So They Remember by Maksim Goldenshteyn

Author:Maksim Goldenshteyn [Goldenshteyn, Maksim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2022-01-23T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Silence

FROM 1941 TO 1945, famed Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman covered the Eastern Front as a reporter for the Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper. He wore glasses, suffered from asthma, and lived with a variety of phobias—hardly the archetype for a war correspondent. Yet he summoned the courage to report from the front lines, venturing where few others were willing to go, even as many of his counterparts relied on information fed to them by army officials. While embedded with combat units, he witnessed the war’s most decisive battles and was among the first to document the Holocaust’s aftermath. Following the German Army’s defeat in Kursk, Russia, in August 1943, and with the German forces in retreat, Grossman traveled westward with the Red Army as it began to liberate towns and villages where Jewish life once flourished.1 As his travels brought him to eastern Ukraine, Grossman came to a startling realization: except for a single Jewish lieutenant who had been in hiding since the early days of the war, he had encountered no other living Jews.2

The reality weighed heavily on Grossman, a native of the city of Berdychiv, who learned that his own mother had been among the victims of mass murder.3 The deafening silence led to an article called “Ukraine without Jews,” which he submitted for publication in fall 1943: “You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls. Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.”4

Of the Jews living in prewar Ukraine, comprising the largest Jewish population in Europe, at least 1.6 million were killed between the years of 1941 and 1945. By far, the highest death tolls were in German-controlled territory. The few who remained alive did so by fleeing ahead of the German advance, being mobilized by the Red Army, or by going into hiding. Others survived German labor camps and eventually escaped into Transnistria. Across Transnistria, survival rates were higher.5

On March 20, 1944, the day after Dzhuryn’s liberation, a snowstorm blanketed the town and the roads leading out of it, leaving the Bravermans stranded inside the synagogue for one last week. It took another three days for them to walk thirty miles to Tulchyn. When they reached their hometown’s former Jewish quarter, they found Voikova Street in ruins.

“We saw only rubble,” Etel remembered. “Only stones remained. We had nowhere to stay. So Mama stops a city official and says, ‘Where do I go? My husband died. I have four children.’”

“Just take an empty one and live there,” he replied.

While wandering central Tulchyn, they spotted a small hut on Lenin Street, just east of the Cathedral of Christ’s Nativity, not far from the old market. It had whitewashed clay walls and a hipped roof made of thatch. They peered in through the front windows and saw no one inside.

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