I have so many memories of this time and place: the woman who repaired flat tires, the bakers across from us, the charcutier with his workshop for making sausages. Everything, or almost everything, was handmade in public, not behind the walls of distant factories. These sorts of jobs still exist on a small scale today in certain villages in Eastern Europe. But they are going out on the tide of modernity.
Nevertheless, one can still find a blacksmith to adjust the shoe of a draft horse, sweepers with “village-made” brooms, seamstresses under little awnings in the middle of an open market, cooks who go each day to the municipal canteen with their blue-and-white aprons tied and their white chefs’ hats. The small trades and the farmer’s life make up the village. I was so surprised, during my research on the Shoah, to discover that a number of these jobs were deemed necessary and requisitioned on the day, or the day after, the execution of the Jews.
I recall, among others, a patchworker.
July 29, 2007
We had arrived early that morning in the village of Zabolottia, near the Volhynie in northwestern Ukraine.1 The street was sprinkled with red, green, and yellow houses. The surrounding fields were freshly harvested, a tableau vivant, a van Gogh.
Irina was there with us, sitting on a low wooden stool. She was agitated. Her phrases were choppy. Her memories wouldn’t leave her in peace. Curiously, Irina talked little about the execution itself and more about the day after. After the execution, she told us, a German originally from the village, a Volksdeutsche, returned there to requisition female labor. He stopped at Irina’s house and summoned her to accompany him on foot. Eventually, she found herself sitting with a dozen other young peasant women from Zabolottia inside the Kommandantur, which today has become a school. She had been led into a room where the Jews’ possessions were all piled up: comforters, sheets, quilts, covers, pillows, as well as clothes of no value. The German ordered her to do some sewing, or rather mending.
At this point in her story, Irina’s hands began to tremble.
“There were a lot of clothes…. The Germans had collected all the damaged clothes and put them in this room. It was completely full. They requisitioned us to patch the holes.”
Patch the holes: I think I am hearing my grandmother. She spoke in simple terms, recalling the repetitive movements as though it were yesterday, “The clothes were in a pile. We took them, repaired them, and threw them in another pile.”
According to her, the clothes were of poor quality. “We sewed for a day and a night.”
Why did the Germans want to have local peasants patch quilts and used bedding from Jewish houses? Who were they destined for? Were they going to be resold to the villagers? Or given to the Volksdeutsche, the Germans who had been living in the Soviet Union before the war and whom the troops of the Reich had decided to help in order to consolidate their occupation? Apparently, the clothes had been gone through before the arrival of the menders. Only the clothes of poor quality were left, says Irina. Most likely, the valuable ones were taken by the Germans at the crime scene.
Irina’s memory of her night of patchwork still distressed her, sixty years later. She kept repeating that, that night, she had committed a theft, a very minor theft considering the circumstances. She had kept for herself three buttons from a quilt cover—the use of quilts is traditional in Soviet territories. Her incessant memory of this futile guilt about three buttons may have been a way of expressing a deeper sense of culpability at having patched the bedding of the dead after their murder. Maybe, but I’m not sure.
Even the smallest theft of Jewish goods by neighbors after the crime was strictly forbidden by the Germans. Did she feel bad because of having stolen three buttons from a murdered Jewish family or because it was illegal and punishable by the German regime? I have met too many witnesses able to talk about the murder of the Jews without discomfort. It was legal to kill Jews, but it was not legal to steal their goods.
Even sixty years hence, the laws put in place during the genocide seem to determine the feelings of guilt and innocence of the neighborhood. Law, even the law of a genocidal dictatorship, would appear to trump conscience. Human beings are quite adept at telling themselves that if something is legal, they can’t be guilty.
Chapter 25
THE SANITIZER
His name was Stepan. It was April 5, 2007; it’s as if it were yesterday. Memory, like the heart, has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. I have never forgotten the mixture of misery and dignity emanating from Stepan. There was a huge sadness that seemed to consume his entire being, a melancholy he had borne ever since the Second World War.
Propped up on his cane, walking with great difficulty, he insisted on being filmed standing, in his jacket. On his left pocket was an impressive strip of Soviet decorations. Younger people laugh at these decorations. But for Stepan, these multicolored medals attested to a certain dignity, signaling a past that for him had not disappeared. His speech slow and very difficult, his skin weathered by the years, he very much wanted to speak and to remain standing. It was almost as if he were testifying at the helm of history.
It was still cool that April in the small Ukrainian village of Rakv Lis.1 Red tulips were starting to flower in gardens here and there, a harbinger of spring.
Stepan was twenty when the Germans occupied the region. But he didn’t want to talk about his war. He wanted to talk about the executions of the Jews of the ghetto of Kamen-Kachirski.2
It was summer. For reasons I don’t know, he was requisitioned several times. Maybe because he was among the poorer people in the neighborhood or maybe also because of his age, he was one of the young men considered available for any work.
First off, along with twenty other villagers, he had to dig the ditch.
“The police came to my house and told me to go dig in this place. They gathered us all together. There were twenty of us, and they brought us there and gave us the dimensions. If you refused to go, you would be killed on the spot. You had to obey.”
