A Writer at War (40 page)

About 30,000 Jews were killed in Berdichev
. The brothers Pekilis, Mikhel and Wulf, survived. Many people in the city knew the Pekilis family. They were well-known stonemasons, the father and five sons. They built houses in Berdichev, built factories in Kiev, and even took part in building the Moscow underground. When the Germans came, Mikhel and Wulf escaped. They were building beautiful stoves for peasants and lived under the stoves. Then they dug a hole under a German establishment in Sverdlovskaya [Street], where they sat for 145 days. A Russian engineer, Evgeny Osipovich,
was feeding them. Then, they fled from this coffin and found the partisans. Mikhel and Wulf Pekilis took part in the liberation of Berdichev.

A boy from Berdichev: ‘
They called me Mitya Ostapchuk
, but my name is Khaim Roitman. I am from Berdichev. I am thirteen now. Germans killed my father, and my mama, too. I had a little brother, Borya. A German killed him with a sub-machine gun, killed him in front of me . . . It was so strange, the earth was moving! I was standing on the edge of the hole, waiting. Now they’ll shoot me, [I thought]. A German came up to me, squinted. And I pointed: “Look, there’s a watch!” There was a piece of glass glittering there. The German went to pick it up, and I ran as fast as I could. He was running after me, shooting, a bullet made a hole in my cap. I ran and ran, and then stumbled and fell. I don’t remember what came next. An old man, Gerasim Prokofievich Ostapchuk, picked me up. He said: “Now you’re Mitya, my son.” He had seven children, I became the eighth.

‘Some Germans came once, all of them were drunk. They began to shout, they’d noticed I was dark. They asked Gerasim Prokofievich: “Whose boy is he?” And he answered: “Mine.” They scolded him, said he was lying, because I was dark. And he answered, so calmly, you know: “He is my son by my first wife. She was a Gypsy.”

‘When Berdichev was liberated, I went into town. I found my big brother, Yasha. He survived, too. Yasha is big, he is sixteen. He is fighting. When Germans were leaving, Yasha found the swine who’d killed our mama, and shot him.’

Grossman’s article, ‘The Killing of Jews in Berdichev’, was censored by the Soviet authorities with the double purpose of reducing emphasis on the Jews as victims and camouflaging the degree of Ukrainian collaboration in the atrocities.

The seizure of Berdichev by the Germans
was sudden. German tank units broke through to the city. Only a third of the population could get away in time. The Germans entered the city on Monday, 7 July, at seven in the evening. The soldiers were shouting: ‘
Jude kaputt!
’ from their trucks and waved their arms. They knew that almost all the Jews were still in the city.

Woodworker Girsh Giterman, who escaped from Berdichev on
the sixth day of the occupation, told me about the first crimes committed by Germans towards Jews. German soldiers had forced a group of people to leave their flats in Bolshaya Zhitomirskaya, Malaya Zhitomirskaya and Shteinovskaya Street. All these streets were close to the leather plant. The people were then brought to the tanning unit of the plant and forced to jump into huge pits filled with astringent catechu.
³
Those who resisted were shot, and their bodies were also thrown into the pits. The Germans thought this execution funny: they were tanning Jewish skin.

A similar comical execution was carried out in the old city: Germans ordered the old men to put on their
tallit
and
tefillin
and hold a service in the old synagogue, praying to God to forgive their sins against Germans.
⁴
The door of the synagogue was locked, and it was set on fire. A third farcical execution was carried out near a watermill. They seized several dozen women, ordered them to undress, and announced to them that they would spare the lives of those who made it to the other bank. The river was very wide by the mill, as it had been dammed up. Most women drowned before they reached the opposite bank. Those who did make it to the west bank were forced to swim back at once.

Another example of a German ‘joke’ is the story of the death of an old man, Aron Mazor, kosher butcher by profession. A German officer looted Mazor’s flat and ordered the soldiers to carry off the belongings that he had selected. He himself stayed behind with two soldiers in order to have some fun. He had found Mazor’s big knife and discovered Mazor’s profession. ‘I’d like to see your work,’ he said, and ordered the soldiers to bring in the neighbour’s three little children.

