NOVEMBER 11th REMEMBRANCE DAY & POST-UKRAINE REFLECTIONS by guest blogger, Geneviève Blouin 11/11/2011
Editor’s note – In July, Geneviève Blouin, who works for Yahad in Canada, accompanied an investigation team to Odessa, Ukraine, to research the surrounding area. Following are her observations after a few months of reflecting on the experience. To read earlier posts from her trip, click on “Odessa trip” in the right hand column of this page.  In Canada, November 11th is Remembrance Day and commemorates the sacrifices that Canadians made in armed conflicts, including World Wars I and II. While we must honour those who fought to serve and protect us, we must not forget the victims of war as well as those we lost long before protective forces were able to defend their lives. On this November 11th, I reserve a moment of silence for the Jewish and Roma victims I learned more about during my trip to the Ukraine with Yahad this last August. In the spirit of Remembrance, I find myself recalling memories of our last day in the Ukraine and wish to share with you a few reflections… On August 4, we were in the village of Sakharove, in the region of Odessa. We began that day by first interviewing a woman named Tamara. She spoke of the day the Germans brought Jews to their village. Most of the Jews were kept in a stable (that no longer exists today) for a few weeks and then were housed with villagers. This now very elderly woman talked about how a woman named “Ghenia” and her niece “Lida” stayed with her uncle next door. She recalled playing with Lida and how one day, she found herself walking in the column of Jews that were being marched off to their death. She came within an inch of death before being pulled out of the column by a guard who recognized her and pulled her away from the fate Lida and Ghenia were about to face. These names stay with me today. The existence of these women may have been lost forever to their relatives and others who would have been unable to trace them to this final resting place if the elderly woman’s fading memory had not been recorded as testimony by Yahad’s research team -- testimony that will eventually be made available online via Yahad’s and the USHMM’s websites.  The second witness we interviewed in Sakharove was a woman named Larissa. After recalling a similar scenario from the previous witness, Larissa talked about a time after the war when some of the perpetrators of these murderous crimes were hanged in town for all to see. While for some, the hanging of the perpetrators may have represented a form of “justice,” it doesn’t bring back the approximately 500 people that were killed in that village. As with many accounts, we heard how witnesses saw the column of Jews arrive to where they were held captive. We heard of how during the winter months, some villagers would bring the Jews hot water and others would barter with them for food which was scarce for everyone at the time, but more so for the Jews.  We heard of the day when all the Jews that were brought to the village were forced to form a column and were led off to be killed: they were shot next to a pit in line-ups of 2 to 6 people at a time, their bodies stacked (often only wounded and not dead), with a few villagers requisitioned by the Nazis to extract gold teeth from the victims before the bodies were burned the following day. Bodies would burn for three days; moans could be heard until the flames died out. Our previous interviewee, Tamara, had reported that a woman who was shot along with her two children was, in fact, only wounded and hid by the side of the execution pit until nightfall. She fled to a nearby house where she was hidden until the end of the war by Tamara’s aunt. There were too few of these survival stories but they provided at least fragments of relief from the much more numerous accounts of those less fortunate. I remarked to a Yahad research team member that the stories were often the same from village to village and they corrected me by reminding me of the details that made each village scenario or extermination site different. It is almost instinctive as a human to want to label such events as “one-in-the-same” in the hopes of processing the traumatic information more easily. But it is these specific details that must be noted and preserved as they represent the fates not of a people as a whole, but of individuals’ respective lives and how those came to an end. So many died anonymously, do we not at least owe them the respect of preserving as many details of these mass exterminations as possible? We cannot, as Father Desbois often remarks, let their ashes be swept under the rug of time and filed as “history,” from which the world should just move on. We owe the victims some form of acknowledgement. We need to speak for those who cannot, and on this Remembrance Day, I ask you to include a thought for Lida and Ghenia, and all those who’s names will never surface.  STILL LIFE, POST-UKRAINE REFLECTIONS CONTINUED… In an inadvertent homage to French photographer Eugène Atget, who for three decades documented doors, windows, interior courtyards and local residents of Paris in an effort to capture the decline of the Old Regime, I found myself taking many photos of the interiors and courtyards of our interviewees’ homes.  While many homes had electricity, they did not all have running water and they all still use outhouses. While we observe their traditional way of life and their continued agricultural practices, we understand that nothing has changed for them on the surface but every discussion reveals a change in their mentality.  