Judgment Before Nuremberg by Greg Dawson

Author:Greg Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A sharp unmelodic jangle pierced my sleep, jolting me awake but disoriented in total darkness. The phone! I scrambled out of bed to a small desk and grabbed the offending receiver.

“Good morning, Mr. Dawson, this is Victor at the front desk. You asked to be called at 5:45 A.M.”

“Da, da—spasiba,” I said.

It was December 15, 2010. This was the day I had been dreading. It was also the reason I had come to Kharkov. Sixty-nine Decembers ago my mother, her sister, and her parents and paternal grandparents awoke on this day to an unimaginable fate. The day before, December 14, 1941, the occupying Nazis had posted notices across Kharkov ordering all Jews to report the next day to public squares for transport to an abandoned tractor factory southeast of the city. The blind hope of Dmitri Arshansky and others was that they were being sent to a camp to serve as slave laborers until the war ended, victoriously, and they could return home. My mother had darker premonitions.

We knew it could mean only two things: they would make us laborers in a concentration camp, or it meant the end of our lives.

At noon under a powder-blue sky that belied intense cold, 16,000 Jews began the eight-mile trek to the factory. The streets were coated with fresh snow. Whip-wielding German soldiers and Schutzmannschaften—Ukrainian collaborators—patrolled the sea of marchers, some pulling carts or sleds with belongings, as it flowed glacially on Moscow Avenue out of the city. When darkness fell, the procession was still well short of the factory. By morning, the roadside and surrounding fields were littered with the bodies of marchers dead from exposure. The Arshanskys had survived by huddling together for warmth in a tiny shed Dmitri found.

The living, those who made it to the factory, would soon envy the dead. The buildings at the complex had no heat or running water; a galaxy of broken windows produced conditions of a giant meat locker. The captives were given no food (some had brought scraps from home) and the only “water” was a filthy liquid more likely to cause diarrhea than to slake thirst. The women’s “toilet” was a shed with three holes in the ground. It was a sight my mother could never forget, or forgive.

It was inhuman. The sight of women the age of my mother and grandmother made me shake in shame for the Germans. I wanted to put those who created this hell in the same place as these women. That’s where I wanted Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels.

After two weeks in this fresh circle of hell, after hundreds had frozen or starved or died of disease, after the German soldiers had taken a day off from killing to celebrate Christmas and then the New Year, the surviving Jews were ordered to relinquish all their valuables and prepare once again for transport. Their destination was not a labor camp in Poltava as they had repeatedly been told. Poltava was to the south, and they were being marched in a different direction.

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