Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  By the 1940s the Romanian kingdom had developed a substantial provincial bureaucracy, with more than two decades of experience in governing new and troublesome districts. Much of that bureaucratic apparatus reproduced itself in Transnistria: directorates and sections, subsections and offices, all with the dual task of real-world administration plus the diligent production of paper trails. The Soviets, who scooped up these documents when the region was retaken, were good custodians. That collection now contains more than fifty-two thousand separate files and hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Many have been microfilmed and are stored at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Many more are barely kept from the ravages of mold and mice by a valiant staff at the state archives in Odessa.

  The files hold detailed memos and telegrams about the establishment of the ghetto and its liquidation, the deportation of Jews to work camps and internment centers elsewhere in Transnistria, and their deaths from disease, exposure, and systematic slaughter. Yet of all the horrors in the archives, some of the most disturbing reading—especially from a city that still takes its cosmopolitanism seriously—comes in the written denunciations and secret agent reports that average Odessans filed with the Romanian authorities: hundreds of pages scrawled in ink or grease pencil on onion-skin writing paper, the backs of old posters, even the inside of candy wrappers. Along with the lists of class aliens and enemies of the people arrested and shot under Stalin, the bulging files pay bleak witness to the darker city that lurked behind the enlightened one.

  ODESSANS BEGAN DENOUNCING each other almost as soon as the Romanian cavalry trotted down a deserted and sandbagged Richelieu Street. After the bombing of the military headquarters on October 22, 1941, the volume picked up. The demand to unmask hidden Bolsheviks before they could stage further terrorist attacks was greater than ever, and the supply of Odessans eager to avoid suspicion themselves probably spiked as well. After all, it was hard to have survived the 1930s without embracing to some degree the Soviet system, and in the topsy-turvy world of war and occupation, every virtue conjured from necessity was now a vice waiting to be revealed. It really was like stepping through the looking glass. The dueling denunciations of Skopov and Labunsky are an instructive example.

  In November of 1941 one Grigory Skopov wrote to the Romanian military command to denounce his neighbor, Pavel Labunsky, as a Communist and NKVD agent. He supplied a list of people who could verify this information and gave a detailed record of Labunsky’s determined opposition to the Romanian state. When Labunsky heard from others in his apartment building that he had been denounced by Skopov, he quickly shot off his own handwritten note to the authorities. He affirmed that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He noted that he had been born into a family of reasonably well-off landowners. He had been married in an Orthodox Christian ceremony. He had been “repressed” on several occasions by the Bolsheviks. His brother had fought on the side of the Whites during the civil war, for which he was sent to the gulag and had his property confiscated. In turn, Labunsky had been left with the task of caring for his brother’s wife and two children. When the new war started, Labunsky was drafted into the Red Army, but he immediately deserted. Beyond all that, he wrote, the person the Romanians should really be worried about was his denouncer. He was merely trying to cover up his own Bolshevik past and well-known felonious ways by casting aspersions on someone else. “Skopov is the absolute worst enemy of the new order, which has come to liberate humanity from the hated Bolsheviks,” Labunsky concluded. “Skopov should pay for his past criminal activities.” He then appended a list of eleven neighbors and other witnesses who could verify his claims.2

  A few years earlier, all the bits of biography that Labunsky offered as bona fides—his class background, his religiosity, his brother’s service with the Whites—would have marked him as an enemy of the Soviet state. But in the new order, things that had been liabilities now became advantages to be valued and marketed. For plenty of Odessans, the way to demonstrate a healthy sense of civic duty was by stepping up and being of use in the maintenance of law and order, the discovery of underground Soviet agents, and especially the exposure of hidden Jews.

  Alexianu’s administration saw all Jewish Odessans, at least in theory, as Soviet agents. The equation between “Jew” and “Communist” had a long and gruesome history throughout eastern Europe. But given that the Romanians were not only fighting a war but also conducting a counterinsurgency campaign—against real underground fighters hiding out in the catacombs, disrupting transport, and at times targeting senior Romanian officials—the search for hidden Jews was not simply a matter of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. It was also, from the perspective of the occupier and many of the occupied, a matter of security. Latent and at times enthusiastic antisemitism, fear of a Soviet return to the city, paranoia about being denounced oneself, and the universal neighborly emotions of greed, envy, and resentment were twisted together in the motivations of Odessa’s collaborators.

