by Barry Rubin
CHAPTER SIX
THE SHOAH IN DOLGINOV
On Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, as Dolhinov’s students nervously awaited for their final exam grades, Germany attacked a Soviet Union, totally unprepared for its ally’s betrayal. The German army reached Dolhinov in just six days. Within a year, the SS would report that the “Jewish problem” in Dolhinov had been solved forever.
During the war, six million Polish citizens perished, half of them Jews. The Germans succeeded in murdering 90 percent of those Polish Jews unable to flee to the USSR before they arrived. Almost as many Jews would die in Dolhinov alone, more than 3000, as American soldiers on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Fewer than 300 survived.
Briefly, it happened like this. On March 28, 1942, came what the SS called the First Action, and on April 29-May 1, the Second Action. Around 2400 Jews were killed in those two operations. The remaining approximately 200 survivors still in town, kept alive temporarily because the Germans claimed to need their skills, were murdered on May 21. A smaller number were killed in small groups throughout the German occupation. About 300 had escaped, before, during, and after the two main massacres to be hidden by peasants or partisans, though a number of these escapees did not survive the fighting and see the war’s end.
In my own extended family, of 186 Rubins and Grosbeins alive in Dolhinov on June 22, 1941, no more than 15 would still be breathing on June 22, 1942.
Such statistics conceal the fact that the story of each who lived and everyone who died is an epic tale in itself. Moreover, the significance of these events—despite, or perhaps because of, decades of discussion about the Shoah—has been vastly misunderstood.
The conclusion most commonly drawn by contemporary society about the mass murder of European Jewry is that it shows the need for tolerance, diffusing into a sort of unfocussed niceness, hate-crime legislation, and Political Correctness. Ironically, by the early twenty-first century it often seemed the main beneficiaries of this view were those reviving the type of slanders against the Jewish people who perpetuated the massacre in the first place.
What clearer demonstration could there be then the April 2009 speech, coincidentally on the anniversary of Hitler’s birth, by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a UN-sponsored meeting supposedly fighting racism and anti-semitism. He had simultaneously denied the Shoah had happened while labelling Jews and Israel as the equivalent of Nazis. At the meeting’s end, most of the world’s nations passed an anti-Israel, and in many ways anti-Jewish, resolution. In short, the image of the Shoah had been turned against the victims while giving aid and comfort to contemporary spreaders of hatred, incitement, and violence against Jews, including as targets the survivors of the Dolhinov and other such massacres.
In contrast to the view of the Shoah that is so watered-down as to be rendered useless or, even worse, the reversal of lessons which justifies contemporary fascism and antisemitism is the concept of the German-born rabbi Emil Fackenheim. A Shoah survivor who later emigrated from Canada to Israel, Fackenheim pointed out that if that state had existed earlier, Europe’s Jews could have been saved.
Just before the 1967 Six-Day war—inspired by the threat to Israel’s existence at a moment that threatened to repeat the events he’d lived through—Fackenheim stated, “Thou shalt not hand Hitler posthumous victories.” And yet in our time the very memory of the mass murders he unleashed had become transformed into a tremendous posthumous victory for Hitler.
When I heard Ahmadinejad’s speech, I thought of an event that happened in Dolhinov. It was May 1, 1942. A little girl named Esther Dokszycky’s mother, Rivka, and sister, Roshke, had just been murdered by the Nazis. She had just seen a little boy shot down before her eyes and barely escaped death herself. Saved because her father was one of the few remaining skilled workers the Germans kept alive, she was taken by the collaborationist police to the house where the last Jews of Dolhinov were imprisoned.
One of the few remaining survivors was Ringa, Dokszycky’s first-grade teacher from the Zionist Tarbut school. The young woman, sitting next to her own four-year-old son, the last two living in her family, was astonished to see one of her students alive. She hugged and kissed Esther, and with tears in her eyes, said to her: “Remember how I taught you about Israel. But we didn’t have the opportunity to go there.” A few days later, she and her little boy were murdered, too.
Those who lived and died in Dolhinov knew the lessons of the Shoah.
First, the mass murder was a specifically Jewish phenomenon and not some universal event. Jews were targeted based on a long tradition of antisemitism whose continuity endured despite shifts in its specific themes. It arose from the slander of Judaism and of what Jews did and sought. This doctrine was manipulated by movements seeking power and aggressive dictatorships. And these factors are still true today.
Second, it was also profoundly anti-pragmatic, based on passion and ideology beyond rational calculations. One of the main reasons Jews in Dolhinov expected not to be murdered was that killing them would damage the German war effort. Yet such “irrational” aspects of antisemitism continue to endure today, in which injuring the Jews overwhelms the more immediate material self-interest of those consumed by such hatred.
Even today, does the West understand Communism or fascism, pan-Arab nationalism or radical Islamism? For Western society, certainly in our time, has the greatest difficulty in understanding how anyone might believe anything that would cause them to act in any way that wasn’t the most efficient, immediately rewarding for their material interests.
The West has prospered by following the road of pragmatism. Yet it has lost the capacity—indeed, the dominant worldview outlaws it—to understand that not everyone thinks alike. Addressing this non-ideological materialism contemptuously, shortly after the Iranian revolution took power in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini snorted at those who thought the upheaval took place to lower the price of watermelons, that is, to improve living standards.
The German fascists called their doctrine Weltanschauungskrieg, the war of ideologies. The Communists called it class struggle. The Islamists call it Jihad.
Third, as Fackenheim and Ringa, I’m sorry that I don’t know her family name, understood, the Shoah showed the need for a Jewish state, a place where Jewish civilization could continue and which could offer protection to Jews in the face of inevitable incitement and efforts at persecution. While it could certainly be argued that the existence of Israel itself inspires antisemitism, the problem is that this is demonstrably untrue. At any rate, for Jews to cease to exist as a people is a preferable alternative to being hated for living as one. Let those who chose otherwise follow their individual paths.
Finally, there is the all-important lesson from the Shoah that Jews must be willing and able to defend themselves from would-be repressors or murders. Moreover, others cannot be depended upon to provide such protection.
Today, it often seems as if the central lesson taken from the Shoah is the well-meaning but dangerous utopian notion of making “bad people” extinct through education, of breeding aggressiveness and intolerance out of society. The reality, however, is that “bad people,” guided by greed and delusionary ideologies, will continue to exist, sometimes even the very product of such efforts. They must be defeated by force of arms if necessary, imperfect and impure as that means must inevitably be. And if no one else can or will defend you, you must defend yourself.
As Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir once put it, “A bad press is better than a good epitaph.” The world might be more kindly disposed toward dead Jews, but it is preferable to be alive and face criticism by those who either don’t understand or don’t care about the reality of your situation.
It is the morning of June 22, 1941. The Red Army retreats in disorder. German planes bomb the roads and villages where there are no military targets. Panzer tanks roar up the roads, forcing fleeing Soviet soldiers into fields and through the forests. Twenty-two-year-old Private Boris
Kozinitz, a Jew from the town of Dokshitz, neighboring Dolhinov where he has many relatives, drafted into the Soviet army despite being a Polish citizen, moves through the forest with three comrades. Panting with exhaustion, perspiring with fear, they hide in the sheltering forests but are starving. Desperate, Kozinitz approaches a Polish farmer who generously fills his bags with food. The Germans, the man tells him, are trying to win over the villagers by giving them back all the property nationalized by the Soviets.lxiii
But food brings the men little comfort. They are surrounded. His non-Jewish comrades want to surrender to the Germans but Kozinitz, knowing what would happen to him, refuses and decides to make his way home, 200 miles through German-occupied territory. Generous farmers give him food and old clothes.
