Pavel was giving us a lesson in the workings of mass graves. In his explanation, the stairs were there to allow the Jews to get down more quickly.
I can still feel my profound unease on that second day of a new year as I got back into our van with our silent crew. Anna’s testimony was calm and moving. Pavel’s was cantankerous. His scenes were like layers of a hard lava flow from an ancient volcano, technical, bitter, and cold.
These two elderly people in this freezing farmhouse were from two very different families. Anna’s family had housed a Jewish boy and tried to help his mother, even while Ivan, the eldest son, was digging their common grave. Neither Anna nor her mother had wanted to see the Jews murdered. Pavel came from a vastly different place. He dug and stayed to watch the crime. Then he waited with his horse-drawn cart, which was requisitioned to carry the clothes of the murdered Jews.
Were Anna and Ivan from a family of diggers? Saviors? Paid hosts? Forced witnesses? And Pavel? Was he a digger, a witness, a transporter of clothing?
I continue to believe that to be requisitioned to dig a grave for your Jewish neighbors marks your identity and your memory indelibly. Some families remember with tears the names of those killed. Others recite the measurements of the ditches, describing their architecture and their workings. Yet the names of their Jewish neighbors have left no trace in their memories.
I will end this chapter here. The streets of Chicago have been nearly flooded by the storm. I have to go meet my team at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
Chapter 4
THE NIGHT
It is late, but sleep won’t come. Our investigation has been moving forward, and I can’t stop going over the testimonies we’ve been gathering for what is now ten years. We have interviewed more than 3,900 people in seven Eastern European countries. Little by little, we are able to take apart and analyze the different stages of the crimes from the dawn arrivals of the German convoys through their evening departures. We have been cross-referencing Soviet and German archives with the testimonies. And now, even as the work progresses, I suddenly feel that something isn’t right. It’s like a small clanging sound in a running motor.
You hear it little by little, as you recall witness after witness, men and women. The villagers who saw the execution of the Jews seem to talk about everything, or almost. A silence, or perhaps several silences, can be heard.
Silences, by definition, say nothing. But this one was different. It was like a gap in the chronology of the murders.
Suddenly, I was struck by the memory of the testimony of a Jewish survivor from the ghetto of Zoludek.1 Her name was Irena. Irena not only survived the arrests and raids in the Zoludek ghetto but managed to keep an intimate journal about her experience. Her statements stayed with me for two reasons: the precision of her memories and the depth and intensity of her response to the daily extermination of the Jews taking place before her eyes.
She testified at a hearing after the war. In the middle of her long deposition, during which she translated her Polish journal into German, a bell went off in my head. This was the moment all the witnesses we interviewed seemed to have forgotten. Irena explained that the crime began not at dawn, but the night before.
“Last night, they surrounded the ghetto and didn’t let anyone out of their houses. The shutters had to remain closed for twenty-four hours. That evening, they gathered sixty horse-drawn carts belonging to the villagers, as well as people and shovels. They bivouacked all night beside a fire in the park, next to the police station.”
It took me some time to understand the implications of what she had written. Irena understood that if the neighbors were requisitioned outside the ghetto, with tools, it meant that the next day they were going to murder the Jews; this confirmed the Serniki testimony. When the Jews saw their neighbors with shovels and wagons, they knew the shooters were coming to the village. The requisition of the villagers was often understood by the Jews as a sign of their impending death. The conscription of the diggers was like a black crow presaging their utter misfortune.
Yet no one had ever told me about a nighttime requisition. Sixty villagers are called and forced to wait all night outdoors. An unknown and invisible requisition, either forgotten or condemned to silence in the words of the witnesses. The aim of this requisition cannot be in doubt. The men have shovels. They are here in order to be ready first thing to carry off the Jews, the old, the sick, but also the healthy. They are here to bury them.
They were called up at night so as not to waste any time at dawn. The Germans, the staroste, must have figured that it wasn’t certain the cart drivers would be awake and ready on time. They preferred to make them come the night before in order to have them “at hand.”
