THE HOLOCAUST IN THE UKRAINE AND THE FIRST NAZI WAR CRIMES TRIAL
For my mother
FOREWORD
T his is not a book I ever expected to write. I ended up writing it because no one else has, and because a book like mine is overdue—by several decades. It’s a byproduct of Hiding in the Spotlight, my account of my Ukrainian mother’s escape from the Holocaust, published in 2009, but it’s not exactly a sequel.
In the course of making public appearances for Hiding in the Spotlight, now close to 150, I was startled to find that most people in these interested audiences knew virtually nothing about the Holocaust in Ukraine—as little as I had before doing research for my mother’s memoir.
Like me, they were not aware that what we think of as the Holocaust—the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis—did not begin in Germany or Poland, but in Ukraine after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Nor did they know that at least 750,000 Jews—mostly Ukrainian—were murdered by gunfire before the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau began operation, the majority even before the tenets of the Final Solution had been formally laid down by Hitler and Himmler.
While I had encountered a few people here and there during my travels who knew about those events, I have yet to find a single person out of the many hundreds I have addressed, from university professors to families of survivors, who could answer this question correctly: When and where was the first trial of Nazis for their crimes during the war?
Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 is a good guess. But it is wrong. The correct answer is Kharkov, Ukraine, December 1943.
I happened on this startling fact at the Holocaust museum in Kharkov in 2006 while doing research for Hiding in the Spotlight. I mentioned it in the epilogue of that book and did not expect to return to it—until my book-tour experience revealed a gaping black hole in public knowledge of the Holocaust that cried out to be filled.
I said a book “like mine” is overdue because although there are many books about the Holocaust in Ukraine on library shelves, few even touch on the Kharkov trial. Nearly all were written by historians and scholars and, sadly, it seems that nearly all of them have been read only by other historians and scholars, not general readers, resulting in this rather disturbing gap in popular understanding of the Holocaust.
I am neither historian nor scholar. I am a newspaper reporter of more than four decades, accustomed to writing stories that assume the reader may not know anything about my subject, be it a basketball game, oil spill, or city zoning law. I am used to writing for the intellectually curious but under-informed, something that could be a byword when it comes to Ukrainian Holocaust scholarship.
Ukraine is the final frontier of Holocaust scholarship and literature. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a mother lode of secret and suppressed material about the Holocaust in Ukraine has been made available to academics and journalists, and the flow continues nearly two decades later. In early 2011 the archives of the Ukrainian KGB agreed to open its wartime files to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial after more than fifty years of secrecy. All this promises to keep historians busy for decades doing the grueling work of real scholarship.
Judgment Before Nuremberg is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, a very personal journey through one small corner of history. If casual readers learn as much reading the book as I did writing it, I will have accomplished one of my goals—and the credit will belong to the master historians: Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Richard Rhodes, Deborah Lipstadt, Yitzhak Arad, Alexander Prusin, and many others, without whose work this book could not have been written.
And if Judgment Before Nuremberg moves readers to seek out those sources of my own illumination and inspiration, and to discover the full breadth of their majestic work, I will have accomplished both my goals.
PROLOGUE
E ven under many layers of warmth including a bulky new coat—a final-hour gift from my mother—my blood ran cold on a December night in Ukraine as I boarded a shuttle bus at Borispol International Airport in Kiev. It was the second time that night that the shuttle had made the trip from the terminal to an Aerosvit Airlines commuter jet on the tarmac for the flight east to Kharkov near the Russian border, the final leg of my journey which had begun 15 hours earlier in Orlando, Fla.
On the first attempt, the plane had reached Kharkov but could not land due to icy runways, and returned to Borispol. The shuttle took us back to Terminal A, the departure point for regional flights. It was late Friday night and the terminal was teeming with passengers on the way to Odessa, Lviv, Donetsk, and other weekend destinations. Maybe the plane would try again in a few hours. Maybe not.
For those accustomed to spacious, mall-like American airports, “terminal” belies the reality of Terminal A at Borispol, which is closer to a bus station in size and amenities. There was a kiosk offering hot drinks, hard liquor, and snacks, but no TV screens tuned to CNN, no gift shops to browse or newsstands selling English-language newspapers. There was little for me to do but people-watch, and for a long while I was diverted by the antics of a pixyish girl about eight years old who raced and pirouetted across the waiting room, mugging for an invisible camera.
By the time we left Kiev several hours later, I understood the significance—the meaning for me—of this little Ukrainian dervish.
