This was going to be my last morning with the team.  Like every morning, we had a brief meeting in the parking lot to explain where we were going and what for.  The village was Khalebodarovka almost two hours west of Donetsk.  We jumped in the cars and we started another day of research; the difference today was that we did not have any idea of where to find the witnesses so we were going to use Yahad’s method: knocking door by door in the village and asking the old people: were you here during the war? Did you see what happened with the Jews of the village?  Did you know them? Do you know someone who saw what happened? …

We finally found a lady who gave us the address of an old man in the village who knew what had happened.  We went to see him and our Ukrainian team, Svetlana and Katia, talked to him and asked if he would accept to give his testimony to our team.  The answer was, Yes! We entered his house, it was a tiny Ukrainian house, very clean with the typical flower carpets that almost every house has in this region. Vladimir was born in 1930, he told us about his life in this village, he told us that there were Volksdeutch and Jews living together before the war, he told us about his Jewish classmate who sat next to him in the school. He remembers when the Germans arrived and when they took all the Jewish families away. He also saw other Jewish families passing in front of his house; he did not know that they were going to be killed, he learned it later through his neighbors.

I could not stay for the end of the interview, I had a conference call with the office in Paris, with Professor Edouard Husson, Father Desbois and Patrice Bensimon, to discuss the program of 2013 with the Sorbonne University and ESCP European School directed by Professor Husson.  This was a good opportunity for me to share with them from this small town in Ukraine how the research was going. The interview finished almost at the same time as my conference call.  It was already noon and I had to leave the team to go to the airport, I still had two hours to go and my flight was at 4PM. I said goodbye to each of the members of our team, Geoffroy, Marie, Omar, Juan Pablo, Svetlana, Denis, Katia, Vassil and Micha .  And I asked to say goodbye for me to Micha who was in another town looking for witnesses to interview in the afternoon. It is not easy to say goodbye after being so close during three days, all of us with the same motivation, all of us believing in how important it is to find as many of the still surviving witnesses as possible to keep history alive, to keep the memory alive, to be passed on to the next generations, to listen to what these old men and women have to tell us, before it is too late! My flight will depart in 10 minutes, I think of Yahad in Paris and I think of Yahad in Khlebodarovka,  two hours away from the Donetsk airport. I’ll be landing in Paris at 9PM.

At 7:30 AM we were all together in the parking lot of the Central Hotel of Donetsk to organize our journey. Father Desbois suggested going back to the region of Guliepole in the city of Novozlatopol where he and the Yahad team did research five years ago. At that time, they found several witnesses who told our team how the Jews were killed and where the mass grave was located. There were some questions without answers at that time and Father Desbois was willing to resolve some of them.

We took the cars and we left Donetsk; a half hour, later we were in the middle of the Ukrainian landscape, fields and fields, some of them green and some of them totally natural, empty. The trees were changing colors, the leaves turning brown, red and orange, the autumn is beautiful here.

After two hours driving, we decided to stop in the middle of a tinny route and take some pictures of the landscape and a little town in the middle of nowhere. Then, another hour before arriving in Novoslatopo where Micha had found two witnesses the day before. We decided to go to Nicolai’s house, one of the witnesses who wanted to give his testimony. His dog, Drouzhok, welcomed the team jumping and shaking his tail.

Nicolai was born in 1924, in Vychneve, leaving school when he was 16 and going to Novozlatopol to work at the shoe factory, the same place where his father had worked. He spoke to us about his life before the Germans arrived and some of the Jewish families who were living in the town at that time.  The Germans arrived and he was sent to a camp to work in another village far from Novozlatopol.  He succeeded in escaping and came back to his city, where he decided to go to the factory to look for his work tools but could not get inside. He was surprised to hear a big noise inside; people from the village were making noise with the metal tools and the aluminum pans. He learned a couple of days later that the Germans had told the village people to make all this noise to cover the noise of the firing of guns while they killed the Jews.  Nicolai confirmed the place of the mass graves, the same place the other witnesses had indicated to Father Desbois and the Yahad team five years ago.

There was only a small shop in the village, it was 2PM already so we decided to have a picnic; some cheese, herrings and bread would be okay, we were all together, we were all motivated. We decided to go to the mass grave where today a monument has been built by the Jewish Community. Rabbi Mendel wanted to know who built this monument as it was not indicated anywhere; a lot of administrative work needs to be done to have an answer from the local administration to have this answer.  To be continued… We visited also the rest of the Jewish cemetery of Novozlatopol, where only a few stones are visible today.

