by Anna Reid
Much the same thing happened when Germany invaded Ukraine itself. When the Wehrmacht attacked in June 1941, it was joined by two 600-strong OUN units, ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’, recruited and drilled under the approving eye of German military intelligence. Nachtigall, clad in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, marched into Galicia; Roland, in the uniform of the First World War Ukrainian Sich, into the southern steppe from Moldova. OUN also organised ‘march groups’ of young activists, who raced forward into eastern Ukraine setting up Ukrainian city administrations (many of which joined enthusiastically in the first Jewish massacres).50 But almost immediately, the Ukrainians ran up against the limits of German tolerance. A few days after entering Lviv, a leader of OUN’s Bandera faction, Yaroslav Stetsko, called a ‘national assembly’ in the old Prosvita building and proclaimed a ‘Sovereign All-Ukrainian State’.51 The announcement was broadcast from the city radio station, together with a message of support from Sheptytsky. Ten days later Stetsko and Bandera were arrested and sent to Berlin. The arrest and execution of dozens more OUN activists followed, and Nachtigall and Roland were both withdrawn from the Ukrainian front and sent to fight Soviet partisans in Belarus.
The honeymoon with Germany over, the Ukrainian nationalists went underground. A variety of partisan groups sprang up, the largest being the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, controlled by the Banderivtsi. Fielding up to 200,000 men, for a few months in the autumn and winter of 1943 it controlled most of north-west Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and hospitals. Even more remarkably, small UPA guerrilla units carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign against the Soviet Union for years after the end of the war. The last UPA commander, Roman Shukhevych, was killed in a shoot-out near Lviv in 1950, but small detachments continued to operate in the hills and forests, despite wholesale deportation of villages suspected of giving them shelter.
UPA’s methods were every bit as ruthless as those of the SS and the NKVD. During the German retreat, it massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia. ‘At night, and even by day,’ Oliynyk recounts,
partisans would pounce on Polish houses and kill everyone from the youngest to the oldest . . . There was an incident in our village when one of the men, Petro Vasylchyshyn, refused to join in and went home to his parents. A week later, the USB [OUN’s secret police] took him to the woods and shot him. And when the USB found out that his parents were complaining, they shot them too.52
Fighting continued in the Bieszczady mountains of south-eastern Poland until the spring of 1947, when UPA was rounded up by the Polish army. Over the next months Ukrainian villages in the area were systematically demolished, and their inhabitants forcibly deported to the ex-German ‘recovered territories’ in the north and west, or to the Soviet Union.
Retreating westward in the last months of the war, the Wehrmacht marched to a gloomy Russo-German ditty: ‘Es ist alles vorüber, es ist alles vorbei/Drei Jahre in Russland, und nichts ponimai’ – ‘Everything’s over, everything’s past/Three years in Russia, and we don’t understand a thing.’ It was truer than the soldiers knew: one of the Nazis’ biggest mistakes of the war was their treatment of Ukraine.
Germany’s suppression of the OUN-led partisans affected only a relatively small group of committed, even fanatical nationalists. What turned the population as a whole against Nazi rule, initially welcomed as a deliverance from Stalinism, were two other policies: its treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the mass deportation of civilians to Germany as slave-labourers.
