1
Arkadi Zeltser,
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
THE HOLOCAUST IN THE USSR: INTERPRETATION OF EVENTS AND
SPECIFIC PROBLEMS OF SOURCES1
For many years the study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, especially
within the borders of 1939, was underdeveloped. The reasons for this were 1)
political, 2) historical, and 3) the lack of sources.
During the Cold War Western and Israeli scholars who studied aspects of
the USSR concentrated on problems of the functioning of the Soviet system as
such, including the system of suppression of all unofficial activity. The
following two ideas were dominant: that under the impact of the Soviet system
Soviet Jews had lost all positive ethnic self-identification and all manifestations
of religious tradition, and that a substantial deformation of historical ethnic
memory had taken place. In the Soviet Union itself the topic of the Holocaust
was basically taboo and only in certain cases did the authorities use the issue of
the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis for their own political goals.
The majority of Holocaust survivors in the West and in Israel were former
residents of Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. They not only
provided numerous testimonies about the Holocaust, which are located in the
archives of Yad Vashem or published, but also directly participated in studying
the Holocaust in the areas from which they came or of which they were
witnesses. As a result the study of the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR in
its 1939 borders found itself on the periphery of the general historiography of
the Holocaust.
Materials, including those related to the Holocaust, published in the USSR
during the war and the early postwar years raised among researchers justified
1
I thank my friend and colleague Dr. Yisrael Elliot Cohen for his help in preparing this text.
2
questions about their reliability. However, sometimes the skepticism was
exaggerated, especially in the context of the prejudices existing in the West and
Israel regarding those Soviet Jews who at various stages actively participated in
the Cold War on the side of the Soviet Union, e.g. Ilya Ehrenburg, Itzik Fefer,
et al., who were involved in the publication of materials about the Holocaust.
Researchers devoted more attention to the question of the degree to which the
uniqueness of the Holocaust was denied in the Soviet Union than to the
question of what details about the Holocaust could be gleaned from the sparse
Soviet sources. This did not mean, of course, that scholars of the Holocaust
completely ignored the rare information that appeared in the USSR or that was
prepared there during the war but was not published there.
Among the latter was The Black Book edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily
Grossman and published by Yad Vashem in Russian only in 1980 and in
Yiddish in 1984. How were such materials about the Holocaust in the Soviet
Union complied, what other materials of this kind exist, and what changes were
made during the preparation of such publications?
Answers to these questions would allow us to evaluate the level of detail
and the reliability of these documents and to attempt to understand to what
degree this corresponds to actual events.
During the war the main source of information in the West about the
Holocaust in the USSR was materials prepared by Sovinformburo (the Soviet
Information Bureau), a propaganda organ established early in the war to provide
the Soviet public and the Western press with information. Various anti-fascist
committees, including the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee (JAC), were
established within this propaganda structure.2 The JAC was created by the
2
On the activity of anti-fascist Committees, see N.K. Petrova, Antifashistskiekomitety v SSSR,
1941–1945, Moscow, 1999. On the JAC, see Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and
Stalinism: a Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR,
Luxembourg, 1995; Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov”: Vlast’ i evreiskaia
intelligentsiia v SSSR, Moscow, 2009); Ilya Altman, “The History and Fate of The Black and
The Unknown Black Book,” in The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the GermanOccupied Soviet Territories, eds. Joshua Rubenstein, Ilya Altman, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 2008, xix–xxxix.
3
Soviet authorities in the spring of 1942 to mobilize Western Jews to support the
fight of the Red Army against the forces of Nazi Germany.
The members of the Jewish intelligentsia, including Yiddish writers and
journalists, were not only Soviet patriots but also had Jewish goals. They felt
the need to express themselves about issues that were important for Soviet
Jews, especially in providing information about the Holocaust.
Obviously, their publications basically corresponded to the official view
that Jews were killed first of all because they (along with members of other
ethnic groups) were Soviet citizens. However, in texts in Yiddish, despite
additions about the hostility of the Nazis to all Soviet peoples, one could hear of
the specific tragic fate of the Jews, information about which the Soviet reader
knew well how to garner by reading between the lines.
At this time the JAC became a center to which flowed a large mass of
unofficial information about everything of concern to Jews, including the
Holocaust. Starting in 1942, the JAC purposely collected information about the
Holocaust. Eventually, in the summer of 1943, under the auspices of the JAC
there began a search for and selection of Holocaust testimonies for an anthology
to be called The Black Book.
From 1942 there were basically two main channels for providing readers
with information about the Nazi policy of annihilating the Jews. The first was
the Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt, which was published in the USSR starting in
June 1942 in a print run of 10,000 copies, of which one third was sent abroad.3
The second channel of information was translated into English and Spanish and
sent to the West, to Palestine, and South Africa. In regard to selectivity, the
information published in Eynikayt and that sent directly to the West were quite
similar. As of the beginning of March 1943, of the 1,633 articles sent to the
West 426 (26.1%) were concerned with the Nazi policy of killing Jews. 4 Many
articles in Eynikayt were also devoted to this theme.
3
GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1062, l. 8–12.
Dov Ber Kerler, “The Soviet Yiddish Press: Eynikayt During the War, 1942–1945,” in Why
Didn't the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust, ed. by
Robert Moses Shapiro, Jersey City, N.J., 2003, p. 225.
4
4
Thus, much material about the Holocaust had come into the hands of
Jewish organizations, i.e., the JAC, the editorial office of Eynikayt, and the
editors of The Black Book. Some materials had been written down directly by
Holocaust survivors, who sent them to the JAC, the editors of The Black Book,
or to Ehrenburg personally. Others were recorded by correspondents of
Eynikayt and the JAC, or simply by military officers.