Now, stomach full and dressed like a civilian, Kozinitz can pose as one of the many Soviet political prisoners freed by the Germans who crowd the roads heading home. He passes through seemingly deserted ghost towns where fearful Jews have locked themselves into their homes, which offer some illusion of safety.
The Germans warn against housing or helping Red Army soldiers or Jews. Refused help by peasants who’ve heard this decree, he finds a pigsty to sleep in. His appearance and accent mark him as a Jew, his shaved head as a soldier. Seeking his brother, Jacob, in Vileika, Kozinitz is pleased to learn that he and his wife escaped to Russia.
He stays the night in the attic of a woman who worked as cleaning lady for the NKVD. In the middle of the night, anti-Communist Poles break in to see if any comrades are hiding there. Kozinitz, who’s no Communist but might be dead before convincing them of that, burrows beneath the hay. They don’t find him. The next morning, as he leaves, the woman tells him that a Jew was shot to death for not giving his bicycle to the looters.
Finally, Kozinitz finds a farmer leading some cows to market in Dolhinov who lets him pose as a farm hand. Everything there is in chaos, as Polish and Byelorussian townspeople loot Soviet supply depots, including the ample stocks of vodka. Drunken men stagger through the streets. He spends the night with relatives and the next day finally, after his six-day odyssey, makes it home to Dokshitz where no one recognizes him given his haggard appearance and ragged farmer’s clothes.
“Little did we imagine,” he later wrote, “that in a short while most of the town Jews would not be among the living.” Decades later, after surviving the war, he would live not far from me in Tel Aviv.
Although it had only been been 18 months since Poland had been invaded by Germany and fought desperately against the Nazis, many Poles in the Dolhinov area exulted at the new German attack. Mikołaj Klementowicz from Polany village watched as Soviet soldiers ran east in panic, looking miserable “in their funny pointed hats and dusty uniforms.” They kept getting lost, threw away their weapons, and split into ever smaller groups. None of them did any fighting.
In Dolhinov itself, Józef Leszkiewicz and a group of men went to the Communist headquarters, the People’s House, to tear down the red star and hammer-and-sickle emblems from the roof. Armed with crowbars, they marched to the market square to break down the doors of the cooperative enterprises. Suddenly a woman shouted, “The Soviets are coming!” A Red Army armored car roared up to the main square. It fired some shots at the looters and killed one of them. Leszkiewicz ran and hid in the nearby church.
Order momentarily restored, a Soviet soldier made an excited speech to whoever would listen: “The day of great vengeance will come!” The Red Army would return to Dolhinov. But the soldiers didn’t want to hang around any longer. Someone yelled that a German patrol was driving up Vileika street. The Soviets jumped back in their armored car, raced off north, and were not seen again in the town for three years.
Leszkowicz would later tell an interviewer that the, “Poor and some criminals kept demolishing Jewish stores, Soviet cooperatives and stealing goods,” though he had apparently been that group’s leader. Was he motivated by a desire to remove the hated Soviet symbols or to strike at the Jews? Such was the irony of Poland’s fate, however, that Jozef was welcoming the German assault partly as revenge for the Soviets having deported his brother, Antoni. Yet three years later, that same brother would die as a soldier fighting the Germans as an ally, however reluctant, of the Soviet Union.
Bushke Katzovitz of Dolhinov was a college student in Grodno when German planes and artillery bombarded the city. On June 23, the Germans march in and the dormitory where she was living became their headquarters. Never for a moment did she think of fleeing the country. “I knew that I must be with my family,” she explained. But how could she get back to Dolhinov without a pass issued by the Germans, whose police checked the passengers on every train?
She asked one of her professors, now forced to work for the Germans, to help and he got her the needed permit. Now she was sitting on a train heading north through the flat Polish countryside, a young woman wearing a big yellow star with the word “Jude” on it, as required by the occupation authorities.
A Polish Christian woman sat down next to her. They conversed in Polish, which Bushke spoke well, “Why are you wearing that star since it puts your life in danger for every moment. Take it off! You don’t look Jewish and can pass as a Pole.” Bushke listened to her, ensuring that she made it back to Dolhinov unscathed. When she arrived home, she thought, “I was very happy to be with my family, for better and for worst as long as we are together.”
As long as we are together, she said, and that was the most important thing. Almost exactly 70 years later, I was in a passenger van, heading east through the Lithuanian countryside not far away from where Bushke had that conversation. My host, a young, tall and handsome Lithuanian man, looking like a Star Trek conception of some superior alien race, asked me a question that was the modern parallel of the one asked Bushke: Why didn’t the Jews flee? Why didn’t they fight?
I took no offense, understanding that he was genuinely puzzled. No one resisted the Soviets more than the Lithuanians, though many back then—often the same people—had found the Nazis more congenial. And here I want to give him a full and proper answer to his queries.
The first issue, why they didn’t run away, is the easiest to answer. Of course, the Nazi attack of June 1941 was unexpected. Even after the invasion was launched, Jews living under Soviet rule in places like Dolhinov were assured until it was almost too late that there was no danger. No one could defeat the Red Army.
Shalom Yoran, in a town not far from Dolhinov, described what he saw on June 22.lxiv While he was at work, someone rushed in and said that the Germans had attacked. Yoran stepped outside right into the middle of a crowd buzzing with rumors. Only at 4 AM the next morning did Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov make a radio speech announcing the attack, giving no details, and predicting inevitable victory for the USSR. It was broadcast repeatedly. And that’s all the news there was.
By that time, German planes had strafed the town. Desperately spinning the radio dial to try to find some information, Yoran heard only music. The local Communist party office told everyone that there was good news: the Soviet army had pushed back the Germans and was advancing triumphantly toward Warsaw. “Our spirits rose,” he recalled and he envisioned a quick victory.
But the next day, as claims of victory were continually repeated, his doubts grew. The roads were jammed with trucks and horse-pulled carts packed with Soviet soldiers and officials fleeing back home. Townspeople stood at the curbside, shouting: “Where are you going? The front line’s the other way!”
No, the passengers yelled back, there is no more frontline. The Germans are getting closer and our army’s crumbled away. No defender stands between you and the Nazis. Nobody wanted to believe it. Perhaps, said one man, these are just German saboteurs trying to demoralize us. But as more and more Red Army men and bureaucrats fled down the road, leaving only dust behind, the truth could no longer be denied. Relief turned into panic.
During the short time between realizing the Germans were on the way and the
moment they arrived, escape was still difficult. The Soviets only evacuated their own personnel, who were packing their bags while reassuring the public that there was nothing to worry about. Local Soviet officials even threatened some Jews that fleeing would be interpreted as showing insufficnet faith in the USSR’s power and could result in severe punishment.
Nevertheless, hundreds of Dolhinov Jews tried to get across into Russia, but were turned back by border guards as the Soviets sealed off the old pre-1939 frontier, fearing refugees would be spies or German agents. Only men without families and in good condition could sneak across and keep on running. The rest turned around and sadly walked home. They had nowhere else to go.