This was my second trip to Ukraine. I had come in 2006 to do research for Hiding in the Spotlight , a book about my mother, Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson. She and her younger sister, Frina, are the only known survivors of a Nazi death march in January 1942 that led 16,000 Jews, including Frina and Zhanna’s parents and paternal grandparents, to Drobitsky Yar (Russian for “ravine”), a killing field outside Kharkov. It was thought that no one could have possibly escaped the march, so when a memorial was erected with the names of victims etched on walls, the sisters’ names appeared next to those of their parents and grandparents.
Brushing my fingertips across the Cyrillic letters spelling out my mother’s name was a jolting brush with my own mortality—a reminder that the Nazis meant for half my genes to have been interred in that deep ravine with her bones. SS chief Heinrich Himmler made that clear in describing the steps necessary to ensure the extermination of the Jewish race.
“We have come to the question: how is it with the women and children?” he told an assembly of SS officers. “I have resolved on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to cause this Volk to disappear from the Earth.”
Why had I decided to return, to reappear in Ukraine? Not to taunt Himmler’s ghost with my presence and thereby avenge the murder of my grandparents and great-grandparents. There is no commensurate vengeance for these crimes. I had come back to do what I could to end the coverup of this crime, the darkness surrounding Drobitsky Yar and Ukraine’s Jews. It’s been said that history is written by the winners, but in the history of the Holocaust it’s as though the chapter on Ukraine had been written by Himmler himself. For all practical purposes, the pages are blank.
While Hitler did not succeed in making “this Volk disappear from the Earth,” he destroyed most of European Jewry in trying—and he began here, in Ukraine, in the summer of 1941. Upwards of a million Ukrainian Jews—give or take 100,000 “kikes” as Himmler, who often used the slur, might have blithely put it—were shot and dumped like garbage in mass graves in their native soil before the first Jews died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in March of 1942.
In their later retreat from Ukraine, the defeated Nazis attempted to destroy the evidence of their mass murder by digging up and burning the corpses, but there were too many corpses and not enough time. Witnesses told of the earth at the killing fields moving, heaving like a distended belly from the gases emitted by thousands of decomposing bodies, blood seeping up to the surface. The gassings—and ovens—at Auschwitz were antiseptic in comparison.
The slaughter by gunfire in Ukraine should have become Hitler’s original sin and Babi Yar—where 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days—the darkest icon of the Shoah. But when the war ended, Stalin abetted Himmler’s coverup by throwing an Iron Curtain around the crime scene, off limits to writers, journalists, and historians. The only deaths in the great war to defend the Motherland would be “Russian” deaths. And so, by default, the liberation of Auschwitz and other camps became the defining images of the Holocaust. Hitler’s crime in Ukraine began to fade slowly from public view and consciousness till it became what it is today—barely a footnote in popular understanding of the Holocaust.
By the 1970s when “Never forget” had become a familiar mantra of Holocaust remembrance, the Holocaust in Ukraine had already been forgotten, if it had even been remembered to begin with. It was as an ironic fulfillment of Himmler’s macabre coverup—as if the Nazis had actually succeeded in unearthing and burning the evidence of their monstrous crime.
On a Thursday night in February 2008, I was slicing vegetables for dinner in the kitchen of our Orlando home and half listening to the NBC Nightly News when anchorman Brian Williams said something that made me look up.
“Tonight some extraordinary reporting by our friend and colleague Ann Curry. It’s a story of a kind of invisible part of the Holocaust where more than a million Jews simply disappeared,” Williams said, using the same portentous inflection reserved for discovery of a lost tribe in New Guinea or ice crystals on the moon. Curry did not skip a beat.
“In fact, this is stunning new information about an unknown part of the Holocaust,” she reported. “We are learning in detail now about what happened to 1.3 million Jews who simply disappeared in Ukraine between 1941 and 1944.”
It was a surreal moment that made me want to check the calendar. Was it really 2008? Was NBC News—67 years after the fact—really reporting the Holocaust in Ukraine as “news”? So it seemed. It’s hard to find a better working definition of “news” than “stunning new information.” The pretext—or “hook,” in journalese—for Curry’s story was Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who had undertaken the noble mission of finding undiscovered killing fields in Ukraine and interviewing witnesses to the shootings. He told his story in Holocaust by Bullets , published in 2008.
Father Desbois had not, as the NBC report breathlessly suggested, solved a great historical mystery—a vanishing act by a million Ukrainian Jews. Rather, he had corroborated and shed welcome new light on the voluminously documented Nazi Holocaust in Ukraine. And although the professional journalists at NBC should have checked the record before presenting “new information” that was not, Curry’s report undoubtedly was news to virtually everyone watching. That would have included me too, had I not spent the previous eight years researching and writing Hiding in the Spotlight.
