TRANSNISTRIA

An American immigrant originally from Tulchyn, Manya Ganiyevva, wrote down her recollection of her wartime experiences in Transnistria and deposited that memoir through the Jewish Family Service of Cin­cinnati with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash­ington, D.C.

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to compare their own fates with those from other regions. They come to understand their wartime memories in relation to a prevailing narra­tive of the Holocaust. They become aware that their own experiences in Transnistria do not fit comfortably into the Holocaust as it is commonly understood in the West. In the previous chapter I noted that many of the most recognized symbols of Holocaust experiences were largely absent from the Soviet experience. Instead, Soviet Jewish victims of the Holo­caust tended to be killed closer to home, in ravines and cemeteries on the outskirts of their towns. However, the experiences of the local Jews in Transnistria also do not fit this model.

Second World War Transnistria—not to be confused with the current breakaway republic of contemporary Moldova—was established on Au­gust 19, 1941 when German military officials ceded the area between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers to Romania in return for Romania's continued cooperation in Operation Barbarossa.² This territory had no political history as a united region and was a completely arbitrary cre­ation. Some 300,000 Jews lived in the region that became Transnistria before the war, 180,000 of whom lived in Odessa, the only major me­tropolis.³ The rest of the Jewish population was scattered across various towns and villages in what had been the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the southern portions of Vinnytsya Province. The largest of these towns—among them Tiraspol, Dubosar, Mohyliv- Podilskyy, Zhmerynka, Balta, and Ribnitsa—had Jewish populations of 3,000-7,000, and total populations of 10,000-30,000. The region also included numerous smaller shtetls, including Tulchyn, Sharhorod, To- mashpil, and Kopayhorod, each of which had prewar Jewish populations of 2,000-5,000, and in which Jews often constituted up to three-quarters of the total population of the town.

The Romanian authorities who seized control of Transnistria hoped to use it as a dumping ground for the Jews they were expelling from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina—the provinces that Romania had acquired from Russia and Austria in the aftermath of the First World War, which were then seized by the Soviet Union in 1940 before being recaptured by Romania the following year. Romanian authorities sought to expel the Jews ostensibly in retaliation for the alleged Jewish support of the Soviet occupation. In reality, the Jews were victims of an extensive Romanian ethnic purification campaign.

Tulchyn, though, had a prewar Jewish population of 5,600 and a post­war 1959 Jewish population of about 2,500.

the Jewish population perishing, mostly of starvation or typhus. But the discrepancy between the death rates in these towns and those in German-occupied territory across the Southern Bug are noteworthy, particularly since the border was arbitrarily drawn; it had never before served as a political boundary, and did not mark any significant cultural, demographic, or historical division. Yet the fate of those on either side was drastically different. In Nemyriv, for instance, the Jewish commu­nity ceased to exist in any meaningful way after the war. Yet Bratslav, a mere 20 kilometers across the river, retained a functioning Jewish community for decades.

“but our soldiers were poor folk”

By the time the Germans arrived in Tulchyn on July 23, 1941, most of the able-bodied men had been drafted into the Red Army. It was a city of mostly women, children, and the elderly. The military and technologi­cal superiority of the Germans was instantaneously apparent. As Yente Kolodenker told us, “They were all on motorcycles and with cars, but our soldiers were poor folk, poverty-stricken. And they were rich.” This same theme was repeated by many others, including Manya Ganiyevva, who spent the first few weeks of the war fleeing from town to town, traveling eastward almost to Kirovohrad, before deciding it would be safest to return to Tulchyn. She writes, “Not a single German soldier was going on foot. They all traveled in cars and motorcycles, some on bikes. But our soldiers retreated by foot, worn out, dirty, injured with filthy carts.”⁷ Numerous people remember the German trucks, which contrasted sharply with the horse-drawn carts that locals still com­monly used for transportation in the district.

The first thing Pinia Golfeld remembered the Germans doing in Tulchyn was marking each of the Jewish houses with a Jewish star: “They would mark it with a Jewish Star of David and then go on to the next one.” Many recall the chaos and lawlessness during the first month of joint German and Romanian occupation of the city. But unlike the situ­ation in most towns on the other side of the Bug, there were no mass killings of the civilian Jewish population in Tulchyn during this period.