In the Katzovitz family there was a debate over what to do. At first, they didn’t believe the “legendary Red Army would collapse in such a short time.” Another reason was that they knew their daughter, Buske, would leave her college in Grodno and come looking for them. By the time they got to the border, it was already closed.lxv
Batya Sosensky’s brother Yosef’s friends—including her future husband, Reuven Kramer--jumped on their bikes when they first heard about the German advance and crossed the old border before it was closed. Yosef asked his father if the whole family could go but he replied that with five children it was impossible to run away. So Yosef stayed with his family in Dolhinov.
Yakov Segalchick managed at the last minute to get on the last car of the last Soviet train leaving. But German planes strafed the train and the car he was on derailed.. He then walked to the border and saw:
“Thousands of refugees…. Some came by horse and buggy, some by foot. They were running back and forth, looking for a place to cross to the other side and save themselves from the disaster to come. However, Soviet guards stood with weapons ready at every crossing point. They demanded that everyone go back, saying that we were all causing unnecessary panic, and that we must return to our proper places.”lxvi
Hundreds of Jews from further west did flee the Germans but when they arrived in Dolhinov they reached the end of the road. With the Soviet border closed they could go no further. The Dolhinov Jews took relatives or strangers from other towns into their own homes and shared with them the little they had.
Once the Germans themselves had arrived, the question for the Dolhinov Jews became why they should assume an attempt to flee would be more likely to preserve their lives and how they would go about escaping. Although it might be hard to understand this in hindsight, the Jews of Dolhinov and other towns in eastern Poland knew very little about Hitler and Germany while holding warm feelings toward the Germans themselves.
It should be remembered that those dwelling in such small towns had little opportunity to get foreign news and no contact with people from abroad. Especially after 1939, they were cut off from the world by what later would be called the Iron Curtain. Indeed, the Soviet media during the 18 months of their rule over Dolhinov spoke quite positively about Germany and censored out any news of atrocities. One could argue that they should have known better but they didn’t.
Even more important, however, was the failure to differentiate between Germany as they knew it and Germany under the Nazi regime. They might not have known much about the cultured Germany of Heine and Beethoven but they certainly believed in Germany as a model of civilized behavior. Older Dolhinov Jews had viewed Germany as a preferable alternative to Czarist Russia, a place where Jews had far more rights and prosperity.
This attitude was reinforced during World War One, when the Germans occupied Dolhinov. One of my relatives had been a Russian soldier in World War I. Shot in the hand, he had been captured by the Germans who had given him good medical assistance and treated him better than the czar’s government. When the Germans arrived in 1941, he actually went out with bread and drinks for the soldiers. Another relative of mine had been briefly arrested by the German occupation authorities in 1917 but his wife had easily talked the kaiser’s men into releasing him.
“Most Jews didn’t expect the Germans to be so difficult,” recalled Ida Friedman, “We were told that in World War I they were very friendly toward the Jews in Dolhinov. We didn’t think it was possible they would be so bad.”
Another powerful factor was an inability to leave homes and break up families. Many of Dolhinov’s young men were working in Vileika at the time, where jobs were available, but though they could easily have boarded numerous trains heading for the Soviet Union in time to escape, all of them decided to return to Dolhinov for two reasons: to be with their families and, as one of them wrote, “We believed…there was no way that the powerful Red Army could be defeated.”1 Another who considered, but rejected, running away asked, “How do you abandon a house you have lived in all your life?” lxvii Almost none of the Dolhinov Jews had ever been far away or to another country. Instead, countries—in the form of changing borders—had always come to them.
The hardest thing of all, though, was the break-up of families necessitated by going into the rough conditions of the forest. Men would have to leave wives and children; young people their parents and siblings to a certain death.
Boris Kuzinitz bought a World War One rifle and 14 bullets from a peasant and hid them in the cellar of the family house. Finding the cache, his father forced Boris to admit his plan to leave. Having been badly beaten by Germans, his father couldn’t make the journey. "If we are together at least I'll know when we're killed," he said. Boris recalled that before he left, “He cried continuously, begged and did not leave me alone that whole night.” Boris promised to return for him but his father was later murdered by the Germans, despite Boris’s efforts to save him.
In the Friedman family of Dolhinov, the two youngest daughters missed their two older brothers who were in safe hiding places with peasants and cried so much that their father brought them back home, where they would all die together.
The Dokszycky family had a unique opportunity for escape that they rejected for this reason. An uncle with Soviet citizenship came through town while fleeing from Vilna, where he’d been working, just after the German invasion. He urged the family to come with him immediately. They refused. He begged to take his favorite niece with him.
Her parents refused. “Whatever will happen, will happen,” they said. How bad could the Germans be? After all, the Russians hadn’t been so good either?
“You’ll find out!” he warned as he went out the door toward the border.
And who could say at the time which direction led to life? Batya and Haya Sosensky’s cousin, Bluma, was married to a skilled shoemaker who the Germans designated as a valued specialist. After the first massacre, this status seemed a ticket to survival. The Sosensky family decided to give their youngest daughter, six-year-old Sima, to these relatives so that at least one member of the family would survive.
But Sima cried and refused to go with them. It turned out that the other family--both parents and four of six children--all perished while Sima, her mother and sisters survived. In other cases, the exact opposite happened.
Families refused to give up children or children refused to flee with relatives or hide in the countryside only for all to leave this world together. Dov Katzovitch, who became a partisan, put it best: “The best characteristics of the Jewish nation turned against it. Jews are very attached to their families and so many fathers and sons, having the chance to escape did not. In many cases partisans came back to the ghetto to die together with their loved ones.”lxviii
There is one other factor of which people at the time were very conscious. The flight of any individual to join the partisans might lead to the instant execution of his entire family. In Glebokie, for example, when two brothers joined the partisans, the Germans told their father to make sure they came back or the entire family would be murdered. He wrote his sons and they did return.
Obviously, anyone who has never faced such stark decisions cannot judge those who have.
It is also true that, at least during the early mont
hs, the Dolhinov and other Jews of Poland simply could not conceive of what the Germans were planning to do. That such a thing could happen was not only too much at odds with their personal beliefs—and faith that God would not allow it—but also with their personal and Jewish historical experience. Discrimination, repression, and even pogroms were things they knew about but in some ways that legacy of pain misled them into thinking such assaults would always be temporary and partial.
In the past, remembered by tradition as well as personal observations, it was always possible to bribe, outwit, and outwait. A sense of humor had also been a vital asset. As one Dolhinov wit put it at the darkest moment of 1942-1943, when the winter was especially cold and the rains unusually intense: “You know why the Lord made it so rainy this year? It is because Jews are outdoors in the forests.” But it was also true that at times the old methods worked. Every Jewish resident of one Ukrainian shtetl occupied by Romanian troops, allied with the Nazis, survived by paying off the soldiers. The Germans were made of sterner stuff.
This basic approach was taken by the Judenrats, the Jewish councils either elected by constituents or appointed by the Germans. Like many Jews, these leaders thought the vast majority of the community could survive by proving their labor’s value for the Germans, outwitting their tormentors, and the war’s quick end.
