In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

  Did the occupying Germans realize that Soviet children and adolescents, standing on the roadside or hiding behind the fences of their farms, believed they were seeing the enactment of a religious scene as the column passed? It is far from impossible.

  This could explain in part why the execution of the Jews wasn’t hidden from the villagers. The Stations of the Cross in reverse were not only public but on view. Since meeting Olga in Medzhybizh, I now frequently ask the witnesses I am interviewing, the neighbors, “Did you make the sign of the cross when the Jews passed in front of you in their columns? Did you make the sign of the cross while the Jews were being shot?”

  The answer comes, simple and implacable: “Of course!”

  It took me years to dare to ask this question. We all have our blind spots, especially when our own identity is at stake. But the Christian faith that was transmitted to me during my childhood cohabited with the Resistance. Not with anti-Semitism.

  The Germans in the Eastern territories could not be unaware that the gawkers who rushed to see the Jews murdered, sometimes up to the grave’s edge, crossed themselves over and over. Consciously or not, they organized a tableau vivant, a living picture, of an inverted representation of the Stations of the Cross. The Christian representation of the Jews’ unpardonable guilt regarding Jesus sent certain spectators to the scene of the crime on the day of the Jews’ murder by the Nazis, not only as curious neighbors but also as pseudo-Christians.

  Chapter 8

  THE GIRL IN LOVE

  October 1, 2009

  We are in Monastyrchchina, in the region of Smolensk, a large city on the Russian border, near Belarus.

  Autumn has already robbed the trees of their leaves. Everything is dressed in gray. We are staying in Smolensk, near a big park, and each day we leave early in the morning to explore the villages of the region. The days are already short in the month of October; night falls quickly. This morning, when we left Smolensk, it was still foggy.

  This is our first research trip to Russia. After five years of inquiries in Ukraine and Belarus, we have decided to begin investigations in the enormous Russian territory, or rather in the Russian territories that were occupied by the German army. The Germans made it as far as St. Petersburg to the north.1 To the south, they got as far as 125 miles from Baku, in Azerbaijan. The immensity of the territory to be traversed makes your head spin. Yahad consists of a small team of about fifteen employees in Paris, and it’s a real challenge to cover not only Ukraine and Belarus but now also the parts of Russia that were once under Nazi occupation.

  Our initial choice for a Russian region was Smolensk because we already had the archives needed to prepare our investigations in order to gather testimony. According to these archives, the German occupiers had many victims: Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and prisoners of war, but also Russian civilians.

  On this October morning, we found ourselves in the home of Alexandra. Denis, our Belarusian interviewer, had found her at the market. She was a woman of a particular stature, very strong and determined, wearing a large, dark smock, her cheeks highly colored by the morning cold. She had had a very interesting career as a police colonel.

  Everything in her house suggested sobriety. There was a large, white-tiled wood-burning stove, an armchair upholstered in a gingham print. She held herself erect and held a white handkerchief in her hands. Tears came often to her serious and sometimes stony face.

  She agreed to hold the interview in her heated home, which was a stroke of luck for the team. How many interviews have we conducted in glacial winds?

  She sits down on a couch draped in a brightly colored woven rug of the kind often hung on walls in rural houses.

  Within the small room, her discomfort is palpable. Alexandra appears focused but sad, with her gray hair in a ponytail. From her very first words, I understand that the war was not the first tragedy to strike her family.

  Before the war, her parents were designated as “kulaks” and condemned by the Soviet regime for having too many possessions and refusing collectivization in the kolkhoz. They were, as they say locally, “repressed.”