For those who remained in Tulchyn, the first month of the war was a time of great confusion. One witness writes: “The Red Army retreated.

Before the entrance of the Germans, the residents began to rob stores and Jewish homes. They dragged their things and food in bags. The roads were clogged with refugees. Few succeeded in evacuating. They believed the propaganda that the war would last for a month or two. Many could not leave behind their ailing elders. They evacuated with carts, behind which the elderly, women and children walked. Planes bombed col­umns of refugees.”⁸ Manya Ganiyevva writes that she headed toward the train station in Zhuravlivka, about 15 kilometers from Tulchyn, but seeing that it was clogged with soldiers, and after hearing warnings that other stations were also closed, she returned to Tulchyn. All the roads were clogged with refugees and carts, everybody fleeing in all direc­tions. At one point, she made it as far as Demkovka station, where the situation was chaotic: “It was impossible to obtain tickets for the train. Whoever was alone, without children, without luggage would jump up onto the foot of the train and squeeze into the vestibule. And those who remained, among them our family, could not get on the train. In the station, there was a din, shouting, children crying. The radio announced that everybody needs to leave the station in order not to be killed because this type of place was often bombed.”⁹

“every day we waited to die”

Bershad fell to the Germans on July 29, 1941.

We didn't manage to evacuate ourselves, so we lived under occupation. And every day we waited to die. They were supposed to send us out some­where. It says in the Bible: “We are witnesses because we survived.”¹⁰ We look heavenwards and must say “Thank God.” We need to tell the youngsters how they tortured the Jews. Well, we wanted to evacuate ourselves, but they didn't allow it anymore. They came in right away. Before anything else could happen, they bombed Bershad. They threw two bombs next to the bridge.... I ran into a grocery store. They dropped a bomb on a Jewish house and the house burned down all the way to its roof.

Khayke Gvinter told us it was her house that was first bombed in Ber- shad, although she had fled the city by that time: “The first bomb fell on our house There was a big square there. It was such a nice house with a fence and trees.... When we returned, it was just a pit. We took what we could out of the house.” Another time she told us, “I remember the war well, how the bombs were flying. We evacuated, and then the Germans were here. When we returned, our home was no longer there. It had been a beautiful house. People thought of it as a palace.” Gvinter spent much of the next twenty years living in the basement of the syna­gogue, a space that had been utilized over the years by the forlorn and the homeless.

As soon as the Germans took over Bershad, they prohibited Jews from having contact with Christians, ordered the Jewish community to elect a council that was responsible for collecting valuables to be turned over to the Germans, and organized labor brigades. The kosher butcher, Eli Marchak, who had hosted the clandestine Breslov Hasidic group before the war, became the leader of the Jewish community and later of the ghetto. All Jews were required to wear a white Star of David badge on their chests and back.¹¹

In nearby Tomashpil, German soldiers rounded up and murdered about 150 Jews when they first came into the city. Klara Sapozhnik was living in the nearby Gigant kolkhoz. During the first days of August, the Germans gathered all of the Jews from Tomashpil and the surrounding villages, including Gigant, together into two streets that were designated as the ghetto. Sapozhnik explained that a group of Ukrainians were taken to the outskirts of town, by the Polish cemetery, to dig several large pits. Several days later, she saw Romanian gendarmes and German soldiers start taking groups of Jews outside of the town to the cemetery, where they were executed. “The Germans came in and immediately, on the 4th of August, they started to execute them.” Nisen Kiselman, who we interviewed in 2009, managed to flee the killing, but not before the Germans took his mother and sister. He recalled that “the Germans invaded Tomashpil in August 1941. They gathered 250 people and killed them. My mother was also in this pack and my sister was in that pack. And they took them all and killed them. I barely escaped.’⁴² He later explained that “the German thought that I was a non-Jewish boy, a Ukrainian boy,” as a result of which he was able to evade the massacre.