Among the materials obtained by the JAC were letters from soldiers and
officers who had found themselves in their home regions, learned about the
tragic fate of their loved ones, and felt that it was their duty to inform people
about it. Sometimes these personal letters, intended for relatives, made their
way to the JAC or the editors of Eynikayt. The driving motive of people who
wanted to record information about the murder of Jews was, evidently, quite
correctly expressed by Shmuel Dovid Kugel an old man from the Belorussian
shtetl of Pleshchennitsy: “Very few like myself survived. I believe that I owe it
to the world to bear witness.”5
In early 1949, after the Soviet authorities liquidated the Jewish Antifascist Committee, all the archives of Jewish organizations, which contained
many manuscripts, articles, letters, office papers, etc, were transferred to the
MGB (Ministry of State Security.) There, during the preparation for the trial of
members of the JAC, the materials were separated into files and much of this
material was translated from Yiddish into Russian.
In 1955 they were transferred from the KGB (the successor of the MGB)
to the care of the government. They are now located in the State Archive of the
Russian Federation (GARF). These are mainly typed copies of material already
prepared to be sent abroad or for publication in Eynikayt, or literary works for
publication in the USSR. In many case the originals have been lost. Part of this
material has been used in different forms in The Black Book. Some of them
were published in the Yiddish collection Merder fun felker (Murder of Peoples),
that was prepared by Ehrenburg and published in Yiddish in Moscow in April
and September 1944. In 1993, in cooperation with GARF, Yad Vashem
5
Yad Vashem Archive, JM/26091/ 291.
5
published in Russian some of the supplementary materials about the Holocaust
by Soviet writers that were located in the JAC archive. The volume was titled
Neizvestnaya Chernaya kniga (The Unknown Black Book). In 2008 an English
translation of this volume appeared.6 This collection included also some
materials that appeared in The Black Book itself in a less concise version.
Despite the post-1948 silencing of the topic of the Holocaust in the USSR,
from time to time there did appear materials based on eye-witness testimony. In
particular this took place in the Moscow-based Yiddish journal Sovetish
heymland, which began publication in 1961, and in the Yiddish newspaper
Birobidzhaner shtern. Both types of materials provided information about
events in specific shtetl locations, for example: Medzhibozh, Krupki, and
Beshenkovichi.
Another important source of information about the Holocaust in the USSR
is official Soviet documents that were not intended for publication. This
category is comprised of five main types of materials: 1) materials from the
State Extraordinary Commission for Investigating Nazi Crimes (ChGK); 2)
reports from members of the NKVD and from military personnel written in
1941 about events that took place in Nazi-occupied territory; 3) materials from
investigations carried out by the military soon after liberation of an area; 4)
materials related to trials of local collaborators; and 5) war-time testimony of
German soldiers and officers captured by the Red Army or post-war testimony
of the same before they were tried by Soviet tribunals.
The largest and currently most accessible type of material is that from the
ChGK. These materials are mostly from 1943-1945 and contain records of the
questioning of eye-witnesses, official conclusions of local branches of the
Commission, and information about the exhumation of the bodies of Nazi
victims. The basic task of the Commission was to collect information about
Soviet material losses during the war and the murder of Soviet civilians and
POWs. At the same time the Commission collected information about those
Review on The Unknown Black Book, see Arkadi Zeltser, “A New Life for
Documents,” Yad Vashem Studies, No. 1, 38 (2010), pp. 247-257.
6
Old
6
involved in the murders. The people who questioned eye-witnesses were
employees of the NKGB. This questioning took place within the framework of
an interrogation, including the obligatory formula of warning the person being
questioned that, if he gave false testimony, he would be held responsible
according to the criminal code. For this reason the accuracy of much of the
information provided to the Extraordinary Commission is questionable.
However, some of the information that comes from ChGK files does not
indicate that it was obtained via the efforts of the secret police.
The most important collection of ChGK materials is preserved in GARF.
These materials arrived in Moscow from all over the country although some
primary materials of the Commission may still be found in local archives. On
the basis of materials from various regions one may conclude that there were no
special instructions about the necessity to conceal the ethnic origin of the
victims or about the degree of detail in reports. To a large degree it was
determined by the personality of the person who was conducting the
questioning, the readiness of the local population to speak about the mass
murders of Jews, and the existence of people who witnessed the killings.
Consequently, for some places there is a fair amount of detail about the mass
murders of Jews while for others records relate to Soviet civilian victims
without any indication of their nationality. However, given the general
historical context and a comparison of material from various sources, one may
conclude that a specific document is reporting on the murder of Jews. Thus, if
one is speaking about the mass murder of women, old people, and children in
1941 or early 1942, the matter definitely refers to the Holocaust. In some
regions the information from the ChGK is quite fragmentary (e.g. in regard to
Lithuania) and there are a number of former shtetlech about which almost no
information exists. Often the sole documents providing information about the
Holocaust are lists of victims, with their first names, family names, and
nationality.
