In 2006, when I visited Ukraine for the first time to do research for Hiding in the Spotlight, the most startling double-take moment was finding my still-vibrant mother’s name etched on a wall memorializing the 16,000 Jews executed at Drobitsky Yar. Seeing her and her sister listed among the dead was a surreal jolt—a vision of a near-miss epitaph for me, my brother, and our four children, as well as our Aunt Frina’s children and grandchildren.
And yet, five years later it’s a different moment from that visit, less dramatic at first glance, that I find myself replaying over and over: I turn a street corner, look up, and see on the side of a building in Russian, “48 Katsarskaya”—my mother’s address. At Drobitsky Yar, where her parents and grandparents are buried but she never set foot, I could see my mother’s name but could not feel her presence.
On the tree-lined sidewalk outside 48 Katsarskaya, it felt like time had collapsed and she was standing there with me, thirteen and carefree again, returning home after a lesson with Professor Luntz, her beloved teacher at the Kharkov Music Conservatory. It had been sixty-five years since the Arshanskys—a candy maker, his wife, and their two girls—were routed from their apartment by Nazis. But something of them lived on, still seemed to possess this space. I recalled what my mother said about her father’s violin, taken by a German who looted their home.
He took the violin, which was like “a member of the family,” she said. “But he could not take its vibrations that came from our existence. The vibrations would remain, without the body.”
And so it was with the apartment at 48 Katsarskaya. I sensed emanations from within, and felt a need to see inside my ancestral Ukrainian home. I wondered if the piano my mother learned on—a Bechstein with a mirrored music stand her father ordered from Germany—was still there. The tall windows facing the street were covered by sheer curtains which beckoned … and repelled. I didn’t knock on the door that day or on a return visit four years later. It was not just reluctance to invade a stranger’s privacy that stopped me. I feared the apartment door could open a Pandora’s Box of historical wounds and recrimination. The vibrations remained.
Rumbling west to east across Ukraine in 1941, the Wehrmacht was a threshing machine separating Jews from their homes and possessions, discarding the useless human husks in giant graves and distributing the harvest to non-Jewish Ukrainians and ethnic Germans. Some of the booty ended up in the hands of local authorities. Gold and silver objects, and currency (rubles), generally were seized and sent to Berlin. Here is a typical Einsatzgruppe report on the harvest from one area in central Ukraine:
“Kiev … Gold and valuables, linen, and clothing were secured. Part of it was given to the NSV (Nazi Welfare) for the ethnic Germans, and part to the city administration for distribution among the needy population. Zhitomir … About 25–30 tons of linen, clothing, shoes, dishes, etc., that had been confiscated in action were handed over to the officials of the NSV for distribution.”
The Nazi “philanthropy” was not always so systematic and controlled. Looting often occurred in the frenzy of Jews being led to slaughter, as described in this scene at Berdichev where 12,000 Jews were murdered on September 14–15, 1941.
“Policemen, members of their families, and the mistresses of German soldiers rushed to loot the vacant apartments. Before the eyes of the living dead, the looters carried off scarves, pillows, feather mattresses. Some walked past the guards and took scarves and knitted woolen sweaters from women and girls who were awaiting their death.”
I am thinking of my grandfather’s gold watch, furtively slipped to a young Ukrainian collaborator in barter for my mother’s life on the road to Drobitsky Yar: does it tell time today in the pocket of the collaborator’s grandson? Did the old man tell the boy how time stood still in the moment he took the watch from my grandfather? I am thinking of the Bechstein piano with the mirrored music stand on which my mother learned to play, and my grandfather’s beloved violin. Were they plundered and put on trains to Germany for use in beer gardens and the private homes of Nazi leaders—or did they pass into the hands of other Ukrainian prodigies?
The most prized of all the plunder were apartments left behind by Jews. “Thousands of apartments and their contents remained vacant after the deportation and murder of their Jewish owners,” wrote Yitzhak Arad. “Some apartments were used to accommodate German administration staff and military personnel; some were requisitioned by the police and local administration and their associates, and some were invaded by local inhabitants.”1
Nova Ukraina, a newspaper published in Kharkov during the German occupation, reported that 1,700 families moved into new apartments in December 1941—the month my mother’s family was ordered to abandon their apartment at 48 Katsarskaya. Probably several families have occupied the apartment since then, but given the decimation of Kharkov’s Jewish population, it’s highly unlikely that Jews live there now. Collaboration with the Nazis by a minority of Ukrainians remains an exposed nerve in the body politic. I decided that whoever lives there now would not welcome my touching that nerve.
From a strictly military perspective, no city was fought over more often or fiercely during the war than Kharkov. As a major industrial center and producer of tanks, situated on the road to Stalingrad to the east, Kharkov was a strategic plum. “Kharkov, Russia’s ‘Pittsburgh,’ Captured by Nazis” said a front-page headline in The Bismarck (North Dakota) Tribune on Oct. 25, 1941. It changed hands four times during the war and was the largest Soviet city occupied by Germans (its pre-war population of about 900,000 was actually larger than that of Kiev). Seventy percent of Kharkov was destroyed during the Nazis’ on-again-off-again 22-month occupation of the city from October 1941 to August 1943, when it was liberated for good by the Red Army.
