Vladimir Chervinsky: “Odessa Stories Without a Happy Ending”

Odessa Stories Without a Happy Ending

Dear reader, what I have written is not a book in the generally accepted sense. It is simply a long letter, or more precisely thirty-nine letters addressed to Anya and Matvey, Vika’s and my grandchildren. I hope they reach their addressees in good time.

28. Odessa — a Russian Marseille?

The compiler and editor of the collection “Odessa: Life Under Occupation, 1941–1944” is Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky, an authoritative Soviet and Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, professor at the Higher School of Economics, and member of the Academia Europaea. He also wrote the introductory article, in which he surveys the texts by three authors included in the collection, quotes the most important passages, and comments on them. This helps the reader navigate the mass of facts and separate the subjective from the objective. It is, of course, impossible to reproduce all three texts in this chapter, even though they are extremely interesting; retelling them would be an equally thankless task. I will therefore allow myself to make use of Oleg Budnitsky’s own survey of these articles, naturally in an abridged form.

“It cannot be said that Soviet historians totally falsified the history of Odessa during the occupation. The problem, however, was that while they generally presented realistically what the occupation regime and life under occupation in Odessa had in common with other cities, they ignored Odessa’s particular features — and under strict ideological control they could hardly have done otherwise. In the works of Soviet historians, the inhabitants of Odessa appeared, first, as a kind of unified mass, apart from a few renegades, and second, as behaving the way Soviet people were supposed to behave. Yet the occupation showed that the ‘Sovietness’ of many of them was only external and was discarded at the first opportunity. At any rate, many of them were quite willing to ‘decompose spiritually.’ Otherwise it is difficult to imagine how the numerous entertainment establishments that sprang up in the city with astonishing speed could have survived. In the post-Soviet period a number of articles have been published, based mainly on the occupation press, illuminating various aspects of city life in 1941–1944.

“Among sources about life under occupation, sources of personal origin are extraordinarily important. Official documents reflect far from everything and rarely convey, figuratively speaking, the taste, color, and smell of an era. Particularly important are memoirs written relatively soon after the events, before their authors had been strongly influenced by one established tradition or another. A number of texts about life under occupation were written by émigrés of the postwar, so-called second wave. One should bear in mind that they remained abroad or left together with the retreating German or Romanian forces because they rejected Soviet power, although many did so because circumstances left them little choice. One must also remember that a considerable number of second-wave émigrés collaborated with the occupiers to one degree or another. These circumstances have to be taken into account, and not every statement in texts they wrote should be accepted at face value. The same, of course, applies to all personal sources.”

Diaries kept by Odessans after the outbreak of war, during the defense of the city, and throughout the occupation are also personal sources. In earlier chapters devoted to the beginning of the war I already quoted them, so it is particularly interesting to continue reading entries made under occupation. Adrian Orzhekhovsky, Vladimir Shvets, and the schoolboy Yuri Sukhodolsky all continued keeping diaries during this period. They differed completely in age, profession, and outlook on life.

Adrian Orzhekhovsky

January 11, 1942. “Today is a memorable day for us: the opening of our shop. In the evening we counted the receipts, which came to 132 rubles. For a first debut that is quite good. With capital like ours one cannot expect much more. Tomorrow we will also have milk. People are pouring in; some, as always, criticize, and a smaller number actually buy. Our shop is very clean and has a quite neat appearance. For greater solemnity we hung an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. In short, everything is proper and respectable.

“Alongside our own event, which gives us joyful hopes for the future, as we hope, today an appalling drama occurred for all of Odessa’s Jews. Early this morning an order was posted requiring every Jew in Odessa without exception to move to Slobodka, where a ghetto has been arranged for them. Their despair knows no bounds: there is nowhere to sleep, it is cold, and to make matters worse snow has begun to fall. No one knows where or how he will live; most of them are women, children, and old people. In short, the picture is indescribable, it is difficult to convey the whole drama. What happiness it is now not to be a Jew.”

January 12. “Today truly is Judgment Day for all Jews. From early morning, from six o’clock, long lines began moving toward Slobodka. In our courtyard the wailing and crying of children could be heard constantly. Along every street these unfortunate people moved in long files on foot, carrying their possessions, pulling them on small sledges, with old women, old men, and children barely trudging through quite deep snow. I saw two ancient old women, completely exhausted, lying directly on the snow with no strength to rise. I have been up to my neck in work in the shop all day, without even time to have lunch, but of course that is not bad at all — better than being persecuted now.”

Vladimir Shvets

March 24, 1942

“There are clashes with the Romanians. For example, when Jews returning from prison persuaded the Romanians to let them back into their apartments, a German officer beat a Romanian officer. A scuffle broke out and the police had to be called. Father replied by telling a story that supposedly happened in their factory yard: a woman was hiding Jews in a shed. One day she went to buy food for them. Her four-year-old child, left behind, blurted it out to the Romanians. They were seized, but one of the Jews kicked the child to death. The woman and the Jews were shot on the spot.”

June 4. “Antonescu, who visited Odessa the day before yesterday, ordered the opera artists to be paid double salary. According to Yura, Savchenko, who is now ill after a car accident, will receive 600 marks.”

Yuri Sukhodolsky

September 27, 1942. “...At five in the morning we were in Odessa. We made our way on foot. Naturally there were meetings, kisses... We submitted applications to the industrial technical school... I will study free of charge. Otherwise tuition is 200 marks a year. Marks here are called rubles. There is an abundance of food... Tremendous joy. Being with Father and my comrades. I am very happy. Everything is divine. But still something is not right. It hurts to look at the destroyed houses. And in general...”

October 14

“...In Odessa, needless to say, life has been put in order. At the opening of the University, the mayor, Mr. Gherman Pântea, said that life in Odessa was better than in any other city in Western Europe. Indeed, at the market it is simply astonishing: sausages, meat, butter, fruit, and everything else. Of course everything is terribly expensive, but still. Educational institutions are functioning and trams are running. At every step there is a ‘bodega’ — small basement places where wine and simple snacks are sold. Signboards are everywhere, as are commission shops; smartly dressed ladies, heavily made up, Romanians, and Germans walk through the streets. One comes across destroyed buildings — the regional Party committee, bank, School No. 116, telephone exchange, Pushkin house, houses on Deribasovskaya, Rishelyevskaya, and elsewhere. Many. Some were destroyed to the foundations by mines dropped by parachute... But some houses are already being rebuilt, new shops are opening, boys run about advertising ‘Odessa Newspaper,’ ‘Odessa,’ ‘World,’ ‘Laughter,’ ‘Bell,’ ‘Children’s Sheet,’ ‘The Week.’ Not all the newspapers and magazines are good by any means. They have a kind of gossiping, servile orientation. Tomorrow the opera season opens with ‘Boris Godunov.’ Father is singing...”

Vladimir Shvets

October 16, 1942

“Today they are celebrating the anniversary of the capture of Odessa. Much noise and music. Many speeches, assurances, prayers. Collectors of ‘donations’ can be seen in the streets. There was a prayer service at the conservatory...”

Yuri Sukhodolsky

October 16, 1942. “Today Odessa has a holiday — the anniversary of the city’s liberation from the ‘Bolshevik yoke,’ and so on. A prayer service in the church on Pushkinskaya Street. The whole city is decorated with the national flags of the Axis powers. People have been ordered to hang carpets from balconies... People walk through the streets with collection boxes and sell little flags for the benefit of the poor.”

October 18. “Father and I went to boxing at the circus today, using passes Igor obtained. Interesting. Seven pairs fought. The most interesting bout was between a Romanian from Chișinău and an Odessan. The Odessan literally gave the Romanian no time to recover and beat him so badly that he became completely dazed and stopped resisting. The circus was roaring wildly; the winner was kissed. The Romanian is taking the matter to court, and apparently the affair is also being given a certain ‘coloring’...”

