Before 2009, when I began appearing before strangers to promote Hiding in the Spotlight, my mother’s Holocaust biography, I was never self-conscious about the fact that I knew almost nothing of her amazing story until I was thirty years old, and that I was a teenager when it first dawned on me that I was actually Jewish.
I remember the looks of shock and disbelief from the audience the first few times these facts slipped out during question-and-answer periods. You would think I had told them I was thirty before I discovered my left hand, or that I was a teenager before learning the truth about Santa Claus.
“Wait!” they would say. “You were THIRTY?”—making it sound like ONE HUNDRED THIRTY.
“Well,” I would explain sheepishly, “I was never told. And frankly I never thought to ask. My only religion growing up was Hoosier basketball. I’m sorry! Please feel free to leave right now.”
People are kind—so far no one has walked out—but I remain very self-conscious about being possibly the most clueless second-generation Holocaust survivor in the world, or so it feels every time the facts come out and jaws drop across the room. This is why it was such a moment of relief and validation for me when Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz let slip the information that he—chief rabbi of Kharkov—knew almost nothing of his father’s Holocaust experience until he was thirty and had been chief rabbi for five years.
“I always knew he was in Auschwitz and a survivor, but nothing more,” the rabbi told me in his office in the beautifully restored synagogue on Pushkinskaya Street. “He didn’t talk about the details until the Spielberg interview with him.”
Like my mother, the Rabbi Moskovitz’s father, Nissan, broke his virtual silence to be interviewed for The Shoah Project, filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s effort—launched after the phenomenal success of Schindler’s List—to seek out and preserve survivor stories before the fastapproaching day when all the subjects will be gone. Born in 1965 in Venezuela, Rabbi Moskovitz represents a reverse Diaspora of Ukrainian Jews, returning to the land his father left in Nazi chains.
Nissan Moskovitz was thirteen when the Germans arrived in his hometown of Chumayev near Khust in far western Ukraine. “We don’t know the date,” the rabbi told me, but it likely was 1942 or later because the Jews of Chumayev were shipped to Auschwitz instead of being shot and buried on the edge of town—the Nazi method early in Operation Barbarossa, before Auschwitz was in operation. At Auschwitz, the Moskovitz family endured the waking nightmare of instantaneous dissolution—an agony unique to the Holocaust.
“His mother and younger siblings were sent straight to the left to the gas chambers and he was taken to the right line to work,” the rabbi said of his father. “Until the end of the war, he went from camp to camp until they were freed by the Russians. After the war he met up with his father, who also survived, in Budapest. From there he went to London and then to Colombia. My mother was in Venezuela, also a survivor. We knew my father was a survivor, but he never spoke of it. At home we always discussed the Holocaust, and he was always quiet with his red eyes. He’s very religious, a big believer, even though when you hear his story, what he went through—how do you keep your faith? How do you even believe in people? It doesn’t work rationally.”
After short-term stints at synagogues in South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, Moskovitz, then twenty-five, was named chief rabbi in Kharkov in the summer of 1990—an historic moment for Kharkov Jews. Only weeks before, Soviet President Gorbachev had officially returned the great domed synagogue, built in 1913 and closed by the Communists in the late 1920s, to the Jewish community of Kharkov. It was the first shuttered synagogue in the Soviet Union to resume its original purpose after being used as a secular playground for decades. Moscow authorities had even turned it into a sports complex at one point.
“The sports complex was in the actual synagogue building,” the rabbi said. “They added a floor in the main sanctuary so that football and basketball could be played at the same time. When we received the synagogue back in August 1990, the Olympic symbols from 1980 were still on the windows and the walls, and the additional floor was still there. All the other synagogues in Kharkov were no longer functioning. Meshansky synagogue was burned many years ago and in its place is a factory. The Chebotarsky 17 synagogue was returned to us in 1998—it had been used as a traffic police station—now we use it as a dormitory and yeshiva. Another synagogue is now used as a planetarium.”
Kharkov’s Jewish population, about 30,000, is a fraction of what it was before the war, but a much larger fraction than for cities in western Ukraine where the population had less warning—in most cases none—of the Nazi advance and its attendant atrocities. Kharkov’s pre-war Jewish population was around 135,000, and most fled east to the Urals before the Nazis arrived in October 1941, in contrast to many towns and cities to the west where nearly all the Jews were murdered in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. Writing after the Soviets had pushed the Nazis out in 1944, Vasily Grossman, a Jewish journalist working for the Red Army, lamented that “there are no Jews left in Ukraine”—only a slight exaggeration.
If people at my book events were dumbfounded by what I did not know about myself, I was dumbstruck at what they collectively did not know about the Holocaust in the East, which served as the backdrop for my mother’s story. And keep in mind, except for classrooms of captive students, these were self-selected audiences with, presumably, an above-average knowledge of the subject. Who could imagine that I would find the same dearth of knowledge at ground zero of the story itself—Ukraine.
“You would be surprised to know how little people know, even here,” Rabbi Moskovitz told me. “When we came in 1990, on the small monument at Drobitsky Yar the word ‘Jewish’ was not mentioned at all. Even people here who wrote history about what happened never wrote about the Jewish Holocaust in Ukraine. And the sad part is, even today in Ukraine the children, our youth, don’t know about the Jewish Holocaust. They know about the war between the Red Army and the Germans, the ones who are scholars. But if you go out on the street to ask about the Holocaust, not many people know about it.”
