The Holocaust (30 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
One survivor of this massacre was the sixteen-year-old Zvi Michalowski, who had fallen into the pit a fraction of a second before the volley of shots which killed those next to him, including his
father. Later he had heard the chief executioner, the Lithuanian Ostrovakas, singing with his fellow executioners as they drank to their successful work.
Just beyond the Jewish cemetery were a number of Christian homes. Michalowski knew them all. Naked, covered with blood, he knocked on the first door. The door opened. A peasant, he later recalled, was holding a lamp which he had looted earlier in the day from a Jewish home. ‘Please let me in,’ Zvi pleaded. The peasant lifted the lamp and examined the boy closely. ‘Jew, go back to the grave where you belong!’ he shouted at Zvi and slammed the door in his face. Zvi knocked on other doors, but the response was the same.
Near the forest lived a widow whom Michalowski also knew. He decided to knock on her door. The old widow opened the door. She was holding in her hand a small, burning piece of wood. ‘Let me in!’ begged Michalowski. ‘Jew, go back to the grave at the old cemetery!’ She chased him away with the burning piece of wood as if exorcising an evil spirit.
Michalowski, desperate for shelter, returned. ‘I am your Lord, Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘I came down from the cross. Look at me—the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent. Let me in.’ The widow crossed herself and fell at his bloodstained feet. ‘Boze moj, Boze moj,’ ‘My God, my God,’ she kept crossing herself and praying. The door was opened.
Michalowski walked in. He promised the widow that he would bless her children, her farm, and her, but only if she would keep his visit a secret for three days and three nights and not reveal it to a living soul, not even the priest. She gave Michalowski food and clothing and warm water to wash himself. Before leaving the house three days later, he once more reminded her that the Lord’s visit must remain a secret, because of His special mission on earth.
Dressed in a farmer’s clothing, with a supply of food for a few days, the young man made his way to the nearby forest. He was to survive the war in hiding, and as a partisan.
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Since the German occupation of Kiev on September 19, the Jews had waited, uncertain of their fate, noting, as the sixteen-year-old Konstantin Miroshnik later recalled, the ‘joyful faces’ of some of the
Ukrainians who stood watching the German troops arrive. On the second day of the occupation, Ukrainian policemen appeared on the streets, wearing armbands announcing that they belonged to the ‘Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists’. For nine days the Jews were unmolested. But both they and the Ukrainians had a sense that all was not well. Miroshnik later recalled how one of their Ukrainian neighbours said to his grandfather, ‘Well, Leib, your Jewish power has come to an end, the new order will begin now, so keep in mind, you’ll be reckoned with…,’
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On September 21, as Golda Glozman was told by one of her Jewish neighbours, her father Shlomo Glozman, one of the Jewish community leaders in Kiev, was murdered. As she later learned from neighbours:
…the Nazis put him and nine other most honourable old Jews in a lorry, forced them to put on their prayer vestments, and drove them through the town until dinner-time. They repeated this procedure several days in succession. The people in the streets were laughing. On one of these days Nazis came to their house after the dinner and drove him in the direction of Konstantinovskaya Street. There, nearby the cinema, ‘Udarnik’, he was beaten badly and only just managed to reach his house afterwards. However, on the next day he was forced again, together with others, to stand on the ‘chariot of disgrace’.
A few days later Shlomo Glozman left his house in order to visit his son. As he crossed Kiev, a drunken SS man attacked him in the street and beat him to death.
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At Kiev, on September 27 and 28, posters throughout the city demanded the assembly of Jews for ‘resettlement’. More than thirty thousand reported. Because of ‘our special talent of organisation’, the commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later, ‘the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being executed that indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled.’
