Olga's Ukraine: September 1941

In writing a family history one cannot ignore the larger history of the time and place. The time and place of a portion of Olga’s history was Zhytomyr, Ukraine, from 1929 until 1943. Most of us have the wonderful blessing to live mundane lives through unremarkable times. We have the luxury to obsess and prattle on about the making of a fine pot of borsch. Olga’s borsch is simple. It’s bean soup with beets, cabbage and whatever. In September of 1941, I’m sure all kinds of cooks were simmering pots of borsch in Zhytomyr. I'm also sure none remember how it was made or wrote down a recipe. In Olga’s Ukraine other things were going on.

In the City of Zhytomyr, according to Wendy Lower, in Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine: “On 10 September 1941, Zhytomyr’s Feldcommandantur met with staff from Einsatzgruppe C, and they decided “definitively and radically to liquidate the Jewish community.” . . . The final blow came in the early morning hours of 19 September 1941: “Starting at 4:00 o’clock [a.m.], the Jewish quarter was emptied after having been surrounded and closed the previous evening. . . .3,145 Jews were registered and executed.”

Following the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Zhytomyr, the SS troops looted the most valuable Jewish personal property and currency. What was left behind amounted to nearly thirty tons of linens, clothing, shoes and household goods and was “donated” to the Nazi “People’s Welfare Agency.” In the remains of the ghetto, a prison camp housed 240 skilled Jewish laborers who were later killed in 1942.

Olga remembered.

The entire awful spectacle of the Nazi “Final Solution” rapidly surrounded her. Within less than two months, what began in July as a hopeful dawn of liberation marked openly by her Christian baptism along with that of 30 young friends, became in September a part of one of the darkest episodes of human history.

When asked about the Holocaust, she paused and thought for long while, then said: “My best friend was Jewish girl. They lived across the street. One morning we got up. The whole family was gone. They were simply gone.”

It was as if a kaleidoscope of memories flashed through her mind and froze on the singular, black, almost vacant memory, the one that was the most painful. In the pause and in the brief answer that followed, there was an unspoken footnote. It said, the horror of what happened is beyond comprehension, and something not to be recalled.

Less than two weeks following the slaughter of Zhytomyr’s Jews, seventy or eighty miles to the west another girl kept a diary. She kept track of the events as they unfolded, still beyond comprehension, but not benevolently draped by the gauze time layers upon memory. Iryna Khoroshunova, on September 29, vividly wrote this from Kiev:

“We still don’t know what they did to the Jews. There are terrifying rumors coming from the Lukianivka Cemetery. But they are still impossible to believe. They say the Jews are being shot . . . Some people say that the Jews are being shot with machine guns, all of them. Others say that sixteen train wagons have been prepared and that they will be sent away. Where to? Nobody knows. Only one thing seems clear: all their documents, things, and food are confiscated. Then they are chased into Babi Yar and there . . . I don’t know. I only know one thing. There is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped or explained.”

A few days later with the uncertainty dispelled, she wrote:

“Everybody is saying now that the Jews are being murdered. No, they have been murdered already. All of them, without exception – old people, women and children. Those who went home on Monday have also been shot. People say it in a way that does not leave any doubt. No trains left Lukianivka at all. People saw cars with warm shawls and other things driving away from the cemetery. German “accuracy.” They already sorted the loot! A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery, but crawled through the fence from the other side. She saw how naked people were taken toward Babi Yar and heard shots from a machine gun. There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact. A fact which is starting to drive us insane. It is impossible to live with this knowledge. The women around us are crying. And we? We also cried on September 29, when we thought they were taken to a concentration camp. But now? Can we really cry? I am writing, but my hair is standing on end.”

The massacre at Babi Yar was a different sort of explosion than the many explosions that shook Kiev. Kiev fell on September 19. The German army advanced into a city that remained largely intact. The main battles had occurred in Kiev’s outskirts and the surrounding countryside. By the time it came to a close the German military saw no need to shell the city itself. However, beginning on September 24 and lasting nearly two days, a series of explosions wracked the city’s center setting nearly 250 urban acres ablaze. The fire took another three days to put out. Between 10 and 50 thousand city residents were left homeless.

From the outset, both the Germans and residents of Kiev were outraged. According to Karel Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair, already on the first day of the explosions angry crowds began looking for culprits. In the following days, the blame was increasingly placed on Kiev’s Jewish population. Even though the fire left many Jews homeless, the German occupiers found blaming the Jews was a convenient non sequitur. It was a conclusion that many Kiev’s residents were more than willing to buy into. As Berkhoff explains, they “feared a terrible German revenge and wanted a scapegoat.”

