3. The soltous was the representative of regional power in a Polish commune.
4. Called either “desiatskiy” or “dejourny” (assigned a very specific mission). This was a person charged with specific functions of public and communal order for a limited number of households (often ten). This position had existed in the Russian empire since the seventeenth century. Appointed by the local government, the desiatnik answered to the mayor as well as the regional authorities. His work was not paid because it was considered a civic duty. This system was taken up by the Soviet Union and maintained under the German occupation. During the war, the desiatnik fulfilled certain duties relating to the executions, such as stockpiling shovels and organizing the labor force for the digging and filling in of the ditches. The orders given the desiatnik, often with a threat of death if they weren’t followed, were issued directly by the German authorities or by the mayor.
5. Ukrainian synonym for “mayor.”
6. A traditional Romanian, Moldavian, and Ukrainian dish of yellow corn.
7. The term Volksdeutscher (literally, “member of the German people”) was coined during the First World War for people whose native language was German but who lived outside the Reich and were citizens of another country. A special branch of government, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), was created in 1937 to facilitate immigration for Volksdeutsche into the Reich. During the war, the VoMi was in charge of registering all the Volksdeutsche living in occupied territories and giving them material aid. The VoMi worked in conjunction with Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV). Each Volksdeutsche had a special identification card, called a Volksliste, and official proof of the purity of their race. They had advantages over the local population, including access to special stores and extra food rations; sometimes the VoMi would distribute the clothes of executed Jews among the Volksdeutsche. Estimates of their number in occupied Ukraine vary between 350,000 and 500,000.
8. Kartakaï, a German colony in Berezivka in the region of Odessa. It no longer exists.
Chapter 3: The Diggers
1. Deposition from October 14, 1944, GARF (Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii—archives of the State of the Federation of Russia), 7021-67–78, 83s.
2. A Russian and Yiddish diminutive of Isaac.
3. Nickname for Ivan.
Chapter 4: The Night
1. Small Belarusian village, part of Poland until 1939, where the Germans carried out several Aktion, murdering more than three thousand Jews.
2. A town on the Polish border, better known by its former name of Brest-Litovsk.
3. Today the town is called Berioza.
4. Deposition of October 3, 1944, from the Regional Archives of Brest, 514-1-289, 14ff.
5. Probably a German policeman.
6. Deposition from December 7, 1960, BArch, B 162/3409, 670ff.
7. Jewish council. The Judenrat was an administrative body formed by force in the Jewish ghettos, by order of the Germans. It served as a liaison between the Nazi authorities and the population of the ghetto.
8. “Report from experience,” from November 1942, document from Nuremberg USSR-119a, BArch B162/4949, 2ff.
9. Town in the south of Belarus where more than twenty thousand Jews were exterminated.
10. Acronym for Narodnii Komissariat Vnoutrennikh Diél (in English, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). In the former Soviet Union, this political police force was created in 1934 to supersede the GPU and was itself replaced with the creation in 1946 of the MVD, or Ministry of Internal Affairs. The NKVD played a crucial role in the Great Purge of the 1930s, when hundreds of thousands of people were arrested or killed.
11. Deposition of February 13, 1963, BArch, B 162/4956, 058ff.
12. Before 1939, this Polish village was called Zablocie.
13. Report from September 30, 1942, from the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 15th Regiment of the police, GARF 7021-148-2, 342–3.
14. Deposition of Alfred Metzner from September 18, 1947, Nuremberg document NO-5558.
Chapter 5: The Rapes
1. At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt received regular reports (Ereignismeldungen and Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten) from the Einsatzgruppen. A set of originals exists in the German Federal Archives.
Chapter 6: Barriers
1. Town in Occidental Ukraine, called Ivano-Frankivsk since 1962.
2. Small town in the region of Lvov, where, of 13,000 Jews, only four hundred survived.
3. Deposition of November 12, 1973, BStU (Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik—Federal proxy for documentation for the Stasi of the former East Germany), MfS HA IX/11 ZUV 40, vol.1, 46ff.
