Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  He was elected as a military representative to the local parliament that formed when the Russian Empire disappeared and then worked as a minister in Bessarabia’s briefly independent government. He was part of the group that opted in 1918 for union with Romania, just as the Bolsheviks were preparing to descend on Kishinev, the Bessarabian provincial seat. Once absorbed into the Romanian kingdom, Pântea served three terms as Kishinev’s mayor. As the son of poor Bessarabian villagers but educated as a lawyer in the tsarist system, he was bilingual in Romanian and Russian. He even knew something of Ukraine, since he had studied briefly at Ilya Mechnikov’s old institution, the university in Odessa. When the Soviet army invaded Bessarabia in the summer of 1940, Pântea joined the masses of Romanian soldiers and officials retreating westward.15

  Although he did not know Ion Antonescu personally, the Romanian leader called him to a meeting at the train station in Kishinev in August of 1941. He was informed of Antonescu’s intention to name him mayor of Odessa once the city was captured by German and Romanian troops. His considerable experience in Bessarabia would have made him a reasonable choice; perhaps liberal politicians in Bucharest—those already concerned about Antonescu’s harsh policies at home—pushed him forward in hopes of softening the regime’s behavior in the occupied territories. In any case, when the city finally fell, Pântea was duly named to the mayoral post, arriving in Odessa on October 18, less than a week before the fateful bombing at the military headquarters.

  Pântea was a direct witness to the “reprisals” carried out against Jews in the days following the attack. He wrote a personal letter to Antonescu—avoiding Alexianu and jumping up the chain of command—in which he recalled coming back from the recovery effort at the ruined building near Alexandrovsky Park to find people hanged along the major streets and intersections. He learned that the military command had ordered Jews to assemble for deportation to Dalnik, the place where many were eventually shot or burned alive. “If you were informed precisely about the situation, in particular that the population had no involvement in the act of October 22,…you would revoke the order for reprisals, and innocent people would not be punished,” he wrote. Pântea even requested that Antonescu name someone else as mayor since his power was dwarfed by that of the local military authorities. He stopped short of resigning, however.16

  For all his objections, Pântea nevertheless attended the crucial meeting that determined the fate of Odessa’s remaining Jewish population. Through Ordinance No. 34 in January of 1942, Alexianu had ordered the creation of a special “commission for selection and evacuation” to supervise the cleansing of the capital city. On January 6 the first session of the commission met, chaired by Colonel Matei Velcescu, the police prefect for the Odessa region. At that session the members decided the manner in which Alexianu’s order would be effected, including the systematic emptying of the ghetto in Slobodka. Although the people charged with doing the work on the ground were local police and gendarme units, Pântea had been present at the creation of what amounted to the final solution of the city’s Jewish problem. He attended no more sessions of the “selection and evacuation” committee and named one of his deputy mayors as a stand-in. He remained in post as mayor until briefly handing control of the city to German forces in the spring of 1944.17

  Pântea’s authority was severely circumscribed by the overweening power of Alexianu as well as by that of the Romanian military command, which had final say over local affairs. But within the areas under his control and within the bounds of a wartime economy, the city seemed to be on its way back. Public works were restarted, including the provision of water and electricity. Restaurants and markets reopened. For the first time in two decades, individual vendors were allowed to sell produce and manufactured goods in private shops and stalls. Cinemas offered films prohibited under the Soviets, and their upkeep became a particular concern to the occupation authorities.18 Movies had the huge potential for keeping the local population happy and entertained, and Romanian propaganda films regularly highlighted the progress of the war and the depravities of Stalin—the latter, at least, a point about which many citizens did not need to be convinced.