The Germans remained in the town for eight days before Romanian gendarmes moved in to take over control. When the Germans left, Kisel- man told us how the surviving Jews buried the bodies of those who had been massacred. He sifted through the corpses in the hopes of finding the bodies of his mother and sister, but the bodies were already decom­posing in the hot humid summer heat and were recognizable only from the clothing: “And then, as soon as the Germans left that ravine, they collected all the old Jews. They carried the people [corpses] to the field and lay them all down. People looked for their parents. I recognized my mother. I couldn't find my sister. I don't know why. I couldn't recognize her clothes. I remembered what my mother was wearing.” As a result, he told us, “Leyke is buried in the mass grave, but I buried my mother sepa­rately.” Sapozhnik, who attributed the murder to the Romanians rather than the Germans who, she told us, only moved in later, also described how she went to the site of the mass grave a few days after the massacre. She took with her a child whose parents and siblings had been murdered in order to help him identify his family from among the corpses. In her interview with the Shoah Foundation, she described how “the ground moved for three days, spouting a fountain of blood.”

There are differing recollections and inconsistencies on some specifics of the massacre: the exact day on which it occurred, whether Roma­nian gendarmes took part in addition to the Germans who directed it, and how long it took before the survivors were able to bury the dead. Sometimes the same informant gave varying details during different interviews, or even in the same interview. In Tomashpil today, where there is a small Jewish community without a strong leader, narratives have not been standardized, and recollections are fluid, subject to the fluctuations and vicissitudes of human memory—the dates and details of this massacre have yet to become ingrained in the town's collective history, but the general contours of that terrible day remain etched in the minds of those who witnessed it.

Tomashpil was not an isolated incident. Although the pace and death toll of massacres south of the Southern Bug was not as great as that on the northern shores, there were still many innocent victims of German atrocities. On Saturday, July 19th, in Ozaryntsi, Germans on motorcycles gathered all the Jews in the old synagogue and selected forty-three men whom they executed in a field near the town. Romanian soldiers killed another twenty-eight Jews in the town the next Saturday. German se­curity police executed fourteen Jews in Kryzhopil on July 22nd and Sonderkommando 10a executed ten Jews in Pishchanka on August 3rd.

Between July 24th and July 27th, German and Romanian soldiers exe­cuted and drowned twenty-five Jews in Chernivtsi (Vinnytsya Province). The largest single recorded massacre in the part of Vinnytsya Province that became Transnistria took place between July 27 and July 29, when German and Romanian soldiers killed 435 Jews in Zhabokrich, a small village near Kryzhopil with a prewar Jewish population of around seven hundred.¹³

Yosl Kogan's wife was one of the few survivors of the Zhabokrich mas­sacre. We have interviewed Yosl Kogan on many occasions over nearly a decade, but his wife finds the experience too painful to talk about directly. She has on occasion sat in on our interviews, but she cannot bring herself to speak of the horrors she endured. When we first met the couple, Yosl summarized his wife's experience for us, while she sat beside him nodding assent and groaning in anguish: “She was born in Zhabokrich.... In Zhabokrich they gathered the Jews together in five cellars and they massacred the entire city. And nobody has documented it.... They rounded up all the Jews and forced them into cellars. And she was the only one who survived from her cellar.” “It's a major story and nobody is documenting it,” he lamented. Indeed, the scale of murder and the number of individual acts of atrocities is so large that it is difficult to account for each one.

After the conquest of the area, the Germans immediately moved on, eastward across the Southern Bug River, leaving Romanian gendarmes and local police to guard the west bank, while the Germans themselves guarded the east bank. Manya Ganiyevva, upon returning from German territory to Tulchyn, wrote of her encounter with a German soldier on the river embankment: “In Ladyzhyn, on the bridge over the Bug, there was already a guard. A single German was standing with an automatic gun, and a policeman. They wouldn't allow anybody to cross the Bug.” But when the German came to understand that they were from Tulchyn, he allowed them to pass “The German was not a member of the SS, and didn't look at our passports.’⁴⁴

