Chapter 3
THE DIGGERS
June 29, 2012, Chicago
On the eve of a conference, the sky has suddenly darkened. The cars have put their headlights on and are speeding across the little metal bridges that span the river. It’s twelve thirty, and darkness envelops the skyscrapers. A violent storm threatens to break over the city. Unperturbed, air conditioners churn, ignoring the angry sky. The screen of my iPad lights up the laptop on my dark wood desk. The light outside is pale.
The words won’t come. My screen is blank.
Something is bothering me, blocking me. I try desperately to write, holding onto the keyboard the way we used to grab our pens in school. Next to me is a thick file: Soviet archives, translations of Ukrainian testimonies enclosed in a red folder. Written across the front in black ink are the words: THE DIGGERS.
Certain types of manual labor that are perceived as grubby are too often substituted for the names and stories of those who perform them. A “grubby” job designates the person who does it as a tool. My own approach to the diggers suffered from this.
When I first listened to Soviet men and women talking about digging the mass graves of the Jews, I thought, Incredible, this is a digger! It was as if I’d discovered a new species, a human tool. In my mind, the repugnance of the job was so strong as to forever mark the person who did it, no matter how briefly. It gave them a name. It achieved a sort of branding. In murder cases, it is not uncommon for the media to name the perpetrators after their crimes. Last week, the French headlines were full of stories about “the cutter.”
It took me a while to see that the “diggers,” despite their repetitive movements, had personal histories, often involving their Jewish neighbors, and that these histories were part of the larger human story of the genocide of the Jews. Without the digging of a grave, there could be no mass shooting.
It might seem difficult, even indecent, to want to know about the people who dug the graves where the bodies of the Jews and Gypsies were thrown. Nonetheless, I chose to tell their stories in the same fashion as those of the people who had been requisitioned.
Not to tell their stories seemed to me a way of getting rid of them and thus forgetting a basic genocidal act. Failure to include them would be to reduce their act to a mechanical task, as though they were nothing more than human excavators, devoid of responsibility.
Why did it take me so long to dare to write this chapter? Perhaps unconsciously, I thought of “diggers” the way we think of gravediggers. They’re the people we would prefer not to face as we leave the cemetery in tears. We would rather imagine that gravediggers have no place in our family—indeed, that they have no place in history at all.
In French, a gravedigger, a croque-mort—the literal translation is “eater of the dead”—carries associations that are disgusting to our modern sensibilities. We use sanitized terms around death like “mortician” and “undertaker.” They sound cleaner. Gravediggers are barely visible; when a family arrives at the cemetery, the grave is usually prepared; it has been dug.
I am going to try to face the men and women who dug, in all their ambivalence, in order to address the questions they raise. And through them, I will look at the interweaving of genocide into ordinary village life.
Perhaps this chapter is particularly difficult for me for personal reasons, too.
Local Soviet archives rarely lie about the execution of Jews by “Fascists.” I reread a document in which a forest warden recalls, in 1944, having seen French prisoners from Camp 325, digging large graves for more than 15,000 Jews. Camp 325, Rawa Ruska, is the camp where my grandfather Claudius was held.
In this document, a certain Stefan Alexeievitch Pelip is questioned; he witnessed the French prisoners digging.1
“From working as a forest warden and living seven hundred meters [half a mile] from the site of the shooting of the Jews, I know all the details of the shooting of the Jewish population by the Germano-Fascist monsters. In the month of November 1942, within this perimeter, French prisoners dug a huge grave, thirteen meters [forty-three feet] long, eight meters [twenty-six feet] wide, and four meters [twelve feet] deep. On December 5, 1942, early in the morning, seven trucks carrying Jews, men, women, and children of all ages, guarded by the German police, drove up to the ditch. At that moment, I was on a hilltop, about two hundred meters from the ditch and I saw the shooting happen. The German police put the Jews in rows of six, making no distinctions of age or sex, and made them advance to the edge of the ditch where there were six machine-gun shooters.”