4. Diminutive of the name Demiane.
Chapter 7: The Column of Jews
1. Jewish religious movement founded in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe.
2. Personal counsel to the Archbishop of Lyons.
3. This thesis blamed the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In 1959, Pope John XXIII suppressed the critical language (perfidis et perfidiam) in the Good Friday prayer. This decision was made official in an announcement by the Vicariate of Rome on March 21, 1959 cf. Les Eglises devant le judaïsme, official documents from 1948–1978, texts gathered, translated, and annotated by Marie-Thérèse Hoch and Bernard Dupuy, Cerf, 1980, ch. 58, 351.
4. The apostle Judas.
5. “Broken,” or “destroyed,” in German.
Chapter 8: The Girl in Love
1. During the siege of Leningrad, between 1941 and 1944, more than a million civilians died of cold and hunger.
2. Bathroom in a small cabin.
3. Diminutive of Samuel.
Chapter 9: The Director of the Trucking Company
1. Deposition of October 1, 1945, BArch, B 162/19726, 8ff.
2. The Kreishauptmann, head of the Generalgouvernement district, was first SS-Untersturmführer Wilhelm Rebay von Ehrenwiesen; as of the summer of 1942, it was SS-Untersturmführer Joachim Nehring.
3. Späth was never found after the war.
Chapter 10: The Transporters of Jews
1. Until December 1920, the city was called Iekaterinodar.
2. A town in the region of Krasnodar. Until 1848 it was called Armianski (Armenian town).
3. One of four Einsatzgruppen units that exterminated over 120,000 people in Moldava, Ukraine, and Southern Russia.
4. “Kids are great!!”
Chapter 11: The Layers of Planks
1. Small village on the bank of the Boug river, in the Nikolayev region of Ukraine. More than 50,000 Jews in the vicinity of Odessa and Bessarabia were first deported to Bogdanovka and held in pork slaughterhouses. After a typhoid epidemic, at least 45,000 Jews were executed, with the help of the Romanian police, by the Ukrainian police and the Selbstschutz units, made up of Volksdeutsche, between December 21 and 23 and December 28 and 31, 1941. The bodies of the dead were burned.
2. Deposition of May 4, 1965, BArch B162-5835, 1082ff.
3. In German, “Again, faster, fire!”
Chapter 12: The Dance
1. Similar to a tambourine.
2. Unleavened bread, eaten at Passover.
3. Synonym for desiatnik.
4. The Ukrainian anthem to this day, composed in 1863 by the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian priest, Mykhaïlo Verbytsky.
Chapter 13: The Cooks and the Shooters
1. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Jewish colonies were created in eastern Ukraine, among other places, in order to encourage Jewish immigration. After the Bolshevik Revolution, from 1924 on, other Jews came to occupy these former colonies. Even while they were integrated into the local social and economic fabric, these Jewish agricultural colonies formed a distinct community in rural Ukraine.
2. Hanna’s testimony can be found in Porteur de mémoire (Bearer of Memory) (Paris: Michel Lafon, 2007), 127ff.
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3. September 29 and 30, 1941, the Sonderkommando (special detachment) 4a, subunit of the Einsatzgruppen, killed more than 33,000 Jews in this ravine.
4. Anatoli Kouznetsov, Babi Yar (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011), 93.
5. Deposition of Georg P. from October 6, 1967, BArch, B 162/17909, 362ff.
6. Noncommissioned officer charged with supplies and logistics for the unit.
7. Deposition of Oscar C. of October 6, 1967, BArch, B 162/17909, 355ff.
8. SS rank, equivalent to lieutenant.
9. Schutzpolizei: subdivision of the regular police force of the time.
10. Deposition of Viktor T. from October 6, 1967, BArch, B 162/17909, 367ff.
11. Warehouses in which the Jews’ goods from Auschwitz-Birkenau were stored.
12. Unfinished addition to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Chapter 14: The Curious Children
1. Mischlinge, in Nazi terminology.
2. The Wannsee Conference, on January 20, 1942, held in a villa in Berlin, brought together fifteen of the leaders of the Third Reich to work out the administrative, technical, and economic details of the “final solution” to the Jewish question.
