Why is it so hard to say that you were forced to come with your cart at six p.m. on the eve of the murder?
The answer—or at least one of the answers—is perhaps found elsewhere. The folder that I had in my hands in that rattling old van held the deposition of a certain Alfred Metzner. He was German, originally from the Baltic states. The Nazi word for such colonized Germans living now in the territories of East Germany was Volksdeutsche. Since they spoke Russian and had good knowledge of the Soviet Union, they were often recruited to the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen to serve as interpreters. The most zealous among them, like Alfred Metzner, became shooters. In 1947, Metzner recounts the liquidation of the ghetto of Slonim, not far from the road we are currently on.14
“At this extermination, about 10,000 Jews were liquidated. The night before the Aktion, the protection and the sealing off of the ghetto had already been ordered. Protection against the partisans had been ordered by the commander of the town. At four in the morning, the ghetto was surrounded by the local police. All the Jews who tried to escape were immediately shot. The Jews had learned ahead of time about the execution and that is why they had tried to dig holes in the ground at various places in order to escape the encirclement. The ones who did escape were turned in by the local population and shot on the spot. The extermination of the Jews took place as follows: when the Jews refused to leave their houses, they were either forced out and then shot or shot inside their houses. During these Aktions, particularly sadistic people threw lit flares at the living Jews; they caused serious injuries. Men with machine guns were stationed outside the ghetto to counter any attempt to escape. The Jews were not led to graves but shot right on the spot. The night before, women had been raped by the police and then shot. The police bragged about the number of women they had abused in this manner and tried to outdo one another. Later, when no one was coming out of the ghetto anymore, the troops were formed up to go inside.”
Not only were the Jews in the ghetto of Slonim guarded all night, on the eve of their death, but they were also preyed upon by their guards. It had never occurred to me that such violence would have been perpetrated on the eve of the executions. It was as though nothing held these men back because the Jews were going to be killed the next day.
I don’t know if this happened anywhere other than in Slonim.
Is this how we explain and interpret the silence of 3,900 Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian witnesses about the night preceding the shooting of the Jews?
The extermination machine is not just for killing. It authorizes all forms of cruelty so long as they don’t interfere with the strict timing on the day of the genocide.
The van stops. Andreï, the driver, turns to me and shows me the sign for the village of Bronnaya Gora. I gesture for him to drive on to the center of town. A new investigation begins.
Chapter 5
THE RAPES
It was July 2008, and Andrej had just returned from a long investigation in Belarus. He called me from Cologne, Germany, where he currently lives. “I had a very long interview with a witness. In Russian. It’s amazing what he told me….” I could tell from his voice that something had happened, something unexpected and shocking.
Some time passed. As usual, the recordings were sent to Paris, where they were digitized and filed. Several months later, witness number 100B was assigned to a translator, Anna, who day after day gave us access in French to the words of a certain Léonid.
Léonid was not a neighbor. Léonid was Jewish. He lived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In this country, where more than seven thousand villages were burned, Hitler’s troops met an unusual degree of resistance.
Because it was too long to be translated in one day, I received Léonid’s testimony in pieces.
One morning, I took the time to reread it in its entirety. As I went through it, I understood why Andrej hadn’t told me more when he first called. At the time, he had explained that Léonid wanted to talk at a hotel, safe from the gaze of his family, behind a thick curtain that surrounded the lobby. He spoke for hours.
It was only behind the curtain that he could return to the Minsk ghetto, where he himself had been imprisoned. Where the common graves had reportedly been.
The interview was not only long, it was also intimate.
First, he told the story of his father’s death. Then his mother’s. It is always something to hear the voice of an old man, who became an orphan long ago, describe the murder of his parents by young men who’d come from Germany.
Here is that testimony.
“June 28, 1941, the Germans came to Minsk. I remember their arrival very clearly. They came in cars and on motorcycles…. My grandmother, who remembered the Germans in Belarus during the First World War, always said of them, ‘The Germans are a cultivated people. They are cultivated, they won’t do us any harm.’ We had no idea what was going on in Poland, where the persecution of the Jews by the Germans was already in full force at the time. We didn’t know that Hitler had made the extermination of the Jews his stated goal. Ten days after the German Fascists arrived, they ordered the creation of the ghetto.
“So we had to leave our apartment, find someone to help us transport our things, find a place to move in. It was horrible! I remember that I myself didn’t cry—I was fourteen—but my mother and grandmother cried quite a bit. We had to leave so many things for which we had worked so hard and which we needed so much. We couldn’t bring the bed or the armoire or the buffet. We had only ten days. It was clearly posted that those who had not moved within ten days would be shot….