Curry’s report was stark illustration of how completely the Nazi crimes in Ukraine have been erased from our collective memory and body of common knowledge about the Holocaust. NBC was not the first or last to rediscover the story. In recent years there has been a spate of reports, most focusing on the Einsatzgruppen , mobile killing squads which followed the German army across Ukraine, murdering Jews. Like Curry’s story, these reports, many an hour long, come packaged as “news,” like “Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust,” which aired on The National Geographic cable channel in September 2010.
The historical amnesia, the deep black hole, is not confined to the general reading public or TV audience—it can be found among those who have made study of the Holocaust their lifework. A focal point of this book is the first trial—and conviction and execution—of Nazis for their wartime crimes. It was held in Kharkov in December 1943, well before the end of the war and the celebrated postwar trials in Nuremberg, Germany. I have encountered Holocaust scholars in the U.S. who know nothing about this trial, though it’s no historical secret. The trial and executions—witnessed by tens of thousands of Kharkov residents—were reported in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, and Life Magazine , which even included photos.
Time and inattention have since relegated these facts to a netherworld of library archives and academic symposia. The seminal event of the Holocaust—the rape of Ukraine—has become obscure knowledge held by a tiny priesthood of professional historians and amateur aficionados. I had come to my mother’s homeland a second time to gather material for a book that I hoped would help elevate Ukraine from the footnotes to the forefront of Holocaust history where it rightfully belongs.
I was not prepared for the sense of being surrounded by spirits in the corporeal form of the Ukrainians all around me. Touching my mother’s name on the wall of the dead four years earlier at Drobitsky Yar—my own epitaph, in a way—sent an existential shiver up my spine, and it cloaked all I surveyed in an air of unreality, as if I were visiting a parallel universe populated not by the living but by symbols and apparitions.
After two hours in the waiting area of Terminal A, we were informed that landing conditions had improved in Kharkov and we were herded back onto the shuttle bus. The adult travelers stood silent or murmuring in the rolling ice box. A few feet away from me, the same exuberant young girl who had lit up the dreary terminal with her theatrics now jumped up onto a seat, grabbed the overhead straps, and was showing off—twisting, turning, swaying, pretending to fall—her smiling eyes alive with mischief and pure joy.
“Mama!” she cried. “Papa!”
Her seated parents cast mock scowls and waved for her to get down, but the show went on. At that moment, I thought that she was the happiest child I had ever seen. This was a peculiar reaction. After all, I had seen a lifetime of happy children on playgrounds. What was it about this child that filled me with such joy and also, oddly, deep melancholy?
In this beaming, blithe spirit I saw my mother as I imagine her at eight, a carefree wanderer in her beloved seaside hometown of Berdyansk in southern Ukraine when life was good, before the storm.
And so it was everywhere I went in Ukraine—spirits and flashbacks and omens. On the flight to Kharkov, the flight attendant serving us was “Marina,” the fictitious name used by my mother’s sister, Frina, during the war. On the side of a bus in Kharkov was a poster for a young entertainer named Zhanna, my mother’s name, who became a pianist and was performing around Ukraine by the time she was ten. I visited the school in Kharkov my mother attended when she was thirteen and spoke to a class of students the same age. Looking out at the sea of fresh faces, I saw… survivors.
I returned to Kharkov State Music Conservatory where my mother and Frina studied as children, starting at ages eight and six. A student symphony was rehearsing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, an electrifying piece full of darkness and light that only a Russian could have written. My mother recalls sitting cross-legged on the stage of the elegant concert hall as virtuosos performed only feet away, knowing at that moment, so very young, that she wanted to become a great artist too. I climbed the stairs to the balcony and took a seat at one end.
After a while, my gaze drifted from the stage to the opposite end of the balcony and a most incongruous sight. Seated in the second row up from the rail was a babushka in a bulky gray coat, a headscarf tied under her chin in classic fashion. Babushkas, or “grandmothers,” many of them war widows, are a common sight on street corners in Ukraine where they sell dried fruit, nuts, and seeds. Not in balconies of concert halls. The babushka seemed to be listening intently. From time to time she would bend forward, as if reaching into a bag.
I wondered—as Hemingway did of the frozen leopard found on Mount Kilimanjaro—what she was seeking at this altitude, in this empty balcony. Not warmth, I decided. If it was warmth she sought late on a December afternoon, surely there were other options—stores, cafes, subways—which did not entail climbing several flights of stairs. I wanted to know what had brought her there, but I would not ask and interrupt her reverie. I could only imagine.