Vladimir Shvets

February 17, 1943. “At the corner of Deribasovskaya and Rishelyevskaya the Romanians are digging machine-gun nests. But life in Odessa remains lively. A concert devoted to Mozart was held at the conservatory; it was rather lifeless.”

Adrian Orzhekhovsky

February 21, 1943. “At the front, for two months now, the Reds, having assembled enormous forces, have gone onto the offensive and without interruption, wave after wave, day and night, with terrible elemental force, have been pressing the Germans. In this short period, and especially during these last few days, the Germans have lost an enormous amount of territory, retreating almost everywhere, especially in Ukraine, surrendering Stalingrad and a number of other cities as far as Kharkov. People chatter that the Romanians at Stalingrad betrayed them and three divisions surrendered, opening a wide gap in the front into which Soviet troops poured. Total mobilization has been declared in Germany. We shall see what comes next. I am depressed.”

Vladimir Shvets

May 11, 1943. “In the morning I was at the University for Italian. But then I was shivering so badly and my tooth hurt so much that I left the lecture early and went home. I was told the reason peasants were being expelled: supposedly they had hidden a Soviet landing party and refused to give it up. At the Sugar Factory in Odessa proclamations have been scattered several times, and the Romanians promised to shoot every fifth person. The same happened at the University. They caught a teacher involved in it. He was beaten so badly that ‘his guts nearly came out.’”

October 14. “Was at the University... My work arranging the Symphony for piano is progressing. The weather is disgusting, damp and rainy. But that is very good, because it is ruining this brazen comedy of celebrations marking two years of the barbarians’ presence in Odessa. People are insistently saying that the city will pass to the Germans. But all this affects one less and less. There is nothing to expect except the worst. In the evening I was at Vronsky’s theater.”

September 26. “It has been announced that Anapa and Smolensk have been evacuated. I spent the whole day copying the Symphony. In Voznesensk partisans blew up the bridge over the Bug and a German train had to turn back. The soldiers went by another route on foot. There is an underground organization in Odessa in which blind people also take part. In the evening I was at Galina Georgievna’s. She told my fortune and predicted a long journey. But that cannot be! I will hide when the Germans retreat...”

November 10, 1943. “Was at a lecture at the University. In the evening a Romanian named Aude, a former factory director who had recently returned from the front, came with Father. He stayed the night and told us many things. He had been near Stalingrad. He was captured there and then sent home. He knows that 200,000 Romanians were lost near Odessa, and 700,000 near Crimea and Stalingrad. Now in Romania you can hardly find either a young man or even a middle-aged one. Only women and cripples remain. He said many things that raised my hopes for a favorable outcome of everything...”

Adrian Orzhekhovsky

December 25, 1943. “All the warring sides are confident of victory. Of course, they shout about it in order to cheer their people up and make it easier to drive them to the front to die for their prettified ideas. In short, all are still very strong, all have an inexhaustible reserve of fools, military matériel, and time, and therefore the war may last another two Christmases. Tosya and I are alone. I am writing these lines while she reads ‘Novoye Slovo,’ an article called ‘Odessa and the Odessans,’ in which a correspondent describes life and the abundance of everything here. And indeed such prosperity probably exists nowhere else in Europe. Everything is available. In our shop, for example, there is complete abundance: about 400 liters of wine, vodka, liqueur, sausages — plenty of everything. The markets are full of excellent white bread, and still, despite such abundance, very many people can hardly wait for the Reds to return, without understanding that the very next day you will not be able to get a piece of bread...”

Vladimir Shvets

March 14, 1944. “Was at the Conservatory. Because of German failures there is panic everywhere again. They are saying that Nikolaev, Kherson, and Ochakov have been surrendered. Local selected Germans have been ordered to prepare for evacuation by Thursday. Georges in the library attacked Alexandra Nikolaevna like a madman because, supposedly, she was spreading panic. He believes the Bolshevik offensive is a newspaper hoax and that in three days everyone will see how everything changes. ‘Everything is going as I said. I am afraid of nothing, even if they conquered all of Europe. They will never take Odessa!’ Georges said. Everyone laughed at him.”

Adrian Orzhekhovsky

March 25, 1944. “Saturday, five o’clock. My mood is terrible. Every day I get up at eleven or twelve. My head is full of the stupidest thoughts. Complete paralysis of the will, no desire for anything at all, or for any useful activity. What is to be done? We need to open the shop and I have no desire to. And in fact there is nothing to sell. I will try to open on Monday. Many are leaving; Odessa is emptying again, as during the Jewish pogrom. Almost all shops are closed. Prices at the market have risen again. What will happen?... Total war has been declared in Germany. Here in Odessa panic has begun and the population has rushed to buy up food, while peasants have stopped bringing goods in. As a result there is a food crisis and the market is empty. Prices for everything have risen incredibly. Our shop emptied in two days, and we have been left with no goods, only a pile of paper money with which nothing can be bought. We shall see what happens next. I am depressed.”

March 26. “I am sitting by the lamp, drinking tea and writing these lines. Went into the city. Odessa has died again, as it did when the Romanians first came, with the one difference that now there are Germans and very few Romanians; everyone is evacuating. The streets are empty, no people are visible, only German trucks full of all sorts of junk, and even there are considerably fewer of them today than the day before yesterday. They say mines are already being laid in the port so that everything can be blown up during the retreat. Refugees say the Germans will drive the entire population out of the city when they leave. Fate is preparing a second Jewish exodus for us.”

April 7. “Eleven in the morning. Annunciation. The weather is bad again, drizzling. Mud. So far it is quiet. Explosions are heard occasionally. Tosya went to church. I dreamed of Venya as a little boy. Where is he? If he is alive, he is probably following the Red Army’s advance toward Odessa. And the other three as well. Odessa alone remains untaken as a major center. But its hours are already numbered.”

Yuri Sukhodolsky

April 10, 1944. “So! Odessa has been occupied by the Russians. The day is full of impressions. I will record them briefly. On learning that the Reds were in the city — in the morning, around seven — Father and I went to Preobrazhenskaya and saw the first Red Army men, an officer in a green cap...”

The reasons why the authors of these diary entries remained in Odessa and spent all two and a half years of occupation there were different.

Adrian Orzhekhovsky had suffered at the hands of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s as a small private trader, had been deprived of voting rights, and had become embittered toward Soviet power. He consciously stayed in Odessa, believing that the fascists would overthrow the Bolsheviks and that he would no longer have to work as a dyer in a factory but could reopen a small shop as in former times.

Vladimir Shvets, a conservatory student and talented musician completely absorbed in music, was uninterested in politics and believed he could remain outside politics even after the Germans arrived.

Yuri Sukhodolsky was a schoolboy and Komsomol member who had come to Odessa for vacation and had no time to leave.

It would be unfair to accuse them of collaboration or of assisting the occupiers. Like many other Odessans, they simply survived, and for the most part survived reasonably well, accepting the rules of survival imposed by the occupiers and closing, or half-closing, their eyes to the horrors around them. After liberation none of them was accused of anything or punished.

By an irony of fate, after the war Adrian Orzhekhovsky worked at the Odessa Soviet Party School, albeit as a night watchman, and died quietly in 1960.

Vladimir Shvets graduated from the conservatory in 1946, pursued an active career as a composer, was a successful teacher beloved by his pupils at Odessa’s Stolyarsky School, wrote a number of books on music theory, and died in 1991.

Yuri Sukhodolsky went to the front immediately after Odessa was liberated and a few months later, on November 6, 1944, was killed on the outskirts of a Hungarian village near Lake Balaton.

Such diary notes are interesting for their absolute sincerity, emotional openness, and small but important details. They do not, however, provide a complete overall picture of life in occupied Odessa. Let us therefore return to the introductory article and Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky’s survey of three publications about life in occupied Odessa.

“A few days later, on ‘one wonderful spring morning,’ BBC correspondent Alexander Werth set out for Odessa. He was one of the first correspondents and, unquestionably, the first foreign journalist to visit the ‘Russian Marseille’ after its liberation.

