The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  On September 21, as Golda Glozman was told by one of her Jewish neighbours, her father Shlomo Glozman, one of the Jewish community leaders in Kiev, was murdered. As she later learned from neighbours:

  …the Nazis put him and nine other most honourable old Jews in a lorry, forced them to put on their prayer vestments, and drove them through the town until dinner-time. They repeated this procedure several days in succession. The people in the streets were laughing. On one of these days Nazis came to their house after the dinner and drove him in the direction of Konstantinovskaya Street. There, nearby the cinema, ‘Udarnik’, he was beaten badly and only just managed to reach his house afterwards. However, on the next day he was forced again, together with others, to stand on the ‘chariot of disgrace’.

  A few days later Shlomo Glozman left his house in order to visit his son. As he crossed Kiev, a drunken SS man attacked him in the street and beat him to death.56

  At Kiev, on September 27 and 28, posters throughout the city demanded the assembly of Jews for ‘resettlement’. More than thirty thousand reported. Because of ‘our special talent of organisation’, the commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later, ‘the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being executed that indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled.’57

  The Jews of Kiev were brought to Babi Yar, a ravine just outside the city. There, they were shot down by machine-gun fire. Immediately after the war, a non-Jew, the watchman at the old Jewish cemetery, near Babi Yar, recalled how Ukrainian policemen:

  …formed a corridor and drove the panic-stricken people towards the huge glade, where sticks, swearings, and dogs, who were tearing the people’s bodies, forced the people to undress, to form columns in hundreds, and then to go in the columns in twos towards the mouth of the ravine.

  At the mouth of the ravine, the watchman recalled:

  …they found themselves on the narrow ground above the precipice, twenty to twenty-five metres in height, and on the opposite side there were the Germans’ machine guns. The killed, wounded and half-alive people fell down and were smashed there. Then the next hundred were brought, and everything repeated again. The policemen took the children by the legs and threw them alive down into the Yar.

  That day the watchman witnessed ‘horrible scenes of human grief and despair’. In the evening, he noted, ‘the Germans undermined the wall of ravine and buried the people under the thick layers of earth. But the earth was moving long after, because wounded and still alive Jews were still moving. One girl was crying: “Mammy, why do they pour the sand into my eyes?”’58

  After the war, a Jewish doctor, David Rosen, was told of the fate of his Aunt Lisa, who had been so far advanced in pregnancy that she had been unable to leave Kiev in the last evacuation trains before the Germans arrived in the city. ‘Aunt Lisa’, Dr Rosen was told by a neighbour after the war, ‘and her six-year-old son Tolik went to Babi Yar. She was so horrified and frightened that she began giving birth. Driven by the Germans and policemen to the ravine, together with her son and the newborn child in her arms, she fell down into Babi Yar and perished there in pangs.’59

  The horrors of Babi Yar were endless and obscene. When the war was over, Victoria Shyapeltoh learned that when the Jews had been ordered to assemble, her neighbour, a Ukrainian woman who had lived in the same apartment with them for many years, had dragged her seventy-year-old father, Yakov-Pinhas Zindelivich, from the apartment into the street, and handed him over to the Germans. The old man was wearing his prayer shawl. Still wearing it, he was driven to Babi Yar, ‘praying all the way’.60

  One of the few Jews to escape from the pit at Babi Yar was Dina Pronicheva. After the war, she told her story to the Russian writer Anatoli Kuznetsov, who published it, first in Russia in 1966, and then, under the name A. Anatoli, in Britain in 1970. Dina Pronicheva, like hundreds of those who were shot during these massacres, was not in fact killed. But unlike most of those who fell into the pit alive, she managed to avoid being suffocated, and to escape undetected:

  All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living.

  Some soldiers came out on to the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone not far from Dina went on groaning as loud as before.

  Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing at those which showed signs of life.

  Among them was the policeman who had examined her papers and taken her bag: she recognized him by his voice.

  One SS-man caught his foot against Dina and her appearance aroused his suspicions. He shone his torch on her, picked her up and struck her with his fist. But she hung limp and gave no signs of life. He kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trod on her right hand so that the bones cracked, but he didn’t use his gun and went off, picking his way across the corpses.

  A few minutes later she heard a voice calling from above:

  ‘Demidenko! Come on, start shovelling!’

  There was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies, coming closer and closer until it started falling on Dina herself.

  Her whole body was buried under the sand but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth. She was lying face upwards, breathed in some sand and started to choke, and then, scarcely realizing what she was doing, she started to struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic, quite prepared now to be shot rather than be buried alive.

  With her left hand, the good one, she started scraping the sand off herself, scarcely daring to breathe lest she should start coughing; she used what strength she had left to hold the cough back. She began to feel a little easier. Finally she got herself out from under the earth.

  The Ukrainian policemen up above were apparently tired after a hard day’s work, too lazy to shovel the earth in properly, and once they had scattered a little in they dropped their shovels and went away. Dina’s eyes were full of sand. It was pitch dark and there was the heavy smell of flesh from the mass of fresh corpses.