At a distance, the babushka appeared to be a few years older than my mother, who was born in 1927. Perhaps she had fond memories of coming to the hall as a girl to hear a brother or sister perform—or perhaps a boyfriend or husband lost in the war. Perhaps she herself had been a student at the conservatory and had seen her dreams shattered, as my mother had, on June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded. I could only imagine. The babushka was still in the second row of the balcony, staring at the stage, when I left.
Later, downstairs, I saw her drifting silently, ghostlike, through the hallways crowded with students, much as Ukraine still moves silently, unseen, through the hallways of Holocaust history.
I had come to liberate the ghosts of Ukraine, and to face my own.
CHAPTER ONE
W hat did I know about the Holocaust, and when did I know it?
As a baby boomer growing up in the Midwest in the fifties and sixties attending public schools, I knew as much as the guy at the next desk—nothing. There was no mention of the Holocaust in our textbooks, nor do I remember any teacher telling us about it. This may seem incredible to anyone, say, thirty years old who was in middle school in 1993 when Schindler’s List debuted and the U.S. Holocaust Museum opened in Washington, D.C. That student may even have met one of the many Holocaust survivors who regularly visit schools to share their stories.
But in the context of 1961 when I was in sixth grade—the level that Holocaust education commonly begins today—the invisibility of the Holocaust was hardly surprising. In fact, any mention of it by Mr. Mize, my teacher at Rogers Elementary in Bloomington, Indiana, would have been startling—wildly out of sync with mainstream America where “Holocaust” would not be a household word for another decade.
Nineteen sixty-one was still early dawn of Holocaust awareness in America, even though sixteen years had passed since GIs entered the gates of the Dachau concentration camp populated by corpses and legions of hollow-eyed walking dead—newsreel moments imprinted indelibly on the American mind. The New York Times did not use “holocaust” to describe the murder of Jews until May 1959 in a story about dedication of the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. The first graduate seminar on the Holocaust in the U.S. was at Emory College in 1959–60. Night , Elie Wiesel’s transformative memoir, was published in the U.S. in 1960 but sold only a few copies that first year. American TV had extensive coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961, and Judgment at Nuremberg , starring Spencer Tracy, was released that year and won two Academy Awards.
I believe I speak for my immediate twelve-year-old peers at the time in admitting that I did not watch the Eichmann trial or go to see Judgment at Nuremberg. My favorite movie that year was The Absent-Minded Professor in which Fred MacMurray invented an anti-gravity goop called Flubber that made his old jalopy fly and let the vertically challenged slam-dunk a basketball. I saw it twice. Above all, I remember 1961 as the year Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a season. Holocaust awareness was still a long way down the road and around the bend for my friends and me.
You might think it would have been different for me since my mother was a Holocaust survivor—the only one on the block!—but she did not share that part of her life with me and my younger brother, Bill, deciding it was “too cruel” to burden young children with such information. My information was sketchy. All I knew was that my mother had been caught up in the war and had somehow made it to America. Had we gone to synagogue and been surrounded by Jews with their own survivor stories, it would have been impossible for my mother to keep her secret. But ours was a secular home, my mother a non-observant Jew, my father a lapsed Roman Catholic from Virginia. Sunday the rabbi stayed home, and so did the Dawsons.
On the other hand, my mother made no secret of the fact that she was Russian. She was fiercely proud of her heritage, and made it known often in the kitchen by fixing borscht and other traditional meals, and she spoke Russian to me from birth. I was bilingual until age seven when I became aware of the childhood pitfalls of being “different” and begged her to stop speaking Russian to me around my friends. Unfortunately, she caved to my demand, and we now agree it was a bad decision in the long run. Fluent Russian would have satisfied my college language requirement the easy way and broadened career choices later. What was coming naturally to me in childhood, when the mind is at its ripest to absorb new languages, is nearly impossible for the ossifying adult mind short of a total immersion program. But my aversion to Russian was understandable at the time. It was the 1950s, the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. With people checking under their beds for Communists each night, it was not the best time for a kid in the Indiana heartland to be caught speaking the language of America’s mortal enemy.
I tell the story of how I became monolingual because it helps explain, in part, why America—Main Street and Washington—was slow to make the Holocaust a focus of our national conversation and education. “Better dead than Red!” went the McCarthyite cry. Only a decade after liberation of the death camps, America was more obsessed with the Red than the dead. In paranoia over the perceived threat from our recent ally, the actual horrific crimes of our recent enemy were, if not exactly forgotten, placed on a distant back burner of benign neglect.
