Legacy of Blood by Elissa Bemporad

Author:Elissa Bemporad [Bemporad, Elissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Return of the Unthinkable

In the fall of 1945, a pogrom caused havoc in the streets of Kiev.75 On the afternoon of September 4, Lieutenant Josef Rozenstein, a Jewish NKGB senior radio operator, was on his way back home from the bread store when he was attacked by two servicemen. First they confronted him with the antisemitic slur of “Tashkent partisan,” implying that like most Jews, instead of fighting at the front, he had “enjoyed” evacuation; then they physically attacked him. In retaliation, the lieutenant took the law into his own hands and sought revenge. Wearing his NKGB uniform for a semblance of legality, he shot and killed both men. This action sparked instant unrest in the city: a large crowd gathered around the dead bodies and attacked the lieutenant’s wife and a Jewish man passing by. Both were severely injured. The next day, the servicemen’s funeral further ignited ethnic tensions, as the procession quickly turned into a pogrom. It began with antisemitic slogans, chanted through the city’s main streets, and eventually deteriorated into violence against Jews, in particular in the area around the marketplace. Thirty-six of the one hundred victims in the attacks were hospitalized; five were murdered. The violence also affected a number of non-Jewish civilians “who looked like Jews.” Apparently the local police did not intervene until a few days later. But Lieutenant Rozenstein was no Scholem Schwarzbard, and on October 1, 1945, the military tribunal sentenced him to death.76

Shocked by the Kiev pogrom, four Jewish Communist Party members and war veterans who had fought at the front wrote a passionate letter addressed to Stalin, to the NKVD chairman Lavrentii Beria, and to Pravda’s chief editor, P. Pospelov. They openly complained about the abnormal political atmosphere in their city, where antisemitism reigned. They protested that “ ‘[B]eat the Yids,’ the favorite slogan of German fascists, Ukrainian nationalists, and the tsarist Black Hundreds is heard through the streets of the capital of Ukraine, in the trams, trolley-buses, stores, the marketplace, and even in some Soviet institutions.”77 The war veterans voiced their dismay, hinting at the collapse of the founding myth of Soviet Jewry, namely the absence of pogroms: “[I]t is a disgrace for our Party and our socialist motherland that a Jewish pogrom occurred here in Kiev under the Soviets . . . after our victory over German fascism. [I]t will be written in the history of our Revolution that the first Jewish pogrom since the collapse of tsarism occurred . . . on the 28th year since the October Revolution.”78

The long letter was above all an open attack on local authorities. The petitioners identified them as chiefly responsible for the context that led to the violence, which could result, they feared, in a pogrom of even greater magnitude, “one worthy of Hitler and Goebbels.”79 According to the veterans, Rozenstein’s decision to kill the two servicemen who attacked him grew out of the local authorities’ indifference to the plight of the Jews.80 They were “enemies of the people,” argued

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