In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

Should we think then that young Lydia, the daughter of a merchant, isn’t really afraid of the guard for the sole reason that she knows she is not Jewish? Terrible question. With a terrible answer.

  Lydia is not unique. Many young neighbors to the crime, whom we met sixty years after the fact, had no hesitation about confirming this. All of it, the guards, the Jews, the shooters, was a horrifying spectacle for them, but it remained, after all, and perhaps more than anything, a game, a child’s game, an attractive game.

  Patrice, on his return from the Ukrainian region of Khmelnitsky, told me the following facts.

  In Derajnia, a small town known for its train station, he had met a certain Maria. Like Lydia, she knew the Jews of her town personally; she spoke of them with smiles and emotion: “There were a lot of Jews. We went to school together; we were friends. They were very good people. If a Jew gave his word, it was sacred. Everyone would confirm that for you….

  “Most of them were artisans. They sewed boots, dresses, linens, etc. Some were merchants: they had shops. There were also musicians. I remember at the end of the street, there was a house with a veranda…. There was always an old Jewish man there playing the violin. We would go listen to him.”

  She has no hesitation in naming the polizei of the village and in denouncing their violence. She knew them. “I’m sure they were very aggressive. For example, Dioma4 Podnevitch was ferocious, to the Jews and to the Russians. There was also a certain Kassiane.”

  Like Lydia, before the shootings Maria went willingly to the boundary of the ghetto many times to exchange food with the Jews enclosed behind the barbed wire: “I took milk and I went there. I passed it through a hole because the whole Jewish quarter was surrounded with barbed wire. It was called the ghetto. I came and I set the milk down. The Jewish woman glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then she came to pick it up. Sometimes, they asked if we could bring potatoes or other things.”

  She recalls in particular one of the Jewish friends she visited, Sara. But on the day that all of her Jewish neighbors were exterminated, including the old violinist and her childhood friend Sara, what does she do? She takes all kinds of risks in order to watch the murders, to witness the massacre of the very same families to whom she has been bringing milk:

  “On that day, we children were watching our herds near the ravine. People came running. ‘They’re taking the Jews! They’re taking the Jews!’ they cried. We climbed trees to see what was going to happen. Once we were already up high, a German or a policeman started shooting at us with a machine-gun pistol. We jumped down from the trees. Where should we go? The field had just been plowed, and the most recent tractor grooves were deep. Bending down, we walked along the furrow, and we found ourselves facing the execution site. In order to escape notice, we put down clods of earth between which we left enough space to be able to see. That’s how we saw everything.”

  A guard fires at her while she is perched in a tree, a young, educated girl. Does she run and take refuge at home? No, she goes and hides in a deep tractor groove in a field and makes loopholes to peer through, as though she were building a dirt fortress. The way a child on summer vacation might build a sandcastle on the beach. Rereading Maria’s words, I saw myself as a small boy in Bresse, walking in my big tan plastic boots inside the deep tractor grooves in my grandfather Émile’s freshly plowed fields; some of the grooves were so deep that one could indeed hide in them. Maria and her friends continued this childhood game for as long as it took to murder their Jewish neighbors, the groove becoming for them like the crenellated wall of an earthen fort.

  And yet, what she describes is not a childhood game but an absolute horror.

  “Two young women tried to give something to a German in order to be allowed to keep their nightgowns on…. But he didn’t permit it. They started to hit the girls, and they tore off their nightgowns, and they were naked like all the others.

  “They forced the Jews to line up along the steps that had been made on either side of the ditch. They fired with a machine gun, and all the Jews on one of the steps fell. Then they shot the Jews on the other step. This way, they all fell headfirst toward the middle. I can’t talk about it. It’s extremely hard. Can you imagine, for the child that I was! It was a nightmare. After having seen all this, I couldn’t sleep or eat or do anything at all…. There were some mothers who had babies in blankets in their arms. They were told to put them down around the ditch; they did it. That’s when Dioma, the policeman, came. He kicked all the babies down into the ditch; they were alive.”