Hardball geopolitics clearly was at play. The U.S. government was anxious about offending West Germany, its new ally against the evil empire in Moscow. Intense lobbying by West German government and church officials led to reduced sentences and early freedom for many officers of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for murdering over a million Ukrainian Jews. At Nuremberg in 1948, the tribunal sentenced 14 Einsatzgruppen functionaries and field commanders to death, two to life sentences, and five to prison terms of 10 to 20 years.
Under the Nuremberg Charter, sentence reduction was the “sole prerogative” of the American Military Governor for Germany, John McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War, who replaced General Lucius Clay in 1950. Clay had affirmed the death sentences and stoutly rebuffed all appeals, but McCloy, eager to nurture U.S.-German solidarity for the Cold War, succumbed to the deluge of demands for clemency and established an Advisory Group to review all the sentences. Subsequently, four of the convicted killers were hanged at Landsberg Prison near Munich in 1951. By 1958 all the rest, including nine men originally sentenced to death, had been set free.
Such sweeping absolution for perpetrators of the crime induces a sort of philosophical vertigo. It is difficult to put any name on this head-spinning nullification of justice other than “Holocaust denial”—perpetrated, incredibly, by representatives of the same country that went to war to stop the criminal in chief. Is it any wonder, then, that it was possible—in fact more than likely—to grow up in the American heartland in the 1950s and ’60s and know nothing of the Holocaust?
That’s the way my mother wanted it, of course—my innocence preserved—and the world cooperated by providing me with no information. Yes, I knew who Hitler was—who didn’t?—but only from capsule descriptions in grade-school texts and as the slightly ridiculous figure in grainy newsreel footage—a ranting, fist-pumping, bug-eyed lunatic who didn’t know when to stop. I also knew that Hitler killed many Jews, but more as collateral damage, it seemed, than by design.
In the absence of more and better information, my unfortunate impression of Hitler as cartoonish was reinforced by Hogan’s Heroes , a TV sitcom which hilariously satirized Nazis. Colonel Klink, the buffoonish commander of the prisoner-of-war camp, was played by Werner Klemperer, who only a few years earlier had given a fine dramatic performance as a remorseless defendant in Judgment at Nuremberg. John Banner played Sergeant Schultz, the genial, strudel-fed, risk-averse guard who repeatedly claimed, “I know nothing—nothing .” Just like me!
It was about the time Hogan’s Heroes came on the air in 1965 that I became fully aware that I was Jewish. Like the Holocaust, it may seem incredible that I would not have this crucial data. How could this be? Well, not only did we not go to church or synagogue, religion was not discussed at the dinner table. It was not verboten, just irrelevant—not as interesting to me as sports, politics, food, and the doings at the Indiana University School of Music where my mother, a pianist, and my father, a violist, were on the faculty. I also don’t recall religion being discussed outside the home—being asked by virtual strangers which church I attended, which today often comes right after “hello.” In those days people’s religion (or lack of it) was their own business. So, I had no particular reason to consider my religious or ethnic identity. I thought of myself as half Russian, half Virginian, and 100% Hoosier.
I say that as a teenager I became “fully aware” of being Jewish because I had been dimly aware of it for many years. Except for religion, ours was culturally a very Jewish home, filled with Jewish food, Jewish humor. Most of my parents’ friends, colleagues on the music faculty, were Jewish. It was a matter of putting two and two and two together—but who was counting? I don’t remember precisely when and how I learned that I was officially Jewish—there was no dramatic come-to-Jesus talk with my mother—but I considered it a diversity upgrade. No offense to my father’s English-Scotch ancestry, but Russian Jewish, with a dollop of Mongolian, added zest and exotic flair missing from the monochrome (yawn) Dawson line.
The revelation did not kindle a religious awakening for me or prompt questions that might have led to discovering my mother’s great untold story. Most children, at some point, would wonder why their mother had never spoken of her own parents. Why were there no photos? Why no stories from her childhood? I never thought to ask my mother about her parents—my phantom grandparents—perhaps because my paternal grandparents had never been part of our lives either. My father’s dad died when he was thirteen; his mother when I was very young. The absence of grandparents seemed normal.
My father, David, knew my mother’s story before he met her, from his brother, Larry, an Army lieutenant who discovered her and Frina in the displaced-persons camp he ran near Munich after the war. Beguiled by their musical gifts and fiery personalities, he pulled strings to bring them to America. Going through my mother’s papers for Hiding in the Spotlight , I found letters from Larry to my father, and a Western Union telegram alerting him to the girls’ arrival in New York in May 1946. I also found the copy of an affidavit, “Janna Dawson’s story as told to David Dawson,” submitted to a reparations board which awarded each sister $800, an amount so slight and nonsensical that it illustrates the notion of incalculable loss. I’m confident that my father would have confided my mother’s story had I asked, but I never did while living under their roof. I was twenty-five—working in Florida, a new husband and father—when he died in Bloomington at the age of sixty-two of cigarette-induced emphysema, without our ever speaking of the subject.
