collaborators, the Germans had the necessary manpower.66
Killing became extermination last in the lands that the Germans took first. Though the Germans had overrun all of the former lands of eastern Poland in the first ten days of the war, in June 1941, many of the native Jews of Poland’s southeast, now the west of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, had survived until 1942. German forces had already passed through by the time Himmler began to order the destruction of whole Jewish communities. By the time German policy had shifted, most German forces had already departed. In 1942 the Germans undertook a second round of mass shootings in the western districts of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, this time organized by the civilian authorities and implemented by the police, with a great deal of help from local auxiliary policemen.67
These west Ukrainian districts were typical of the many towns and small cities, in the lands that had been eastern Poland, where Jews numbered about half of the population, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more. Jews usually inhabited the center of the cities, in stone houses around town squares, rather than the wood shanties of the outskirts. These were settlements where Jews had lived for more than half a millennium, under varying governments and with varying levels of prosperity, but with a success demonstrated by the simplest measures of architecture and demography. The majority of this Jewish population, in interwar Poland, had remained religiously observant and rather separated from the outside world. The languages remained Yiddish and (for religious purposes) Hebrew, and rates of intermarriage with Christians were low. Eastern Poland had remained the heartland of an Ashkenazic Jewish civilization, speaking Yiddish and dominated by rival clans of charismatic Hasidim. This Jewish tradition had outlived the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where it had originated, it had outlived the Russian Empire, and it had outlived the interwar Polish Republic.68
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint invasion of Poland, Soviet power and Soviet citizenship were extended to these Jews in 1939–1941, and thus they are usually counted as Soviet Jewish victims of the Nazis. These Jews did live for a time in the Soviet Union after Soviet borders were extended westward to include what had been eastern Poland, and they were subject to Soviet policies. Like the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Belarusians of these lands, they had been subject then to arrests, deportations, and shootings. Jews had lost their businesses and their religious schools. Yet this brief period of Soviet rule was hardly enough to make Soviet Jews of them. With the exception of the very youngest children, people in Rivne and similar settlements had been citizens of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, or Romania for far longer than they were citizens of the Soviet Union. Of the 2.6 million or so Jews killed on the terrains of the Soviet Union, some 1.6 million had been under Soviet jurisdiction for less than two years. Their civilization had been seriously weakened by Soviet rule during 1939–1941; it would not survive the German Reich.69
Rivne, unusually for these cities, had already seen a mass killing action in 1941. Although Kiev was the center of the German police state in Ukraine, Rivne was in 1941 the provisional capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Reichskommissar, Erich Koch, was a man known for his brutality. Hitler’s advisors called Koch a “second Stalin,” and they meant it as a compliment. Koch had already in autumn 1941 ordered that most of the Jews of Rivne be killed. On 6 November 1941 the police had told all Jews without work permits to report for resettlement. Some seventeen thousand people were then transported to nearby woods, known as Sosenky. There they were shot over pits dug earlier by Soviet prisoners of war. The remaining ten thousand or so Jews were then forced to live in a ghetto in the worst part of the city.70
In early 1942, even after the majority of the Jews were dead, the Rivne Judenrat was trying to maintain for the survivors some means of subsistence. The German authorities, however, had decided that Jews were not to exist at all. In summer 1942 Koch, with an eye to food shortages, took the next step, asking his subordinates for a “100% solution” to the Jewish problem. On the night of 13 July 1942 Rivne’s Jews were herded by German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries from the ghetto. The Jews were forced to walk to the train station, where they were enclosed in train cars. After two days without food and water, they were transported to a quarry near woods outside the town of Kostopil. There they were shot by German Security Police and the auxiliary policemen.71
In Lutsk, the Jews constituted about half the population, perhaps ten thousand people. In December 1941 the Jews were forced into a ghetto, where the Germans appointed a Judenrat. Generally the Judenrat served to extract the wealth of the community in exchange for various stays of execution, some true, some false. The Germans also usually established a Jewish police force, which was used to create the ghettos, and then later to clear them. On 20 August 1942 in Lutsk the local Jewish police set out to find Jews who might be in hiding. The same day Jewish men were sent to woods near Hirka Polonka, seven kilometers from Lutsk, to dig pits. The Germans guarding them made no effort to disguise what was about to happen. They told the men to dig well, as their wives and mothers would be resting in the pits the next day. On 21 August the women and children of Lutsk were taken to Hirka Polonka. The Germans ate and drank and laughed, and forced the women to recite: “Because I am a Jew I have no right to live.” Then the women were forced, five at a time, to undress and kneel naked over the pits. The next group then had to lie naked over the first layer of corpses, and were shot. That same day the Jewish men were taken to the courtyard of the Lutsk castle, and killed there.72
In Kovel, too, Jews were about half the local population, some fourteen thousand people. In May 1942 the Jews of the city were divided into two groups, workers and nonworkers, and placed in two separate ghettos, the first in the New Town and the second in the Old Town. One local Jew, having learned the Nazi terms, knew that the Germans saw the second ghetto as the one for “useless eaters.” On 2 June German and local auxiliary police surrounded the ghetto in the Old Town. All six thousand of them were taken to a clearing near Kamin-Kashyrskyi and shot. On 19 August, the police repeated this action with the other ghetto, shooting eight thousand more Jews. Then began a hunt for Jews in hiding, who were rounded up and locked in the town’s Great Synagogue with no food and water. Then they were shot, but not before a few of them left their final messages, in Yiddish or Polish, scraped with stones, knives, pens, or fingernails on the walls of the temple where some of them had observed the Sabbath.73
A wife left a note of love and devotion to her “dear husband” so that he might learn of her fate and that of their “beautiful” child. Two girls together wrote of their love of life: “one so wants to live, and they won’t allow it. Revenge. Revenge.” A young woman was more resigned: “I am strangely calm, though it is hard to die at twenty.” A mother and father asked their children to say kaddish for them, and to observe the holidays. A daughter left a farewell note to her mother: “My beloved Mama! There was no escape. They brought us here from outside the ghetto, and now we must die a terrible death. We are so sorry that you are not with us. I cannot forgive myself this. We thank you, Mama, for all of your devotion. We kiss you over and over.”
CHAPTER 7
Holocaust and Revenge
Belarus was the center of the confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. After the German invasion of June 1941, its inhabitants observed, if they survived, the escalation of both German and Soviet violence. Their homeland was a German zone of occupation and a once and future Soviet republic. Its cities were battlefields of armies in advance and retreat, its towns centers of Jewish settlement destroyed by the Holocaust. Its fields became German prisoner-of-war camps, where Soviet soldiers starved in the tens and hundreds of thousands. In its forests Soviet partisans and German policemen and Waffen-SS conducted ferocious partisan warfare. The country as a whole was the site of a symbolic competition between Hitler and Stalin, represented not only by soldiers behind the lines, partisans in the forests, and policemen over pits but by propagandists in Berlin and Moscow and Minsk, the republic’s capital city.
Minsk was a centerpiece of Nazi destructiveness. The German air force had bombed the city into submission on 24 June 1941; the Wehrmacht had to wait for the fires to die down before entering. By the end of July the Germans had shot thousands of educated people and confined the Jews to the northwest of the city. Minsk would have a ghetto, and concentration camps, and prisoner-of-war camps, and killing sites. Finally Minsk was transformed by the Germans into a kind of macabre theater, in which they could act out the ersatz victory of killing Jews.1
