Iryna, who was twelve at the time, was at the village school on May 11, 1942, when the principal came into her classroom and proposed that all the students go see that very day how we kill our “enemies,” which is to say, the Jews of Klevan.
What she recounted astounds me to this day.
“The principal came into our class and said, ‘Children, if you would like to see how we do justice to our enemies, you can go.’ Of course, we rushed over there! They had been taken to be shot. And so, we went to see that horrible scene.”
The principal of the school, who was thirty, was named Kourianik. According to Iryna, he seemed annoyed to have to make this announcement, as though he had been forced. Nevertheless, he was the moral authority for these children, and he came to suggest that they go watch the murder of their Jewish neighbors. He called them “enemies,” classic anti-Semitic terminology that accused the Jews of being enemies of the people. Twenty to thirty children from the school went; they knew where the ditches were because other Jews had already been shot.
“We were above and we watched. We were on this hill…. We went there to see better.”
The children from Klevan arrived in advance. There were no Germans, police, or Jews yet. So they sat above on a hillside, comfortably, for a good view, as though on circus bleachers. “When we arrived here, there was still nobody. We waited. We knew that they were being brought here.”
Iryna spoke at length. The Jews had to climb onto planks, there were the undressings, the shooter. She said she looked for her Jewish classmates but couldn’t recognize any. She said she had cried a lot and looked a lot. Attraction mingled with horror.
What can be in the mind of a child, sent by an authority figure, encouraged by her friends, to go see the Jews, including her classmates—deemed enemies by the principal of her school—meet their death?
Sixty years after the fact, Iryna’s statements remain ambivalent. She tried to see her Jewish classmates murdered.
“In fact, that’s the reason I went there…. My goal was to see these two children, Routa and … I forget … and Voussik. I thought I would meet them here…. There were some children here, but I was so upset I couldn’t recognize the ones I wanted to see…. There were lots of children…. about ten children.”
She couldn’t see her Jewish friends. And it seems she was fascinated by the German shooter. Her description of him, as a young girl admiring a young man, completely ignores the fact that he is a killer: “There was only one shooter. He was a handsome young German…. He was almost a child! He had a pistol attached at knee level, but when he approached this place, somebody handed him a machine gun that he started shooting with.”
Iryna, with her wrinkled face, kept talking like the adolescent she had been. According to her, the Germans, including the shooter, knew that the children from the Klevan School were there, on the hillside less than a hundred yards away, watching. All the spectators that day were young students.
The principal himself didn’t go to the shootings, nor for that matter did any of the teachers. Yet he had, perhaps involuntarily, mandated that the children of his school go watch their neighbors be murdered, like at a show.
PART FOUR
THE EVENING
Chapter 20
THE FILLERS
Among the conscripted villagers were what they called the “fillers.” The fillers filled in the graves dug by the diggers. They make up the largest portion of the requisitioned people we have met over these past ten years.
They were conscripted in their houses early in the morning by a polizei, or by a villager sent by the staroste, or by an armed German. Or else they were called to work later, sometimes on the road to their fields. They came to the graves with their shovels. Often before the massacre was over, but sometimes much later, after the killers had left.
From our interviews, it seems that the majority of fillers were men, often older children, barely twelve years of age. Sometimes, though, women had to fill in the graves. I can recall, among others, the member of a Crimean collective who was made to join the fillers with her own shovel.
Most of the fillers had to wait onsite for a long time before they could begin work. Some sat beside the ditches from daybreak. They had been part of the digging team; they had dug out, either at dawn or on the preceding night, the same ditch they would soon fill. Others had been called in as reinforcements during the shootings, while the Mauser rifles or the automatic pistols were still firing on terrified Jewish families.
Once it was time for the fillers to work, to bury the bodies of the Jewish victims, the Jews for the most part had already deposited their clothes, at least the best ones, around the outside of the ditches. Sometimes the Jews were made to throw their clothes in a horse-drawn carriage waiting nearby, sometimes simply on the ground. It was not rare for a jacket, pair of pants, or a pair of shoes to be given to a filler as recompense for his work in the evening.