In November 1942, my grandfather was already imprisoned in the camp at Rawa Ruska. Was he a “digger”? I cannot bear to think about it. Or rather, I can think of nothing else; it all comes to the same thing. What if I am the grandson of a digger? My thoughts take flight, or rather they crash into one another. You can study for years, visit thousands of villages, and still there is a question you cannot ask yourself, a personal question you encounter, far from home, after years of work. In the corner of a forest. On the page of an archive. Your question: Was my grandfather implicated in the genocide of the Jews while a prisoner in one of the most repressive camps of the Third Reich?
You cannot change your origins, nor can you erase your own links to genocide. Did my grandfather perceive my premonition when I asked my question, with such insistence, as we traveled the roads of my native Bresse? “Did you do anything bad in Rawa Ruska?”
On that day, he, who never got angry, started to yell at me.
How could I have understood? Maybe his will was forced, his moral conscience twisted like metal, by heat and hammer. How to understand his fear of being judged and misunderstood upon his return to France? The situation at Rawa Ruska was so complicated to explain at home in the West. What he lived through—what it was I will never know—both guides and cripples my research.
It’s as if I were desperately seeking to understand what happened to him, and to us.
Who is the human being caught, either voluntarily or in spite of himself, in the mechanism of genocide? Genocide is of course first and foremost the creation of mass murderers. Nonetheless, it is made possible by the participation, voluntary or forced, of thousands of people. Armed men are not sufficient to commit genocide. It requires so many arms, legs, shovels, and wagons—so much labor. It is the deeds, as well as the conscience, of these minor actors in the crime that I seek to understand and hear today. I want to keep asking hard questions in the hope that tomorrow the leaders of genocidal governments can’t find help so easily.
These thoughts, while sitting at my desk in this stifling hotel room in Chicago, take me back to the winter of 2008. To Serniki, in the Rovno region of Ukraine.
It was cold. It was January 2, 2008. My entire team and I were looking for mass graves. It was hard for us to wish one another a happy New Year. The archives we were working from were hardly clear. They estimated the number of Jews shot at 850, in a grave somewhere outside the village. I knew an Australian investigative team had already been to Serniki. In 1990, right before the crumbling of the Soviet bloc, they came as part of the prosecution of a polizei who had taken refuge in their country.
The hotel where we were sleeping in Rivne, the regional capital, was one of those gray Soviet buildings, with ice-covered concrete steps. The impassive face of the receptionist hardly lent the place a festive air.
We’d left early in the morning. After about an hour of travel, we found ourselves standing in snow, next to an icy road leading into Serniki.
Serniki is a small Ukrainian village near the border of Belarus, embedded in a thick, dark forest. While we were passing through the sleepy town, a workhorse appeared. It was brown, heavy-footed, pulling a wagon covered with yellowed corn husks. An old man was sitting on top of the pile of husks, legs hanging, hooded, a thick coat covering him. Svetlana, our translator, stood on the side of the road, immobile in the cold, as though she were hitchhiking. She waited for the cart to approach. The driver pulled on the rei
ns and the horse stopped. Svetlana started a conversation that none of the rest of us could follow.
I never quite understood what she said to the old people in the villages. All I knew was that after a few minutes she would become a part of the Soviet fraternity. She would tap into its empathy, open its communal memory. I saw the driver of the cart point out a house to her. Svetlana came over to me. “In the house over there, there is a woman; her name is Anna. Anna saw everything.”
I reread the page in the archive: more than 850 Jews had been shot not far from Serniki in September 1942. We made our way, trying not to slip on the snowy road taking us to a cold and silent farmhouse.
Anna appeared standing in her yard, dressed all in black. She came toward her painted wooden fence. Svetlana pushed open the gate, which screeched under the weight of the snow. From out of sight, a dog barked loudly. Svetlana exchanged a few words with Anna before turning to us. “She says she agrees.” Agrees to give the interview.