The minds of these thousands of people were unable to comprehend a simple and terrifying truth, that the state itself encouraged and approved these ‘unsanctioned’ executions, that Jews were outlaws who were the most natural objects for torture, violence and murder. However, not one of those who had been moved to the ghetto imagined that the move was just the first step towards the well-prepared killing of all the 20,000 Jews.
⁵

An accountant from Berdichev who had visited the family of his friend, the engineer Nuzhny, in the ghetto, told me how Nuzhny’s wife had cried a lot and was very worried because her ten-year-old son Garik would be unable to go back to his Russian school in the autumn.

Old doctors in Berdichev lived with the hope that the Red Army would come back. There was a moment when they comforted each other with the news, which someone had reportedly heard on the radio, that the German government had received a note demanding them to stop outrages against Jews. But by this time [Soviet] prisoners of war brought by the Germans from Lysaya Gora, had already started digging five deep trenches in the field close to the airfield, where Gorodskaya [Street] ends and a paved road leading to the village of Romanovka begins.

On 4 September, a week after the ghetto was established, 1,500 young people were ordered to prepare for agricultural work. The young people packed little bundles with food, said goodbye to their parents and set off. On the very same day all 1,500 boys were shot between Lysaya Gora and the village of Khazhina. The executioners had so cleverly misled their victims that none of the doomed people had suspected the forthcoming murder until the last minute. It had even been hinted that after the work was completed they would be allowed to take a few potatoes home to the old people in the ghetto. And during the few days remaining to them, those who had stayed in the ghetto never learned the fate of the young boys. This execution removed from the ghetto almost all the young men who were capable of resistance.

Preparations for the operations were completed. Pits were dug at the end of the Brodskaya Street. Units from an SS regiment arrived in Berdichev on 14 September and the city police was put on standby. The whole area of the ghetto was surrounded during the night of 14 September. At four in the morning [on 15 September] the signal was given, and the SS and police began driving them out and on to the market square. The way they behaved showed people that their last day had come. The executioners killed those who could not walk, old people and cripples, in the houses. The whole city was woken by the terrible screams of women and children’s crying. Soon the market square was filled with many thousands of people.

Four hundred people had been selected, including the elderly
doctors Tsugovar, Baraban, Liberman, female doctor Blank, electrician Epelfeld, photographer Nuzhny, shoemaker Milmeister, old stonemason Pekelis and his sons Mikhel and Wulf, and tailors, shoemakers, metal workers and several hairdressers. These professional people were allowed to take their families with them.

Many of them were unable to find their wives and children whom they had lost in the crowd. The witnesses tell about the shocking scenes that they saw there: people shouted the names of their wives and children trying to sound louder than the distraught crowd, while hundreds of doomed mothers were trying to hand them their sons and daughters, begging them to say that they were theirs and save them from death. ‘You won’t find yours anyway in this crowd.’

The first sub-machine-gun bursts sounded. I do not know whether the Germans did this on purpose, or whether they just did not realise that the execution site was only fifty to sixty metres from the road along which the doomed people were being brought in. The column passed the ‘scaffold’ and thousands of pairs of eyes saw the dead falling down . . . Then the people were taken to sheds at the airfield where they waited for their turn, and then walked back again, this time to the place where they would be killed.

This slaughter of the innocent and helpless went on all day. Their blood poured on to the yellow clay ground. The pits filled with blood, the clay soil was unable to absorb it, blood overflowed the pits and there were huge puddles of it on the ground. Rivulets of it flowed, accumulating in depressions . . . The executioners’ boots were soaked with blood.

Grossman never wrote in any of his articles or for
The Black Book
about the fate of his mother. This finally came out in his novel
Life and Fate
, where she is given the identity of Anna Shtrum. His mother had been one of the thousands of victims executed out by the airfield. His sense of guilt and horror can best be estimated by the two letters which he wrote to her after the war. The first was in 1950.