  Corruption was rampant in the newly energized economy, but then the city had hardly been a paragon of economic virtue under the Soviets. Citizens learned to respond with the dark and corny humor for which Odessa was already famous. In the open-air markets, sellers taunted strolling Romanian soldiers and bureaucrats with creative wordplay. The standard Romanian greeting “Buna? dimineaa”—“Good morning”—became the Russian “Budem’te meniat’sia”—“Let’s make a deal!”19

  Even if the final status of Transnistria after an Axis victory was still uncertain, the Romanians were committed to managing affairs in ways that would appeal to local Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans. The major city streets were rechristened in forms consonant with the new order. Karl Marx Street became, a bit too obviously, Hitler Avenue. Jewish Street was renamed for Mussolini. One of the city’s great landmarks since the 1870s, the Opera, had been severely damaged during the siege. The roof was caved in, every window smashed, and heating and water systems broken. Already by the end of 1941, the city government had arranged for the windows to be replaced. Soon the theater’s magnificent organ, long dysfunctional under the Soviets, was in working order (a project overseen by the same deputy mayor who spent the rest of his time attending meetings on the liquidation of the ghetto). During the 1942–43 season, Odessans walked into a fully reoutfitted building, freshly plastered and painted, with the chance to buy tickets for one of fifty-eight separate productions, from La Bohème to Eugene Onegin. The city administration made no effort to “romanianize” the musical repertoire. Three-quarters of the productions were the standard European classics, while a quarter were Russian works.20

  “Pântea was a popular man in Odessa,” recalled one local actress in the late 1950s, “and even today the population remembers him fondly.”21 A constant stream of Romanians journeyed from the kingdom to see for themselves the new experiment in neighborly imperialism. Students and professors from Bucharest University, representatives from the Romanian Association of Teachers, delegations from Romanian villages, and choirs, dance groups, and journalists all visited the city at the expense of the government. The Lawn Tennis Section of the Sports Association of Romanian Railways organized a two-day match with guest invitees. Even a prize-winning group of Bucharest schoolchildren, selected as the Romanian capital’s most promising pupils, were rewarded with a tour around the province they would presumably one day rule.

  Ion Antonescu visited on three occasions—once in 1942 and twice in 1943—to see the wonders being wrought on the eastern frontier.22 The flow of visitors became so great that lower-level functionaries called for the creation of special cantine turistice—tourist hostels—to accommodate the missions of artists, musicians, educators, students, and dignitaries coming weekly from the motherland.23 Overall the city exuded freshness and vitality, a place “full of young people,” as one visitor recalled, a marked contrast to the empty streets and squares in other parts of occupied eastern Europe.24

  Pântea had nevertheless been perfectly aware of, and deeply troubled by, the events of the first year of the occupation. When the systematic removal of Jews from Odessa began, he wrote to Alexianu protesting the move. “I have reported to you verbally and in writing,” he said, “that this evacuation is wrong and inhuman, and since it is taking place in the depths of winter, it has become truly barbaric.” Repeating the argument he had made earlier to Antonescu, he complained that the governor’s advisors had mistakenly convinced him that Jews represented a security threat in the city. Pântea insisted that they were in fact working hard to rebuild it. But with the transport trains and columns of marching Jewish Odessans already on the way, Pântea wrote that he now wished to make “the last attempt to save as much as may be saved.” He asked specifically for Jewish craftsmen and teachers to be exempted from deportation, along with the roughly one thousan
d Karaim still living in the city. No sizable effort was made to sort out the first two categories, although the Karaim, as in the past, were generally passed over as not “racially” Jewish (a view developed by Nazi race theorists and adopted by the Romanians).25

  But because of his protests against Romania’s Jewish policy, the mayor remained deeply suspect in the eyes of Alexianu and his other superiors, all the way to Bucharest. He was surrounded by Bessarabian Romanians, who—as people of the frontier and bilingual in Romanian and Russian—had always been considered by officials from the old kingdom as being of dubious loyalty and imperfectly versed in the ideals of Romanian nationalism. (As early as 1939, the Romanian ministry of defense was gathering intelligence reports assessing whether Bessarabians were likely to fraternize with Soviets rather than fight them.)26 Pântea used Russian as the working language of the mayor’s office and communicated decrees and other bureaucratic acts to Odessa’s population primarily in that language. This, again, raised suspicions about his nationalist credentials, even while certainly easing the task of city administration.