I have never heard a survivor attack the Judenrats, though in some towns there was specific criticism of their Jewish police for being too harsh at times. In Dolhinov, survivors had no complaint about either institution. On the contrary, people recognized they were doing the best they could to stall for time and propitiate the Germans. In the words of Boris Kuzinitz, speaking of his nearby town, “The Judenrat people did all in their power to help and make things easier.” Shraga Soliminski said of the council in his town of Lida, “They always did as much as they could to help everybody, and they informed the ghetto in advance of any impending disaster.” Their strategy turned out to be profoundly wrong but they recognized that long before the end and almost all the members in each town paid for their mistake with their lives.
Speaking of Dolhinov, Avraham Friedman explained that the members of the Judenrat “tried to make the life of the Jews a little easier. If someone was arrested, they tried to obtain his release by giving gold and expensive presents to the Germans, and usually they succeeded. They did their work with dedication and self-sacrifice, but the problem was that they believed too much in the power of gold. They thought that they would always be able to buy the hearts of the enemy. I couldn't believe that even for one minute.”
It was no accident that the two men who would emerge as the most determined fighters in Dolhinov—Friedman and Yigal Sigalchik--unlike most people in the town, had been eyewitnesses to Nazi atrocities elsewhere during the first days of the war and thus understood what was happening.
Yet sometimes gold did have power, at least temporarily, to save lives. The Germans forced the Judenrat to send 20 young men from Dolhinov to Vileika to cut firewood for the army intelligence and SS offices. They were often badly beaten. The men met in March 1942 and sent a messenger to Dolhinov telling of their suffering and begging for help.Within a day, the Judenrat paid a bribe to the Germans and the men were allowed to return home.
Thus, while all the Dolhinov Jews, and those other other towns, wanted to live the question which had no easy answer at the time was: What strategy had the best chance of succeeding? The Hassidic rebbe of Zelechow told his followers, reversing the long-revered practice of “kiddush ha-shem”--accepting murdered, passive martyrdom to glorify God through showing one’s firm belief--“Every Jew who survives sanctifies God.” Staying alive was the highest form of resistance.lxix
But what to do once it was clear that the Germans were not going to go away soon and were striving to make the Jews go away from this world of flesh-and-blood?
Three main impediments came into play to fool Jews into thinking that they could survive—in fact, only could survive—by staying in place and playing along with their captors.
The first was the idea that running away effectively was either impossible for long or was even more likely to result in death. As Dov Katzovitch put it, “To escape the ghetto meant only the beginning of the fight for survival.” Without help from non-Jews, no one could live long outside the ghetto. Your first mistake in trusting the wrong person—even being seen by the wrong person--would be your last. Even if you found a peasant willing to give you food or shelter—at the risk of his whole family being killed—for a day, you would have to find someone to do so the next day and the day after that.
Hundreds of Jews who fled to the forests were in fact murdered; others merely robbed or died from starvation, or cold. There were bandits in the woods, Soviet soldiers who deserted or escaped prison camps, driven to such acts by rapacity or antisemitism, who would rob, rape, or murder a Jew as fast as any German. When a group from the Vilna area escaped and reached the forest near Dolhinov in 1941, Russian deserters attacked them, took away their handguns, and killed them. Most often, refugees were merely told to go away and fend for themselves.
If turned in by a local person or captured by German soldiers or police those fleeing died quickly. In the ghettoes, Jews saw friends and neighbors return home, exhausted, to tell of their privations. And the Germans let them do so freely in order to demoralize the others.
When I think about this question, Gutte Markman from Dokshitz comes into my mind. Given her last name, she was probably a distant relative of mine by marriage. She was among the hundreds of people shot and left for dead during the big March 1942 massacre in her town, by the same men who two days later did the same thing in Dolhinov. They had somehow missed her. Slowly, painfully she crawled out from a large pile of dead bodies.
Full of fear and anguish every second, traumatized by seeing her entire family wiped out, she ran stumbling to a nearby village and found a farmer to hide her—I dare not think at what price, though perhaps that is unfair. Four days later he threw her out. In search of some help, she was caught by peasants who turned her over to the police. Within a few moments they rectified their previous bad aim.
Knowing the risks of flight, a majority chose to take their chances with the Germans. In the earlier days, at least, though, they didn’t know fully the risks of not fleeing. This was also partly due to the Soviet authorities’ keeping the truth from them. Under Soviet rule, no news about Nazi atrocities was permitted, since Germany was Moscow’s ally. Even after the German attack, Soviet officials spoke not a single word about the massacres of Jews or the need for special measures to save them. In 1942, the United States and Great Britain knew very little about the Holocaust; the Soviets—much closer to the scene—knew everything. Their soldiers had contact with thousands of witnesses of mass murder from hundreds of places. Yet little was done and nothing was publicized.
A second and powerful factor was the Jews’ belief that their work’s value to the German war effort would shield them. As one survivor put it, “A lot of young people thought that they had found a job that would keep them alive,” because it was so useful to the Germans. The Germans themselves were well aware of this assumption, as well as the local Jews’ ignorance about the nature of the Nazi regime. A German official reported in July 1941, for example that these Jews knew nothing of German antisemitic laws and expected they would be left alone if they worked. That hope was stoked by the Germans in the sign over the entrance of the Auschwitz death camp—“Work brings freedom,” and this was precisely the illusion proferred and accepted in Dolhinov.lxx
If some of the German officers had their way that indeed might have happened. Commanded to live off the land, Army commanders needed civilians to grow food, repair roads, and perform a host of services. To squeeze the maximum output, they would mistreat and starve workers but had no interest in killing them.
And every day, as the Jews were driven to work, starved, beaten, the most needed technicians among them given speci
al permits and minor privileges, they held the conviction that this life—terrible as it was—would go on until the Germans were finally defeated and driven from their lands. Why should the Germans destroy such a useful labor force, sacrifice millions of unpaid workers, an asset that might be the difference between victory and defeat in the war?
The answer was that the Nazi leadership believed in their ideology. They believed that Jews were vermin, that they were responsible for all the world’s ills, that they were forever enemies. And they were willing to pay a high price for their destruction. All these features would be revived bu radical Islamists a half-century later.
There was one significant, albeit temporary, and very unlikely dissenter. His name was Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, a founding member of the Nazi Party and governor in Minsk for all of conquered Belarus. He had risen fast in the party but fell when caught trying to blackmail another Nazi official’s wife. Dismissed from his post and even sent briefly to a concentration camp, Kube was brought back into authority in 1941 by no less a figure than the director of the Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler himself.
During the months following the German conquest, in the summer of 1941, Kube argued that Jewish labor was needed for the German war effort and that the Byelorussian people were being alienated rather than won over by the war against the Jews. His colleagues were scandalized, whispering Kube was a Jew-lover. Kube protested that he was unsurpassed by anyone in his hatred of the Jews and promised to move forward with the massacres. He faithfully implemented Hitler’s policy until he was himself assassinated in a partisan operation, organized by Jewish members of the underground, on September 22, 1943.
The third, heartbreaking, thing that doomed the Jews was the timeline. The main killings in Dolhinov took place between March and May 1942, ending just as partisan forces were going into military action and establishing liberated areas. If the Germans had been slower, the Jews of eastern Poland at least would have had a real chance for a safe haven or rescue. And it was one the last survivors seized whenever possible.
Yet even after all this there was one more thing that the Jews of Dolhinov and other such towns clung to in their desperation and helplessness: a disbelief that such mass murders could happen or were happening elsewhere.
