In Broad Daylight

by Father Patrick Desbois

  One day, at ten in the morning, Josef got a special order for trucks for the following day. The trucks had to be ready early, at six on the dot. “I saw that the orders were blank. So I couldn’t tell where the vehicles would have to go. Also, it was expressly stated that the drivers had to be German, although their copilots could be Ukrainian.” Josef learned that thirteen other private German transport companies had received the same orders. Every truck in Rawa Ruska was mobilized.

  On that day, Josef only had two German drivers at his disposal. His three other trucks would have to be driven by Ukrainians. He went through the usual motions: putting in the orders for five vehicles, asking for their gas tanks to be filled, for snow tires and chains. It was December.

  “Since the trucks had been reserved for the entire day, I assumed that they were being used for a long trip. I told the drivers that they should bring food and have the tanks filled for a four-hundred-kilometer [two-hundred-fifty-mile] journey, meaning two hundred kilometers each way, which corresponds to one hundred and twenty liters of gas in the truck. I had them take double the usual number of spare tires and put on chains for the snow. My trucks were ready for an all-terrain journey.”

  The next morning at 5:30, Josef heard the vehicles leaving the parking garage. It was still pitch dark at that hour on December 20, 1942. At 8:30 a.m. he arrived at his office, where he learned that none of his Jewish workers had showed up. He rushed to the center of town, which today is a big square, not far from the Polish Catholic church. There he watched the arrest of the Jews, who had to get into all the trucks.

  “By that time, the first three trucks had been called and filled with Jews. There was an SS guard on each truck step, submachine gun in hand. An open car, with two SS officers, started to drive in front of the three trucks. A. and I went to the military town-planning center. There we learned that no one had been told ahead of time and everyone at all the other companies had been just as surprised. The military planning service had simply given the order to make available to the Kreishauptmann2 as many trucks as possible for a special mission. We concluded that we were powerless and could do nothing but wait. So we turned around and headed for our office on Potiliczerstrasse.

  “At around ten in the morning, the Bermann trucks came back to the garage, much sooner than anticipated. The first driver, H., who was from Cologne, was pale. He couldn’t speak. It was B., the second driver, who told us, ‘Once our trucks were full of Jews, we still didn’t know where we were supposed to go. On each of our truck steps was an SS guard with a loaded submachine gun ready to fire. We started to drive once the three trucks from the Stickel, Charlottenburg Company were full. We went down Judenstraße, to Lembergstraße, then we turned right down Lublinerstraße. After two kilometers [a mile], we turned off to the left, behind a small forest, and took a dirt road. We kept going until we got to an old Russian anti-tank ravine. At the edge of the ditch was a large number of SS with submachine guns, and here and there we could see actual machine guns. The Jews had to get out, and were immediately surrounded. The Jews wearing good quality clothes were forced to take them off. Then, they were ordered down into the ditch in groups of ten to fifteen people, with no difference made between the young and the old or between men, women, and children. Once the first of them were in the ditch, the SS started to shoot. Already on the trip, the Jews who had tried to resist had been immediately executed. People were trembling, many on their knees praying. The SS were pitiless and pushed them into the ditch. Then we came back here. We won’t go back.’”

  Josef then went to assess the state of the trucks and saw that they were full of blood.

  “This is the report made to me by B., our driver from Hamburg. I inspected the vehicles, filthy with blood, and gave the order to clean them. I sent the driver B. home. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, the other three trucks returned, also full of blood. I again had them cleaned and parked. I had decided not to let my vehicles go again, and I succeeded.”

  The drivers from Bermann, along with the thirteen other transport companies in Rawa Ruska, were neither military nor police but German civilians, small and medium-sized companies that had voluntarily expatriated to occupied Soviet territory.