Twenty years later Werth would publish what became one of the best books about the war on the Eastern Front, Russia at War, 1941–1945. A year later it would be translated into Russian and issued in a numbered edition ‘for official use.’ In 1967 a substantially abridged translation of Werth’s book would be released for the general public. The book sold out immediately and became a coveted item among people interested in the history of the Great Patriotic War and among bibliophiles. Yet Werth’s book, in passages removed by the censors, contains curious information and observations about the moods and morals of the inhabitants of the city that had only just become Soviet again. The chapter is actually entitled ‘Odessa: Personal Impressions.’ Russian was as native a language to Werth as English.”

“We were approaching Odessa at dusk, and as we came closer to the Black Sea the countryside grew more hilly, and here and there traces of fighting could be seen. Large numbers of dead horses lay everywhere along the road, and here, on these windswept hills on the Black Sea coast, we again saw horse carcasses, bomb craters, and from time to time human corpses. And then we were already in Odessa, whose streets were filled with the acrid stench of fires. Odessa was plunged into impenetrable darkness. The Germans, who had been in charge of the city during the previous two weeks, blew up all the power stations before leaving; worse still, the city was left without water apart from the small quantities supplied by artesian wells. At the Bristol Hotel, where we stayed, one bottle of water per day was issued for washing.

“The hotel was attended by a laborer or dock porter with a hoarse voice and a sharp, unpleasant laugh, and his assistant, a shifty-looking little old man with a gray beard. Both usually stood on the pavement in front of the hotel watching Odessa girls in light dresses passing in groups of four or five. They made obscene remarks about the girls, while the shifty-looking old man told various jokes.”

Women interviewed by employees of the academic Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War also spoke frankly about the less-than-steadfast behavior of a considerable number of Odessa women. In June and July 1944 the commission recorded interviews with more than fifty Odessans who had survived the occupation. Those interviewed ranged from the artistic director of the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater, which had been generously financed by the occupiers, to partisans who had hidden in the catacombs. Librarian O. P. Ivanova recalled:

“The Romanians would come into the courtyard and say, ‘I want to love.’ It must be said that some women made very good use of this. They turned it into a means of survival. They lived with Romanians right and left. The income was decent because the Romanians liked to steal and knew how to steal... and they brought everything they had stolen to the woman they were living with.”

She was not, however, inclined to condemn indiscriminately every woman who found herself a Romanian ‘protector’: “For a long time, almost half a year, we had no bread. Only Romanian soldiers had bread. Women were bought for a piece of bread. It is difficult to blame women...”

Remarkably, brothels were still being opened literally a month before the city was liberated. On March 11, 1944, young Odessan Yura Sukhodolsky wrote in his diary: “An interesting thing. In one house, No. 2 in Sretensky Lane, they have opened a brothel—a red lantern is hanging outside. The whole city already knows about it and is talking animatedly about it.”

The Romanian occupation regime differed noticeably from the German one: “While the chances of an Axis victory still seemed favorable, the Romanians intended to turn Odessa into a second Bucharest, only merrier and more carefree. It was not merely that they opened restaurants, shops, and gambling establishments here, and that Antonescu solemnly appeared in the former imperial box of the Odessa Opera; there was also a serious attempt to convince the city’s population that it was, and would remain, part of the population of ‘Greater Romania.’

“Unlike the Germans in the cities they occupied, the Romanians closed neither the university nor the schools. Schoolchildren were made to study Romanian, while students were warned that if they failed to learn to speak Romanian within a year, they would be expelled from the university. One feature distinguished Odessa from German-occupied cities: Odessa was full of young people. This was a fortunate accident. The Romanians regarded Transnistria as part of their own country and its inhabitants as future Romanian citizens. That is why the overwhelming majority of Odessa’s young men and women were deported neither to Germany nor anywhere else. Nor were young Odessans conscripted into the Romanian army, since, from the Romanian point of view, they were considered completely unreliable.”

The differences between the Romanian and German occupation regimes were discussed in the summer of 1944 by Colonel D. E. Libin, head of the regional NKGB administration, in a conversation with an employee of the academic Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War: “There was a certain courting of the population here, in particular of the scientific intelligentsia, whom they courted very intensively. Some people were given a second salary, some received reductions in rent. Some were fed with various rations; excursions to Romania were arranged as rewards.”

A number of prominent scholars took part in the work of the Anti-Communist Institute established by the Romanians, including the most distinguished of them, astronomer K. D. Pokrovsky, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Among those who worked with the Anti-Communist Institute were the well-known classical philologist and theater scholar B. V. Varneke and philologist V. F. Lazursky, who had once lived in Leo Tolstoy’s household as tutor to his children.

According to Werth’s observations, in the first days after liberation Odessa still retained many traces of Romanian occupation:

“Advertisements for lottery clubs and cabarets were still on display, along with signs bearing the Romanian word ‘Bodega’ and scraps of proclamations in Romanian, German, and Russian—but not Ukrainian. Theater posters announced musical performances at the ‘Teatrul de Operă și Balet’... Odessa also had many other amusements; even a symphony orchestra of the German Air Force gave a concert here, performing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

“There were also several tailoring establishments and many other small workshops whose owners had now disappeared. Free enterprise of every kind had evidently flourished vigorously in Odessa under the Romanians. The Romanians were speculators, and half the population of Odessa—perhaps more—also engaged in speculation. Were speculation and enterprise not in every Odessan’s blood? Romanian generals brought suitcases full of women’s underwear and stockings from Bucharest and made their orderlies sell them at the market. Even now one could still buy all sorts of trifles there—German pencils, Hungarian and German cigarettes, even bottles of perfume and stockings, though the latter were already becoming rare and were sold only under the counter. The militia watched this kind of trade closely, and the Odessans at the market looked somewhat subdued.”

Soviet Army Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand entered Odessa on the day it was liberated. He too kept a diary during the war. Here is what he recorded on April 11 and 12: “In one house not far from Odessa-Sortirovochnaya station I found mourning and tears. In the middle of the room lay a woman’s corpse. The dead woman’s head was bandaged, and a pool of blood had formed around it. Her ninety-year-old mother, her young husband, and a flock of children were sobbing over the body. During the final days of their stay in Odessa the occupiers forbade local people to appear in the streets after dark. The woman had looked out through the door of her own home and was cold-bloodedly shot on the threshold by a German soldier.”

Gelfand was struck by Odessa’s beauty, by the Catholic church, the cathedral, and, of course, the opera house. He went inside, where some serviceman was conducting an improvised tour; among the visitors the lieutenant noticed generals. At the entrance to the theater, the performers were holding a meeting. “It was touching and joyful. The artists were ready to give a performance for the Red Army the next day.” Gelfand regretted that he had to leave to catch up with his unit. Of course, he did not know that the company had been considerably depleted: all the leading ballerinas had departed after the occupiers, some of the actresses together with their patrons, senior Romanian officers. Seventeen ballet soloists left in all. After the city’s liberation, Professor V. A. Selyavin, artistic director of the Odessa Opera Theater, wrote in a memorandum entitled “Information on the Activities of the Romanians at the Odessa Opera Theater During the Occupation,” apparently prepared at the request of the Extraordinary State Commission for Investigating the Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders: “Poor in spirit, poor in knowledge, and far behind the Russian theater, the Romanians greedily seized upon the theater, wanting to show what a temple of art they had taken possession of.”

According to Selyavin, the company bore a “heavy yoke,” “living on bread alone because wages were not paid for a long time. All employees felt as though they were in a concentration camp behind barbed wire.” Selyavin was being disingenuous, since the theater reopened only one day after the occupiers seized Odessa—on October 18, 1941. Perhaps at first the performers really did live on bread alone, although even that is open to serious doubt; but as early as June 1944 Selyavin told an employee of the academic Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War something quite different:

“The material conditions of the theater stars were excellent.