Stepan dug, but, according to him, he was not at the execution. He was well informed, however, as his brother-in-law was a member of the polizei. I sensed in his eagerness to talk that he wanted to tell us something else and was anxious to know that we would hear him out. At the time, it’s true that I wasn’t used to hearing such horrors and I frequently cut interviews short.
With clipped phrases that were almost injunctions, he guided us into his memories. “Those who weren’t hit died smothered by the ones who lay down on top of them to be killed. The blood was more than a meter [three feet] deep.” I knew that most Jews died of hemorrhage, but to hear Stepan speak of three feet of blood was something else.
And suddenly, his words fell like stones. “So, they made us bring lime in wagons, and we put it into the grave. It was summer.”
He had said it. Stepan had been one of the hands requisitioned to perform one of the most hideous tasks, drying up the blood of the Jews that seeped out of the grave. While he was speaking, I would not, could not, visualize what he was describing. The only image that came to me was that of my grandfather, Émile, throwing lime on the body of a dead calf that had been put in a hole some distance from the farm. But I didn’t want this image.
I had already heard other villagers, men and women, explain how they were made to get ashes from the hearths of their farms and carry them in wheelbarrows or buckets to dry up the blood that was running out from the ditches. This was the case in Borove, not far from Rawa Ruska. “The blood was running into the street,” the neighbors recalled, “so we had to bring ashes.”
But what Stepan was telling me was even worse, because the number of dead was so great. He wanted to recount something that for us was absolutely horrific, and yet it was his job as a conscript. “The grave was filled in. You could ride over it in a wagon. We poured lime onto it because there was more than a meter [three feet] of blood, and the Germans were worried it would make people sick. It was summer.”
He had to get the wagon f
rom his farm, to hitch up his horses. He had to search through the village, emptied of its Jewish population, and go into the now deserted house of a Jewish lime merchant. “Actually, we put it in the bathtubs that we took from the houses of Jews. They had their businesses, their houses. They were the ones who made the lime to whitewash houses and to fill in holes in the walls….”
The lime sold by a Jewish merchant to fill in holes in the local cob walls became the lime to clean up Jewish blood. The personal bathtubs ripped out of Jewish houses became anonymous tubs for transporting the lime to the mass graves where the Jews had been murdered. For a few days, the entire village seems to have been transformed into a human slaughterhouse. A slaughterhouse needing to be sanitized after a crime.
Stepan vaguely remembered the size of the grave. “It was as deep as a man is tall and about twenty meters [sixty-six feet] long, maybe more. You know, we thought they were going to kill us there, but they sent us home and that was all.”
Hearing these measurements, even though they were approximate, I could understand why Stepan was emphasizing the level of the blood.
He gave a few more details.
“It was liquid lime…. It was in big ditches.”
In the Soviet Union, I thought, a ditch can have many uses. It can hold potatoes, beets, cabbages, but also lime. Stepan, his eyes downcast, had revealed the terrible secret he had been carrying for such a very long time. He had been forced to work for a few hours in the human slaughterhouse of his Jewish neighbors.
There were conscripts before the crime, conscripts during the shooting, conscripts after the murder. A labor force accustomed to Soviet pressures did not seem to have any means of refusal. Thus, when evening came, the Germans could go home. The human slaughterhouse, set up in the morning, disappeared from the village landscape by nightfall. And along with it went all traces of the blood of its Jewish victims.
Chapter 26
THE METHOD
Already, night is falling.
The writing of this book is ending. I leave the new regional hospital in Chalon-sur-Saône, where my father, in intensive care, is quietly preparing himself for his final journey. While I was there, the doctor came into his room and asked him, “What was your work, Monsieur Desbois?”
My father started in on a long explanation that began with these words:
“My father was deported. When he returned, he weighed forty-five kilos [one hundred pounds]. I had to stop working to help him. I couldn’t leave him.”
His account of his eighty years began with the deportation of his father, Claudius Desbois. I was astonished. I hadn’t known that his life too had been marked indelibly by the deportation of the man he had such trouble recognizing on his return.
I leave the hospital pensive, sad, and surprised. My father is about to die and it is only today that I discover that, like me, his whole life he has thought about his father’s, my grandfather’s, deportation.
The TGV (high-speed train) takes me back to Paris. The unchanging countryside of my native Burgundy flies by. My thoughts take flight. They go east to village after village, archive after archive, investigation after investigation. No two murders, no two shootings were the same. And yet there are constants among all the shootings. Perhaps there is no consistent method, but there is a kind of timed coordination in each mass murder. There is coordination among the shooters, the auxiliary police, the requisitioned personnel, the carts and horses, but also the cook.
I didn’t know if I would find this coordination described in writing anywhere. Perhaps it was my own projection. When one is a math teacher, one can’t help but search for the lowest common denominator. If there wasn’t a method per se, it seemed to me that there was a recurring criminal savoir faire. Was this know-how transmitted orally or simply through habit?