These people were once silenced by the fear of accountability for sharing information when there was Communist rule. Now elderly, as many feel death approaching, Yahad’s work is their last opportunity to archive a testimony of their memories before this land forgets them too. 1 Comment Again, apologies for the backlog. The following took place on Aug. 3rd, 2011.  We started the day by journeying out to the village of Onorivka, where there is a stable a pre-interviewee informed us about. While there are now sheep in this stable, there would have been 400 people “living here” for 1 month, only 40 would have escaped. The Jews were killed about a hundred meters away.   We then met with an elderly woman who witnesses everything the day of the mass shootings. She recalls with profound sadness: “I had 2 Jewish friends who were approximately 18-20 years of age and we would always visit each other’s houses. When my friends were moved to the stable I would bring them food.” She adds: “I was visiting my friends on the day of the mass shootings. The Germans would have circled the stable to bring the Jews to the execution site and if it weren’t for the local Police who recognized me, the Germans would have brought me to be shot with Jews. One of my Jewish friends tried to escape the carnage but was caught by the Germans, killed and thrown into the silo. It was horrific. And since they were communist Jews who worked on a kolkhoz together, they left the stable arm in arm singing a communist hymn, knowing that they were marching off to their death.” She tells another story of a woman about to be executed with her children: “she wrapped her braids around each child to keep them close. After one of the two children was shot, he must have been 8 years old, the other child begged for his life. The bodies, dead or alive were covered with kerosene and those who weren’t dead would yell and beg to be finished off by bullet. If the shooters missed, they would continue to yell until they were terminated.” This was the 1st time someone has come to ask her about what she saw. The village youth don’t know these killings happened here and they don’t teach it in school because there is only a primary school in the village.  We then visited Chizheve where a witness informs: “when the Germans came to their house they would have taken our cow if it weren’t for my grandmother who spoke a little German who convinced them to take their food but leave the cow for there were young children who lived in the house.“ The witness brought us to where the Jews would have been executed, showing us where they would have taken off their clothes and jewels before advancing to their death.”  Another local witness informs: “the Germans would take breaks in between the shooting of groups of a hundred people or so. They would go off about a hundred meters away to a wagon that housed cases in which they had food and a lot of alcohol. They were always drunk.”   Our last witness was another man whose father was requisitioned to follow the Jews in a wagon from the place where they were held to the execution site, all the way “carrying those who were too sick or weak to walk”. He witnessed the entire execution, as did the others that day, and confirms it lasted from morning until dusk. Unlike the others, he specified: “to save bullets, I saw them throwing infants into the pit and would be piled-on with bodies of the dead and wounded. It was a literal bloodbath.” We ended the day exhausted but none as drained as our translators (Lilia, Svetlana, Patrice and Sasha). They interact with the witnesses in Ukrainian and Russian and translate their testimonies in French, absorbing the blows that are nuance and intonation. While I, a Canadian who doesn’t speak any Slavic languages, was spared hearing witnesses‘ voice cracking or choking–up due to the recalling of buried traumas. However our translators understand everything first hand and are more subjected to the lingering pain these people feel. Since this is a public post, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank them for their patience, empathy, professionalism and most of all for doing what they do so well.  Apologies for the backlog. This event took place on Aug. 2nd 2011  In the village of Marianovka, we met with a woman who had a Jewish friend. She tells us: “Rosa was a seamstress who had two sons that were away for their studies. Rosa would come to work at my house because I had a sewing machine. When Rosa had to be confined to the village makeshift prison that once was the social club, Rosa gave me a quilt she had made to keep as a memento, in memoriam of her. The minute the quilt exchanged hands, a Romanian soldier snatched it away from me and wouldn’t give it back.” When you’re hearing consecutive testimonies, day-in and day-out, you become more analytical. You listen, as would an investigator, a psychologist or journalist, and become slightly detached from what you are hearing. However, we are human and eventually, something will trigger all our empathy to pour out and it can sometimes be for something as inane as an inanimate object, such as a quilt.  I suddenly felt grief stricken. I felt I knew Rosa, I wanted that quilt, I wanted it for her sons. How many people were left without a single trace that their loved ones had even existed? The only thing left to do is try to get as much information on what happened and remember them collectively.  Later, we met with a witness that currently lived in a house that belonged to a person that had everything taken away from them by the Communists and was thereafter sent to Siberia. Vacant, this house was appropriated by Nazi enforcers to house some of the Jews whom had been deported from Odessa.  