  Reading over this report, I thought, how many German civilians, how many small businesses, were “used” for the murders of Jews in Soviet territories? Without Josef’s deposition, would we know that thirteen German trucking companies had been directed to carry the city’s Jews to their death? And who could have told us that so many Jews were gravely injured or murdered in transit? Never again, after reading this deposition, could I travel the road between Rawa Ruska and the forest without thinking of the Bermann Company’s German trucks.

  Later, the Rawa Ruska Gestapo must have realized how many German civilians were used as part of the machine of genocide. They were made to sign a pledge of silence at the headquarters of the Rawa Ruska Gestapo.

  “On the Gestapo’s orders, all the Germans in Rawa Ruska had to meet in the German mess hall,” Josef continued. “The Gestapo chief, Späth,3 made a speech in which he explained that the threat of typhus had been very serious in the town of Rawa Ruska and that it was for this reason that the action had been carried out…. At the end, he said that no one could leave the room until he had signed a paper. Späth then read us what it said. The content was basically, ‘I guarantee, by my signature, that I will keep a strict silence regarding the procedures and actions taken in Rawa Ruska and its surroundings. I have been informed that I would expose myself to severe sanctions were I to talk about this.’ That was pretty much it. As we went out, there was a table where we all had to sign, about four hundred fifty Germans, men and women.”

  Four hundred fifty civilian Germans! Just in the town of Rawa Ruska, 450 German civilians were used by the genocidal machine, or at least had knowledge of the crime and had to sign an oath of secrecy. In one town, 450 German civilians knew. I ask myself, how many thousands saw or participated in the genocide of the Jews and stayed quiet for the most part, going home and saying nothing?

  Apparently, killing units weren’t afraid to publicly murder Jews in front of Slavic populations, but they didn’t feel the same way with respect to German civilian employees. Practically, it would have been impossible for them to murder all the Jews in Rawa Ruska without using the available German labor. Still they tried, with signed documents, to reduce the German civilians to silence, so that in Germany itself, both during and after the genocide, nobody would know the full story. Josef’s deposition is proof in itself that the pledge of secrecy did not fully work. After having read it, I walked differently through the streets of Rawa Ruska, asking myself how many German civilians had lived during the occupation in these houses I passed, witnessing or actively participating in the massacre of the Jews.

  Chapter 10

  THE TRANSPORTERS OF JEWS

  It is spring 2012.

  We are far from Moscow, far from Berlin. We are in Krasnodar,1 a large Russian city founded by Cossacks in 1793.

  As soon as we arrive here, I am struck by the animated, colorful little markets, with their Armenian and Azerbaijani merchants sitting on the sides of their trucks, calling out invitations to buy potatoes in burlap sacks. On the outskirts of the markets is a peaceful calm, like a village. There is an air of the South in these streets.

  We go to Armavir,2 named in honor of its Armenian founders. Armavir is known for its pretty nighttime lighting; one would think it was Christmas. Garlands, in the form of pines, flowers, and giant rabbits line the main street, lending a joyful air when the sun disappears. We come home late every night and leave early in the morning, so for several days we see the city only in this lantern light.

  In the immensity that is Russia, we drive many miles to get from one place to another. We know from archives that many Jewish shootings occurred in this region of the Northern Caucasus. The victims were not all Russian. Many among them were refugees from Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. We often forget that the
Soviet Union took in many refugees, Jews and non-Jews alike, hoping to escape the German army. Most of them were eventually caught by the commandos of the SS.

  The documentation we have on Nazi crimes in the Caucasus is thin, and the German reports from the period are less than complete. The region is very far from Berlin and by the time the Germans were here, they no longer felt certain of winning the war. The occupation here did not last long; the German military invaded some villages in November 1942 and left in March 1943. Five months. What is five months but a blip in the history of the twentieth century? But this occupation was long enough to allow Einsatzgruppe D3 to murder Jews, Gypsies, and Communists, sometimes in the same grave.

  We returned several times to the Caucasus.

