“The Aktion was already prepared…. Everyone had his orders…. I don’t know anything about the executions. I wasn’t outside…. We heard that an action would take place. We had to organize more provisions than usual…. H. came to tell me how much food to organize…. I don’t know who transported the provisions…. It was the same day as the action. Usually, I had to coordinate the feeding of one hundred twenty people. For those two days, it was for four hundred. There was no distribution of alcohol on these days. There was only a little rum in the tea. I learned only afterward why I had to prepare so much. There were open-face sandwiches and tea.”
Thus, I understand that at Babi Yar, beginning at dawn, while the assembling and undressing of Jews for execution has already begun, a man, a German off to the side, is busying himself in improvised kitchens.
For him, a mass shooting is foremost a question of supply, of mouths to feed, the mouths of murderers. He is ordered to prepare food for four hundred, for the killers and their acolytes.
Georg P. seems, in his role as cook, to be used to mass murders. He has already had to do similar work but for smaller executions. In an improvised locale, off to the side of the ravine, he is busy furnishing sandwiches and tea with rum.
He talks about a dining room that he needs to install, which means he isn’t far from the ravine. The shooters must have had to come out and sit down to replenish their strength before heading back to the shootings.
Part of the food seems to have been delivered to the site. He isn’t the one responsible for the delivery. His job is to prepare the food. Another German, a certain Oscar C.,7 during the same trial, will tell the story of the delivery of the supplies to the crime scene. Oscar C., with his van full of food, takes the same route as the Jews walking toward their death through the streets of Kiev. He crosses the German roadblock, sees the mound of suitcases that the Jews have been forced to leave behind; he drives on toward the site of the shootings, where he drops off the bread, sausage, and grog.
“Obersturmführer8 M. came to see me, saying that he needed me to transport provisions. P. had given me bread, sausages, and tea. I transported it with my Ukrainian driver. I saw a long convoy of people. It looked like the migration of a whole population. When we got to the barricades, there were comrades at a table. They were writing down names and numbers. This was where the baggage had to be handed in. There were already mountains of suitcases when I arrived…. I went on one hundred meters [one hundred yards] past the barricade onto a plain of about three hundred or four hundred meters. At the end of the plain, you could see the edges of the ravine. We could see the barriers, and I could hear the shots. The Jews were led there by men in uniform, either Wehrmacht or SchuPo,9 I can’t remember anymore, but in any case, it wasn’t our commando. I called over one of our men to give him the provisions…. I hadn’t transported alcohol to the ravine. It’s possible that there was rum in the tea. It was cold that day.”
Yes, it was cold…. This is the first time I read a statement from a German whose only concerns are the cold, hunger, and thirst of the murderers; the column of Jews he passes in his van seem transparent to him. While thousands of Jewish families were beaten and forced to strip before being murdered, the delivery man seems mostly preoccupied with making his delivery on time, even though nothing, not even a wooden barrier, separates him from the Jews he doesn’t see.
One of the shooters, Viktor T.,10 as part of the same trial, describes what happens in the ravine, just a few feet from where the provisions are dropped off. Murder in all of its horror. Butchery. With breaks every ten to fifteen minutes so that the murderers can warm up with rum-spiked tea that the head cook has prepared and had delivered to the edge of the ravine.
“The next day, they put us into trucks early and we left…. I found myself in a very wide ravine, like the anti-tank ravines we would dig. There was a curve in the ravine…. What I saw there was the worst thing I ever saw in Russia. I hadn’t shot [anyone] before. People were packed lying down like in a tin of herring. I don’t know how many layers there were already. I had to go down into the grave. They were bringing people who were half undressed. There were soldiers sitting on the edges, reloading our guns and tossing them to us. It was horrible to be standing among those stacked cadavers. It’s indescribable. It was horrible. And that was where we had to shoot. We were relieved every ten or fifteen minutes. It was very long. During our breaks, we got hot grog, or something of the sort. In any case, it had alcohol in it. On the other side of the ravine, I saw countless clothes and jewels. They called it the ‘jewelry store.’”
