I couldn’t believe it: an old retiree, apparently alone, motionless and silent on an anonymous bench. Within him was a witness whose memory of the murder of the Jews proved quite precise. His family, who lived across from the bench, agreed to let him get into our van. With the camera rolling, we drove through the village or, rather, along the paths of his memory.
Right away, he guided us to the center of Inhulets, to what he called the theater. It was a large, flat, white building with big wooden doors that looked as if they had been shut for a long time. The sun was leaden.
Sitting on another bench, next to the theater, he told us his family memories with great nostalgia. He explained how his father and his whole family had come to live in this Jewish colony.
“How did we end up here? … At the time, the roof tiles of the Jewish houses were tin. After a violent storm, the roofs were torn off. My father was a skilled tinsmith, so the Jews came to offer him work. They brought him here to re-cover their houses with tin. [Here, the witness cries.] That’s how we ended up in the Jewish colony. At the time, this colony was only Jews, there were no Ukrainians or Russians here, except for the miller, the mechanic who ran the mill, and then us …”
Yevgeny couldn’t help crying. His family had left western Ukraine after having suffered under Soviet repression, long before the war. His grandfather had been branded a kulak and had lost everything. I understood that for him and for his parents, the village of Inhulets, or rather the kolkhoz, had been not only a haven of peace but also a Soviet structure for reintegrating his family. His father was able to work and be admitted to a kolkhoz. The families of kulaks often remained tainted by their history and were rejected by the Soviet regime.
Yevgeny’s entire universe shifted again when the German units came to Inhulets to exterminate the Jewish-populated kolkhoz, which was basically the entire village. “One day, there was a raid. The Germans and the police surrounded the Jewish territory and took all the Jews into the theater building. We have a big theater, it still exists …”
On that same day, Yevgeny, the son of a Ukrainian worker, found himself requisitioned, pulled into a criminal machine.
“Early in the morning, the sergeant1 came to see me at home. At the time, I was working with horses, working the earth. The sergeant told me to harness the horses to my cart and to go to the front of the theater. By now, all the Jews had been gathered in the theater. They had been told to bring their things and their valuables because they were going to leave.”
His words were interrupted by sobs. He wiped his eyes with a big white handkerchief. He went on to describe what happened at the theater door. Four other villagers had also been requisitioned with their carts, “When we arrived in front of the theater, there were five carts in all. The Jews loaded their things onto the carts, and then they were lined up into a column and taken away. The column was led by the Germans and the police.”
In the very place where we were talking, he had had to wait for the Jews to come out of the theater, which had been transformed for a night into a prison. His hay cart was transformed into a transport vehicle for Jewish possessions: their luggage, their jewelry, everything they had brought with them.
I asked him calmly to explain where he waited with his cart, where his horse was, and where the other carts were waiting.
With his long arms, he showed us the exact spots. Then, without hesitation, he explained that the Jews put their things into the empty carts themselves and then waited to the right of the theater door.
Our photographer took shots of the theater doors, closed ever since; of the places where the carts waited, and also of the road on which the Jews walked toward their death. In silence, standing to the side, I looked at the theater, the doors, the road. Sixty years ago, the Jews, suddenly deprived of everything, couldn’t know their murder was so near.
Yevgeny began to take us through his memory of transporting the goods of his Jewish neighbors on the day of their murder. Then he was quiet, his eyes vacant. He agreed to get back into our van and to guide us to the extermination site.
Certain witnesses speak coldly, with no apparent emotion, without so much as a tear for the death of their neighbors. Not so Yevgeny. He reminded us several times that he knew them all by name. Some of the Jews had been part of the kolkhoz for a long time. Others had arrived recently from western Ukraine as refugees from the war. They had tried to flee the Germans at the beginning of the occupation and thought they were safe in this Jewish village lost in the steppes. But that was not the case.
Nowhere in our research had we found even the smallest hamlet where the Germans didn’t turn up to murder the Jews.
As we approached the extermination site, Yevgeny began to speak again.
“They went off to the south, in the direction of Chyroke…. There was a natural ravine there, and the ditches were already dug. The Germans had taken twenty-five Communists there…. They had dug an enormous ditch because there were many, many Jews. In fact, they dug two ditches separated by a path. That’s where they took the Jews. The column stopped marching fifty meters [fifty yards] from the ditches and the Jews were forced to undress. They had to get fully naked, the women, the children, the elderly—all, without exception. I waited with the other drivers on the hill, and the Jews were in the ravine. So we could see perfectly what was happening below.”
Yevgeny spoke more and more. He didn’t seem to see us anymore. He saw the Jews there, where he had stood more than sixty years ago.
“Then it started. They brought the Jews onto the path between the two ditches, and the firing squad, posted on the other side of the ditch, shot them with machine guns. The naked bodies fell into the ditch…. We had lived in this village for a long time, and we knew a lot of Jews. We knew all of them, the women, the children, the old people….”