Anna invited us into her home. The door to her kitchen opened, and when I went in, I saw her with her husband, Pavel. He was very thin, as though he had shrunk to protect himself from the cold, and perhaps also from gazes and memories. There was almost no difference between the temperature inside and outside the house.
Very quickly, they assumed the positions in which they probably spent most of their day: sunk as though drowsing in two low chairs on either side of a large, unlit, blue-and-white tile stove.
Anna wanted to talk quickly; her sullen husband rarely let out a word, and when he did it was in spite of himself.
In September 1942, on the day of the execution of the Jews in Serniki, Anna and Pavel were not yet married. They were fourteen years old. Anna had seen the arrest and the columns of Jews. Her older brother, Ivan, had been conscripted to dig the graves.
Anna, with her somewhat cold, impassive face, spoke of herself very simply in the typical manner of older Soviet peasants. “I was born in November 1928. I have always lived here. And I will finish here…. We had two cows. I had no father, only my mother. We were three children, myself, my younger sister, and my older brother, born in 1925. I took the cows out to pasture.”
“I took the cows out to pasture,” she repeated several times. I thought, How many Soviet cowherds have helped us in our search? While following cows to the pastures, they were able see, from afar or up close, the murder of the Jews. Few admitted to having temporarily abandoned their herds, but I know very well that cows fear the sound of gunshots and the smell of blood.
Anna spoke calmly, her face often turned downward. Her grandparents lived in the “Jewish neighborhood,” as she called it. The Jews were not foreign or unknown to her. “We knew Jews because my grandparents lived in the Jewish neighborhood, which was at the center of town. I went there often; all the Jews knew me.” Anna was a child who lived among Jews.
Suddenly, the tone of her voice changed. She recalled a certain boy named Aizik.2 When Aizik’s mother was confined to the ghetto, she sent him to Anna’s mother for safety. Aizik’s mother also left clothes in Anna’s house; perhaps to protect them from German theft, or perhaps to pay for her son’s lodging. Aizik was not there very long. “He spent two weeks at our house. He slept in the same bed as my brother, Ivan.”
This was the same Ivan requisitioned to dig the ditches in which the Jews were to be shot. Sixteen-year-old Ivan, a digger, slept in the same bed with a young Jew, Aizik, who was hidden in his house. I had to concentrate not to let my expression betray anything. A digger and a Jewish child hidden on his farm, in the same bed!
When Aizik’s mother learned that Ivan, the son of the family where she had sent her own child for safety, was digging a ditch, she ran to the farm to question him. “Ivanko,3 they’ve forced you to dig a ditch? A ditch for us? What ditch have you dug?”
Such an awful question. The scene described by Anna was surreal. This wasn’t the first time a witness had told me about Jews leaving the ghetto to ask, “Is the ditch for us?”
Before all this research, I thought that worlds were distinct on the day of a genocide: that there would be a farm where the digger lived and another farm that sheltered Jews. This was the first time I was confronted with the knowledge that a digger and a victim lived under the same roof. Here in Serniki, a young Ukrainian named Ivan left his house in the morning and returned in the evening shouldering a shovel. Along with other peasants, he dug. Then he returned home, sat at the family table, and played with another young Ukrainian from the village lodging with them.
Anna clearly remembered the anguished dialogue between Aizik’s mother and Ivan. “My brother answered, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Then she asked, ‘What does the ditch look like?’” Ivan used hand gestures to show this Jewish mother the shape of the ditch he had dug.
In an instant, Aizik’s mother understood. It wasn’t a silo for corn or an anti-tank trench. The ditch Ivan dug was a grave for the Jews.
Suddenly Anna’s husband Pavel interrupted her. “Eight meters [twenty-six feet] wide, forty meters [one hundred thirty feet] long! I dug it!”
My thoughts froze for an instant. So the taciturn Pavel, sitting here to the right of his stove, was also a digger. What a family, what a farm!
Ignoring her husband’s remarks with a nonchalance that was probably habitual, Anna continued impassively. “So this woman said to my mother, ‘Give me back my clothes. I have to go. Where is my son?’”