“They received the governor’s ration from the governor’s shop. That ration was itself divided into several categories. The first ration included five kilograms of sugar, five kilograms of butter, and other things. The troupe’s salaries were generous. Savchenko received the most—2,250 marks, when sugar cost 20 marks. The average rate in the chorus was 400 marks, though there were salaries of 500 and 600 as well. Leading performers received no less than 600. The monthly payroll for the entire troupe was 39,000. Antonescu visited the theater twice. Each visit by the dictator was accompanied by payment of a month’s salary to every theater employee without exception.”

The accounts of the British and Soviet journalists, who saw the last glimmers of Odessa’s “economic miracle,” or at least heard fresh memories of it from Odessans, confirm the realism of the recollections by Nikolai Fevr, correspondent for the Berlin newspaper Novoye Slovo, who visited Odessa in November and December 1943. He was struck both by the abundance of the Odessa market and by the flourishing cultural life.

“The famous Odessa Privoz market was seething with life. Shops, carts, and a mass of animated people” gave it the appearance of a fair:

“On every side there are heaps of all kinds of goods. Here is lard stacked in tiers, hams, sausages, smoked fish, endless baskets of grapes and apples, and outside—live poultry and piglets with stones tied to their legs so that they cannot run away from their owners. To someone well acquainted at the time with the half-starved life of most European cities, the Odessa market made a stunning impression, not only because of its abundance but also because the reasons for that abundance were at first incomprehensible.”

Perhaps Fevr’s strongest impression, however, was his first one: “A pillar plastered with every kind of poster and notice. What isn’t there! Boris Godunov and The Queen of Spades at the opera; Swan Lake and Le Corsaire at the ballet; Resurrection at Vasily Vronsky’s theater; Lysistrata at the Musical Comedy; Zaporozhets Beyond the Danube at the Modern Theater; Rosemary at the Operetta; Little Red Riding Hood at the Children’s Theater. The poster for the city circus is splashed with some astonishing acts, while a neighboring placard invites people to a football match between the Odessa and Bucharest teams. A huge banner wrapped around the whole pillar announces that the following Sunday a public celebration will be held in Alexandrovsky Park, with music, a lottery, performances by artists, and all the usual attractions. There are several more posters for individual concerts, and after reading all this one begins to believe that it is a feast in time of plague. But no. Beneath the large posters I read small advertisements: ‘Wanted: a Spitz puppy’; ‘I improve handwriting within one month’; and finally: ‘Victor Fischer system springless truss. Comfortable day and night. Useful for those suffering from coughs.’ No, this is not a feast in time of plague. During a plague people do not improve their handwriting, they do not buy Spitz dogs, and they do not take an interest in springless trusses, even if they help those who suffer from coughs.”

It should be noted that the Berlin correspondent’s recollections of the abundance of the Odessa Privoz during the occupation coincide word for word with entries made at the same time in the diary of Komsomol member and patriot Yura Sukhodolsky, quoted earlier in this chapter.

When I read about the abundance in the market during the occupation of Odessa, or that the Odessa theater reopened its doors only a couple of days after the Romanians and Germans occupied the city and continued working, offering delighted audiences its best productions, I involuntarily searched for some explanation of facts that simply would not fit in my mind and contradicted everything I knew about life in other Soviet cities seized by the Germans. Obviously, I told myself, the Romanians, regarding the Odessa region and Odessa itself as already part of Transnistria, encouraged agricultural development there. Harvests had always been good, markets began filling up, and Odessans did not have to starve as people did in other occupied Soviet cities. That spared them torment and suffering—and thank God for that, I thought. The fact that Odessans could go to the theater, hear opera and good music, allowed them to distract themselves from anxiety, fear, and grief, to forget for a while and preserve their emotional strength. And the fact that Romanian, and often German, officers sat beside them was no more under their control than the occupation itself. The continued operation of the university, conservatory, and other educational institutions gave the young people who remained in the city a chance not to lose several years of their lives, not to be deported to Romania, but instead to receive an education and later work successfully for the benefit of their Soviet Motherland after the Victory they were nevertheless awaiting, I thought.

But there my attempts to explain these unexpected facts about life in my beloved Odessa during the occupation came to an end, because what the journalists wrote next in their memoirs was much harder to explain.

To my great and sincere surprise, I discovered that in addition to bread and butter and the possibility of compensating for life’s sorrows through musical experiences, Odessa offered—and most Odessans gladly, even greedily, made use of—a mass of other everyday pleasures and conveniences that made their lives extremely pleasant and comfortable. Obviously, this abundance of food, the striking impression it created, and the variety of services on offer could have arisen only under conditions of economic growth, industrial development, and, very importantly, public demand for these opportunities. For many years nothing was written about Odessa’s economic life during the occupation, or else it was written about in the spirit of Professor S. A. Volsky, whose book Essays on the History of Odessa During the Great Patriotic War Oleg Budnitsky managed to locate. This is what he wrote: “Odessa’s economic life fell into complete decline. The port was effectively idle. Factories and plants stood still, apart from several food-industry enterprises. On the other hand, speculation flourished, which the occupation authorities broadly encouraged as ‘private entrepreneurial initiative.’ A pack of predatory speculators who poured into Odessa from Romania opened various commercial establishments in which they sold off looted state property and the personal belongings of working people. The city’s cultural life came to a standstill... The enemy’s attempt to corrupt Soviet people spiritually by means of fascist lying propaganda, a venal press, cinema, radio, and theatrical buffoonery also ended in complete failure. The population boycotted all the so-called cultural activities of the Hitlerites with disgust and contempt.”

As in his earlier quotation concerning conditions in Odessa at the beginning of the occupation, here too the professor, to put it mildly, turns the facts almost exactly upside down.

Alexander Dallin, the well-known American historian, paints a very different picture in his book The Soviet Union Under Nazi Rule. He calls the period of Romanian occupation a “new NEP.” “The overwhelming majority of enterprises, as during the NEP, opened in the service sector. They included snack bars, restaurants, bathhouses, laundries, barbershops, hotels, cinemas, and variety theaters. As for production, first, most of it was under the control of the occupation authorities; second, opening a factory required substantial capital, which the new entrepreneurs had nowhere to obtain; and third, it required specialized skills that most of them also lacked. In Dallin’s view, the new enterprises met the demand for a comfortable, ‘bourgeois’ way of life and the desire for ‘normality.’”

The scale of entrepreneurial activity is shown by the number of applications to open new enterprises. By June 30, 1942, the city authorities had issued 3,536 trading licenses and 926 licenses to open businesses. At the beginning of 1942 Odessa already had 1,500 registered private shops, and by the beginning of 1943 the figure had reached almost 6,000. According to other data, between November 1, 1941 and August 1, 1942, the Romanian authorities issued 5,282 permits to open private businesses, including restaurants, cafés, canteens and snack bars, food shops, bakeries and confectioneries, general stores, commission shops and haberdasheries, building-material stores, soap works, and many kinds of workshops, including fuel, leatherworking, watchmaking, automobile repair, metalworking and mechanical shops, smithies, carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking, and musical-instrument workshops. Barbershops were especially popular with new entrepreneurs: applications were submitted to open 1,251 establishments of that kind.

Unlike the German occupiers, who sought to deindustrialize the territories they seized, the Romanians, who regarded the occupied territories as “their own,” immediately began restoring industry and, despite the almost complete evacuation of industrial enterprises, achieved some success. One year after the Romanian capture of Odessa, industry—mainly processing industry—had been restored, depending on the branch, to between 60 and 90 percent of its former level.

The figures quoted above show that the practical-minded Romanians treated the “wealth” that had fallen into their hands very carefully. “No point letting good things go to waste,” they apparently thought, and after exterminating the Jews they began energetically arranging their lives not only in Odessa but throughout Transnistria, pursuing the cherished objective of Romanian nationalists: the creation of “Greater Romania.”

