It is unbearable for me to think that the Jewish shoemaker Tevel will shake the hand of the polizei Kostiouk before climbing into his grave. With great emotion, I recall this passage from Robert Anthelme’s L’Espèce humaine (The Human Species): “There is no ambiguity; we remain men, and we will finish only as men. It is because we are men like them that the SS will ultimately be powerless before us.”1
Mykola recounts this scene: “It was a surrealist painting, the Schutzmann speaking in a friendly way to the Jews. My father was sitting beside them with his shovel. He was looking at his friends whom he was going to have to bury soon, and I was watching this scene from behind the bushes. Once Richter returned, the Jews had to undress. Tevel shook Kostiouk’s hand and climbed into the ditch. I also saw my neighbor go into the ditch holding her baby in her arms. Richter sat on his stool and started to shoot. I think he hit the baby first, because the baby started to scream so loudly that I couldn’t stand it. I wished I had a weapon to kill Richter. It was horrible.”
It was Richter’s temporary absence from Toutchyne on the day of the crime that would allow the villagers a few moments “among themselves.”
“They waited near the ditch and talked. The Jews called the Schutzmann ‘brother,’ as they were all sitting and chatting together. But as soon as Richter came back, the behavior of the Schutzmann immediately changed. They stood back up and ordered the Jews to stand up, too. The Jews had to undress. Then Tevel shook Kostiouk’s hand, asked him for a last cigarette, and went down into the ditch. But the thing that touched me the most was the screaming of the baby hit by the bullet.”
Mykola has not forgotten the payment offered his father at the end of the day.
“After the shooting, they gave my father two or three pieces of clothing, but I don’t know what happened to the rest of the clothes.”
Mykola himself inherited a jacket with some gold in the pockets.
“My parents had ten children. We needed clothes. I remember that they gave us a jacket. When I put it down, I heard a jingling. When I looked closely, I noticed an interior pocket. I found five rubles in gold. The Jews often hid money in the lining of their clothes.”
The life of the neighbors took up again after the massacre and included the few surviving Jews; Mykola, dressed in the jacket of a murdered Jew, met one of the surviving Jews in the street. “After the shooting, there was a so-called amnesty for the Jews to come back to town. I remember I was wearing the jacket that had been given to me when I crossed paths with a Jew in the street. I was so ashamed of wearing this jacket, because I knew where it came from, that I threw it away.”
I know very well that the Soviet requisition was coercive. The members of a collective could hardly refuse to participate in its work. And I know that the Germans took advantage of this collective structure to have free labor on hand. But I cannot help but ask myself certain questions. To be forced to bury your Jewish neighbors, dead or alive, then to live with the few who have survived while wearing the clothes of the dead … It is somehow harder to bear genocidal human fracturing deep in a Soviet village than to hear Nazism screamed and hammered out by Himmler on a podium in Poznan.2 How many Soviets had to bury their own neighbors with their own shovels right after having spoken to them?
I cannot end this chapter without sharing a final memory of Mykola’s of a young Jewish girl, sitting on top of a pile of bodies, screaming in Ukrainian:
“I want to see my mommy! Take me to my mommy’s house!”
The little girl cried out in Ukrainian and not in Yiddish, because around the grave, Ukrainians were all she saw.
Chapter 21
THE SALE
His name was Nikolai. We interviewed him on October 26, 2010, at his home in Novozybkov, in the Briansk region of Russia. He would reveal himself to have an exceptional memory.
It was autumn, and the leaves were becoming more and more crimson and swirled in gusts of wind. Nikolai had a very long white beard, and his silver hair and light eyes gave him the allure of old faces in ancient Russian paintings. Patrice conducted the interview. The room was badly heated and decorated with several flags. Svetlana, who was translating, kept her hat on and pulled down over her ears to protect against the cold.
Nikolai lived on the street where the train station was during the war. This station would play an important role in his story.
Even though he was originally from Koursk, he had spent most of his life in this little town of Novozybkov. His father had abandoned the family, and he had grown up with his mother and sisters. He had known the local Jews, of whom there were more than three thousand according to the 1939 census.1 In fact, as a child he had learned to read the Talmud with a friend: “I had Jewish neighbors, and I had a very good Jewish friend named Dvorkine. We were very curious about everything at the time, and we asked him to bring us the Talmud, and he did bring it and he translated it. He had a garden, and we met there and discussed the Talmud.”
I had met and interviewed many villagers from the former Soviet Union who still spoke Yiddish. They had learned it working with Jewish families, or else from being a “Shabbos goy.”2 One of them even wanted to do her interview in Yiddish.
But this was the first time I had come across an old Russian man in a small town who had studied the Talmud, which was written in Hebrew and Armenian, with his neighbor as a translator!
He told us about the war, his war. He was seventeen when it broke out. And since he lived by the train station, he saw German trains carrying starving Soviet prisoners. With tears, he described the first dead people he saw: Soviet prisoners who had fallen out of trains and were shot.