Due to all these problems the views of scholars about the work of the
Commission are
quite varied,
although
they all note its
political
7
tendentiousness, lack of objectivity, exaggeration of the number of victims, and
tendency to give credence to information that does not warrant it.7
The most complex questions relate to the number of victims and the
chronology of mass murders, especially those of Jews. Serious discrepancies
often appear between documents compiled within the framework of the ChGK
and those from other sources (e. g., reports of the Einsatzgruppen). In almost
every case the statistics of the ChGK are higher than those in other sources
(although in some specific cases, e.g., Mstislavl, the Commission’s figure for
the number of victims was lower than that given by Einsatzengruppe B).8
In addition to the political ones, there are objective reasons for this
phenomenon. As a rule, ChGK statistics about the number of victims were
established on the basis of exhumation of bodies and the testimony of eyewitnesses. It is not clear whether all the pits and trenches of the murder sites
were discovered by the Commission or whether all of the ones found were
opened for investigation. Furthermore, at many sites of the mass murder of Jews
(for example in Vilnius [Ponary], Kiev [BabiYar], Daugavpils [Pogulyanka],
and Bobruisk [Kamenka]), the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims in 19421944 (is Sonderaction 1005 was carried out by the unit under the command of
Paul Blobel). Often information about the number of victims was based on the
testimony of witnesses, both of Jewish survivors and of non-Jews. Thus, Soviet
POW Konstantin Potanin, a survivor of Ponary, stated that approximately
100,000 people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians were
buried in Ponary. The figures of the ChGK for Ponary are based on his
information, which he apparently obtained from the Germans.9 In the shtetlech
and towns an ordinary person could hardly provide an accurate figure for the
7
On the ChGK see the following articles: Nils Bo Polsen, "Rozsliduvannia voennykh
zlochyniv'po-sovets’ky.'Kritichnyi analiz materialiv nadzvychaynoiderzhavno ikomisii”,
Golokost i suchasnist’, No. 5, 2009, pp. 27- 45; Feferman K. Soviet investigation of Nazi
Crimes in the USSR: Documenting the Holocaust // Journal of Genocide Research. – 2003. –
№ 4. – P. 587–602; Sorokina M. "People and Procedures. Towards a History of the
investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,' Kritika. – 2005. – № 4. – P. 797–831; Soviet
Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities, London- New York: Hutchinson and Co, n.d.
8
http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/murderSite.asp?site_id=140
9
GARF-7021-94-1.p. 11.
8
number of people in a guarded column of Jews that extended for hundreds of
meters.
Statistics from the Soviet census of 1939 for different locations were not
available at that time. Estimates both by Jews and non-Jews of the number of
Jewish victims were often based on understandings of the data from the 1926
census -- on the assumption that the Jewish population as a whole increased,
despite the fact that between 1926 and 1939 the Jewish population in a majority
of shtetlech declined significantly. Therefore, often the number of Jewish
victims given for a shtetlor town was higher than the Jewish population,
according to the 1939 census, for the region as a whole. The picture became
even more confused due to the lack of knowledge of the number of evacuees,
especially in urban areas, and the fact that the farther east the village or town
was located the more difficult it was to estimate the number of those who left
their original homes and survived.
Furthermore, non-Jewish witnesses often did not correctly recall the date
when Jews were murdered. For many of the former the event was an alien
aspect of the war, one that did not affect them personally. In contrast, accounts
of the deaths of members of a non-Jewish person’s family generally were dated
precisely. Similarly, Jewish survivors tended to remember correctly the date of
the murder of their dear ones, which was connected both with the personal
trauma and the importance of knowing the correct date for the yortsayt (annual
commemoration). Characteristic in this regard is the testimony preserved among
ChGK materials of the Jew Mikhail Pekelis (born in 1906) who survived all the
killings in Berdichev and then escaped from SD imprisonment to the partisans
in November 1943. (His wife and three children were killed in Berdichev.) In
his testimony Pekelis recorded precise dates for all the major murder operations
carried out against the Jews in Berdichev, although the question of the
correctness of some of his data remains open.10 The truly unique aspect of the
ChGK material lies in its comparatively exact description of the location of the
10
GARF
7021-60-285;
copy
YVA
JM/19703,
http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/berdichev/krasnaya_sr.html.
see
also
9
murder sites. Further, for dozens of sites ChGK materials contain sketches of
the murder sites with indications of the topographical features that identify the
location.11
Therefore, the degree of reliability of ChGK materials, their completeness,
and degree of detail in relation to the Holocaust vary from site to site and from
one document to another. Therefore, one’s approach to these materials should
take into consideration the specificity of each case. All the more so since these
testimonies were generally given from one to three years after the event. That
circumstance affected both the preciseness and the reliability of the information.
On the one hand, they were closer in time to the war than many memoirs or
interviews that were recorded in the 1990s and 2000s. On the other hand, the
way that people viewed the situation in 1944 or 1945, after the return of the Red
Army, may well have significantly differed from the way they viewed and
understood things during the occupation in 1941.
More authentic from the point of view of time are the comparatively little
known reports from army or NKVD officials about what was happening in 1941
in the occupied territories. One document of this kind is the December 2, 1941
report about the self-immolation of several dozen Jews in occupied Mozyr in
Belorussia.12 Materials of this kind may be found in archives of the former
KGB and in the archive of the Ministry of Defense. Most of these documents,
especially those that had some kind of operational significance are now, as
previously, off- limits to researchers, especially foreigners. However, due to the
disorder in the compilation and preservation of documents, it is not clear how
many documents were created during the chaos of the first months of the war.
Another type of army document that is also difficult for foreign
researchers to gain access to is materials from investigations that were
organized directly by military authorities immediately after the liberation of
towns and villages. Basically, they are less politicized than materials of the
11
See, for example, the Yad Vashem Site
http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/bobruysk/kamenka.html
12
See http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/mozyr/gofshtein_sr.html
10
ChGK. It is likely that people told about what happened during the war much
more freely to the members of the armed forces than to officers of the NKGB.
This type of document exists, for example, in regard to the mass murder of Jews
in the shtetlech of Krasnopolye and Mstislavl. However, on the whole, this type
of testimony is very close to ChGK materials.