We’re not talking about a small group of people gathered in secret. Sixty villagers! That’s a lot of horse-drawn carts. I know from experience what a horseshoe sounds like on a road, paved or dirt, and I know the squeaking noise of wheels. Sixty carts driven to the center of the village at the end of the day could in no way pass unnoticed. And it is impossible that the families or neighbors of the cart owners would not have asked, looking out their windows, “Where are you going with your wagon at such an hour?”
Village life is like clockwork. The herds of cows leave at the break of day and return to their stables in the evening. Always at the same time. When people see the cows coming home with their cowherd, they know they should stop work soon because night is going to fall. Their comings and goings are like walking timepieces. The carts that carry the fertilizer out to the fields and return laden with hay or potatoes are also regimented by the hour, day, and season. How many desiatniks did they have to send to the town hall to get all those drivers to come? To convince them not to go home but to spend the whole night outside with their horses?
And yet nobody, absolutely nobody, after so many long years of interviews, told us or even hinted that anyone—himself, his father, or his neighbor—was forced to come with his horse and cart to spend the night just outside the ghetto walls. A forgotten requisition. Occulted. Silenced. But for what reason?
Why such a veil over something that ultimately, compared to the rest, could seem insignificant? Banal acts that have been collectively silenced in the narrative of a crime can, once discovered, elucidate a whole part of the commission of that crime that everyone is trying to hide. Often these acts prove serious.
April 8, 2009, Belarus
The green Volkswagen van drives off from the hotel into the main thoroughfares of the town of Brest.2 It is seven in the morning. The sun’s rays, still cold, slowly illuminate the Soviet buildings. The parks are covered in frost. It is already our tenth day investigating in this region. Despite refrains of Vera Brejneva blaring from the little radio that belongs to our driver Andreï, the team dozes. But I prefer to keep an eye on the road. I’m too aware of potential surprises, like wandering cows.
After leaving the town and its endless gray concrete periphery, we head for Bronnaya Gora. It is eighty miles from Brest, a solid two hours.
On the seat of the van is a file. I page through the archives that have been translated for this trip until I get to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s interrogation of a Polish police officer from Bereza Kartuska,3 Josef Chidlovski. Chidlovski recounts the process of shooting the Jews of Bereza Kartuska in May of 19424:
“When Pitschmann5 arrived in the morning, he gave the order to gather the police in addition to the members of the Gestapo who came with him, about five hundred people. When we, the police, were assembled, they gave us the order to stand guard near the houses where the Jews lived. The cordon was organized in the following manner: one policeman and then one German from the Gestapo. They positioned us three and a half meters [eleven feet] apart behind the Jewish houses. They gave the order not to let anyone in or out of the houses. I should correct myself and say we actually encircled the Jewish houses that evening. I was in the police cordon. We stood guard near the Jewish houses until the morning; at s
unrise we saw the trucks arrive and the Germans started to force the Jews out of their houses and make them climb into the trucks.”
Josef, in his capacity as a local policeman, is one of those called upon to surround the Jewish domiciles until their killers arrive. For the whole night prior to the execution, the ghetto is methodically sealed off and guarded by armed men. But why? The shooting won’t take place until the next day. Why do the guards surround the ghetto the evening before and not at dawn, as they normally would for a police arrest? What is it that happens during this night?
The van accelerates. We are alone on a long straight road crossing through a dark forest. I ask myself … The surrounding of the ghetto on the eve of the crime at Bereza Kartuska seems to happen quickly and silently. Was this the case elsewhere? I cannot recall any witness, not a single Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian farmer, mentioning this lockdown. Yet, in Bereza Kartuska, it wasn’t a team of just a few police officers scattered around the ghetto but five hundred uniformed people encircling an entire neighborhood. This couldn’t have gone unnoticed.
