Ratnik.tv 
25 April 2022

Odessa. The Jewish Question. Along the Roads of Death 

FACTS

Iosif Vergilis was born in Odessa in August 1934. During the occupation of Odessa, together with his family, he passed through a prison, a ghetto, and a concentration camp, where most of his family perished. After the war he graduated from the Odessa Polytechnic Institute and worked as a design engineer. Below are excerpts from Iosif’s recollections of what he lived through in Odessa.

Before the October Revolution, Odessa was the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire by population. During the Revolution and Civil War, Odessa’s population fell by 60 percent, but before the Second World War it had again reached half a million, of whom Jews made up 40 percent, or about 200,000 people.

Such a substantial decrease in population, both in Odessa and throughout the territories affected by the Civil War, is explained in the text by atrocities, lawlessness and anti-Jewish pogroms committed by the White Volunteer Army.

Pogroms were avoided in some large cities—Odessa, Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk—where central authorities and Entente missions were located. Elsewhere, according to some estimates cited in the article, White forces carried out 1,295 anti-Jewish pogroms and killed 306,000 Jews.

Petliura’s forces were especially violent. In May 1920, when they captured Kyiv, a new wave of pogroms swept through towns and small settlements; in Chernobyl, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv and the Vinnytsia region about four thousand Jews were killed. Beginning in May 1919, Jewish youth flocked to the Red Army. Entire Jewish self-defense detachments were transformed into regular Red Army units.

I now want to return to the story of our family and my parents, whose lives were closely connected with the circumstances in Odessa described above. Fortunately, during the Civil War they were in Odessa and escaped the pogroms. I was born on 14 August 1934. At that time my father, Semyon Yevseyevich Vergilis, was thirty-eight, and my mother, Zinaida Ilyinichna Vergilis, née Gleizerman, was twenty-two.

My mother’s family moved to Odessa from another Ukrainian city, Proskurov, now Khmelnytskyi, in 1916, a year before the October Revolution. They were fleeing pogroms and hunger, which were typical of Jewish places of residence in Ukraine.

During another pogrom in Proskurov, my mother’s uncle was killed after the pogromists lifted him on their bayonets. That was the last straw for my mother’s family in deciding to move to Odessa. At that time many Jewish families emigrated from their small towns to America, while some moved to Odessa.

Odessa was in a completely different situation then. It was a prosperous city in which everyone could find a place in life. Cultural life also flourished: many newspapers, magazines and books were published; theaters and museums operated; various interesting meetings were held. Odessa was a wonderful place both for work and for cultural life. For this reason many Jewish families moved there from their small towns in hopes of finding a better life.

Most newly arrived Jewish families settled in the Odessa district known as Moldavanka. No one knows why the district received that name, since Moldavians had never lived there. The people of Moldavanka worked in various trades and commerce, as cab drivers and as dock laborers.

My parents married in 1933. As a young family they were given an apartment on the ground floor of the same building in which my mother’s family lived. I was born in that apartment on 14 August 1934. My mother told me that people around them were surprised that in such a difficult time they had allowed themselves to have a child. When the country’s economic situation improved, our family began to grow: my brother Anatoly was born in 1937 and another brother, Vladimir, in 1938.

We continued to live in the same small apartment. Our parents occupied the bedroom, while the three of us boys slept in one common room.

I remember clearly how the war began for us. It was a beautiful sunny day, 22 June 1941, when my mother Zinaida, or Zelda, my two younger brothers and I were returning from the cinema. We were all in a good mood and animatedly discussing the film we had liked.

Suddenly, from the radio loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, we heard Yuri Levitan’s voice announcing the beginning of the war with Hitler’s Germany. A crowd of people stood around every loudspeaker, deeply agitated by what they had heard. People wept and lamented: “What will happen to us?” and “What should we do now?” Everyone also spoke about the coming mobilization.

Then life in Odessa continued as usual. The Germans bombed Odessa for the first time exactly one month after the war began, on 22 July 1941. At that moment we were in the square near the Opera House. We could not sit at home and wanted to be among people.

Suddenly German bombers appeared over Odessa. They flew so low that the German crosses on them could be seen clearly. They were heading to bomb the port, where industry and people were being evacuated from Odessa. When the bombers appeared, anti-aircraft guns mounted on the roofs of many buildings opened fire. From their shooting and the falling bombs, the whole city seemed to be in flames. We saw one bomb fall into our square. It did not explode, but it made a deep crater.

The bombing continued the next day. The Germans began bombing early in the morning. At four o’clock one bomb fell near our home at 3 Maly Lane. It completely destroyed that house, leaving only one wall. People who had been sleeping on their balconies survived and were later brought down by firefighters using ladders. In the following days the Germans continuously bombed the port and bombs fell very close to us. One bomb or mine demolished the neighboring building at 15 Lastochkina Street: of the large house only gray dust and a stench remained.