Comparatively inaccessible for foreign researchers are materials of the
trials of local inhabitants accused of collaboration with the enemy and of
Germans who were accused of war crimes, especially murdering members of
the local population. Despite the fact that some of them gave testimony about
their direct participation in murdering Jews, as a rule, those accused tended to
minimize their own roles in these crimes (this was also typical in regard to trials
in other countries). The degree of detailed information about the annihilation of
Jews is often insufficient. Thus, the prosecution had difficulty in proving the
extent of the participation of the accused in the crime although it did not have
difficulty in establishing the historical details of what had taken place.
All these sources taken together allow us to compose a more accurate
picture. Sometimes, however, the especially contradictory nature of information
totally confuses us. To a large degree we at Yad Vashem encounter the problem
of contradictory reports within the framework of our project “The Untold
Stories,” in which it is necessary to determine as accurately as possible the date
of the murder, the number of victims, the perpetrators, and the location of the
events, including features of the typography. On the whole we know relatively
little about the murder of Soviet Jews during the Holocaust period and are
seriously limited by the sources. Often this relates to comparatively large
shtetlech and even cities, although the situation varies according to location.
In contrast to other countries, for the Soviet Union within its 1939 borders
there exist hardly any testimonies about the Holocaust that were written down
just when the events were taking place (i.e. diaries and other records relating to
the period of Nazi occupation). Exceptions are the above-mentioned 1941
reports of Soviet officers and Einsatzgruppe reports to Berlin. As a rule, the
latter include the data of the murder operation, the number of victims, and their
11
place of residence, as well as the Germans’ stated grounds for the killing. Often
the murdered Jews were depicted either as part of the Party or government
bureaucracy in the context of the Nazi conception of Judeo-Bolshevism or a
disturbers of the social peace for being active supporters of the partisans – even
when there were none of the latter in the vicinity.13
In regard to the Soviet Union in its 1939 borders there was almost a
complete absence of dairies or other chronological accounts, in contrast to
Warsaw or Vilna. One of the few examples of writings in the form of a journal
was that of Sara Gleikh about her experience under occupation in the southern
Ukraine and the murder of the Jews in Mariupol. Although in his memoirs
Years, People, Lives Ehrenburg refers to her writing as a diary14, in The Black
Book they were more accurately described as notes (zapiski) while, in her 1996
interview (No. 19924) with the Shoah Foundation project, Sara Gleikh stated
that she wrote her notes a couple of months after the events, when she was
already on Soviet territory in Stalingrad, rather than under occupation.15 The
lack of diaries, evidently, was partly affected by the atmosphere in Soviet
society, where it was risky to engage in such activity, especially, among young
people. Most likely, writing diaries was a rare activity and in those cases when
Jews did write diaries, for example, in the Red Army, they did not necessarily
include Jewish topics.16
Obviously, not all of the dairies that might have been written during the
war would have survived. The post-war mass arrests in the USSR and the antiSemitic environment there also led to the destruction of diary entries that might
have been written on Nazi-occupied territory. Preserving them would have been
risky. Thus, some of them were either destroyed by the writers or their families,
13
Svidetel'stvuiutpalachi: Unichtozhenie evreev na okkupirovanno iterritorii Belarusi v 19411944 g.: Dokumenty i materialy, Minsk, 2009; Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel
Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, New York, 1989.
14
Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn', Moscow, 1991, vol. 2, p. 354.
15
I thank my colleague at the Yad Vashem "The Untold Stories" project Shlomit Shulchani
who drew my attention to this information.
16
L. K. Brontman, "Iz dnevnikov voennykh let." Prepared by V.A. Nezhina and O.S.
Nikulina, in Arkhi vevreiskoi iistorii, Vol. 2, Moscow, 2005, pp. 82-140; Ilya Altman, Leonid
Terushkin, Irina Brodskaia, Sokhran imoi pis'ma, Vol. 2, Moscow, 2010.
12
or found their way into the hands of the MGB and became inaccessible to
researchers. For a person to write regularly in a diary there was a need for at
least relative stability (as there was, at times, in Warsaw or Vilna), but this was
hardly the case on Soviet territories within the 1939 borders. There was looting,
murder, and rape, as well as frequent total lack of food and heating: from the
very first days. Such was the terrible daily situation of Soviet Jews in the
occupied territories.
In regard to all documents the question of their reliability remains an open
one. This is particularly the case in regard to documents produced in the Soviet
Union, especially those that were prepared for publication or were published
(e.g., The Black Book or materials for Eynikayt). It is natural to assume that
censorship and Party supervisors mercilessly corrected these texts so that they
corresponded to the approach enunciated by Alexander Shcherbakov, Central
Committee Secretary for Propaganda, who was among those close to Stalin.
Shcherbakov said: "Why should we reveal to those abroad that we have traitors,
that they are killing Jews, Russian, and Ukrainians. It is not appropriate for us
to send those kinds of articles abroad.” (The occasion for these remarks was an
article sent abroad by the JAC about the murder of Jews by a Belorussian Nazicollaborator.17 ) In his introductory article to The Unknown Black Book Joshua
Rubenstein noted that what was decisive for the selection of materials for The
Black Book was the absence of negative information about the local
population.18 Scholars have noted that an additional factor was the
correspondence to the demands of Party supervisors and the head of the
Propaganda and Agitation Administration of the All-Union Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) Georgy Aleksandrov to minimize the tragic fate of the Jews and,
thereby deny. the uniqueness of the Holocaust. And, in fact, despite all the
efforts of the censors and the fact that many texts were seriously rewritten
according to the requirements of the Party supervisors, readers of The Black
17
Petrova, Antifashistskiekomitety v SSSR, p. 207.
The Unknown Black Book, p. 28.
18
13
Book can clearly perceive the uniqueness of the Holocaust.19 However, the view
of Rubenstein, that the texts chosen for The Black Book was selected on the
basis of their lack of negative information about the Jews’ “neighbors” is only
partially correct.