Yevgeny cried more warm tears. For him, these were not Jews who were murdered but names and faces. Since the beginning of our investigations, I’ve been struck by the fact that those who cry and sometimes have to stop talking are usually the ones who recall names and faces. For others, their neighbors had become anonymous “Jews.”
He cried and wiped his eyes several times but wanted to continue talking. This was the old man who, a few hours earlier, had been waiting immobile on his bench, facing the door of his house. He was speaking today for the first time.
He had to stay until the end of the shootings because he had to collect the clothes of the dead. It was only once the firing had stopped, and the bodies had fallen into the ditch, that the four carts could drive into the ravine to the place where the Jews had undressed.
“Once the shooting was over, it was a terrible sight, naked bodies every which way in the ditch…. I can’t talk about it…. Some were still moving. Then they told us to bring our carts to the pile of clothes. They ordered us to load them onto our carts and transport them to Chyroke.”
I knew he would have to hold his horses tightly because the smell of blood would make them desperate to bolt. The words that came next surprised me.
“We deposited the clothes stolen from the Jews in the church at the edge of the village that the Germans were using as a warehouse. We unloaded the clothes, and we left. I don’t know what they did next with these things. There, I have told you everything I saw.”
The church of a neighboring village became a storage site for the possessions of the murdered Jews, a warehouse for the clothes of the dead. For Germans, coming from a country deeply marked by Christianity, the local church had become a warehouse for goods stolen from murder victims. It was perhaps irrational, but when I heard this, I thought of German centurions: Gott mit uns (God with us)!
Sometimes during our investigations, when a witness is too upset or too tired from age, I hesitate. Should I interrupt the interview? But on this day, I had no hesitation. It was too rare to meet someone who had been requisitioned to carry the clothes and possessions of Jews and who was willing to talk about it. Everything that touches on the taking of good
s seems to provoke silence. I have met and questioned many diggers and fillers. But this was the first time I had met someone who admitted to transporting Jewish possessions.
I also didn’t hesitate because I grasped that this lonely old man was recovering some of his dignity in telling his secret so that it could be re-inscribed in our memory and in the memory of the human race.
This son of a tinsmith, grandson of a kulak, who had been welcomed into a Jewish kolkhoz, was for one day a small part of the machine that stripped his Jewish neighbors as they were killed.
Listening to him, I thought about how on that day, the Fascists had completely overturned his universe. His expertise, his horses, the carts of the kolkhoz that were meant for carrying stacks of wheat, and even the church in the neighboring village: his immediate world was suddenly transformed into what is often the least known aspect of the genocidal machine, a machine run by Germans and villagers alike, that robs, transports, and stores the goods of the dead Jews, down to the last item of clothing.
For stealing as well as for murdering, the Nazis came to the village empty-handed. Under Nazi orders, everything in the daily life of the village became tools for killing and stealing. The genocidal machine for stealing is just as human and made up of the village as is the machine for killing.
The sun began to set, and we had to leave. Our van passed by Yevgeny’s house one last time. I turned to look for him, and I will never forget what I saw. He was sitting again, motionless on his bench, waiting.
Chapter 19
THE TEACHERS
In all the villages where we’ve conducted investigations, even the smallest, the school has been one of the most prominent buildings and the teachers have been people of note. I recall one we met during a frozen winter. I wanted to speak with her to ask if she knew where the old people lived. When I came into her classroom, I was surprised to see her standing in her anorak and her students bundled in their coats and mufflers. I asked if they had heat. The teacher showed me a hole in the wall, about one and a half feet long and eight inches high. I saw red coals. A brazier. Through their determination, teachers in these rural settings play a considerable role.
To this day, the witnesses we interview will often mention their childhood teacher. Although some went to school infrequently, others can remember proudly moving up through the grades.
For these children of the war, school, with its classrooms, its benches, its teachers, remains an important touchstone. And yet, I’d rarely thought about what happened in the village school on the day the Jews were massacred. What did the teachers say to the children? What could the children see from school? It’s strange, as a former public school teacher myself; I could have raised these questions in every village. But perhaps this is the very reason I suppressed it.
In going over the long list of thousands of interviews conducted by Yahad, I rediscovered that of a certain Paulina. When she was young, she lived in Tchoutchmany, not far from Bousk, the capital of the district of western Ukraine. Tchoutchmany is a very small village not far from a lush forest. I remember Paulina because she was terrified during her interview and asked us not to bring any vans into her street. She was mostly afraid of her neighbor, a former nationalist.
It was only sitting on her couch, in the shadow of thick curtains that darkened her small house, that she began to speak openly.
During the war, after the summer of 1942, she worked as a teacher in a school in Bousk, school number 2. With her salary, she had been able to pursue studies by correspondence at the University of Lemberg. But on the day the Jews were executed in Bousk, she was still a student in the eighth class, or the last grade of high school. She relives all of her memories from the perspective of her classroom bench. Even when the Germans invaded, she was sitting in class.