When there weren’t too many victims, a filler’s work could be done in a few hours. But it could also last several days in cases where the ditches would swallow up more than ten thousand people. The fillers always worked in teams. Very rarely have I heard of a filler being sent alone with his shovel.
However, the fillers were not entirely like the other conscripts. Each of them was confronted not only with the bodies of murdered Jews but also with Jews who had survived the shooting and were in agony, or who had simply been thrown alive into the grave and were trying, most often in vain, to extract themselves from the mass of bodies, blood, and sand.
This is what immediately affected me upon meeting them. Their shovels full of dirt were, in fact, murderous.
One of them, named Samuel, in Dovbych, a small town in the Lvov region of Ukraine, has never left my mind. Young at the time, he went up close to the grave to look. He was one of the many Soviet adolescents whose curiosity got the better of them. This was how he was recruited by a polizei to become a filler. I listen again to his words, recorded ten years ago already. All the early members of Yahad can recall Samuel, with his white shirt and black pants. He was the first to clearly explain to us that he had been ordered to bury Jews alive. He was also, curiously, stirred by his own Christian feelings at the moment the polizei ordered him to start shoveling dirt.
“Me, I had come to see what was happening. A police officer came up to me and gave me a shovel. I remembered a religious commandment that said, ‘Never dig a grave or it could be your own.’ Seeing the people still moving in the grave, I started to feel bad, to stagger on the side of the ditch. A policeman I knew, a neighbor, came and pushed me aside so I didn’t fall in. I couldn’t stand on my legs anymore. My mother came a little later to take care of me. She talked to me and asked me questions, but I was incapable of answering. I stayed there for about three hours until the graves were already filled in, and the police were gone. We were still there. We saw the graves still moving. Then we went home.”
Samuel saw “people moving.” Many witnesses among the diggers remember seeing children’s toys, hands, feet sticking out of the dirt. Samuel saw people moving. This is something else entirely.
Samuel is surely the one who made me realize that the filler is not in fact a conscript like the others. He must, of course, bury the dead Jews who have just been murdered. But also, and sometimes mostly, he has to bury living people, Jews who have been wounded but also Jewish adults, children, and even infants who have been shoved or brutally thrown down like dead dogs. And the filler’s live burial will certainly finish them off.
Samuel mentioned a verse of the Bible that made it all the more impossible for him to shovel the earth.
The act of filling, even when forced, contributes to—or rather is inscribed in—the criminal act. The shooters shoot. The pushers, sometimes with leather gloves, sometimes with the heels of their boots, push the bodies of the dead and wounded Jews into the graves. The fillers bury both the dead and the living. Thus the filler is a conscript physically associated with the murder, m
ore precisely with the very act of killing. And not all fillers would feel young Samuel’s pain.
As our interviews progress, a range of fillers becomes evident. They situate themselves differently with respect to the victims and to their mandate to bury the living. Here again, behind the awful task of the filler, there lies a fully responsible man.
Some, like the young Samuel, will refuse or become incapable when they find themselves looking into a grave that is full and writhing. They will not fill. These witnesses are rare. Most of the fillers did not leave the grave before the end, often because they were forced to stay by the polizei or the Germans, but also because they were hoping for recompense from the killers, often in the form of clothes belonging to the dead.
At the extreme other end of the human chain from Samuel, in terms of responsibility, I recall a Ukrainian woman whom I did not film because she fled after she talked; although in truth, she didn’t talk, she yelled. We were going toward an execution site with one of the witnesses we’d interviewed beforehand. The woman shouted out terrible words while waving her arms in the air. Words that have stayed engraved in my memory. Her mother had been called up to fill the Jews’ common grave.
“My mother buried them, some still alive. She hit them with her shovel to finish them off.” She screamed this violently in the middle of a group of neighbors, without any apparent regard for what the others might think. Maybe the neighbors already knew?