Let us return to the collection and to eyewitness impressions of that “paradise” that somehow arose in Odessa.

The collection opens with N. M. Fevr’s memoir essay “Transnistria: Odessa During the Second World War.” Nikolai Mikhailovich Fevr was a fairly well-known journalist from the émigré “second generation.” In 1941 he was invited, as a journalist, to work for the Berlin newspaper Novoye Slovo. As its correspondent he visited the occupied territories of the USSR several times. On his third assignment, in December 1943, he spent most of his time in Odessa, producing a series of articles for Novoye Slovo. The articles had an unmistakably Nazi tone and did not conceal the author’s antisemitic views, which he later tried in every possible way to disavow; nevertheless, his impressions of conditions in Odessa are undoubtedly of interest.

“...The noise and clamor of the crowd are deafening, while nimble Odessa boys jump onto the footboard of the carriage and compete with one another to offer matches, cigarettes, and lighters. To someone thoroughly familiar at that time with the half-starved life of most European cities, the Odessa market made a stunning impression, not only because of its abundance but also because the reasons for that abundance were at first incomprehensible.

“It was at this very market that a peasant who had come from starving Nikolaev, after standing for some time in delighted amazement, suddenly looked around once more, took off his cap, crossed himself, and exclaimed: ‘Lord! ... By God, it’s just like under the Tsar!’

“We drive out onto Preobrazhenskaya Street. The day has already fully begun.

“There are many people in the street hurrying about their business. Packed trams run briskly past. Shops and stalls—and here they are at every step—have already opened their doors and are full of customers.

“We pass the square laid out on the site where the Odessa cathedral, demolished by the Bolsheviks, once stood, and turn onto Deribasovskaya. I stop the cabman by a newspaper kiosk, and here comes another surprise. Odessa, it turns out, has four daily Russian-language newspapers, two illustrated weeklies, and a humor magazine. After the feeble weekly papers I had seen in German-occupied territory, four daily Odessa newspapers say even more about the life of this city than the Odessa market packed with food....

“...The Odessa day begins early. At half past five in the morning a siren sounds—not an ominous wail, but an ordinary, steady, peaceful signal. It does not summon people to air-raid shelters; it tells Odessa’s working population that the working day is beginning. Half an hour later the streets come alive with groups of workers hurrying to their enterprises. Odessans in calmer professions can sleep another hour. For many of them the signal to wake is the Odessa radio station. At five minutes to seven, from the innumerable loudspeakers in Odessa apartments comes the melodious crowing of a rooster. Then the gentle voice of a little girl recites the Lord’s Prayer. After that the music begins. One need not be particularly sentimental to feel something joyful and reassuring in this unusual opening of Odessa’s radio broadcasts. By eight o’clock the streets of Odessa are full, and the life of the great city is in full swing....

“...Odessa’s commercial successes, however, were not limited to the ‘bodega-and-restaurant’ sector. Many shops appeared in the city selling first-rate fabrics, footwear, and jewelry, while some especially enterprising shareholders even opened the Lafayette department store, which occupied an entire floor and supplied every imaginable type of merchandise. True, prices for everything except food remained very high, but they were still considerably lower than the prices for such goods in other European cities at the time. In any case, if some Odessa dandy who had vanished into oblivion in 1916 suddenly reappeared in Odessa, he could, without ration cards or special arrangements, order a tailcoat from a tailor on Deribasovskaya Street, buy a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates in a shop, and go to a ballet premiere at the theater. After the theater he could throw a banquet for his friends at the Londonskaya Hotel to celebrate his resurrection, with caviar, champagne, and game. At that time he could have done the same in only two or three cities in Europe. Odessa lived and traded, and by the end of 1943 dark rumors were already circulating that ‘millionaires’ had appeared in the city. I was introduced to some of these suspected capitalists. I did not, of course, ask how much money they had, but they were undoubtedly already prosperous people.”

I could continue quoting descriptions of Odessa’s relatively prosperous life during the occupation; the memoirs of Werth, Fevr, Peterle, and Manuilov devote a great deal of attention to it. But that would add nothing essential to the conclusion one is forced to draw: with few exceptions, Odessans readily and gladly plunged into the unexpected wave of comfortable life that washed over them, without noticing the taste of blood in its murky water. Why did this happen? Fevr, whose observations of Odessa life are quoted above, asked the same question. Despite his obvious political bias, his conclusions are fairly well grounded. This is what he wrote in his notes:

“The future chronicler of the Second World War and of the fate of the Russian regions caught in its whirlpool will certainly devote several pages to the enviable fate of Odessa, so unlike the fate of other Russian cities. And everyone who visited the city during the war was amazed and tried to discover the reasons for the almost fantastic speed with which Odessa life revived.

“There were, of course, several reasons, and only their fortunate combination made possible Odessa’s near-miraculous resurrection from the dead socialist hell. The chief driving force of this resurrection lay in three words whose enormous importance was underlined with a bold stroke by the days of Odessa’s revival: freedom of private initiative. The new Odessa administration understood perfectly that the principal weapon against the terrible legacy of the Marxist experiment was private initiative and every possible encouragement of it. From the very first days of occupation, the governorate and city administration became a life-giving source of permits for opening every imaginable private enterprise, shop, stall, and restaurant. Where private initiative could not manage on its own, the municipal authorities came to its aid with loans and subsidies. In addition, the governorate and city administration themselves opened cooperatives and shops. Naturally, this was not done without benefit to the officials of those institutions, who usually became shareholders in the businesses, but that is not the main point. What matters is that, as a result, all Odessa became covered with a network of commercial enterprises.

“To supply these enterprises with the necessary goods and raw materials, the Romanians began restoring factories and plants. In this matter the governorate and city administration took on the main burden. Thanks to their efforts, almost all of Odessa’s factories were restored in a short time—not only those producing necessities, but also those making what, under wartime conditions, could be considered luxuries, such as chocolates and metal paper fasteners. Taken together, all this immediately gave a powerful stimulus to Odessa trade and, most importantly, persuaded peasants willingly and confidently to bring their produce to the city markets, where in exchange they received not merely a bundle of colored banknotes but almost everything a large city could manufacture for the countryside. This not only helped supply Odessa with food but also rapidly restored peasant farms, which revived after so many years of systematic plunder by the Soviet state.

“Another important factor in Odessa’s rapid recovery was that the Romanian administration of the city consisted largely of Bessarabians who were, in essence, more Russian than Romanian. Odessa’s mayor, Gherman Pântea, and his right-hand man Costinescu had formerly been officers in the Russian Imperial Army. The entire new Odessa administration, from top to bottom, was permeated by Bessarabians who not only knew Russian perfectly but also understood very well the needs and aspirations of the population. As a result, not only city residents but visiting peasants willingly dealt with the new authorities and found understanding and sympathy there.”

It should be added that all the “chroniclers,” regardless of their views and their attitude toward the occupiers, singled out Gherman Pântea and attributed to him qualities sharply distinguishing him from other senior officials of the Romanian administration.

Gherman Pântea was an experienced administrator who had served several times as mayor of Chișinău. He did much to restore buildings destroyed in Odessa, municipal utilities and power stations, to reopen the university, and to establish cleanliness and order in the city. His efforts ensured that all Odessa museums were preserved and protected from looting and from the removal of exhibits to Romania. Some literature almost attributes to him the leadership of the mass executions in Odessa’s streets after the explosion of the NKVD administration building. This is incorrect. Pântea was not informed in advance of the planned executions and protested against them, just as he protested against the deportation of Odessa’s Jews in a letter to Antonescu dated October 23, 1941. He called the executions barbarism “which we shall never be able to wash away before the civilized world.”

Nevertheless, although deportations and killings continued, Pântea did not resign. It should also be noted that he was later tried twice, first by a Soviet court and then by a Romanian one. He was acquitted both times, something unusual for an official of an occupation administration.

