10: Hitler Moves East

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the mass murder of Jews began within a few days, on a scale hitherto unknown. Before June 1941, the Jews under Nazi rule had been subjected to persecution, humiliation, expulsion and random killing. In June 1941, began the deliberate attempt to destroy all Jewish lives over a vast region of Europe.

In the immediate wake of the victorious German Army came the Einsatzgruppen. Within twelve months, more than one million Jews had been murdered east of the September 1939 border of Greater Germany. Most were driven from their homes, forced at gunpoint to pits and ravines a few miles away, ordered to undress and then shot. No mercy was shown.

The Germans understood the complex make-up of the regions through which they advanced. They knew of and exploited the historic tensions between Christianity and Judaism, and between the local people and the Jews. As a result, they were able to call on Lithuanian, Latvian, Belorussian and Ukrainian volunteers to participate in mass murder. In some instances, especially in Lithuania, local gangs took the initiative in seeking out and killing Jews, even before the German Army and killing squads arrived.

Almost every town that the Wehrmacht conquered during the invasion of the Soviet Union, especially in the first months, had a substantial Jewish population. In every city, town and village the Jewish inhabitants were subjected to the same process: the initial slaughter of those seized at random on the streets or arrested because they were leaders in the community; the creation of ghettos strictly sealed off from the outside world and subjected like the ghettos in German-occupied Poland to repeated raids and increasing starvation; and then the deportation of almost all the remaining community to mass murder sites -- deep ravines or specially dug pits -- a few miles outside the town.

The names of these mass murder sites quickly became synonymous with brutality. One of them, Ponar, in a wooded area outside Vilna, had been a popular picnic resort for Vilna's Jews between the two world wars. It became a site of mass murder, the scene of cruel and relentless destruction.

Brest-Litvosk had been a part of Poland between the wars, and in June 1941, it was the first city to be overrun by the Germans. Jews were half the town's population: 21,519 in 1936, joined by as many as five thousand refugees who had managed to escape in 1939 from German-occupied Poland. The Jews of Brest followed many trades -- carpenters, joiners, house painters, tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths and taxi drivers. There were Jewish lawyers and doctors, merchants and factory owners. The city had seen five hundred years of Jewish life. A Jewish hospital was built in 1838, a home for Jewish widows in 1866.

When the Germans attacked Brest on June 22, 1941, the Russian commander of the Fortress was on holiday, so the defense was taken over by a Jewish officer, Yefim Moiseyevich Fomin. Wounded and suffering from shell-shock, he was taken prisoner. Denounced to the new German occupiers by a local informer as both a Communist Commissar and a Jew, he was executed.

The fate of the Jews of Brest was like the Jews of every town in the area of the German advance. In the first days individual Jews were shot at random on the streets, then, in the first week of July, two hundred Jewish men were seized on the streets, imprisoned in the Fortress, tortured, refused water or medical treatment, and then shot. Only one managed to escape.

On July 10, the first large-scale "action" (round-up) took place. More than 6,000 -- mostly professionals and their families -- were seized and taken to a hilly area outside the town, where twelve large pits had been dug. There they were ordered to give up their luggage -- they had been told that they were being "resettled" in another town -- before being forced to undress. Then they were shot. Among those murdered were seven physicians, a neurologist, an economist, a women therapist and a woman electrical engineer.

In the autumn of 1941, a ghetto was established for the remaining 20,000 Jews of Brest. Almost all of them were deported by train in October and November 1942, to a mass execution site at Bronna Gora, seventy-five miles away, on the railway line from Brest to Minsk. A few managed to escape and join the partisans, but fewer than 200 of the Jews who were in Brest when the Germans attacked survived the war.

As noted, the fate of the Jews of Brest-Litovsk was to be the fate of the Jews of every city, town and village in the area conquered by the German Army after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen continued from the end of June 1941 until the end of the year, and then into 1942 and 1943. One by one the communities that had survived the seventeenth century Chimlecki massacres, the nineteenth and early twentieth century Tsarist pogroms, the privations of the First World War, and the civil war and famine that followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, were each wiped out.

In Kishinev, where forty-nine Jews were killed in the pogrom in 1903 that shocked the Western world, more than 24,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. In Odessa, where three hundred had been killed in a pogrom in 1907, more than 19,000 were killed between January 12 and February 23, 1942. In Kamenets-Podolsk, 14,000 Jews who had been deported from Ruthenia -- which had been occupied by Hungary in 1940 -- were shot down in cold blood. Everywhere, the scale of the killing was unprecedented.