She was the only one, to my knowledge, after so many interviews, to yell such a thing. Yet I can’t help but think that there were others who finished off the murders with their shovels. Between Samuel’s panic and the shovel blows of this anonymous woman who “finished off” the Jews, we discovered an entire human panorama.
Living today in a city like Paris, we tend to think of Jew, polizei, and grave filler as separate beings, or at least as clearly distinct from one another. But above all, they were simply neighbors. Sometimes it would turn out that the filler knew the polizei who guarded the Jews leading up to shooting, as well as the Jewish family with all its children who waited, naked, beside the ditch. They were all, or rather they had all been, neighbors. And not just for the past few weeks or even years, but quite often for generations. Only the Germans, foreigners arriving by truck or car from the big city, were strangers to the villagers.
This fact of being neighbors would sometimes mean that there were words or gestures back and forth before or even during the crime. Some witnesses can recall the last words exchanged. Old neighbors who were talking together until some of them killed the others.
In March 2012 in Ukraine, Patrice interviewed one of these neighbors whose father, conscripted to fill in a grave, heard a polizei speaking to his Jewish neighbor before the neighbor was killed. Mykola lived in the small village of Toutchyne in the region of Rivne. He was the ninth boy in his family. His father was the chief miller in the village; he worked at the watermill. His father must have personally known most of the inhabitants. In a rural village in the 1940s, everyone needed the miller to mill grain or to buy flour.
“I forgot to mention that most of the workers in the mill were Jewish; Shats was the owner, Liouppe the accountant, Pinia worked as a night watchman, etc. As for my father, he was the head miller.”
Many of the villagers in Toutchyne had told Patrice that Mykola was there on the day of the shootings. He had a nickname, “the artist,” probably because of his especially unkempt hair. Mykola had a good memory for the past and could remember tensions and fights between the Jewish and Ukrainian children from before the war. “Sometimes these fights got violent and the mounted police had to intervene. I don’t think the fights were religious in nature. Sometimes the Jewish kids called the Ukrainian peasants ‘boors,’ and the Ukrainians called the Jews ‘Yids.’”
Rare, though, are those who have been willing to describe serious tensions between the two communities before the German occupation. Mykola described life in Toutchyne with plenty of vivid detail.
“The Jews were mostly engaged in commerce, just like today. For example, Khyzda, Khania, and Leika owned shops. There was a big market in town where the Jews sold provisions. It was also a fairground; there was a puppet theater and a circus with polar bears. I remember when we were coming home from school and we saw the heads of tigers and were very impressed.”
He expressed nostalgia for his fourteen-year-old self at the time the war broke out without losing sight of the tarnished atmosphere of the village at the time. Names of Jewish families studded his childhood memories. On the day of the crime, his father had to dig and fill, and Mykola had to come to the grave with food for him. Many villagers remember meals set up for the Germans beside the ditches; few mention that the conscripts were hungry, too, and that they were not fed by the German authorities. Often, it was a relative who brought them food on site.
Hearing this, I envisioned my grandmother Victorine during the harvests in Villegaudin. I could see her in the cool shade of an awning, preparing a heavy wicker basket with slices of sausage, two-pound loaves of bread, and fruit from the farm that she wrapped conscientiously in a big white napkin to keep cool. She would add a bottle of red wine and another of lemonade. Then my cousin and I would heroically carry the basket out into the fields of ripe wheat. I can still remember the smiles of the harvesters when they would see us arriving. I can’t help but think that if I had grown up in an occupied Soviet village, I could have carried the same basket into a field of extermination. Simple, rural gestures carried out on the day of the crime against the Jews have often recalled similar repetitive acts, seen or performed during my childhood, gestures I might otherwise have forgotten.
So Mykola was not just the son of a grave filler. He was also the carrier of provisions to his father, beside the ditch where a number of Jews, by force of blows, were undressing to be shot. “When the grave was ready … the villagers, my father included, were requisitioned. And I went to carry lunch for my father. I remember Richter sitting on a chair beside the ditch.”