Once Romanian authorities took control of the territory they estab­lished ghettos in each town, to which Jewish residence was restricted. In Romanian terminology, the space of Jewish residence was called a “colony,” whether it was located within a distinct quarter of a city, as in a ghetto, or outside the city, as in a camp. As a result, residents today often conflate the terms ghetto and camp, making little distinction be­tween the two spaces of forced Jewish concentration. The fact that no towns in Ukraine had ever before had areas to which Jewish residence was restricted—in contrast to Central European towns, for instance, which had had ghettos in the medieval and early modern periods—also render the terminology of ghetto problematic.¹⁵ Romanian authorities established about two hundred of these concentration points, most of them with only a few dozen residents, throughout Transnistria. Of the fifty-three ghettos in Mohyliv district, for instance, twenty-six had fewer than one hundred and fifty people in them, and only two imprisoned more than one thousand people?⁶ The first ghetto to be set up in the region was probably in Mohyliv-Podilskyy, which was established on August 15th, and held 3,733 local Jews as well as another 15,000 from Bukovina and Bessarabia in December 1941?⁷

According to documentation from the Odessa State Archive, a formal order to establish a ghetto in Tulchyn was issued on September 22, 1941J^s and the ghetto was established on October 1st, which corresponded to Yom Kippur in the Jewish calendar?⁹ In accordance with the general order for the Jews of Romania issued on September 3rd, all Jews were required to wear a black circle with a yellow star on their chests. Sasha Kolodenker recalled the construction of the Tulchyn ghetto: “They drove everybody out of their houses, destroyed the houses, and threw every­body into the ghetto. They stuck them there, surrounded by a fence.” Yente Kolodenker added that when the Jews left their homes and moved into the area of the ghetto, non-Jews would tear apart the wood of the abandoned Jewish homes and use it for firewood. Her own house, she told us, was used for kindling. Klara Katsman of Tulchyn now lives across the street from her former house: “When they set up the ghetto, goyim immediately destroyed our house. Immediately.”

The Romanian gendarmes instructed the Jews to assemble in the town square, and allocated them a segment of “Beggars' street” in what had been a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city. Barbed wire was strung around the area. The Romanian authorities established a Jewish com­munal authority and appointed some of the wealthier members of the community to lead it. All able-bodied workers were required to report to the Jewish community office by the bus station every morning for work, which usually entailed cleaning the streets or clearing rubble from the German bombs.

In Tomashpil, Romanian gendarmes established a ghetto by string­ing barbed wire around two streets and ordering the Jews to stay within the confines of the wire. Those, like Dora Guzman, who already lived within the cordoned-off area were able to stay in their own homes, and thus had access to some familiar comforts. Nisen Kiselman explained: “They drove out all the Jews from every street and made one single street. They spanned it with barbed wire.” Romanian gendarmes and Ukrai­nian policemen guarded the street. Jews from the neighboring collective farm Gigant were also brought into the ghetto and forced to find shelter for themselves among the other residents. “Wherever you were able to sleep you slept, in a basement, on an oven. We suffered such torture,” continued Kiselman. Within the ghetto, starvation was a constant threat and conditions were exceedingly difficult. Kiselmans wife filled in some details as Kiselman nodded along: “They sewed pants out of bags. That's what they wore. They didn't have anything to heat, but there was a sugar factory, where they discarded the coals. They would go up the hill, rags wrapped around their feet, and collect coal for themselves. And they heated the oven.” Ghetto life in Tomashpil was characterized by slow suffering. When we asked Manya Gingold, who was born in Tomashpil in 1927, if people went into the synagogue or observed any holidays in the ghetto—Passover or Rosh Hashanah—she shook her head and replied, “If you went in there, they would beat you and kill you. They would take you to work... paving, clearing snow.”

The establishment of the Bershad ghetto followed a similar pattern, but in contrast to the Tomashpil ghetto, which held mostly locals, the Bershad ghetto would become a major congregation point for Jewish refugees from Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia. The ghetto was es­tablished in September 1941 when Romanian gendarmes prohibited the Jews from leaving the ghetto district on pain of death, and ordered them to wear a Star of David on their chest and back as well as a white band on their arm.