His story was strange, or rather unique. It was winter of 1943, and he went to his uncle’s house. “For the Jews, I was an eyewitness. My uncle lived in Kakhovka. I was taking him potato peelings for his cow, and I was walking toward the station. There I was stopped by a German, an armored soldier who said to me ‘Komm, komm.’3 I was on a sled. He ordered me to take his suitcase, put it on my sled, and to take it along with him to the house where the German soldiers were. I took him.” Nikolai’s words evoked the German objective of colonizing the Soviet territories. During this period, a German would consider any Russian villager at his disposal.
Nikolai, in his sled, with his passenger and the suitcase, came right up against a German roadblock: a column of Jews en route to extermination. The Jews of Novozybkov were shot in midwinter, on January 18, 1942. According to Soviet archives, 950 people were murdered.4. They were killed by Einsatzkommando 8.5 Nikolai speaks of a thousand people. He describes the column in simple words.
“When we are a ways away from the station, I see a column of Jews that they’re taking to be shot. In front, there are four SS, obviously the big chiefs with the military stripes and crosses, big strapping Germans. They call out to the tank driver and yell at him, almost hit him, and give him the order not to move from there. In short, we let the column they were taking to be executed go by. There were carts in which they drove the children and old people, who understood they were going to be shot. Their legs no longer carried them and so they were driven in carts.”
So they waited, Nikolai and the German officer, for around twenty minutes, watching the column of Jews go by. Then traffic resumed. He spoke like someone who has seen so much death and so many crimes that a column of Jews walking toward their graves was first and foremost a traffic jam. “We started up again to do what we had to do. We lived near the station, and it was very close to the place. We heard the firing of automatic weapons.”
His testimony could have stopped there as far as the murder of the Jews was concerned. He did not go to the ditches to watch. But once evening fell, it was very cold and the Germans returned from their shootings. On their way home, they went into Nikolai’s house to warm their feet.
“Since we lived near the station, they came by our house. They had boots that didn’t fit, they were cold and came into our house to warm up.”
To hear him, the Germa
ns were regular guests in his house. I don’t think the Germans could go into any house to get warm without some risk. In this one, there was no man in the family. It’s also possible that the proximity of the house to the station got them used to each other, so the family had no choice. Nikolai recalls with precision something that happened in his house.
“And one night, a young SS, about the same age as me, showed up, and my mother and my aunt said to him: ‘You should be ashamed, you who are so young, to do things like this, to shoot people.’ And he answered: ‘We’re not the ones who shoot. It’s the Russians.’ And he explained how this happened. First, they ordered the Jew to undress and to keep on only their underwear. Then they patted down the underwear because sometimes the Jews sewed in coins. And while they were being searched, a woman escaped just like that, in her underwear, through the forest. She escaped execution.”
Nikolai’s eyes grew misty. What happened next in his house leaves me speechless.
“He had a handkerchief where he had put teeth, rings, objects of value, maybe four hundred grams [almost a pound], and he offered them to us, but my aunt refused. I asked him: ‘Are you the one who took these things?’ He said: ‘No, they were confiscated from the Russian police.’ Our people, the Russian police.”
So, I thought, on the very evening of the murder, when the Jewish bodies were barely in the ground, a young SS officer returns having collected the gold teeth and jewelry of the dead and tries to sell them to the neighbors, without hiding it from the other Germans who are there to get warm. This isn’t a furtive sale on the fly, but a sale around a home fire. Probably it was easier to sell gold there before returning to base.
Stories of jewelry stolen by Germans during the executions are quite common. The neighbors see them fill their pockets and bags with jewels as well as expensive clothing.
But an SS officer who resells gold the same night to the Russian neighbors of murdered Jews! I thought about it in the simplest terms: this SS was looking out for his own interests. He killed the Jews out of Nazi ideology, but he hadn’t forgotten to help himself. The story also showed that somewhere in the village someone was extracting golden teeth before the Jews were shot.
This German SS didn’t live in the village. He apparently couldn’t care less if the local peasants knew that his motivations were as venial as they were racial.
Nikolai was the only witness who described an intended sale that took place in his home. I can’t help but ask myself: how many others saw this and were silent?
PART FIVE
THE DAY AFTER
Chapter 22
THE AUCTIONS
April 2009, Brest, Belarus
It is still cool in Belarus, yet everywhere there is a feeling of spring. The scene seems unreal to me: I am in the middle of a pedestrian street in the center of Brest with the entire team. The camera is on its tripod on newly mounted nonskid pads. The town of Brest bears the imprint of historical combat. On June 22, 1941, the day of Operation Barbarossa,1 the German army attacked the town, destroying the Soviet lines of defense. But the town and her citadel organized a resistance that held against the attack until July 8, 1942. Since then, Brest and her citadel have become symbols of the resistance of the Soviet people against Fascism. Who in Russia has not heard of the Citadel of Brest?