  “Yes, de-kulaked. It was the collectivization of the times. We were de-kulaked during the collectivization. My parents were fairly well off…. Life set us apart. My parents owned four horses and some livestock. They took everything from them. They wanted to send them to Siberia; my father left for Leningrad and my mother for Smolensk. As for me, they left me with my grandparents. They took everything from us: our house, all our possessions, and they forced us into the bania.”2

  Once the German occupation came in 1941, Alexandra’s family was dislocated. She went to live in Smolensk but couldn’t remain there, because, as with many others, her house was bombarded. “In Smolensk, the house we were living in was destroyed by a bomb. So we came running here, to Monastyrchchina. Our maternal grandmother came from Leningrad, whereas we came from Smolensk after the destruction of our house…. Here we lived in the center of town.”

  In Monastyrchchina, thanks to a Jewish family for whom her father worked, they moved into a house that had belonged to a Jewish kolkhoz, emptied of its inhabitants by the Germans.

  “My parents had a Jewish acquaintance. When they did carting, they transported this Jew’s merchandise…. When we arrived here in Monastyrchchina, he met my grandmother and said to her, ‘Come live with us in our house.’ They were about to be moved into the ghetto. They left us their house, their big house.”

  “We arrived with nothing…. His [the Jew’s] wife was sick. He would have left…. But he couldn’t because of his wife. Some police came and took them away. At that point, we weren’t yet living in their house. He had just made us the offer to move in. We moved in later, about a week after they left. The house was open and no one was going in. At the time, people didn’t pillage…. If I recall their leaving, it’s because they had a son six years older than I was. I went to visit them two or three times and we became friends. His name was Ziama.”3

  She speaks of Ziama hesitantly, with the precaution and shyness of the ten-year-old girl she had been. One day, a policeman arrested Ziama and his family to imprison them in the ghetto. Clutching his rifle, the policeman had pushed open the house’s wooden door. He had seized Ziama by the collar and brutally dragged him outside while his parents begged for mercy. The whole family had been taken to the ghetto.

  At first Alexandra tries to tell me that she hadn’t seem Ziama again after the arrest. Most likely, this is also what she once told her family.

  “Did you see your friend?”

  “No. We just talked through the fence.”

  The translator insists, “So you saw him several times through the fence?”

  “Yes, not many times; just a few times. They locked me in the house. I would say I went a dozen times. What could we have talked about? He asked me to bring him things to eat. We talked about the pieces of bread that we shared with them and brought, passed through a hole according to our private signal. The ghetto was entirely surrounded by a fence and barbed wire. The Jews put a branch between the planks. That meant that they could lift the plank at that spot and get whatever we had brought for them. In summer, it was easier. In winter, with all the snow, it got harder. We talked about a bottle of milk and the best time to bring it. I do have to say that there were some good police. They sometimes let us give food to the Jews: we went to the ghetto gate and gave the food to the Jews.”

  It is my turn to insist. “Do you remember the last time you saw him? Did he have a sense that something was going to happen? Or did you not talk about that?”

  “No one talked about it back then. Nobody talked about anything; everyone was scared of everything. Something happened every night: either it was the police who came or it was the resistance fighters. They all wanted something. We were afraid.”

  This fear seems never to have left her. Her retelling is made all the more difficult by the insistent ringing several times of a white telephone on the table. Each tim
e, she picks up the receiver, answers briefly, and hangs up. Then she resumes her testimony.

  Finally, she admits that she was there when the Jews were arrested, on the day they were taken to their mass graves.

  “It was wintertime. January, I would say. I don’t recall the exact date. I know that it was the beginning of the month of January. They were being taken in groups.”

  She was there as usual to bring food and possibly to see her friend. “That day, we got to our agreed-upon spot just at the moment they were being taken out by group. They were guarded; there were Germans everywhere, and police. I saw Ziama and I wanted to go to him.”

  Alexandra is reliving her life as a small Soviet girl; how could she have known that far away in Berlin, in comfortable and well-heated villas, it had been decided that her Ziama was no longer to be considered a full-fledged human being and must be eliminated from the surface of the Earth? For her, he was not primarily a Jew. He had a name. His name was Ziama.