On 16 October 1941 Odessa was abandoned by the Separate Coastal Army and the Black Sea Fleet for strategic reasons. At dawn that day the last warship carrying troops left Odessa for Sevastopol. The occupiers could not believe that Odessa was no longer resisting and were afraid to enter the city. They began occupying it on the night of 16–17 October 1941. From that moment, all Jews who remained in Odessa became victims of the Nazi occupiers.

The first mass killing of Jews in the Odessa region had already taken place in the town of Kodyma on 1 August 1941, when more than a thousand Jews were killed. Of course, Odessa’s Jews had no information about this. Had they known anything about the Nazis’ destruction of Jews, they would have tried to flee Odessa by any possible route.

The memoir states that Hitler began to hate Jews from an early age because of their abilities in science, art, literature, commerce and other fields, and that he lacked those talents himself and could eliminate Jewish superiority in them only through physical extermination.

But, it continues, the main cause of Hitler’s antisemitism was not only personal resentment but historical antisemitism, which had long existed in Germany and which he used to come to power. Already in the nineteenth century there had been a powerful movement in Germany demanding that Jews be excluded completely from the economy, their property confiscated, and then that they be expelled from Germany altogether. These were the actions taken against Jews when the Nazis came to power in 1933, followed by the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question.

People were seized directly in the streets, and some were immediately hanged from posts and trees to intimidate the population. Nazis burst into apartments supposedly searching for communists and Jews and beat the people inside with rifle butts regardless of age.

Young women were gang-raped on the spot before family members paralyzed by horror, while everything the attackers liked was looted, mainly jewelry, watches, gold and money. Then everyone was driven out into the street and marched for registration either to the hospital on Khersonskaya Street or to the school on Komsomolskaya Street. We ended up at the school, where people were kept in overcrowded rooms for several days without food or water.

Any protest was punished by being shot on the spot. After the long-awaited but purely formal registration, all Jews were driven to the local prison, where the authorities had decided to create a Jewish ghetto. The prison was empty because the Soviet authorities had evacuated all criminals to Siberia and Kazakhstan. It would have been better, the memoir says, if some Jews had been evacuated there instead of the criminals.

After all the mass killings, 60,000–70,000 Jews remained in Odessa, for whom the authorities intended to establish a ghetto. At first they wanted to create it in remote parts of the city, in Slobodka or Moldavanka. The authorities even began fencing off an area in Moldavanka with barbed wire, covering Malorossiyskaya, Srednyaya and Stepovaya streets and the former flea market.

It was assumed that Jews would work both inside and outside the ghetto, wear a six-pointed star on their chest, and return to the ghetto at night. After two days of agonizing waiting under terrible conditions for formal registration at the school on Komsomolskaya Street, we, along with many other Jews, were driven to the former Odessa prison. It was 26 October, immediately after the days of terror. The families of our neighbors mentioned above were with us. The prison was almost empty after the mass killings of Jews, but there were also people who had been there since the first day of the occupation, 17 October, and had miraculously survived the days of terror.

We were led into the prison’s second courtyard. Two detachments were waiting: one SS unit with a machine gun and submachine guns, and another unit of Romanian soldiers. They ordered us to take the spades standing nearby and registered each of us. We formed up and marched through the prison gates. Outside, a detachment larger than our group surrounded us. There were 121 of us, and a machine gun followed behind.

A German officer, speaking broken Ukrainian, gave the order: “Carry the scattered bodies into one pit. Dig up earth and cover the corpses in the warehouses so that they cannot be seen.” Pieces of planking lay nearby, and stretchers were made from them. Body parts and corpses were carried to a pit filled with water and thrown in. The pit was large, but after two hours it was already full and another had to be dug. Soon that one too was full. We were ordered to cover the pits with earth and carry the remaining corpses into the warehouses and cover them there.

In the prison we were placed in a large cell together with our neighbors and other families; altogether there were about fifty people in the cell. As people were transferred to the prison after registration it became overcrowded again. People could not lie down and even slept sitting up. Everyone tried to get a better place near the walls so that others would not have to step over them.

But even under these terrible conditions people did not lose their human dignity. They gave the better places near the walls to women with children, young women and grown girls, in an effort to protect them from drunken fascists and Ukrainian policemen. Every night they burst into the cells with large flashlights searching among the new arrivals for young women and girls.

When they seized a victim, that woman usually did not return. Those who did return were in such a tortured state that they lost their reason and could do nothing but cry. Parents, brothers and other relatives therefore tried to hide their young women, covering them with belongings or smearing their faces and clothes with dirt. Sometimes they managed to buy these men off with valuables.

By order of the authorities, Jews began to be released from prison in groups. The authorities feared epidemics because of the terrible unsanitary conditions. Under the order, most Jews were released except young men up to the age of fifty, young women without children, and girls. Having a child gave a woman the right to leave the prison, so people arranged to share children for this purpose.

Young men were not released because they were used for heavy and dangerous work such as clearing mines from the airfield. Men were forced to perform such labor until they were completely exhausted and were then shot. Young women fared no better: they were kept in the prison for the amusement of Romanian soldiers. The two daughters of our neighbors, the Cherekhovskys, also remained in the prison. Their parents asked permission to see them, to which soldiers replied with giggles that their daughters were doing very well in prison. The young women and men were never released.