After ten long years of listening and reading, one thing I was sure of was that from the perspective of a Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian farmyard, the minute precision of the Fascist crimes gave the impression that someone, somewhere, was keeping strict time. Who wore a watch? Who were the human metronomes marking time during the crimes committed against the Jews of a village?
To someone who hasn’t been there, these may seem like banal questions. It’s banal to start at six in the morning and finish at noon, or at five o’clock in the afternoon. As banal as office hours in Paris or New York.
But we traveled to these far-flung places, traveled many miles on muddy, badly paved roads leading to villages without running water. We searched fruitlessly for hot water to try to improvise a cup of coffee, watched the snow or rain weigh on our windshield, had one of our vehicles stuck in mud and needed to call on a massive tractor left over from Soviet times to pull us out. Come noontime, we could often find nothing but a little cold, wet bread along with a few tired tomatoes to eat. So when we left at night, our bodies and hearts heavy with cold and the weight of listening, we had to ask ourselves: How, in the 1940s, with less asphalt, less fresh bread and running water, could an armada of German trucks appear at 6:00 a.m. sharp? How could the neighbors of the Jews who were to be murdered not only be awake in the small hours of the morning but also be ready with their shovels to dig the ditch while it was still dark? How did the cook from the local canteen know precisely when to warm her wood-burning ovens and cook for midday so that the entire criminal team and its collaborators could all eat on time?
How many times at a little village restaurant have we waited more than an hour for a simple hot meal because, behind the counter, a woman calmly seated on a wooden stool was carefully peeling potatoes? How many hours have we sighed, aware that nothing, absolutely nothing could speed up the rhythm of these post-Soviet villages? How many times have our vehicles been slowed down by herds of cows returning home nonchalantly from the fields, their udders swollen with milk? Our drivers know that there is nothing to be done. Horns are pointless. For a time, the van has to move at the rhythm of a dairy cow.
Sitting at a computer in Paris, the timely efficiency of the genocidal crime can seem like a given. But when you have traveled so slowly through these same villages, the question of how such speed was ever possible becomes a permanent one.
I read through many Soviet and German archives looking in vain for a key or at least the beginning of an explanation. How could the Germans keep up the tempo of their daily criminal activities?
Then, one day, sitting in my Parisian office, I received an unexpected text from Olga, one of our Yahad translators.
Like a needle in a haystack, in one of the many Soviet commissions of 1944 was lengthy testimony from a person heretofore unknown to us. He was a Ukrainian who became the head of a Ukrainian police unit, of Schutzmann. His name was Fiodor Alexandrovitch Zaloga.
I had read numerous depositions from local police tried after the war by the KGB as Fascist collaborators. But this one was different. The man not only recounted his memories of the shooting of the Jews, he explained the process, with its distinct and successive steps and, most importantly, its precise timing. Schedule was omnipresent in his testimony.1 On several occasions, he also used the term “method.”
The villages and the town in which he admitted to having participated in crimes were not unknown to me. I had traveled through them several times. But who was this Zaloga? He was no longer a young man when the war broke out in 1941. He was already thirty-five, with a long career in the Red Army behind him. This was his thirteenth year in the Soviet military.
This is how he describes himself: “I, the undersigned, Zaloga Fiodor Aleksandrovitch, born September 17, 1906, in the town of Stalino2 … worker, was in the Red Army from November 2, 1928, to August 5, 1941, the last rank in the Red army was captain…. 39th Armored Division of the Army No. 12.”
So he had acquired not only a savoir faire along with military discipline but also combat experience, notably against the German army, and this experience lasted until August 1941, three months after the attack on the Soviet Union. At this point, he entered the aux
iliary German police. What happened? How did Zaloga take such a sharp turn? How did he, a former soldier from the Red Army, become a Nazi police officer?
In fact, Zaloga did not go straight from the Red Army to the German police. He was injured in combat against the Germans and interned in a German prison camp at Ouman.3
“Between the 5th and 11th of August 1941, having been injured, I rested in the village of Niebylivka…. On the 13th of August 1941, all the injured were transferred to the prisoner of war camp at Ouman. I escaped on August 20 or 21 and came to the village of Vipachovka…. There I lived with my uncle, Zaloga Vassili Fillipovitch … between August 28 and September 25, 1941.”
Rereading this, I realized that there was a six-month gap in his deposition, a blank unaccounted for. He did not join the police until March 1942. Why this silence? Was it forced? Voluntary?
In this, his story resembles those of many other auxiliary police in the occupied Soviet Union. A Soviet soldier made prisoner by the Germans and then recycled into the auxiliary police. But his motivations are not clear: was it in exchange for his life? To avoid being sent to a work camp in Germany? For money? Or out of a conviction to serve the good Nazi cause?
The fact is that in March 1942, he has to undergo training to become a Schutzmann in order to be what the peasants today still call a polizei. His superior is called Reich. “When I arrived in Kamaniets-Podilsky4 on the morning of March 23, 1941 … Lieutenant Reich informed me that I, in fact, did have to do the Schutzmann training course.” The training would prove bizarrely short.
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