The second witnesses was very gentle to the team, he did not see the killing of the Jews, but he saw the Jews passing in front of his house going to Novozlatopol to get killed, probably some of the faces of those Jews he saw that morning were the same Jews who were killed the day that Nicolai stopped by the shoe factory. We went to what stays today of a Jewish colony not far from Novozlatopol and we knocked at three houses that are still inhabited there but none of them knew the Jews living in the colony before the War.  It was 4:30 PM and the sun was gone. We decide to take the route back to Donetsk. Our driver did not see a big hole in the middle of the road and the tire exploded. In the middle of nowhere, everybody got out of the van and waited until the tire was changed. We stood in a cold rain with our cell phones providing the only light in the middle of nowhere. We finally arrived back in Donetsk. After a hot mushroom soup, I said good night to the team. I had to get up early as we had decided to leave from Donetsk at 8 AM next day and I had to pack as I was going back to Paris at 4PM. I was sad to leave the team…

We had to leave at 8 AM, as we were going to a town one hour from Donetsk. After a breakfast and two cups of coffee, I was ready to start the day. Geoffroy, the team leader, gathered the  team to give the program for the day. We were going to Volnovakha 80 kms west of Donetsk.  The day before, Denis and Micha found four witnesses who were willing to talk to our team and give their testimony.  This town has a very important railway system which was used during World War II by the Germans to bring Eastern Front prisoners of war.

The sky was gray and I could feel a few drops falling in the parking lot of the hotel before jumping in the van. We stopped in the mines of Donetsk where 75,000 people were killed. They were pushed inside the mines, 300 meters deep, sometimes dead, sometimes only hurt; among the victims were 3,000 Jews from Donetsk.  There is a memorial on the site and a wall with the names of 75 of the victims who were able to be identified, as the Germans used acid to destroy the bodies.  We took the car and the silence was long…

After one hour of driving, we arrived in Vonovakha and went straight to the first witness’ house, a very nice old man who invited us in out of the rain. Gregory was born in 1928 and he knew where two camps of Pow’s were located and also where the bodies were buried, next to the cemetery of the village. We spent all morning with him showing us these places.

Another witness in the afternoon confirmed the testimony of Gregory and a third witness described how the Germans killed a Jewish man using their hammers. The testimonies are powerful and outside in the street I tried to imagine how things were different in the very same place, 70 years ago. In this part of Ukraine, the sunset is around 4PM  and it was dark, very dark when we left Vonovakha and took the cars to go back to Donetsk. Another night arrives and then a new day will bring the sun again. We have to leave tomorrow morning at 7:30AM from Donetsk, another village, other witnesses, more archives to read and our hearts beat giving energy to our bodies to continue our research.

Munich was dressed in white this morning when I left the hotel to go to the airport to take my plane to Donetsk. The landscape was beautiful, but I was a little concerned about making my plane and finally join the team in Ukraine. Everything was okay, even if the plane was again almost one hour late; it finally took off and I was on my way to Donetsk. Two and a half hours later and +15°C I landed in Donetsk. After the normal passport control to get into the country, I got my luggage and I took a taxi to the hotel.

I called Geoffroy, the team leader and he told me that they were still interviewing a witness 60 kms from Donetsk and that they believed they'd get back to the hotel around 7PM.  The hotel was in the center of Donetsk so I checked into my room and waited for them.  I was surprised to see that it was 4PM and the sun was almost gone…

I was in the lobby when Denis, a young man, part of the Yahad team from Belarussia, arrived with Vassil, the driver. They were very happy to see me and Denis spoke to me about the researchers around Donetsk.  He told me that they found 4 direct witnesses of the shooting of the Jews in a small village near the city and that they were willing to talk to our team tomorrow.  He also told me that today was his 25th birthday and it was the third birthday he has celebrated with a Yahad research team in the field.  We had to have a piece of the hotel's “tiramisu.” 

10 minutes later the rest of the team arrived at the hotel and they told me over dinner about the witnesses they interviewed during the day; especially an old lady who sang the song “Lady Marlene” in German to the surprise of the whole team.  You could feel the emotions of the team after one day of research.

Tomorrow, we will leave the hotel at 8AM to meet with the 4 witnesses that Denis found today; we have to take advantage of the daylight as much as we can and we have  a lot of expectations to listen to their testimony. We also have Rabbi Mendel who has been working with Yahad for 3 years and who is arriving tonight from Strasbourg, France, and will join the team tomorrow as we continue the research in this region. The photographer works on the pictures from the day, the cameraman is loading the videos and I talk about tomorrow's plans with Micha and Svetlana, who both have been part of the Yahad team for more than 10 years. The night will be short but our motivation to continue our work is big.

Editors note: This week's Yahadblog posts are by Yahad Executive Director, Marco Gonzalez, who is part of a research team investigating the history of the Holocaust by bullets in the Donetsk, Ukraine region.

The taxi picked me up at 7AM this morning to drive me to the airport.  Lufthansa counter was not too full even if the holidays in the schools just began this weekend. The team is already in Donetsk, Ukraine, having traveled there two days ago. I received two e-mails, one from the team leader, Geoffroy, and one from Marie, a Yahad research who coordinates all research in the German archives.