He brought us to the sites he described after his interview. We saw the barn where hundreds were kept before being brutally killed. The witness walked us to the exact location burned in his memory forever and said: “it is in this barn that we villagers would come to barter clothes and jewelry for food as it was a time of great famine and food was scarce for us all but. even more so for the Jews, trapped in this building, only allowed to leave to relieve themselves of their bodily functions.” He walks a bit further and points away saying: “and there is the place where the Jews were forced to remove their clothes, and then they would make their way over there where men, women and children were shot dead.” Like many witnesses, he spoke of how the Jews were denuded, stripped of their jewelry, shot into a mass grave and lit on fire, dead or alive. The witness was able to see everything from his hiding place, which was in a neighboring house’s hayloft.  Our final witness of the day was in school when he saw a column of Jews walking to the place where they would be shot. The teacher insisted they look away but they knew something terrible was in the making. When doing Yahad research, while we are happy to talk to those who only saw bits and pieces of these historical episodes, we are best helped by direct eyewitnesses that were old enough to understand what they saw yet are lucid and in good enough health to accurately transmit to us what they saw and experienced. Sadly, many witnesses can only recall accounts and whereabouts. Many names have fallen through the cracks of their memories. Our only regret is that Yahad hadn’t existed sooner. Apologies for the backlog but the Ukrainian region we were working in isn't exactly known for its reliable internet connection! The following events took place on Aug 1st, 2011.  "I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.” Those were the first words of a witness we did a selection interview with the village of Gradovka. He was too young to be sent to the front but old enough to see and understand what went on in his village. He saw everything: the columns of Jews arriving to the village, the places where the Jews were kept and how they were treated, and most importantly, he saw the Jews (men, women and children) killed in droves of hundreds by machine gun and burned in a pit. He recalled a story of how “a column of many hundreds of Jews rebelled by simultaneously running away when it became apparent they wouldn’t be sent to a work camp but off to their death in a pit. Not having proper military training, the Jews tragically ran up a hill instead of following the ravine, which made them easy prey for a nearby machine gun that would have eliminated them in minutes. I was hiding with friends in a nearby hayloft where we could see everything through the window.  This witness brought us to the many sites where he recalled appalling history taking place. The place that sorrowed me the most was the site of a Church where two important German SS military officials would have been buried during the war ceremoniously with flowers, wreaths, religious representatives and colleagues. Such a glorious manifestations for people who led sickening acts! Whereas but a few miles away lay the ashes of hundreds without so much as a little plaque to commemorate their lives.  I met Holocaust survivors who just want to forget and move on with their lives, and while I understand the human impetuous to survive and move-on beyond past traumas and not let them own us, I understand why Yahad does what it does: this is about the victims. Who will speak for them if not the living?  Misha, Yahad’s trustee ballistics expert found a rusty “brass knuckle” weapon, undeniable proof violence occurred on these lands. Our witness informed us that the pit where the greatest number of Jews was burned is a clay quarry where trucks often come to get building clay and so most of the bullet shell casings have been taken away with these layers. This constant erosion of proof of the mass murders that occurred here also supports why documenting eyewitness accounts is so important. One witness told us he felt “the end for him was near” and so it is with the greatest sense of urgency that the team thoroughly tries to reach as many villages as possible while there is still time.  In the neighboring village of Chernigovka, another witness interviewed had extremely vivid recollections of the shootings. She informs: “the shooters weren’t foreign military but the local “Volksdeutsche” or “the local German colonies" that had settled here. I had to work as a servant for a Volksdeutsche family. The family matriarch would offer me clothes that were quite fine and beautifully ornate. I highly suspected these clothes to have belonged to the Jews that were killed and stripped of their belongings. It was very troubling.”  The witnesses we meet on our investigations are often quite generous with us. Today we were offered exquisite fresh honey, harvested the day prior, and “platscki” (donut-style pastry of the region) as a snack before we were on our way again. While we often lose our respective appetites hearing atrocious details, we need to force ourselves to eat to keep up the strength to continue working late into the evening. A door to the past re-opened 08/03/2011