“Once, in the spring of the year 1942, I was with my father. There were no longer any sidewalks. People tried to avoid the streets. We mostly went in between houses to avoid walking in the streets. But on this day, I was in the street with my father. All of a sudden, the Kommandant of our ghetto and another German appeared at the corner. My father didn’t have time to take off his hat. I myself didn’t have a hat on. The German came up to my father and asked him: ‘Why didn’t you take your hat off?’ In the meantime, my father had taken off his hat and tried to explain to the man, ‘I didn’t see you coming.’ The German answered him, ‘I’m going to teach you how to see.’ He took out his pistol and shot my father on the spot, merely because he hadn’t taken off his hat. The German laughed. He said to me, ‘Now you’ll know Die Mütze muss man abnehmen!’ One must take off one’s hat!”
Thus, his father was murdered before the child’s eyes simply for having forgotten to take off his hat for a German.
Suddenly, Léonid seemed to stumble into a memory of a day when he had been protected by his family, pushed deep into a bed on the pretext that he was sick in order not to be taken by the Germans.
“Worst of all was that, in the Minsk ghetto, we had no peace, day or night. At night, the Germans and the police came into the houses. I think it was during the day that they decided which houses they would go into. They raped the young women, looked for objects of value, and then killed everyone….
“Right before the second raid, the Germans had massively invaded the ghetto, which made people panic because they knew there was definitely going to be an Aktion. My mother ordered me to get into bed and forbade me to get out. By this time, people already knew that whoever was taken by the Germans would never return home. So, I was in bed and my mother wrapped my head as though I were sick. There was a window with curtains. Of course, I wanted to know what was happening out in the street. On the second floor of our house lived another family. Every house had two families. In this family, there was a young girl. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen. She was very pretty; she wore a very long braid. I can remember it well. Her braid went all the way to her waist and was very thick. She was walking in the street. The Germans captured her. One of them tore off her dress and her underpants, threw her on the ground and started to rape her. Of course, she started screaming. Her mother came out of the house. I saw it. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had never seen a rape before. H
er mother ran out of the house screaming. She was running toward her daughter when one of the Germans who was there shot her.”
I reread these words slowly, in silence. His testimony was clear, implacable. Léonid spoke with his child’s eyes, his adolescent eyes, of what he himself had seen in the Minsk ghetto. Germans went into the ghetto on the days of the Aktion to rape the young Jewish girls and, if the families resisted, they were murdered on the spot. The Germans chose a family, raped, stole, and then killed.
Right away, the question came to me: do we need to talk about this? Do we need to write on this subject? I thought about it a lot. How many people must have stayed quiet, out of respect for their daughter, their mother, and their sister? Do we need to talk about it now?
Ten months later, I was giving a lecture in Rochester, in northern New York State. The weather was nice. The university auditorium was filled with people of a certain age. In the middle of my speech, I started to say that there had been rapes in the ghettos and not only in the ghettos. All of a sudden, someone got up. I don’t know who it was and I never will. He said to me in a firm voice, “That’s impossible. Never would a German, an SS soldier, touch a Jewish girl. It was forbidden.”
His words struck me. Forbidden. It was forbidden.
For the following two weeks, I considered this. Many people must surely think the same thing. Many believe that dictators adhere to the morality of their dictatorship; that genocidal murderers follow the creed of their criminal ideology. How many times, from high on podiums, had the Nazis railed against transgressions with people of impure blood as the surest route to the destruction of Germany!
Léonid was not the only witness to rape. But he had seen it from the point of view of the victim, as a Jew, as a young person.
The words of the Bousk villagers began to reverberate in me. They recalled sexual slaves imprisoned by the Gestapo, selected by the Germans, then shot by a neighboring unit from Sokal; by the end of the year, most of them were pregnant. The guards standing outside the ghettos of Brest, in Belarus, recalled that the Germans went in every night to rape young girls, in full view and in full knowledge of all.
Everyone knows that rape is a form of murder.
The story of the Jewish women in the towns and ghettos of the German occupied Soviet Union remains to be written.
A few weeks ago, Patrice Bensimon, a member of our team, was participating in a seminar in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, organized by the Shoah Foundation. Their theme was violence against women. Several times in the invitation, it was specified that the seminar would be confidential.
Sixty years after the fact, should we say it or keep it quiet?
My sense is that it’s essential to recognize that the Germans who marched in front of their insane leader through Nuremberg Square with robotic expressions on their faces were—once they were far from Berlin and in the Russian towns they believed they were colonizing—nothing more than criminals, murderers freed from any moral obligation. Theft and rape were of a piece with the genocidal crime. Of course, in the Einsatzgruppen1 reports they’ll count the number of Jews murdered. Of course, before the courts they’ll try to minimize their responsibility. They did nothing but obey orders! They surely would never admit that they were also thieves, that they were also rapists.
This brief passage in Alfred Metzner’s testimony, spoken with no particular emphasis, comes back to haunt me: “The night before, the women had been raped by the police and then shot. The police bragged about the number of women they had abused in this manner.”
What if this were one of the reasons for the silence of witnesses concerning the nighttime requisitions? During the night watches, the Jews found themselves at the mercy of the Germans, but also of the local police.