  Unmasking pretenders was a common theme in many of the agent reports and voluntary denunciations. One Igor Brizhitsky reported that he had heard of a man named Strizhak, then living on Greek Street, who had worked as an employee of the NKVD and had participated in the Stalinist repression of ethnic Germans in the Odessa region. Strizhak’s passport said that he was an ethnic Ukrainian, Brizhitsky claimed, but a next-door neighbor confirmed that “his own sister is a yid.”3 In the same report, Brizhitsky went on to detail the more complicated case of a husband, wife, and son, the Zagalsky family:

  KLEIMAN and ZAGALSKY—58 Uspenskaya Street (entry via the courtyard). Director of School No. 8, Aleksey Ivanovich Zagalsky, is hiding the fact that his wife, Klavdiya Isaakovna Kleiman, is a Jew. And that her son by her first husband, by the name of Vadim Kleiman, eighteen years old, is also a Jew. And that Zagalsky adopted him and gave him his surname and makes out that he is Ukrainian. Klavdiya Isaakovna Kleiman, with the help of the yid-run Soviet militsiia [police], managed to get a passport in the surname of her husband, Zagalsky, and in that passport she makes out that she is not a Jew but a Ukrainian. A teacher at School No. 68, Adolf Poze, enabled all these machinations. This information is given by Stasenko, a teacher at School No. 92.4

  Odessans were naturally accustomed to hiding from the view of the state. Smugglers, goniffs, and underground political groups had perfected the art of avoidance. But in 1941 the idea of shining light on the vast underworld—now thought to be populated by Bolsheviks and secret Jews—took on a deadly cast. Sometimes people could be hiding in plain sight. Agent No. 61 reported that a man who was working as a driver at a local factory by the name of Shvidkoy was in fact the same Shvidkoy who had previously been a well-known Communist, a member of the leadership of the factory’s party organization, and “a fairly evil-doing kind of person, always doing things on the sly.” Plus, the agent continued, citing the testimony of a Mr. Kritsky, “despite his Russian name and surname, [Shvidkoy] is a yid.”5

  Denunciations were not always directed at specific individuals, although that is the information the Romanian authorities found most useful. A receiving officer in the military headquarters would sometimes make handwritten notations on denunciation reports, requesting that the writer be more specific about who said what and provide accurate addresses of both denouncer and denounced. It took time to train people to do their job effectively. Still, some Odessans continued to report any trivial fact or pet theory they thought might be of use to the authorities. “I would like to bring to your attention,” wrote one Valery Tkachenko, “that in the basement of 13 Tiraspol Street a group of yids get together and discuss political issues, and they say that the Romanians and the Germans are drinking our blood by the glassful but that we will drink theirs by the bucketful. And that America is helping us.”6

  Others denounced people who were not harboring Jews but rather harboring their old clothes, safeguarding the personal effects of those who had been sent away. Still others
reported that a neighbor had benefited unduly from items left behind when Jews were rounded up by the Romanians—that is, complaining that the person was not sharing the spoils with other residents in the apartment building. Amateur analysts gave their own interpretation of goings on around them, working as informal detectives rather than as simple informants. The mysterious paper found in one apartment might be the residue of an underground printing press, surmised one local woman. The portraits of Hitler, Antonescu, and Romania’s King Mihai that had begun to appear in local bazaars were very poorly done and needed to be policed, said another. One neighbor reported that an acquaintance was usually hanging out with bad elements and probably up to no good. “At the same time his apartment is the meeting place of hidden terrorist-Communists. And besides that, his wife is a yid and is entirely surrounded by yids.”7 Another person gave a checklist by which authorities could smoke out Jews still hiding in the city. “Identification and inspection of the Jew may be made in the following way,” wrote “An Observer”:

  1. the face and appearance of a Jew

  2. a corrupted way of speaking

  3. the official documents he possesses (and also those of his relatives)

  4. the genital organs (for men)8

  Romanian propagandists sought to market the occupation by portraying it as liberation, the final curtain on more than twenty years of Bolshevik terror. But the erstwhile liberators reinforced the basic habits and pathologies of the Soviet system. The paranoia, the self-serving indictments, and the mania for unmasking, exposing, and rooting out potential enemies of the state were ways of behaving to which the city had become accustomed already in the 1920s and 1930s. The format of the denunciation letters and the complaints they contained were often near copies of those used during the earlier Stalin period, from the standard Russian opening line—“Dovozhu do Vashego svedeniya nizhesleduyushchee,” or “I would like to bring to your attention the following”—to rote-sounding endings that attested to the letter writer’s good faith and honesty. Where the occupying power sought clear and actionable intelligence, Odessans were sometimes simply enacting a well-drilled script—one that had a great deal to do with the practiced art of surviving under an oppressive regime.

  Lack of political loyalty, employment in an administrative post in the previous illegitimate regime, abuse of power by government officials, or exhibition of a sexual peccadillo or other immoral behavior could all be grounds for denunciation, under both the Soviets and the Romanians. The temptation to inform on one’s neighbors and take over their living space—especially in overcrowded apartment buildings in the desirable city center—was also a direct inheritance from the Soviet system.9 The difference now was the clear equation between being an enemy and being a Jew, a union that few Odessans seemed to have difficulty accepting. The city had been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and antisemitic propaganda for decades—from the supposed threat posed by Jewish self-defense organizations in the early 1900s to the more recent efforts of German and Romanian hearts-and-minds campaigns to portray the Soviets as an arm of world Jewry. Older cleavages between Jews and their neighbors now became canyons that only the most heroic Odessans were able to bridge. “They consider the Jews a very perfidious, wily, and unforgiving nation,” reported an agent, “and one that is still capable of a whole range of dirty tricks.”10

  The personal testimonies of survivors corroborate the stories told in the official documents. David Senyaver was born in the town of Balta, to the north of Odessa, where his family worked as fishmongers. When their house and business were requisitioned by the Soviets in the early 1930s, the family moved into a small shed, paying the price for having been denounced as bourgeois-class enemies. During the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, they decamped to the city, but life was equally hard there, since the family bore an undesirable and potentially deadly class label.

  Senyaver was fifteen when Romania took control of Odessa, and he remembered distinctly the crowds that gathered when Jews were told to assemble in the Privoz marketplace near the city center. “The local population, especially the Ukrainians,” he recalled, “were eager to help the Germans and Romanians hunt down their victims, children and youths, hiding in cellars.” When he was expelled from the city in early 1942, destined for the camp at Domanevka, gangs of locals hurled rocks and called out, “You crucified Jesus Christ.” But in his testimony, Senyaver wanted to be clear on a particular point: a local villager, whose Slavic name he recalled decades later, had taken him in after his deportation. It was the Odessans, not the Ukrainian peasants in the countryside, whom he remembered shouting and throwing stones.11 An urban population practiced in unmasking class traitors, exposing the wreckers of socialism, and rooting out enemies of the people easily transferred those techniques to uncovering secret Jews.

  Jews did manage to survive in Odessa throughout the war, but they were few. Some hid in plain sight by obtaining or forging official documents that certified their status as Karaim, the ethnically distinct pre-Talmudic Jews who were generally left alone by the authorities. Others passed as Ukrainians, Armenians, or members of other ethnic groups, especially if they were able to move to a part of the city where neighbors were unlikely to know their true identity. Careful planning and raw chance mattered in equal measure. Lyudmila Kalika, a teenage girl, survived with her family through a combination of luck and neighborly piety. When the war broke out, they were living in a communal apartment—common in the early Soviet period—and shared their space with another family.