I might never have learned my mother’s story if not for Irwin Segelstein. It was Segelstein, head programmer for NBC in the 1970s, who had the idea for a miniseries about the Holocaust, which seemed a farfetched, costly gamble. From the early 1950s, when a camp survivor appeared on the hugely popular reality series This Is Your Life, prime time was peppered with teleplays and episodes of series such as The Twilight Zone which used Holocaust themes as background and allegory, but never explained what happened outright. Nine and a half hours of straight, unfiltered Holocaust four nights in a row was quite another thing. However, in those pre-cable days the three networks had a monopoly on viewers and money to burn, so NBC rolled the dice—and won, drawing an estimated 120 million viewers.
Holocaust followed the intersecting destinies of two fictional families, one German Jewish, the other German gentile with Nazi sympathies, against the backdrop of the unfolding cataclysm. As the first major pop-culture treatment of the Holocaust—it was the miniseries genre that put the pop in pop culture—Holocaust was not just a big TV event but a significant social and cultural milestone, like the Roots miniseries the year before.
At the time, April 1978, I was back in Bloomington working as a feature writer at The Herald-Telephone, eternally in search of fodder. Reading the massive hype surrounding the upcoming miniseries, I knew there was a story in there for me—somewhere. Perhaps my mother had some anecdotes from her wartime experience that I could spin into a piece. I phoned her in Milwaukee, where she had moved after my father’s death to join the music faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Oblivious to television and pop culture, she was predictably unaware of the miniseries. I described it and asked if she could recount her own experience, hoping for enough relevant scraps to build a feature.
What followed was the most astonishing hour of my life as my mother told me, for the first time, her miraculous story of escape and survival. Not the most proficient typist, my fingers flew erratically across the keyboard, my crooked neck aching from holding the receiver to my shoulder, my mind struggling to wrap itself around the idea that it was my mother at the center of this harrowing fairy tale, improbable even by Holocaust standards. My story began with Dmitri Arshansky, my maternal grandfather, bartering for his daughter’s life.
A gold watch, the turn of a soldier’s head, and she was gone. Zhanna Arshanskaya, fourteen years old, the coat off her father’s back to resist the Russian winter, bolted from the sad column of marching Jews and disappeared into the landscape.
Something my mother said in the interview supplied the headline for the front-page story: “My father didn’t think anything could be so savage.”
My story ran the week Holocaust aired. Writing in Time magazine, critic Frank Rich called the miniseries “an uncommonly valuable achievement… likely to awaken more consciences to the horrors of the Holocaust than any single work since Anne Frank’s diary nearly three decades ago.”
He was correct. Holocaust proved to be a powerful catalyst in America for adding the Holocaust to secondary school textbooks, and in West Germany—where it drew enormous ratings—the miniseries triggered the first national conversation about the Holocaust since the end of the war, forcing Germans to confront pent-up demons and repressed guilt.
The impact was less profound for me and, as far as I could tell, my mother. There was no change in our relationship, which consisted of weekly phone calls and occasional trips to her home in Atlanta, where she moved in 1981. From time to time in ensuing years, as a columnist and later a TV critic, I would call and do a brief interview for a piece I was writing. In 1980, I spoke to her about Playing for Time , a CBS movie based on the true story of a prisoner who played in a band at Auschwitz—a story similar to her own. Just like two years earlier when she had told me her story for the first time, her recounting was vivid, colorful, and detailed, but not emotional—for either of us. Not once had she paused, unable to go on. Nor had I.
Perhaps this steely ability to maintain focus, to block out all intervening thoughts and feelings, simply was the discipline of an artist trained to keep going no matter what—as Dmitri Arshansky had trained his daughter, having six-year-old Zhanna practice in a darkened room so she would learn to play without looking at the piano keys. Or perhaps her eerie equanimity when we spoke of the past was something else altogether, akin to my own.
Not until after Hiding in the Spotlight was published in 2009 did I become aware of an entire genre of literature which had sprung up over the previous two decades or so—memoirs by people like me, children of Holocaust survivors. They even had a collective name, Second Generation Survivors. It turned out there were Second Generation clubs and associations everywhere , yet somehow they had escaped my notice.
Not long after my book came out, I attended a reading at the Holocaust Center in Maitland, a suburb of Orlando, by Alan Berger, a Holocaust scholar at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. We traded books. I gave him Hiding in the Spotlight, he signed a copy of Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors & Perpetrators, a collection of essays he edited with his wife, Naomi. It was my first exposure to this discrete universe of memory and suffering, and it left me feeling very much the outsider.