“When the Germans came, I was in school in Bousk…. The school is still in the same spot today. It’s the one closest to the Jewish cemetery, because there are two schools, and mine was number 2. I didn’t live in Bousk. I lived here, and I went to school on foot. We left early in the morning when it was still dark.”
One morning, she found the doors to her school locked. “One day, as we were coming to school, the German soldiers told us to go back home. The next day, we returned to school, and it’s there that we were told that there had been shootings. For the rest of the week, they continued bringing groups or single people to the cemetery. These must have been people who had tried to hide.”
The high school in Bousk closed only for the first day of the shootings. So this young girl would become a witness from the schoolroom.
“I remember seeing through the school window a woman with her baby being taken to the cemetery. Two guards were with her, one in front and one behind. I started to cry because she was taking such care of the child in her arms, whispering to him, holding him close. I don’t know any more. I didn’t see the shootings themselves.
“She was fairly young, about thirty or thirty-five…. Her child was a baby, less than a year old. She caressed him. She held him against her heart and murmured something to him. I started to cry thinking about how heavy her heart must be.”
Paulina said she simply glanced outside during class. I thought, how could she stay sitting down, following along with one ear, taking notes, writing, while at the same time watching this mother and her baby walk to their deaths?
She continued her account. “Throughout the week, they would bring people they had caught. I didn’t see things clearly. There was just that one time when I looked out the window. My seat at school was by the window and I saw this woman walking in the street outside school. I didn’t see the rest. Such a tragedy!”
This is rare testimony from a high school student whose desk was by the classroom window and who watched what was going on outside during class. It is easy to imagine that the teacher, who would be standing, would see all the arrests and the violence committed against the hidden Jews. And he continued to conduct his class. This immediate reopening of the school transformed the students and teachers into witnesses to crimes. Apparently, neither the Germans nor the auxiliary police feared being seen from the high school windows. Thus, the classroom became a theater.
Just a few miles from Bousk, in the same year, 1942, in another school, a German teacher and her students saw not only the arrest of the Jews but their murder. From their schoolyard.
Twelve miles away, in the little town of Kamianka-Bouzka, Édith D. was a twenty-two-year-old German, or rather a Volksdeutsche, transferred in 1942 to the German school here. I didn’t meet her, but I found her deposition in the German archives. She taught primary school to German-speaking children. It was in Kamianka-Bouzka that she would later marry the man in charge of the farm bureau.
She was never able to forget the day of the execution of the Jews, the Judenaktion, as she called it. Not only had the school not closed its doors on that day, but Édith was on duty in the recess yard. The German children were outside playing when suddenly there was a terrible noise.
“I myself saw several Judenaktion in Kamianka-Bouzka. One day, from the schoolyard, I heard a horrible shriek. The children could watch the execution process from the yard. We realized that a crowd of Jewish women and children were gathered on the land bordering the yard. Ditches had been dug on this land, and they were supposed to be for building bunkers. The group of women and children were guarded by SS men. The victims had to get completely undressed and were then taken in groups of six or eight to the edge of the ditches and shot by a firing squad. This was where the shriek I spoke of came from. In the moment, it was all I could do to shield the children from the spectacle.”1
Édith D., the young teacher, had already witnessed other Judenaktion. On this day, her school wasn’t closed and she hadn’t been warned that another massacre would take place right next to her schoolyard. So she watched and let the children see what she called the process of an execution: the ditches dug, the guards, the undressing of the Jews, of women and children, their pla
cement at the edge of the ditches, the shots, the deaths. She didn’t decide to bring the children inside until the Jews started to scream. It was as though the cries broke through the “process” for her and her students.
First of all, it is barely believable, barely comprehensible, that an execution would be planned next to a German primary school. Unbelievable that the killers didn’t ask for the school to close. Also unbelievable that the children and their teacher watched as though unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle of the murder of the Jews.
In Kamianka-Bouzka, in contrast to Bousk, the killers didn’t even bother to close their own primary school on the day of the murder. What could possibly have gone through the mind of whoever coordinated this shooting to decide to hold it right next to the yard of a Volksdeutsche primary school? Was the extermination of the Jews normalized to such a point of banality that it could happen on a school day in full view of young German children and their teacher?
Édith D. is not just a spectator. She watches and lets her students watch. The questions they ask her once they’re back in the classroom are certainly legitimate. “Inside, the children—these were German children and Volksdeutsche—asked me what crimes the people who were shot had committed. I didn’t give them an explanation. I simply told them that there was nothing we could do besides pray for these people.”
The German students think they have seen death sentences carried out for crimes committed. Their teacher doesn’t weigh in on the subject but instead invites them to say prayers, Protestant or Catholic.
Nevertheless, Édith D. kept her distance, at least according to her deposition; she states several times that she didn’t approve of the mass crimes committed against the Jews.
This wasn’t the case for the principal of another school, in Klevan, a small town not far from Rovno in Ukraine.
In October 2011, Iryna spoke at length to one of our teams. Her testimony was so surprising that I decided she should be interviewed again a few months later.
In Broad Daylight Page 18