Here’s how Shmuel Kugel put his experience. In a village called Zembin, the Jews were forced to dig a large pit by the Germans. Then the adults were shot; children were thrown into the pit alive and buried, with the earth still moving from those struggling in vain to escape. Only ten Jews survived, one of whom arrived in Kugel’s home town of Pleshchenitsy just one mile away. Kugel recounted:
“Such an act of evil seemed inconceivable. One wanted to think that it was…the act of a few crazed German soldiers in reprisal for some Germans found murdered there.” But they heard of more and more such massacres: in Logoisk and Borisov, Smolevichi, Gorodok, and other small towns. “And so we realized that what happened in Zembin was not a chance occurrence, [but] that it was carried out on Hitler’s criminal orders.”
By that time, though, they were imprisoned in the ghetto. It was too late.lxxi In fact, many Jews who did flee Pleshchenitsy went to a place they thought was safer: Dolhinov.
Such accounts of incredulity appear over and over again, reflecting natural human propensity to reject the unthinkable. “We knew,” said Ida Friedman of Dolhinov, “but people didn’t believe” even the stories of those who fled German rule for the Soviet-controlled sector in 1939.
Shalom Yoran put it this way:
“It was totally beyond our comprehension that a civilized nation in the twentieth century would be capable of taking an entire community—the workers who served them, the children, women, young and old people—and systematically murdering them for no other reason than that they were born Jewish….These crimes could not be concealed or tolerated. Didn’t the murderers sense that they would eventually be punished?”
He perceptively understood why people had to think this way:
“We couldn’t allow ourselves to believe what we had heard. To believe it would be to know that we were utterly helpless. It was winter, and we had no escape. My mother still had hope that somehow we would be saved, and because of her optimism people rallied around her. At the time we were totally unaware that we were part of a major scheme. We attributed the behavior toward us to the winds of war. We thought that as the German victories decreased and their military efforts failed, they were letting out their frustrations on the Jews.lxxii
Noakh Melnik remembered that when he escaped death in his home town he went to a larger one, reasoning that there were 10,000 Jews living there, “They can’t kill that many people in public.”
Bushke Katzovitz of Dolhinov recalled:
“We knew that things were going to be bad, but in our worst nightmares we did not anticipate how bad things were to become. We expected that a set of rules would be implemented and we will greatly suffer financially. But we could not imagine murders and organized annihilation of women, children and old. As we gradually realized that every day there is a new retribution and additional restriction imposed upon us, the indication that our end is near became harder to ignore. We knew that we must run and take cover. It would be the only means that we could save ourselves from undisputable death sentence. However we had to acknowledge the bitter recognition that there was no route of escape for us.”
All of these factors made it harder for the Dolhinov Jews and those in other towns to flee or fight. In addition, of course, they had no experience in anything to do with military activities and owned no guns or ammunition. In each case, the actual period of mass killings lasted a very short period, also making it harder to react. There were uprisings in many towns, but mainly between July and September 1942, after Dolhinov had already been wiped out. They had no chance of inflicting serious casualties on the Germans, far less winning any battles. Still, it is clear that the later Jews survived, the more likely they were to have the organization and weapons to fight back.
And one final point in this regard, for the Jews still alive from Dolhinov by the time of the final mass killing, in May 1942, the only way they survived the next three years is because they did indeed fight.
It is hard to believe that all these events took place in less than a year.
Avraham Friedman was born in 1918 into a poor family and though he graduated from the Tarbut school in 1935, both of his parents were dead by the time he was 19 and he was sole support for four younger siblings. So he went to work as a blacksmith with his grandfather. When the Soviets came, they took away the shop so the two men went to work for the fox farm headed by Timchuk, from late 1939 to mid-1940. “I matured a lot that year,” Friedman later wrote. Seeing the new opportunities opened up by the Soviets’ system, “I realized that my future didn't belong in the blacksmith's profession.” He entered an auto mechanics’ course in another town—making the switch from horse shoes to auto motors overnight--which he attended from the end of 1940 until the day of the German invasion.lxxiii
Friedman first decided to walk to Minsk, assuming this would be a safe place since everyone thought, “The Red Army would organize and beat the Germans swiftly. Not in our worst nightmares,” did he and his friends imagine what would come. But the German army blocked their way. On June 26, 1941, Friedman found himself in Rakov, where the Germans assembled everyone in the central square and divided them into two groups: Christians, on one side; Jews on the other. They were held all day and all Jews who could be identified as Soviet soldiers—including two friends of Friedman who’d been drafted—were murdered. The rest were let go.
On and on Friedman walked with a couple of friends, through town after town, heading toward Dolhinov to be with his family. On July 2, they encountered three Christians who knew him from having worked on the fox farm, carrying sacks on their way to loot Jewish homes. They recognized him and stopped a passing German army car, yelling, “They are Communists! Jewish Communists!”
/> Friedman and his companions ran; the soldiers fired, wounding Friedman, and chased them down. Three Germans stood around them with weapons ready to shoot, and Friedman thought his life was at an end. Suddenly, a German officer came by who dismissed the Christian accusers and told the soldiers to let the Jews go. German officer had daily opportunities to save lives if he so wished.
And so Friedman lived to return to Dolhinov, be patched up by Dr. Kohler, and hide in his grandfather’s house. A friend, an electrician who’d been assigned by the Germans to handle the radios confiscated from townpeople, got one for Friedman who was then uniquely able to discover what was happening in the outside world. The Germans told the local people that they’d captured Moscow, and without the BBC’s Polish, German, and English service, Friedman and others wouldn’t have known otherwise.
While Friedman was still trekking down the seemingly endless road home, on June 18, 1941, the German army had marched into—and through--Dolginov. The parade was led by three tanks. Hundreds of thrilled Poles and Byelorussians from the town and neighboring villages came to the Central Marketplace, the town square lined with Jewish shops, to celebrate liberation from the Communists. Women greeted the Germans with flower bouquets Jews closed their stores, went home, and shuttered their windows, but Haya Katzovitz, whose family lived on the square, watched silently the jubilation of her neighbors:
“Two German tanks went through and the non-Jews in the market stood and watched, shocked…Then they came with their motorbikes and big black boots and I was alone with my mother at home. So she asked me, “Why are you so pale? Are you scared? Let’s go to sit with some other Jews so that we won’t be alone.” So they walked next door to be with their neighbors, “There everything was nice and clean. In their house everything was quiet. It seemed as if there were no Germans.”
For the German army at that moment, Haya and her neighbors were of little interest. Dolhinov was just a wide spot in the road to Moscow and Leningrad. But it had a clear strategic value. From Minsk, headquarters of Army Group Central, the main road ran through Dolhinov. The railroad went just a few miles north of it to Leningrad. Thus, while Dolhinov was not exactly Times Square, it was a place the Germans needed, as so many armies had before.
The German supply lines through Dolhinov or the nearby railroad, stretched 1000 miles long to support a battlefront 1500 miles wide. For two weeks, every day at every hour, an unending stream of German soldiers passed through Dolhinov to the front. In trucks, tanks, halftracks, motocycles, bicycles, and on foot they marched, most hardly giving a glance to what they saw as a little town of no interest whatsoever. Like the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible, Stephen Batory, Charles XII, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II, Lenin and Pilsudski and Stalin, all were content to leave the town pretty much as it had been. But this time was different.