In January 1944, as Red Army forces approached Odessa, the Germans abolished the Romanian administration headed by Gherman Pântea and brought their own troops into the city.

Jan Peterle ended his memoirs in the following way:

“In March 1944 chaos had already begun, and the Germans, with almost no resistance from the frightened Romanians, took control into their own hands. Once again the trains at the stations were packed to capacity; they moved cautiously toward Romania through Tiraspol, which the Soviet Army was approaching. All sorts of rumors circulated through the city, and the dominant one was that the entire population should calmly await the arrival of ‘our own’ and that ‘our own’ were no longer what they had been before: they were ‘different,’ bringing not repression but new arrangements, because the war had taught them much and had changed policy. And how many people—even gray-haired ones—sincerely believed this and rejoiced. As a result, families quarreled and split: some decided to evacuate, others wanted to stay, and there were cases in which one family member or another ran away and hid somewhere.

“By the end of March Odessa had fallen silent. At night there was shooting again in the streets. The market stalls were being boarded up. Those who could stocked up on food. Only for German servicemen did the last performances continue at the opera. The partisan movement was clearly growing, drawing in ardent young people as well as those who were preparing to make a ‘180-degree turn’ and greet the Red Army with flowers, hoping in that way to earn ‘forgiveness.’

“With minor street fighting and apparently without significant new destruction, on April 9 Odessa changed once again from the ephemeral ‘capital of Transnistria’ into the Soviet ‘sleeping beauty.’”

Of course, there were also many people in Odessa who faced no choice between fleeing with the Germans and remaining. They lived waiting for the occupation to end and for Odessa to be liberated. This is what Ekaterina Gazhiy wrote in her diary, published after the war under the title Life in Captivity:

“10/04/44 (5 a.m.).

“All night the guns thundered and cannon fire could be heard. Explosions of enormous force shook the entire house. Factories were burning all around; they say the waterworks have been blown up. No one slept. All night there was talk; everyone expects German reprisals—it is obvious that the city has reached its end. I am lying now in the kitchen on a crate because I can no longer walk or think clearly... They say the Russians are in Kremidovka...

“(6 p.m.)

“God, can it really be happening? The Russians are in the city. Yes, Russian soldiers, officers... And the population remained... We were not driven out, killed, or plundered. Our own people have come, dear, genuine liberators. In the morning I am lying in the kitchen and hear the Cossacks shooting in the streets... It is frightening... Suddenly Volodya, who had gone out to find out what was happening—it was about six in the morning—runs in. His face is twitching and he is crying: ‘Russian soldiers are in the city; I saw them myself’... I go downstairs. People are standing in small groups by the gates, but everyone is afraid to show their joy. Everyone says: ‘Maybe the Germans are provoking us.’ But then a vehicle carrying Russian Red Army men and officers drives up to our building. There is no longer any doubt. People embrace and kiss them, invite them into their apartments, give them drinks and food. All day the city is full of excitement. Everyone congratulates one another. Thanksgiving services are held in the churches for deliverance from the ‘foreigners’; bells are ringing... Have we really survived? Are all the horrors really over?! But the war is not over. And if we have already lived through them, many others still have these horrors ahead of them. Can this really be the end?”

On April 10, 1944, the troops of the Third Ukrainian Front under Army General Rodion Malinovsky, supported by the Black Sea Fleet under Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky, completely liberated Odessa from the occupiers.

During the occupation of the city, which lasted 907 days, around one hundred thousand inhabitants died and seventy-eight thousand people were deported for forced labor in Germany. As they fled, the fascists almost completely destroyed the Odessa port, but fortunately they did not have time to blow up a number of mined buildings in Odessa, including the Odessa Opera House.

Concluding this chapter, I want to say that the extraordinary phenomenon of a relatively prosperous and, on the whole, calm life for the inhabitants of occupied Odessa might have occurred not only in this major Ukrainian city but throughout the territory of the Soviet republic if Hitler and his entourage had adopted the concept of one of the chief ideologues of Nazism, Alfred Rosenberg, rather than that of his opponent Wilhelm Kube. These two senior Nazi officials shared the same worldview and were loyal associates of Hitler. The one issue on which they differed was the planned fate of Ukraine—or, more precisely, of its population—in the coming war with the USSR. Hitler prepared for war with the Soviet Union not only by increasing military and industrial capacity but also by developing extremely detailed basic concepts for the conquest of the enormous country. One of these envisaged the destruction of the Slavic peoples or their transformation into completely rightless slaves. Rosenberg had no objection to this principle except with regard to policy in Ukraine, particularly the fate of the people living there. He believed that Ukraine, with its extraordinarily fertile soil, developed livestock farming, and excellent climate, could become an inexhaustible source of first-class food and raw materials and that Ukrainians themselves could produce them, since, in his view, they were fundamentally hostile to the Bolsheviks and Soviet power—which was true to a considerable degree. Anti-Soviet sentiment was especially strong in western Ukraine, something that became very evident in the first days after German troops appeared there. Ukrainian émigré organizations, like Russian ones abroad, had never abandoned plans to revive a free and independent Ukraine. Leaders and ideologues of Ukrainian nationalism, among them Stepan Bandera, saw Nazi Germany as the force that might overthrow the rule of the “Jewish-Bolsheviks” in Russia and Ukraine and thereby, they hoped, enable them to return and create an independent Ukrainian state. As early as the mid-1930s they began establishing various contacts with Nazi circles in Germany and conducting active negotiations about the possible preservation of Ukrainian statehood after a German victory over the USSR, receiving encouraging hints in return. Rosenberg was one of the negotiators on the German side.

For this reason, long before the war began, he opposed the mass destruction of the Ukrainian population and continued to insist on that position even when mass killing became a horrifying reality in the very first months of the occupation of Ukraine. His categorical opponent in this “ideological and theoretical” dispute was another senior Nazi official, Alfred Kube, who believed that Ukrainians, like all “subhumans,” should be destroyed or reduced to the level of working animals and that no considerations of economic expediency should be taken into account. His pathological ideological savagery, shared by Hitler, prevailed over Rosenberg’s Nazi pragmatism. An entire chapter of Alexander Dallin’s very interesting book The Soviet Union Under Nazi Rule, 1941–1945 is devoted to this confrontation between the two Nazi ideologues. It sets out in great detail all their “creative” disputes, arguments, justifications, and even economic calculations. But Kube and the other ideologues of Aryan racial superiority “won,” and so the population of Ukraine was destroyed as systematically and with the same insane sadism as people in other occupied regions of the USSR. Odessa’s life under the Romanians can therefore be regarded only as a model of a “soft” occupation regime capable of attracting the local population to the occupier’s side when part of that population was internally prepared to accept it. Had the fascists followed Rosenberg’s doctrine and also used the Odessa experience of the Romanian military administration, they would most likely have secured in occupied Ukraine—especially in its western regions—the support of a significant section of the population that wanted and waited for an opportunity to rid itself of Soviet power, and there were very many such people. I think that in that case the course of the war could have been entirely different, and it is difficult to say how much more strength and blood the Soviet people would have had to expend to defeat Hitler’s Germany. But the degree and scale of fascist brutality toward civilians were so great that even those Ukrainians and Belarusians who had initially greeted German troops with hope during the first months of occupation, believing that after destroying the Communists and Jews the Germans would allow them to live peacefully as in earlier times, realized with horror how deeply mistaken they had been. The only chance to avoid being killed by the fascists, or later sent to Soviet camps for collaboration, became joining the partisan detachments, of which there were very many in Ukraine and Belarus. Of course, these disillusioned people did not form the backbone of the partisan movement. The partisans operated very effectively and caused the Germans major problems, especially through railway sabotage, derailing trains carrying military equipment and troops and eliminating high-ranking Nazi officers. Among these formations, which numbered many thousands of partisans, were detachments in which the majority of fighters were Jews—escapees from ghettos or concentration camps, as well as inhabitants of small towns and shtetls who organized resistance groups themselves. One reason for this, paradoxical as it may sound, was the existence of antisemitism within some partisan units, something that, as became known much later during perestroika, was not an invention.