Along with the problem of censorship there is a more complicated and
more universal problem -- that of the role in preparing the text that was played
by self-censorship on the part of writers and editors. It is very difficult to
evaluate this factor. Both journalists and editors took into consideration the
Soviet ideological frameworks of the war-time and early post-war years. They
consciously distorted reality to a larger extent that is usually the case in the
memoir genre.20Many authors of letters and memoirs understood that items sent
by mail were being censored: it being forbidden, for example, to mention
towns where their unit was located. For that reason it is quite possible that
testimonies that were sent by mail suffered from their author’s self-censorship
more than testimonies that were not shared in this way.
The degree of reliability of memoirs can be affected by the differing
approaches taken by Ehrenburg and Grossman to preparation of materials for
The Black Book. Ehrenburg believed that there was nothing more powerful and
correct than testimony by itself with minimal involvement of the editor.
However, Grossman believed that on the basis of testimony other people could
reconstruct accounts about events that had taken place.21 An example of the
latter process is the sketch by Grossman himself about the Holocaust in his
native Berdichev, in the writing
of which he made use of a number of
testimonies and articles, some of which have been preserved in the JAC archive.
However, there is also some lack of clarity and preciseness of information in
texts prepared by Ehrenburg. For example, in the account by Basia Pikman
there is an ambiguous testimony about the self-immolation of old men in a
19
Shimon Redlikh, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp. 103-104.
On the problematics of memoirs in a Jewish context, seeJack Kugelmass and Jonathan
Boyarin, eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Menorial Books of Polish Jewry, Bloomington
and Indianapolis, 1998, pp.15- 48, Arkadi Zeltser, “Imaginary Vitebsk: View from the
Inside”, East European Jewish Affairs, Volume 40, Number 3, December, 2010, pp. 217-235.
21
The Unknown Black Book, p.xxvii.
20
14
synagogue in Mozyr (this incident is also referred to in the above-mentioned
NKGB report). In the text published in The Black Book the event is connected
to events in Orsha, while in the Merder fun felker, published by Ehrenburg in
1944, this event is totally omitted. On the other hand, in her August 1945 letter
to Ehrenburg Basia Pikman referred to a self-immolation, citing the letter of a
Ms. Kapilovskaia from Mozyr.22
There are available several texts that were published in The Black Book
which are also preserved in the archives of the JAC in relatively early variants
(some of them were published in The Unknown Black Book). A comparison of
them allows us to draw conclusions about the ideological corrections they
underwent and, the views of their “supervisors” and, possibly, about the selfcensorship of the compilers of The Black Book.
There are topics which were unambiguously banned by the censor. For
example, in the writings of Sara Gleikh published in The Black Book, an
episode was omitted about how, during the early days of the German
occupation, the bodies of 26 victims who had been shot were discovered in the
cellars of the NKVD, for which the Jews were blamed. The Germans forced the
whole population of city to witness the reburial..23 It is likely that, due to
considerations of censorship, information was cut about the disorganization that
accompanied the evacuation in 1941-1942 and the term “former Poland” was
not used to indicate territories that the USSR annexed in 1939. From testimony
of Captain Zaloga, which will be discussed later, information was omitted about
the fact that automatic weapons of Soviet make were used in the shooting of the
Jews of Staraya Ushitsa.24 From the testimony of the physician Olga Goldfain
from Pruzana information was removed about the fact that after she decided to
commit suicide she approached a German guard and said to him in German that
his Fuehrer was a good psychologist and had inoculated the whole German
people with madness. Instead of shooting her, the German said that he was on
guard duty and was afraid to talk to her then, but that she should come back
22
GARF 8114-1-960.
The Unknown Black Book, p. 215.
24
GARF 7021-64-799, p. 233; Yad Vashem Archive, JM/26091.
23
15
later and they could speak about everything.25 This German’s behavior did not
correspond to the censor’s view of the behavior of German soldiers during the
war. It is also possible that Soviet society as a whole was not ready to hear such
accounts.
In contrast to censors, who based themselves on specific official
instructions26 (although each censor might view their task with varying degrees
of strictness), the work of Party supervisors was based on general ideological
attitudes, which were not specifically formulated but rather emanated from the
corridors of the Agitprop Administration of the Central Committee.
Included in materials that were considered undesirable for publication
were items of information about the behavior of neighbors in regard to Jews
and Jewish property. Also, apparently, the compilers of The Black Book
understood well the incongruence of this behavior with the positive picturethat
Party functionaries wanted to be presented. Therefore, omitted from The Black
Book in the writing of Sara Gleikh was the episode about how neighbors could
not wait for the Germans to take away the Jews before looting their property:
:"The neighbors waited like vultures for us to leave the apartment. In fact, they
were not even shy in our presence. Masha opened the doors and told them to
take whatever they wanted. They all rushed into the apartment. …The
neighbors quarreled over things before my eyes, snatching things out of each
others' hands and dragging off pillows, pots and pans, quilts."27And, from the
memoirs of Dr. Olga Goldfain, for example, the following sentence was cut:
“But it should be said that in Pruzana some people became frightened when
they saw me returning from the other world [of the dead] who had witnessed
their dark deeds.”28
Yet another taboo topic was mentioning former Soviet citizens who held
positions in the German administration, especially in terms of their posts in the
USSR before the war. In that regard, as in many others, especially revealing
25
GARF 8114-1-4, p. 360.
A fragment from such instruction was published in Sovetskaia propaganda v gody Velikoi
otechestvennoi voiny, Moscow, 2007, pp. 551- 557.
27
The Unknown Black Book, p. 216.
28
GARF 8114-1-4, p. 371.
