Here again, to my surprise, Maria listed the names of the Jewish men summoned to the club and then shot. “I can name them all: Yankel, Doda, Mounik, Roiterman, two people, Maïté, the two young Meiers…. In all there were about fifteen men. They didn’t bring anything with them. They were summoned, loaded into a truck, and told that they were leaving for work.”
At several points during our interview, Maria returned again to the memory that she absolutely wanted to talk about: the dance. What she described was surreal; the Jews, mostly women, the elderly and children, made to dance in the club. And all the villagers brought to watch.
“They danced for a while. Then they were whipped so they would dance faster, which made the villagers watching begin to cry. They pitied the poor Jews whom they’d lived beside for several years now. The murderers started to threaten the villagers. They said that if anyone wanted to join the Jews, they could take him away too. There was a policeman from Baranivka playing music.”
The policeman hummed to give rhythm to the dance. “He didn’t really play an instrument, but he made music with a comb that he used like a harmonica. He made noises with his mouth. All the Jews, without exception, had to dance. First, they gathered them in the clubhouse, then they made them go outside. They had to dance surrounded by guards before the captive eyes of the villagers.
“The point was to frighten us. We had heard that they were going to shoot the Poles too, right after the Jews. The Poles were terrified. The Jews danced for close to an hour. They were exhausted, but every time they tried to stop, the Germans cried, “Dance!” and threatened them with whips so they kept going.
“The Germans pushed the older children to dance, but didn’t touch the younger ones, who stood here and there in little groups.”
Here Maria recalled an old crippled man.
“All the villagers were taken to watch. Our neighbor, Pess, a very old man, couldn’t stand up on his own. So they tied him to his wife and forced the two of them to dance. That moment has always stuck in my memory…. They were bound together with a large belt, and they were dancing…. When it was time to go to the edge of the ditch, the man literally couldn’t walk. So he and his wife were loaded onto the cart that followed the column of Jews and brought toward the site of the shooting.”
I stopped the video. The dance wasn’t simply a cruel and absurd game preceding the crime. The German viciousness was turned on the weakest. And the awful show was performed for the villagers, who had no choice but to watch. The murder of the Jews became a municipal event. There was a public dance followed by a public massacre.
To understand that the German shootings were far from traditional military executions, all we have to do is consider the fate of Mr. Pess.
“So, when the men were taken away, the Jewish women and children stayed in their houses?”
Maria replied, “Yes, they stayed quietly in their homes, as if none of this was their concern. There were quite a few mixed families; a lot of Polish and Ukrainian women were married to Jews and had children with them. These women got favorable treatment, and nobody harmed them, but the children of mixed couples were considered Jews and were exterminated.”
She had seen her Jewish neighbors summoned by the Germans, first the men. Then it was the women and children and the elderly who were taken to “the club.” She spoke of them all with great emotion.
Certain memories—repeated humiliation and cruelty—block out thought. The dark inventiveness in the sadism of genocidal murderers can seem limitless. I started the video again. Patrice, his voice calm, continued to ask questions, and Maria let her memories rise one after the other. The names of several families came up repeatedly. Her neighbors had become like toys to be switched on, broken, and finally destroyed.
Hatred, anti-Semitism, and the license to kill do not make all killers alike. In this village, the crime was transformed into a form of public amusement.
Chapter 13
THE COOKS AND THE SHOOTERS
Paris, June 10, 2013
Spring is slow to come and is over quickly. A compact mass of gray clouds swallows up all the light. Our morale is affected. One of the Yahad’s five investigative teams is back from the Ukrainian region of Jytomyr. As with each return, after seventeen long days of listening to old men and women share their memories of mass killings, the team has to adjust to the regular day-to-day of Paris, with its traffic jams, its metro, its tricolor traffic lights, the rapid steps of its pedestrians, its shop windows. In short, they have to adjust to life.
Alexy, the young Ukrainian who is the head of this team, calls me. He needs to talk. Among other things, he tells me that this past June 4 he met the daughter of a cook who had to prepare food for the shooters. Her name was Galina.