  Dina could just make out the nearest side of the sandpit and started slowly and carefully making her way across to it; then she stood up and started making little foot-holds in it with her left hand. In that way, pressed close to the side of the pit, she made steps and so raised herself an inch at a time, likely at any moment to fall back into the pit.

  There was a little bush at the top which she managed to get hold of. With a last desperate effort she pulled herself up and, as she scrambled over the ledge, she heard a whisper which nearly made her jump back.

  ‘Don’t be scared, lady! I’m alive too.’

  It was a small boy in vest and pants who had crawled out as she had done. He was trembling and shivering all over.

  ‘Quiet!’ she hissed at him. ‘Crawl along behind me.’

  And they crawled away silently, without a sound.

  Dina Pronicheva survived. The boy, Motyn, stayed with her, but as they sought to leave the area, he called that danger was near. ‘Don’t move, lady, there’s Germans here!’—those were Motyn’s words. Luckily for Dina Pronicheva, the Germans did not understand them. But hearing him speak, they killed him on the spot.61

  The courage of Motyn was recorded only by chance: only because a Russian writer, a non-Jew, was in search of facts about the past. He recorded also an episode, in Kiev, of a Jewish girl ‘running down the street, shooting from a revolver’. She killed two German officers, ‘then shot herself’.62 Her name is not known. Only her deed survives, and then, only by chance.

  After two days of shooting, the Einsatzkommando unit recorded the murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar
. The unit’s machine-gunners had been helped by Ukrainian militiamen. The same Einsatzkommando report also gave details of an even larger slaughter further south, 35,782 ‘Jews and Communists’ killed in the Black Sea ports of Nikolayev and Kherson.63

  On the Day of Atonement, October 2, it was the turn, among other places, of the village of Podborodz to face the fury of the killers. An eight-year-old girl, Hadassah Rosen, was hiding with her parents in the attic of the synagogue. From the attic, she later recalled, ‘we squinted through the cracks in the boards and saw them shoving the Jews into wagons. Whoever was slow in getting into the wagon was clubbed to death.’ It was very early in the morning: ‘soon afterwards we heard volleys of shots. That was how they killed the Jews they took in wagons out of the ghetto of Podborodz.’64

  Also on the Day of Atonement, an Einsatzgruppe report recorded how, at Zagare, as 633 men, 1,017 women and 496 children were being ‘led away’, ‘a mutiny began which was put down immediately’. In the course of the mutiny, the report added, ‘150 Jews were shot right away.’65 The rest, driven to the execution site, were then killed. At Butrimonys, where 976 Jews were murdered, the Germans organized a ‘spectacle’, placing benches at the execution site so that local Lithuanians could have a ‘good view’.66

  In Vilna, whose Jewish population had already been decimated by slaughter, the Day of Atonement was chosen for yet another raid into the ghetto, and for the deportation of more than three thousand Jews to Ponar, and to their deaths.67 In their raids on the ghetto, the SS men, known to the Jews as ‘hunters’, worked with their dogs. ‘These hunters dragged the Jews out of the cellars,’ Abraham Sutzkever recalled immediately after the war, of the raid on the small ghetto on the Day of Atonement, ‘and tried to drive them to Ponar. But the Jews fled into their cellars, trying to hide.’

  The ‘hunters’ began to search with dogs for those who had fled, to drive them out with shots, and to shoot them in the street if they were still resisting. During one such a moment, Sutzkever recalled, an SS officer, Horst Schweinberger, began to shoot the Jews who had been discovered. But at that moment the dog at Schweinberger’s side jumped at him and began to bite his throat ‘like a mad dog’. Then Schweinberger killed his dog and told the Jews to bury it and cry over its grave. ‘We really cried then,’ Sutzkever recalled. ‘We cried because it was not Schweinberger but his dog that had been buried.’68

  At Ponar, men were shot first, then women. Even those who had not been killed outright, could not survive the whole day in the pit, lying there wounded as more and more bodies fell on top of them. Only towards evening, when the last of the women were being shot, did a few of those who were only wounded have some small chance of remaining alive until it was dark, and then of creeping away unseen: naked, bleeding, crushed, but alive.

  From the end of June 1941 to the end of December, at least forty-eight thousand Jews were murdered at Ponar. After the killings of September 3, six are known to have crawled out of the pit alive, and survived. All of them were women.69

  One of the survivors of the October killings, Sara Menkes, returned to Vilna, where she told Abba Kovner the story of a former pupil of his, Serna Morgenstern. At the edge of the pit, Sara Menkes reported:

  …they were lined up; they were told to undress; they undressed and stood only in their undergarments and there was this line of the Einsatzgruppen men—and an officer came out, he looked at the row of women and he looked at this Serna Morgenstern; she had wonderful eyes, a tall girl, long-braided hair—he looked at her searchingly for a long time and then he smiled and said, ‘Take a step forward.’ She was dazed, as all of them were. No one wept any more, no one asked for anything; they must have been paralysed and she was so paralysed she did not step forward and he repeated the order and asked, ‘Hey, don’t you want to live? You are so beautiful. I tell you to take one step forward.’