Chapter 15: The Child with the Bullets
1. The Ikopot and the Chakhivka are rivers near Starokostiantyniv.
2. The October Revolution in Russia, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, started with a coup led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
3. “Jid” is a term for Jew. In Occidental Ukraine, it was not pejorative until recently. It was a common term, preferred over “ievreï,” which was considered Russian. It is still in use, especially in the countryside.
4. Sloboda is a typical village name in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine. The name is derived from the old Slavic word for “liberty,” and can be translated loosely as “free colony.”
5. According to the Julian Calendar, Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7.
6. In total, eleven thousand Jews were executed in Starokostiantyniv.
7. Paul Blobel (1894–1951), an architect by training, was responsible as the chief of the Sonderkommando 4a for several executions in Ukraine, such as that of at least 33,771 on September 29–30, 1941. Between 1942 and 1944, he organized “Operation 1005” which consisted of erasing the evidence of the mass executions committed in occupied territory. He was sentenced to death in Nuremberg in 1948.
8. Deposition of June 25, 1960, BArch, B 162/5641, 1ff.
Chapter 16: The Forced Witnesses
1. One of the major branches of Hasidism.
Chapter 17: A German Soldier as Spectator
1. SS grade equivalent to captain.
2. Deposition of February 13, 1965, BArch, B 162/986, 1,662ff.
3. He gave his testimony on February 13. 1965, in Gissen, as part of the preliminary file for the trial of the men of Sonderkommando 10b of Einsatzgruppe D, conducted by the public prosecutor in Munich (primarily against Alois Persterer, who was head of the SK10b).
Chapter 18: The Transporter of Clothing
1. The head of a team of workers in the kolkhoz.
Chapter 19: The Teachers
1. Deposition of October 23, 1967, BArch, BAL, B 162/20009, 516ff.
Chapter 20: The Fillers
1. Paris: Editions Tel Gallimard, 1957, 332.
2. Himmler’s speech in front of SS officers in the town hall of Poznań, Poland, October 4 and 6, 1943, in which he openly defended the necessity of the Shoah.
Chapter 21: The Sale
1. The last census before the war in the USSR was conducted in 1939.
2. Yiddish term for a non-Jewish person who helps the family on the Sabbath by performing forbidden tasks, like cooking or lighting candles.
3. “Come!” in German.
4. GARF, 7021-19-2, 142.
5. Subdivision of the Einsatzgruppen operating in Belarus.
Chapter 22: The Auctions
1. Military operation named for the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I, or Frederick Barbarossa, when the Third Reich invaded the USSR during the summer of 1941.
2. River originating in Ukraine that passes through Belarus on its way to Poland, where it flows into the Narew.
3. Soviet and Russian term for the Second World War.
4. Song sung on Fridays at dusk in the synagogue to welcome the “Sabbath fiancée” at the beginning of the evening service.
5. Shoe factory.
6. At least 2.5 million people died between 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine and Southern Russia.
7. Campaign of repression between 1929 and 1933, directed against peasants who owned significant amounts of land.
8. In all the German townships, the auctions were organized by the local fiscal authorities.
Chapter 23: The Coats
1. More than five thousand Jews died of cold and sickness in the Yavoriv ghetto or were executed in several Aktions, the last of which was in April 1943.
2. Zentralhandelsgesellschaft Ost, a semi-private enterprise with more than 20,000 employees that helped direct agricultural economies in occupied territories.
3. Deposition of October 16, 1959, BArch, B 162/2883, 789ff.
Chapter 24: The Patchworker
1. Several hundred Jews were killed there between 1941 and 1943.
Chapter 25: The Sanitizer
1. Small village near the town of Kamen-Kachirski in Volhynie, Ukraine.
2. More than 1,800 Jews were killed between 1941 and 1942. In November 1942, four hundred Jews were able to escape from the ghetto of Kamen-Kachirski. Some of them, like Jack Kagan, were able to join up with Jewish rebels like the Bielski brothers. See Jack Kagan and Dov Cohen, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1997).
