So the German played the auctioneer.
“This German could get the price up to ten, fifteen, or twenty marks.”
Vladimir recalled that the sale of the Jewish goods was successful overall. There were no crates left over. He himself was able to scrounge some shoes to replace his own, which were “falling apart.” He is embarrassed to tell us this and tries to give an explanation, “Here we could find Bata5 shoes, from Poland, which were very sturdy, and so we wore them ourselves, too.”
Could these shoes be considered a payment from the Germans for a job done? This is not unthinkable, especially considering other testimonies confirming that requisitioned workers could often freely take goods and shoes. After thousands of interviews, Vladimir remains one of the only ones to describe in such detail the organization of the auction of Jewish goods in a town as large as Brest.
As a prisoner who conducted these sales under German constraint, his lack of personal responsibility probably made it easier for him to tell the story than it would have been for those who had freely participated. He spoke at length. Onlookers gathered silently around us, to listen to him.
Listening to Vladimir’s testimony, I am reminded of another witness to an auction that took place in the village of Romanivka, in the Jitomir region of Ukraine. Anna Pavlovna, an old woman in a blouse with giant purple flowers, described the sale of Jewish goods in the days following their shooting by Ukrainian police:
“They took what they wanted. They had taken all the horses, the carts, and the clothes belonging to the Jews.”
On the day after the shooting, they sold the clothes at a sort of fair. The clothing market was held in the primary school that was transformed into a bazaar. It’s impressive to think that over the course of one night the police were able to collect the clothes, sort them, classify them, and alert all the villagers to the fact that the Jewish goods were for sale.
“They had opened the windows of the school. In each classroom, there were different things. In one were the women’s clothes, in another, the men’s clothes. They had gotten young people from the village to sort the clothes. They sold them through the windows.”
For the furniture, a large number of requisitions were needed over a very short time. They needed people to sort, to transport, and to unload. It took three days to get the furniture out of the Jewish houses.
“Our village was big. There were more than a thousand Jewish houses to empty.”
It took a village-wide effort to get the Jewish furniture out of the houses and into the schoolyard where it was sold. “They brought furniture, then sold it. They brought more furniture and sold that, too. They went from house to house, loading this, loading that. Then they came back to the school and unloaded everything.
“It was the police who did this, along with the strong young people, the adolescents…. They used the kolkhoz carts.”
In one week, using the basic materials of rural life, carts and horses, more than a thousand Jewish homes were emptied and everything had been sold. I imagined the villagers coming to the little school with their own carts, pictured these muddy streets teeming with carts full of furniture, coming and going. This wasn’t pillaging, it was a sale!
Most of the Jews murdered here were farmers. Their livestock was not abandoned for long: “The livestock came and went freely in the village. The cows mooed because they were swollen with milk. It wasn’t the Germans who came to take them; it was the Russians. They took them, killed them, and sold them.”
I know from my own rural roots that anyone on a farm can become a butcher, especially when it comes to killing a pig. But from there to catching the animals of all the Jews in order to kill, butcher, and sell is quite a step. There again, the coordination among the villagers can’t help but leave me with questions.
It takes not only efficiency but also know-how based in longstanding habits and customs to explain the extraordinary reactivity of the police aided by the requisitioned population. And we should not forget that similar auctions had taken place six years earlier, when families disappeared or died out during the Great Famine6 and also during the persecutions of the kulaks.7 A very old witness in the Krivoi Rog region of eastern Ukraine lived through both of these earlier “catastrophes” as well as the auctions during the war. He first told us about an auction during the purge of the kulaks.
“There was a man who lived right over there, and he was dispossessed.”
“When they confiscated someone’s house, what did they do with the furniture?”