In the spring of 1942, in this small town, 3,000 Jews were crowded into the ghetto houses. To go out into the street was to risk being humiliated or beaten by guards. The extermination of the Jews had started; the peasants were asleep and saw nothing of the maneuver.
Through foggy windows, I look out at the landscape. Villages, enshrouded in thick morning fog, pass before my eyes in a slow country rhythm. No, I thought, it wouldn’t be surprising that the local Belarusians would have seen nothing of the nocturnal lockdown of the ghetto. I take up my archival reading again. There is another town, Novogrudok, southwest of Minsk; there was a ghetto there, too. Here is the testimony of a Jewish survivor Mordechai Meirowicz, recorded in Tel Aviv in 1960.6
“On the night between August 7 and 8, the ghetto of Novogrudok was hermetically sealed by German units along with local police. In the morning, all the inhabitants of the ghetto were gathered in the square in front of the Judenrat.7 They had received the order to bring one piece of hand luggage and been told they were being taken away to work. The trucks advanced and the people were loaded onto them…. Then the victims were taken to Litovka, undressed, and shot and buried in mass graves.”
Here again, the surrounding of the ghetto took place at night. But why?
I see a rusty blue sign for Pinsk. I am reminded again of the report8 from November 1942 written by Helmut Saur, the chief of the 10th Company of the 15th Regiment of the German police, which recounts the liquidation of the ghetto in Pinsk.9
“The blockade that was ordered began at 4:30 in the morning. Under the command of the chief of personnel, given in secret, the barrier was finished in little time, making any escape by the Jews impossible. According to orders, the combing of the ghetto should start at 6:00 a.m. But because it was still dark, it was postponed to a half hour later.”
The testimonies converge. The execution of the Jews took place within full view of all. However, the surrounding of the Jews took place at night, with speed and secrecy. Was the secret truly unknown or was it a known secret that was well kept? And for whom?
I see painted wooden houses emerging through the fog. The road is bad, and the van has a hard time avoiding potholes. I’m no longer paying attention to the music crackling on the radio, going in and out as we cross through the high pine forests.
Secrecy. In our interviews, secrecy was rarely mentioned. By contrast, it was evoked frequently by witnesses describing the arrest of their neighbors by the NKVD.10 A black vehicle would arrive in the middle of the night and several members of the NKVD would emerge and quickly and noiselessly arrest the designated person and force him into the car, so that his fate was lost in the dark of night. All this happened in silence, in secret. No one knew what became of the person they had arrested, not even the family.
When I first came to work the ground in Rawa Ruska, I discovered, with the aid of the mayor at the time, that there were living witnesses from the camp where my grandfather was interned. There were also living witnesses to the shooting of the Jews. I asked myself, what if this were the case elsewhere? I quickly realized that, in most of the Ukrainian villages I was passing through in my rusted Volga, there were elderly people who had been present at the executions. Before Rawa Ruska, I was under the illusion that the Shoah had taken place in secret. But no, our research showed us that the genocide of the Eastern Jews happened not in secret but in broad daylight, in the presence of local witnesses.
The actual arrests of the Jews took place during the day, amid the yelling of the Germans or the police, the barking of dogs, and the cries of distress from the victims. The secrecy of the nocturnal encirclement of the ghetto clashes with the rest of the process of the Nazis’ execution of the Jews. What then was the point of this encirclement the night before?
In the archives, it is clearly stated that the ghetto was sealed off in order to prevent the escape of the Jews, who might try to flee when they saw the Germans or local police arrive. The lockdown constituted not only a threat but also a mortal trap. In the course of one night, the ghetto was sealed off. No one could go in or out. Any attempt to escape was punishable by death. Either Germans or police, armed with rifles or machine guns, were posted around the ghetto. A vise closed in on the Jews as dawn approached.
I turn the pages of the file with reddened fingers; outside the cold is arctic and the van’s heater is struggling. My eyes linger on a particular testimony. Another German, Rudolf F., a member of an SS cavalry unit, describes his role in the liquidation of the ghetto of the Belarusian town of Stolin.11 I glance at the map of the region spread out in front of me; Stolin is a few miles east of Pinsk.
