Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  But in the late summer and autumn of 1941, Odessans were making monumental decisions about staying or leaving with little knowledge of what lay ahead, either in the city itself or in some unknown resettlement facility. One Holocaust survivor, Boris Kalika, recalled being dragged down to the port by his mother to catch a Soviet ship. Crowds pushed toward the docks. Luggage lay in piles on the quay. In the melee twelve-year-old Boris, small and frightened, was separated from his mother and sister. He eventually tired of searching for his family and simply walked back to his apartment building, where he remained, in the care of Russian neighbors, until the occupying forces rounded up the city’s Jews later in the year. He was briefly interned in the Odessa ghetto and was moved out of the city toward a Romanian-built camp at Domanevka. Lithe and golden-haired, he managed to slip away from the guards and survived the rest of the war by going from village to village, portraying himself as a Russian orphan. It was only after the war had ended and the Romanian troops withdrew that he was at last reunited in Odessa with his mother, who had spent the war years as a refugee in the Soviet east. His sister, however, had died in uncertain circumstances during the chaotic evacuation of the city in 1941.12

  KILLING JEWS was not a primary goal of the Romanian soldiers and gendarmes as they headed east, but it was a side project pursued with some of the zeal, if none of the organization, of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. Antonescu’s government had enacted a range of antisemitic laws in Romania, and murderous rampages had already taken place there, most infamously a pogrom and forced deportation in the northeastern city of Iai that left thousands dead. But there were no large-scale removals of Jews from Romania proper to the death camps overseen by Reich officials. Antonescu eventually rebuffed German pressure to deport the country’s large Jewish community, and at his postwar trial he still maintained that his actions had always been intended to save Romanian Jews, not to massacre them. But Romania’s actions in the reannexed Bessarabia, as well as farther east in the occupied territory of Transnistria, were another matter entirely.

  Systematic attacks on Jews had already occurred in the city from the first hours of the occupation. The German Einsatzgruppe D, especially its subunit Sonderkommando 11b, entered Odessa with Romanian forces in mid-October.13 Prominent Jewish community leaders were murdered, and Jews were ordered to register with the local authorities, presumably to provide lists of names and addresses for future operations.14 But the bombing of the military headquarters unleashed a new and less regulated round of violence. Mass hangings and large-scale shootings took place throughout the city and the suburbs, initiated by the occupation forces and then expressly ordered by Ion Antonescu himself.

  From October 22 forward, Antonescu sent telegrams that detailed a clear course of action. Two hundred “Communists” were to be killed for every dead Romanian or German officer and one hundred for every ordinary soldier. All “Communists” in Odessa were to be made hostages, as well as “a member of each Jewish family,” all of whom were to be killed in the event of a second major terrorist incident.15 In a further elaboration, Antonescu gave a checklist of measures:

  1. Execution of all Jews from Bessarabia who have sought refuge in Odessa.

  2. All individuals who fall under the stipulations of October 23, 1941 [ordering the killing of “Communists”], not yet executed and the others who can be added thereto will be placed inside a building that will be mined and detonated. This action will take place on the day of the burial of the victims [of the headquarters bombing].

  3. This order will be destroyed after being read.

  A handwritten version of the order survived. Subsequent communication with command headquarters confirmed that the order had been carried out.16

  The use of the general term “Communists,” as well as the particular antipathy toward Bessarabian Jews, reflected one of the critical dimensions of Romania’s policy in Odessa and elsewhere: the lines between Communist, Jew, partisan, refugee, and simple inconvenience were hazy and often nonexistent. The orders issued by the occupation authorities were at times grotesquely vague. On October 23, Trestioreanu instructed the units under his command to hang “at least 100 Jews” each—presumably with full permission to hang even more.17 These actions were always known by the Romanians as represalii—reprisals—and they were aimed almost exclusively at Jews. The intended targets, of course, were Soviet agents, partisans, and their sympathizers, but those were categories difficult if not impossible to assess with any clarity.

  Being a Jew became a surrogate for being an enemy of the state, and certainly was a category easier to identify from personal documents, public records, and routine intelligence-gathering from neighbors and coworkers. Ease of bureaucratic identification, combined with the deeper antisemitic equation of Jews with social undesirables and hidden enemies, was the driver of Romania’s policy. For Antonescu and his subordinates, the occupying troops were simply using lethal force to respond to pervasive partisan activity and discourage Odessans from engaging in further underground attacks. If it was relatively easy to survive the war as a Jew inside Romania, Jews in the occupied lands were placed in a very different category—that of Russian-speaker, crypto-Communist, and likely subversive.