No one could have imagined the wrath that would follow: not Kievans; not Kiev’s large Jewish minority; and not the solders of the German Sixth army. As for the locals, it’s reasonable to assume they expected reprisals along the line of what had occurred in Zhytomyr, where a hundred Jewish men were rounded up and executed as Bolshevik saboteurs in July, 1941. Zhytomyr is about eighty mile east of Kiev. News likely spread through the grapevine, but if so only slowly. The residents of Kiev apparently had no knowledge of the genocidal work in Berdychiv and Zhytomyr.

  

On Sunday, September 28, posters were plastered throughout the city ordering all Jews to appear at an assembly point near the Kiev’s train yards on the following day before eight o’ clock. They were to take their documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing with them. The posters warned that and Jews who failed to show up would be shot, as well as anyone caught looting vacated Jewish homes and apartments.

According to Berkhoff’s account, the SS spread rumors that the Jews were being assembled to concentrated into a ghetto and put to work, or alternatively to be sent to forced labor camps in Germany or to be held for exchange with German prisoners of war.

Instead, on the following Monday and Tuesday all of the Jews who followed the German directive were slaughtered. No fewer than precisely 33,771 according to Nazi records. Berkhoff notes that the number does not include non-Jewish spouses and other relatives who died along with them. Overall, according to most sources, the two day death toll was in the range of 50 to 60 thousand. The Jewish population in Kiev when the German arrived was around 110,000-130,000. During the following months the Nazis continued to use the Babi Yar ravine as a killing site. Soviet sources claim as many 100,000 to 200,000 people were killed there before the before Kiev was retaken by the Red army in November 1943.

It’s stunning how quickly the Nazi killing machine evolved in Ukraine. When the Germans entered Kiev on September 19, as elsewhere in Ukraine they were cautiously welcomed as liberators. Unlike Zhytomyr, the honeymoon was short. Figuratively, it ended the morning after the wedding night. Any hope that the German occupation would be less harsh than Soviet rule was almost immediately squelched. Within two years, Nazi genocide would be nearly complete, not in just in Ukraine but across all Europe.

Contemporary historians have, in trying to answer how the Nazi slaughter could unfold so quickly and so thoroughly, looked hard for what role civilian collaboration played. But, its speed left little room for collaboration, aside from a relative handful of puppets who wormed their way into senior civilian administrative positions and a larger group of thugs enlisted into local police units.

The genocide as it unfolded was primarily a Nazi German export accompanying the invasion. Herman Goring, Hitler’s right hand, in an order dated July 31 authorized SS chief Reinhard Heydrich “to make all necessary preparations” for the “total solution to the Jewish question” in all areas under German occupation. He was instructed to submit comprehensive plan outlining the roles of all necessary government organizations in the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

Until August Lower writes: “. . . the transition from killing male Jews to killing women and children did not occur automatically. . . According to the testimony of the former commander of Einsatzkammando 5 (EK5), Erwin Schulz, he was summoned in early August from Berdyschiv to Zhytomyr, where his superior, Otto Rasch, informed him that the higher-ups were displeased because the SS-police was not acting aggressively enough against the Jews, in particular, by not killing women and children.”

In Western Europe, by comparison, the population tacitly acquiesced to Nazi anti-Semitism, nearly all the way to the rail yards leading to Auschwitz. It’s a big difference and one not entirely overlooked. At the 65^th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, in 2006, Holocaust survivor and then Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau in his address wondered:

“Maybe I am not a historian, but maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on September 29 and September 30, 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem. We are a problem, of course. Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe.

We kept silent. . .  The world became a torch of fire, of hatred, lakes of bloodshed, because of that silence. And before that silence in the ‘30s what did we see? What did we hear? The voice was: “It will not happen, it can’t be. The world will not enable such a horror. The world is too cultured to enable that horror.”

January 1942, following a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, is generally recognized as formal beginning of the “Final Solution.” It was at Wannsee where the plans to deport Jews from German controlled Western Europe and North Africa to Eastern European death/work camps were outlined.

In Western Europe the Holocaust evolved gradually over a course of years. In Ukraine the “final solution” stormed in quite literally behind the blitzkrieg of tanks. The atrocities of the Holocaust cannot be underscored or diminished, yet in very real way all of Ukraine was traumatized.