For me the most haunting essay was “The Lifelong Reporting Trip” by Julie Salamon, the author of several Holocaust-themed books including a novel, White Lies, and a memoir, The Net of Dreams: A Family’s Search for a Rightful Place. Like me, Salamon was a journalist and Second Generation Survivor who grew up in the placid Midwest—southern Ohio, on the river—but both her parents were survivors.
“My parents raised me to be optimistic, to believe in goodness, the future, the possibility of beauty and love,” she wrote in her Reflections essay. “Yet, they didn’t hide their background from us, so we were also well aware of evil, no hope for the future, the reality of ugliness and hate.” She recalled her “public declaration” as a child of survivors in 1979 in a review of Helen Epstein’s book Children of the Holocaust that she volunteered to write for the Wall Street Journal, where she was covering the commodities market.
In the review, she wrote of being obsessed with concentration camps when she was young. “I read Exodus by Leon Uris for the first time when I was seven, lingering over his renditions of what happened to people in concentration camps. My dreams were filled with visions of mangled and bloodied Jewish bodies. I substituted fictional victims with my mother and father and would cry out in the night for Mommy and Daddy. I never told my parents why I cried so often at night. I’m not sure why.”
All the essays in the collection echoed Salamon’s. They left me profoundly grateful for the gift of my Mickey-Mantle-Flubber childhood. Unlike my mother’s decision to stop speaking Russian to me, withholding her story was a good decision in the short and, especially, the long run. As a child, I had a recurrent nightmare of falling down the long, dark set of stairs in our first home in Bloomington. I can also recall a sharp sense of foreboding while waiting for my parents to return home at night after a party or concert, though they had been gone only a few hours, and always returned. On the whole, however, mine was an untroubled, blue-sky childhood. As a teenager and young adult, when many “Second Gens” began to experience delayed trauma from corrosive childhood memories, my subconscious was blessedly tabula rasa.
This, I believe, is why hearing my mother’s story for the first time at age thirty did not faze or unsettle me. By then I was a husband and father with fully developed emotional armor. I was able to listen to my mother’s story with nearly the same detachment as that of a stranger—then put it in a mental drawer and move on. Over the next fifteen years my wife, Candy, and journalism mentor, Bob Hammel, continually urged me to open the drawer and make the story into a book.
I continually resisted—on the grounds that I did not have the time; that my mother would not sit for more interviews (even though she had opened up, there was so much she still would not speak of); that I was a columnist, not a book writer, and I feared my own mother becoming the victim of a literary lab experiment gone horribly wrong—the Survivor Bride of Frankenstein. Whatever my grounds for resisting, conscious or buried, it would take a middle-school class assignment years later to unlock my mother’s emotions and compel me to open the drawer once again.
CHAPTER TWO
I n 1994 our daughter, Aimee, was in eighth grade at Glenridge Middle School in Winter Park, near Orlando. She was fortunate to have a man named Ron Hartle as her history teacher, a passionate dynamo known for multimedia presentations that brought any subject to life. One day Aimee came home with an assignment from Mr. Hartle. Each student was to ask a grandparent, or other older relative, what their life had been like at the same age.
Aimee, thirteen, decided to ask “Zee,” as she affectionately called my mother, about her teenage experiences. “Good luck with that!” we thought. Aimee knew little about her Russian grandmother’s early life beyond the fact that she’d come to America after the war, and even less about the Holocaust. She had no idea “Zee” had been caught up in the Holocaust at age fourteen and was not eager to discuss that part of her life. So Aimee forged ahead.
“Dear Grandma (Zee): Hi, how are you doing? I hope everything is going well for you right now. I am writing this letter for a school history project we are doing. The project is to find out as much as possible about our grandparents, and what was going on when they were about 13 years old. I know some about your life then, but I would love to hear more. Some specific things I would like to know are what life was like overall in about 1940. What was your home life like? Also, what are some major world events that you remember from around that time? I look forward to hearing from you, and hope to see you soon. Love, Aimee Dawson.”
We were surprised when, two weeks later, Aimee received from “Zee” a handwritten letter covering four pages of her 8-by-10 personalized stationery with the sketch of a grand piano in the upper right-hand corner. We were astonished when we read the letter.
Not only had my mother directly answered Aimee’s questions about her life and “major world events,” she had done so in wrenchingly personal terms—reaching emotional depths untouched in her interviews with me.