  The scale of these operations was staggering. Besides the hangings and indiscriminate shootings immediately after the explosion, thousands of Jews were rounded up by Romanian security forces with the assistance of SS units and executed in the port, in military buildings on the outskirts of the city, and in sheds in the nearby settlement of Dalnik. The poles supporting overhead electric lines that serviced the city’s trolley system were used as makeshift gallows, with lines of bodies stretching out into the suburbs.18 Meanwhile, SS Sonderkommando 11b was given the task of finding Jews who might still be hiding in the city and dispatching them to Romanian killing squads outside town.19 Mass shootings with rifles and machine guns, immolations with blazing oil and gas, and the bombing of buildings packed with Jewish citizens—precisely the ghoulish symbolism Antonescu had ordered—were carried out in the weeks following the bombing. “The chaos and the horrifying sights that followed cannot be described,” noted a contemporary account. “Wounded people burning alive, women with their hair aflame coming out through the roof or through openings in the burning storehouses in a crazed search for salvation.”20 Estimates based on witness reports, postwar trials, and limited survivor testimonies give a figure of at least twenty-five thousand people killed in Odessa and Dalnik during this period—that is, perhaps around a third of all Jews who were living in the city when it came under Romanian control.21

  These massacres were carried out according to written orders passed down the Romanian chain of command. As such they were part of the “Holocaust by bullets,” as one historian has called it—the mass murder of civilians in ditches, old buildings, and tank traps across Ukraine and other parts of the western Soviet Union. That was the way in which millions of Jews and others experienced the war, even though this version of the Holocaust is usually overshadowed by the impersonal, mechanized killing in death camps such as Auschwitz.22 The Romanians did not create extermination facilities, but they did construct an array of camps and ghettos in Transnistria to which the remainder of Odessa’s Jews—and many other Jews and Roma (Gypsies) from Bessarabia and Transnistria itself—were eventually sent.

  AS WITH MUCH of Romanian policy, the confinement of Odessa’s Jews to a ghetto was an inconsistent and disorganized process—a fact that produced horrific cruelties as well as possibilities for escape or evasion. Some Jews were forcibly moved to the Slobodka neighborhood, just beyond the city center, as massacres were winding to a close. Some were allowed to return to their homes, but soon men and boys were required to report to the local prison, with a sweep throughout the city picking up any who had not registered. Then, in mid-November of 1941, officials in Transnistria ordered all Jews to report to a hastily arranged ghetto. The policy was only loosely enforced. Soon women, children, and the elderly were allowed to return to
their homes, many of which had already been ransacked or seized by their neighbors.23 It was also possible for men to sneak back into other parts of the city (the ghetto was a neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings, not a walled enclosure) and for other Odessans to visit them there or in other detention facilities. One secret agent reported to Romanian authorities how easy it was to take food to a Jewish neighbor in the municipal prison, whereas that would have been impossible, she said, under Stalin.24

  The full confinement to the Slobodka ghetto seems to have come later in Odessa than in other parts of Transnistria. Before the late summer of 1941, Romania’s practice had been to kill Jews on the spot or to deport them to the east, across the Bug River into German-occupied Ukraine. But the resulting chaos—with disorderly columns of Jews being pushed across the river and then back again by German soldiers unprepared to handle the influx—was meant to be squelched by an agreement signed on August 30, which formally awarded Romania control of Transnistria. The agreement set out Romania’s responsibility for dealing with Jews on what was now defined as its own territory. Jews were to be “concentrated in labor camps and required to work” until military operations ceased, at which point they would be “evacuated” to the German-controlled east.25 In Odessa the creation of the ghetto was probably a matter of timing: with the bombing of the headquarters and mass killings that followed, it took months from the time of the initial invasion for the authorities to devise concrete plans. In mid-December Antonescu gave the order definitively imprisoning Odessa’s Jews in the ghetto—the first time in history that Jews were fully restricted from living in whatever part of the city they could afford.

  The ghettoization policy was the first step toward the relatively quick removal of the city’s remaining Jews. Many had already been deported in October and November, making the long trek to villages and camps farther inland, where thousands were shot by local police or later died of malnutrition and typhus. Acting pursuant to Antonescu’s instructions, the civilian governor of Transnistria issued the command on January 2, 1942—Order No. 35—that sealed the fate of Odessa’s Jews. They would be expelled from the ghetto and relocated to the districts of Berezovka and Ochakov, to the north and east of Odessa; their goods would be turned over to the state and sold; and they would be subject to a regime of forced labor.26

  The removal began on January 10. The mass exodus was conducted on foot and in horse-drawn carts, between ranks of jeering soldiers and local Odessans, in temperatures below freezing. Those who fell behind or tried to run were shot on the spot. The bodies of the dead lined the streets.27 The orders were executed by units of the Romanian army and gendarmes, who reported regularly on the progress of their work. It took months to empty the ghetto, not only because of the transport required to move the tens of thousands of people now living in Slobodka, but also because of the numerous sweeps that were required to make sure that no Jews were left. Even weeks into the removals, Jewish Odessans were still to be found hiding in houses, especially in attics or crawl spaces.28 Romanian soldiers sometimes had difficulty overcoming their own fear, disgust, and sympathy, according to official reports. To buck them up, the military command required each soldier to sign a personal declaration confirming that he had read and understood the orders prohibiting fraternization with Jews.29

  Yet the conditions of atrocity, scarcity, and survival created alliances of necessity. The fates of Sergeant Nicolae Tnase and Vera Sepel, for example, were intertwined in the weeks preceding the elimination of the ghetto. Tnase was a sergeant assigned to the headquarters of the Romanian 38th Infantry, which gave him ready access to supplies of food, clothing, and fuel. Sepel was a Jew. But for a few months in late 1941 and early 1942, they made something of a life together. He visited her on multiple occasions. He may even have set up a home with her in a modest apartment somewhere in the city.