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The Jews of Kiev were brought to Babi Yar, a ravine just outside the city. There, they were shot down by machine-gun fire. Immediately after the war, a non-Jew, the watchman at the old Jewish cemetery, near Babi Yar, recalled how Ukrainian policemen:
…formed a corridor and drove the panic-stricken people towards the huge glade, where sticks, swearings, and dogs, who were tearing the people’s bodies, forced the people to undress, to form columns in hundreds, and then to go in the columns in twos towards the mouth of the ravine.
At the mouth of the ravine, the watchman recalled:
…they found themselves on the narrow ground above the precipice, twenty to twenty-five metres in height, and on the opposite side there were the Germans’ machine guns. The killed, wounded and half-alive people fell down and were smashed there. Then the next hundred were brought, and everything repeated again. The policemen took the children by the legs and threw them alive down into the Yar.
That day the watchman witnessed ‘horrible scenes of human grief and despair’. In the evening, he noted, ‘the Germans undermined the wall of ravine and buried the people under the thick layers of earth. But the earth was moving long after, because wounded and still alive Jews were still moving. One girl was crying: “Mammy, why do they pour the sand into my eyes?”’
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After the war, a Jewish doctor, David Rosen, was told of the fate of his Aunt Lisa, who had been so far advanced in pregnancy that she had been unable to leave Kiev in the last evacuation trains before the Germans arrived in the city. ‘Aunt Lisa’, Dr Rosen was told by a neighbour after the war, ‘and her six-year-old son Tolik went to Babi Yar. She was so horrified and frightened that she began giving birth. Driven by the Germans and policemen to the ravine, together with her son and the newborn child in her arms, she fell down into Babi Yar and perished there in pangs.’
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The horrors of Babi Yar were endless and obscene. When the war was over, Victoria Shyapeltoh learned that when the Jews had been ordered to assemble, her neighbour, a Ukrainian woman who had lived in the same apartment with them for many years, had dragged her seventy-year-old father, Yakov-Pinhas Zindelivich, from the apartment into the street, and handed him over to the Germans. The old man was wearing his prayer shawl. Still wearing it, he was driven to Babi Yar, ‘praying all the way’.
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One of the few Jews to escape from the pit at Babi Yar was Dina Pronicheva. After the war, she told her story to the Russian writer Anatoli Kuznetsov, who published it, first in Russia in 1966, and then, under the name A. Anatoli, in Britain in 1970. Dina Pronicheva, like hundreds of those who were shot during these massacres, was not in fact killed. But unlike most of those who fell into the pit alive, she managed to avoid being suffocated, and to escape undetected:
All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living.
Some soldiers came out on to the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone not far from Dina went on groaning as loud as before.
Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing at those which showed signs of life.
Among them was the policeman who had examined her papers and taken her bag: she recognized him by his voice.
One SS-man caught his foot against Dina and her appearance aroused his suspicions. He shone his torch on her, picked her up and struck her with his fist. But she hung limp and gave no signs of life. He kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trod on her right hand so that the bones cracked, but he didn’t use his gun and went off, picking his way across the corpses.
A few minutes later she heard a voice calling from above:
‘Demidenko! Come on, start shovelling!’
There was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies, coming closer and closer until it started falling on Dina herself.
Her whole body was buried under the sand but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth. She was lying face upwards, breathed in some sand and started to choke, and then, scarcely realizing what she was doing, she started to
struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic, quite prepared now to be shot rather than be buried alive.
With her left hand, the good one, she started scraping the sand off herself, scarcely daring to breathe lest she should start coughing; she used what strength she had left to hold the cough back. She began to feel a little easier. Finally she got herself out from under the earth.
The Ukrainian policemen up above were apparently tired after a hard day’s work, too lazy to shovel the earth in properly, and once they had scattered a little in they dropped their shovels and went away. Dina’s eyes were full of sand. It was pitch dark and there was the heavy smell of flesh from the mass of fresh corpses.
Dina could just make out the nearest side of the sandpit and started slowly and carefully making her way across to it; then she stood up and started making little foot-holds in it with her left hand. In that way, pressed close to the side of the pit, she made steps and so raised herself an inch at a time, likely at any moment to fall back into the pit.
