? The profound anti-Semitism that poisoned the air? Dire poverty? Authorization by the “forces of order”?

  Andreï described the shootings with the same coldness and the same striking indifference that he showed his Jewish neighbors as they were killed before his eyes. However, when it came to the German shooter, whom he did not know, Andreï watched him closely and retained a very detailed memory of him. He recalls the way his uniform stayed clean, the strain and fatigue on his fingers as he was firing, his need to eat and take a break. For Andreï, the Jews stopped existing, were already dead. The hero, the one who was fascinatingly alive, was the killer.

  It should be noted that in this village a single German, in one long afternoon, killed more than seven hundred Jews!

  “The German shot them in the head. Sometimes in the forehead, sometimes in the neck. He didn’t aim too carefully…. He shot from very close, about a meter away from the Jews; just far enough to avoid the blood splatter…. He had cases full of bullets in the truck…. When the shooting was over, the truck drove to the edge of the ditch to collect the clothes.”

  “Did someone load his gun for him?”

  “No, he had the full magazines in his pockets. Each magazine held seventy-one bullets. The German loaded them as he went…. First the Jews stood on one side, and then when there was no more room, the German switched sides. This way, the bodies fell from both sides, headfirst. There were also babies in their mothers’ arms. The German shot the baby and the mother. We were right next to him. We saw everything.”

  Andreï couldn’t recall any one Jew in particular, not one face, not one name. For him on this day the Jews were not neighbors. They weren’t even human. They were simply “Jews.”

  However, he hadn’t forgotten that the shooter, tired out from working all alone and hungry, asked for some buttermilk. The shooter murdered the Jews because they were Jews and then paid the local farmer for his milk because the non-Jew remained human. Andreï’s intact memory of the killer brings fully to light the fracture in humanity that is genocide.

  “He stopped to drink some buttermilk, and he paid the man who gave him the milk. There were women and men from the village by the ditch. He said he wanted buttermilk. About fifteen meters away lived some people who brought him the milk. He was thirsty because he’d been shooting so long without a break. He drank a whole bottle in one gulp, then he took two deutsche marks from his pocket to pay the villager.”

  “While the people were gone getting him the milk, did he continue shooting?”

  “No, he waited. He was exhausted. He had already killed half the Jews in the column. It was very hot and he was thirsty. He drank the milk, and then the shooting started up again.”

  I lower my eyes. My parents, in Chalon-sur-Saône, sold fresh milk and also buttermilk. I myself sold a lot of it. I know from the inside what Ivan describes. I know that to drink buttermilk in high summer quenches thirst. With all my strength, I want to resist the horrors described by Andreï, especially since they are woven with simple, shared, human acts, acts that have been my own.

  Andreï has not one word for the hundreds of Jews awaiting their death while others lie in the ditch. The shooter drinks buttermilk.

  What is tragically clear is that Andreï only feels empathy, understanding, admiration, and human fraternity with the German killer, the murderer.

  It is a true challenge for us to meet someone like Andreï. We want to understand what happened and to be able to picture the scene of the crime. But at what cost? It is very tempting to show signs of outrage, to exclaim, “You are a racist and an anti-Semite!”

  Without a doubt, this was true. And perhaps it should have been said. But we chose not to show our emotions in order to know more. So that tomorrow young people from all nations, hearing these accounts, would understand how the human genocide machine was built from town to town, from village to village, partially from the consciousness of certain neighbors.

  Andreï recalled that the shooter didn’t wear gloves. He worried about the shooter’s hands just as the Germans seemed to worry about the hands of the peasants who were laying barbed wire.

  “No, it’s just not practical to shoot with gloves. He didn’t have a smock or an apron either. He was wearing a uniform … with a chevron in the form of a skull on his left arm. It was so hot that people were mostly wearing light, short-sleeved shirts. They started around noon and the shooting lasted until evening. There were one hundred and eighty people. The German had pressed down so many times on the trigger that his fingers hurt…. The only break he took was to drink that milk. In the evening, he climbed into the truck and went back to Kovel…. I couldn’t help but notice he had a really good car. All you had to do to start it was to push a button. To start our cars, we had to turn a crank. By five in the afternoon, it was over.”

  Listening to Andreï, one might be forgiven for forgetting the fact that the German’s work consisted of systematically killing hundreds of people.

  He did however relate one instance of revolt by the last of the Jews; a refusal to obey that was punished with horrific violence. Here again, he speaks without restraint.

  “He had chosen five Jews to fill in the ditch with dirt, but they refused. So the German caught one of the Jews with a spade and tore open his stomach. His guts spilled out and the other Jews tried to stuff them back inside…. Then he shot them.”

  “So who filled in the ditch?”

  Suddenly, Andreï was ill at ease. After this litany of horrors recounted in the coldest of terms, he was forced to admit that he himself was one of the ditch fillers.

  “They requisitioned the people from the neighboring villages to fill in the ditch. It was a bloodbath; the smell was unbearable…. I also filled in the ditch…. I would throw in some dirt and the blood would soak through it. The odor was nauseating; I fell to the ground. So the German came to give me a cigarette. But the tobacco was so strong that I fell again, so the German sent me away. I took my shovel and left.”