  So she took that step forward and he told her, ‘What a pity to bury such beauty under the earth. Go, but don’t look backward. There is the street. You know that boulevard, you just follow that.’ She hesitated for a moment and then she started marching, and the rest, Sara Menkes told me, ‘We looked at her with our eyes—I don’t know whether it was only terror or jealousy, envy too, as she walked slowly step by step and then the officer whipped out his revolver and shot her in the back.’

  ‘Must I tell more?’ Abba Kovner asked the court to which he told this story.70

  ***

  Throughout October 1941 the Eastern killings continued. In the newly established ghettos of Kovno and Vilna, work passes were handed out, and those who did not receive them, women and children especially, were sent to the Ninth Fort, or to Ponar. On September 25 the Kovno Jewish Council had been ordered by the Germans to distribute five thousand work permits to workers and their families. Cruelly, the Germans thrust on the Council the burden of choice. The Council discussed refusing to distribute the permits, and even burning them. But after a long debate it decided that it had no moral right to condemn five thousand Jews to death by not distributing what then appeared to be ‘life permits’.71

  On October 4, the Kovno ghetto was raided, and fifteen hundred Jews who had no work permits were taken to the Ninth Fort and murdered. But from the hospital in Kovno, no one was taken away, even though none of them had work permits. Instead, the building was locked, and then set on fire. Patients, doctors and nurses were burned alive. ‘Even now,’ Zalman Grinberg recalled three and a half years later, ‘I can see the blazing hospital. It seems like a bad dream, but, alas, it was true!’72

  On October 6, two days after the slaughter in Kovno, a similar selection was made in the Dvinsk ghetto, where only those with work permits were spared. The rest, the majority of those in the ghetto, were led away, no one knew whither. The selection took two days. At the end of the first day, a woman, who had been among those led away, returned. ‘She was hysterical and uncontrollable,’ Maja Zarch later recalled. ‘When she eventually quietened down, it transpired that she had been in a group that had been taken for slaughter. She described in detail what had happened. She had fallen into the mass grave and had been taken for dead but had escaped from among the corpses….’

  The selection in Dvinsk continued on October 7, when the woman who had escaped from the pit on the previous day was among those taken away, ‘never to return’. Maja Zarch also recalled how a woman, returning from work, could not find her son. ‘For days she walked around—a woman possessed, talking to her son’s hat, clutching it, kissing it.’73

  In Rowne, on October 7, more than seventeen thousand Jews were driven from their homes, marched towards the pits, and then ordered to undress. A Jewish eye-witness, Major Zalcman, later recalled that those who refused to undress had their eyes gouged out. Zalcman also recalled that as the Chief Rabbi of Rowne, Ma-Jafit, was telling his congregation that their deaths would not be in vain, he was shot dead by an SS man.74 It was the second day of the Jewish harvest festival of Succoth.

  On October 10, three days after the Rowne massacre, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the German Sixth Army, issued a directive in which he explained that ‘the most essential aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete crushing of its means of power, and the extermination of Asiatic influences in the European region’. His directive continued:

  THE VOLHYNIA

  This poses tasks for the troops that go beyond the one-sided routine of conventional soldiering. In the Eastern region, the soldier is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of an inexorable national idea and the avenger of all bestialities inflicted upon the German people and its racial kin.

  Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just atonement on Jewish sub-humanity.

  An ‘additional aim in this’, Reichenau went on to explain, ‘is to nip in the bud any revolts in the rear of the army, which, as experience proves, have always been instigated by Jews’.75

&nbs
p; Reichenau’s directive was copied by General von Manstein, who issued it in the Crimean city of Simferopol nine days before the killing of 4,500 Jews at the Crimean port of Kerch, and three weeks before the murder of 14,300 Jews in Simferopol itself.76

  Two days after Reichenau issued his directive against ‘Jewish sub-humanity’, was Hoshana Rabba, the Great Prayer, a day which is considered by many Jews to be a day of judgement. An eyewitness of that day, October 12, in the Eastern Galician town of Stanislawow, recalled four years later how, that morning, the Jewish streets ‘were suddenly surrounded by the Gestapo men and Ukrainian militia’, the latter summoned from the whole district, and how ‘old and young, men and women, were driven out of their houses to the town hall squares’. His account continued:

  I felt quite certain that my labour card would serve to shield and save me. So I went out and even took a pregnant woman with me in order to pass her through as my wife. (Her husband had fled with the Red Army.) According to the official announcement all forced workers and their wives were to be released.

  No sooner had I entered the street than I was attacked by a gang of Ukrainian young ruffians shouting wildly, ‘Look! There are still Jews!’ They whistled. The Ukrainian militia appeared and began dragging me along with all the other Jews. A blind old women aged 104 who lived in my courtyard was also dragged along, and no attention was paid to all her entreaties to be allowed to remain where she was.