Chapter 26: The Method
1. An inquest was made against Fiodor Alexandrovitch Zaloga (1906–1944) by the Ukrainian KGB. His file (No. 11259) is in the archives of the SBU of the Khmelnitsky region, and one copy is in the RG-31.018M section of the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Other testimonies from Zaloga can be found in the files of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission of the district of Kamaniets-Podilsky, Ukraine, in the Russian Federal Archives in Moscow (GARF 7021-64-799).
2. Former name of the town of Donetsk.
3. After a major defeat in a battle near Ouman, more than 60,000 Soviet soldiers were made prisoners of war in August 1941.
4. Former town of Podolie, today in eastern Ukraine, in the region of Khmelnitsky.
5. Region of Khmelnitsky, Ukraine.
6. Village in the region of Khmelnitsky, Ukraine. On July 23, 1942, eight hundred Jews were executed.
7. Deposition of Hermann Graebe from January 29, 1960, BArch, B 162/5221, 61ff.
8. Chief of a district in the zones of civil administration in the occupied territories.
9. Deposition of Alfred Metzner on September 18, 1947, Nuremberg document NO-5558.
10. Mistresses.
11. The district head of agriculture in the civil administration zones of the occupied territories. One of his duties was to receive shipments of farm products.
Conclusion: The Photographer
1. Several hundred Jews from Prozoroki and neighboring villages were put into the ghetto. On December 6, 1941, about four hundred Jews were executed. Many inhabitants were able to escape and join the Soviet rebels.
2. “Small place,” in Russian.
3. Station near the village of Lomachy.
4. Station in the village of Ziabki.
5. Belarusian auxiliary police.
Afterword
1. Deposition of Jakob G., a member of Einsatzkommando 10b, from November 23, 1966, BArch, B 162/989, 2,311.
INDEX
abuse of Jews before Aktions
Bousk liquidations, 72
the rapes, 69–74, 153
Slonim liquidation, 67–68
Abwehr, ix–x, 258n11
Accusation of Deicide, 87, 263n7:3
Aizik (interview, Se
rniki), 51–54, 261n3:2
Aktions
Bereza Kartuska liquidation, 61–62
Bouse liquidation, 77–78
definition of, ix
Drogobytch liquidation, 79
Kamaniets-Podilsky liquidation, 214–215, 232
Kiev liquidation, vii–viii, 143–144, 155
meaning of, 258n7
Medzhybizh liquidation, 84–85, 87–90
Minsk liquidations, 69–72
Mokrovo liquidation, 127–133
Monastyriska liquidation, 88
Naro-Fominsk liquidation, vii
Novogrudok liquidation, 62–63
Novopodilsk liquidation, 145–151
Palanga liquidation, vii
Pinsk liquidation, 62–63
Pushkin liquidation, vii
Rawa Ruska liquidation, 7–10, 27, 49–50, 63–64, 98–104, 116, 128–129
Sdolbunov liquidation, 239–240
Serniki liquidation, 51–56
Slonim liquidation, 67–68
Staraïa Ouchitsa liquidation, 230–241
Stolin liquidation, 64–65
Zablocie liquidation, 65–66
Alexander (interview, Temirgoyevskaya), 106–113
Alexandra (interview, Monastyrchchina), 91
Alexy (interview, Jytomyr), 134–137
Andreï (interview, Rokytne), 29–40
Anna (interview, Léonid), 69–72
Anna (interview, Novossilka), 121–123
Anna (interview, Serniki), 51–56
Anthelme, Robert, 195
Anti-Defamation League, 34
Anton (Bousk, Ukraine), 16–17
Armavir, 105, 263n10:2
“Au Bon Gruyère,” 2–3
auctions, of Jewish goods, 203–210, 242, 267n8
Auschwitz, 144
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 157, 265n13:11, 265n13:12
Babi Yar (murderer’s food supply chain), 140–143, 157
babies
bashed to death, 149–150, 240
buried alive, 189
kicked into ditch, alive, 82
shootings of, 37–38, 79, 136, 168, 179–180, 193–195
bania, 91, 263n8:2
In Broad Daylight Page 26