My flight was supposed to leave from Paris at 8:50 a.m. with a connection in Munich to continue to Donetsk. One small problem: the plane from Paris is late! One hour and 45 minutes later the plane took off from Paris, of course, when I landed in Munich my plane to Donetsk was gone and I’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning…  I watch the snow falling… I feel cold...

I spoke by phone with Geoffroy, the team leader, and we talked about the  the field research.  The research is going well in this particular region of Ukraine. At our staff meeting in Paris, we identified several subjects that need to be taken into account during the research in the Donetsk region: The role of the Volskdeutsche in this region, the evacuation of the Jews (there is very interesting information about this subject in the Soviet archives and Paul Shapiro, from USHMM, just talked about these archives during our International Symposium last week in Baku), the Italian soldiers and the Jewish Ward prisoners.

Geoffroy, told me that the team interviewed a witness yesterday who spoke about the Italian soldiers who occupied the city and were in charge of the city until 1943.  Another witness spoke about the columns of the Ward Prisoners escorted by the Germans. Another witness, Louba, told the team how the German soldiers came to look for and to take away the Jewish families living next to her house. 

I can’t wait to join the team and be part of this investigation. Tomorrow is another day and I hope that this time my flight will not have any problem and that I’ll finally join the team in the field by the end of the afternoon.Meanwhile, I write from a hotel room in downtown Munich and I see through my window the first snow of Winter 2012 falling in the streets.

The driver was waiting for me at the lobby of the hotel at 6:30 AM.  We had to drive for more than one hour to get to the airport of Bucharest.  The night before Father Desbois, Patrice, Valy and I had a last diner together to share our feelings about the beginning of the research in the region of Petesti. The night was short and I could not sleep in the car.  My mind was still in the backyards of the houses of the witnesses, in the streets of the Roma neighborhoods, in the middle of the children, in the middle of the young Roma listening for the first time to their grandfather or their grandmother talking about the difficult years he or she lived during the deportation to Transnistria, during those difficult years where they had nothing to eat or drink, those difficult years when their life did not seem to have value, when they felt they were not part of humankind anymore.

I arrived in Paris and the outside temperature was rising the 30C almost the same when I left Bucharest, but the people were not the same, the routes were not the same and I was not the same… I came back to my normal activities in the office; some files were waiting for me to be completed before the summer vacations, some decision to take, some bills to pay, some checks to sign… Our next team is leaving next week to Ukraine in the region of Odessa. I’ll have a meeting on Monday morning to review all the details and have a last meeting with the team before their departure. They will be in Ukraine for 17 days, traveling from village to village to find the old people, those who saw how the Jews were killed, those who are going to share with us all the horrors they saw during those terrible years, those who today are talking to us for the first time and maybe for the last time, but one thing is sure:  their testimonies will stay in our memories and the memory of the next generations so that the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews and the Roma will never happen again.

 We had a meeting before leaving the hotel to decide where we were going to continue our research.  Patrice who was leading the second group of the team, told us about six Roma survivors they met the day before in the surroundings of Valcea, around 60 kms from Petesti.  We decided to go there to interview the survivors. We drove through the mountains and it made me discover another landscape of Romania, a green landscape surrounding by a two way route through the middle of the mountains. I could not avoid thinking of Guatemala, the country where I was born with its surrounding mountains and volcanos; the sky was blue just the way it is in the mountains of Guatemala. One hour and half later, we arrived at Valcea, drove 10 minutes more and we arrived at a  flat land with very original houses almost in the middle of nowhere and here we met the first survivor of the journey. She was more than 90 years old and she remembers everything as if it had happened yesterday; she told us how she was sent to Transnistria with her mother and her two sisters, she told us how her mother and her youngest sister died of hunger and how her life was difficult during the 2 years of deportation in Transnistria. The interview was almost 2 hours long and we had a lot of new details and information about the life (or how they survived) in the “lagers” where the Roms were deported.

After a brief lunch, we were ready for our second interview, a woman, a Roma survivor full of life and energy in spite of all the suffering she and her family went through during the two years of deportation. After interviewing her for more than one hour , we departed to interview two more witnesses living in the surroundings of Valcea in a neighborhood with only Roma families. All the families around wanted to come to see what “those foreigners” were going to do; they made a circle behind us and they stayed in silence listening to the testimony of Laica and then the interview of Mihai. Both survived the deportation and both shared with us their memories of this difficult part of theirs lives.