  That fact turned out to be a blessing. When the Kalikas decided to go into hiding rather than report to the ghetto, the other family simply expanded into the unused space, rather than have it expropriated by the building superintendent or the occupation authorities. The Kalikas’ flatmates were Jews who had managed to acquire papers that identified them, falsely, as Karaim. The apartment, located on the ground floor, had a cellar big enough to hold several people, and the small space became the Kalikas’ refuge as Jews were being shot or forced out of town. Another neighbor, a Ukrainian woman, provided food and water to the hidden Jews and assisted the putative “Karaim” in keeping control of the communal apartment. She convinced any nosy residents that the Kalika family was either deported or dead. This swirl of circumstance allowed Lyudmila and four other Jews to remain hidden in the cellar for 820 days, until the city was retaken by the Red Army.12

  There was a marked falloff in denunciations after early 1942. Most Jews had been identified and shipped out of the city. Most of the lethal, Soviet-funded partisan brigades had been scotched, their hiding places in the catacombs discovered and sealed. Agents and informants were still active, but their tasks now included delivering newspapers and posting propaganda fliers, not systematically reporting on their neighbors. People who remained in the city were learning how to get on with their daily lives.

  Odessans were in no sense ignorant of what was happening in the camps and ghettos to the north. They had seen Jews hanged and shot en masse. Later, stories circulated in the bazaars about Jews being killed throughout Transnistria. Some people even worried about what would happen in the future if troops were not around to protect the city from Jewish avengers. “When you take off, the yids will be able to hurt us,” women were reported yelling at Romanian soldiers. “Why haven’t you made the yids kaput?”13 Another agent wrote in the spring of 1942 that a few Jews had escaped back to Odessa and were spreading rumors about people being machine-gunned in a ravine at a place called Berezovka. We now know those rumors to have been true. The escapees were reporting one of the worst massacres to have taken place under Romania’s watch, the killing of about twenty-eight thousand Odessa Jews by SS units recruited from among the Volksdeutsche.14 But with Jews no longer being hanged in the streets or crowding the squares before deportation to the countryside, it was easy for Russians and Ukrainians to pretend that news of further horrors could be easily ignored.

  ODESSA’S HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL lies on a busy street n
ear the green warren of Moldavanka. An alley of newly planted trees leads to a central fountain. At the top stands a tiny but haunting work by the sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, a cluster of naked men and women huddling before a small staircase, all surrounded by a jumble of barbed wire. The fountain doesn’t work, the pavement is cracked and broken, and the trees want watering. An inscription inaccurately reminds visitors of the crimes committed by the “Nazis,” not by Romanians or local Odessans. The small park in which it sits is littered with plastic bottles and overflowing trash bins.

  Yet the truly striking thing about the memorial is that most of it is a monument to people identified as Odessa’s ninety righteous, the men and women, mainly Ukrainians, who risked their own lives to save Jews. Each tree is labeled with a name of one of the heroes. It is all a singularly manufactured way of thinking about the city’s wartime experience, for the more somber truth is that an entire forest of Odessans behaved differently: cooperating with the Romanian authorities, eagerly denouncing Jews, or silently going about their lives as if unaware of where one in three of their neighbors had gone.

  The heroes were there, certainly, but they are hard to spot among the betrayers and the whisperers, those whose formal letters and urgent notes peek out from archival files. One way to understand the vast number of Odessans not memorialized in the alley of the righteous is to come at the matter obliquely, through a person who spent longer in the city than Pushkin or many of the other famous figures now assumed into the pantheon of honorary Odessans: the Romanian mayor Gherman Pântea.

  Whey-faced and stocky, with a thick head of hair that went from pompadour to mane in his old age, Pântea was one of the most qualified administrators the Romanian government could have placed in Transnistria. He was a product of the borderland, born in May of 1894 to a Romanian-speaking family in northern Bessarabia, a time when the region was still, as it had been for nearly a century, part of the Russian Empire. He served in the imperial army, but like many of his Bessarabian comrades he converted to the cause of Romanian nationalism during the breakdown of military discipline and the collapse of the eastern front in 1917.