Facing the camera, Vladimir, originally from a little village not far from Brest, is calm and almost immobile. He recalls: “I’m going to tell you everything in detail about the first days of the war. The 21st of June, 1941, I was at home. The war started at four in the morning. In the month of June, this is the shortest night, so the night was ending when the war began. The entire frontier around Boug2 was lit up by missiles; as soon as the missile fire ended, the combat started. Three kilometers [a mile and a half] from our village was an airfield where they immediately burned all the planes and tanks of gas. The fires started to spread, and people were fleeing everywhere in their underwear. That’s how the war began.”
Though he didn’t live in the center of Brest, he heard the shots and was fully aware of the town’s heroism. “We lived not far from Brest, next to it, and we heard the sounds of combat here for a month. The fortress resisted for a long time. The Germans went off in the direction of Minsk, but Brest continued to fight. Sometime later, everything started to calm down and the Germans started to set up here. They installed their power.”
This is how Vladimir began his account. Everyone here carries his own memories and bears his own scars from the Great Patriotic War.3 It was only after having set the scene that he began to talk about himself and, in particular, his life as a prisoner.
“I spent the entire summer of 1942 at home. In the autumn, the Germans summoned me. They took me and brought me here, to Brest, where they put me in prison. Later, from this prison, they took twenty-five people and put them in this building here.”
His testimony sounds all the more anachronistic among the young passersby, often in couples. Young people crowd into the hall of what is now the town’s main movie theater to soak up the clichés of Western freedom. Women in blue smocks sell buckets of popcorn. It feels like a little piece of the West parachuted into this country where kolkhozes are flourishing again.
While the crowd hurries in so as not to miss any of the show, we stay planted firmly on the sidewalk outside, the camera fixed on Vladimir’s face and gestures.
Vladimir celebrated his twentieth birthday in 1947. He had already known war, camps, and forced labor. His youth was battered under the bootheels of the German occupants.
We had met Vladimir randomly in the street. Seeing an old man, our researchers had started to ask the usual questions: “What year were you born?” “Where did you live during the German occupation?” “What did you see?” Vladimir was willing to testify about the war in Brest as well as about the extermination of the Jews in the ghetto. With his sharp black eyes and his leather—or leatherette—cap pulled far down, he talks. As he remembers, he relives.
He points out the building, the famous movie theater. He explains that it was built over the walls of Brest’s former synagogue. I can hardly believe my ears. While he speaks, I look through the windows of the theater, I listen to the sound effects coming from inside, and suddenly it all seems different to me. Then Vladimir takes us inside. Together, we go down a small staircase toward the restrooms. There, in a hallway, we can see the foundation walls of the synagogue. The Jews have become like the Mayans of Belarus. We look for traces of them beneath new construction. Seventy years ago, rather than kids hurrying in to see a movie, there were others rushing into this place. They were eager to see the “Kabbalat Shabbat” on a Friday night. I can hear in my mind the melody, Lekhah dodi liqrat kallah, p’nei Shabbat neqabelah.4 A little saddened, we climbed back up the stairs of this movie theater encasing the former synagogue.
Through word and gesture, Vladimir tried to explain what the ghetto of Brest was to him. Occasionally, he had to repeat himself several times in order for us to grasp what he was saying because it was just so strange.
He brought our team to the former site of the gates to the ghetto. He knew this place by heart. He had been locked in a building right behind the spot where we stood.
Vladimir was part of a team of twenty-five Soviet prisoners who were forced to “clean, store, and package” the goods of the Brest Jews after the shootings. There were mostly clothes and shoes, but also pillows, cloth, and sheets.
“A German came with a translator and told us that today we were going to the ghetto to clean up.”
The band of prisoners had to go into the empty dwellings, carry the Jews’ possessions outside on stretchers, and, after cleaning them, put them into crates.
“You know, crates where we would store butter, square crates like that.” Vladimir shows the size of a crate with his hands. “So they made us fill the crates with the Jews’ things. There was a lot of cloth, shoes, and other things, and we packed it all up. Afterward, we took it all to the market. There were two
markets here. One was in Pouchkinskaya Street, and it was smaller. The other one, the main market, was in Moskovskaya Street, and it was bigger.”
Not only was the sale of Jewish goods not hidden or discreet, camouflaged, but it took place in broad daylight at the center of Soviet life. To this day, these bazaars remain vibrant places of commerce and social interaction. In the place where everyone went to make daily purchases, the possessions of murdered Jews were sold shamelessly at auction. Given the presence of the Germans and the way the sale was conducted, no one could be unaware of the origins of these crates and their contents.
The crates were transported by truck through the streets of Brest. They had been shut, and then sent to market where the buyer couldn’t open them until after he had paid.
But before this happened, Vladimir and the other prisoners had to clean everything, “The Germans forced us to clean everything, the good clothes, the not-so-good clothes, the different shoes.”
And the contents of the cases could vary considerably. “People had to make deals after they had paid.”
Not only did Vladimir pack up the Jewish goods, he was part of the team of salesmen hawking the merchandise at the market. His role consisted of holding up the crates to show the customers in order to get the auctions started.
“We would hold up a case, and the German next to the truck would cry out, ‘This crate cost five marks, who will give more?’”
In Broad Daylight Page 20