One day, a German soldier on a bicycle hit a bump in the road. The bike wobbled, he lost his balance, and crashed right next to the home of Nachman Friedman whose wife, seeing an injured man, another human being, went to help him. She took him into her home, tied up his ankle with a rag, and offered him water. The young soldier accepted her hospitality and rested on a chair in their parlor. After some minutes he stood, looked her up and down, and instead of thanking her, merely said, “Do you think this is going to help you? You Jews are going to `get it.’ You’ll see what we’ll do to you,” and stomped out. Almost 70 years later, her niece Ida Friedman who was there at that moment, told me, “I guess we saw that he was right.”
Combat soldiers en route to the front and their own fates there yelled down from trucks to Jews working on the highway, telling them they should run away as fast as possible because Hitler was planning to kill them all, showing that average Germans were not quite so ignorant of what was going to happen. A few bought tobacco from Jews and drank coffee with them, “I have nothing against you,” one said, “but things are going to go badly for you.” Others, riding by in trucks to the front, "Juden, Du habst dem Krieg Gewollt" ("Jews, you wanted the war"!) - well, there you have it." Others laughed: "Das ist das derweilte volk" ("These are the chosen people")lxxiv
For while it is true that some regular officers angrily complained that the mass murders dishonored the army and in some cases even kicked the SS out of their areas at least temporarily the great majority supported actively or passively the Shoah. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau on October 10, 1941 announced, “The soldier in the Eastern Territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of a ruthless national ideology….Therefore the soldier must have understanding of the necessity of a severe but just revenge on sub-humans.”lxxv
In contrast to the situation of the Jews, the dominant feeling among Poles, as several eyewitnesss described it, was relief. “People cried of with joy. In our village the villagers prayed and thanked God for salvation. Then they cursed the Russians and wished them a defeat in the war.” The German troops seemed invincible and were warmly welcomed as saviors from arrests, deportations, and collectivization. The Poles and Byelorussians had no idea that they’d gone if not from the frying pan into the fire, at least into another frying pan.
Józef Leszkowicz describes the welcome for the German troops as enthusiastic.
“A magnificent welcome gate was made with an inscription `Heil Hitler!’ though it was written with a [spelling] mistake, it expressed the gratitude of the people for saving them from hated Soviet occupation. An orchestra waited next to the gate. First a motorcycle rider appeared on the road then an armored vehicle. It looked really threatening. Then suddenly the orchestra started to play a welcome march. Somebody approached the Germans with bread and salt. They didn’t understand the meaning of it so somebody explained to him that this was a Polish traditional way of welcoming guests. The atmosphere became more relaxed” and the German soldiers were pleased with the ceremony.
Only a dozen or so German soldiers were stationed in Dolhinov during that first year: one officer to run the militia they’d recruit from among local people; a few to run the bigger farms to produce food for the army, a squad of the Geheime Feld Polizei to supervise control of the Jews, and a four-man communications’ team to report back to headquarters on road conditions and the garrison’s needs. Police applicants, it was said in the posted advertisement, should have military experience and know how to fire a gun. The commander was an ethnic Pole from Kovno in Lithuania who, as one Jewish survivor put it, “was worse than the Germans.”
The Germans’ big radio set was installed in the Dubanevich family’s home because it was the first place on the south end of town. When the communications’ unit came into the house for the first time, the officer in charge asked Maria, the oldest daughter who sold tickets in the bus station, “Where’s your father?”
“He was arrested by the Soviets, sent to Siberia, and never came back,” she answered.
“Well, we’re going to stay here,” replied the officer.
“But there are six of us in the family. What are we going to do without our home?”
“We don’t ask permission,” came the reply from an officer not used to being spoken to that way. Yet these were Poles, not Jews, and their orders were to get along with these local people.
Evidently, though, the men felt sorry for the probably widowed mother, a victim of the Bolsheviks after all, and her five children. “You can stay here during the day,” they said, “but you’ll have to leave at night.” Having six Polish civilians around while the soldiers were asleep on the floor was a security risk. And so the Dubanevich’s went to neighbors every night and did their family activities around the little German military base in their parlor in the daylight hours.
Eventually, the Germans became friendlier and even brought them food from the military canteen. I hear the story sitting in the same room, two-thirds’ of a century later. The furniture probably hasn’t changed that much, threadbare rug, collection of crosses, big jars of pickled cabba
ge on the table, old radio playing—ironically—“Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end….” Standing on the very spot where these events had happened, perhaps molecules from the officer’s uniforn settling on my clothes.
The Germans immediately reorganized the local government, police, and created a militia. The police were volunteers from local Polish and the Byelorussian residents; others were ordered to join the militia, which was equipped with old rifles. During the initial phase, the main priority was to win over the Poles, playing on their anti-Soviet sympathies.
Every Polish and Byelorussian resident of the German-occupied territories (along with Ukrainians further south) had to decide how to deal with the new regime.
Those who passionately loved Poland could hardly be expected to welcome the German invaders, even among those who shared with them a hatred of Jews. Ironically, though, the Soviet repression had made the German occupation far stronger. The Polish communal leadership and patriots who would have resisted the Germans, like the Bilewiczs, had already been deported by the Soviets. As a result, a Polish national underground was never organized in Dolhinov during the German occupation.
As for the Byelorussians, some 20,000 volunteered for security police duty or the German army, where they formed the 29th and 30th Waffen Grenadier Divisions. Bylorussian nationalists participated in a puppet government headquarted in Minsk. Other Bylorussians were drafted into poorly armed local militia groups. A lot of their duties involved fighting the partisans, though the 30th Grenadier Division was moved to the Western Front where it was put into the line against U.S. forces in late 1944.
In the Dolhinov area, however, where Byelorussian was virtually synonymous with an educated and passive peasantry, there was no such political movement. Instead, the thuggish and opportunist who required no rationale took the lead. As a result, collaboration in this area, in contrast to the Ukraine or Lithuania, had no programmatic content. The motivating force was hatred of others—Jews, Russians, and, among Byelorussians, Poles as well—along with a love of money and material goods. But these are all attitudes more likely to be found in average human beings than the self-sacrificing courage of patriotic Poles which had met the Soviet conquest.
Many of those who joined the police were bullies and semi-criminal elements, attracted by the steady pay and the chance to loot Jewish property and beat up Jews. In Myadel, most of the local collaborators were Poles who declared, "All the Jews were Communists." They began torturing Jews before any Germans gave orders to do so. “In some ways,” Segalchik who was there at the time, “the local assistants were many times crueler than their German bosses.” When the bodies of two prisoners from Myadel killed by the KGB during their retreat were found, a big funeral was organized by the new police chief, with German soldiers as honored guests, along with fiery speeches blaming the Jews and demanding revenge.
Not long after all the Jews of Dolhinov had been killed or fled, Haya Katzovitz ran into a woman named Liza, who had been her family’s housekeeper before the war. Haya asked her what it was like in Dolhinov now. She said, “All the Christian inhabitants of Dolhinov became wealthy. They confiscated the possessions that were left by the Jews.”
Yet even when non-Jews had to go along with the Germans, each individual among them still had a choice between sullen necessity and enthusiastic cooperation. The German emphasis was on assuring that the police chief was an enthusiastic and usually sadistic collaborator, as were the majority of poice. In the ranks, though, there were some policemen who behaved decently out of humanitarian feelings, personal friendships, and Polish patriotism. There was no clear criterion for knowing how an individual would behave since people once on good terms with Jews might be among the cruelest of all.