  She got so close that she was almost swept up into the column of Jews. “The policeman almost took me. But the women along the street screamed, ‘What are you doing, she’s Russian!’ They are the ones who pulled me out.” Recalling that moment, she sighs deeply, as with regret. As though she still didn’t realize, sixty years later, that she might have died on that day. Or rather, as though she still loved her Ziama.

  She takes up the thread of her memories again. “They were put into rows, but some of them could walk while others needed to be helped. It was a tragedy…. How to describe it to you? They didn’t walk in regular columns, but there were about five people in each row. Some held others by the arm…. Ziama’s mother was sick. He and his father held her up as they walked. This is what I saw. Then I was pulled out of the column.”

  Her words are seared into my memory. I was struck by the complete difference between her recollections and those of the vengeful anti-Semites. On that day, she did not see a Jew…. Her childhood love was being marched to his death. Did his murder influence her professional choice to join the police, eventually to rise to the rank of police colonel? This thought crossed my mind.

  Finally, as if summing up, she remembers the punishment her mother gave her when she learned that her daughter had risked getting shot with the Jews from the ghetto. “My mother came from somewhere and hit me and brought me back to the house.”

  How many Ziamas and Alexandras must there have been in Soviet lands?

  How different it is to see the Shoah from an airplane or a satellite than to see it from a Belarusian farmyard!

  I hazard a last question: “Did he also see you?”

  “Yes [with sadness]. Yes.”

  I have never forgotten my interview with this woman, this retired police colonel in Monastyrchchina. Whereas for the Germans, the Jews advancing in their column were already considered dead, for Alexandra, Ziama stayed a person to the end.

  The young girl she was awakens slowly in her testimony, as her first love and her great risk come back to her. Her face lights up as she evokes her memories of Ziama. Their story could have ended there. The story of two Soviet children in a kolkhoz; one Jewish, the other not.

  A fence was put up between them on the orders of people who believe in shattering the human race. Alexandra sighs again, as though she has just returned from that rupture. I am conscious of the fact that her biggest regret, even to this day, is not having stayed with Ziama. Without the intervention of her neighbors and her mother she would have been killed along with him by the Germans. She was made to live because she was not Jewish. He was not allowed to live because he was Jewish.

  What the fence boards of the ghetto could not separate, bullets could.

  I leave Alexandra’s house with a sadness of my own. I look at the distant fields swept by the autumn wind. Her words resonate in my head: “I barely had time to get close to him when the policeman pushed me into the column. The others started to scream and got me out. We weren’t able to exchange a single word. It was very stressful. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was already used to all kinds of suffering. There was a punitive detachment in our area. We saw all kinds of horrors. But we never thought they were going to take all these people to be shot.”

  On that day, I understood that, despite it all, despite the too numerous common graves, despite the bullets, Hitler had failed. Alexandra loved Ziama as a young girl loves a young man. The Nazis’ intended fracturing of the human race could not touch their love.

  Chapter 9

  THE DIRECTOR OF THE TRUCKING COMPANY

  Rawa Ruska. For me as a child, Rawa Ruska was nowhere. I didn’t even know what country it might be in. And then one day, a very long time ago, I found myself with my friend Steven Goldstein in Cracow. I will never forget it.

  He lived in Geneva and sold duty-free chocolate in the shape of gold bars. They could be found in all the airports as the Goldkenn brand. It is doubtless with him that I began my journey. He had told me that his parents got married in the Cracow ghetto, then fled with the promise that, if they survived, they would find one another.

  I walked with Steven through the streets of the Cracow ghetto, the medieval ghetto of Kazimir, and then of Podgorge, where the exterminations took place. With his guidebook in one hand and his phone in the other, he called his mother, who was in a retirement home in the town of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. He had suddenly come upon the place of his parents’ marriage, now an ordinary spot on a middle-class street.