  The guards, who made a cordon around the men who were murdering the Jews with such violence and cruelty, appeared to those outside as security guards for the villagers. I’m afraid that, on that day, they led the neighborhood children to understand that they were not at any great risk.

  In Derajnia as in Bousk, there were guards rather than barbed wire around the graves. In places like Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, barbed wire cut humanity in half. On the inside, Jewish human beings were corralled to die in artisanal gas chambers; on the outside, their Polish Christian neighbors could approach, sometimes watching through binoculars, standing on a hill, as the Jews entered the gas chambers. Outside the barbed wire of the extermination camps, as outside the circle of the guards around the common graves, the neighbors knew that they lived on the right side of humanity. The side of life.

  Ultimately, didn’t the sight of the armed guards at Derajnia signify to Maria that she was going to live? So why do Lydia and Maria stay so long to watch the massacre of their neighbors and friends? Is there a certain pleasure in watching one’s neighbors tortured and murdered as long as one knows that one doesn’t belong to the group of “others”? Is there such great pleasure in watching “others” die because we’ve been authorized to live? A pleasure such that neither Maria nor Lydia would want to avoid the spectacle? On a day of genocide in a village, is Sade the expert in human behavior?

  I reread with terror the last lines of Patrice’s report upon leaving Derajnia.

  “Throughout the village, the witnesses were paradoxical. They all had many Jewish acquaintances with whom they got along very well. One of them had even been taken in as an orphan by a Jewish family; still another had a Yiddish accent…. And yet, they all went to watch the incredibly violent execution…. The witness who had the Yiddish accent was … very, very calm, a teacher wearing sunglasses. During the interview, she seemed both present and absent, as though deep in her memories. But she didn’t cry.”

  In the end, the local guards who surrounded the Jews on the day of the murder reassured all the others. The authorization to live, the pleasure at seeing the “others” die on a day of genocide, seems to obliterate for a number of us all human ties with the condemned. They become a “spectacle,” both horrible and alluring.

  Chapter 7

  THE COLUMN OF JEWS

  Jerusalem, 1999

  As a young priest, recently named secretary of the Conference of French Bishops for Jewish Relations, I find myself in Schlomo Street, not far from the Great Synagogue. I am walking with Father Bernard Dupuy, an erudite Dominican who was the first secretary of Jewish relations for the Church of France. I have a hard time keeping up with him despite his age and weight. He knows where he is going; with a greeting in Hebrew, he enters the shop of an old bookseller. The owner, kippah over white hair, raises his eyes behind small round spectacles. From his look, I can tell that Father Dupuy is a familiar face here. The owner isn’t at all surprised to see the priest dive into the back of the store, stand on a wobbly stool, and begin searching through shelves that look as ancient as the books they hold. Still busily intent, Father Dupuy goes into a small room lit by a single lightbulb hanging from a wire. He looks for, or rather he rips from the shelves, the works he thinks are essential for me to understand Jewish tradition. The Mishna translated into English. “Patrick, you have to have this translation. It’s hard to find in Paris these days.” Then he hands me a volume on Hasidism.1 In his chee
rful, intelligent way, he tells me, “It all starts with Baal Shem Tov, in Medzhybizh. He’s the one who founded the Hasidic dynasty. But you also have to read the works of those who opposed the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim, but also the history of the secular Jews, and also …”

  We had to return to this little shop several times carrying big bags, for we had bought about two hundred pounds of books—which got me into some heated negotiations a few days later at Ben Gurion airport as I was checking in for my El Al flight.

  Medzhybizh, 2008

  Years later, I find myself in Medzhybizh, the home of Hasidism. The place where Hasidic Jews from all over the world come to pray at the tomb of Baal Shem Tov, who died in 1760. Back when I was listening to Father Dupuy’s quick, precise words in Jerusalem, it never occurred to me that one day I would actually find myself here, in this holy site of the Jewish faith.