“There was a special sale…. My father went to this sale. There were many men like this man in Ukraine, and their goods were sold at this sale. They sold to the person who would pay the most; it was an auction. I know that my father bought a table and a cot. We were poor…. All these things were sold at a low price, I know it. And so, this man’s things were also taken there…. The sale took place in Krivoi Rog, because my father had a horse at the time and I know he went there. They sold good clothes as well as furniture. Everything they had taken from the kulaks. Because they took everything from the kulaks! They even sold the house…. They sold the animals! Yes, yes, yes, they confiscated everything! As for the horses, local people bought them.”
There is striking similarity not only between the facts but also between the terms used by the witnesses to both the de-kulakization and to the stripping of the homes of murdered Jews. On the day of the murders, did the police and the Germans simply tap into a longstanding Russo-Soviet village tradition? Each villager knows what he is supposed to do in life but also is guided by custom in all his tasks. Gestures are repeated throughout the seasons. Everyone knows, for example, how to work together on harvest days, how to gather potatoes, or how to catch a pig, kill it, cut it up, fill its lungs to make them pretty, and reward the workers with morsels of meat.
Is it possible that these village habits and customs allowed such rapidly organized sales of furniture, clothing, and animals to take place in times of the “disappearance” of portions of the local population? That it happened thanks to—and because of—these non-improvised, habitual ways? For example, the expression “good clothes” is troubling. I’ve heard it many times from the mouths of peasants in reference to the sorting of the good clothes belonging to the Jews from those of little value. The speed is equally troubling, and the way the witnesses describe it as nothing spectacular—on the contrary.
Did the Nazis understand how to tap into local rural customs? Or were they relying on their own experience of selling Jewish goods at auction outside Soviet territory? Should we interpret the auctions as German initiatives in Soviet territory,8 similar to what they had done elsewhere? Or is the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis inscribed somewhere in the heart of Russo-Soviet village traditions?
What is clear is that the auctions of Jewish goods in villages and certain big towns are an established fact. However, whether they are more rooted in Nazi tradition or in Russo-Soviet customs of repression will always be an enigma to me.
Chapter 23
THE COATS
The years have passed. Yavoriv,1 this village in the Lviv region, a small Galician town, is far from our other research sites. It is distant in time, too, early January 2009, and yet I have never been able to forget it. It’s not so much the place that stays in my mind but rather a villager named Ievhenia. Why has her image persisted? I don’t know. Perhaps because she wanted to speak inside the village church. Memory, after thousands of interviews, has kept certain faces and certain words while completely forgetting others.
Ievhenia was an educated person, a teacher. We met her as she was walking down the sidewalk, wrapped in a thick fur coat, her head covered by a stylish brown fur hat. Although retired, she had kept the keen eye and firm voice that had taught many generations of children from the region.
She refused to speak in her home or in the street, but insisted on going into the church, inside the walls where mass had just been celebrated. This was a rare if not unique circumst
ance. I should add that we had arrived in Yavoriv on January 9, the day after Orthodox Christmas.
Having asked the permission of the parish priest, we set up in the church. Ievhenia had her back to a decorated Christmas tree, and we faced her in a semicircle. The building had just emptied out as mass had recently finished. The sweepers, parishioners who had tied on their aprons, cleaned up pine branches scattered all over the church so that everything would be in order for the following day. I can still hear the scratching of brooms on the floor.
I remember being bothered by this tree sparkling behind her in the lens of our camera. I asked if she would mind moving so that we could see icons behind her instead. It seemed less bizarre, less indecent, and more appropriate to someone who had seen Jews murdered.
I can still hear her voice, her structured speech, as though she were conducting a class. As she told us what she had seen, she couldn’t help but instruct us. She explained how the Ukrainians had believed Hitler’s promises of independence and only later understood the horror that came with them. But what, exactly, had she seen?
Right away, she placed herself as a member of the local petite bourgeoisie. This is rare in the former Soviet Union, where anyone perceived as bourgeois risked deportation.
“My father was the head of a bakery, and my mother never worked. In our family, the women did not work. The village women worked or tended livestock. But our family was bourgeois, and my mother never worked.”