This ignorance is the toxic residue of Soviet anti-Semitism coupled with Kremlin policies that pretended there were no ethnic minorities—especially Jews—in the dizzyingly multi-ethnic Soviet Union, just “citizens” and “patriots”—a familiar refrain at the Kharkov trial where the primary victims, Jews, were never mentioned by name. Like nuclear waste at Chernobyl, Soviet attitudes about Jews are proving to have a long afterlife. Writing in 2008, Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies in Kiev, observed that “Ukrainian society seems incapable or unwilling to perceive its national history as a history of various cultures. This is leading to a situation in which Ukrainian society, especially the younger generation, does not know the background to the Holocaust in Ukraine. A notion has even taken hold that the Holocaust took place exclusively in Western Europe and is not of any importance to Ukraine. The fact that the Jews were the Nazis’ chief victims is being obscured.”1
Podolsky’s anecdotal impressions were confirmed by Elena Ivanova, professor of psychology at Kharkov National University, who conducted a study in 2002 among 107 students, ages fifteen to seventeen, from private, public, and Jewish schools in Kharkov. They had forty-five minutes to write essays in response to this prompt: “Please write about the Holocaust (the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War).” She put the definition of Holocaust in parentheses, Ivanova noted, because “the word was still not in widespread use in Ukraine” in 2002.
“The youngsters were clearly surprised, if not taken aback, when they read the essay assignment,” Ivanova reported. “They began to exchange glances, laugh, and whisper back and forth. It was obvious that they had never written about anything like this and perhaps had never spoken about it. As the essays would show, many had not really heard about the Holocaust and, according to several students at one of the schools, it had not even been mentioned in their history lessons. It was obvious how difficult it was for the students to write anything on the subject.”2
This was hardly surprising. Soviet textbooks studiously ignored the Holocaust. It was officially included in secondary school curriculums in Ukraine in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in the U.S. we would call it an unfunded mandate. Dr. Phil would call it passive-aggressive behavior. The ministry of education did not stop teaching of the Holocaust, but also did nothing to promote it, Podolsky said. There were no training programs for teachers, and not enough class time was allotted to the subject. “So we have a situation where the State and Ministry create no formal hurdles for Holocaust teaching, but real possibilities are also non-existent,” Podolsky wrote.
In short, thanks for nothing. And then there were the textbooks, some of which provided “very scant, fragmentary, and even distorted information,” Ivanova observed. One eleventh-grade textbook described the massacre at Babi Yar—the most iconic of killing fields in Ukraine—without ever mentioning that Jews were killed there. It’s little wonder Ivanova found that “Most students were informed about the Holocaust, but their knowledge was superficial. Most had a murky idea about anti-Semitism as a phenomenon, and did not link it directly to the Holocaust.”3
This is how you “teach” the Holocaust without really teaching it—by leaving important lessons unlearned. “The number of students manifesting anti-Semitic and racist views was quite large, as was the number more generally under the sway of stereotypes and prejudices,” Ivanova concluded. “All of this speaks to the fact that a serious labor of enlightenment is essential in order to overcome negative views and prejudices,” especially ones that have been latent in society for centuries.4
This is happening in Kharkov through the labors of Rabbi Moskovitz and numerous Jewish organizations—day schools, cultural centers, and the like—which operate freely though with tight security, as I experienced. The Jewish Agency for Israel on Pushinskaya Street, where I passed through an entrance with armed guards, is among the organizations offering Holocaust literature, teaching guides, programs, and other material free of the state’s softfocus filtering. The Kharkov Holocaust Museum, opened in 1996 and unequivocal in presenting the Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe, is now a popular destination for school groups.
I asked the rabbi about the level of anti-Semitism in Kharkov today.
“Government anti-Semitism is non-existent,” he said. “People-to-people anti-Semitism? I think it exists everywhere. Here it is not worse than other countries.”
The task of teaching the Holocaust in Ukraine and healing its wounds is complicated by the fact that not everyone was on the same side. Collaboration with the Nazis by Ukrainians—some Ukrainians—remains a very big pink elephant in the room as the Ukraine attempts to reconcile with its past. Rabbi Moskovitz said of his father, “He always knew that Ukraine is a place where they (Germans) killed the Jews. And he said the Ukrainians were even worse.” Ukraine is still recovering from the civil war within the war against Germany. And unlike the American civil war, in which North and South occupied separate domains, Ukrainian collaborators and patriots shared the same space and passed each other on the street every day. Their sons and daughters still do. To appreciate the magnitude of the pink elephant in Ukraine, take the testy semantic squabble in the U.S. over “civil war” versus “war between the states” and multiply by a thousand.
Two days before I visited Rabbi Moskovitz at the synagogue, we met at an annual ceremony at Drobitsky Yar, where my mother and her sister were destined to die with 16,000 Jews, including their parents and grandparents, had random good fortune not intervened—as it did for the rabbi’s father, who was chosen to work instead of die at Auschwitz. We stood at the base of the majestic monument, shivering in the cold, knowing the 16,000 marched in far worse, clothed in much less that December day in 1941. It would be seventy years before their identity as Jews finally was acknowledged, and honored, in this same place. For Rabbi Moskovitz, it was progress, a milestone of sorts.
“One unbelievable thing that happened in Kharkov was that (Leonid) Kuchma, the president of Ukraine, came to open the monument at Drobitsky Yar in 1992. He walked together with me and the ambassador of Israel from the road all the way down to the monument. This was a big event.”
After returning to Orlando, I transcribed my interview with Rabbi Moskovitz and e-mailed him some follow-up questions. He replied with rabbinical thoroughness and added a postscript.
“As a note from a rabbi, I would like to point out that since we are both children of survivors who miraculously survived the Holocaust, we have an additional mission to spread good in the world—being that we are also part of their miracle. So, whenever we do a mitzvah we are continuing the life of those who perished in the Holocaust.”