The lack of a physical barrier in ghettos like Tulchyn and Bershad, or the semi-porous barriers of barbed wire that surrounded the Tomashpil ghetto, allowed for continued interaction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish world throughout the war. Although Jews were prohibited from leaving the ghetto except for work, those inside could receive as­sistance from non-Jews outside the ghetto, or could trade what little they had for food. Dora Guzman explained, “If you had to go out to buy things, you couldn't. It was difficult enough already, and you couldn't even go out anywhere. It was good that we had Christian acquaintances, who would come and bring us milk or potatoes. Such wonderful people.” Most surviving Jews therefore were never wholly cut off from the sur­rounding communities; at most, they were sealed behind barbed wire rather than concrete walls. The world outside was still visible to the ghetto inmates, and those outside could still see in. This arrangement facilitated some empathy from those on the other side, who remained in regular contact with their imprisoned former neighbors. Residents of the ghettos also worked alongside Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war, suspected communists, and other prisoners as slaves in the massive labor projects the Germans undertook.

“and then refugees started to come in”

During the fall of 1941, large convoys of deported Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were being relocated into several towns selected to receive the deportees, including Mohyliv-Podilskyy, Sharhorod, and Bershad. The influx of tens of thousands of individuals from Romania into the already congested ghettos led to massive overcrowding: by late 1941, the population of Mohyliv-Podilskyy swelled to 19,000, Shagorod to 7,000, and Bershad to more than 25,000.²⁰ Khayke Gvinter remembered: “And then refugees started to come in.... There were ones from Edinet, Chernivtsi, Moldova, Mohyliv-Podilskyy, and from other districts. So many people.” Yosl Kogan remembered how his mother fed the Bessara­bian and Bukovinian Jews with soup. Many of the Romanian Jews who were herded into the ghettos arrived already sick and tired after endur­ing forced marches across the Dniester River, and living in stables and other temporary dwellings along the way.

The refugees, who tended to come from wealthier and more urban communities than those of Vinnytsya Province, brought with them valuables and money they had managed to salvage when they were forced out of their homes. Many of those without material assets came with spiritual sustenance—a resilient faith in God and intimate familiarity with religious ritual. In her interview with the Shoah Foundation, Clara Grinberg of Chechelnyk told of religious life in the Chechelnyk ghetto under the Romanians. Speaking in broken English, she explained, “The people who came from Moldovia. They was religious. They make in a small house like a synagogue. And it was when the holidays we went all to these people, they pray and it was out and see and hear what they did.”²¹ The revival of spiritual life helped sustain some whose faith had been repressed by twenty years of Soviet rule.

In Bershad, the Romanian gendarme Lieutenant Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu protected the Jews in the ghetto from excessive violence and allowed for the functioning of a market in the ghetto, at least until his dismissal in August 1942. Yosl Kogan remembered that when the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina came into Bershad, they set up a piata, a square in the town next to the well, where they sold bread and other food. Bershadskaia also recalled: “There was nothing to eat. There was a Jewish bazaar in which you could buy a potato pancake [totch]. Jews would go around and sell a hot polenta from cornmeal. And that's how they earned a kopek. My father worked for the proprietor of the house we lived in and Benchik [her younger brother] sold the wood; they would chop the wood, and he would sell it in the marketplace. They would sell it for a few kopeks.” Gvinter told us, “I gathered potatoes under the Ro­manians. I dressed like a non-Jew and I would sell them there in the Jew­ish market. And that's how I lived.” After Petrescu's dismissal, the new gendarmerie further restricted the importation of food into the ghetto. By 1943, nevertheless, some semblance of institutional functionality had been achieved in the Bershad ghetto with the establishment of a hospital, an orphanage, and schools, much of which was made possible with the assistance of aid from the Jewish community of Bucharest^

“homeward, brothers, homeward”