  The German took pity on Andreï and freed him from his work. Andreï recalled the killer as capable of compassion for a young man who couldn’t stand so much blood. Andreï seemed to have memorized everything about this man, his words, his gestures, the way he ate and dressed. Even the way he started his car. The German remained indelibly in Andreï’s memory as the only real person at the scene of the crime.

  A man requisitioned for a task remains a responsible human being; he can sometimes choose between better or worse, even while forced to perform certain acts. Some, like Andreï, extorted goods from starving Jews, combed through their empty houses, denounced those in hiding. Still, many Germans, on trial after the war, never stopped repeating, “We were just obeying orders.”

  The conscripted population was at the bottom of the genocidal ladder and probably the most constrained. However, Andreï’s testimony is that of a man responsible for many of his actions. The claim of total constraint appears to me to be camouflage. The fact that he was obeying orders does not erase his complicity.

  To illustrate my point, I would turn to the story of another requisitioned man, a certain Gregory. Gregory was interviewed by Andrej in August 2012. He lived in Transnistria, a region that was occupied by the Romanians. Today, Transnistria is Ukrainian and is one of the most rural parts in the whole country; its roads are often difficult to navigate.

  Months after the interview, Andrej was still moved by the thought of Gregory. Gregory had been requisitioned to transport Jews who arrived by train from Odessa at the station in Berezovka, a small town
in the north country. The interview took place during a heat wave. The night before, on August 2, Andrej had interviewed a Jewish survivor whose mother had thrust her into the arms of a Ukrainian woman when she emerged from the same train at Berezovka. An exhausted mother had saved her daughter, who was raised by a Ukrainian family as one of their own. An investigation like ours is made up of historical research, of course, but also of encounters that touch the depths of the soul.

  In January 1942, Gregory had to go to the station in Berezovka in order to transport the Jews by sled. His story is very different from Andreï’s. First of all, he recalled the bitter cold and the poor state of the people disembarking from the freight car at the station:

  “The winter was brutal. It was minus thirty-five degrees [minus thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit]. A polizei came to our house and told me to … go to the Berezovka station. When I asked what I was supposed do there, the polizei answered that I would receive my orders on arrival. In total, they requisitioned twelve people from my village; there were twelve sleds between us. It was snowing hard…. We arrived at the station at around ten in the morning. We asked the police there what we were supposed to do. They answered that we should wait…. We were at the station and we were waiting for the train to arrive…. We saw exhausted people sitting in freight cars that were normally used for transporting coal. They looked worn out and frozen. There were women, children, and old people…. They were dirty from the coal dust in the wagons, and the police told them they would be taken to the baths. They brought them to the hose that they used to fill the locomotive and they turned the water on. It was minus thirty-five degrees. Some people froze on the spot.”

  For Gregory, the people getting off that train are not “Jews,” but women, children, and elderly people who were being mistreated before his eyes. As he attempted to describe the people he had to drive through the cold, his eyes sparkled with emotion.

  “Then they told us to load as many people as we could fit onto our sleds. On my sled, there were twelve people: two men, one boy, and nine women. The people we carried were the weakest. The others had to walk to the village. On the way, I saw people frozen to death on the other sleds. Because they’d been forced to rinse off in cold water at the station, in negative thirty-five-degree temperatures, a lot of them died from the cold along the way. It was horrible. I saw frozen corpses falling from the sleds on the way there.”

  Gregory’s kolkhoz was called Kondrachov. The women in the village had also been requisitioned. They were given the job of building an enclosure. “During this time, the polizei requisitioned the women to cut down trees in the forest in order to make posts. Then they had to surround the stables with the posts. The stables were empty because the Germans had already stolen all of our livestock.”

  Gregory’s family decided to take the twelve people on his sled back to his farm.

  “These people were exhausted. It was so cold that I took pity on them. So I decided we would lodge the twelve people who were on my sled. I brought them home with their suitcases. I asked my mother to welcome them and to light the stove to warm them up. They stayed in our home to sleep. My mother cooked them potatoes and mamalyga.6All night long, the villagers worked outside. First, they surrounded the stables, then the entire village, in barbed wire; they created a ghetto. This way, the Jews could move around within the confines of the village, but they couldn’t get out.”

  Listening to his testimony, I thought: a requisitioned man who took the initiative to shelter Jews in his home. Between the stories of Andreï and Gregory, there was an abyss—the abyss of human responsibility.

  The village was suddenly transformed into a provisional prison for all the Jews living there. Gregory and his family shared their home with those they saved for three months. “There were twelve Jews and we didn’t have any beds available. So we brought in hay, and they slept on the hay on the floor. Early one morning, the polizei came. They asked the Jews with a certain irony if they were comfortable. The Jews thanked us for our warm welcome.”

  Like Andreï, Gregory was called up several times by the polizei. They came to get him for a second time to transport Jews from Berezovka. “A while later, another train full of Jews arrived, but I refused to go.” This surprised me. During our investigations, we have encountered very few villagers who resisted being requisitioned.