Several days later, I received the video of Galina; life had not been kind to her. Her hardened face was protected by a tight red scarf; she was rather small, and she had trouble walking. Around her left calf was a sort of white cloth bandage. She lived in one of those old public housing buildings that survive from the former collective farms, the kolkhozes. A sad gray concrete bungalow shared by four grandmothers, each one poorer and more diminished than the last. Once she was seated on a “bench” outside, her back against the house, she told her story without hesitation. Her neighbors, one after the other, approached, perhaps to support her, perhaps also to learn, because none of them had been there on the day the Jews were murdered.
I was desperate to see the video. In this kind of meeting, certain details can escape the interviewer. Alexy’s description rang true. Poor Galina spoke as best she could, relying on her knotty hands to help communicate what she could not say with her too-simple words. She wasn’t sitting on an actual bench but on a board propped up on two wooden blocks. Behind her was a brick wall painted with lime. To the right of her were some abandoned tools. The whole scene reeked of misery. Yet she had put on her Sunday best, as they say in Bresse, where I come from.
When she was asked if she had seen the Germans, she didn’t beat around the bush. She spoke directly: “Yes, when they shot.” The Germans she had seen were killers.
Some Jews had been sent to work in her collective. And then one day, some Germans all dressed in black appeared. One of them called out to Galina’s mother, “Hey, you, woman, go make us something to eat. We’re going to be hungry after the shootings.”
I raised my eyebrows: so, in occupied Russo-Soviet territory, one could requisition a cook with a few words tossed off brusquely, the cold, routine words of criminals who were obviously not on their first job.
Galina’s mother worked in the collective’s canteen. Later, the canteen would become a warehouse, then it would be abandoned and left empty. We’ve lost count of how many remains of dismantled Soviet collectives we have come across in the middle of immense prairies as we travel endless potholed roads. They are like shipwrecks in the middle of fields, vestiges of an abruptly vanished universe.
I listened attentively as Galina continued her story. It seems that as a child she went back and forth between the mass grave and the canteen where her mother worked. She said she mostly saw the beginning and end of the shootings. “There was only one who shot. The other Germans stood beside him. He yelled loudly…. He screamed at my mother: ‘Get going, give us something to eat!’ And my mother said to him: ‘It’s not ready yet.’”
This was the first time I had heard about phrases exchanged between a German gunman and the village cook. The gunman gives orders, she replies the way a canteen worker of today would to a rushed client. Galina spoke about it with the rough vocabulary of a simple woman, a member of a collective who has worked hard.
“Yes, it was at the edge of the grave, and we brought him food…. He shot them one by one…. His gun was big…. They were single shots. When he was done shooting, he walked around the ditch, and he shot inside to finish off the ones that were still alive.”
She explained in her own words how they murdered mothers and babies: “They took them li
ke this, fired, and then threw them in. First, they killed the mother, then the little baby. They only cried out once before they fell into the ditch.”
When the shootings were over, the Germans first stopped by the well, not far from the canteen. Before they ate, they had to remove the spots of the Jews’ blood. The well doesn’t exist anymore; it’s been filled in since that time. No trace of it remains.
Galina repeated several times the orders screamed at her mother.
“He was in uniform. He screamed loud! He yelled at my mother to make something for them to eat…. Yes, yes, in German: ‘Makta, gut! Makta eat!’”
The German seems to have addressed her mother with the same injunctions several times, including at the end of the meal. “They shot, and my mother cooked. He came up to my mother and yelled. My mother said to him, ‘Why are you yelling? Don’t you like the food?’ He replied, ‘Makta, gut! Makta gut!’ My mother said to him, ‘There is no gut!’ And they left.”
They washed their blood-covered boots and cleaned off the traces of the crime on their faces. Then, with their leather boots still wet, they went to eat. In the canteen.