As the baker’s daughter, Ievhenia was an important figure in the village. The bakery was two blocks from the church. She didn’t mind telling us that, during the war, the bakery supplied German stores as well as the shops owned by locals. The Germans ordered not only bread but also pastries. German colonial life in Yavoriv had its perks.
“It was the only bakery in town, and the Germans would come place their orders. My father made bread specially for them because they only wanted the best…. They ordered pastries, croissants, and brioches, while the villagers had gray bread…. The bakery didn’t sell bread directly. We delivered to stores, and people came with their ration tickets to get the bread in these stores.”
Listening to her, I recalled another bakery, in Belzec. The baker there also served both the Germans who worked in the extermination camp and the local population. She kept repeating, “Thanks to me, people ate white bread all through the war. With the flour provided by the Germans from the camp.”
In Yavoriv, the Ukrainians’ bread was gray. Ievhenia recalled the ghetto with its fence, right behind the church in which we were talking. I remember wondering if that wasn’t the reason she wanted to speak here, as though sheltered yet so close to the former ghetto.
Her testimony, her words, were accompanied by vivid gestures. With her black-gloved hands, she spoke without hesitation of the “ambiguities” of neighbors who had housed Jews … and then denounced them.
“There was one Jewish family that went into hiding with people. The father was a pharmacist, and they had a little girl, Ziouta. The daughter and mother hid with one family, and the father hid somewhere else. The people hiding them denounced them. When the Germans went to get them, the girl took poison that her father had given her and died on the spot, but the mother didn’t have time to take the poison. They put little Ziouta’s body on a cart and the mother walked beside it. They took them to the cemetery and buried both of them there. So, there were good people who hid Jews and others who denounced them. I also think the Jews paid a lot to the people who hid them. Some took the money and then denounced them.”
This too I recall as though it were yesterday. It is uncommon for a witness to talk about the neighbors’ terrible choices. Some hid Jews for money, others denounced them, and sometimes they were one and the same.
But when I go back in my memory, I see that it wasn’t the pretty church or the scratchy brooms interfering with the recording, nor was it her testimony itself, despite its uniqueness, that has left such an impression. It’s something else, one of her memories that has taken me years to process.
She spoke of herself without awkwardness or embellishment, except when describing her tears at the burning ghetto. Suddenly, she was no longer the teacher, and she had to take her handkerchief out of her pocket. She was remembering a coat, her own; a coat from during the war. I should add that I had asked a question that somehow seemed to put a tangle in her narrative thread. She had gone into the ghetto.
“Was the ghetto surrounded by barbed wire or a wooden fence?”
“The ghetto was not well sealed off,” she replied. “In places there was wood fencing, in others some barbed wire, in others nothing at all. But there were guards all around it. Once I went into the ghetto because the Jews were great seamstresses and my parents had put in an order with a tailor to make me a coat. On this day, I had to go into the ghetto to pick up my coat, but as I was approaching, I heard shots. The Germans had surrounded the ghetto and weren’t letting anyone in. That was the day they liquidated the ghetto.”
She had been able to get into the ghetto easily to order a custom coat from a Jewish tailor. But she never got to see the much-anticipated coat. The ghetto was liquidated before her eyes. And yet this was the memory that made her cry! The memory of this coat, lost forever, brought tears to her eyes sixty years later. It was as though, suddenly, this loss, so insignificant in comparison to the murder of the Jews, became her most potent childhood memory.
Her story is not isolated.
Another account that we discovered in the German archives tells of something similar. The subject is Berta, a German civilian working as an interpreter in occupied Ukraine in the service of the ZHO.2 She was stationed in Kamaniets-Podilsky, a big Ukrainian city in the Khmelnitsky region. She gave her deposition in 1959, sixteen years after the fact.3 It happened that the house where she was lodged with her chief in Kamaniets-Podilsky during the war had a view of the ghetto. “My chief, Mr. H., and I lived in a little house facing the Jewish ghetto.