During its initial advance, the Wehrmacht captured vast numbers of prisoners – over 60,000, according to German records53 – in its pincer movement on Kiev alone. Partly because the number of surrenders was so huge, partly because Slavs were Untermenschen undeserving of even basic care, few preparations were made for their reception. Instead, the Wehrmacht herded hundreds of thousands of men into ‘cages’ – bare enclosures surrounded with barbed-wire. The Jews and political commissars among the prisoners were executed, and since deciding who was Jewish was left up to officers’ ‘intuition’, so too were tens of thousands of circumcised Muslims from the Caucasus and Crimea. It sufficed, according to one observer, ‘for a man to have black hair and black eyes in order to be considered a Jew and shot’.54
Ravaged by typhus, beaten and starved, the remaining prisoners died like flies. At no camp was the death rate less than 30 per cent, and in some it was as high as 95 per cent.55 The bodies were left lying for weeks on end, the guards only entering the verminous compounds in order to incinerate the dead and dying with flame-throwers. Cannibalism made its appearance: ‘After having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots,’ Göring joked with the Italian foreign minister, ‘they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry’.56
In the final months of the war, thousands of prisoners were shunted west in death marches similar to those suffered by the inmates of the concentration camps. Altogether, of the 5.2 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by Germany during the war, 2 million are recorded as having died in camps, and another 1.3 million fell into the catch-all category of ‘escapes, exterminations, not accounted for, deaths and disappearances in transit’. Taking only the most conservative figure of 2 million deaths, the Eastern Front’s prisoner-of-war camps killed over a third as many people again as the entire Holocaust.57
Unsurprisingly, the fate of Soviet PoWs shocked the civilian population far more than did that of Ukraine’s Jews. The Avhustivka villagers threw loaves of bread over the wire to prisoners in a nearby transit camp; the Jewish massacres, in contrast, were treated by some at least as entertainment. Germany’s treatment of its prisoners also gave Soviet soldiers, many of whom had little or no enthusiasm for Stalinism, the best of incentives not to change sides. After the initial German advance, numbers of deserters dropped sharply – ‘because’, as a Soviet officer explained, ‘most of the prisoners have been disappointed . . . days without food; only cursing and beating; shootings without reason, often only because the prisoner cannot understand what the Germans want from him . . .’58
Worst of all, from the average civilian’s point of view, was the Nazis’ programme of forced labour. Between the spring of 1942 and the summer of 1944, Germany deported 2.8 million Soviet civilians – 2.1 million of them Ukrainian and just over half women59 – to the Reich as Eastworkers or Ostarbeiter. Initially recruitment was voluntary, but as news of atrocious work conditions got back home, the Germans resorted to violence, piling people into lorries as they left churches or cinemas. Thirty-eight thousand Kievans – over 10 per cent of the city’s population – were delivered to the Ostarbeiter programme in the first ten months of occupation.60 Once in Germany, they were forced to wear badges embroidered with the letters OST, barred from fraternising with Germans and from public transport, subject to punitive whippings and paid starvation wages. ‘A glass of cold water,’ ran an Ostarbeiter song, ‘keeps you working ‘til the afternoon/The soup is good – a litre of water, one grain of kasha and one little potato . . .’61 Escapees were executed or sent to concentration camps. As the more pragmatic of Hitler’s henchmen repeatedly but vainly pointed out, one of the chief results of the Ostarbeiter scheme was that more and more Ukrainians fled to the forests to join the partisans.
In Kiev’s main post office I met an ex-Ostarbeiter, an old woman with gold front teeth, a furry white beret and bright blue eyes. We started chatting in the queue for stamps – she wanted to know if I believed in God. I forget how it came up that she had been in Germany during the war, but I finally persuaded her – ‘You’re not a communist, are you? You’re not going to print this?’ – to come to my flat and talk. With feet planted wide apart, and many theatrical flourishes of a tear-stained handkerchief, she told her story – a remarkable, but not, for her generation, a particularly unusual one. Her name was Lydiya Gordeyevna, and she came from a poor Kiev family; her mother was a seamstress and her
father worked in a canteen. In the spring of 1942, aged sixteen – ‘Oh such a long time ago, I had beautiful hair then, down to here!’ – she was sent to Germany. First she weeded beets on a farm, and when summer was over she was transferred to an armaments factory, where she worked on a lathe. The norm was 450 shells an hour, which meant lifting nine and a half tonnes of metal a day. ‘The Germans fed us with cabbage full of worms. When we complained they said – this is meat for you!’