This is a story of terrifying simplicity. I think, as I listen, about Galina’s mother, busy cooking as fast as possible, with Germans screaming at her while from just a few feet away she can hear the shots and the cries of the Jews falling one after the other. Surely, she had learned to cook so that the workers on the collective could get their strength back after hard work in the fields. But on this day, it was neither the harvest nor the gathering of potatoes or beets. It was the murder of the Jewish neighbors.
The cold pragmatism of the killing units is chilling. Can it really be that for mass murderers a routine crime is simply bracketed between an early morning coffee and a meal served at a local canteen? They talk about it as though it were a hunting party. This raises so many questions.
And what of the cook who has to fill the correct number of plates for the shooters and their auxiliaries, and have everything ready by the end of the fusillades? The genocidal criminals killed the Jews, then barked at the cook.
Galina’s account touches me: the Germans’ verbal abuse of the “little people” in the village is yet another manifestation of their urgency and their violence.
Quite a while ago, in July 2006, I met Hannah, the niece of another cook. She, too, was conscripted in the early morning before the shooting started. She lived in Romanivka,1 in eastern Ukraine.
The weather was good. She told her story sitting down low to the ground, on a tree trunk that had been stripped of its bark. She spoke kindly, punctuating her words with “my son,” as she looked at Andrej, who was translating at the time. It was as though she were speaking to one of her children. Yet her delicately spoken words revealed a very dark universe.
Apparently, there was no canteen in Romanivka. The Germans wanted to eat outdoors, with a view of the grave. Or, more precisely, they wanted to alternate between shooting and eating. This meant the shooting lasted quite a long time.
The Jews had been forced to dig a hole not far from the grave. It was a pit for a fire over which they could suspend a cooking pot. The wood for the fire had been torn out of Jewish houses. The food, a cow and a goat, was stolen from a Jewish farm. The cooks were Russian women, not Jews, conscripted in the early morning. The animals had been killed and prepared by the townsfolk. The tables and chairs were borrowed from the village primary school. In short, it was an open-air kitchen for an improvised banquet.
Several times our witness repeated, “I remember the Germans conscripted my aunt to do the cooking. They only wanted to eat big pieces of meat, they didn’t like the little ones. Then, some of them would shoot the Jews while the others ate and drank. Then those who had eaten went again to shoot the Jews, and those who had been shooting came back to eat. They killed people in groups of twenty-five. Mothers held their small children in their arms.”2
Hannah herself, a young, black-haired girl of ten, became a waitress for the day, serving at a murderers’ banquet. Curiously, the way the table was set remained a vivid memory for her. She recalled the iron nails that had been hammered into the trees so firmly that the shooters could hang their guns on them while they ate. They alternated, two by two, between the banquet table and the common grave. The Jews waited, naked, stripped of their belongings. The meal was washed down with alcohol brought by the Germans in their trucks. While the Germans ate, the Jews agonized.
With her mind’s eye on both the table and the grave, she talked and talked. “I don’t know anymore what time their orgy ended. They were drinking, singing. They were drunk. They were shooting at the same time. You could see little arms, little legs that spilled over the edge of the ditch. There was one woman who was very fat. They shot her several times, but she didn’t fall into the ditch, so they had to go up to her and push her in.”
It was so hard to listen! I lowered my eyes. It was terrible to glimpse the two faces of the crime at once: the shooting of the Jews and the meal of the killers. And difficult too to listen to someone who served a meal only feet away from the shooting of Jews.
For Hannah, the two were one: the meal to be served and the murdered Jewish neighbors. The killers became guests, and the guests killers. The meal seemed to last as long as the crime. There was no separation. In Romanivka, the shooters ate, drank, and shot. Between the table and the common grave, there was no barbed wire, no door, not even a partition, not even a thicket.
Is this what a genocidal human being is like? Capable of murdering an entire population while at the same time, in the same spot, forcing people to serve them big pieces of meat?