Yosl Kogan styled himself as a type of bard of the Bershad ghetto. He recorded his experiences in the Bershad ghetto in the songs he wrote during and immediately after the war. He explained to us once that he wrote poetry both as a protest and as a mnemonic device to preserve the memory of what happened in the ghetto during those terrible years: “I wrote the first song because I was afraid that they would kill me. Someone would find a Jew and would go around telling people that he wrote Yiddish songs against Hitler.” He had notebooks full of poetry that he kept by his bed and recited to us whenever we visited. He told us that he wrote the poems during the occupation and kept the books hidden until the town's liberation. Most of the pieces in his notebook were songs circulating in the region that he had copied down, but a few were compositions he had created, often by stringing together stanzas and phrases he had picked up from other sources. He told us that after the war, he stopped writing his own pieces. When he sung the songs for the Bukovinian Jews who remained after the war, he continued, they all applauded, chanting his name and honoring him. These versified memo­ries draw motifs from other poems and well-known songs, which Kogan adapted to the circumstances of the Bershad ghetto, freely combining tunes and stanzas to create poetic tributes and memorials. Most of Ko­gan's poetry—written in conditions of unimaginable despair—contain hints of optimism, reflecting the hope that the suffering will soon end and that the Jewish people will one day be free in a land of their own. Even his most bitterly satirical comments on the Jewish predicament in the Soviet Union are tempered with a kernel of optimism. These songs seem a reflection of Kogan's personality: he spoke freely of the most ter­rible atrocities he had witnessed and endured, but did so with the firm conviction that bearing witness will bring about a better world. One of Kogan's favorites is a song called “Aheym” (Homeward), which he has sung for us in several variants over the years. The poem's opening verse laments the sorry state of Jewish life in the ghetto, in which Jews are disdained and disgraced simply on account of their names—for being Jews—and ends with a fervent declaration, issued in almost messianic terms, that “there will come a time when all Jews will be free.”

Nem farzets dos letste hemd

Abi nit zayn do in der fremd.

Aheym, briderlekh, aheym.

Mit dayn nomenyeder shemt zikh, yid,

Mit dayn nomenyeder krimt zikh, yid,

Un af der velt bistu gor na-venad.

Aheym, briderlekh, aheym.

Dayn mokem, dayn menukhe

Dayn eygene melukhe,

Vu du host, Yisroylikl, farbrakht.

Mit dayn nomen yeder shemt zikh, yid,

Mit dayn nomen yeder krimt zikh, yid,

Un af der velt bistu gor na-venad.

Aheym, briderlekh aheym.

Es vet kumen nokh a tsayt,

Ven ale yidn veln zayn bafrayt

Un demlt veln mir zingen a nay lid.

Af der fon der mogn-dovid

Un ale yidn hobn koved

Mit dem nomen: pintele yid.

Take and pawn your last shirt

Only don't stay here in a strange land.

Homeward, brothers, homeward.

You are disgraced for your name, Jew,

You are disdained for your name, Jew,

And you are homeless in this world.

Homeward, brothers, homeward.

Your own place, your own repose,

Your very own state, Where you, dear Israel, once dwelled.

You are disgraced for your name, Jew,

You are disdained for your name, Jew,

And you are homeless in this world, Homeward, brothers, homeward.

There will come a time,

When all the Jews will be free

And then we will sing a new song.

The star of David on the flag

And Jews will have pride

In the name of the Jewish spirit.

The piece is cobbled together from various songs and poems that Ko­gan likely heard in the ghetto, probably from the Romanian deportees who knew of the Yiddish source tunes, which were popular in interwar America. The opening lines of “Aheym”—“Homeward, brothers, home­ward” and “Take and pawn your last shirt / Only don't live here in a stranger's land,” as well as the phrase “Your own place, your own repose, your very own state,” for instance, were derived from David Meyerow- itz's song “Aheym, briderlekh aheym,” which was written in 1918 for Jacob Adler's New York Yiddish theater and appeared in the operetta Di kraft fun natur (The Power of Nature).²³ It is doubtful, but not impos­sible, that Kogan would have known of this Zionist song from his time in prewar Bershad; he more likely learned it from the Romanian Jews who populated the ghetto. Other motifs can be found in Louis Gilrod's lyrics for the song “Dos pintele yid” from the 1909 operetta of the same name. But the sentiments are those of Kogan and others who may have sung the song together with him in the Bershad ghetto.