In 1943, having been discovered writing to a friend that ‘the Germans would run away from Russia with their trousers down’, she was sent to the women’s section of Ravensbrück. Had I heard of it? Yes, I had. The guards ‘were like witches. They had black uniforms and rubber sticks and they hit us on the head, everywhere – real witches. Even the SS men weren’t as bad as the women.’ At three o’clock each morning a siren went off and the prisoners had to stand outdoors at attention for ‘two or three hours – shivering and shivering’. Girls who were too ill to work were taken away on ‘transports’ and never seen again. ‘There were rumours that patients were burned but we didn’t know exactly what happened – we only saw the chimney, with black smoke coming out. We didn’t know about the gas chambers.’ Crippled by rheumatism, Lydiya only just escaped the chimneys herself. ‘An officer came to the hospital, and insisted I should go on the transport. But the old doctor was looking around for reasons for me not to go. He said – look at her glands, she’s got diptheria, she might contaminate German air!’ To thank him, she gave three days’ bread ration to ‘a Ukrainian woman there who was a sort of sculptor. She got a bit of cardboard from somewhere, a bit of red velvet from an old dress, and some steel turnings from the factory. She made a picture of a vine – really beautiful, with leaves and grapes and everything. I hid it under my jacket and gave it to him. He was really pleased.’
The end of the war found her in another camp near Leipzig. ‘In 1945 they collected up all the women and marched us off under guard. We marched day and night and slept on the ground. We were only allowed a glass of porridge a day – not even bread. Lots of people died – young girls – on the road. Crows picked at their eyes. It was a horrible sight – even the Germans cried.’ Passing through woods, some of the women ran off into the trees. ‘Then we saw that the younger guards were doing the same. Only the old ones were left – they had plenty of bullets but they couldn’t run.’ Lydiya and a friend ran too, and hid in a hay barn. ‘We sat there for three days and nights. Then suddenly we heard Russian swear words – we knew our people were coming.’ Their liberators were not, however, the clean-cut heroes of Soviet legend. ‘The commander arrived, he said – you, come over here! I didn’t know what he wanted. I saw he had all sorts of bits of gold hidden under his jacket – perhaps they’d taken it off dead bodies. Then he pointed to a bed.’ Outside, German soldiers were coming out from the farm buildings with their hands up. ‘I heard – bang bang!’ – the old woman pretended she was holding a machine-gun – ‘and they all fell down.’
Back home in Kiev – after a train journey during which officials ‘collected all photos and postcards and made us throw them away so we couldn’t show anyone what life was like in the West’ – things were not much better. The returning Ostarbeiter were treated like pariahs. ‘I couldn’t get a job. The managers kept saying – were you in Germany? Then get out! They really hated us, despised us. Even now I’ve got a neighbour who keeps saying I’m a fascist – why? – because I was in Germany, that’s all.’
Now Lydiya lives off her pension in a one-room flat with her husband and an orphaned grandson. She has been abroad once since the war, when a German organisation arranged for a group of camp survivors to go back to Ravensbruck for the fiftieth anniversary of liberation. Producing a grubby Soviet passport from inside her dress, she turned to the page with the German visa on. It was big and shiny and multicoloured; it even involved a holograph. She stroked it as if it were a piece of silk: ‘Look, isn’t it beautiful?’
What the worthy organisers of Lydiya’s trip presumably did not know was that Lydiya is, by Western standards, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. Talking about Ravensbruck she referred to Jews as zhidy – yids – or, conspiratorially, to ‘members of a certain nation’: ‘The block where the Polish members of a certain nation were kept had a terrible smell. We used to say – it’s the dirty yids.’ It was not the first time I had heard this sort of thing. In Odessa, I stayed with a very sweet old lady who fed me to bursting with a lethal mixture of fried fish and stewed pears, the purchase of which must have used up nearly all the five dollars a night I was paying her. Unfortunately, her conversation was heavily larded with tales of how Jews took all the best jobs, hid gold under their beds, and so on. Even young, educated Ukrainian friends were prone to throw-away jokes about Jewish cunning and Jewish parsimony, looking genuinely baffled when I explained to them, with some heat, that in Western society this would not go down well at all.
Is Ukraine still an anti-Semitic place? At the official level, definitely not. There is no Soviet-style ‘nationality’ entry on the new Ukrainian passports, the informal quotas on Jews entering higher education are long gone, and there are Jews in senior positions in every branch of government. Israeli and Ukrainian foreign ministers exchange cordial visits, and Odessa has elected a Jewish mayor. Synagogues are slowly being reopened (though the one on Rustaveli Street in Kiev is still subject to a rearguard action by a children’s puppet theatre), and Kiev recently got its first kosher restaurant. No Ukrainian political party save the tiny UNA uses anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the country has no political figure, to its great credit, even approaching Russia’s ghastly Zhirinovsky. Though Ukraine still has anti-Semites – the graffiti and the bricks through the synagogue windows testify to that – anti-Semitism is no longer an institutionalised part of its culture.