Dear Mama,

I learned about your death in the winter of 1944. I came to Berdichev, entered the house where you used to live and which Aunt Anyuta, Uncle David and Natasha had left, and I felt that you had died. But as far back as September 1941 my heart already felt that you weren’t here any more. One night at the front I had
a dream. I entered your room. I knew for sure that it was your room, and I saw an empty armchair, and I knew you had slept in it. A shawl with which you’d covered your legs was hanging down from the armchair. I looked at it for a long time, and when I woke up I knew that you weren’t any longer among the living. But I didn’t know then what a terrible death you had suffered. I only learned about it when I came to Berdichev and talked to people who knew about the mass execution that took place on 15 September 1941. I have tried, dozens, or maybe hundreds of times, to imagine how you died, how you had walked to meet your death. I tried to imagine the person who killed you. He was the last person to see you. I know you were thinking about me a lot during all that time.

Now it’s been more than nine years since I’ve stopped writing letters to you, telling you about my life and work. And I’ve accumulated so much in my soul in these nine years that I’ve decided to write to you, to tell you, and, of course, to complain to you, as no one else is particularly interested in my sorrows. You were the only one who was interested in them.

I can feel you today, as alive to me as you were on the day when I saw you last, and as alive as when you read to me when I was a little boy. And my pain is still the same as it was on that day when your neighbour in Uchilishchnaya Street told me you were dead. There was no hope of finding you among the living. And I think that my love for you and this terrible sorrow will not change until the day I die.

He wrote again in 1961 on the twentieth anniversary of her death.

My darling, twenty years
have passed since the day of your death. I love you, I remember you every day of my life, and my sorrow has never left me in these twenty years.

I last wrote to you ten years ago, and in my heart you are still the same as you were twenty years ago . . . I am you, my own one. And as long as I am alive, you are alive, too. And when I die you will live in the book which I have dedicated to you and whose fate is so like yours.
⁵
And it seems to me now that my love for you is
becoming greater and more responsible because there are so few hearts left now in which you still live. I’ve been thinking of you all the time during these last ten years when I was working . . .

I’ve been rereading today, as I have for many years, the few letters to me which have survived out of the hundreds that you had written. I also read your letters to Papa. And I cried today once again reading your letters. I cried when I read: ‘Zema, I also don’t think I will live long.
⁶
All the time I am expecting a disease to get me. I am afraid I will be very ill for a long time. What is the poor boy going to do with me then? It would be so much trouble for him.’

I cried when you – you, so lonely, whose only dream in life would be to live under the same roof with me – wrote to Papa: ‘It seems to me sensible if you’d go and live with Vasya if he’s got room. I am telling you this once again, because now I am well. And you don’t need to worry about my spiritual life: I know how to protect my inner world from things around me.’ I cried over your letters because you are in them: with your kindness, your purity, your bitter, bitter life, your fairness, your generosity, your love for me, your care for people, your wonderful mind. I fear nothing because your love is with me and because my love is with you always.

1
The 95th Rifle Division had become the 75th Guards Rifle Division.

2
Major General (later Lieutenant General) Vasily A. Gorishny (1903–1962) and Colonel (later Major-General) Aleksei M. Vlasenko.

3
Catechu is a tannin obtained from the tree
Acacia catechu
.

4
The
tallit
is a prayer shawl and
tefillin
are ritual black leather boxes containing scriptural passages attached to the head and to the hand.

5
The figure of 30,000 cited earlier was established later, when the full scope of the massacres became apparent.

5
He is of course referring to
Life and Fate
. It has been suggested that this letter is an answer to the last letter written by Anna Shtrum to her son in the novel, the letter which Grossman felt his mother had never had time to write to him herself.

6
Zema was her diminutive for Vasily Grossman’s father, Semyon Osipovich Grossman (1870–1956).

At the beginning of March, Grossman was attached to the headquarters of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. The Germans had held on to the Black Sea coast despite being outflanked by the thrust of the 1st Ukrainian Front to the north.