In Dolhinov, at least three of the policemen hated the Germans, were friendly toward the Jews, hated the Germans, and were ready to help the Soviet partisans. A true hero was Vlodia Maslovsky, the nephew of Dolhinov’s appointed mayor. The uncle asked Vlodia to join the police, but Vlodia who had many Jewish friends—he spoke German, Yiddish, and even some Hebrew in addition to Polish; had no desire to work with the Nazis. So he came to his friend Avraham Friedman for advice, proposing that if he did join he could provide information and warnings to the Jews, and Avraham agreed that this was a terrific plan.
Avraham was the only Jew in town who had a radio and heard General Sikorsky, leader of the Polish government in exile, announce his agreement with the Allies to raise a Polish army to fight for his country’s freedom. Friedman and his friends immediately wrote three leaflets describing the news, hoping even antisemitic policemen would be stirred by patriotic feelings. One was left for Maslovsky and the others for two other friendly policemen, Takovitch, the secretary of the force, and Maletzko. Friedman’s sister had the job of cleaning the police station so she snuck in the leaflets.
As soon as he saw it, Maslovsky realized it had been written by Friedman. He asked his friend, “How do you know this?”
Not wishing to reveal his source, Friedman said that some Polish teachers in nearby villagers had told him. But later, Friedman told him the truth and was able to supply another radio for the three patriotic policemen, it being kept in Takovitch’s house. The Jewish and Polish groups began discussing how to resist the Germans. The police even offered to supply money so weapons could be bought and a joint partisan group established, though this plan was never realized.
All three of the policemen, along with Takovitch’s brother who lived in a nearby village and hid Jews on several occasions, were able to save lives. For example, when the Germans invaded, Yosef Shinuk, a police official in Dolhinov under the Soviets, refused to leave without his family. He grew a beard, wore a black beret and glasses, and obtained a fake identity paper. For some weeks he hid at home but knew he finally fled to Kurinitz. A few months later, a collaborator there recognized him and informed a Dolhinov policeman. Fortunately, the policeman who took the report was Maslovsky who, instead of arresting Shinuk, told a Jewish friend to warn him. To rescue her husband, Rosa, Yosef’s wife, dressed up like a peasant and walked 22 miles to Kurinitz to pass the message to her husband. He escaped to another town, where he died only when the ghetto there was wiped out.
Mayors were often forced to take this job and did not necessarily have pro-Nazi attitudes either. The village mayor of Zamshutzi, a village just outside Dolhinov, Julius Korianovich, helped feed and protect Jews from the town who hid there. In nearby Dokshitz, the mayor, Sitchonk, was actually hiding a Jewish family named Kramer—who survived--at the moment he was carrying out German commands. Tragically, the partisans didn’t know this and killed him in a grenade attack late in the war.
Dolhinov itself was at first lucky in this respect. The Catholic priest was a very ethical man who had never engaged in antisemitism. The first German-appointed mayor, Zygmund Volk and police chief, Anton Krosovsky, were also decent local people, with the added advantage that Krosovsky was happy to trade favors for vodka. As a result, neither of them lasted very long in their posts. The Germans fired the mayor and appointed Maslovsky’s uncle, who was also no willing collaborator and whom they executed on a charge of sabotage within a year. As police chief, Krosovsky was replaced by a thug from Krivichi who had neither moral scruples nor local ties.
The truth is also that many Polish townspeople—especially with the town’s most responsible and conscientious citizens deported by the Soviets--were eager to turn on and turn in their Jewish neighbors. Both they and Byelorussian peasants from surrounding villages were eager for loot. One day, a peasant came to the Telis house, a family she knew from having been a customer at their store, to point out their dim and very limited future. “You have a lot of clothes and you’re not going to need them any more. Give them to me.”
Aside from personal sadism, there were three main motives that impelled collaborators: hatred of the Soviet Communists, thirst for loot, and hatred of the Jews. The Germans tried to link these things but
while very successful in recruiting individuals, they never could get a mass movement going. The most obvious reason is that their need to exploit the local people plus a doctrine viewing them as racially inferior ensured that the Germans squeezed them badly.
Publicly, lip service was given to helping the locals against the Germans’ enemies but this rarely figured in reality. For example, General Lemelsen, commander of the 48th Panzer Corps, ordered his men to stop murdering (non-Jewish) civilians on June 25, 1941, explaining, “We want to free the civilian population from the yoke of Bolshevism and we need their labor force.”lxxvi
But even Lemelsen admitted his order was not carried out. “This is murder! The German Wehrmacht is waging this war against Bolshevism, not against the united Russian peoples. We want to bring back peace, calm and order to this land which has suffered terribly for many years from the oppression of a Jewish and criminal group.” Moreover, he warned, such behavior would lead to the execution of captured German soldiers and inspire the Russians to fight to the death and never surrender. This is precisely what happened.
For example, when two big sleds carrying German army supplies hit mines near the village of Ladomiry the Germans slaughtered the entire male population and burned down all the houses. Consequently, partisan activity in the area increased, not so much because the population hated the Germans more but because they knew that death was the only alternative to resistance.
What the Germans, including Lemelson, did do far more successfully was to link tirelessly the Jews and Bolsheviks as a twin menace—an idea central in Nazi ideology—and offer rewards to collaborators. In a 1941 report, the Polish nationalist agent Jan Karski, who courageously spied on the Germans and brought out the first news about their mass murder of Jews, told a revealing anecdote passed on to him by a Polish official.
This man had fired an employee of the German-sponsored regime who had robbed a Jewish jewelry store in Warsaw. The robber complained to the Gestapo who called in the official.
“Why,” he asked the official, “did you fire him?”
Startled, the Pole replied that the dismissed man had committed a criminal act.
The German policeman responded: “It is permissible to take from a Jew verything….We are even anxious to see the Polish population made aware than any Pole may go up to any Jewish store” and take it for himself, “Whoever wishes may kill a Jew, and our law will not punish him for it.”lxxvii
Given the realities of human nature, many responded to this call to enrich themselves. In a little town like Dolhinov, greed and covetousness seethed beneath the surface. Yet in such places there was also human decency and cross-communal friendships. In the occupation’s early days, SS reports showed that many Byelorussians were not eager to attack the Jews. The most remarkable such event is contained in a report by a Soviet agent operating behind enemy lines.
On July 23, 1941, in the village of Rubezhevichi, a German army officer gathered together the 26 local Jews, made them dig a trench, then ordered the Christian villagers to bury them alive. The Byelorussians refused. He then demanded the Byelorussians change places with the Jews and ordered the Jews to bury the Beyelorussians. They refused. Flustered, he simply had his men shoot down the Jews where they stood.lxxviii
Did this really happen? One would like to believe it did. But either way the Jews were doomed.
Many peasants, both Poles and Byelorussians, would later help the partisans with supplies and information or even joined the units themselves—though this did not mean they wouldn’t persecute or kill Jews if given the opportunity. Others hid Jewish acquaintances or even complete strangers.