  “Did other men go in your place?”

  “Yes, they took my horses, which belonged to the commune anyway, and they requisitioned other men to go get the Jews at the station. Eventually, the whole district was populated by Jews…. Over two or three days they brought almost two thousand Jews here…. They came in January and stayed until March.”

  Gregory witnessed several shootings carried out by the Volksdeutsche,7 who were Soviet citizens of German ancestry. The Jews in his kolkhoz in Transnistria were shot by the Volksdeutsche of a neighboring town. “During all this time, on Sundays, the men from the village of Kartakaï,8 a German colony, went around to the villages; they were the Volksdeutsche. They came to the villages where the Jews were being held, and every Sunday, they shot a group of Jews in one of the villages. Every Sunday, they shot around two or three hundred people.”

  I couldn’t help but think, as I listened to this testimony, about the Sunday hunting parties. The role of German citizens in the Shoah remains very poorly known.

  “On March 29, 1942, the Romanians came here and surrounded our village…. Then the Volksdeutsche came in wagons. They told the locals that the Jews were to be taken somewhere else. They had rifles, guns, and a machine gun. Right away, the Jews knew this wasn’t about a simple move. They knew they were going to be shot. Not far, there was a clay quarry that was about eight meters [twenty-five feet] deep.”

  Gregory’s family had to say goodbye to their lodgers. “When they came to get them, we said goodbye to the Jews. They had been with us for two months, and we had become friends.”

  Gregory’s mother sent him to see up close what became of their protégés, hoping they might somehow escape.

  “We were worried. So my mother told me to go and see if ‘our’ Jews had been able to escape. We knew that it was practically impossible to escape because the column of Jews was surrounded, but some brave men had gotten away nonetheless. The column of people stopped on a wasteland in front of the quarry. There they had to take off their clothes. Some stayed in their underwear, others were entirely naked. Then they were taken by groups of ten or fifteen toward the quarry.”

  Andrej pressed on in the interview, sensing that Gregory must have gotten very close to the quarry.

  “Did you get closer to see what was happening?”

  “No, I stayed a hundred meters from the quarry. I was scared to get too close.”

  “But you could see that the Jews were getting undressed?”

  “Yes. The young children were simply thrown into the quarry. They took them by the feet and threw them to the bottom. Among the Jews, I saw those who had been living in our village. I was pretty far away, and the Jews were undressed so that I couldn’t recognize them by their clothes. So I got closer and hid behind a stone wall not far from the quarry.”

  Gregory ended up admitting his attraction, his desire to see the crime up close.

  “There were others watching, but I was the only one who got close. The others stayed back. At the time, I was brave and reckless, so I got up close. I saw the Germans drinking eau-de-vie. They took drinking breaks between shooting. They had planned everything; they had brought a jug full of eau-de-vie on their carts. They would go up to the cart and take turns drinking their alcohol from a tumbler.”

  Gregory watched the victims as they got undressed, but also the killers; they were neighbors, seeking comfort in alcohol. The killers were not professional criminals, they were neighboring German peasants. These civilians, amateurs, often murdered the Jews with boundless brutality.

  Suddenly, almost inadvertently, Gregory began to tell the story of the rescue of two Jewish women. Most peopl
e who have saved Jews barely mention it in their interviews.

  “Toward evening, the Germans were drunk. Suddenly, I saw two women walking in the direction of the quarry. They were Jewish. When I saw them, I said, ‘Run away while the Germans are drunk!’ They came toward me and I told them to lie down on the ground. I covered them with leaves and I went to get some clothes because it was still cold in the month of March…. I gave them the clothes I found.”

  “What were these women called?”

  “Their names were Lucia and Tania…. They were fairly young. They were three or four years older than I was…. They were in a state of shock, terrified. They weren’t hurt. God spared them. I asked myself where I should take these women. I told them I would go ask Lidia Kondrachova, the mother of my friend who had been lodging them up till now, if she would take them back. It was dangerous. We had been warned that those who hid Jews would be shot along with them. I went to Mrs. Kondrachova, and I told her everything. She really didn’t know what to do. Then she asked the advice of her daughter, who told her she should take in the Jews. So I brought these two young women to the Kondrachov family.”

  Gregory was a boy of fourteen who was probably considered a simple young man capable of odd jobs. Yet, he decided to step forward and save two Jewish women, despite the risk.

  Andreï and Gregory, two young Ukrainian men who underwent the same requisitions. Two cogs in the genocidal machine.

  And yet, two radically different people.

  Can we affirm that belonging to a criminal machine neither negates a person nor absolves him of responsibility? I have come to believe that a requisitioned person can chose to be a killer or a savior. Andreï denounced a Jew in hiding to a polizei, knowing full well that the Jew would be shot. Gregory saved two young Jewish women just feet from the grave that was waiting for them.

  It can be hard sometimes to perceive the least “important” people, the neighbors, the helping hands, as actually responsible. But they are responsible. For the worst as well as for the best.