“In autumn 1942, Mr. H. knocked on my door early one morning and told me that they were going to get the Jews from the ghetto and asked if I wanted to see. I declined and stayed in bed.”
Apparently, Berta is not a morning person. She is not willing to get up earlier than usual just because the ghetto is being liquidated under her windows. So, by the time she leaves for work, the ghetto is lifeless. Nevertheless, she will go in because she too has objects with the Jewish artisans.
“On that day, I went on foot to my office as usual. The next day, I went to the ghetto and it was empty. The ground was covered with cushions and other objects from inside. All of a sudden, five Jews approached. They were trying to make a good impression because they were scared. Mr. H. and Mr. K. were with me. We’d come into this ghetto to get watches and other items from Jewish artisans, things we had given them to work on or fix.
“I had a fur coat made for myself by the Jews, but I didn’t find it. When I couldn’t find my coat, I complained in writing to the local police chief, a party member, and all of a sudden, my coat reappeared. I don’t remember anymore the name of the police chief, but I would recognize it if someone said it. If I recall other details later, I will be sure to communicate them.”
Ievhenia and Berta, two women, one Ukrainian and one a German civilian; one cried for her coat as she watched the ghetto burn and the other complained because she couldn’t find her fur coat after the liquidation. Neither one worried about the Jewish tailor or seamstress. As for Mr. H and Mr. K., they were looking for watches they were having repaired as well as other objects.
Ievhenia, Berta, H., and K. remain, above all, men and women concerned only with their possessions. They had had sufficient confidence in Jewish artisans to entrust them with commissions and objects to fix, taking advantage of the discounted prices, if not the free labor, of those imprisoned in the ghetto. Apparently, people can sometimes recall a lost item with greater emotion than they can summon for the victims of murder.
On a day of genocide, a pe
rson can not only prove indifferent to the murder of her neighbors but seemingly motivated by one interest only: her own.
Chapter 24
THE PATCHWORKER
My childhood was a universe of manual jobs. Everything was made by hand. That world has been swallowed up today by big industry. In 1980, I went to Africa as a professor of mathematics. Three years later, on my return, I realized that my artisanal and family universe had faded.
We were poultry people. We bought chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl on Bresse farms and brought them back to our “plucking house,” as we called it. On a given afternoon, it took no less than six or seven people, each one with their own small job, to pluck the Bresse chickens. How could I ever forget my grandmother, Marie-Louise, sitting on a straw-bottomed chair, holding a big white plastic bucket? How could I forget the women sitting at the back of the plucking house, each with a small, well-used knife, who checked each bird and scraped off any remaining down? How could I forget my grandfather, who folded each Bresse chicken before it got cold and stapled the beautiful tricolor medals to the animals’ necks with the inscription that was our coat of arms, “Poulet de Bresse”? The plucking house was noisy, mostly because of a machine with metal discs that tore out the feathers.
Once a week, I went with my grandmother to Mme Gouillon’s house, at the other end of the neighborhood. She made mattresses and pillows with goose and duck feathers. She and her husband worked in an odd place. It was a building that had been used as a sentry house on the border between the free and occupied zones during the war. It was at the end of a bridge. This little house, with its pointed tile roof, was still intact in the spot where the Germans and the French police controlled traffic. I went there each week to see Mme Gouillon stitching the pieces of striped material that would become mattresses.
Next to my parents’ house, in Chalons, there was a dim shop run by the Denis sisters, two spinsters always dressed in black, with cardigans and knitted hats. They made funeral wreaths with beads of all colors. Their door was next to ours, a door with a bell that crackled. I went almost every day with my brother. We sat down with the sisters on very low straw-bottomeed chairs. All around us were rolls of wire. And there were buckets of red beads, green beads, yellow beads, and blue beads. We threw the beads into a little centrifuge and held the wire close. The green beads became branches; the blue and yellow ones became flowers. Then we pinned on a piece of paper with the name of the family that had placed the order and displayed the wreath in the shop window.
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