Another one of Kogan's songs is a sardonic satire of the well-known Soviet song, “Zhankoye,” an upbeat propaganda piece about Jews building farms and new lives for themselves in the collective farms of Crimea. The original song begins with the famous lines: “As you travel to Sevastopol / Not too far from Simferopol /There's a railroad station” and continues to celebrate how former shtetl Jews with typical shtetl names—Abrasha, Leye, Beyle—are now working on collective farms as productive Soviet workers, as reapers, threshers, and tractor drivers. Kogan took the basic melody of “Zhankoye,” but sung it at a slower, more somber pace, and altered the lyrics to deride the optimistic life promised by the original song. Rather than the open fields of the Crimean coun­tryside, Kogan situated his song in the overcrowded Bershad ghetto, which he calls a camp.

Az me fort keyn Balonvike

Iz nit vayt fun Obodivke—Bershad

Dortn iz a lagerl faran.

Yid lign op meslesn

Nit getrunken, nit gegesn

Gitler, merder, zogt azoy darf es zayn.

Oy-vey, tsores, tsores

Toygn yidn af kapores

Hoft men afn mazldikn tog.

In a vinkl khropet Dvoyre

Reb Gedalye halt di toyre

Un bet got er zol shoyn tun dem nes.

Oy-vey, tsores, tsores

Toygn yidn af kapores Hoft men afn mazldikn tog.

Avrom-Iche fort af dem vogn

Es iz a kharpe im tsu zogn

Er makht shoyn skhakl shoyn dem zektsn tur.

Di obshchine hot im geheysn

Im farnemen ale meysim

Groyen im far veytik azh di hor.

Oy-vey, tsores, tsores

Toygn yidn af kapores Hoft men afn mazldikn tog.

Inem shtetl, Bershad, der besoylem Prinimayet yenem oylem

Griber shtaygn poshet nit farshit.

Es lign yidn un zey foyln

Azh dos harts heybt on tsu groyen

Akh farvos darf opkumen der yid.

Oy-vey, tsores, tsores

Toygn yidn af kapores Hoft men afn mazldikn tog.

As you travel to Balonivke

Not too far from Obadivke, Bershad

There you will find a little camp.

Jews lie dying,

Not eating, not drinking.

Hitler—murderer—says

It must be so.

Oy, vey, sorrow, sorrow

Jews are left for rubble

Hoping for a more fortunate day.

In a corner Dvoyre snores,

Reb Gedalya holds the Torah,

And pleads to God for a miracle.

Oy, vey, sorrow, sorrow

Jews are left for rubble

Hoping for a more fortunate day.

Avrom-Itshe leads the wagon

It is a disgrace to speak to him,

He is already doing his sixth round.

The community appointed him

To take all the bodies.

His hair is gray from grief.

Oy vey, sorrow, sorrow

Jews are left for rubble

Hoping for a more fortunate day.

In a shtetl—Bershad—the cemetery

Is receiving the entire community.

Graves pile up not yet covered,

Jews are lying and they rot.

The heart shudders.

Why does the Jews have to suffer.

Oy vey, sorrow, sorrow

Jews are left for rubble

Hoping for a more fortunate day.

Instead of the railroad station found at the end of the road in the origi­nal song, Kogan finds a concentration camp. Instead of Abrasha, whose tractor races through the field, Kogan inserts Avrom-Itshe, who hauls a wagon full of corpses. Leye the reaper is replaced with Dvoyre who snores, and Beyle the thresher becomes Reb Gedalya, who holds the Torah. Each of the characters in Kogan's song is based on a real indi­vidual he knew from the ghetto: Avrom-Itshe Lekhetser, he told us, “was given a wagon with a horse. He would collect the corpses six times a day—no less. They were falling like flies.” Gedalya, he continued, “was one of our shoykhets,” and Dvoyre was his wife. When the Germans came through the town on their retreat in 1944, Kogan explained, they executed Gedalya on charges that he had been assisting the partisans in the forests outside the town. Kogan honored the murdered Gedalya as the one who “holds the Torah and pleads to God for a miracle.” Kogan vacillates between referring to Hitler as a “murderer” and a “thief.” In the several variants of the song that he sung for us over the years, he sometimes sung the verse, “Hitler—murderer—says it must be so,” and sometimes “Hitler—thief—says it must be so.”