26
16
was the testimony provided by Captain Zaloga (a commander of a subunit of
shutzmen) stationed near Kamenets-Podolsk. The document is located in the
files of the ChGK and was published in The Black Book with serious omissions.
Information has been removed from this document about the role of the
local regular Ukrainian administration in segregating the Jewish population:
marking Jewish homes with a Star of David to distinguish them from the houses
of non-Jews/, which were marked with a cross and, even, their participation in
the selection of murder sites. Furthermore, since information about
collaborators was quite limited and carefully checked in Soviet publications, the
names of district heads which would have indicated that they were of local
origin were cut from the whole document That to some degree contradicted
other documents in The Black Book, where such last names were sometimes
mentioned. Nowhere in the document did the word “German” remain, although
it could be found copiously in the original, while the concept “shutzman” was
depersonalized. The uninformed reader could get the impression that the person
being referred to was a German rather than a Ukrainian policeman.
Furthermore, in one place the word “Germans” was replaced by the word “we,”
which gave the impression that the matter related to the Germans.
One may assume that some of the testimony in The Black Book was
condensed to prevent the behavior of the Jewish population from being
interpreted negatively by non-Jews, i.e. that this was due to considerations of
self-censorship. Hence, the reader was not told that, before the shooting, the
Germans summoned the chairman of the Jewish community and had him to tell
the Jews to collect on the square with their possessions. Otherwise, the
chairman’s actions might have been interpreted as Jewish collaboration.
Apparently for the same reason, phrases were omitted from the testimony of
Olga Goldfain about a “house of meetings” that was set up by the Germans in
the ghetto in Pruzana where Jewish craftsmen “brought things that they had
made for Aryans [non-Jews].”29
29
GARF 8114-1-4, p. 363.
17
In another place, in his testimony Zaloga recounts what happened when a
column turned toward the execution pit. There arose a general screaming “in
which this time the men participated no less than the women. No threatening
shouts accompanied by German curses and blows of rifle buts and kicks could
stop it. The coarse screams of the men and the penetratingly high screams of the
women mixed with the bawling of the children and their cries to be held, all this
gradually quieted down, then with increasing force was heard again. That is
how it continued for 100-200 meters, right up to the murder site, where the pit
had been dug.”30
Zaloga also pointed out that the Jews “fell to their knees, grasped and
kissed the Germans’ hand and boots. [But] these pleas were responded to … by
blows to the head.” Most likely, such cuts in the texts reflected the reaction of
the Jewish intelligentsia to the frequent charges that the Jews were cowards,
charges that were expressed not only by Nazi propaganda but also by the local
population. Thus, when he met on the premises of the Jewish Anti-fascist
Committee in 1944 with representatives of Jewish partisan Unit No. 106,
Mikhoels spoke about his understanding that the people in the ghetto were
psychologically broken, that there was mass apathy “but those people who had
become accustomed to ask all kinds of questions did not take that into
consideration.” Furthermore, he noted: “One could perish in two ways. One
could perish trying to do something, somehow trying to organize something, or
one could perish passively. A great part of the population perished passively…
One wants to ask whether these people did not want, at least with their bare
hands, to throw themselves on those villains.”31 It is likely that, in order to
somehow explain the particular psychological state of the Jews under
occupation, some of the texts in The Black Book retain a description of the
apathy among both the Jews and non-Jews under occupation. An example is
presented in the account of the Indikt couple from Dnepropetrovsk. Although
she was Russian and he was Jewish, apathy and suicidal thoughts were
30
GARF 7021-64-799.
GARF 8114-1-1053, pp. 260-261.
31
18
presented as being more characteristic of her than of him. This account was
published despite the fact that it contradicted the general Soviet heroic concept
of depicting the indomitable Soviet people who were standing up to the enemy
both at the front and in the rear.
It is, evidently, not by chance that there was no reference in The Black
Book to the fact that the whole way to the murder pit was littered with gold
(cigarette cases, earrings, jewels, etc.) and money which the Jews threw away
when they understood that they were being taken to their deaths.. Zaloga noted
that “a large amount of Soviet paper money, American dollars, German marks,
etc. was torn up. Documents, photographs, letters, and other papers with notes
on them. were thrown away.” This omission was probably connected with the
fact that the question of Jewish gold, evidently aroused the attention of a large
part of the non-Jewish population. When Jews came to join non-Jewish partisan
units, they were castigated for having voluntarily handed over gold to the
Germans when the latter demanded contributions.32 Murder sites of Jews, for
example in Rezekne, were often dug up by gold-seekers.33 It is possible that a
grave of Jews in Medzhibozh was completely covered with cement in the mid1960s to prevent such “treasure-hunting.” In Western Belorussia in the 1980s
one heard the following anecdote about a wealthy neighbor and the source of
his wealth: ‘Jews are to this day living in his cellar. He didn’t tell them that the
war was over.”34 On the other hand, some Jews had the following to say about
the possession of gold watches by simple “village” non-Jews: “Where did he
get a gold watch? He took it from Jews during the war.”
Often testimonies about the war report outspoken anti-German remarks
made by individual Jews before they were shot, sometimes expressing Soviet
patriotism and, even, praise for Stalin. It is difficult to evaluate to what degree
such expressions that appeared in Soviet publications during the war
ГАРФ 8114-1-1053, p. 260.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/commemoration.asp?cid=182
32
33
34
EvgeniiRozenblat, Irina Yelenskaia, "Pamiat' o Kholokoste v Belorussii.Stereotipy, mify,
tabu." In Istoriia –mif-folklor v evreiskoii slavianskoi kul'turnoi traditsii, Issue 24, Moscow,
2009, pp. 153-180.