  The neighborhoods were still not entirely rebuilt, and one could easily get through half-broken-down gates, into courtyards, to look around and to ask questions. When we found the place, I didn’t know what to say. Steven’s wife could barely walk, not because she was tired or old but because it seemed that at every corner she might still meet the Germans. Across from us, on other side of the street, was a sign in big letters for OPTIMA, a chocolate brand. As Steven realized that his parents were married across from a chocolate store, he was struck by the symmetry of his having spent most of his life selling Swiss chocolate in the shape of gold bars. Since then, he has gone into the health food business.

  We went to the Cracow train station. At that time, it was an old Soviet station with small, seemingly faceless ticket windows and long lines. We went because we knew that many Jews had left from there.

  I looked at the big departure boards where the letters spelling out destinations turned with a loud mechanical noise. Suddenly, a new destination appeared: the next train was leaving for Rawa Ruska.

  I couldn’t believe it. Rawa Ruska, the mystery town, was displayed on the board at the Cracow train station. Unable to resist, I waited in line at the window and asked where Rawa Ruska was. The Polish rail employee said to me, “We’ve just reopened that line. It’s at the Ukrainian frontier.”

  For the first time, Rawa Ruska was an actual place.

  It took me about ten years to finally take the road leading to Rawa Ruska. It’s not easy to go to the site of such a painful family memory, even if it’s not your own but that of a beloved grandfather, even with the passage of time. How many times since that first visit have I passed through Polish and Ukrainian customs?

  When we did go, we weren’t just passing through Rawa Ruska—we were staying there. The adjunct mayor, Yaroslaw, housed our team. The place was strange, located just inside the border. There were numerous gatehouses where one could change money, euros and dollars, into hryvnias. We wondered why there were so many of these gatehouses, because the exchange rates from place to place didn’t vary. Still, each of the women sitting in these poorly heated booths would try to attract any obvious tourist getting out of a truck or car.

  We made our way through this succession of little huts. Each one was more or less falling apart, their paint peeling, crowded together behind the forest. Suddenly, a little sign pointed us to a hotel decorated with red-and-green painted wooden dragons. A small structure served as the hotel lobby. Just inside, a man, apparently a trucker, was focusing all h
is energy on a game machine that he was shaking desperately in order to get his coins to fall in. A young woman gave us our keys and led each of us to a little wooden cabin. Here we stayed for a long time, put up by the mayor at minimal cost, as we had almost no budget. The furniture was basic; there was a white electric radiator always set on high because it was so cold, a small bed whose sheets often went unwashed, a rudimentary bathroom. But we were grateful to be somewhere in Ukraine that offered us a base for our investigations. Without Yaroslaw, without this surreal setup in Rawa Ruska, not far from Camp 325 where my grandfather had been a prisoner, we would never have been able to go as far as we did in our research.

  At the border crossing, there was a big forest and a no-man’s-land between Poland and Ukraine. I have made the crossing in all sorts of weather, fog, snow, sunshine. At the beginning, I couldn’t have known that one day I would discover in the archives that a certain Josef, head of a trucking company that was operating under the German occupation, had made this same crossing with his trucks full of Jews bound for mass graves. I couldn’t have known that this pretty forest at the frontier still conceals, to this day, the unknown tombs of more than ten thousand Jews.

  It was 2012 when Andrej called me on the phone. “I’ve found the testimony of a German civilian who was working in Rawa Ruska.” Each time the veil lifts a little more from over Rawa Ruska, my mind reels. Andrej went on to give me Josef’s testimony.

  Josef Liefers was interrogated after the war by a German court as part of a trial of Nazi war criminals. He was from the town of Essen in the Ruhr Valley. Before the war, he was a truck mechanic. At Rawa Ruska, he was hired as the director of the trucking arm of the German company, Bermann. He had previously worked for the company in Hamburg, Germany.1 “I got a contract to work and a pass that allowed me to come into the country without hassle. Once I arrived in Rawa Ruska, I took on the direction of the company’s entire inventory of trucks. The garage was located at number 6 Potiliczerstrasse.”