The Remnant - Stories of the Jewish Resistance in WWII (35 page)

There was little dirt over the dead and the pits gave them up by the thousands. The first bodies were in such advanced state of decay that they came away in parts. The stench was unbearable. The prisoners were sick from the sight and smell. They vomited. The Kapos vomited. When even the German guards began to vomit, they started guarding the diggers from a greater distance.

As Ivan worked he came to the horrible realization that this first pit was the one Solomon's family was in. He wondered if he were lifting the very bodies of his parents, brothers, sister, his grandfather. Then an even more horrifying thought crossed his mind. If I survive long enough might I come across? He couldn't make himself think her name in that regard.

Ten meter square areas were marked off on the ground. The bodies and parts were laid out in the spaces. On each layer of the dead was placed a layer of wood and on that, another layer of the dead. Those diggers who died that day were also placed on the pyre. Thus they were placed until the pyre was about two meters high. Then petrol was poured over the entire pile and ignited.

Flames licked at the sky beneath a thick black cloud of smoke. A new disgusting smell was added to the already existing stench. But after a short time, the flames died. The petrol and the top two or three layers had burned, but the mass below was packed too tight. There was insufficient draft to let the pyres burn.

By dusk that day, there were six partially burned, smoldering piles. When their food came, no one could force himself to eat. They escaped the horror in sleep.

Again the German's ingenuity came to the rescue. The next day the replacements were accompanied by two hundred additional prisoners. The newcomers' shock was evident on their faces. While two hundred prisoners dug and carried the dead out of the pits, the remaining hundred or so were put on trucks. Ivan was among the latter. It was still in the early morning and already the sun was hot. Dimitri said to Ivan, "The heat will take its toll. Many of us will die today."

"It will make little difference which day we die," Ivan replied. "Do you have any guess at where they are taking us?"

"None."

They drove only a few minutes when the truck stopped just outside the old Jewish cemetery at the entrance to the ravine. "Good Lord, you don't suppose they want us to dig up these dead, too?" Dimitri asked, half-joking.

"Well, at least we'll know where to dig, if so," another answered.

"Get out! Hurry! Everyone out into the cemetery," Timtov commanded.

"I can't believe it," Ivan said. "I think they really are going to have us exhume those corpses. They won't even leave the Jews at peace in those age old graves."

Once inside the graveyard, Timtov gave them instructions. "At once, start taking down the grave markers. Take down each headstone and carry it over to the main gate where I want them neatly stacked. Now, you four," he said, pointing to the largest and strongest men he could see, "you will take them from that pile and stack them on the trucks. Two carry to the trucks while two of you work on the truck stacking.

"Four more of you are to take down the iron fence that is on top of the brick wall. Four volunteers, quickly!"

Ivan and three others stepped forward. Ivan wanted no part of desecrating these graves. He thought it strange after all that he had been through the previous day, but the thought of taking down headstones left him with an uncomfortable feeling.

The work was hard, but a pleasure compared with the work in the pits the day before. By noon, the sun burned down without mercy. The temperature was well over a hundred; there was no refuge from it. Even the Germans realized that to get the work done they'd have to indulge the workers in an unprecedented act of kindness-they brought in a water truck.

As the men took their unusual break, they noticed a strange, muffled explosion. A few minutes later another, then another, puff, puff, puff after puffing. As the temperature rose, the explosions became more frequent.

"What in the hell is that?" Ivan asked Dimitri, not really expecting him to know the answer.

"I've never heard anything like it. It's too muffled to be a very big explosion. I can't imagine what it could be. But with the Germans, there are a lot of things I can't imagine!"

"I can't guess what they want these headstones and iron fences for," Ivan added.

All day they worked. Truck after truck was filled with materials, which were driven back into the ravine. By dusk, the cemetery had been denuded. It looked eerie, a field of unmarked graves, unkempt and overgrown with weeds. No one will ever be able to find a loved one's grave in here again, Ivan thought, then he realized there was no one left to return to those graves.

