(NAME-MCE) New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews

[Bill Howe]

  _____  

April 20, 2009 - NY Times



New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews 

By ETHAN BRONNER
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ethan_bronner/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
JERUSALEM - In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to
swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children
were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno,
Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.
Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi
slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the
Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union
where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths. 
 
That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust
museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites,
comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, crosschecking numbers
and methods. The work, gathered under the title 
 
"The Untold Stories," is far from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance
Day, which starts Monday evening, the research is being made public on the
institution <http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/homepage.html> 's Web
site. 
 
"These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved
smaller towns and villages," said David Bankier, head of the International
Institute for Holocaust
<http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/departments/institute/home_institute.ht
ml>  Research at Yad Vashem. "In many cases, locals played a key role in the
murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying
to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and
turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide
elsewhere, like in Africa."
For the purposes of this project, a killing field entails at least 50
people, said the project director, Lea Prais. The killing began in June 1941
with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic republics in
the north to the Caucasus in the south, Nazi death squads combed the areas.
 
The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by
Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet
collaborators. 
 
The new research checks that evidence against German records, diaries and
letters of soldiers, as well as accounts by witnesses and the few surviving
Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes, the
researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is noted
on the Web site. One goal of the project is to learn more exactly the
numbers killed.
One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in
Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem
museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with
the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a bystander with a movie
camera. 
 
According to part of his account, "After the civilian guards with the yellow
armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home
guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to
jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled
and weak people, who were caught by the others.
 
"At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the
trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were
forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end.
They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the
moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them.
They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of
corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand."
 
Ms. Prais said one of the discoveries that had most surprised her was the
way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to commemorate
those who had perished. In distant fields and village squares they often
placed a Star of David or some other memorial, despite fears of overt Jewish
expression in the Soviet era.
 
"The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent," she said.
 
The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One case
Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what happened in
the town of Krupki, Belarus, where the entire Jewish community of at least
1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.
A German soldier who took part in the mass killing kept a diary
<http://www1.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/krupki/starozhevitsa_river_gr.html>
that was found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of
having volunteered as one of "15 men with strong nerves" asked to eliminate
the Jews of Krupki. "All these had to be shot today," he wrote. The weather
was gray and rainy, he observed. 
 
The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany, but as
they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident.
Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time controlling
the crowd.
 
"Ten shots rang out, 10 Jews popped off," he wrote. "This continued until
all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The
children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won't forget
this spectacle in a hurry...."
 
 
 
 
 
Bill Howe
Multicultural Education Blog  <http://billhowe.org/MCE/>
http://billhowe.org/MCE/
Multicultural Dimensions  <http://www.multiculturaldimensions.org/>
http://www.multiculturaldimensions.org
Asian Pacific American Coalition of CT http://www.apacct.org
<http://www.apacct.org/> 
Personal Website  <http://www.billhowe.org/> http://www.billhowe.org
Travel Blog http://billhowe.org/BillBl <http://billhowe.org/BillBlog/> og/