In the Shadow of the Shtetl by Jeffrey Veidlinger

Author:Jeffrey Veidlinger [Veidlinger, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Jewish, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Religion, Judaism
ISBN: 9780253011527
Google: hUjJAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-11-01T01:41:25+00:00

8

Life beyond the River

TRANSNISTRIA

An American immigrant originally from Tulchyn, Manya Ganiyevva, wrote down her recollection of her wartime experiences in Transnistria and deposited that memoir through the Jewish Family Service of Cincinnati with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She begins her memoir with the lament that “after the war I often happened to read about the camps in the territories of Poland and Germany: Buchenwald, Maidanek, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and many others, where many thousands of Jews were exterminated and cremated. But in all these years, I have never read about those German concentration camps in which I was held, in which many thousands of Jews from all of Ukraine, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were detained.”1 Her memoir is remarkable in that in all the interviews we conducted with former inmates of camps and ghettos in Transnistria, we never heard such references made to the notorious extermination and concentration camps of Germany and Poland. When survivors relocate—usually to America, Israel or one of the larger cities of Ukraine or Russia—as Ganiyevva did, they come to understand their experiences within a wider context, and begin to compare their own fates with those from other regions. They come to understand their wartime memories in relation to a prevailing narrative of the Holocaust. They become aware that their own experiences in Transnistria do not fit comfortably into the Holocaust as it is commonly understood in the West. In the previous chapter I noted that many of the most recognized symbols of Holocaust experiences were largely absent from the Soviet experience. Instead, Soviet Jewish victims of the Holocaust tended to be killed closer to home, in ravines and cemeteries on the outskirts of their towns. However, the experiences of the local Jews in Transnistria also do not fit this model. With few exceptions—such as the murder of 150 Jews in Tomashpil on August 11, 1941—Jewish communities of Transnistria were spared such massacres. Even the “Holocaust by bullets” was largely foreign to the experiences of Transnistrian Jews.

Second World War Transnistria—not to be confused with the current breakaway republic of contemporary Moldova—was established on August 19, 1941 when German military officials ceded the area between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers to Romania in return for Romania’s continued cooperation in Operation Barbarossa.2 This territory had no political history as a united region and was a completely arbitrary creation. Some 300,000 Jews lived in the region that became Transnistria before the war, 180,000 of whom lived in Odessa, the only major metropolis.3 The rest of the Jewish population was scattered across various towns and villages in what had been the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the southern portions of Vinnytsya Province. The largest of these towns—among them Tiraspol, Dubosar, Mohyliv-Podilskyy, Zhmerynka, Balta, and Ribnitsa—had Jewish populations of 3,000–7,000, and total populations of 10,000–30,000. The region also included numerous smaller shtetls, including Tulchyn, Sharhorod, Tomashpil, and Kopayhorod, each of which had prewar Jewish populations of 2,000–5,000, and in which Jews often constituted up to three-quarters of the total population of the town.

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