Here we have the summary outline of the food chain for the killers of Babi Yar on the day of the genocide: Georg P. is busy in his kitchen; bread to cut, to butter, sausage and tea with rum to heat. Oscar C delivers it all, driving alongside the columns of Jews. And Viktor T., along with many others, fires into a ravine that, for several days, has been turned into an extermination site.
Across from Viktor T. is what they call the “jewelry store”: the place where the Jews are robbed of their jewelry and their personal belongings. Above the ravine, along with the loaders refilling the magazines to throw down to the shooters, is the food and grog that are available at breaks every ten to fifteen minutes.
A pretty little green valley transformed into a valley of extermination, without barbed wire, without a train, without tattoos. And yet, for a few hours, or rather a few days, certain spots are given names, like the jewelry store.
In Auschwitz too, they assigned names to certain places: Kanada,11 Mexiko.12 The murderers seem to dress up the landscape of their crimes, albeit furtively, like landscape painters, not hesitating to label the sites of their worst horrors with a certain elegance and humorous flair. The topography of crime is thus named by the murderers with words that cover over the crime scene in proper terms.
So, it seems clear: at Babi Yar, hunger, thirst, cold, and the killers’ need for rest were taken into serious consideration in the planning of the crime.
On such blood-soaked days, one might have thought that the human extermination machine would forget to eat, drink, or rest. Such was not the case. Those who organized the mass shootings seem never to have sacrificed the comfort of their staff.
Chapter 14
THE CURIOUS CHILDREN
Curious children running through the streets exist in all civilizations but especially in little villages, where daily life repeats itself ceaselessly over the course of seasons, through the cycle of sowing and reaping.
I remember when, as a young professor of mathematics in Haute Volta, Burkina Faso in 1983, I would pass through villages on my blue motorbike and see hordes of children running everywhere. They rushed out of their straw-covered huts, playing and crying loudly, “Toubabou! Toubabou!” This meant “The white man! The white man!” A white man on a motorbike was, for a few minutes, a great spectacle.
Most of the witnesses we spoke to in the villages of the ex-Soviet Union had been part of the streams of children who followed in the wake of the columns of Jews during the German occupation. They would sometimes accompany them on the sidewalks of towns or run to keep up with them through the fields of grain.
It is virtually impossible today to imagine the pain endured by men and women being beaten as they were marched to their death simply for being Jewish while their neighbors’ children ran up and down beside them, more likely than not just to watch the show. It is difficult to visualize this coexistence, the juxtaposition of the mass murder of one part of the village and the curiosity it excited in the children of the same village, a curiosity that would be banal were it not focused on a crime of genocide.
Yet, it happened. I think back to April 2006, in Kamianka-Bouzka, a small town in western Ukraine. A man was standing there. A short man. Planted like a post in the middle of the road. He had a visor cap pushed far down on his head, like a jockey. We were interviewing him in a street that was still muddy from the previous night’s rain. He said, “I was standing here where
I am right now. I saw the Jews being killed.”
I was listening distractedly. At the beginning of my investigation, it seemed improbable to me that a child could have come to watch the murder of the Jews as a spectator, like going to the circus. And yet there he was, straight as a post, describing the scene with big gestures.
Suddenly, a stout woman of about fifty, in an apron and a scarf that nearly swallowed her face, burst out of her house. Three other women followed. They walked toward me at a fast and furious pace and started to scream. I asked my translator what they were saying. Svetlana whispered in my ear, “They’re saying, ‘Don’t take my kitchen garden! Don’t take my garden!’”
I found myself in the middle; the old man dressed like a jockey to my right and to my left the three women coming toward me threateningly. In a flash, I understood: the dead were buried under the garden!