Yet far more townspeople pointed out Jewish hiding places to the Nazis—leading directly to the deaths of the Jews concealed there; peasants turned in Jews they saw or even informed on other farmers, leading to the murders of both the Jews and their hosts, as well as served as German spies on partisan activities. Neighbors rushed to loot Jewish property at the first opportunityDov Katzovitch of Dokshitz, near Dolhinov, recalled an incident that says it all. Outside town on a work detail, when he heard the machinegun sounds of a massacre there, he headed back when quiet returned to see if his family had survived. He recalled:
“On the way I met two women holding big bundles, speaking Polish with each other and telling each other about what had happened. I recognized one of them for I had gone to school with her son. This son was…in the local police. It seems that the son knew beforehand what was to occur and advised the women to profit from [taking] the Jews' things. When she saw me she was shocked for a minute and then started to scream: `Why didn't you report with the rest of the Jews?’ I did not answer and walked away.”
For a Jew to be alive was an unacceptable effrontery.
Only compared with the Jews were Soviet prisoners of war better off. Hundreds of thousands were captured in the war’s early days. As the German army marched east through Dolhinov, columns of captured Russians staggered west. A Polish resident named Klementowicz described the prisoners as “a horrible sight,” the enlisted men staggered along like ghosts, barefoot and so hungry they ate grass growing alongside the road. When one of them could go no further, the German soldiers shot him and left his body on the road. In contrast, though, the officers were transported by carts as a reward for surrendering.
Dolhinov’s Jews watched and took pity. There was a prisoner camp, riddled with dysentery, on the town’s eastern outskirts, next to the swamp and below the hill where the Jewish cemetery stood. One of the tasks done by Jewish forced laborers was to take them food and to bury the many dead.
Political commissars were shot immediately and some German army divisions also separated out and killed Jewish soldiers, too. Senior commanders authorized the killing of prisoners but only if done under orders. In the West, British and French prisoners were treated properly but in the East other rules entirely prevailed. Lacking good winter gear, German soldiers stripped the Russians of their warmer clothing and boots, leaving them shod only in crude wooden clogs, and ensuring they died of exposure. Fifty-seven percent of Soviet prisoners, about 3 million people, died in German captivity during the war.lxxix The prisoners suffered especially during the area’s deadly winters. Jewish burial crews were kept busy until the day they were themselves buried.
Now I have to write what I’ve been putting off as long as possible. Strangely, I feel that as long as I don’t write about the deaths of specific people they are still somehow alive. If the tortures have not been set down on paper the victims are still untortured though all the deeds have been done long ago, the story is finished in the world of senses, and all has turned to dust. To write of this is to make their memory live but also in a sense to kill them once again.
The killings, which had been going on in German-occupied Poland for eighteen months now started in what had been Soviet-occupied Poland. Already, on June 30, just a week after the invasion, a German Justice Ministry memo explained, in paragraph 4: “It may safely be assumed that in the future there will be no more Jews in the annexed Eastern territories.”lxxx
The first phase of implementing this plan began in Brest on June 28-29, with the SS killing 5000 Jews; in Pinsk, August 5-7, 4500. In Slonim all 15,000 Jews were killed during those same two days; in Bobrusk, 25,000; Mogilev, to Dolhinov’s southeast, 20,000; Vitebsk east of Dolhinov, 20,000; and in Slutsk, 18,000. In Rakov, they were burned alive in the synagogue. Himmler and Adolf Eichmann inspected the Minsk ghetto and ordered gassing vans. After this initial frenzy there was a pause, a stay of execution for the rest.
Yet even this was not all. For with their killing apparatus less developed further west and the concentration camps not yet fully ready, the Germans imported Jews to murder by gunfire.
Far away in the village of Turie, Czechoslovakia lived my cousin from my mother’s side, Marie Dub, 64 years old, who ran a little shop there. She lived in house number 213 with her son Jozef Dub, 41, proprieter of the Eichenbaum Timber Company, and hi
s wife, Ilsa Meisel Dub, 35, and their daughter Ilsa, 9. They had never been a few miles from home. Suddenly, they found themselves on a train to Lublin, Poland, deported by Nazi Germany’s Slovakian client state—which actually paid the Germans to dispose of them—and shot down there. My even more distant cousin 64-year-old Olga Janniz Lowenbein, born 75 years to the day before me in Trumau, Bohemia, was taken from her apartment at Castlegasse 16, Vienna, and sent to die in the massacre of the Minsk ghetto on November 28, 1941.
Such individual stories mean something more immediate to us. Yet one must imagine football stadiums packed to capacity for town after town, in each seat one of them, everyone a human being a—as Jewish tradition puts it—universe in their own right.
Is there anything left to say about the Shoah after so much has been written? Yes, quite a lot. The prevailing image of the Shoah is from the west of Europe. The images are of urban Jews virtually indistinguishable from neighbors, assembled, put into cattle cars, transported by rail to concentration camps, selected out for life or death, and either gassed and burned immediately or forced to live in Hell for months or years until they die of starvation.
The east of Europe was quite different. The Dolhinov Jews were not trying to be French, German, Italian, Russian, or Polish. This was not some universalist parable of man’s inhumanity to man: it was a massacre of people because they were Jews, based on all the ideas and claims that had always furnished—and still do—the rationale for such hatred, slander, and violence, and for that reason alone.
Not a single one of them went to a concentration camp. They were,either marched a few blocks through their own home town, past buildings they’d lived or worked among all their lives, then burned or shot to death. Or they were shot down in their own living rooms and yards, a medieval-style massacre far more like a serial killer’s rampage than redolent of modern assembly-line methods. In a sense, the latter tragedy was far more bizarre than that of the camps.
In Dolhinov, they had continued to live in or near their own homes. Within the confines of those walls they lived as they had always done. One day the Germans murdered the next day—as if they were off-duty and had punched a time clock—they left everyone alone. One minute Dolhinov Jews were living their daily lives, wearing their own clothes, sitting at their dinner table, the next they were being machinegunned as many of their neighbors cheered.
And finally, unlike in the west, some would have a chance to fight back, but only when it was too late for almost all of them.
From the time of the Germans’ arrival, in the words of Haya Katzovitz, “The entire Jewish population with no exception became outlawed.”lxxxi Ida Friedman’s father dryly remarked, “Don’t think that they’ll leave us alone.” On the first day, when Esfira Dimenstein wanted to go visit her grandmother, a German soldier and local policeman stopped her and ordered her back inside until orders were issued on what the Jews must do.
Immediately, Jews were ordered to wear white arm bands. Then, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’av—the day when all the worst disasters of their history were said to have happened, starting with destruction of the First and Second Temples—the decree was promulgated in Dolhinov that all must wear yellow Stars of David front and back to brand them.
Jewish children were barred from attending school; Jewish adults from doing business or praying in synagogue. New decrees found creative ways to confiscate any financial assets held by Jews. The first to be killed were five men, four of them Jewish, who had worked for the Soviet administration. The Jewish community, including all of the children, was forced to stand in the market square and watch the executions.
Restrictions were endless. Jews could walk only in streets, or on sidewalks. Jews could not have their own businesses or work for non-Jews but only for the Germans. They could not be out after a certain hour, could not go to villages except with German permission, and could not buy food in the market. The food given them was half the smallest amount given to non-Jews on their rations’ cards. Their cows, bicycles, and radios were confiscated as was warm clothing.
And in addition there were acts not part of Berlin’s explicit plan: ceaseless extortion both by German officials and the police for gold and silver, diamonds and furs, gold and anything else of value. They demanded loot from the Judenrat which knew who had such things and could get them. In exchange, they promised the Jews would not be killed. Such promises were worthless, but if such orders were not followed many would have been executed immediately.