The Germans destroyed fifty industrial plants, the railway junction, power stations, telephone and telegraph connections, medical and educational institutions, and most of the city’s bridges. The 70% figure would have been much higher if the Soviets had not dismantled many factories—among them the tractor works near Kharkov used by Nazis as a ghetto—and shipped the parts east to the Urals before the Germans arrived. Much of the industrial infrastructure left behind was destroyed by the Soviets under Stalin’s “scorched earth” edict.
“Along the battle-scarred Ukrainian countryside, a thin mantle of snow falls to hide or soften the hideous panorama of destruction that unfolds mile after mile,” Edmund Stevens, a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, wrote in December 1943 from Kharkov. “Twisted rails, burnt-out railway cars, wrecked tanks and armored cars and guns are strewn helter-skelter alongside the track. The train halts where cities and towns once stood, but little now remains save shell-pitted walls. Even trees planted along the right of way are blasted and broken from shellfire.”
In the hierarchy of Nazi crimes committed in Kharkov, the destruction of commercial, industrial, and military infrastructure—commonplace targets in war—must rank beneath their larger attempt to disembowel the cultural life of the community and to usher in a new Dark Age. A week after taking Kharkov in October 1941, the Nazis ordered the closing of all institutions of higher learning—more than forty—in the city. All valuable resources, including apparatus for splitting the atom, files, and books, were either shipped to Germany or destroyed.
“Under the Germans, Kharkov’s cultural life was completely interrupted,” Stevens wrote. “They did not so much as open one library or bookstore for the distribution of books and magazines, even Nazi propaganda.”
The war on literacy was consistent with Himmler’s vision of transforming Ukraine into a German colony—a “Garden of Eden” in the East—in which the servant/slave natives would receive only enough education to recognize and sign their names. As if to drive home the point while adding insult to injury, the Germans put in charge of eviscerating the great universities of Kharkov “mostly semiliterate noncommissioned officers,” Stevens wrote. “Professors and researchers were denied any food ration and either starved or eked out a miserable existence by making boot polish, soap, candles or other small commodities.”
The Germans occupied Kharkov, on and off, for nearly two years, and took the opportunity to commit—even for them—some of their most macabre atrocities there. No person or place was immune to Nazi terror, even wounded soldiers in a hospital. In trial testimony, a hospital worker—one of many witnesses to this particular horror—described the scene at the First Evacuation Hospital of the 69th Army, where Red Army soldiers were being treated.
“In the 8th block of the hospital there were 400 seriously wounded men who needed immediate surgical attention. They were either in the operating theater or being prepared for operating when a dull explosion occurred. The nurses ran toward me shrieking. SS men had driven up to the hospital, nailed up all the entrances and hurled two incendiary bombs into the premises. The first floor was at once enveloped in flames. The fire reached the beds of the wounded. With their clothes burning, they crept toward the windows. Many were so weak they fell dead after crawling a few steps. Those who reached windows and climbed onto sills were shot with tommy-guns by SS troops who had surrounded the building. Similar scenes took place on the second floor, which the fire soon reached.”2
The Nazis were nothing if not thorough exterminators. They returned to the hospital the next day, the deputy superintendent of the hospital testified.
“The Germans made a round of the other blocks—ward after ward, basement after basement. Coming to a ward, they would first toss several grenades into it, fire a burst from a tommy-gun, then enter the ward and finish off those who were still alive. Wounded men, who, by some miracle, escaped with their lives, later told me that the Germans were accompanied by an officer who flashed a torch into all the corners. On approaching each bed and ascertaining that the patient was dead, he would say: ‘Kaput,’ and walk on.”3
But all work and no play makes Hans a dull boy. After transforming the hospital into an abattoir, the Nazis amused themselves with a coup de grâce.
