The drivers, for their part, said nothing. Their silence intrigues me. It is obvious that they knew. Throughout all of our research, we have met very few people who transported Jews. The diggers, the fillers, even the sellers of stolen clothes will speak. Why do the transporters stay quiet? From experience, what usually engenders silence is the theft of belongings. Were the drivers compensated? Did they partake in pillaging at the time of the arrests? Or did they rob the Jews they carried? How to find out … ?
Alexander goes on with his terrible story: a game on the fly for the kolkhoz kids, the road to death for the Jews.
“The carts left the village, and after about a hundred meters [a hundred yards], the German stopped the column. He had kept his promise to give us a ride, but now it was time for us to go home. He inspected each of the carts and made all the village children get down; then he got back in his seat and the line of carts began to move forward again.
“We wanted to ride some more. We chased after them and jumped back on the carts. He looked at us with a smile and said nothing. Five hundred meters [a third of a mile] farther along, he stopped the procession again and this time he told us firmly to go home.”
It’s terrible to realize that this line of carts, full of Jews, was perceived by the children of the village as a mobile carnival ride. Terrible to know that the requisitioned drivers were aware. Why did they stay walled in silence? Had they received threats? Money? Goods in exchange? The children played on the carts until the last minute. The German led the procession. The drivers went on without a word.
When the carts had finally disappeared, the children started to play again. “The carts left and we stayed where we were and played a game of reds and whites.”
But Alexander’s childhood is over. It snaps like a cut cord.
“Suddenly, we heard women’s voices, then German voices, and then the sound of motors. We heard a crowd screaming, but we didn’t see anyone, and then there were volleys of gunshots, and then more women’s cries. We got scared and ran toward the village.
“The next morning, I still didn’t realize what had happened the evening before. I went to the river because I had left some fishing lines out, when suddenly I saw the corpse of a little boy in the water. He was kneeling, naked, his head in the water. All you could see was his back. I had seen the bodies of Russian and German soldiers before, but I had never seen a dead child. I didn’t dare to touch him with my hand, so I turned him over with my foot, and I saw that it was my friend Sergueï.”
Alexander can no longer speak; he is sobbing. He cries like the child he was, the child he will never be again. Up until now, he has been able to hold together the illusion of the drama and the game. But all at once, no more games are possible. No tag, no reds and whites. The body floating in the river was not that of a stranger. Nor was it simply the body of a child. It was Sergueï’s body.
So many peasants have told us, in tears, how they saw their classmates, whom they can still name, arrested, transported, then shot before their eyes because they were Jews. It has always seemed to me that these former children formed simple bonds with their Jewish friends, and they have never recovered from witnessing their murder. The young Alexander, within a few minutes, grasped everything and understood too much.
“When I turned him over, the current carried him off. It was at this precise moment that I understood that all the Jews had been shot. I don’t know what came over me. I started to run without stopping and, even when I reached my house, I couldn’t stop running; it was as though I had lost my mind. I ran in circles around the yard, in a state of shock. My father came out of the house and told me in Ukrainian to stop…. I could hear his voice, but I couldn’t obey him. He caught me and asked me what was happening to me. I told him they had shot the Jews! As I spoke, he put his hand over my mouth and carried me into the house…. He forbade me to go outside for the next three days.”
The father’s action speaks volumes. Alexander, like the transporters of the Jews, like his own father, is going to have to be quiet. Quiet out of fear. The German units also murdered Communist partisans.
“Sometime later in the village, a handwritten announcement began to circulate. It said: ‘Citizens, if you discover the body of a German soldier, you must inform the Kommandantur. If you find the body of a Russian soldier, you must bury it. However, if you find the body of a Jew, do not touch it!’ Then two or three weeks later, the bodies of the Jews started coming to the surface of the water. That’s how we knew they shot them in the river. When the other boys and I came to swim, we saw the bloated bodies floating. We saw our neighbors, Katia and Aunt Dounya. We pushed the bodies as far away as possible, waited an hour, and then went swimming…. Nobody tried to get them out. All of the bodies were undressed, the women were in underwear. The river was called the Laba.”
Alexander continued his life in this small village, swimming in the Laba River. This was the first time that he had spoken to people who weren’t from the village. It was the first time he had left his silence.
Chapter 11
THE LAYERS OF PLANKS
Childhood in Villegaudin, immersed in a Bressan countryside that was virtually unchanged in the 1960s, seems so close, so present, and so far away all at once. Everything was stable, or at least cyclical; like the purslane seeds my grandmother Victorine planted in the spring around our cement terrace, always in the same spots, to bloom amid the gravel. There was the green bench, the wooden wing chair that we always had to repaint after the thaw. The wisteria blossomed everywhere, its interlacing branches transforming the facade of our house into a Manet painting. The ancient roses, tiny but so sweet-smelling. The first cuckoo song in the spring forest, heard from afar, that brought good luck to those who happened to have money in their pockets. The big ditches around the moats of the château on whose grounds my family lived, its two beautiful stone lions reigning for eternity.
Everything remained, everything was renewed.
As Catherine Deneuve says in Indochine, “Youth is believing that things don’t have to come apart.”