  Yes, most of the functionaries in the mayor’s office were former Communists, he wrote to Alexianu, but that was to be expected in a city that had been under Soviet control for two decades. Moreover, the entire idea of Communist agents sneaking around in the city was largely a fiction. “It is not true that the local population is agitating [against Romania],” he wrote. “On the contrary locals have gotten down to business, going to work in all senses, and participating effectively in the rebuilding of Odessa. Fabrications about the ‘agitation’ of the population are circulated by various secret organs of the State, which have full interest in stirring up things in order to justify their existence and their expenditures. That is why these organs speak of the Communist threat to Odessa, of plots, of the catacombs’ being full of Communists, Jews, and so on.”27 Both the eager denunciations by locals and the equally eager receptivity on the part of Romanian security services, he suggested, were more a matter of self-interest than real threat. The former sought to ingratiate themselves with the new power. The latter hoped to convince their higher-ups that they were doing their job. As even the city’s mayor knew, Odessans and their occupiers were locked in a mutual, and at times mutually beneficial, embrace.

  WE KNOW THE DETAILS of the careers of Alexianu and Pântea because both were put on trial after the war. Shortly after Romanian forces pulled out of Odessa, leaving the city and the wider Transnistria region notionally in the hands of the Germans, Romania itself switched sides. With the Soviets pushing ever westward and the Axis war effort crumbling, in August of 1944 the Romanian king, Mihai, overthrew Ion Antonescu and declared Romania’s accession to the Allies—just in time to stave off an all-out fight against the Red Army, now pursuing its own version of blitzkrieg. At the end of the war, the Soviets gradually installed a Communist government in Romania, which cemented its position by forcing Mihai to surrender the throne and leave the country at the end of 1947. One of the new government’s first tasks was to prosecute—or in many cases re-prosecute—the leaders of the old regime.

  Alexianu was one of four defendants found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death, and executed by the Communists. The others—the powerful vice chairman of the Council of Ministers, Mihai Antonescu; the brutal deputy interior minister, Constantin Vasiliu; and the conductor himself, Ion Antonescu—had been visible public figures, working in the central government in Bucharest and tacking back and forth between their own profound antisemitism, the exigencies of war, and the demands of their patron, Nazi Germany. Their hatred of Jews tended to be of the conservative kind found among traditional right-wing parties throughout central Europe, not necessarily the rabid, revolutionary variety preached by Nazi propagandists. It was activated into a political program by the experience of being an occupying power and by the infectious zeal of the SS, German liaison officers, and Hitler himself. However, what emerged in the trials was that of all the senior officials, the relatively obscure Alexianu, diligently issuing decrees from halls that had once hosted Lise Vorontsova’s famous soirees, was perhaps the truest of the true believers.

  Alexianu denied having any role in the massacres of late 1941, attributing those to excesses by the secret police and the gendarmerie. But he stood by his efforts to administer Transnistria in ways beneficial to the Romanian state, especially by shipping as much of its wealth as possible to the motherland and, where necessary, removing Jewish populations he believed presented a threat to public order.28 Unlike many at the top of the administrative hierarchy, he seems not to have benefited personally from his role in the war. Investigators found him living in a modest apartment in Bucharest, with no major property holdings elsewhere in the country, no transfers of funds to foreign banks, and no hidden accounts in which he could have stashed the loot taken from the Jews who were deported and killed during his nearly three-year reign.

  Most of his remorseless testimony was taken up with defending his husbandry of the provincial economy—the very issue that had meant the end of his career: Antonescu had sacked him from the governorship in January of 1944, shortly before the entire Transnistrian adventure came to an end, for being a bad manager.29 Even as he faced death, he was still defending the nobility of the national cause, a scene captured by a newsreel camera at the time. Standing before their joint firing squad, Vasiliu and Mihai Antonescu fidgeted, while Ion Antonescu raised his homburg in a theatrical salute to his fellow soldiers and executioners. Alexianu, thin and clean shaven, stood glum and ramrod straight.