Richter. Many times, Mykola will describe the behavior of Richter, the German who personally shot the Jews of Toutchyne. For Mykola, Richter was not a foreigner come from elsewhere; he was the German commander of the town and had a reputation as an extremely violent man.
“He was sitting on a stool at the edge of the ditch. The Jews went into the ditch, lay down on the ground, and Richter shot them from above. I can still see his silvery gun shining in the sun. He put two bullets into each person’s neck. No one checked to make sure they were dead. They were immediately covered with dirt.
“Richter was right at the edge of the ditch, he saw the Jews lying down inside and had no problem aiming because he was very close. My father was nearby. He had to wait until the end of the shooting to fill in the grave. He could hear the Jews asking how they should lie down and the police answering, ‘Face to the ground.’”
In fact, Mykola’s father hadn’t been directly conscripted by the police; he had put himself forward to replace one of his sons, “It was the polizei who came to get him. They wanted to take my oldest brother, but my mother started to cry and persuaded them to take my father instead. She guessed that it was to bury the bodies and she didn’t want my brother to be traumatized by the blood and the cadavers. The police accepted and took my father.
“The Jews had to strip naked, climb down into the ditch, and lie down. Richter was sitting on a stool by the ditch. The Schutzmann brought the Jews, and Richter shot them in the neck with his pistol. As soon as the Jews were shot, they were covered with a layer of dirt and the next group was brought in. The bodies piled on top of one another. It was horrible.”
And then, suddenly, Mykola stops designating the naked bodies of “the Jews” condemned to die but evokes his neighbor, a young mother with her baby. “My neighbor was among the people shot. In fact, her house still exists. I remember that she was there completely naked with her baby in her arms. Our house was on top of a hill and we could see clearly what was hap
pening there…. The Schutzmann searched for Jews everywhere and rounded them all up. Once they had grouped a large number of Jews, they brought them toward the ditch. I saw two Schutzmann bring a group of two hundred Jews. They didn’t say anything. You could just hear a low moaning that made me shiver. I don’t know if you can imagine the horrible sound of the moans of people condemned to death. It’s horrible.”
Here Mykola began to cry. “It’s horrible.” “Strachne” in Russian. Countless times have I heard old people, former Soviet children, cry while repeating “Strachne …”
Like young Anna in Medzhybizh, Mykola could still remember the sound of the footfalls of the Jews walking toward their death. This hum of two hundred people resonated for a long time in my head.
One of them even recovered his name in Mykola’s narrative: Tevel was a former neighbor, just like the polizei, who himself had a name, Kostiouk.
“I’m going to tell you something else that happened. In this spot, there used to be the house of the shoemaker, Tevel. We knew him well because my brother was his apprentice. The Jews were already gathered next to the ditch when suddenly Richter had to leave. He left on a motorcycle, and the Schutzmann stayed to guard the Jews. As soon as Richter was gone, the Jews started talking to the police. Tevel addressed the policeman Kostiouk, saying: ‘Brother, give me a cigarette!’”
As he speaks, Mykola himself realizes that his story sounds unreal; a police officer, here to help the killer, conversing calmly with the shoemaker he’s guarding before he’s to be murdered. They speak together because the German authority is no longer present. The grave filler watches, listens, and waits along with the people he is going to have to bury in the coming minutes. And Mykola, a child, watches them all.
I don’t know why, but I hadn’t realized, before hearing this testimony, that very often all of the people around the grave were neighbors. The village Jews, their neighbors who had become police, and the neighbors conscripted to work, as well as those who came as spectators. Neighbors. No doubt, I would have liked to think that these people no longer had any human connection, that no words were exchanged between them on the day of the crime. I would have liked for there to be only Jews, Germans, collaborators, and spectators. Black, white, and gray. But on the day of the crime, everyone—polizei, conscripts, Jews, and spectators—are all part of the same Soviet village.
In Broad Daylight Page 19