Another one of Kogan's songs from the Bershad ghetto, “What Have You Given Us, Hitler,” describes in verse the horrors he witnessed, as he watched refugees from Romania forge across the river with their be­longings on their backs. In “What Have You Given Us, Hitler?” Kogan accuses Hitler of placing thieves on the throne. The poem again borrows phrases, rhymes, and motifs from other sources: the phrase “scattered and dispersed,” for instance, is often used as a general reference to the state of Diaspora Jews, but was employed specifically in songs of Trans­nistrian ghettos to refer to the Jewish deportees from Bessarabia. The Yiddish writer Szmerke Kaczerginski, for instance, published a song that parallels the variant sung by Kogan, which Kaczerginski obtained from a source who was in the Sharhorod ghetto.²⁴ Kogan ends his song with a verse of hope, drawing from the same themes he employed in “Aheym.” Once again, the Jews will wait for a time when all the Jews in the world will be free, they will fly a flag emblazoned with the star of David, and will have respect for the Jewish Spirit. In Kogan's variant the song drifts into recitative mode, as he parenthetically comments on the suffering he witnessed.

Vos hostu Gitler—merder—mir azoy gegibn

Akhuts a numerl af geln karton,

A hoykhn zabor arum dem shtetl?

Un di gazlonim hostu geshtelt afn tron.

Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,

Vu ir zeyt, vu ir geyt.

Yidelekh fun yener zayt brik

Mit di pekelekh in di hent, Kleyne kinder af di hent.

Me traybt undz, me shlogt undz,

Nit farvos.

Itstert vil ikh, az ir zolt zen dos.

Dos harts heybt on tsu flakern,

Zen tsukukndik af di kinder,

Vi-zoy zey mutshen zikh.

Tsukukndik af zey

Rayst zikh op dos harts.

Tsukukndik af di kinder un af di mentshn.

Yidelekh fun yener zayt brik, Farshvoln, hungerik in kelt Aroysgetribn hot men undz fun yener zayt, Fun undzer shtub.

Brider, shvester, fraynt.

Zey hobn dertseylt diyidn, azoy.

A sakh undzere brider un fraynt

Zenen geblibn af di felder, af di felder.

S'iz take emes, take azoy.

Un me shlogt undz un me traybt undz un me pakt.

Me zogt azoy: mir hofn, mit gots hilf

Az s'vet kumen di mazldike sho

Ven ale yidn fun der gorer velt veln besholem zayn.

Mit gots hilf zayn bafrayt,

Un demit ver s'vet blaybn lebn

Veln mir ale undzere zingen a naye lid.

Af der fon—dem mogn-Dovid.

Ale yidn fun der gorer velt veln hobn koved.

Mid dem nomen pintele yid.

What have you given me, Hitler—murderer,

Aside from a number on a yellow badge,

A high fence around the shtetl?

And you put the thieves on the throne.

Scattered and dispersed,

Wherever you look, wherever you go,

Jews from the other side of the bridge

With packs in their arms

And little children in their arms

They goad us, they beat us

For nothing!

Now I want you to see this:

The heart begins to flutter

Looking at the children

How they torture them,

Looking at them,

It tears your heart,

Looking at the children and at the men.

Jews from the other side of the bridge,

Swollen, hungry, and cold,

They forced us from the other side, from our home. Brothers, sisters, friends.

That's how the Jews explained it.

Many of our brothers and friends

Were left in the fields, in the fields.

It's completely true, just like that.

And they beat us, and goad us, and grab us

They say “we hope, with God's help, a better hour will come,

When all the Jews in the entire world will be at peace.

With God's help, they will be free.

And then, those who remain alive,

Will sing a new song, all of us together.”

On the flag—the star of David!

All the Jews from the entire world will have respect

For the name, “the Jewish Spirit.”