“In the autumn of 1942 P. K. Ponomarenko, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus and head of the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement, sent commanders of partisan formations a radio message forbidding them to admit people who had escaped from Minsk, supposedly because German spies might be among them. It was apparently no accident that eight Jewish partisan detachments were created near Minsk, since it was difficult for prisoners who had escaped from the ghetto to join existing partisan units.”

This quotation comes from the memoir My Life, or Did I Dream You?, written by Yuliy Aizenshtat, who as a teenager escaped from the ghetto established by the Germans in the Belarusian town of Glusk, reached the Red October partisan detachment based deep in the forests of Polesie, and for several years was, in effect, a “son of the partisan detachment.” Born in 1930, he carried out every assignment that could be given to a boy: he herded cows, looked after horses, served as a courier between other partisan groups, and delivered to towns and shtetls the newspaper printed in a forest press.

There were very many such boys—“sons of regiments and partisan detachments”—during the war, but I decided to mention Yulik Aizenshtat in my notes because life unexpectedly brought us together in the Czech spa town of Mariánské Lázně, where he and his wife, and Vika and I, were on holiday in 2017. Friendly and energetic at eighty-seven, on the very first day we met he mentioned that during the war he had been in a partisan detachment, had experienced and endured a great deal, and had written a book of memoirs about it. We spent about a week and a half together, and every day I showered him with questions about those years and the events in which he had taken part. I found it extraordinarily interesting. Information from a firsthand witness—nothing is more valuable. I cannot acquaint you in detail here with his stories or, still less, with the contents of this remarkable book, which is impossible to read without emotion, so I shall limit myself to two quotations. The first is from the foreword written by the American writer and journalist David Guy.

“Yuliy Aizenshtat bore everything on his child’s shoulders—the ghetto, life in the Red October partisan detachment, and the execution in the March marsh.

“Six partisans, Yuliy among them, were hiding in the marsh among loose snow. Not all of them had weapons, and short automatic bursts sounded like barking as two dozen Germans methodically shot the six. Yuliy was lucky. Death looked him in the face and passed by: a German wounded him in the arm and did not finish him off, preferring to send him to the Ozarichi concentration camp. There the prisoners, especially children, were deliberately infected with typhus so that the epidemic would spread to residents of the surrounding villages and to Soviet soldiers liberating that part of Belarus. Aizenshtat survived by a miracle, received a higher education, became a well-known engineer in Minsk, and the father of four children.”

The second quotation is from Yulik himself:

“The sadism, vandalism, and barbarity of the inhuman creatures, the helplessness of my people, and the hopelessness of our situation shocked me and turned my child’s soul inside out. Not so much by reasoning with my mind as by feeling with my heart, I understood one thing: there would be no mercy for us Jews, and in any situation, however nightmarish, one must not lose self-control or presence of mind but must look for ways to survive. In August 1941 my childhood ended...

“...Among those shot in the quarry on Myslochanskaya Hill on that freezing day, December 2, 1941, were the people dearest and closest to me. Thus, in a single hour, the centuries-old history of the Jews of Glusk came to a tragic end. It was as though they had never been there at all, as though they had never lived there. To use German terminology, Glusk became free of Jews—‘Judenfrei.’ About three thousand Jews were shot in Glusk. No more than sixty or seventy people survived.”

Jewish partisans were most numerous in Belarus and Eastern Europe, but groups also existed in occupied France and Belgium, where they cooperated with local resistance movements. Many individual Jewish fighters participated in other partisan movements in other occupied countries. Overall, the number of Jewish partisans is estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000. Unfortunately, there is little literature devoted to Jewish participation in the partisan movement, but on the Internet one can find many publications about these detachments and about individual fighters, commanders, scouts, and radio operators who made a substantial contribution to the struggle against fascism but are undeservedly forgotten today.

32. Retribution

I recently read that killings committed during a war, in the course of military operations by one belligerent against another, regardless of which side is the aggressor and which is liberating its own territory, are not classified as war crimes unless they are carried out by prohibited methods of killing or with “inhumane” types of weapons. So, apparently, there are permitted ways of killing and forbidden ones, such as poison gas, phosphorus bombs, biological weapons, or certain types of antipersonnel mines that do not kill but only maim or tear off limbs. If one were to imagine, purely theoretically, that at the end of some war not a single civilian had suffered and no soldier had been poisoned with gas, there would be no one to prosecute. That is the theory. In practice, during the Second World War the fascists not only violated every “rule” governing the killing of people but invented methods so savage and sadistic that extraordinary commissions, investigators, courts, and tribunals had enough work for several years. After the war the desire for just retribution gripped anyone who knew even a little about fascist crimes, to say nothing of those whose relatives had been killed in the war or had become victims of the perfected machinery of death created and set in motion by the Germans and their allies.

In the immediate aftermath, when punitive troops and their local accomplices were captured in liberated territories, death sentences were sometimes carried out within hours. Lieutenant Gelfand, who entered Odessa with his unit on the very first day of liberation, witnessed one such execution.

“On Tiraspolskaya Street he saw a ‘gallows-truck,’

on which three scoundrels stood with nooses around their necks: two Romanians and one Russian. The truck drove away and the bodies were left hanging. The agony of two of the hanged men was ‘below average,’ the lieutenant recorded with almost bureaucratic precision. The Odessans who had gathered to watch the execution greeted the sentence and the moment of execution with applause. In front of the burned-out railway station another Romanian was hanging—‘for rape and the shooting of civilians.’”

The results of the work of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders were still far in the future, as was the judgment against the Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trial, but heart and soul demanded revenge immediately, here and now. The mind boiled with hatred and with the knowledge that far from everyone would receive what he deserved; many might escape punishment. Boris spoke to me about this when he told the story of the neighbor, the “fighter” from the house on Ekaterininskaya Street, who strangled Manyushka on the way to the ghetto. He bribed the Romanians and escaped, then later returned home, served only a short term after the war, and went on living quietly. Nor was the famous USSR boxing champion Oleg Zagoruichenko, whom Boris also mentioned, punished.

At the beginning of the war Zagoruichenko served in the intelligence department of the Baltic Fleet. In the autumn of 1941, during an attempt to land an intelligence group, their boat was destroyed, but Zagoruichenko survived; concussed, he was picked up from the water. In the prisoner-of-war camp he was recognized by a German officer who before the war had headed a German sports delegation in Moscow. Zagoruichenko was released and appeared in Odessa, where his father lived. There he agreed to cooperate with the Germans and Romanians and became coach of the Victoria boxing club, which, as later became known, was in reality a German intelligence school; Zagoruichenko trained German saboteurs there. Shortly before Odessa was liberated he fled and, together with the Romanians, ended up in Bucharest, where he died in circumstances that were never clarified.

It was not only individual traitors and murderers who escaped retribution. Thousands of ordinary Romanian participants in the extermination of Odessa’s Jews remained unpunished, and their names were never even publicly exposed. Germany and the German people fully experienced the deserved mortal terror of the Soviet military armada sweeping across their territory; retribution there was merciless, tangible, often cruel, and at least in some measure soothed the emotional wounds of the soldiers. Romania, by contrast, although it had fought on the side of fascist Germany, successfully avoided not only Soviet military occupation and just punishment but even public condemnation.