  We are in a van weaving between muddy potholes and frantic geese crossing the road, hopping and honking. After half an hour of research in the village of Medzhybizh, the investigators, the people who search out witnesses, come back to get me. “We found a grandmother,” says Denis. “A young Belarusian. She saw the column of Jews being led to the shooting. The column went along this street,” he adds, gesturing with his hand to the street where we stand. Denis looks determined. Our research would be impossible without investigators of his caliber. Before the camera crews arrive, teams of investigators, a few men and women, tirelessly scour roads and villages, knocking on doors in search of elderly witnesses to genocide. Today again, Denis has discovered an important witness. He has the gift not only for finding them but also for reassuring them.

  He takes us to a blue-painted house. Olga is sitting there. Her memories are a child’s, and it shows in her gaze. From the moment Denis begins speaking to her, we can see that a scene has begun playing out before her eyes. A scene she witnessed decades ago that remains engraved in her memories as a little girl. It is not at all rare for witnesses to take on a childish vocabulary when they speak to us. This is what Olga will do today, sunk into her armchair, covered in a thick red blanket.

  Just moments into the interview, Olga tells us, “The first shooting took place on September 21, 1942. The second one happened the next day. People said it was Judgment Day. We lived not far from the paved path on which they took the Jews to the shooting. My memories of that day, and my feelings, are still those of a child….

  “The Jews walked calmly; they spoke slowly; they talked among themselves; some even smiled. However, there was a sense of worry in the air. The path was paved with little blue stones. The Jews walked and their footsteps made a rustling sound. They moved along slowly, without hurrying…. It made such an impression on me that even now the feeling I had as a child rises up in me. People said, ‘They aren’t out for a stroll, walking like that.’”

  Olga’s gaze is lost in the scenes of her memory. I have never heard a witness remember the color of the paving stones on which the column of Jews walked, nor mention the sound of their feet as they advanced toward death. But her strongest memory is that of thinking she was witnessing Judgment Day. For me, as a priest, the idea is especially striking.

  The Last Judgment. I had already heard this expression from a witness to the shootings in another village, an old man. We had just begun our research. It was only 2004, and yet it seems a century ago. We’ve accumulated so many testimonies since then. We were standing at the entrance to a small Ukrainian village in the region of Lvov. The old man, dressed in a gray shirt that was too big for him and a light-colored beret, was standing by a wooden fence. In front of us was a small hill that he gestured to with his hand. “Look, the Jews went up to Golgotha.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You don’t see? It’s like in the icons!”

  And he pointed to a small road, or rather a twisting path up to the top of the hill. It was the path the Jews had taken to their common grave. The old man insisted, “You know, I saw it on the icon!”

  As a priest, these little phrases impressed themselves upon my memory first as shock, but also as a question. From Father Dupuy, and from my teachers like the doctor Charles Favre,2 I had learned that the Catholic Church had broken with the Accusation of Deicide.3 The Jews had been perceived for centuries by the Church, with public opprobium, as having committed the unpardonable crime of murdering Jesus, or God himself.

  For my part, I have always refused any religious interpretation of the Shoah. Perhaps this is thanks to my roots in French secularism, but more likely it is the inherited determination of my grandparents; we didn’t theologize about Nazism, we fought it.

  Here in Medzhybizh, I listened to Olga tell me that as a young girl she thought she was witnessing the Last Judgment as she watched a column of Jews, her neighbors, walking to their deaths under the blows from the German guards.

  For a long time, I wondered. How can you believe you are at Judgment Day watching the Jews of your own town die murdered before your very eyes?

  Throughout my travels in the former Soviet Union, on farms in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, I have seen countless small icons, painted and gilded, representing the Virgin, Jesus, or some saint, often simply glued onto little white boards, decorated with fabrics embroidered in regional or national colors. I can recall a small red-brick house in the Donetsk region. Along the angle of one wall was a series of icons arranged vertically, surrounded by dried flowers on wallpaper that had yellowed with age. I remember this scene in particular because just below the icons, sitting on a varnished coffee table, was a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev.

  Despite years of Sovietism, the countryside of these nations has not lost its deep attachment to the Christian religion. In the 1940s, the Biblical scenes portrayed by the icons were, it seems, still very much alive in the eyes of villagers.