  On April 10, 2012, our team visited a hamlet near the village of Temirgoyevskaya, in the region of Krasnodar. According to his neighbors, a certain Alexander had much to tell about the execution of Jewish refugees during the war. As we walked into his yard, our eyes needed time to adjust to the universe we were entering.

  Alexander is sitting on the ground, shaping pieces of white wood with which to repair his gate. All around him are fresh wood shavings. Alexander has a lively air about him; he is dressed in blue and reminds me of the old kibbutzniks I met in Israel.

  “It’s almost Easter!” Alexander exclaims. “We have to spruce up anything that got damaged during the winter.” In many villages, I have often seen families repainting their garden walls, often blue, at the approach of Easter. At the back of the yard, Alexander’s wife is also sitting on the ground. She is mixing wet earth with dried hay.

  Without interrupting his own repair work, Alexander explains that his wife is making bricks to fix the walls of the chicken coop, which were devastated by rain and snow. There are, in fact, many red and white chickens wandering around in the yard; they peck around for stray corn kernels or grains of wheat. On the left, a small staircase gives them access to the branches of a large tree where they can find shelter at night. Alexander notices us looking at the setup and comments that when chickens sleep up high, they are protected against lice. I recall my grandmother Victorine’s guinea fowl in Villegaudin. They also slept in a tree, a weeping willow, and they woke us up at dawn with their little cries.

  Everything in this yard speaks of the simplicity of traditional rural life. This universe is familiar to me. Our little house in Bresse, where my maternal grandfather Émile was born, had only one room at first. The walls were also made of cob, the mixture of mud and straw that for so many years served to build the farmhouses of Europe.

  Alexander spoke calmly, for a long time. Hanna, our translator, would tell us later that he was one of the easiest witnesses to translate.

  Alexander was an adolescent when the war broke out. He talks about it with the freshness of a young Soviet, proud of his country. “When we found out that the war had begun, we were enthusiastic. We were kids, and we were convinced that we were going to win easily. For us, this was a chance to demonstrate the greatness of our country that we had read so much about in books. At the time, I was twelve and this was an adventure.”

  With the same vivacity, he recounts the arrival of the Jewish refugees in his kolkhoz. The trucks had to pick them up at the train stations and divide them up between the local families.

  “They brought the Jews here on the train and lodged them with the inhabitants of the surrounding kolkhozes. We lived in harmony. But I don’t know where they came from…. The district administration just gave the order for the trucks to be available to drop the Jews off in the kolkhozes. The people here thought the Jews wouldn’t stay long and that they’d return to the west afterwards.”

  The history of these evacuated Jews taking refuge in the Asian republics of the Soviet Union is very little known. At the time of the evacuations, sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous, the traces of many families are lost in the East.

  Alexander continued his story. Suddenly he was struck by the memory of a Jewish childhood friend named Sergueï. We asked, “Did your friend Sergueï live in your house?”

  “No, he lived over there, but I never went to his house. He came over to mine often. We were friends and we got into mischief together; we were only twelve at the time. We would go swimming in the river in the summer, in August 1942. We played ‘whites and reds,’ where you had to break through team lines and take your opponents’ flag. We also played tag and hide and seek. Sometimes, we got up to mischief and snuck into the village orchards to steal fruit. We also went into the forest a lot. We were very curious.”

  Memories of a Soviet childhood. On our side of the curtain, we were playing cowboys and Indians, while on the other side they played whites and reds. Games inspired by national myths.

  Sergueï’s parents, Jews from the West, seemed a bit strange to Soviet peasants. They were city folk, unfamiliar with working the earth. “Sergueï’s parents didn’t work. They only stayed here for about a month, not enough time to work. It was the month of August and we often saw them on the riverbank. That’s where we met.”

  For Alexander, the arrival of the Germans was an adventure, a game tinged with fear. When the Wehrmacht invaded the village, most of the inhabitants hid in the forest. Alexander was very worried about his father.

