“the kindly uncircumcised”

Those who survived often managed to do so by begging or trading for food with Ukrainians in nearby villages. Pesia Kolodenker told us she would occasionally sneak out of the camp in order to beg for bread and sugar from the villagers, the latishe areylem, literally the “kindly uncir­cumcised.” She would walk barefoot with rags on her feet in the freezing cold, and villagers would give her a bowl of noodles, some milk, and some clothes to wrap herself in.

Whereas some attribute the occasional willingness of neighbors to help to kindness and empathy, others emphasize the motive of greed. Certainly, everybody remembers what a bit of gold could be traded for. Those without gold, traded their skills for food: Nisen Yurkovetsky ex­plained how his uncle would give the Romanian gendarmes haircuts in return for food. Yente Kolodenker's mother was able to bribe the police with a bottle of moonshine, and traded clothing for food with the peas­ants. In her written memoirs, Manya Ganiyevva also wrote of individual acts of kindness by some peasants: “I remember one particular peasant woman who approached the stone fence of the camp in order to trade for bread.

Initially, the inmates relied upon the nearby residents of the town of Pechera for sustenance, but eventually the town residents tired of giving alms, and the inmates who managed to get out were forced to go begging in more distant villages, in Vishkivtsi and Bortnyky. Some even forged across the Southern Bug to Sokilets, where the Germans were stationed. A few former inmates spoke of escaping the camp for multiple days at a time, traveling from village to village in search of food, before return­ing to the relative safety of the camp. Donia Presler remembered once “during their Passover,” she said of Easter,

When we came to Pechera, people had already stopped giving out food, and they sent us further, so we walked further. If the herdsmen—young boys of ten years old with cows in the fields—got hold of you they would immediately kill you. It was worse being caught by them than by the police. They would cut you to pieces. So we hid behind the haystacks. When they took away the cows for the night, we showed up in the village. The older people would take pity on us. We would come and say “Christ has risen” and they would reply, “Truly, He is risen.” People would give us a piece of bread, or two potatoes, or beetroot.

Frida Pecherskaia was also able to escape the camp in search of food.

Individual Ukrainian villagers and townspeople saved Jews through­out Transnistria. Outside the barbed wire of the Tomashpil ghetto, Nisen Kiselman explained, “There were good Christians who helped us during the war. They brought us food to eat. There was a ghetto and one couldn't get out, so they would come and give food................................................................. Non-Jews passed by the

barbed wire and threw in potatoes.

In another act of humanity, Khayke Gvinter told us of one German soldier who turned his weapon on his comrade-in-arms in order to save a child: “There was a German who couldn't shoot the child. As long I live I won't forget. That's when the other German realized he could fire. He overcame him.... Yes, one [shot] the other. He said, ‘I also have a child. I can't! I can't!' There were also good ones among them.” Even in the midst of a massacre, perpetrators were capable of small acts of humanity. But far too rarely.

Others who fled the camp managed to obtain help from the Jewish communities still in the ghettos. Yosl Kogan, who spent most of the oc-

cupation in the Bershad ghetto, remembers that many people who had escaped from Pechera, sought refuge in town. Pinia Golfeld, who had been imprisoned in Pechera, told us he would walk 40 to 50 kilometers a day, from village to village in search of food.

prayed with him. Every day there was a minyan... he had a courtyard and a house and they would pray there,” he told us.

Golfeld eventually left Chechelnyk and continued to flee, relying on help from Ukrainian peasants, Romanian gendarmes, and even German soldiers. He recounted to us how he once reached a house, from which he could smell the aroma of varenikes. A Polish Catholic priest answered the door and asked if he was a Jew. When he responded truthfully, the priest chastised him for killing Jesus, but then took him in and fed him: “The priest was also a good guy,” Golfeld concluded. Later, Gol- feld made it back to Tulchyn, where he endured the rest of the occupa­tion in the ghetto. Sometime in the winter of 1942-1943, as the Battle of Stalingrad was deciding the future of the war some thousands of miles from Tulchyn, he became acquainted with a Russian-speaking German soldier who was passing through the town on his way to join the battle. The soldier gave Golfeld cookies and bread in exchange for washing his car. “Petia,” the soldier confided, using the diminutive of Golfeld's name, “I am going to Stalingrad. I will be killed there.” By this time, the war had already turned against the Germans, and the soldier knew his likely fate, as he traveled east to sacrifice himself in the battle. His kindness to the little Jewish boy may have been an early capitulation—an admission that the ideology for which he was fighting was depraved—or else it was just an all-too-rare moment of compassion.