  Thus, Olga, as she watched the column of Jews leave for the shooting, believed she was witnessing the Last Judgment. What can this mean? The Jews are condemned to die by occupying armies with the famous inscription engraved on their belts: Gott mit uns. God with us.

  The death of Christ, for a Christian, is first and foremost the liturgy of the Stations of the Cross. I have never forgotten the little church of my childhood in the village of Villegaudin, in Bresse. Having traveled several miles by bicycle, following, as best I could, my grandmother on her black Solex moped, we would go inside the parish church, planted in the middle of a cemetery, where the priest was waiting to lead us through the Stations of the Cross. Station after station, we followed the progression of Jesus being put to death. His arrest, his humiliations, his fall, the idiotic remarks of the men guarding him. We followed these stations of public execution by walking through the interior of the church along the walls of the nave. The path was not very long, and we crammed together to get closer to each station, closer to Jesus’s suffering. In the narrative of the Passion, not only does Jesus die in public, but he falls in public, is humiliated in public. And this public, prior to Vatican II, was very often designated as guilty of murder. The guilty ones, the public, were Jews, we were told. Jesus went onward, surrounded by Roman guards amid the Jews.

  The Germans often inverted the Bible to explain their crimes. I can recall a small town south of Ternopil, called Monastyriska. The Christians in this town had been informed about the arrest of the Jews. They were told to get wooden crosses to affix to the lintel of the doors to their farms. Wherever there was a cross, the Germans would not enter. Wherever there was no cross, the Germans would enter, pillage, arrest, and kill the Jews. An inverted Jewish Easter!

  It seems to me that the same thing happened in Medzhybizh. Olga sees all the Jews being marched in a column under the blows of a brutal occupying army and circulating among the local Christians until they are put to death. She believes she is seeing the Stations of the Cross in reverse, the Last Judgment, God’s answer to what happened to Jesus.

  Other witnesses in Medzhybizh, on seeing the Jews wearing yellow circles inscribed with the German
word Jude,4 thought they were reading the name of Judas, the apostle in the Gospels who betrayed Jesus. “The Germans put discs with the inscription ‘Jude’ on the Jews’ clothes. Who was Jude? Jude was the traitor of Jesus Christ. So the Germans believed that whoever was Jude was kaput.”5 So, every Jew had these discs sewn on his clothes: some on the chest, some on the back. And on these disks was written “Jude.”

  The arrest of the Jews, their humiliation, their being put to death … Olga wasn’t the only one to believe that she was seeing God’s response to Judas. His response to the Stations of the Cross, to the Passion of Christ, to the betrayal of Jesus by Judas! God’s personal response to the deicide committed by the Jews. Thus, the column of Jews heading for their mass graves was perceived, somehow, as a religious procession. Like a liturgy. Like an act of God himself.

  How many little Olgas, in thousands of Eastern villages, believed on the day of the crime that they were witnessing the Last Judgment? Is it possible that in Western Europe, certain Catholics likewise perceived the raids, the camps, the trains bound for Auschwitz as an act of response by God himself? Was not Séverine Drumont, the wife of Edouard Drumont, the all too well-known pseudo-Catholic author of the anti-Semiitic tract La France Juive [Jewish France], the guest of honor at the exhibit on the Jews organized in Paris by the Vichy regime?

  Medzhybizh is not an anomaly on the map of Jewish murders. I have heard more than twenty elderly women whisper off camera, after having recounted the horrors they witnessed, “But they killed Jesus!”

  This could explain in part—and only in part—why so many neighbors chose to go watch the executions of the Jews. The way you would watch Jesus’s death until his last breath.

  I remember a teaching of the philosopher Gerard Israel, speaking before a group in Judeo-Christian dialogue in Lyon, many years ago: “If the Christians, or rather certain Christians, didn’t reach out to the Jews in a brotherly fashion, might we not wonder if, when they saw the deportation and the humiliation of the Jews, the humiliation made public, they couldn’t help but think that they were witnessing God’s vengeance in some way?”