Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (26 page)

Thousands of average Romanians well below Antonescu and Alexianu saw in the Transnistrian experiment the chance to realize a particular pet project or further their own careers. Romanian officials did not by and large suffer from what the Germans called
Ostrausch
, the intoxicating effects of working far from home, in a place seen to be inhabited by subhuman Jews and savage Slavs. But the possibilities afforded by Transnistria were not to be ignored. Academics explored the riches of the region between the Dniester and Bug rivers and prepared for the wholesale restructuring of its population. Scholars organized anthropological expeditions, measuring heads and studying the brow lines of villagers to sort out true Romanians from hybrids. (Twenty-five percent Romanian blood, it was agreed, would suffice to make someone genuinely Romanian—a far more capacious definition of national identity than that applied by the Nazis.) A new “national eugenics institute” was proposed as a way of putting the Romanian nation on a more solid genetic footing. In the summer of 1942, Romanian authorities began the process of identifying ethnic Romanians who lived to the east of the Bug River, inside the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. The plan was to relocate them to the west, into Transnistria, where they would help build a flourishing and more ethnically pure province, the Latin equivalent of Germany’s “repatriation” policies toward its own
Volksdeutsche
. Some Romanian families were resettled before the tide of war began to turn against the Axis.
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Liberals and humanitarians spoke out about the treatment of the country’s own Jews, while prominent Jewish leaders in Romania organized aid missions to assist Jews in the Transnistrian camps. The most enthusiastic nationalists welcomed policies that involved moving people, changing borders, and purifying territories thought to be contaminated by the racially or ethnically alien. But to most Romanians, the fate of Jews in the occupied region was probably of only passing concern. Even worldly intellectuals had a particular blind spot when it came to what was happening in the east. The eminent historian Gheorghe Ioan Br
tianu traveled with a Romanian cavalry unit all the way to Crimea, but he was moved mainly by the long rows of soldiers’ graves and the heavy toll that artillery had taken on the region’s antiquities.
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The province and its capital city were not the sole purview of a limited, secretive, and depraved cadre of officials and soldiers. Through acts of commission or omission, Transnistria was very much a participatory affair.

In Odessa all this would have seemed clear at the time. As one secret agent working for the occupying forces reported, some Odessans thought of the many Romanians now patrolling the streets and serving in government offices as representatives of a “soft nation,” whereas the Germans were “strong…they would have quickly brought discipline” to the city—that is, they would have restored order, kept the streets clean, rounded up criminals, and stamped out official corruption.
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That was probably the dominant view among Russians and Ukrainians: having Romanians in charge wasn’t the kind of occupation one would have chosen, but nevertheless there it was. And in any case, as brown leaves floated down to empty pavements in the autumn of 1941, the basic task that the occupiers had set themselves seemed obvious: they had come to get rid of the people the Romanians called
jidani
and whom Odessans knew in everyday Russian as
zhidy
—that is, the yids.

A city liberated: The Soviet Union’s 62nd Stalingrad Army marching down Richelieu Street, April 10, 1944.
Photo by Georgii Zel’ma, courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

A
fter the war every Odessan schoolchild could recite the dates that bracketed the occupation: the Red Army’s strategic retreat on October 16, 1941, and its triumphant return on April 10, 1944. Those 907 days were treated as a brief interregnum before the restoration of Soviet power and as a time of communal suffering, when the city was held in the strangling clutch of foreigners. Even today, along the Alley of Glory in Shevchenko Park (the former Alexandrovsky Park), a sloping walkway is flanked by memorials to the war dead. It leads to the obelisk of the unknown sailor and a sputtering eternal flame. On public holidays the memorial is patrolled by goose-stepping, uniformed children, who compete for the honor of standing to attention at “Post No. 1.” From there, visitors can look out on the harbor and the high-rise apartments beyond, evidence of the city’s journey from victim to victor.

Soviet historians tended to label the old enemy as “fascists” or “German-fascist occupiers,” especially once Romania became a Communist state and an ally in the Warsaw Pact. The former enemy had become a socialist friend, so painful episodes from the past were quietly put aside. Few people, even in Odessa itself, know of the wartime experience in any detail—in part because of the passing of the generation that still remembers the war, in part because a half century of Soviet propaganda emphasized the city’s defenders and downplayed its foreign occupiers and local collaborators.