Some questions leave such a bitter taste in the mouth! This hypothesis seems plausible but has to be verified.
The entire village knew that the Jews were to be shot in the morning. It’s not hard to imagine the appetites, the discussions among the families, the desires for pillage and rape, especially since the German commando hadn’t arrived yet.
This is only a hypothesis. Will it ever be possible to know what happened during those terrible nights of guarding the ghettos, during the several hours spent waiting for the Einsatzgruppen vehicles to arrive?
PART TWO
THE MORNING
Chapter 6
BARRIERS
It was the festival of the Greco-Catholic Church in the village of Bouse, in western Ukraine. The popular Palm Sunday. Children came out one after the other with pretty decorated bunches of budding twigs. Their color lent joy to a landscape slowly emerging from the sadness of winter. Once the mass was over, Lydia appeared on the church steps. She was well dressed, with her black hat and mantilla, as one should be to attend church in a rural village. I had no inkling, as she approached the microphone held out by a member of our team, that her testimony, her memory, was going to open up a whole new vista of questions that to this day remain without convincing answers.
Her parents were merchants in Bousk, more precisely “meat merchants in the town center.” As a child, she saw the ghetto; along with her mother, she had several times exchanged food for goods with the Jews imprisoned there. She talked about it at length. She was one of the first people to describe for me the comings and goings of the Soviet farmers around the ghetto fences. The villagers exchanged and bargained with the Jewish families, who often had no choice in the matter. Until then, I had pictured the ghettos hermetically sealed. She explained in detail where the places of exchange and passage could be found, out of sight of the police who guarded the Bousk ghetto.
I saw her again several times. She didn’t give up information easily. Or rather, she reflected a lot before she spoke.
As our conversations progressed, shielded from her neighbors’ gazes in her well-decorated house, she ended up telling me that every day of the German occupation she went to her primary school via a long street called Chevtchenko. Suddenly one morning, all traffic was cut off, including for pedestrians; a guard, a polizei, stationed in the middle of the street, said to her, “No school today.”
There was “no school” because in Chevtchenko, not far from this guard, to the right, in the cemetery, the Jews from the ghetto were being murdered.
So Lydia had a “vacation day.” But she didn’t turn around. She didn’t go home to her parents but instead found a way to see what was going on up close, despite the guard. She wanted to see with her own eyes “the crime” of the ghetto Jews, the same people with whom her mother had traded food just a few days earlier.
This is what sticks in my head: why did the young Lydia from a merchant family decide, despite the guards apparently posted all around the site of the shootings, to play hide and seek with armed policemen? Wasn’t she playing hide and seek with her own death in the event the police decided to open fire? Why wasn’t she really afraid of Ukrainian guards?
For that matter, what did these guards do?
We find them present at every stage of the crime. Many of them were interrogated in the postwar German trials. The terminology they employed was often that of the police: “locking down the ghetto,” “the raid,” “the inner cordon of guards around the ditch (or the grave) and the Jews,” “the outer cordon to block all traffic.” They could be German, Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian, made up of mobile units or local ones.
Their deployment apparently had only one objective: that the Jews have no possibility of escape or revolt, that they walk toward the graves through a storm of blows and threats, and that no neighbor get close enough to disrupt the shootings.
We shouldn’t picture these guards as being like the Parisian police who block traffic when there is a protest in our capital. They are in no way simple keepers of order. If a Jew doesn’t obey a command, the guards have complete discretion over whether the Jew lives or dies. If a Jew tries to escape, they are going to shoot to kill.
In his tes
timony before the East German authorities, Joseph H., a member of a mobile unit of the Stanislau1 Gestapo, clearly describes the division of duties among the guards during the extermination of the Jews in Drogobytch,2 Ukraine:
“After rounding up all the Jewish people of the town, one group of guards was responsible for keeping watch on them in the main square with the fountain, which had been designated as the site of the roundup. Another group was responsible for directing and protecting the transportation of the Jews to the site of the shooting, and a third group for guarding the victims waiting beside the ditch as well as accompanying them to where they would be shot…. Their stated mission was to stop all attempts at flight from the ghetto by the victims, and, with their firearms, to shoot any fugitives.”3
When I read Joseph H.’s deposition, I cannot help but think of Lydia; she was only a few yards from the site of the shootings, despite the fact that she’d been banned by a guard with the authority to shoot … to shoot Jews, that is.
Does this imply that the guards separated the space of the crimes from that of the ordinary villagers? I would be inclined to think so. The perimeter that they set up in Bousk is the line between life and death; inside the perimeter, all the Jewish inhabitants—men, women, children, babies—will be killed. On the village side, outside the fence, the guards simply have to push back overly curious neighbors. They stand there with their arms out, defining for a few hours the circle of genocidal rupture between the citizens of the same town. They constitute a human enclosure around the scene of the crime against the Jews. They are to the shootings of the Jews what the barbed wire is to the concentration camps.
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