BUT THE FRONT CAME A LITTLE CLOSER, SO THE GERMANS DIDN’T SUCCEED”

In early 1944, as the war began to turn in the east and the Red Army slowly rolled westward, liberating eastern Ukraine from occupation, the Romanians retreated from Vinnytsya Province, and the Germans retook control.

Presler told us that during the final days of the occupation in Pech- era, SS officers forced all of the camp’s inmates inside the sanatorium building, and prohibited them from looking out the window or going toward the door on pain of death. She remembered hearing the Red Army airplanes flying overhead and worrying that the planes would bypass the camp, not realizing that it held prisoners. She told us that a Romanian Jewish inmate who was locked in the camp with them was able to convince a guard to undo the chains that locked the door. When the chains came off, all the prisoners went running out, dodging the sol­diers’ bullets. She hid underground where the water pipes were located, and waited for several days with some other prisoners. After a couple of days, a little boy who was hiding with them could no longer withstand the claustrophobia, and emerged from their hiding spot. When he sur­faced, he saw that the camp had been abandoned except for some Red Army soldiers wandering about. The remaining prisoners emerged from their hiding spots, liberated as “living corpses.” The soldiers brought them cookies and kasha.

In many towns, the Germans sought to destroy any evidence of their atrocities before retreating: the most obvious evidence was the testi­mony of survivors. In Tulchyn, as the Red Army approached in late January 1944, German soldiers surrounded the ghetto with the inten­tion of executing the few remaining Jewish artisans.

Anna Tkach, who we interviewed in Yampil, told us that in 1944 the Red Army arrived at Chernivtsi, a town in southern Vinnytsya Prov­ince, across a bridge over the River Murafa from the villages of Moyivka and Babchyntsy. She remembered how the Soviet soldiers took revenge on one particular individual who had worked as an informant for the Germans. He had used the little Yiddish he knew and his connections with the Jewish community from before the war to gather information on Jewish resistance and pass it on to the German occupiers: “When the tanks came into Chernivtsi—I remember it was a Friday—he went running out with a bouquet to meet our soldiers, but they shot him im­mediately and threw him into the river.” They knew, she explained, that he had been an informant.

The Germans returned to Bershad after the Romanians fled. Elizaveta Bershadskaia told us, “Before ours entered, the Germans were here and killed so many Jews they were here about a week and carried out

a pogrom.” Just before the Red Army arrived, the Germans captured a Jew who had been working for the underground assisting the partisans. Under torture, he revealed where a bottle had been hidden containing a list of the names of those who were active in the underground. The Germans gathered all those on the list together with their families and executed them in early February 1944.⁵⁰ As the Red Army grew closer, the Germans carried out additional massacres: among those executed were Eli Marchak, the shoykhet, as well Gedalya—who held the Torah in Kogan's song—and other members of the Jewish communal leadership.

Bershadskaia remembered how the Red Army—“ours”—arrived in Bershad: “The tanks came in—the tanks were already on the road—and everyone went running into the streets to meet them They were still bombing us, planes were flying.” When Red Army soldiers liberated Bershad on March 14, 1944, they found approximately ten thousand people in the ghetto?¹

The final bombings and destruction that characterized the last days of the war destroyed much of the infrastructure that had managed to survive the years of occupation. The shtetls that were liberated by the Soviet army were very different from those they had left thirty-two months before: factories had been evacuated or destroyed, houses had been leveled by bombs, electrical networks had been disrupted, and power plants had been demolished. Most importantly, the population had been transformed: what had once been largely Jewish shtetls were now mostly Ukrainian villages.

The worst of the atrocities were over, but the people of the occupied territories—Jews and non-Jews alike—still had a momentous struggle ahead of them. The surviving Jews would begin a process of bereavement that continues to this day. But it was not just the Jews of the shtetl who had suffered during the occupation. Christians and Jews alike shared in the experience of destruction, and would have to work together to rebuild. Jewish residents would have to continue to live with the knowl­edge that many of their Ukrainian neighbors had stood by and allowed the Jews to be murdered, or had even actively participated in the kill­ing.

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In many of the lands on which the atrocities themselves were com­mitted, the Holocaust as an entity distinct from the war in which it took place is hardly recognized. Yiddish-speaking Jews in the small towns of Ukraine don't even have a word with which to express the common fate of Jews during the war. When discussing their lives under German occupation, those we have interviewed speak of di shlekhte, the bad times, or simply, di milkhome, the war. When they speak of massacres and atrocities, they call them pogroms, invoking the Russian term for “riot” that had been used to describe anti-Jewish violence in that part of Europe for hundreds of years. The violence they lived through, therefore, is terminologically equated with the same type of violence that their parents and grandparents had survived. The absence of a word to denote collectively the atrocities experienced by Jews during the war is not sim­ply a semantic idiosyncrasy, but is rather part of a broader aspect of how the war is remembered by Jews in the shtetls of the former Soviet Union.

Many elderly Jews in small-town Ukraine, who have not been exposed to the postwar explosion of Holocaust representations in the West or to the more recent rediscovery of the Holocaust among young students and survivors in the larger cities of Eastern Europe, view themselves primarily as survivors—or even victors—of the “Great Patriotic War.” For much of the postwar Soviet generation, the Second World War was marked in very specific ways, what historian Nina Tumarkin has called “nothing less than a full-blown cult.”⁵² But the cult of the Great Patriotic War was radically different than remembrance of the Second World War outside of the Soviet Union, as evidenced not least by the specific names ascribed to the war.

In the years that followed the war, any attempt to highlight the suffer­ing of one particular ethnic group over another was branded as national chauvinism, a crime that could result in imprisonment, exile to Siberia, or even a death sentence.⁵³ Thus, despite the fact that in most of the Soviet Union the Holocaust took place in plain sight, memory of the event has only recently become a part of public discourse. Behind the Iron Curtain, few had access to the standard narrative of the Holocaust that so permeates Israeli, Western European, and American culture; books, poems, and films that dealt with the war were sanitized of the unique Jewish experience. Remembrance was often restricted to the private domain. In some towns, like Tulchyn, groups of Jewish survivors would meet, share their experiences, and bond over their common fate. In other towns, like Korsun-Shevchenkivskyy, the director of the Jew­ish community told us that it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that a group of Jews met to plan a memorial museum and realized that it was the first time they had been in a room together since before the war. The lack of a public discourse about the fate of Jews meant that there was a great deal of regional variation in modes of remembrance. Many of those residing in provincial small towns do not embed their stories of survival within the context of the Holocaust, but rather Soviet survivors can integrate their memories into the wider Soviet narrative of “The Great Patriotic War.”