At the beginning of my inquiries, I would sometimes cut an interview short, because I was incapable of processing the unbearable contradiction between the ordinary lives of those who were not murdered because they weren’t Jews, Gypsies, Communists, or handicapped, and the others. The proximity of villagers defending their kitchen gardens and those who lay buried beneath them was just too much.
There were many times when I asked the cameraman to stop shooting because I didn’t want to, and simply couldn’t, know any more! And then, little by little, perhaps hardened, but perhaps also animated by a combative flame that made me realize I shouldn’t give in to terror, because terror is the strategy of mass murder, I have grown able to hear the unhearable.
Today, I know that when the Jews were gathered in the market square or along the main road, everyone in the village understood that they were heading for the mass graves that had been dug by local farmers on orders of the mayor, who had been his given orders by the Germans a few hours earlier. Now, I know.
I know that hordes of children, boys and girls, but mostly boys, rushed out from their farmyards, their schools, or the fields where they were working to play hide and seek with the police or the Germans, who tried to shoo them away like crows. I know, and yet I can’t get used to it.
I have met these children, who have grown old now. Their words unnerve me and raise questions about the human capacity to bear the horror of genocide. Children who were witnesses to massacres.
It is May 28, 2010. We are in eastern Ukraine.
I will never forget Vladimir. I met him in one of those flat, rectilinear streets that make up the former kolkhozes. This one was called Novopodilsk, and it was an old Jewish colony in the Dniepropetrovsk region.
Dressed simply in a checked shirt and blue cloth cap, Vladimir has light eyes. He stands squarely in the middle of his farmyard, facing the camera. His parents were sergeants in the kolkhoz, which means they were chiefs of a unit of manual laborers. His mother was the milking sergeant, and his father was a sergeant in the fields.
In the oppressive heat of the Ukrainian summer, a storm grumbles in the distance. We see the lightning, hear the thunder, see that the storm is approaching, but I can’t tell exactly how far away it is. David, our cameraman, is worried and keeps saying, “I’m scared of thunder!” Suddenly, one of the lightning bolts appears much closer. Hastily, we pile all our equipment into our van and ask Vladimir if he knows of somewhere in the village that would be sheltered from the rain where we could continue. Without hesitating, he points toward the center of town, indicating the school. It’s a typical old Soviet school, a single story, raised up a few feet on concrete. A big bronze soldier by the door memorializes the dead of the Great Patriotic War.
The school closed its doors two years ago. Walking in, we find ourselves in a damp, cold hallway with a ruined ceiling, leading to deserted, silent classrooms. We set up in this dilapidated hallway. Vladimir starts to tell his story.
In his memory, the one execution that stands out the most is that of the village children with only one Jewish parent. They were called mixed-race children.1 These children were in preschool with all the others, in the very building that is giving us shelter from the storm. A Ukrainian policeman came to the door with his horse and cart. He had orders to load all the half-Jewish children into the cart.
“The policeman came into the school. The teacher pointed out each of the half-Jewish children: ‘Juden! Juden! Juden!’”
We shivered. I swept my eyes over the classroom. This abandoned school with its moldy wooden desks was the site of an unbearable act of selection among students, in which the teacher was complicit.
The policeman loaded the children into his cart.
Vladimir’s grandmother lived on the farm right across from the school. Apparently, she tried to stop the roundup but to no effect. The oldest of the children was six; there were also babies among them. Their young parents were at work in the kolkhoz fields and didn’t witness the arrest. They didn’t learn about the murder until it was too late, in the evening upon their return from the fields.
The horse and cart made their way to a mass grave that had been specially dug a few miles outside of town. Four Germans stood around its perimeter. Vladimir followed the cart across the fields. “There were grapes growing…. I went through the vineyards to follow the cart … and then, we saw …”
Vladimir takes some time explaining how he came to watch the whole scene. First, he describes how he was in the vineyards, stealing grapes, not far from the mass grave. We decide to take our van together to the scene of the crime. Standing on the site of the grave, I ask, “So, where were you exactly?” He points to some distant vineyards. I’m surprised. “But those vineyards are far away. How could you see from there?”