 Today’s journey began in the village of Kovalivka. Here, the Ukraininan neighbors and Roma survivors corroborate the same recollections about what went on in the Ukrainian village, a hamlet where the deported Roma were forced to live, and the “bazaar” where wares would be bartered for food and the clay quarry where the dead bodies of the Roma were burned. Mitsa Serban, a now elderly Roma we have interviewed in the past, lost an uncle and cousins, and saw so many perish of famine and typhoid here. As a child deported to live there, she rarely left her house for the Roma women were often raped. She remembered a horrible episode when German officers in uniforms came into the house where she lived to rape a girl, her mother protested and protected her and they shot them both dead in front of them.  For one of today’s interviews, a Ukrainian woman who was born in that very village, recalled how her family and her were forced to suddenly leave their home and move to a neighboring village to make room for the Roma. When she would occasionally go to visit her old house with her siblings, her sister would bring the starving Roma “mamalega”, while she would cry because there would be at least 50 people in her old house and dead bodies outside.  We soon after met up with a Babushka from the village we had met the day before who guided us to a house that was built on the land where the corpses of the Roma were transported to be burned. The woman who lived in this house showed us where in her garden the incineration would have taken place.  We visited the train station where the Roma arrived from Romania by way of Odessa. The Roma who were able to flee and return home to Romania, like Mitsa, did so by hiding on trains from station to station.  We ended the day at the home of a Roma who, to avoid being shot dead by the Germans, had torn-up his passport and put aside his traditional nomad Roma heritage to become sedentary. He had to lie and say he was Moldovan to be let into the Kolkhoz to work as a mason. It's incredible how many bodies were buried and burned on land where one would simply never know all these horrors occurred here except for what survives in the memories of the village's few remaining elderly witnesses. Our days appear to be getting longer as we are traveling farther out into the countryside to do interviews. We would have every right to be a cranky bunch at times due to fatigue and rudimentary conditions when doing field work, yet everyone’s mood is good as a great deal of satisfaction comes from unearthing these testimonies. Unlocking Memories 08/02/2011
Today we are headed to the region of Kovalivka.  As per usual, the group splits-up to cover as much ground as possible and effectively identify the best witnesses to interview. I was asking Patrice Bensimon, our group leader, how Yahad ultimately makes a selection when many witnesses are available. He says that the team looks for witnesses that would have personally witnessed people being killed or raped, seen bodies being buried, whom were deported themselves or whom have lived in the village visited since that time.  Here we would have met a series of witnesses that recalled many things that no one had ever asked them about prior to our coming. One witness saw the shootings of Bogdanivka, where Jews were told to march onto a wide board that lay across a ravine where a fire was lit below. Once shot, the victims would fall and be incinerated. Thousands and thousands of people would have died this way. He surprised us with his recollection that the person who directed this mass killing was a German woman officer. In this region, while the Jews were being systematically killed, the Roma (“Gypsy people” of Romania) were deported from Romania and died in the tens of thousands from forced famine. The Roma were either sent to work in the fields of the Kolkhoz (a Soviet collective farm) or they were confined to a hamlet where there were fewer shelters than needed to house the Roma. These homes belonged to Ukrainians that were themselves forced out. While the Roma weren’t allowed into the neighboring Ukrainian village, there was a “Bazaar” in between the hamlet and the village where the Roma could trade with the Ukrainians. In another village, a witness talked about what he would have the Roma make for him where they were set up, which was in an open field. There, Ukrainians would go and commission pieces from the Roma in exchange for food.  Our last witness was a woman who received medals for saving Jewish people during the war. She and a friend once snuck girls across vegetable gardens to bring to them to her house to hide them in the basement under a trap door hidden by hay. Her father was a cobbler. She recalled a story of a woman with 3 children whose shoes were worn through who snuck out of the column (long row of Jews walking) to get shoes made and the witness’s father hid them for three days while he made them shoes. All the other columns and guards had time to pass through and they fled to another village and escaped death. After the war, they came back to see her family and thank them. This last witness of the day saw wagons go to the social club, the synagogue and the barn to get the corpses of the Jews who died in these buildings. She wished she could have saved more.  DAY 1 WITH YAHAD 07/31/2011