The trucks returned once more to take the prisoners back to their temporary living area in the ravine. As the sun set and the air-cooled, the muffled explosions had ceased. When they arrived back at the area, they saw what their labor had been for. Makeshift open furnaces were being built of the headstones and the iron fences were being used as grates, letting the pyres draw air from underneath.

The pyres from the day before had been restacked on the grates. They were packed more loosely and three were ready for ignition. One of the Kapos was given a torch, which he put to the stacks of dead bodies. It went up in roaring flames. The same horrible stench filled the air.

Humans can get used to anything, Ivan thought; that night when the food came, almost everyone ate.

Ivan sat near one of the men who remained behind on the pit detail. "What was that noise we heard all day? Sounded like muffled explosions, all-coming from inside the ravine. Do you have any idea?" Ivan asked.

"They were just that, explosions. We could see them. Never saw such a thing and hope never to again. We were working in the terrible heat, when suddenly we started hearing those sounds. They came more frequently and we could see puffs of dust rise from the ground with each report. They were over there by that cliff." He pointed over his shoulder without looking himself.

"Well, what was it?" Ivan asked impatiently.

The man shrugged. "It appears the Germans used that area for their slaughter last week. The earth over the dead is very shallow. The sun reflecting off the cliff raises the temperature over there much higher than it does here. The heat beating down on the dead causes gasses that form in the corpses to burst. Those bodies were actually exploding under the ground. Each time one exploded it made a loud puff and raised a little dust."

The thought of it ended Ivan's meal. He gave his bowl to the man who had related the story. He was glad to take what was left of Ivan's food.

Ivan rolled over on his side right where he had been sitting and went to sleep.

The bringing up and burning of bodies went on for almost six weeks-seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. The number of workers was increased to five hundred. And all the time that Ivan and the other prisoners were made to dig up and burn old corpses, new corpses were being added by the Nazis. Each and every day the shootings continued as the Germans brought in new victims.

Each pyre had a hundred bodies in each layer and sometime there were twenty layers to a stack. The Germans decided two thousand bodies made the most efficient blaze. It took about two nights and a day to burn out one pyre completely. The prisoners worked all day to stack as many pyres as possible and that night would ignite them and the next day, while they still burned, new pyres would be stacked for burning that evening.

After a burning, when the ashes heaped under the grates, a crew of prisoners sifted through them for any gold or precious stones that might have escaped detection at the time of execution. What bones were found were brittle and another group of prisoners was put to work crushing them. Then the bone ash was bagged to be used as fertilizer.

Ivan estimated that each day, they burned about ten thousand corpses; bodies, people, humans. There were usually at least five pyres stacked each day, sometimes as many as eight. This pace continued for forty one days-from August 19, when the efficient burning plan was accomplished, to September 28, when the digging was finally stopped. And there were untold bodies still in the ground.

The nights were getting cooler in September and after the first week of that month the Germans started taking the workers back to the dugout huts in the concentration camp for the nights.

As they rode back to the camp one evening toward the end of September, a relative newcomer to the work crew said to Ivan, "Do you know what I just calculated?"

"How many days to Christmas?"

"No! But do you know how many bodies have been raised and burned since you started this work?"

"Yes, about four hundred thousand bodies to date. The question I have is how many are still left in the ground?"

Ivan wondered if Sosha's body...

"How could they have murdered so many?" the young man asked.

"How? For them it was easy. They just sat day in and day out and pulled the triggers and released gas in their vans. In the first week of their slaughter, they murdered a hundred thousand Jews."

"Are you serious? In the first week?"

"That's the estimate I heard and I believe it. The first pit we emptied was filled with their remains. When we had them all out, the bare pit was ten meters deep, twenty meters wide and over eighty meters long. The weight of the corpses on the top had so compressed the ones on the bottom that we had to hack them apart with shovels and axes to get them out. In a few cases, the Germans went down and set small charges of dynamite to blow the bodies apart."

"Oh God!"

