Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (44 page)

The underground subverted the organs of German control over Jewish life, the Judenrat and the Jewish police. In the occupied Soviet Union, as in occupied Poland, German rule forced Jews into ghettos, which were administered by a local Jewish council typically known by the German term
Judenrat
. In the cities of occupied Poland, the Judenrat was often composed of Jews of some standing in the prewar community, often the same people who had led the Jewish communal structures that had been legal in independent Poland. In Minsk, such continuity of Jewish leadership was impossible, since the Soviets had eliminated Jewish communal life. The Germans had no easy way to find people who represented Jewish elites, and who were accustomed to making compromises with the local authorities. It seems that they chose the initial Minsk Judenrat more or less at random—and chose badly. The entire Judenrat cooperated with the underground.
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In late 1941 and early 1942, Jews who wished to flee the ghetto could count on help from the Judenrat. Jewish policemen would be stationed away from places where escape attempts were planned. Because the Minsk ghetto was enclosed only by barbed wire, the momentary absence of police attention allowed people to flee to the forest—which was very close to the city limits. Very small children were passed through the barbed wire to gentiles who agreed to raise them or take them to orphanages. Older children learned the escape routes, and came to serve as guides from the city to the nearby forest. Sima Fiterson, one of these guides, carried a ball, which she would play with to signal danger to those following behind her. Children adapted quickly and well, but were in terrible danger all the same. To celebrate that first Christmas under German occupation, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader, sent thousands of pairs of children’s gloves and socks to SS families in Germany.
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Unlike Jews elsewhere under German occupation, Jews in Minsk had somewhere to run. In the nearby forest, they could try to find Soviet partisans. They knew that the Germans had taken countless prisoners of war, and that some had escaped to the forests. These men had stayed in the woods because they knew that the Germans would shoot them or starve them. Stalin had called in July 1941 for loyal communists to organize partisan units behind the lines, in the hope of establishing some control over this spontaneous movement before it grew in importance. Centralization was not yet possible; the soldiers hid in the forest, and the communists, if they had not fled, did their best to hide their pasts from the Germans.
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The Minsk underground activists, however, did try to support their armed comrades. On at least one occasion, members of the ghetto underground liberated a Red Army officer from the camp on Shirokaia Street; he became an important partisan leader in the nearby forests, and saved Jews in his turn. Jewish laborers in German factories stole winter clothes and boots, meant for the German soldiers of Army Group Center, and diverted them to the partisans. Workers in arms factories, remarkably, did the same. The Judenrat, required to collect a regular “contribution” of money from the Jewish population of the ghetto, diverted some of these funds to the partisans. The Germans later concluded that the entire Soviet partisan movement was funded from the ghetto. This was an exaggeration arising from stereotypical ideas of Jewish wealth, but the aid from the Minsk ghetto was reality.
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Partisan warfare was a nightmare of German military planning, and German army officers had been trained to take a severe line. They had been taught to see Soviet soldiers as the servants of communist political officers, who taught them to fight as partisans in an illegal “Asiatic” fashion. Partisan warfare was (and is) illegal, since it undermines the convention of uniformed armies directing violence against each other rather than against surrounding populations. In theory partisans protect civilians from a hostile occupier; in practice they, like the occupier, must subsist on what they take from civilians. Since partisans hide among civilians, they bring down, and often intend to bring down, the occupier’s retaliation against the local population. Reprisals then serve as recruitment propaganda for the partisans, or leave individual survivors with nowhere to go but the forest. Because German forces were always limited and always in demand at the front, military and civilian authorities were all the more fearful of the disruptions partisans could bring.
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Belarus, with its plentiful forests and swamps, was ideal territory for partisan warfare. The German army chief of staff later fantasized about using nuclear weapons to clear its wetlands of human population. This technology was not available, of course, but the fantasy gives a sense of both the ruthlessness of German planning and the fears aroused by difficult terrain. The policy of the army was to deter partisan warfare by striking “such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist.” Bach, the Higher SS and Police Leader, later said that the ultimate explanation for the killing of civilians in anti-partisan actions was Himmler’s desire to kill all the Jews and thirty million Slavs. There seemed to be little cost to the Germans in preemptive terror, since the people in question were meant to die anyway (in the Hunger Plan or Generalplan Ost). Hitler, who saw partisan warfare as a chance to destroy potential opposition, reacted energetically when Stalin urged local communists to resist the Germans in July. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already relieved his soldiers of legal responsibility for actions taken against civilians. Now he wanted soldiers and police to kill anyone who “even looks at us askance.”
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The Germans had little trouble controlling the partisan movement in late 1941, and simply defined the ongoing mass murder of Jews as the appropriate reprisal. In September 1941 a clinic on anti-partisan warfare was held near Mahileu; its climax was the shooting of thirty-two Jews, of whom nineteen were women. The general line was that “Where there are partisans there are Jews; and where there are Jews there are partisans.” Just why this was so was harder to establish. The anti-Semitic ideas of Jewish weakness and dissimulation conspired in a sort of explanation: military commanders were unlikely to believe that Jews would actually take up arms, but often saw the Jewish population as standing behind partisan actions. General Bechtolsheim, responsible for security in the Minsk area, believed that if “an act of sabotage is committed in a village, and one destroys all of the Jews of the village, one can be certain that one has destroyed the perpetrators, or at least those who stood behind them.”