Flustered, he answers, “I came through the cornfield, to see. For us children, it was interesting.”
Countless times I have heard this phrase, in Russian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, Polish: “For us children, it was interesting….” Is a child always interested in watching, at no risk to himself, the murder of his schoolmates? Does the absence of danger for the child spectator, in conjunction with the absence of any barrier between him and the scene of the crime, transform murder into a compelling show?
It’s true that the situation is unique; if you see a murder in the streets of Paris or New York, you are in danger. The murderer or his accomplices may want to kill you too since you are a witness. Your presence is unauthorized by the killers.
But in the case of the mass crimes against the Jews, the neighbors and children present rarely ran any sort of risk. The crimes became spectacles for a considerable number of Soviet children. And, of course, there was also pervasive anti-Semitism as well as Nazi propaganda justifying the murder.
I feel a mounting disgust for our species. The sort of nausea that makes you want to quit the human race. Yet I continue my dialogue.
“How many babies did you see have their heads bashed against the walls of the cart?”
“Twenty.”
I close my eyes for a moment. I tell myself not to waver. But this man’s calm is hard to bear as he recounts a double horror: the murder of the “half-Jew” children of his village coupled with the fact that he, a child himself, spent a whole day watching.
Many of the victims were the same age as this witness. I ask him if he knew any of the children killed. He stammers, “Yes.” Yes, he saw four of his cousins shot. He barely remembers their names. Although he does recall that one was called Boris. He was one of the four children of a Ukrainian aunt married to a Jewish man. I ask if the children tried to run to escape being killed or at least acted scared. He said, “They didn’t move because they saw how the babies’ heads had been smashed against the walls of the cart and they were afraid of the same thing happening to them.”
The interview lasts a long time. Vladimir has a little blue string around his neck with a cell phone attached, hidden under his shirt. It rings constantly. His wife is calling him, warning him to stop talking to strangers who may be spies. Finally, he turns the phone off. He wants to talk to us. Although his face bet
rays no emotion, his body seems to remember, as though he has never really left the cornfield by the ditch.
Vladimir’s testimony resonates with me.
We know very little about the German units’ murder of children with one Jewish parent, or Mischlinge. I had met Nina, a survivor from Crimea, who told me that her Gentile mother was asked to turn over her daughter while she herself would remain free. The murderers seemed to scrupulously follow the Nazi rules of selection regarding those they considered Mischlinge, and therefore condemned to death. But I never imagined that the children would be selected during class. Nor did I imagine the selection would be performed by a local policeman barging into school.
Later that evening, in the same village of Novopodilsk, another villager, Sergueï, tells us that his mother saw that policeman return covered in blood. “What did you do with those Jews and those children you had on the cart this morning?” she asked. Sergueï overheard the unvarnished response, “We didn’t have enough ammunition, so I tore a piece of wood from the cart and crushed the heads of the children with it.”
It is horrible to read the transcript of the SS chiefs discussing the murder of half-Jewish children during their meeting at the Wannsee villa2 in suburban Berlin in 1942. But to be in the dilapidated corridors of the school where their selection took place, to go to the common grave where these children were murdered, is to truly understand and still not comprehend.
Vladimir is for me one of the most painful enigmas of my species. How can a typical child watch the murder of other children under the most horrific conditions with five or six of his friends, for an entire day? Did anti-Semitism block out the conscience of these children? Did it blind them to the point of losing all compassion and all sense of the other as a fellow member of the human race?
We know from the history of the Cambodian genocide how many children and young adolescents were party to the killings. Anti-Semitism and racism have a repulsive effect on the conscience of young human beings. Was Vladimir from an anti-Semitic family? Maybe, because he said on several occasions, “But they were only half-breeds!”
In Broad Daylight Page 15