“They found a man still alive in one of the basements,” said a hospital worker. “They dragged him into the yard and were about to shoot him. One German was already aiming his tommy-gun when another said something to him, and both burst out laughing. The first German ran off and soon returned with a hammer and nails. The Germans seized the half-dead man, stripped him naked, and nailed him to a wall for the amusement of themselves and other German monsters.”4
On the flip side, one element of Ukrainian society that flourished during the Nazi occupation was the Christian religion, which was anathema to Stalin’s secular communist state. Church leaders, especially in western Ukraine in the early stages of German rule, greeted the invaders as liberators from Stalin’s godless tyranny. Also liberated and given fresh voice was the anti-Semitism endemic in Ukrainian churches. Pastoral leaders did not use the word “Jews,” but it was easy to read between the lines when the leader of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church praised Hitler for “conducting a tireless and uncompromising struggle against the anti-religious communist regime,” code language for the boogieman of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
The non-action of church leaders in the face of violence against Jews spoke louder than their words. Early in Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis had seeded Soviet territory with anti-Semitic propaganda in the hope of inciting “spontaneous” pogroms. “Thousands of Jews were murdered by incited mobs, even before the Einsatzgruppen began their murderous operations,” Arad wrote. “The heads of the churches were silent when their followers carried out these atrocities.”5
In Kharkov, newspapers announced that churches would give a prayer of thanks on the first anniversary of the German occupation of the city. Another leader of the Autocephalous Church sent Hitler a telegram on April 5, 1942, wishing him happy birthday and rapid success in the war. The telegram was sent three months after the Nazis marched 16,000 Jews through the streets of Kharkov, under the horrified gaze and occasional anti-Semitic taunts of onlookers, to the tractor factory and then to slaughter at Drobitsky Yar. Even the monkeys who hear, see, and speak no evil would have had difficulty pleading ignorance of these events, which did not take place in barbed-wire–enclosed death camps on the edge of town, but rather on city streets and in open fields.
Averting their gaze from Nazi atrocities was a fulltime job for church leaders in Kharkov. In the first two weeks of the occupation, their “liberators” hung 116 people from lamp posts, balconies, and trees on Sumskaya Street in the center of the city. A magnificent statue of Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet, was festooned with corpses. Starvation was another favored weapon of the Nazis against both civilians and prisoners of war. General Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, in his directive “The Conduct of the Army in the East,” minced no words. “Supplying the civilian population and prisoners of war with food is an unnecessary humanitarian act. It is like giving away cigarettes and bread—an example of misdirected compassion.”
The bulk of local harvests and food was confiscated to feed the occupying army or shipped to Germany. The daily bread ration for residents of Kharkov was 5.25 ounces. For Jews, it was 2 ounces. The German command expected at least ten to twenty million people in the East to starve to death during the winter of 1941–42. Soldiers were given a mantra to repeat if they felt they were losing their nerve and about to commit an unnecessary humanitarian act: “Each gram of bread or other food that I give to the population in the occupied territories out of good-heartedness, I am withdrawing from the German people and thus my family. The German soldier must stay hard in the face of hungry women and children. If he does not, he endangers the nourishment of our people.”
Apparently it worked, at least in Kharkov. “As early as December 1941, starvation was quite frequent, even among the non-Jewish population, and by March 1942, almost half as many people were starving to death in Kharkov each month as in the Warsaw ghetto,” wrote historian Dieter Pohl. My mother remembers going through German garbage for potato skins her mother could use for making soup, and later, while hiding in an orphanage, scrounging for much less savory things than potato skins. Upwards of 100,000 residents of Kharkov are thought to have died of hunger during the German occupation.
N.F. Belonozhko was the wife of a soldier. She kept a diary of daily life in Kharkov during the occupation. Her fate is unknown, but Belonozhko’s notes were retrieved and published in The Unknown Black Book, the Danteesque testimony of those consigned by fate to Himmler’s “Garden of Eden.” What follows are excerpts from Belonozhko’s diary.
“Winter began fiercely this year. No one had a stove. There was no fire wood either. I am working in a cafeteria. Today it’s borscht from frozen beets without bread, then kozein, a glue-like, repulsive white substance (made from bones); it tasted like rubber. They say it was used in building airplanes.… The first to get sick in our room is Shura and Sonya’s mother. Sonya would go to a village to the south to get her milk. Her mother dies slowly. And now in our apartment is the first coffin, made from a chest of drawers.
“In the kitchen in the evenings, everyone looks nervously at their legs, squeezing them. Are they swollen? Sonya’s and Nyura’s are very swollen, and the Mordukhaev girls are just wasting away. They look like they are made of wax. They don’t comb their hair, they don’t wash, they make something out of potato peelings and snow and eat it. People live by selling things but they’ve got nothing left to sell.
“Lice are crawling around the apartment.… Another one of us has died. Sonya died in the hospital. Her feet became infected and she died of blood poisoning. They buried her in a common grave. There’s no one left to recall the past, our life before the Germans. There’s no one to dream about. Margarita has gotten sick, too. When will this end? When?”6
August 23, 1943. That is when it ended, on a Thursday morning.
“By dawn on August 23, the 89th Guards and 183rd Divisions had reached Dzerzhinsky Square, the 89th hoisting its red banner over the Gosprom building,” wrote historian Karel Margry. “However, the Russians bagged few of the enemy. The German units had completed their withdrawal from the city, occupying defensive positions south of the Uda River. At noon, the Russians declared the city clear of German troops.”
Not completely. Three lower-level German officers had drawn the shortest of short straws fate could deliver to a Nazi invader, leaving them behind in the hands of the Soviets who would use them to show the world the price to be paid by those who blindly saluted Hitler and perpetrated atrocities in his name.