A three-day orgy of killing took place in the ravine of Babi Yar outside the city of Kiev in September 1941. In those three days, 33,771 Jews were killed, the numbers recorded later by the Germans when they ordered Jewish slave laborers to dig up the bodies and burn them to erase the evidence of the crime. After that, only ash and ground-up bones remained. A further 8,000 Kiev Jews who had been discovered in hiding, or who had been kept as slave laborers, were killed in Babi Yar in January 1942.

The name Babi Yar became synonymous with sudden, vast slaughter. Men, women and children were taken in groups to the ravine, ordered undress and then shot. In Minsk, in the Ratomskaya street ravine, 12,000 Jews were shot down in November 1941. A further 25,000 followed in July 1942, 1,500 in February 1943, and 2,000 in October 1943. In Kharkov, more than 40,000 Jews were killed in Drobitsky Yar.

The killing went on and on and on. Seven thousand in Vitebsk, 2,000 in Yessentuki, 1,800 in Kislovodsk, 300 in Piatygorsk. In the Crimea -- where as well as Jews living in the towns, there were eighty-six Jewish agricultural settlements, dating back to the early 1920s -- a total of 91,678 Jews were killed between Janurary and April 1942. The number was carefully recorded by the killers of Einsatzgruppe D, who listed men, women and children in separate columns in their report.

The scale of the killings was copiously documented. When, in 1943, Jewish slave laborers were forced to dig up the corpses at Ponar outside Vilna, 58,000 bodies were uncovered. However much the mind may tire at such statistics, or simply fail -- for the sake of sanity -- to grasp their enormity, they represent real people, people who had committed no crime, people who, in their hundreds of thousands, had not yet reached an age when they could savor life to its fullest, had not yet had time to add to the sum total of human endeavor and achievement, to marry, to have children of their own, and to see the growth of succeeding generations.

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Ten days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had summoned the Rumanian dictator, General Ion Antonescu, to Berlin, and explained to him the imminent destruction of the "Jews of the east." Rumanian troops were active alongside the Germans during the advance into Bessarabia and Bukovina. Rumanian gendarmes and soldiers rounded up Jews, imprisoned them and carried out mass executions in which 160,000 Jews were killed. Antonsecu then ordered the eastward expulsion of the 150,000 Jews who remained.

As they were driven eastward into Transnistra and northward into Podolia, tens of thousands were killed, either shot by Rumanian guards, or dying of thirst, disease, ill-treatment and exhaustion. In all, 90,000 of those deported died. In Transnistra and Podolia they were put into concentration camps under SS control. Within Rumanian soldiers and gendarmes joined the Germans in killing Ukrainian Jews.

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In the wake of the German armies, whole communities of Polish and Russian Jews were wiped out by the journeymen killers of the SS Einsatzgruppen. In most of the massacres, the procedure was the same. The Jews were marched to a remote execution site. There they were ordered to undress; they did not understand why, but it was partly to facilitate the searching and salvaging of their clothes, and partly because naked people rarely resisted.

"Our father did not want to undress," said Rivka Yosselevscka, who survived a massacre of Russian Jews at Zagrodski in spite of a bullet wound in her head. "He did not want to stand naked. They tore the clothing off the old man and he was shot."

Immobilized by horror, Rivka watched as her mother was shot. Then her 80-year-old grandmother was shot along with the two children she held. "And then there was my father's sister. She also had children in her arms, and she was shot on the spot, with babies in her arms."

Rivka's younger sister was the next to die. "She went up to the Germans with one of her friends -- they were embracing each other -- and she asked to be spared, standing there naked. A German looked into her eyes and shot the two of them."

The Germans then shot Rivka's second sister, and finally it was Rivka's turn. "I felt the German take the child from my arms. The child cried out and was shot immediately. And then he aimed at me. He aimed the revolver at me and ordered me to watch and then turned my head around and shot me. Then I fell to the ground into the pit amongst the bodies."

After the Germans left, "I rose, and with my last strength I came up on top of the grave, and when I did, I did not know the place, so many bodies were lying all over. Not all of them dead, but in their last sufferings; naked; shot, but not dead."