Never, ever, had anyone explained to me that one day we would have to leave; we were one with this place. No one had even told me that we had to die. Ever. For me the Château de la Marche would always be “chez nous.” This meant that when we heard the approach of any motor, be it a car, a truck, or sputtering motorbike, we looked up to see who could possibly be coming; an unfamiliar vehicle was an event.
At eighteen, like many young people, I kept a diary. I ended it with these words: “I’ll write about just one week because my life is a succession of weeks.” This was country life before tractors or television. Everything, absolutely everything in life, was a function of repetition, repeated acts generation after generation, time without end. From the outside, this might be termed “habit and custom.” For us, it was simply life.
I picture myself with my cousins, shouldering pitchforks, going into the fields full of freshly cut green hay drying in the sun. I can still smell it, still hear the scurrying of little gray mice fleeing at our approach. I can taste the blackberries from the brambles. We learned life by observing it, or rather, we were immersed in a universe where objects, actions, and seasons were all of a piece. And objects were one with actions.
When, much later, after years at the university, I came as an adult priest to the Ukrainian or Moldavian countryside, I would suddenly find myself mesmerized by the smell of a room recently whitewashed, a smell I recalled so well from a distant time and place. I was moved by the sight of a farmer throwing corn to her chickens, a gesture I knew well but had forgotten, buried as deeply as if under concrete. Not to mention the daffodils and red tulips in a freshly tilled garden, with pink peonies planted at the entrance and a dog chained to the gate. I had already seen all this. This was home. This was us.
No doubt that is also why I felt my own self come into question every time a peasant described a crime scene in which a familiar object or farm tool would appear but wouldn’t b
e serving its intended purpose in village life. It might be a shovel, a table, a pitchfork, a bowl, a chair.
Often, one of these objects would appear in isolation; isolated from its proper use but also from the person who had transported it. In the rural world, an object doesn’t exist by itself; it is always attached to a certain know-how.
The first time I had such an impression was at Rawa Ruska. It was in front of the mass grave in the hamlet of Borove where they killed the last 1,500 Jews from the ghetto. The villagers told me the story on several occasions. I went back many times. They all recalled that the German shooter had put down his guns, apparently Mauser rifles, on a table several yards from the ditch. A farm table in a field.
Many also remembered a black box on this same table, also belonging to the shooter. The box contained mints that the neighborhood children, especially the youngest ones, would sneak while the shooter was busy killing the Jews. A box of candy on a farm table in a field … Where did this table come from? And this box? And these mints?
All the witnesses recalled two chickens, bought in the village, that the Germans had grilled themselves for fear of being poisoned by the farmers. But where did these chickens come from?
At the beginning of our research, I was so surprised to discover these familiar objects displaced in this way that I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask where they came from.
However, when I heard people talking about wooden planks, it was too much. Many witnesses, especially in western Ukraine and in Belarus, described wooden boards placed over the ditches. The Jewish victims, already beaten, had to stand on these planks to be shot so they would fall directly into the ditch—dead, in their death agony, or sometimes only wounded. There could be just one plank, or several, or, as in Bogdanivka,1 a full walkway where four rows of Jews could be lined up to be felled by machine gun and fall into a ravine. No doubt, this was one of the most deadly killing grounds for Jews in the East, for 45,000 victims were murdered around Christmastime in 1941.
It was not during the actual interviews but much later, as I read the translations, that the question took root in me. Something didn’t sound right. In the testimonies, the planks seemed to come out of nowhere, as if by magic. But who had actually carried them and why wouldn’t anyone talk about it?
The answer took years of investigation to discover. Surprisingly, it was easier for witnesses to say that they had seen Jews from their windows, carried their dead bodies, or taken their clothes than it was to explain where those wooden boards came from.
But why? I figured that someone had been requisitioned to bring the planks and someone else to put them over the grave once it was full of bodies. I thought of this particular person as akin to the man who lifts the guillotine blade between beheadings. We’re not talking about the murderer or the victim but about a crime technician, like a stagehand who transports the flats for theater productions from location to location, only the production in question was the spectacle of putting one’s Jewish neighbors to death.
Who were the transporters and layers of the planks?
In order to understand, I had to listen again to the accounts of several witnesses. They mentioned the boards as being placed across the ditches for many of the executions. The Jews were forced to go forward, one by one, or in families or groups. Even if the planks were not an official element of the killings, there are mentions of them in German depositions as well. Twenty-four years after the fact, Ostap Hucalo, the Ukrainian mayor of the small town of Bolekhov, near Ivano-Frankivsk, recalled the massacre of two thousand Jews—men, women and children—in the local cemetery in 1943.
“A board had been placed over the ditch on which the Jew had to go naked. I still remember that the Jewish families held hands on the plank. Then they were shot in the head from behind and then they fell into the ditch. There were a few Jews down in the ditch who had to lay the dead bodies in rows.”2
Planks were also used in Belarus, in the districts of Disna, for example, where Fadei, a witness to an execution of local Jews, explained, “Planks had been laid across the ditches. The Jews were beaten as they were brought to the ditch, in groups of five, forced to undress, and pushed naked out onto the planks. As soon as the victims stepped onto the planks, they were cut down with salvos of automatic weapons fire and fell into the ditch. Then a new group of five Jews followed.”
