RUTHFULLY YOURS

At sundown today begins the annual observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. There are many museums, plaques, books that let today’s visitors get a glimpse of the horrors and the heroes of that time. As one passes through and on, what is often missed is the individual stories, the lost hopes and potentials, the personal exertions, the evils that were so common among men and women of many nationalities. The Nazis could not have killed so many without the work of those in conquered countries, some coerced, some bribed, some for their own salvation, many because of rife anti-Semitism. The Yad Veshem museum and memorials, including to Righteous Gentiles, outside Jerusalem, is a major repository of these individual stories. Visit the website.

The Holocaust needs to be remembered and restudied in every generation just because of its scale, and because of what it says about the thin veneer that separates now from then and now from recurrence. (It is not by coincidence that the week after Yom Hashoah is the celebration of Israel’s Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut.)Below is a piece I wrote in 2006 that includes first-person accounts of what happened in a village near where much of my family perished.

Imagine, 16-miles of files: A Sacred Task

Sixteen-miles. That’s how far stretches the surviving individual records of what happened to millions of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis. Those records have been kept under lock and key by the International Red Cross since they were captured by the Allies after World War II. Soon, they will become available on digital copies.

The Nazi’s meticulous record-keeping, which fell apart late in the war, captures the fates of so many who today are only remembered in big numbers that fail to capture the individual horrors. Similarly, the scope of the death operations is now known to be even larger than previously described.

The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.
Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

“We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories,” said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.
The archive [also] has some 3.4 million files of DPs _ Displaced Persons.

[Also] Some 50 million pages scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.
When I was a very young child, I recall the extended family gathering around a short note from the International Red Cross about the fate of part of my family: Taken out of their village in Belarus by local sympathizers of the Nazi’s, to dig ditches, then hammered on their heads with the shovels, some shot, and tossed into the ditch like garbage.

I recently came across some eyewitness accounts from a village in the area. Some excerpts:
Itzak Nahmanovitch’s Account [4]

The year 1939 arrived. David-Horodok was taken by the Soviets. Many Jewish refugees from western Poland migrated to David-Horodok to settle. Then in 1940 the Soviets began arresting and exiling Zionists and others. The town shuddered. The mood was strained. Still there was the motto: “All for one and one for all.”

Then July 6, 1941 arrived. The town was captured by Hitler’s troops. Many Jews wanted to save themselves in Russia, but the NKVD and border guards would not let them pass. So the Jews of David-Horodok were forced to remain under Nazi rule. Then began the horror, and the Belarusans showed their murderous side. They began catching Jews in the streets and forcing them to do labor.
Many of Hitler’s troops passed through the streets of the town heading east. A few days later they returned because of the bad roads, intending to find another path through the marshes. In town it was rumored that the Germans had been driven back by the Red Army. This was exploited by the newly-proclaimed mayor, the villainous feldsher [paramedic] Ivan Maraiko, who went to Gestapo headquarters in Pinsk to report that the Jews were spreading the rumors and that the Jews were attacking the German army. This vile slander brought on the bloody 17th of Av [August 10, 1941], about one month after the Germans had captured the town.

Bas-Sheva Kushner and Gunm Polavin’s Account[5]

On July 5, 1941 the Germans entered David-Horodok. Several weeks before the capture of the town, local Christians headed by Maraiko, Kulogo and Latun, may their names be blotted out, succeeded in creating the impression that the town Jews were waiting for the Red Army to return. As a result the Christians received permission from the SS headquarters in Pinsk to handle the Jews at their own discretion.

The Slaughter of the Men
In August 1941, German SS infantry and cavalry regiments were ordered to clear Polesye’s swampy and wooded areas of the remnants of retreating Soviet units. They preferred the easier task of killing Jews. Thus the first days of Nazi occupation were marked by mass executions or aktionen organized by locals and the Einsatzgruppen, the special sections of the SS delegated with the task of annihilating Jews in their own villages and towns. In the months of August-October 1941, tens of thousands of Jews in the small shtetls of Western Belarus were murdered in the towns of Hanzevitch, Eishishok, Lohishyn, Luninets, and David-Horodok[6]
On the 16th of Av, 5701 [August 9, 1941], an order was delivered in David-Horodok that at six o’clock the next morning all Jewish men over the age of 14 were to gather at the marketplace opposite the Catholic church, taking shovels with them. It was implied that they would be taken to work. Early the next morning the Jews began assembling at the marketplace, which was surrounded by armed German SS troops and many Horodtchukas. After all had gathered the Horodtchukas spread around town checking for holdouts. The brothers Issur and Hershl Gurvitch, who were found in a hiding place, had their eyes gouged out while being taken to the marketplace.
All those gathered at the marketplace were led away on foot by a strongly armed SS detachment, accompanied by hundreds of Horodtchukas, to Hinavsk, a village four-and-a-third miles from David-Horodok. There the graves had already been prepared. Surrounded on all sides by artillery and machine guns, every single man was shot to death. The cries and the screaming of the unfortunate victims carried through the air and reached as far as David-Horodok.

The gathered Horodtchukas fulfilled a triple mission: They made sure that no one fled from the field. They removed the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, boots and even tore out gold teeth. Finally they carried out the job of throwing the victims into the graves, not looking to see if they were really dead or still half-alive. Only two children succeeded in escaping unnoticed from that frightful slaughter. Wandering through the fields they joined a partisan group and thus survived.The very few survivors are aged, and fewer everyday. Remembering and acting against any who engage in such mass murder, anywhere, is our sacred task.