The Soviet narrative of resistance is still powerful. Schoolteachers walk their classes through the twists and turns of the catacombs, where guerrillas plotted raids on the enemy. Commemorative plaques still mark the former homes of heroes, patriots, and partisans. Only a few Odessan writers have begun to question this version of events. For over two and a half years, were citizens really thinking only about “how to blow up the enemy headquarters, rub out an enemy soldier, or at least puncture the tires of a Romanian car?” asked one author wryly.
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But today we know—or at least can know—a great deal more about the local response to the wartime occupation.

By the 1940s the Romanian kingdom had developed a substantial provincial bureaucracy, with more than two decades of experience in governing new and troublesome districts. Much of that bureaucratic apparatus reproduced itself in Transnistria: directorates and sections, subsections and offices, all with the dual task of real-world administration plus the diligent production of paper trails. The Soviets, who scooped up these documents when the region was retaken, were good custodians. That collection now contains more than fifty-two thousand separate files and hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Many have been microfilmed and are stored at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Many more are barely kept from the ravages of mold and mice by a valiant staff at the state archives in Odessa.

The files hold detailed memos and telegrams about the establishment of the ghetto and its liquidation, the deportation of Jews to work camps and internment centers elsewhere in Transnistria, and their deaths from disease, exposure, and systematic slaughter. Yet of all the horrors in the archives, some of the most disturbing reading—especially from a city that still takes its cosmopolitanism seriously—comes in the written denunciations and secret agent reports that average Odessans filed with the Romanian authorities: hundreds of pages scrawled in ink or grease pencil on onion-skin writing paper, the backs of old posters, even the inside of candy wrappers. Along with the lists of class aliens and enemies of the people arrested and shot under Stalin, the bulging files pay bleak witness to the darker city that lurked behind the enlightened one.

O
DESSANS BEGAN DENOUNCING
each other almost as soon as the Romanian cavalry trotted down a deserted and sandbagged Richelieu Street. After the bombing of the military headquarters on October 22, 1941, the volume picked up. The demand to unmask hidden Bolsheviks before they could stage further terrorist attacks was greater than ever, and the supply of Odessans eager to avoid suspicion themselves probably spiked as well. After all, it was hard to have survived the 1930s without embracing to some degree the Soviet system, and in the topsy-turvy world of war and occupation, every virtue conjured from necessity was now a vice waiting to be revealed. It really was like stepping through the looking glass. The dueling denunciations of Skopov and Labunsky are an instructive example.

In November of 1941 one Grigory Skopov wrote to the Romanian military command to denounce his neighbor, Pavel Labunsky, as a Communist and NKVD agent. He supplied a list of people who could verify this information and gave a detailed record of Labunsky’s determined opposition to the Romanian state. When Labunsky heard from others in his apartment building that he had been denounced by Skopov, he quickly shot off his own handwritten note to the authorities. He affirmed that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He noted that he had been born into a family of reasonably well-off landowners. He had been married in an Orthodox Christian ceremony. He had been “repressed” on several occasions by the Bolsheviks. His brother had fought on the side of the Whites during the civil war, for which he was sent to the gulag and had his property confiscated. In turn, Labunsky had been left with the task of caring for his brother’s wife and two children. When the new war started, Labunsky was drafted into the Red Army, but he immediately deserted. Beyond all that, he wrote, the person the Romanians should really be worried about was his denouncer. He was merely trying to cover up his own Bolshevik past and well-known felonious ways by casting aspersions on someone else. “Skopov is the absolute worst enemy of the new order, which has come to liberate humanity from the hated Bolsheviks,” Labunsky concluded. “Skopov should pay for his past criminal activities.” He then appended a list of eleven neighbors and other witnesses who could verify his claims.
²

A few years earlier, all the bits of biography that Labunsky offered as bona fides—his class background, his religiosity, his brother’s service with the Whites—would have marked him as an enemy of the Soviet state. But in the new order, things that had been liabilities now became advantages to be valued and marketed. For plenty of Odessans, the way to demonstrate a healthy sense of civic duty was by stepping up and being of use in the maintenance of law and order, the discovery of underground Soviet agents, and especially the exposure of hidden Jews.