During the period of relative calm for Odessa’s Jews after the prison, thousands of people were dying nearby at Dalnik, on the death march from Dalnik to Bogdanovka, and then in Bogdanovka itself. During the same period a Jewish committee was created in Odessa. According to the recollections of Iosif Kapler, a member of the committee, it was headed by a man named Podkaminsky.

The committee helped Jewish families who had lost their apartments after prison and had no roof over their heads, supplied food, and provided medical help to Jews in urgent need. It also compiled lists of Jews who remained in Odessa after returning from prison. The committee calculated that by the end of December 1941 about 70,000 Jews remained in the city.

Alongside the Jews released from prison there were a small number who had managed to escape from Bogdanovka and return to Odessa. They told of the horrors taking place there. The committee helped them with housing and food.

Iosif Vergilis’s story is only one of many terrible testimonies about wartime events in Ukraine.

The horrors of occupation affected many districts and areas around Odessa. A state report is publicly available that was drawn up by residents of the village of Bogdanovka in the Domanevka district of the Odessa region, together with representatives of the first military unit to enter the village, which the executioners had turned into a cemetery.

The report states that between 22 December 1941 and 15 January 1942 the German occupiers carried out a mass shooting of civilians driven from the Odessa region and the Moldavian Republic to a camp at the Bogdanovka state farm, about 54,000 people in all.

Of these, “44,000 people were shot in a pit near the pine forest of the Bogdanovka state farm. In three pigsty buildings, one thousand people in each, who refused to come out to be shot were burned alive. Every day 500–700 people kept in the open air died from hunger and cold. The corpses of citizens who had been shot or had died were burned on bonfires; the Germans threw living children into the fire.”

The published report lists some of the names of people tortured in the camp and also names their executioners—the Germans and policemen who directed and carried out the shootings.

Similar documents describe another terrible crime. Children were transported from beyond the Bug River in cold, broken railway cars without food or water—small, frightened, miserable children torn away from their relatives, from Kryvyi Rih, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Pervomaisk and many other Ukrainian cities.

They were transported for a very long time. They reached Odessa at the end of February 1944 at the Vtoraya Zastava station, and there they were kept for another week in closed railcars. Stretching their thin little hands through the bars, they begged for food. People brought them bread and hot meals but could not pass the food to the children because German patrols drove them away with rifle butts and gunfire.

One March morning in 1944, a group of prisoners of war was sent from a camp to unload railcars at Vtoraya Zastava. A covered truck stood beside one car that had been shunted onto a dead-end track. When the men opened the car doors, they recoiled in horror. The wagon was filled with the bodies of children aged seven to fourteen. Clenching their teeth and holding back tears, the prisoners gently removed the small bodies from the wagon and placed them in the truck.

By ten o’clock on the morning of 10 April, Odessa had been completely liberated by Soviet troops. Partisans and underground fighters who emerged from the catacombs and hiding places gave significant help to Soviet troops in freeing the city. They helped clear the enemy from Odessa and prevented prepared explosions at the port, piers, buildings and warehouses. On the night of 10 April partisans struck the enemy from the rear. Twenty-seven formations and units that distinguished themselves in the liberation of the city received the honorary designation “Odessa.”

For heroism and courage shown in the battles for the city, fourteen people were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union and more than 2,150 received Soviet orders and medals.

There is little information about exactly how reprisals against occupiers and collaborators were carried out. This is understandable, the article says: from a legal point of view, vigilante justice in liberated territories fell into a “gray zone.” It is possible that Soviet law-enforcement agencies deliberately allowed such a period in order to simplify their own work.

According to a widespread version, hundreds of gallows were erected in Odessa’s main square. Enemy collaborators were supposedly hanged in haste, after which the instruments of execution were removed. There is, however, no documentary confirmation of this version.

Soviet Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand left an interesting testimony about justice in Odessa. His diary entry of 12 April 1944 says nothing about events in the main square. But Gelfand saw with his own eyes a truck-mounted gallows on Tiraspolskaya Street. Odessa residents gathered around it to watch the execution of “three scoundrels”—two Romanians and one Russian who had committed abuses in the village of Anatolyevka near Odessa. A formal “trial” had nevertheless been held for them.

Odessa was once the third most important and developed city of the Russian Empire, its “southern gateway.” The article then shifts to a contemporary political assertion, stating that today the city founded by Russian Empress Catherine the Great is “under occupation,” and that Odessa residents are subjected to arrests, beatings and severe pressure by right-wing radicals and Ukrainian security services.

The point, the article says, is not only the strategic importance of a city of a million people, not only the seven ports and ship-repair plants in the Odessa region, and not only that Odessa is a key to lifting the blockade of Transnistria. The point, it argues, is the people—the Russian and Soviet people whom it says have been “under occupation” for thirty years.

The article concludes by noting that Odessa residents nevertheless marked the Day of Liberation from fascism. They did so on 9 April, before a long curfew. Fresh flowers once again lay on the memorial slabs to the soldiers who liberated the city. Memory cannot be destroyed.

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