  “My father was standing there and a German pushed him from behind with his machine gun. I don’t know what got a hold of me, but in a flash of rage I jumped on the German and grabbed onto his gun. The German was surprised by this unexpected action, and he looked at me without moving to see what I would do next. I pulled with all my strength to get his gun away from him, but he was a big strong man, and he didn’t budge one millimeter. I stayed holding on, suspended in air. He laughed, set me on the ground, and said, ‘Gut, Kinder.’”4

  Alexander’s story could have ended there. Memories of a very brief German occupation. It was nothing much. But then, Alexander’s face darkened at the recollection of another man, a Russian-speaking German. He arrived at the head of a train of carts, each with a horse and driver. Alexander climbed aboard the cart the man was driving. This German would deceive the whole village, for he was preparing the massacre of the Jews.

  “It was two weeks or maybe even a month after the Germans’ arrival. One morning, at around nine o’clock…. I saw a column of between seven and nine empty carts arrive. On the first cart, there was a German, a young man. When he saw me, he signaled me to stop and asked me where the Jews were. I told him the Jews lived near the barns. He told me to go with him. I tried to refuse, but he forced me. I asked him who he was…. He spoke Russian with no accent. He told me he was German but had lived a long time among Russians.

  “I later learned he was in charge of taking the Jews to the ghetto. We went to the area where they were living, and, I admit, I was curious to see what this man was going to do.”

  Alexander accompanied the German from house to house. For Alexander it was a game, but the German was counting the Jews.

  “He went into one house after another and asked if there were any Jews. All he had with him was a notebook and a pencil, nothing else. I tried to see if he had a gun, but I couldn’t find anything. In his notebook, he had a list of the Jews with the names of the people who were housing them. If all the Jews on his list were present, he told them to load all their possessions onto the carts. He said they had to leave for the ghetto, that their departure was set for five o’clock. We went around to all the houses, and the Jews loaded their things.”

  The list of Jews was easy to find. Anyone who lives in the Soviet Union has to register, so all the Jewish refugees were known to the local administration. All the Germans had to do was get hold of the registers; this is how the German had the list of names and addresses in hand. From nine in the morning until five in the evening, Alexander would accompany the young German. In Temirgoyevskaya, the Jews were not promised removal to Palestine but rather a transfer to the ghetto. The height of the German’s treachery was that he took a nap at the end of the aft
ernoon, right before the massacre.

  “We were talking, and he was laughing. I couldn’t possibly imagine that he was taking the Jews to be shot. We went to a woman’s house, and the German asked her for some milk and a duvet. He drank the milk, then he laid out the duvet in her garden and went to sleep.”

  How could the Jews have been afraid of a young German accompanied by a kid from the village?

  Alexander had no idea what was about to happen. While the Jews had loaded their possessions on the carts and were themselves sitting or standing, Alexander insisted on taking a cart ride the German had promised him. “I asked him if we could take a ride in a cart. He said yes. After the ride, I went swimming with the other boys.”

  Sergueï came one last time to Alexander’s house. Alexander’s father seemed to know what was going to happen but kept quiet. “Before leaving, my Jewish friend Sergueï came over. My father gave us something to eat and looked at Sergueï with sadness. At the time, I didn’t understand why my father was looking at him like that. I think he already knew what was going to happen. We were at the river until four o’clock, then we went straight to the carts. They were all loaded. The German Kommandantur had given the order to round up all the Jews and bring them to the ghetto.

  “At five in the evening, all the Jews got onto the carts. The German counted them. I noticed that our driver didn’t talk to anyone. Maybe he knew what was about to happen. The German got onto the first cart and gave the order to leave. Along with thirty other boys from the village, I climbed on with the Jews, for fun. The line of carts headed off in the direction of Temirgoyevskaya.” The killer would eventually have to put an end to the game the children of the kolkhoz were playing, but up until the very end, the children played with this convoy of death.