There was a little bush at the top which she managed to get hold of. With a last desperate effort she pulled herself up and, as she scrambled over the ledge, she heard a whisper which nearly made her jump back.
‘Don’t be scared, lady! I’m alive too.’
It was a small boy in vest and pants who had crawled out as she had done. He was trembling and shivering all over.
‘Quiet!’ she hissed at him. ‘Crawl along behind me.’
And they crawled away silently, without a sound.
Dina Pronicheva survived. The boy, Motyn, stayed with her, but as they sought to leave the area, he called that danger was near. ‘Don’t move, lady, there’s Germans here!’—those were Motyn’s words. Luckily for Dina Pronicheva, the Germans did not understand them. But hearing him speak, they killed him on the spot.
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The courage of Motyn was recorded only by chance: only because a Russian writer, a non-Jew, was in search of facts about the past. He recorded also an episode, in Kiev, of a Jewish girl ‘running down the street, shooting from a revolver’. She killed two German officers, ‘then shot herself’.
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Her name is not known. Only her deed survives, and then, only by chance.
After two days of shooting, the Einsatzkommando unit recorded the murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar. The unit’s machine-gunners had been helped by Ukrainian militiamen. The same Einsatzkommando report also gave details of an even larger slaughter further south, 35,782 ‘Jews and Communists’ killed in the Black Sea ports of Nikolayev and Kherson.
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On the Day of Atonement, October 2, it was the turn, among other places, of the village of Podborodz to face the fury of the killers. An eight-year-old girl, Hadassah Rosen, was hiding with her parents in the attic of the synagogue. From the attic, she later recalled, ‘we squinted through the cracks in the boards and saw them shoving the Jews into wagons. Whoever was slow in getting into the wagon was clubbed to death.’ It was very early in the morning: ‘soon afterwards we heard volleys of shots. That was how they killed the Jews they took in wagons out of the ghetto of Podborodz.’
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Also on the Day of Atonement, an Einsatzgruppe report recorded how, at Zagare, as 633 men, 1,017 women and 496 children were being ‘led away’, ‘a mutiny began which was put down immediately’. In the course of the mutiny, the report added, ‘150 Jews were shot right away.’
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The rest, driven to the execution site, were then killed. At Butrimonys, where 976 Jews were murdered, the Germans organized a ‘spectacle’, placing benches at the execution site so that local Lithuanians could have a ‘good view’.
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In Vilna, whose Jewish population had already been decimated by slaughter, the Day of Atonement was chosen for yet another raid into the ghetto, and for the deportation of more than three thousand Jews to Ponar, and to their deaths.
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In their raids on the ghetto, the SS men, known to the Jews as ‘hunters’, worked with their dogs. ‘These hunters dragged the Jews out of the cellars,’ Abraham Sutzkever recalled immediately after the war, of the raid on the small ghetto on the Day of Atonement, ‘and tried to drive them to Ponar. But the Jews fled into their cellars, trying to hide.’
The ‘hunters’ began to search with dogs for those who had fled, to drive them out with shots, and to shoot them in the street if they were still resisting. During one such a moment, Sutzkever recalled, an SS officer, Horst Schweinberger, began to shoot the Jews who had been discovered. But at that moment the dog at Schweinberger’s side jumped at him and began to bite his throat ‘like a mad
dog’. Then Schweinberger killed his dog and told the Jews to bury it and cry over its grave. ‘We really cried then,’ Sutzkever recalled. ‘We cried because it was not Schweinberger but his dog that had been buried.’
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At Ponar, men were shot first, then women. Even those who had not been killed outright, could not survive the whole day in the pit, lying there wounded as more and more bodies fell on top of them. Only towards evening, when the last of the women were being shot, did a few of those who were only wounded have some small chance of remaining alive until it was dark, and then of creeping away unseen: naked, bleeding, crushed, but alive.