“I know we were woken up during the night. That evening, there was a rumor that an intervention was really imminent. We marched to the market square, where we took our positions at dawn. They announced that the ghetto was going to be evacuated. I was posted as a machine gunner, with Walter B., in the market square. It was our duty to make sure that none of the assembled Jews could escape.”
I lift my eyes to the landscape, still frozen in the frigid morning. Why won’t the local people we interview sixty years later talk about this? What is so weighty, so terrible, that after over half a century none of them will broach it? The secret …
Various hypotheses swirl through my mind. Perhaps it’s simply that we never asked the right question. Can this explain the silence? No, in the light of our many investigations, it seems instead that the silence of the witnesses is due not to an omission but rather to a feeling of guilt.
I look again at our document from the village of Bereza Kartuska. Between 250 and 300 local police were conscripted the night before the execution to surround the ghetto until the Germans’ arrival.
The local police didn’t reside in barracks; they lived on their farms with their families, their wives, and their children. How is it possible not to see so many police, with their guns and armbands, heading for the ghetto one evening? I can recall a little Ukrainian village called Inhulets, in the Dniepropetrovsk region, where one evening the return of a herd of cows shook up the entire community. In this countryside, where the slightest unusual movement was an event, where everyone knew everyone, how could the departure of 250 to 300 men be achieved in secret? At the very least, the families of the police had to be aware. Ghettos were rarely on the outskirts of town. The inhabitants of the houses near the ghetto of Bereza Kartuska couldn’t be unaware of this many people moving through, of the human barrier that was isolating the Jews of their town.
It’s eight in the morning. We’re still driving. The sun appears above the tree line and slowly begins to warm the road in a monotonous yellow light.
I continue to search in the archives for anything that could illuminate the motivation for such a general silence about these nighttime requisitions. Then I recall the report from a police battalion about the extermination of about three hundred people in Sabolotje (or Zablocie),12 in the Belarusian region
of Brest. It took place over September 22 and 23, 1942.
“The company received the order to exterminate the locality of Zablocie, situated in the northeast of Mokrany…. Units 1, 2, and 3 arrived at the western exit of Mokrany at about six in the evening, with their own trucks.”13
Here we are again. This is the same timing as at Zoludek. The killers’ trucks leave the evening before, at six o’clock. In the month of September at six o’clock, the night is approaching but there is still daylight. More vehicles will join them.
“After a short discussion about the situation and the dividing up of the men, we started to march in the direction of Zablocie at around 11:00 p.m.”
And here was the clue I was looking for:
“The ninety-three carts mobilized for the action were left aside to be called upon later, and were guarded by a quarter of the commando unit.”
This was surely because the Germans knew that the farmers would try to return home to sleep. So, before the police battalion even arrived in the village and then headed to the extermination site, ninety-three carts had already been requisitioned. “Mobilized,” as is written in the deposition. This statement aligns perfectly with Irena’s deposition. It even appears that that they weren’t used right away but were stockpiled for later. The carts were put at the disposal of the killers, whatever their needs.
Ninety-three carts, with at least as many horses and drivers! A veritable armada. It suggests at least ninety-three requisitions. In 1942, there was almost no outdoor lighting in these parts. It is understandable that Irena has the impression of seeing a bivouac. The Aktion begins at dawn:
“On September 23, 1942, at two in the morning, we reached the outlying farms of Zablocie. While most of us continued on toward the village, the isolated farms were surrounded by a commando…. The soltous, who was also present, was ordered to be at the edge of the village at five.”
We have met so many requisitioned people who have described fifty different jobs given them for a day or even a few hours. Not one of them remembers a nighttime requisition! Some recall having dug graves, sold clothes, pulled out gold teeth. So why doesn’t anyone want to talk about what happened the night before?
In Broad Daylight Page 7