Alexianu’s administration saw all Jewish Odessans, at least in theory, as Soviet agents. The equation between “Jew” and “Communist” had a long and gruesome history throughout eastern Europe. But given that the Romanians were not only fighting a war but also conducting a counterinsurgency campaign—against real underground fighters hiding out in the catacombs, disrupting transport, and at times targeting senior Romanian officials—the search for hidden Jews was not simply a matter of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. It was also, from the perspective of the occupier and many of the occupied, a matter of security. Latent and at times enthusiastic antisemitism, fear of a Soviet return to the city, paranoia about being denounced oneself, and the universal neighborly emotions of greed, envy, and resentment were twisted together in the motivations of Odessa’s collaborators.

Unmasking pretenders was a common theme in many of the agent reports and voluntary denunciations. One Igor Brizhitsky reported that he had heard of a man named Strizhak, then living on Greek Street, who had worked as an employee of the NKVD and had participated in the Stalinist repression of ethnic Germans in the Odessa region. Strizhak’s passport said that he was an ethnic Ukrainian, Brizhitsky claimed, but a next-door neighbor confirmed that “his own sister is a yid.”
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In the same report, Brizhitsky went on to detail the more complicated case of a husband, wife, and son, the Zagalsky family:

Odessans were naturally accustomed to hiding from the view of the state. Smugglers,
goniffs
, and underground political groups had perfected the art of avoidance. But in 1941 the idea of shining light on the vast underworld—now thought to be populated by Bolsheviks and secret Jews—took on a deadly cast. Sometimes people could be hiding in plain sight. Agent No. 61 reported that a man who was working as a driver at a local factory by the name of Shvidkoy was in fact the same Shvidkoy who had previously been a well-known Communist, a member of the leadership of the factory’s party organization, and “a fairly evil-doing kind of person, always doing things on the sly.” Plus, the agent continued, citing the testimony of a Mr. Kritsky, “despite his Russian name and surname, [Shvidkoy] is a yid.”
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Denunciations were not always directed at specific individuals, although that is the information the Romanian authorities found most useful. A receiving officer in the military headquarters would sometimes make handwritten notations on denunciation reports, requesting that the writer be more specific about who said what and provide accurate addresses of both denouncer and denounced. It took time to train people to do their job effectively. Still, some Odessans continued to report any trivial fact or pet theory they thought might be of use to the authorities. “I would like to bring to your attention,” wrote one Valery Tkachenko, “that in the basement of 13 Tiraspol Street a group of yids get together and discuss political issues, and they say that the Romanians and the Germans are drinking our blood by the glassful but that we will drink theirs by the bucketful. And that America is helping us.”
⁶

Others denounced people who were not harboring Jews but rather harboring their old clothes, safeguarding the personal effects of those who had been sent away. Still others reported that a neighbor had benefited unduly from items left behind when Jews were rounded up by the Romanians—that is, complaining that the person was not sharing the spoils with other residents in the apartment building. Amateur analysts gave their own interpretation of goings on around them, working as informal detectives rather than as simple informants. The mysterious paper found in one apartment might be the residue of an underground printing press, surmised one local woman. The portraits of Hitler, Antonescu, and Romania’s King Mihai that had begun to appear in local bazaars were very poorly done and needed to be policed, said another. One neighbor reported that an acquaintance was usually hanging out with bad elements and probably up to no good. “At the same time his apartment is the meeting place of hidden terrorist-Communists. And besides that, his wife is a yid and is entirely surrounded by yids.”
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Another person gave a checklist by which authorities could smoke out Jews still hiding in the city. “Identification and inspection of the Jew may be made in the following way,” wrote “An Observer”:

Romanian propagandists sought to market the occupation by portraying it as liberation, the final curtain on more than twenty years of Bolshevik terror. But the erstwhile liberators reinforced the basic habits and pathologies of the Soviet system. The paranoia, the self-serving indictments, and the mania for unmasking, exposing, and rooting out potential enemies of the state were ways of behaving to which the city had become accustomed already in the 1920s and 1930s. The format of the denunciation letters and the complaints they contained were often near copies of those used during the earlier Stalin period, from the standard Russian opening line—“
Dovozhu do Vashego svedeniya nizhesleduyushchee
,” or “I would like to bring to your attention the following”—to rote-sounding endings that attested to the letter writer’s good faith and honesty. Where the occupying power sought clear and actionable intelligence, Odessans were sometimes simply enacting a well-drilled script—one that had a great deal to do with the practiced art of surviving under an oppressive regime.