Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (24 page)

The ghettoization policy was the first step toward the relatively quick removal of the city’s remaining Jews. Many had already been deported in October and November, making the long trek to villages and camps farther inland, where thousands were shot by local police or later died of malnutrition and typhus. Acting pursuant to Antonescu’s instructions, the civilian governor of Transnistria issued the command on January 2, 1942—Order No. 35—that sealed the fate of Odessa’s Jews. They would be expelled from the ghetto and relocated to the districts of Berezovka and Ochakov, to the north and east of Odessa; their goods would be turned over to the state and sold; and they would be subject to a regime of forced labor.
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The removal began on January 10. The mass exodus was conducted on foot and in horse-drawn carts, between ranks of jeering soldiers and local Odessans, in temperatures below freezing. Those who fell behind or tried to run were shot on the spot. The bodies of the dead lined the streets.
²⁷
The orders were executed by units of the Romanian army and gendarmes, who reported regularly on the progress of their work. It took months to empty the ghetto, not only because of the transport required to move the tens of thousands of people now living in Slobodka, but also because of the numerous sweeps that were required to make sure that no Jews were left. Even weeks into the removals, Jewish Odessans were still to be found hiding in houses, especially in attics or crawl spaces.
²⁸
Romanian soldiers sometimes had difficulty overcoming their own fear, disgust, and sympathy, according to official reports. To buck them up, the military command required each soldier to sign a personal declaration confirming that he had read and understood the orders prohibiting fraternization with Jews.
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Yet the conditions of atrocity, scarcity, and survival created alliances of necessity. The fates of Sergeant Nicolae T
nase and Vera Sepel, for example, were intertwined in the weeks preceding the elimination of the ghetto. T
nase was a sergeant assigned to the headquarters of the Romanian 38th Infantry, which gave him ready access to supplies of food, clothing, and fuel. Sepel was a Jew. But for a few months in late 1941 and early 1942, they made something of a life together. He visited her on multiple occasions. He may even have set up a home with her in a modest apartment somewhere in the city.

When the authorities ordered all Jews deported from Odessa, T
nase and Sepel hatched a plan to get her out. The sergeant used his military connections to arrange travel documents that would allow her to board a train bound westward, for Romania. Sending her to the west—into the heartland of the Nazi ally that now controlled the city—seems a bizarre mode of escape, but it made sense at the time. Jews were routinely harassed there and pogroms had taken place. But Jews were less likely to be slaughtered or deported en masse. In Romania, she might even be able to blend into the local population, her Jewish identity undetected.

The lovers were taking a huge chance. Jews were restricted from riding Romanian trains without express permission from the government, so Sepel’s documents probably included false identity papers that would have masked her Jewish surname. On the evening of January 10, as T
nase’s fellow soldiers were herding Jews from the newly established ghetto, he met Sepel at the city’s main station. He had come prepared with two street maps, perhaps as a way of finding a backup escape route should the initial plan fail. They waited on the platform for the night train to Buz
u, a quiet provincial town in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, on the other side of the old Soviet-Romanian border.

They never made the train. At eight o’clock that evening, the pair raised the suspicion of a ticket collector, perhaps an old station agent who had served with professional zeal under Soviets and now Romanians. The travel documents, bearing the seal of the commander of the 38th Infantry, were identified as forgeries. Both the Romanian sergeant and the Jewish escapee were taken into military custody. A few weeks later, on February 3, 1942, Sergeant Nicolae T
nase was court-martialed and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “falsifying the documents of a Jew,” plus five further years for “attempting to remove a Jew from internment in the ghetto.” Vera Nikolaevna Sepel was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for attempting to escape the ghetto and evade deportation from Odessa.
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Their fates after that point are unknown. If she remained in detention after her arrest and sentencing, Sepel was probably removed the following March when the Odessa prison was emptied of Jewish inmates. After that, she may have died somewhere inland of typhus or of exposure, or at the hands of a Ukrainian policeman or German militiaman. If she were able to convince her captors that she was really from the Romania heartland rather than occupied Odessa, she might have survived the war. Perhaps she was eventually expatriated to Romania with a new name and a new identity, just as the sergeant had intended.

The deportations that T
nase and Sepel sought to evade—or “evacuations,” in the terminology that Romanian authorities adopted from the Germans—were formally concluded months later, on April 11, 1942. The summary report from the prefect of the Odessa region stated that 32,643 Jews had been “counted and evacuated.” Another 847 were found dead in the ghetto or killed in the process of removal. A further 548 (including pregnant women) were still located in the ghetto hospital but were scheduled for transport to the facilities in Berezovka district as soon as they were movable. A new survey was conducted to identify any remaining Jews in the city and to find a way of disposing of the property confiscated from the deportees.
³¹

Things would get worse in the countryside. Widespread disease such as typhus, systematic killings by Romanian gendarmes and police units recruited from among local ethnic German populations, and the inhuman sanitary conditions in Transnistria’s numerous camps and ghettos—in places known by their Ukrainian names such as Berezovka, Bogdanovka, and Domanevka—claimed tens of thousands of lives. For those who survived, Transnistrian officials, acting on the authority of Antonescu, imposed what amounted to a system of slave labor, decreeing in December of 1943 that all Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty would be required to work in several specified jobs, from collecting eggs to staffing abattoirs. Odessa, however, was to remain a city almost wholly free of Jews. No work assignments were to be made in the city without the express permission of the government’s senior civilian administrator.
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By the spring of 1942, as the acacias were budding and flowers opening in the parks, the Romanian authorities had completed their task with every bit of the morbid perseverance of the German army, police, and SS units elsewhere. With the exception of people who somehow managed to hide their identity, there were only a few-dozen Jewish artisans working in a small, state-controlled workshop in the city center, and most of them were not originally from Odessa.
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The person overseeing the deportations was decorated by the papal nuncio for his diligent management of Romania’s newly acquired eastern territory.
³⁴
He was an obscure Romanian professor who now held the weighty title of governor—
guvernator
—of Transnistria.