I am reminded of the German gunmen in Borove, not far from Rawa Ruska, who brought a box of mints to freshen their breath during the shooting. I recall the one who had cold cuts and vodka set up on the same table as his rifles, while the Jews paraded before him to be shot.
These scenes, which are so hard to hold simultaneously in one’s mind, were in fact not even remotely separate. The genocidal man lives, circulates, murders, eats, and drinks in the same human territory as everyone else. In order to fathom his behavior, we try to picture it as happening elsewhere. Yet his strength resides not in separation but in the inscription of his crime in the very heart of our society, be it rural, urban, traditional, or modern.
He isn’t coiled within our humanity like a serpent in its nest. He participates fully. This is surely the thing we cannot bear to acknowledge and that makes him both invisible and public at the same time. We cannot see what we cannot stand to see together.
Of the 3,900 witnesses interviewed by the time of this writing, only two described the setting up of kitchens for the criminals. Did we miss something? Is it possible that we forgot to ask if the canteen was functioning on the days of the shootings? Especially when the shootings lasted several days? I decided to clear my conscience with more research.
I consulted the archives concerning the site of the biggest shooting, or at least the best-known in the territory of the former Soviet Union: the Babi Yar ravine, in Kiev, Ukraine.3 Could we find any trace of the installation of a kitchen for the shooters in this small valley, where the killings lasted at least two days without interruption?
The answer was not long in coming. Three alarming texts from the same trial, one from a chef in Babi Yar, another from a supplier, the third from a shooter. Three links in the murderers’ “food supply chain.”
Babi Yar is a pretty little valley situated today in a large leafy park in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. If you go into the park and gradually ascend the path, your steps will lead to a sort of precipice. There is a beautiful menorah in black metal, not far from a large, gaping hole. This is the spot where more than thirty thousand Jews were murdered by bullets on the 29th and 30th of September, 1941.
These were the Jews of Kiev. Several days before the shootings, posters appeared all over the walls of the capital. The Jews had to leave their houses and apartments in order to be deported.
ALL THE JEWS IN KIEV AND THE SURROUNDING AREA MUST PRESENT THEMSELVES ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1941, AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING ON THE CORNER OF THE MELNIKOVSKIA STREETS (NEAR THE CEMETERIES). THEY MUST BE IN POSSESSION OF THEIR IDENTITY PAPERS, THEIR MONEY, AND THEIR VALUABLES, ALONG WITH WARM CLOTHING, LINENS, ETC. THE JEWS WHO DISOBEY THIS ORDER AND ARE FOUND ELSEWHERE WILL BE SHOT. CITIZENS WHO BREAK INTO THE APARTMENTS ABANDONED BY THE JEWS AND STEAL THEIR BELONGINGS WILL BE SHOT.4
More than ten thousand of them went toward the station, thinking they would be taking the train. The German units corralled them into what could only be called ravines of death. As they approached the valley, the Jews went through a barricade, manned by the Germans, which prevented them from crossing back, like a fish trap. Then they had to leave their baggage, their jewels, their clothing.
Every Jew—man, woman, child—was murdered by a person armed with a gun. More than thirty thousand victims saw their killers, while each killer looked into the eyes of each of his Jewish victims. In broad daylight. Thirty thousand personal crimes.
A long time ago, I interviewed some Ukrainian women from Kiev who lived next to the Babi Yar ravine. They had gone up onto the roofs of their houses, or into their attics, in order to watch. These interviews took place at the beginning of my research. I didn’t know at the time that, at the scene of the crime, there were a lot more people present than the gunmen and the Jews; there were also cooks and suppliers.
Today, more than ten years later, recalling this ravine that I visited so often on days of national mourning, I sift through the archives.
A German, a certain Georg P.,5 was questioned in 1967, because he coordinated the kitchens at Babi Yar. He testified, “I was a fourrier.6 It was a lot of work…. We got to Kiev at five in the morning…. We had to organize a kitchen and dining room. There was no water and no electricity…. My task was to get the kitchen working and to organize the supplies. I didn’t have anything to do with managing the ammunition….
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