My first day with the Yahad team got off to a bumpy start, literally! The roads leading one off into the countryside aren’t well maintained and while the literal translation in French of roller-coaster is “montagnes russes” or “Russian mountains” we might as well call the roads “Ukrainian mountains”.   While inquiring with inhabitants where the eldest inhabitants of the village live, we caught glimpses of the villagers' everyday life which includes maintaining an elaborate vegetable and fruit garden, caring for livestock and traveling in a horse-drawn cart made of wood or aluminum.  It was surprising to find out some of these micro farms were maintained so arduously by eighty and ninety year old babushkas (grandmothers). The morning in Kovalivka consisted of meeting a few babushkas that spoke to us about the great famine that occurred and left many Ukrainians for dead in this region. One recalled a story where her father was sent to prison for giving the starving bread from reserved rations but died from dysentery before making it to prison. The Roma (gypsy people) were deported from Romania and forced to go live in this region where food was scarce and where there were more people than shelters provided (the previous occupants of the village were forced to leave and vacate their homes). As the Roma began dying off from famine, they would bury their dead in communal graves near the houses they were forced to occupy.  One babushka told us that she was requisitioned to cart off bodies to the two “Kahate” of the village or “potato in-ground silos”. When the two kahate were filled to its capacity with hundreds of corpses, they proceeded to filling the underground silos throughout the forest, which normally house beets, with bodies. In the afternoon, we went to Korchnine, another village where the Roma were deported in 1942. This village is near the Bug river, which divided the region into two areas, one governed by the Germans, and the other by the Romanians, which is where we were. Our first witness of the afternoon was interviewed by Patrick who requested that they take us to the places mentioned to one of Yahad’s investigators, Denis. “Investigators” are the Yahad team members who make initial contact with potential interviewees and determine if they would make good interview candidates (I will write more about the criteria for this on a later-post).  This Ukrainian witness brought us specifically to where the “bazar” used to be. He later explained that it basically consisted of a table and a few benches where people would gather to barter. Here the Ukrainians would purchase jewelry, hand crafts and whatever the Roma could part with in exchange for food. The village houses that once were have almost all been decimated, all except for a few ruins.  As an adolescent he, like all the other village men, were required to take turns guarding the Village for the Roma would often come to beg for food. He recalled how at times the Ukrainian villagers would make the Roma food and bring them drink. In return, the Roma would show their thanks with music. As food became scarce for everyone, the Roma were dying off in greater numbers. Another man in Trihati we met explained that the Roma men who married Ukrainian women were often spared assassination for they would be protected by the Ukrainian villagers: the locals would say that “adopted Roma” were Moldovan and because they didn’t live like nomads but as sedentary hard workers, therefore authorities would believe them. “Hard working” is an understatement when thinking of a qualifier for the Yahad team. Under the tutelage of Patrick, this young dynamic team is extremely resourceful, educated and persevering. Most people would complain about a 14 hour work day but ask any one of them and they will tell you how interested they are in the subject matter and how much they love doing what they do. I feel quite humbled to be a part of it. Introducing guest blogger Geneviève Blouin traveling with a Yahad research team in Odessa, Ukraine 07/31/2011
Greetings Friends of Yahad! My name is Geneviève Blouin and I’m a guest blogger who will be heading up a few projects in Canada for Yahad. I have been invited to participate in this research trip to gain a better, hands-on understanding of what Yahad does. After 10 hours of traveling, we finally arrived to Odessa, once known as one of the most Jewish-populated cities of the pre-Soviet Union before WWII. One can even find a street named “Eureyska Vulitsia” or “Jewish Street”.  This synagogue, contrary to the many others throughout the city, has been converted into a local archives center. Upon leaving the city center, we soon found ourselves amidst a picturesque landscape with sprawling fields of sunflowers. I was sad to find out that these beautiful flowers, made so famous by Van Gogh, were used, along with hemp, as combustion agents to burn the bodies of Jewish murder victims.   Sergei, our driver, spoke to us about how his grandmother bore his father on June 21st 1941, which was also the first day of the German Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Their lives would be a series of trials and tribulation henceforth. Unlike the rest of the Ukraine, this region was under Romanian rule and occupation during the Second World War. Once we arrived to the village of “Voznesensk” we got settled at what is to be Yahad’s home base for the next seven days. As I write this, we are awaiting the return of the Yahad Field Team whom was investigating “Gvozdiovka 2”a small village two hours away where thousands of Jews were murdered and carried in carts to the various mass graves throughout the village. Our investigation of the Nicolaev and Odessa regions will continue tomorrow and for the next week so keep checking-in for updates. I leave you with this photo from the Odessa Opera, a reminder that despite tragedy and horror, we still need to take a moment to appreciate what is beautiful.  | Yahadblog author: ArchivesNovember 2011 LinksYahad - In Unum CategoriesAll |
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