It was 7:30 PM when we finished, another journey full of emotions, full of new information… exhausted but very happy with the work done during the day, happy to know that four new Roma survivors shared their testimonies with our team and that their words will now be kept for the memory of their own people and for our own history as human beings collecting the evidence of this genocide and to teach to the new generation to avoid that it happens again. We made our way back to Petesti through the mountains of Romania…

photos: Markel Redondo / Yahad - In Unum 2012

 We had to be ready to leave at 8:30 in the morning.  We had a brief meeting and Father Desbois decided once again to divide the team into two different groups, with one team led by Patrice traveling 100 kms from Pitesti to look for witnesses.  I joined the second team who stayed in Pitesti to interview a survivor. Valy, our Roma partner started to explain to the family who we are and the reason why it is important to have the testimony of the survivor and help to save the memory for the next generation. They welcomed us in the backyard of a house not far from downtown. Ion spoke to us during almost one hour and explained us all the process of the deportation and the suffering of he and his family.  It was very emotional.  As we finished the interview, there already was another Roma lady who was waiting for our team to be interviewed in the city of Dragusani, 80 kms from Pitesti. We took the car and we drove for the next hour and a half through small villages amidst small hills. We had a brief stop to eat something and then went straight to the house of Leana. His grandchildren came with us in the car until Dragusani.  Another powerful testimony, everybody was moved when she started to cry while describing the suffering of her family during their deportation and the difficulties to find food and water.

We stopped the interview for 10 minutes to let our emotions flow out of our hearts.  Tomas, the head of the family, came at the end of the interview to say he too was willing to testify as a witness.  We turned on the camera again and another interview started. He was 15 years old when he and his family were deported to Transnistria, he remembered a lot of details and remembered hearing the cries of the Jews who were drown in the river or killed by shooting. After the interview finished, the women of the house decided to dress in their original costumes and to dance for all the other members of the family and our team. We left Dragusani at the end of the afternoon, with our hearts full of emotions. We stopped in a very small village where the local Roma population helped us to find two survivors.  We did the interviews surrounded by all of the family, more than 30 people, all ages came to listen to the testimonies, it was hard to get to the end as almost every member of the family wanted to say something in the middle, but we succeeded and at almost 8:00 pm we decided that it was time to go back to the hotel and finish editing the photos and to sleep before starting a new day.

photos: Markel Redondo / Yahad - In Unum 2012

The flight from Paris to Bucharest was 2 hours and 25 minutes.  I crossed the long main corridor at Otopeni Henri Coanda airport in Bucharest under a beautiful Summer afternoon, the temperature outside was 33°C. I took the time in the plane to read some of the information I had on my “travel file”.  I learned that most of the Roma population in Romania in May 1942 was around 41,000 and only around 9,400 were nomadic, around 25,000 were deported to Transnistria where many of them died in terrible conditions. Following my lecture in the archives, I learned that the Roma from Pitesti were the last Roma deported to Transnistria. The driver proposed to drive through the city so I can have an idea of how Bucharest, the capital of Romania look like.  As we crossed streets and big avenues, I could appreciate how people were happy taking advantage of this nice weather and I could not avoid while watching at the old buildings, to imagine the chaos in the city during the Second World Ward.

We started to drive out of Bucharest when Patrice called to say that it has been very difficult for the team to find witnesses; they split the team into two groups, one traveling with him and the second group with Father Desbois. Both groups are still far from the hotel and they don’t know what time they will return. A half hour later, Father Desbois called me and shared the difficulty of finding witnesses in this region. He told me about the interview with one of the four witnesses that they did find during the day and how she had cried at the site of the mass grave where her family had been killed. We all agreed to meet later at the hotel and to plan where to go tomorrow.  30 kms to go…  I see the sunset in the highway from Bucharest and Pitesti…  I think of the team, Patrice, Patrick, Oscar, Merkel, Valy and the others…  imagine that they are also contemplating their day as the sun sets on their way back to Pitesti.

It is going to be the first time that I’m going to Romania; in two days I’ll be joining the Yahad team in the PITESTI and ARGES regions  around 80 kms from the capital of the country, Bucharest. I know from historians' accounts that a lot of horrible things happened in this country during the Second World War with Jews, Roma and many civilians  killed or deported following the orders of the Nazis and their collaborators. We had a meeting in the office today, looking at the archives, reviewing some of the information we found in the German and Romanian archives.

Oscar, the cameraman reviewed all the equipment to be used during the research travel and, Patrice and Patrick decided where to begin our research. Sunday  morning, a new trip will start, Yahad's 12th this year. We will certainly make new discoveries. We will learn a lot of new things from the witnesses, those who survived, those who saw what happened, those who are sharing their memories with new generations so we will never forget, so that we will not build a modern society over a hidden story. We need to know as much as we can from all these people, who suffered or witnessed the suffering in the very small towns of Romania, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldavia…  all these witnesses who are keeping the history alive and who are recounting their stories to our teams…  far away… in those small villages of Eastern Europe.