But if Ukrainian society is coming to terms with its living Jews, the same cannot be said of its dead ones. As in Soviet days, the Holocaust is one of the great unmentionables, fitting in as badly with Ukraine’s new story-book self-image of doughty Cossacks and martyred poets as it did with the Soviets’ square-jawed Slav brothers standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the fascist invader. ‘Ukrainians don’t want to talk about it,’ a Jewish friend told me. ‘They prefer talking about Ukrainians fighting Germans and Russians, and Ukrainians being sent to Siberia.’ When Ukraine’s first post-independence president, Leonid Kravchuk, made a speech at Babiy Yar on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre ‘it was a real shock, because before that, people didn’t even pronounce the word “Jew” – they used euphemisms, they talked about “individuals of Jewish nationality”.’ Babiy Yar has a new menorah-shaped memorial to remind passers-by that the people killed there were not just ‘Soviet citizens’, but hundreds of other sites round the country remain forgotten and unmarked. The subject is not taught in schools, nor much discussed in the media. This selective amnesia applies, it should be added, not only to Jews, but to all Ukraine’s vanished minorities – Poles, Germans, Greeks and Armenians. All are uncomfortable muddiers of the waters in a country that has not even begun to come to terms with a history strewn with more than its fair share of blood and paradox.
Among the Ukrainian diaspora, the Holocaust is still an acutely touchy issue, alternately the subject of flaming polemic and defensive silence. The entry for Babiy Yar in a new English-language guidebook to Ukraine, published in Baltimore and obviously aimed at a diaspora readership, consists of a single astonishing sentence: ‘O. Teliha (1907–42), a poetess and a leading activist of the Melnyk faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, executed by the Germans, is buried here.’ Nazi-hunters and Ukrainian organisations have had frequent spats, the most notorious and longest-drawn-out being the Ivan Demjanjuk affair. In 1986 a Cleveland car-worker, a post-war Ukrainian immigrant, was extradited to Israel on the charge of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, one of the operators of the gas chambers at Treblinka. The case collapsed (Demjanjuk having already spent seven and a half year
s in prison) when it was proved that prosecution evidence provided by the Soviet government had been faked.
In reality, the question of Ukrainian anti-Semitism is an increasingly academic one. There are few anti-Semites left in Ukraine, because there are few Jews. They were less than 1 per cent of the population in 1989, and are fewer still now. Back in Ivano-Frankivsk, Moishe-Leib tells me that 150 families have emigrated in the last three years – most to Israel, some to America or Germany. ‘Every month another two or three lots go, and the old people left behind are dying. The rest are assimilated – half-Ukrainian or married to Ukrainians – and they don’t come to synagogue.’ Even on festival days his congregation numbers only fifty or so – elderly, courteous men dressed with the painstaking respectability of the old Soviet middle class. Moishe-Leib gives Sabbath school to the children and Hebrew lessons to the adults – ‘so they don’t arrive in Israel like wild people’ - and helps with visa applications.
Wouldn’t it be better, I ask, to try to get people to stay, to rebuild something of what was lost? Impossible, he says: ‘The fact is, people have lost their traditions.’ Besides, most of the Jews living in Ivano-Frankivsk today are Easterners who moved in after the war. The real Galician shtetl communities are already long gone. When he has no congregation left, Moishe-Leib will emigrate himself: ‘I’m only here because there are still people I can help. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, I will have gone too.’ What will happen to the synagogue and the graves then, he doesn’t know.
Driving back through town, Moishe-Leib tells one last oh-so-Ukrainian story. As we bump past a routinely hideous Intourist hotel, he points to the bit of empty pavement where Ivano-Frankivsk’s Lenin statue once stood. ‘I’ve done a deal to re-use the stone for a Holocaust memorial’ he says. ‘We’re paying them back in their own currency.’