Local Ukrainians sometimes also provided spiritual support. Yurk- ovetsky and Golfeld both remember one Christian, whom they called Misha the Russki (literally Misha Katsop), who smuggled a Torah scroll into Pechera for the Jewish inmates. Misha had lived in the Jewish quar­ter of Tulchyn prior to the war, spoke Yiddish, and was friendly with many of the Jews in the town. Yurkovetsky had been close to Misha's daughter before the war. Thanks to Misha's Torah scroll, the camp in­mates were able to pray in a part of the building they called the syna­gogue. The influx of religious Romanian refugees also contributed to a spiritual revival among the Soviet Jews, who had been more distant from organized religious life. “There were people learned in Judaism who knew all types of things,” explained Yurkovetsky, and these people would lead services in the camp.

Clearly, relations between Jews, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Ger­mans were highly complex affairs in Transnistria, where the power structure was nebulous and constantly being negotiated and revised. Survivors tell many stories of Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian peas­ants, and Jewish prisoners risking their own safety in order to protect life. That is how they survived. Those who did not survive have no such stories to tell.

We interviewed only people who chose to remain in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They likely have a greater affinity toward their Ukrainian neighbors than those who left and a more conciliatory attitude toward Ukraine than that held by many dmigrds. These indi­viduals may feel a need to justify their decision to remain in Ukraine and can do so by forgiving their neighbors for their wartime conduct, or by downplaying the callousness that surrounded them in favor of the indi­vidual acts of kindness that kept them alive. Memories and judgments of wartime conduct have been informed by half a century of postwar life.

“they came in big cars, with the iron cross”

Beginning in August 1942—once the typhus epidemic in Transnistria began to reside—the Germans started making incursions into Roma­nian-controlled Transnistria in order to seize individuals for labor.⁴⁶ A clause in the Tighina Treaty had allowed for the presence of German units on Romanian territory in order to perform special tasks. Most of those taken prisoner were put to work on the construction of the German supply thoroughfare that was being built to traverse Ukraine, particularly on the segment of the road between Haysyn and Nemyriv. In total, about 15,000 Jews were deported from Transnistria into Reichs- kommissariat Ukraine between spring 1942 and early 1944, at least 4,800 of whom came from the Tulchyn district.⁴⁷ In Bershad, the Gestapo, which had established a unit in the city in the spring of 1943, took about 1,200 residents into the Reichskommissariat for work, where most per­ished?⁸ In the Reichskommissariat, the Germans worked the prisoners to death on starvation rations, or shot them when they became too sick to continue laboring. In a final statement, toward the end of the occu­pation as the Red Army approached, the retreating Germans murdered many of those Jews who had survived the labor brigades and remained relatively strong.

About 2,500 prisoners from Pechera were seized for work in the Reichskommissariat. Pinia Golfeld remembered:

In Pechera, the Germans would come and take people to work. Big cars came with the iron cross, with SS officers, and they would take women to work, men and women.... There were some mothers who had little children in their arms. They would rip the child from the mother's arms and throw it against a tree. They killed the child, and threw her [the mother] into the car and took her to work somewhere. She was taken to work, moving stones to build a road for the Germans.

Presler remembered how the Germans would conduct a selection, separating the healthy from the elderly and sick:

Suddenly we see, the gate is opening, and a bunch of cars with SS of­ficers wearing those emblems drive in. And they force us all out of the camp. Anybody who could make it got out; those who couldn't—the elderly—were immediately shot. There was such a shooting.... They forced everyone out of the camp. And there were large cars, and they set up a table with Germans on one side and Germans on the other. And we had to go in the path between them. The young and healthy were taken into the cars. The sick were thrown off to the other side.

According to several testimonies, the Romanian gendarmes guard­ing the camp sometimes sought to protect the inmates or at least the most vulnerable among them. Presler recalled one episode in which the Germans arrived in Pechera and started loading their trucks with pris­oners: “Just then a Romanian brigade arrived.... The Romanians stood there with rifles and wouldn't let the German cars drive out. There was a

Romanian commandant with us, but the chief prefect was in Tulchyn. A bunch of Romanians came from Tulchyn. They began to talk, they began to fight. And the Germans drove out and left us behind.”