19
corresponded to reality. Did those brave souls actually invoke the name of
Stalin to especially anger the Nazis? After all Stalin and the Jews were the main
villains of Nazi propaganda, or were such reports not true but simply a common
feature of Soviet propaganda? Such an expression was cited in a variant of
Zaloga’s text that was part of The Black Book. The only part of this section that
was omitted were the words “Death to the Fascist German-sausage eaters!”
Such expressions were not longer permissible after the changes that were
instituted in Soviet anti-German propaganda starting in April 1945. This shift
was signaled in an article in Pravda by Aleksandrov, the head of the Agitation
and Propaganda administration, who accused Ilya Ehrenburg of calling for the
killing of all Germans.35
In this way, the cutting of texts by authors and editors of documents
published during the war and in the early postwar period was dictated not only
by strict requirements of censorship but also by the general attitudes of Party
functionaries and considerations of Jewish self-censorship since it was
considered that certain topics might harm the Jews due to anti-Jewish
sentiments that were widespread during the war.
During the postwar period information about what had happened,
including about attitudes toward the events on the part of the local population,
e.g., their participation in the looting of Jewish property, continued to exist
among the Jews in the form of oral history within families.
The sole active form of public Holocaust-related Jewish activity in the
USSR was the erection of monuments that indicated places of mass murders.
Sometimes the inscriptions on the monuments contained precise information
about the date of the shootings and, sometimes also, the number of victims,
although the correctness of the figures often raises doubts. The majority of
monuments were impersonal. Due to the policy of the authorities, the
monuments did not indicate the ethnic identity of the victims. However, there
were places, and they were not few, where the monuments did have definite
ethnic context – there were inscriptions in Yiddish or Hebrew, they had Stars of
35
Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 101.
20
David, as was common in Jewish cemeteries, and sometimes, it was directly
stated that those buried there were Jews. Sometimes, when the authorities did
not permit this, circumlocutions were used, for example, in Medzhibozh, the
victims were referred to as “prisoners of the ghetto.”36 In any case, such
commemorative activity was the most widespread and public manifestation of
Jewish ethnic identity during that time, regardless of social status, degree of
religiosity, gender, profession, age, or Party membership.
Nevertheless, for many years after the war, the topics of the suffering of
Soviet Jews during the war and of the loss of family members were rarely
discussed. This was the case not only in society as a whole, due to the
authorities negative position regarding specific Jewish suffering during the war,
i.e. the Holocaust, but also within the Jewish family. Not only were such things
not written about, but they were rarely spoken about as well, except during
visits to the murder sites on the victims’ yortsayt, their specific memorial day.
The topic of the Holocaust was taboo in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, many
survivors themselves did not want to speak about the horrors of they had
experienced. Those who at the beginning of the war had been young teenagers
had barely escaped death and, many years later, still suffered from the trauma.
Among many Jews, even among the intelligentsia, during those years there was
no attempt to write down what they had lived through. Soviet Jewish society
did not recognize the need “to tell the world what had happened,” as was the
case at the end of the war . The knowledge that the authorities did not approve
of such texts and would never publish them, that non-Jews did not want to hear
about the Holocaust, further discouraged the desire to write memoirs.
The situation changed with Gorbachev’s perestroika, when the topic of the
Holocaust became an important part of public discourse. The following years
saw the appearance of a comparatively large number of Jewish memoirs about
the war. The Holocaust was no longer taboo. Those people who previously had
avoided speaking about this topic were now ready to do so. A particular role in
36
http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/medzhibozh/commemoration.html
21
changing their attitude was, evidently, the interview project of Shoah
Foundation. It turned out that many more people wanted to talk than to write.
Their recollections, however, bore the imprint of later, postwar knowledge. It is
not clear how one is to distinguish personal memoirs from information read in
newspapers or books. Nor is it clear as to what degree today’s view of the past with the general tendency among people as they age - to moderate evaluations
of human behavior (as in, the model of Halbwachs’s collective memory),
corresponds to actual events and, particularly, to accurate evaluations of wartime attitudes and Jewish and non-Jewish behavior.
So, for example, the negative behavior of former neighbors (handing Jews
over to the Germans and looting of Jewish property, not only by local
policemen) which, in general, is a major theme in memoirs, is juxtaposed with
information about help on the part of other Ukrainian or Belarusian neighbors.
One even finds examples of good Germans. One wonders whether this is a
consequence of the situation in Soviet and post-Soviet society where it has not
been considered proper to speak negatively of all members of an ethnic groups,
even the Germans.
Perhaps when people grew older, their evaluations of the past, even of the
Holocaust, tend to become less negative. Or, perhaps, this was the result of
personal experience -- since almost all the Jews who survived did so thanks to
aid from some Ukrainians or Belarusians. Memoirs contain very many
statements that were intended to defend Jewish honor. As was the case during
wartime, these were affected by previous experience. Stress was often put on
incidents of active resistance at the time of the shootings: verbal responses,
refusals to obey the order to undress, people who spit in the faces of their
murderers, and flight, sometimes collectively, from the murder site.
It is rare to encounter descriptions of negative behavior on the part of Jews
(fighting over food or clothing, tension about the different shares Jews would
have to contribution to German levies of money, negative aspects of relations
between men and women, etc.). Instead, attention is often drawn to the theme of
collective responsibility, in particular to explanations of why Jews did not flee
22
from ghettos or shtetlech because they did not want to endanger the lives of
those who remained behind. Similar was the explanation of the reason why
Jews did not flee occupied territories in general.