Anna’s mother tried to keep the Jewish boy hidden in the house. Was it to hold onto the clothes? To save the child? She certainly knew that her child was digging ditches to swallow up the bodies of her Jewish neighbors.
The boy’s mother insisted, “We have to go!”
So Aizik left the farm and returned to the ghetto. Anna started to speak more slowly, her voice quavering. “So they left. A week went by. Maybe less than a week. One day, I had taken my cows out to pasture. I’ll never forget; it was a Wednesday. You see, I forget everything these days, because I was so young at the time, but that I will always remember. They brought them on a Wednesday. My mother had heated the oven and was getting ready to bake bread. I was out with the cows. Suddenly, I heard a noise. I turned around and I saw them: it was like a black cloud…. Once I saw them, I didn’t wait for them to reach me. I took my cows and I ran to the house. My mother hadn’t seen anything. I told her, ‘Mommy, they are taking the Jews to kill them.’ So, they took them out and soon they started to shoot them. We cooked our dinner in tears.”
Anna finished her story with her head lowered, her eyes wet with tears. I too was moved. This was the first time I heard a witness tell of running home during the firing. Instead of watching her Jewish neighbors be slaughtered, she brought her cows home. Then she cried with her mother while they cooked. During the shooting.
At this point, Pavel indicated that he wanted to speak. He did not appear at all emotional. Since the beginning of the interview, when he did speak it was to try to show that he knew more than his wife. He had been a digger.
The cameraman pivoted in Pavel’s direction. Pavel kept his hands crossed on his knees while the crew installed his microphone.
His face nervous and suddenly animated, Pavel began to explain what happened. First, there was a German officer who came before the diggers began work. He had paced out the dimensions and demarcated the size and placement of the ditch. He had marked the four corners with posts. The ditch was rectangular, with a dirt staircase at each end so the Jews could get into the ditch rapidly from both sides at once. The Jews were supposed to lie down head to toe, making two lines down the ditch and leaving an aisle in between.
The shooters circulated in the aisle, shooting the Jews from left to right. “There were three shooters. They relieved one another…. At the beginning, the shooters were outside the ditch; then they went down into the ditch to shoot. Here is the ditch!”
Pavel began to draw, or rather to trace with his foot on the red carpet, a large rectangle, to show how the Jews lay across th
e length of the ditch in two rows. “The heads faced one way, the feet the other. Then the next group lay facing the opposite direction. The shooters walked here, between the two rows of bodies, shooting in their heads.”
“What uniforms were they wearing?”
“The SS ones with the skull.”
Rereading his testimony years later, on a computer screen in the Chicago heat, I can analyze it. But sitting on a low stool in a farmhouse, in stocking feet so as not to dirty the floor with mud and snow, it was hard to find the necessary distance. When I revisit my conversation with Pavel, I become aware of my compulsion to understand the mechanics of how the crime could have unfolded. I realize I wanted to verify his testimony by grilling him with practical questions. Overwhelmed by the tides of information coming at me through the chill of that awful house, I concentrated on the “functional aspects” of the mass grave. This was the first time a villager had described a ditch with two staircases. Here is our exchange:
“So, there were forty meters between the two staircases?”
“Precisely,” Pavel answered.
“Did the shooter stand on the stairs?”
“No, he walked from one end of the ditch to the other, and he shot the heads,” Pavel said, imitating the action of shooting from one side to the other, between two lines of bodies. Then he added, “They positioned the next group in the same formation, naked, but with their heads on the feet of the bodies underneath them. Then the other shooter passed through. That’s how they did it…. If they had shot from above, the shooter would have missed the ones that were farthest from him. And if they had only had one row of bodies, they would have had to dig down six meters [twenty feet]. This way, they only had to dig three meters [ten feet], and even then we had to do it in shifts…. Depending on the position of the heads, the shooter would go down one side or the other. If the heads were facing the inside of the ditch, he would go along the middle. Otherwise he went along the edge. Do you understand?”
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