Already at the beginning of 1944 the Romanian leadership, Antonescu included, began to understand that Germany’s defeat was inevitable. Quiet attempts were made to establish contacts with Britain and the United States and to find a way for Romania to leave the war. Romania’s political opposition, which surprisingly had survived during the war, understood the same thing and managed to unite in a bloc with the Communists and coordinate with the young Romanian king, Michael I, its position and actions aimed at breaking the alliance between Romania and Germany. As a result, in August 1944 Antonescu was arrested and handed over to the USSR, while the king announced Romania’s withdrawal from the war and the beginning of military action against Germany. Although the order did not reach every military unit and some Romanian forces continued fighting against the USSR, Romanian units were subsequently incorporated into the Soviet forces and took part in the war against Germany. It is possible that the well-developed political instinct of Romanian politicians, the timely turn toward military alliance with the USSR, and then the rapid proclamation of the country as a Socialist Republic allowed Romania to avoid the “public flogging” that might otherwise have awaited a satellite and ally of Germany. It also helped blur Romania’s role in the war against the USSR, especially its role in war crimes against the Jewish population of Odessa and Bessarabia. Whereas fascist crimes were a constant subject of historical research, literature, and film, Romanian “achievements” in the same field were hardly mentioned. This dishonest approach by the Soviet leadership, adopted for geopolitical reasons, allowed Romanian servicemen directly involved in mass executions of civilians to dissolve into postwar society, bury memories of the crimes they had committed in the furthest corners of their souls, and become active builders of socialism in Romania.

I cannot rule out the possibility that I shook hands with some of those former servicemen during technical negotiations when I was on a business trip to Bucharest in February 1989. Some participants in the meeting were then around seventy to seventy-five years old. They were friendly, smiling, and happily drank the Stolichnaya vodka we had brought from Leningrad.

Only during perestroika did serious works by professional Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Western historians begin to appear, examining and analyzing with academic completeness and precision the events connected with Romania’s participation in the Second World War.

After Antonescu was handed over to the Soviet authorities he was taken to Moscow. “The Romanian dictator wore a field marshal’s everyday tunic of mouse-gray color with numerous ribbon bars and one decoration,” recalled in the late 1990s retired Major General Mikhail Belousov, who at the time of the events had been a SMERSH lieutenant colonel and had directed the operation. “He was short, thin, reddish-haired, and looked, as I thought to myself, dejected. During dinner, which lasted about two hours, there were no particularly noteworthy conversations. The ‘guests’ drank little but ate reasonably well, saying that all the dishes were tasty. There was some discussion of the hardships and misfortunes brought by the war.”

After arriving in the Soviet capital, the former Romanian leaders were taken to one of the government dachas outside Moscow. They were then transferred to the NKGB internal prison on Lubyanka, where the Romanians remained in pretrial detention until April 1946. At the Nuremberg Trial the Soviet prosecutor reported on interrogations of the Romanian prisoners carried out in Moscow: “Antonescu was interrogated in accordance with the laws of the Soviet Union, and the record of his testimony, which is of exceptional importance for clarifying the nature of relations between Germany and its satellites, has been submitted to the Tribunal.”

No one has thoroughly investigated the causes and origins of his savage hatred of Jews. They surely lay not in the depths of world history or in subtle religious contradictions between Christians and Jews, but in something much simpler and more primitive. I doubt that Antonescu’s personality attracted much attention from serious researchers, but, for example, in the book Antonescu’s City by Yakov Verkhovsky, who as a child lived through the entire Romanian occupation of Odessa, I read that in childhood Antonescu was deeply traumatized when his father left the family for another woman, a Jewish woman, and he associated all his childhood suffering and distress with that woman’s nationality. More strangely still, Antonescu himself later married, for the first time, a Jewish woman named Rachel Mendel; perhaps he could not resist the beauty of a Jewish girl. Tragically, the son born to the young couple died soon afterward, which enraged Antonescu, who from then on supposedly came to hate Jews forever as, in his view, the source of all his personal troubles and misfortunes.

In April 1946 Antonescu was transferred to Romania, where on May 6 the Bucharest trial began of the former marshal, former head of state and chairman of the Council of Ministers, Ion Antonescu. The trial established and confirmed that Antonescu was personally responsible for the deaths of 300,000 Jews living in Romania, Bessarabia, and Odessa, not counting several tens of thousands of Roma who, in his opinion, likewise had no right to live. He and seventeen of his closest associates were sentenced to death, but after a number of pardons only four were ultimately executed. The execution itself turned into a grotesque spectacle in which Antonescu was even allowed to command the firing squad personally, giving the order to fire by waving his hat. A witness and participant recalled: “In his final words Antonescu shouted that he was dying for the ideals of the Romanian people. The dictator did not die after the first volley and, lying on the ground, demanded that they shoot him again. The commander came over and they fired at him once more. The doctor stated that Antonescu still had not died. Then the commander fired again and blew out Antonescu’s brains. ‘All were dead,’ the senior gendarmerie sergeant concluded.”

It appears that the gendarmes carrying out the sentence—and there were at least a dozen and a half of them—were lousy shots with no experience in shooting Odessa’s Jews; there, everyone had shot accurately and with certainty.

Immediately after the war not only fascist leaders but lesser figures as well were tried and executed, although a large number of Nazi criminals managed to escape punishment altogether by finding refuge in Latin American countries.

In Odessa, Romanian fascists and local punitive collaborators were hanged literally in the first days after liberation, in an outburst of righteous anger, hot on the trail and without formal trial or investigation, which were replaced by still-boiling hatred toward specific sadists whose hands bore the traces of blood. In other Soviet cities most severely affected by the German occupation, fascists were executed following court verdicts. One such trial took place in Leningrad in December 1945. The principal materials of the trial remain classified to this day, but available sources show that it dealt with crimes committed in the Pskov and Leningrad regions in the winter of 1943–1944 by Wehrmacht Major General Heinrich Remlinger and his closest subordinates: punitive operations involving shootings, people burned alive, and torture; deportation for forced labor; and destruction of settlements during retreat. The Leningrad trial also mentioned large-scale Nazi crimes committed in the area in 1941–1942 against Jews, Roma, psychiatric patients, and Soviet prisoners of war, but they were not examined in detail; the materials did not enter the indictment, and no one bore public responsibility at that trial for those Holocaust crimes. The draft sentence was sent by the court to Moscow for approval by V. M. Molotov: “Taking into account the degree of guilt of each defendant, we consider it necessary to sentence defendants Remlinger, Strüfing, Sonnenfeld, Böhm, Engel, Jänicke, Skotki, and Gerer to death by hanging; defendants Vogel, Düre, and Wiese to hard labor. We request your instructions” (memorandum addressed to Molotov, RGASPI).

A large Kalinin Square near the Gigant cinema was selected as the place of execution in Leningrad, and several tens of thousands of Leningrad residents gathered there. The execution itself was described in the Leningrad newspapers in detailed and emotional language: “At the front they escaped the just bullet of the Soviet soldier. Now they were to test the strength of a Russian rope. Yesterday in Leningrad eight war criminals hung from a solid crossbar. In their final moments they again met the hateful eyes of the people. Again they heard whistles and curses accompanying them to their shameful death. The vehicles moved. The last point of support disappeared from beneath the feet of the condemned.” (M. Lanskoy, “The People’s Verdict,” Leningradskaya Pravda, January 4, 1946.)

A documentary film entitled The People’s Verdict was made about the trial itself, including the execution of the sentence. Its cameraman was Yefim Uchitel, who later became famous.

It must be said that the process of execution itself and the horrifying details of the final seconds of a living being’s convulsions were a difficult spectacle for many of those present in the square. A normal human being is constituted in such a way that watching another person die, even a scoundrel and sadist, is unnatural and repellent. A close friend of our apartment neighbors in the 1950s, who took part in the trial as an interpreter and was present on Kalinin Square, described similar impressions in my presence.

Returning to Romania, which cleverly avoided full responsibility for its crimes during the war, I cannot in fairness fail to mention that on October 12, 2004, Romanian president Ion Iliescu officially acknowledged the responsibility of the Romanian state for the Holocaust. This allows one to hope that, to a considerable degree, a moral cleansing of Romanian society took place. In his concluding remarks he said: “We must neither forget nor minimize the tragedy of our recent dark historical past, when the Jews became victims of the tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Well then—thanks even for that.