  Pântea’s fate was different. Already in 1945, he was discovered hiding under an assumed name in Romania and was put on trial for allegedly selling gravestones from one of Odessa’s Jewish cemeteries. He was acquitted and freed the next year, but went into hiding again with the advent of the new Communist government. He passed from one friend to another, carrying false identity papers and a signed copy of his letter to Antonescu protesting the “reprisals,” a talisman of sorts against the gathering storm.

  Most nights he slept at the Gara de Nord train station in Bucharest to avoid detection. He was arrested again in 1949, retried, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. It was a sign of the times that his chief transgression was now classed as “causing the deaths of thousands of workers,” not killing Jews or looting graves.30 Even though he was eventually released from prison, as late as the 1960s he was still being tailed by the Securitate, the Communist-era secret police, for hanging out with “anti-socialist” elements.31

  Pântea might have resigned his post as mayor. He might have done more than send his deputy to those unpleasant meetings on the deportations. He could have prevented Jews from being killed by simply notarizing their certificates of baptism as Christians, a last-ditch escape route that many attempted as the ghetto was being emptied.32 He might have done much more than send a few letters of protest. “I am no defender of Jews,” he declared flatly to Antonescu as bodies were still hanging from makeshift gallows.33 But for all these reasons, Pântea was uniquely representative of the city that he oversaw as mayor. Beyond the actions of the most abhorrent architects of the Holocaust, Pântea’s behavior was, in the end, close to that of many Odessans through war, occupation, and atrocity—born of a steely willingness to disregard what was happening right before his eyes.

  Other parts of Ukraine suffered more in sheer numerical terms. In some regions, more than 90 percent of prewar Jewish populations were wiped out. An estimated 40 percent of Jewish citizens perished during the war years in the Odessa region, with the figure surely higher for those killed inside the city itself.34 In Transnistria as a whole, perhaps 50,000 of the 300,000 local Jews remained alive once the region came again under Soviet control.35 Individuals survived by falsifying their identity, relying on the kindness and propriety of a villager or neighbor, or living silently and fearfully inside cellars and attics. In time, some even returned to their old homes, where they wer
e joined by evacuees returning from refuge in Central Asia or other parts of the Soviet Union. But communities were now gone. In November of 1944, after the Red Army had been in charge of Odessa for several months, Soviet officials counted forty-eight Jews living there.36

  PART III

  Nostalgia and Remembrance

  CHAPTER 11

  Hero City

  Memory and myth: Movie poster advertising the 1943 film Two Warriors starring Mark Bernes (left). Russian State Library/Abamedia.

  A Romanian secret agent reported in the winter of 1941–42 that Odessans in the Privoz marketplace regularly speculated about their city’s return to greatness. With the Soviets out of power, one man allegedly proclaimed, “Odessa will once again be a free port and will return to the golden age of Count Vorontsov and the duc de Richelieu under the patronage of His Highness King Mihai of Romania and His Excellency the Supreme Leader of the German Empire Adolf Hitler.”1

  Few people at the time were that mawkish or self-servingly deferential to the occupiers, but the general sentiment was not uncommon. With enough optimism and bravado, Odessans could imagine a future in which their city might be put back on the track it had left at some point in the nineteenth century. Nostalgia was not just a way of longing for the past. It was also a method of conjuring a distant but radiant future. Anyone who was paying attention knew that these were temporary fantasies, however. One cooperated with the occupiers when it made sense and found ways to avoid them when it didn’t. Ducking and weaving were Odessan habits, and the war years only sharpened old skills: skirting customs agents, buying off the police, studiously ignoring the entreaties of government officials, and generally bending to avoid breaking. Survival was a special kind of flourishing.