I have personally spoken with Kyivans who begged the Jews: “Give us your children. We’ll raise them as Jews.”
And they answered, “No, they will perish together with their people.”
My wife always crossed herself when entering her old apartment on Shchekavytska Street in the Podil, the traditional Jewish quarter of Kyiv and the epicenter of the Holocaust in Ukraine. And she heaved a sigh of relief when her former husband took it away. She had no regrets: “It isn’t mine; it’s theirs.” Much later we learned that it had indeed belonged to Jews and theirs was truly a terrible road: Babyn Yar. Something mystical? I always felt like a stranger in that apartment. And it was always horrible for me there. We lost it with no regret — here something horrible had happened. It was a place where children had cried in the night, young people had laughed and made love, and women had gossiped. My wife’s children were afraid to leave their room.
This is my, essentially on the level of everyday life, reflections on the Holocaust. My people also had their Trail of Tears. It was when the Cherokees were expelled from their native land and many perished from hunger, cold, and disease. And that people also approached extinction, but now they have built museums and other institutions to show the world that they still exist.
The Jews do not have to show anyone that they are still here. Their trail of tears is not ended, but the road is still there. They were guilty because they were Jews, because they were not like everybody else, because they were a people chosen by God with their own particular, private conversation with Him. Hitler did not like that, nor did Stalin. Both came to the same conclusion: kill them. For they were not like everyone else; they did not believe in the same gods — be it racist or Marxist — as they did. Kill them!
They killed them at Babyn Yar.
Women gave their children to their tormentors. “Kill them first, so they won’t suffer,” they cried. It did not help. Nauseous smoke hung over Babyn Yar. The smoke was like a curse, and then it covered all Ukraine.
The word holocaust comes from Wycliff’s translation of the Bible in the sense of a burnt offering utterly consumed by fire: “And he made an holocaust unto his God.” The word is steeped in spiritual significance.
The first mass murders of Jews took place in the summer and autumn of 1941 in Ukraine and Belarus. Before the German invasion of the USSR the Nazis organized Einsatzgruppen (literally, action groups) with orders to follow the front and kill all the Jews they found. 3000 people killed millions. As a rule they found a ravine near a town or shtetl. In Kyiv that pit was called Babyn Yar. In Western Ukraine they organized pogroms in a simple fashion: they simply opened the prisons where the Stalinist NKVD had carried out mass executions of political prisoners in advance of the Germans and said, “Look what the Jew-Bolsheviks did!” And there really was a disproportionate number of Jews among those who carried out such “wet work.” No one knows why. But they had been evacuated, and the local population quickly realized that “their” Jews had nothing to do with it and were no enemies. The Germans themselves banned pogroms. Official reports relate how the results had been “inadequate.” Pogroms were simply not an effective way to get rid of the Jews. The Nazis had to do it themselves.
And they did. With insane efficiency. I recall how one American Jew wanted to travel to Trypillia, where there had once been a large shtetl from which his wife’s family came. Not a single Jew was left. “After the war they built the clinic where the Jewish cemetery had been,” a local physician said. “Sometimes after it rains bones come up through the basement floor. It’s a bad place.” Horrible.
An absolute majority of the world’s Aszkenazy Jews have roots in Ukraine, but the Jews are leaving Ukraine. They are going to Germany, Israel, anywhere that promises a better life. Local Jewish activists are depressed, saying privately that in a generation there will be no Jewish community in Ukraine. A shame.
There is an idea that the wealth of humanity resides in its diversity. I personally believe that it is precisely for this reason that genocide is a crime not against the victim but against humanity as such. Whenever we lose any member of the human family, any culture, language, or bearer of its own national genius, human civilization as a whole is impoverished.
And such wealth existed: the writing of Shalom Aleichem or Ilf and Petrov, the Yiddish theater in Lviv, klezmer music, and inimitable humor. Of course, the good Lord never made any people without its quota of sons of bitches, and we can recall Kaganovich and the NKVD men mentioned. For that matter there were Ukrainian collaborators and Ukrainians who hid Jews. But the traditional Jewish Yiddish civilization that was so rich is lost. It is lost to us all, lost to humankind as a whole.
Today among us there are people who are actively working to restore what can be restored. Rabbi Yakov dov Bleich from New York is working to rebuild an Orthodox community in its historical center, the Podil. Borys Khandros collects information on destroyed shtetels. But everyone understands that what once existed can never be replaced. Israel with its Hebrew language and cult of the sabra is completely different from what was. Its loss is a tragedy not only for Ukraine but for the world as a whole. We all grieve for it.