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In this atmosphere, where the partisans were weak and the German reprisals anti-Semitic, most Jews in the Minsk ghetto were in no hurry to escape to the forest. In Minsk, despite all of its horrors, they were at least at home. Despite the regular mass killings, no fewer than half of Minsk’s Jews were still alive as 1942 began.

In 1942, the Soviet partisan movement took on new strength at the same moment as the fate of Belarusian Jews was sealed, and for much the same reason. In December 1941, confronted with a “world war,” Hitler communicated his desire that all the Jews of Europe be killed. The Red Army’s advance was one of the main sources of the weakening German position in Belarus, and of Hitler’s newly explicit desire for the murder of all Jews. Advancing Soviet forces were even able to open a gap in the German lines in early 1942. The “Surazh Gates,” as the space between Army Group North and Army Group Center was called, remained open for half a year. Until September 1942, the Soviets could send trusted men and arms to control and supply the partisans operating in Belarus. Soviet authorities thereby established more or less reliable channels of communication. In May 1942 a Central Staff of the Partisan Movement was established in Moscow.
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Hitler’s express decision to kill all the Jews of Europe raised the association of Jews and partisans to a kind of abstraction: Jews were supporters of Germany’s enemies, and so had to be preemptively eliminated. Himmler and Hitler associated the Jewish threat with the partisan threat. The logic of the connection between Jews and partisans was vague and troubled, but the significance for the Jews of Belarus, the heartland of partisan warfare, was absolutely clear. In the military occupation zone, the rear of Army Group Center, the killing of Jews began again in January 1942. An Einsatzkommando painted Stars of David on their trucks to broadcast their mission of finding Jews and killing them. The leaders of Einsatzgruppe B resolved to kill all the Jews in their zone of responsibility by 20 April 1942, which was Hitler’s birthday.
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The civilian occupation authorities in Minsk also followed the new line. Wilhelm Kube, the General Commissar of White Ruthenia, met with his police leaders on 19 January 1942. All seemed to accept Kube’s formulation: while Germany’s great “colonial-political” task in the East demanded the murder of all Jews, some would have to be preserved for a time as forced labor. Killing actions in Minsk would begin in March, directed against the population that remained in the ghetto during the day while the labor brigades were outside the ghetto at work.
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On 1 March 1942 the Germans ordered the Judenrat to provide a quota of five thousand Jews the following day. The ghetto underground told the Judenrat not to bargain Jewish blood, which the Judenrat was probably not inclined to do anyway. Some of the Jewish policemen, rather than aiding the Germans to make their quota, warned their fellow Jews to hide. When the quota was not delivered on 2 March, the Germans shot children, and stabbed to death all the wards of the Jewish orphanage. They even killed some workers returning home. In all they murdered some 3,412 people that day. One Jewish child who escaped the bloodshed was Feliks Lipski. His father had been killed as a Polish spy in Stalin’s Great Terror, disappearing as people did then, never to be seen again. Now the boy saw people he knew as corpses in ditches. He remembered shades of white: skin, undergarments, snow.
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After the failure of the action of early March 1942, the Germans broke the Minsk underground, and accelerated the mass murder of the Jews. In late March and early April 1942, the Germans arrested and executed some 251 underground activists, Jews and non-Jews, including the head of the Judenrat. (Kaziniets, the organizer of the underground, was executed that July.) At around the same time, Reinhard Heydrich visited Minsk, and apparently ordered the construction of a death facility. The SS set to work on a new complex at Maly Trastsianets, outside Minsk. Beginning in May 1942, some forty thousand people would be killed there. The wives of German officials remembered Maly Trastsianets as a nice place to ride horses and collect fur coats (taken from Jewish women before they were shot).
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Some ten thousand Minsk Jews were killed in the last few days of July 1942. On the last day of the month, Junita Vishniatskaia wrote a letter to her father to bid him farewell. “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive. Farewell forever. I kiss you, I kiss you.”
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It was true that Germans sometimes avoided shooting younger children, instead throwing them into the pits with the corpses, and allowing them to suffocate under the earth. They also had at their disposal another means of killing that allowed them to avoid seeing the end of young life. Gas vans roved the streets of Minsk, the drivers seeking stray Jewish children. The people called the gas vans by a name that had been used for the NKVD trucks during the Great Terror a few years earlier: “soul destroyers.”
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The girls and boys knew what would happen to them if they were caught. They would ask for a tattered bit of dignity as they walked up the ramp to their death: “Please sirs,” they would say to the Germans, “do not hit us. We can get to the trucks on our own.”
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