  When the authorities ordered all Jews deported from Odessa, Tnase and Sepel hatched a plan to get her out. The sergeant used his military connections to arrange travel documents that would allow her to board a train bound westward, for Romania. Sending her to the west—into the heartland of the Nazi ally that now controlled the city—seems a bizarre mode of escape, but it made sense at the time. Jews were routinely harassed there and pogroms had taken place. But Jews were less likely to be slaughtered or deported en masse. In Romania, she might even be able to blend into the local population, her Jewish identity undetected.

  The lovers were taking a huge chance. Jews were restricted from riding Romanian trains without express permission from the government, so Sepel’s documents probably included false identity papers that would have masked her Jewish surname. On the evening of January 10, as Tnase’s fellow soldiers were herding Jews from the newly established ghetto, he met Sepel at the city’s main station. He had come prepared with two street maps, perhaps as a way of finding a backup escape route should the initial plan fail. They waited on the platform for the night train to Buzu, a quiet provincial town in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, on the other side of the old Soviet-Romanian border.

  They never made the train. At eight o’clock that evening, the pair raised the suspicion of a ticket collector, perhaps an old station agent who had served with professional zeal under Soviets and now Romanians. The travel documents, bearing the seal of the commander of the 38th Infantry, were identified as forgeries. Both the Romanian sergeant and the Jewish escapee were taken into military custody. A few weeks later, on February 3, 1942, Sergeant Nicolae Tnase was court-martialed and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “falsifying the documents of a Jew,” plus five further years for “attempting to remove a Jew from internment in the ghetto.” Vera Nikolaevna Sepel was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for attempting to escape the ghetto and evade deportation from Odessa.30

  Their fates after that point are unknown. If she remained in detention after her arrest and sentencing, Sepel was probably removed the following March when the Odessa prison was emptied of Jewish inmates. After that, she may have died somewhere inland of typhus or of exposure, or at the hands of a Ukrainian policeman or German militiaman. If she were able to convince her captors that she was really from the Romania heartland rather than occupied Odessa, she might have survived the war. Perhaps she was eventually expatriated to Romania with a new name and a new identity, just as the sergeant had intended.

  The deportations that Tnase and Sepel sought to evade—or “evacuations,” in the terminology that Romanian authorities adopted from the Germans—were formally concluded months later, on April 11, 1942. The summary report from the prefect of the Odessa region stated that 32,643 Jews had been “counted and evacuated.” Another 847 were found dead in the ghetto or killed in the process of removal. A further 548 (including pregnant women) were still located in the ghetto hospital but were scheduled for transport to the facilities in Berezovka district as soon as they were movable. A new survey was conducted to identify any remaining Jews in the city and to find a way of disposing of the property confiscated from the deportees.31

  Things would get worse in the countryside. Widespread disease such as typhus, systematic killings by Romanian gendarmes and police units recruited from among local ethnic German populations, and the inhuman sanitary conditions in Transnistria’s numerous camps and ghettos—in places known by their Ukrainian names such as Berezovka, Bogdanovka, and Domanevka—claimed tens of thousands of lives. For those who survived, Transnistrian officials, acting on the authority of Antonescu, imposed what amounted to a system of slave labor, decreeing in December of 1943 that all Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty would be required to work in several specified jobs, from collecting eggs to staffing abattoirs. Odessa, however, was to remain a city almost wholly free of Jews. No work assignments were to be made in the city without the express permission of the government’s senior civilian administrator.32

  By the spring of 1942, as the acacias were budding and flowers opening in the parks, the Romanian authorities had compl
eted their task with every bit of the morbid perseverance of the German army, police, and SS units elsewhere. With the exception of people who somehow managed to hide their identity, there were only a few-dozen Jewish artisans working in a small, state-controlled workshop in the city center, and most of them were not originally from Odessa.33 The person overseeing the deportations was decorated by the papal nuncio for his diligent management of Romania’s newly acquired eastern territory.34 He was an obscure Romanian professor who now held the weighty title of governor—guvernator—of Transnistria.

  GHEORGHE ALEXIANU was a missionary of sorts. He was a member of the hopeful generation of 1918, the group of young men and women who witnessed the creation of “Greater Romania” at the end of the First World War. Romania had been a victor power in that conflict, and to the victor went the spoils: the territories that his generation of Romanians saw as rightly belonging to their own nation-state. He looked toward a bright future in which the newly gathered lands—territories such as Bessarabia, Dobrogea, Transylvania, Bukovina, and the Banat, absorbed into the Romanian kingdom from its defeated or defunct neighbors, Russia, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary—would be transformed into a Romanian-speaking paradise.