"Oh God, hell! Better ask, 'Where was God then? After that first week, they imported more Jews-then Gypsies and Russian prisoners-then Communists and partisans-then just innocent men, women and children who happened to be on the wrong street at the wrong time." He paused, remembering his own arrest with Sosha. "Anyway, by now they've killed so many we'll never get them all out. I'd bet we haven't taken out half. And the killing hasn't stopped yet." His bitterness was overflowing now. "And the last pyre will be ours, because we are witness to it all and we can't be left behind to give testimony to this-this..."

"How much longer do you think it will last?"

"Not long. When the wind blows from the east, it carries the sound of battle. The Russians are advancing. But rest assured, the Germans will get rid of us before the front passes back through Kiev."

It was a coincidence that the last bodies to be exhumed were taken from the ground on September 28, 1943, exactly two years to the day since the first Jewish roundup in Kiev. As the last pyre was ignited, Ivan and the other survivors of the forty-one day ordeal knew that tomorrow would most likely be their execution date. That knowledge encouraged the only known mass escape attempt at Babi Yar.

There was nothing to lose.

They would try an escape during the night. It would have to be spontaneous. It was too late to make definite plans. When they were locked in for the night, the men in Ivan's dugout considered their best course. Like prisoners everywhere, the men had over a period of time collected things that might come in handy. This night each brought out his secret treasures. There were some pliers stolen by the men who had been assigned to pull teeth from the dead. One had found a small hammer that some poor soul had taken to his grave with him in the ravine. There were pieces of wire, nails and needles, bits of string, a broken knife blade-but no weapons and little that would be of much help in an escape.

"Give me that piece of wire," one of the men said. "Maybe I can work the lock with it."

He went to the single door in the dugout and pulled the lock, which was outside the wire mesh door, to where he could manipulate it. To everyone's surprise but his own, the lock snapped open with ease.

"Don't tell anyone what you just saw!" he said with a chuckle. "They might get the wrong idea of my past life." To everyone's further surprise, he snapped the lock shut again.

"What the hell did you do that for?" someone asked.

"I just wanted to see if I still had the touch. It's too early yet. We must go after midnight when they least expect it. If the guard comes around and sees the lock off before then, we'll all be shot right in our bunks."

The next four hours were the longest Ivan could ever recall.

While they waited, a fog set in. It lay heavily on the ground to a depth of about a meter. The lock picker volunteered to crawl in the fog to the other dugouts and unlock their doors. "I've done riskier things in my life," he said. "I think I can do it. These fogs usually last the night. Just give me five minutes after I leave the hut; the more people who break for it, the better our individual chances."

"And once we're out of the hut, what do we do?" someone asked. It was a reasonable question.

"All I can think to do," Ivan volunteered, "is to surprise the Germans. Overpower them and hope we can bluff our way out."

"That's crazy!" A voice came out of the darkness.

"Does anyone have a better idea?"

Silence.

"Okay. We outnumber the Germans ten to one at least. If we can eliminate a few before they give the alarm and get their weapons, we may be able to shoot our way out. If we can get lucky and get a few grenades, we might even be able to blow an escape route through the fences." Ivan paused. He knew it had little chance. "Besides, it beats just waiting to be shot tomorrow."

"Maybe they won't shoot us tomorrow. If that's all they have planned for us they wouldn't have brought us back."

Ivan thought. It made sense. "True. So it will be the next day. Only the agony of waiting will be prolonged. I want out tonight-I want to be free one way or another..."

The camp had been quiet for more than an hour. The guards were at the daily minimum.

"Now's the time, now or never." announced the lock expert. He slipped from his bunk and had the lock off in a few seconds. "Five minutes!" He was gone, somewhere in the deepening fog. It was hard for the men to contain themselves. They had no watch. Several of them counted seconds. Five times they counted to sixty, slowly, precisely. Five minutes are hard to estimate, especially when every nerve and muscle wants to go. It may have been five minutes-it was probably a little less. It seemed more.