Another justification for not fleeing was the positive memories Jews had
about the Germans from World War I. The question arises as to what extent this
view corresponded to reality and how widespread was the attempt to attribute
one’s own unwillingness, or that of members of one’s family, to flee while one
abandoned his or her own relatives, homes, property, etc. Even those who were
children rarely mentioned their daily lives as children but tended to dwell on the
murders, hunger, and other suffering.37Many memoirs discuss the issue of
ethical responsibility in regard to the memory of dear ones who perished in the
Holocaust. Those who survived had often fled from their hometowns or directly
from the murder sites, leaving behind their parents and younger brothers and
sisters. One wonders to what degree a feeling of guilt, which in some cases
increased with age38, the need for public repentance and self-justification,
affected the narration of events of the Holocaust and of the survival of the
narrator.
The memories of older non-Jews about the Holocaust also reflect
stereotypes of Jews that existed in non-Jewish society, some of which,
evidently, existed during the war while others, possibly, were of later origin.
This is particularly characteristic of cases when interviews are conducted by
non-Jews, like the interviews about life in the town of Mir that were conducted
by Irina Makhovskay and Irina Romanova and their students. In this case the
respondents were somewhat open to a free discussion of interethnic problems.
This interview project related to the past lives of residents of Mir, with the topic
of Jews being only one of many subjects dealt with.
At this point let us touch briefly on people’s views about the Holocaust.
They all note the restrictions that the Germans imposed on the Jews and the
37
Evgenii Rozenblat, Irina Yelenskaia, "Pamiat' o Kholokoste v Belorussii.Stereotipy, mify,
tabu." pp. 153-180.V ogn eKatastrofy (Shoa) na Ukraine. Svidetelstva i
dokumenty.Beitlokhameihagettaot, 1998.
38
V ogne Katastrofy (Shoa) na Ukraine. Svidetelstva i dokumenty, pp. 58-59,157.
23
particularly difficult conditions of life and death in the ghetto. Still their views
reflect their own position, possibly justifying the fact that the majority of them
were only bystanders of the events. This is reflected even in the depictions of
aid to Jews. Many of these people reported that women approached the
perimeter of the ghetto and threw bread over the fence. However, oOnly once
did anyone recall that women went not to give but to trade the bread and not a
single person reported on details of the exchange.
Much more attention was paid to the question of passivity or
submissiveness of Jews when they were being taken to be killed. Sometimes
one of the interviewees noted that there is nothing one can do when you have a
gun pointed at you, but most connected this submissiveness with traditional
Jewish behavior rooted in the Jewish religion: “…they were so religious that
they went of their own volition. When our people were being taken, if only a
few lads had gotten together and at least jumped on the guards, maybe one or
two would have been shot. But there were only 3 or 4 guards and they tended
to be drunk. But, like obedient sheep, they went to the pits and, even dug their
own graves."39Such ideas about the submissiveness of Jews are quite typical
and widespread today among non-Jews.40
We have hardly any information about the Holocaust in the USSR that
was written down by non-Jews during the occupation itself. Nor do materials
from the Soviet Extraordinary Commission contain any generalizations about
killing of Jews or departures from the clearly defined models; nor do they
suggest any general observations by eyewitnesses of the mass murder of Jews.
Closely connected with the issue of the lack of Jewish resistance as
presented by contemporary views of the Holocaust and explanations about the
life of non-Jews under Nazi occupation was the theme of Jewish collaboration
with the Nazis. In this respect of particular interest are works about the
Holocaust written in recent years by non-Jewish school children. These works
Voinaizvestnauia i … neizvestnaia, Minsk,2010, p.
Numerous examples are given inEvgeniiRozenblat, Irina Yelenskaia, "Pamiat o Kholokoste
v Belorussii. Stereotipy, mify, tabu," pp. 153-180.
39
40
24
contain information that young people heard from aged neighbors and from
their teachers, and well as views they had encountered in books.
One such work notes that “Initially the Jews worked for the Germans,
they brought timber from the forest to their kitchens. They traveled without
guard. Alexander Vasilyevich recalled that he was very surprised that they
didn’t run away. The elders said: “The Jews are afraid of the forest. That’s why
they don’t join the partisans.” However, eventhe more rational explanations of
the events of the past also reflected a contemporary interpretation of events and
a justification of the position of non-Jews during the years of the Nazi
occupation that often did not correspond to reality: “But where was there to
flee to? There were not yet any partisans. Everyone in our village really pitied
the Jews. Their homes stood empty, only a few of them had been taken over by
policemen.”41
Thus, despite the availability of information, there still remain two
different narratives (Jewish and non-Jewish) about the Holocaust that, to a great
degree, reflect the events of the Second World War in collective memory –
through the prism of later understandings.
In conclusion:
The situation in regard to Soviet sources related to the Holocaust is quite a
specific one. Basically, there hardly exist any diaries of the period of the
occupation written by either Jews or non-Jews that deal with the Holocaust. In
contrast to Jews in countries that were totally occupied by the Nazis, after they
fled or were evacuated eastward outside the zone of occupation even during the
war, part of Soviet Jewry had the opportunity to collect thmation about the
Holocaust. However, many published memories suffered from serious
interference of censorship and control from Party bodies. As a result, many
aspects of the Holocaust are missing from the testimonies of Soviet Jews. A no
less important factor was self-censorship and the desire to stress some aspects
and remain silent about others regarding Jewish behavior during the Holocaust.
Voinaizvestnauia …ineizvestnaia, Minsk,2010, p. 73.
41
25
Contemporary memoirs, both of Jews and non-Jews, reflect ideas about the
Holocaust that prevail today.
Many official documents related to the Holocaust that are located in the
former KGB archives and in military archives, in most cases, are once again
closed to foreign researchers, while those (like materials from the Soviet
Extraordinary Commission) that are available are tendentious. Due to the
specific features of these documents, whole topics, especially those related to
contemporary approaches to the Holocaust and connected to social and sociopsychological history, remain little studied.