The use of planks for the shootings was very often accompanied by extraordinary violence in forcing the Jewish victims to step forward and stand, sometimes in family groups, in order to be shot. The number five suggests that the shooter in this village was using a Mauser rifle, with a five-bullet clip. How many times in the vicinity of mass graves have we found little cartridge clips into which the shooters loaded five bullets?
In Berejany, in Ukraine, we met a neighbor who had observed an execution. “From the second floor of my house, I watched the atrocities committed by Hitler’s soldiers through a pair of binoculars. I saw people get undressed, walk on a plank that lay across the ditch, and be shot by a shooter with a machine-pistol. These executions were horrible to watch.”
The use of binoculars by neighbors was quite frequent, as it permitted them to watch, risk-free, from home.
It was on August 20, 2005, in Iltsy, a small Ukrainian village in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, while questioning Fedor, that I was again attuned to a deafening silence. Although the villagers spoke easily of the way the planks were laid out at extermination sites, the silence remained total around the identity and actions of those who procured them, transported them to the ditches, and then took them back to the farms after the crime. It was especially quiet around those who moved them around during the actual execution.
I hadn’t understood until this point that the planks were mobile. Unconsciously, I had perceived them as a fixture, like gallows or a guillotine. A stable instrument for killing that didn’t require a continuous human presence. Or local responsibility.
Fedor explained that the function of the plank was in fact quite different. We met him in a peculiar fashion. We were with the whole team scoping out the elderly people in the market at Iltsy. I watched our researchers circulating among the colorful booths, speaking to one old woman after another. From afar, I noticed a heavyset farmer coming toward the market with a basket of tomatoes under her arm. As soon as we approached her, she let on that she knew all about what had happened here during the war, but that we would have to wait to speak with her until she had sold all her tomatoes. We waited. Once her basket was empty, she got into our van and guided us along a dirt road to her hamlet. Upon arriving home, she simply told her husband to put the cow in the stable. “Go ahead, talk to them, and I will go take care of the cow.” It was then that we understood she had led us to him, this serious little man in blue overalls who had seen the execution of the Jews up close.
Fedor put his cow’s lead in his wife’s hands, climbed into our van, and took us to the edge of what had been the ditch, to the place where there had been planks … and people laying planks. He started to speak softly, with a somber air. Almost immediately, he talked about the ditch and the planks, plunging into his memories.
“If the pile of bodies was too high, they moved the plank farther along…. They would move the plank so that the level would be uniform and there wouldn’t be bumps…. Five or six people could walk on it without it breaking.”
So there wouldn’t be bumps…. This expression resonated from my childhood. It was used for wheat, potatoes, or cabbages. On my grandparents’ farm in Villegaudin, after we carried the harvested wheat in burlap sacks into the granaries, we would make a pile about three or four feet high. Then, with shovels or rakes, we would even out the surface so that there wouldn’t be bumps. We did the same thing in the beet silos.
Fedor spoke of the plank and the Jews’ common grave the way we talked about a wheat or cabbage harvest.
After realizing what Fedor was referring to when he talked about the common grave, I made a decision: to ask several wom
en farmers how they filled ditches with silage. They explained to me that the best way to protect food from frost on farms was to bury it at the bottom of a ditch, in the garden. I pressed them to know concretely what this entailed. I even convinced one of them to bring me and my team down to the bottom of a ditch, or iamy in Russian.
After climbing down a small metal ladder, we found ourselves nine feet below ground, in darkness. We were in an empty ditch that could be filled with potatoes or cabbages once they were gathered next autumn. I refrained from explaining why I was so interested in how these ditches were dug on farms. As our time with this farmer was winding down, she lifted her arms in the middle of the street and proudly exclaimed, “In Ukraine, we say there is no good farmer without three ditches in his garden.” This hearty saying was a revelation to me. The iamy are an everyday part of the Russo-Soviet landscape.
And planks? Do peasants also use planks? And for what purpose? Thinking aloud, I asked if ever planks were put down perpendicularly over the ditches during ensilage.
Svetlana, our interpreter, explained to me that in certain regions, Ternopil in particular, the potato ditches were very narrow, a bit like trenches. When it came time to sell the potatoes that had been stored in the ditch over the winter, planks were laid across the ditches for the customers. From these planks, they lowered their baskets on a rope down to the bottom. There, the seller, or one of his employees, would fill the basket, after which the client pulled it back up. I was told this technique protected the vegetables from being stepped on.
Were the Germans aware of these local agricultural practices? It’s easy to believe, when we consider how numerous the Volksdeutsche were in the Einsatzgruppen or the German police brigades. There were also Soviets in the Volksdeutsche; they knew the local customs. At the end of this interview with the farmer about the potatoes, one of our Ukrainian aides, Micha, who had been listening attentively, burst out, “So, the Germans ordered the peasants, ‘dig a ditch like you do for potatoes’!”
In Broad Daylight Page 12