“Dearest Aimee. To start with you should know that I have loved my country truly passionately from very early childhood. Some easier times and mostly hard times did not take away this feeling of mine. My parents were the most devoted kind to my sister Frina and myself. There was no limit of their concern for us.”
She described her idyllic early life in Berdyansk and later Kharkov where she and Frina studied piano at the conservatory, and how it all vanished in a flash when the Nazis arrived in 1941—when she was about Aimee’s age.
“They hung anyone they wanted on the trees where people had to walk,” she wrote. “They tore into our apartment first to press and hold my mother to the wall, and the second time they took my father’s violin. It was with my father almost every day of his life. That horrified me and I can never tell anyone what hatred I had for them.”
She recounted the march of 16,000 Jews from Kharkov to a killing field outside the city, and how the Nazis mocked the walking dead and took souvenir photos to send home to Germany.
“I found out how little death mattered to me if you weren’t ridiculed, laughed at, or had your picture taken in your most humiliated moment of life. The realization came to me early in five years of war that humiliation is much worse than death. I never felt that I was a big enough person to endure humiliation and I don’t think that has changed. Our honor is life itself to us, and dignity.
“Well, at this point of my story, I will have to make it very sketchy because it’s too long, it’s much too hard on me and also because one day I hope to make it known to this world of ours.”
It was the first time I had heard those words from my mother—“I hope to make it known to this world of ours.” For fifteen years, since she first told me the story, she had resolutely resisted the idea. The letter from Aimee had changed everything. It’s as if she flipped a light switch and suddenly my mother could see the importance of telling her story for Aimee’s generation and others to follow. She grew more and more willing to share her story, agreeing two years later to an interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project. After the phenomenal success of Schindler’s List in 1993, Spielberg sent camera crews around the world to record the testimonies of as many survivors as he could find, knowing they would soon be gone.
My writing mentor, Bob Hammel, and Candy had never given up their campaign for a book, and now events were on their side. Aimee’s letter, the Shoah Project taping, and my mother’s stated desire to “make this known to the world” had given their effort real momentum. There was another event, wholly unexpected, which drove home for me the imperative of preserving the story.
After her sophomore year in high school, Aimee and a dozen classmates followed a venerable tradition—the chaperoned “If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium” summer tour of Europe, five countries in ten days by bus and train. Strange languages, stranger food, midnight pillow fights, picturebook scenery—all of it reflected in Aimee’s scrapbook. Or so we thought. In fact, she had omitted one stop.
In Aimee’s scrapbook and her postcards and calls home, there was no trace of the group’s trip to Dachau. The blank page, the silence, was out of character for Aimee, a garrulous, opinionated student-government leader. We learned of the Dachau tour from one of the chaperones, a teacher who knew Aimee well. Of all the students, she said, only Aimee was visibly shaken by what she saw at Dachau, and said nothing afterward. This was two years after she received my mother’s letter, which did not include this detail: after the war, before leaving their displaced persons camp in Germany for America, my mother and sister played a long concert for two thousand survivors of Dachau.
While it’s possible to engage in too much armchair psychology, it is difficult to account for Aimee’s reaction to Dachau except as trauma—her subconscious connecting what she saw at Dachau to her grandmother’s ordeal. Aimee’s distress was deeper than anything I had ever felt. It almost seems as if the trauma of my mother’s experience, which she spared me, had been transmitted to Aimee, who unmistakably inherited my mother’s slender frame and fiery Russian temperament. Did she also inherit the winds of my mother’s war?
Berger identifies common characteristics among Second Gens such as sensitivity to multicultural issues and concern for social justice. “Many of the second generation witnesses seek a post-Auschwitz mending of the world. For instance, numerous children of survivors enter the helping professions, for example, marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors, social workers, attorneys, and teachers. Furthermore, many of the Jewish second generation speak with a moral voice, on issues ranging from social justice to peace in the Middle East to counseling children of Vietnamese boat people.”1
This portrait of a Second Gen sounds less like me than it does Aimee, who is technically the Third Gen. Perhaps it had nothing to do with her grandmother being a Holocaust survivor who despises prejudice, but as student body president in high school Aimee appointed rainbow cabinets and volunteered with the National Conference for Community and Justice which combats discrimination and hate. Her first job after college was youth program director for the NCCJ in Washington, D.C. Now she volunteers at urban high schools in Indianapolis, teaching reading and presentation skills. And the bond with her grandmother, “Zee,” grew, and continues to grow, stronger each year.
As the new millennium neared, I was chafing under the punishing iron yoke of the top editor at The Orlando Sentinel, where I had been a columnist since 1986, and began looking around. In early 2000, I was offered a job as consumer columnist at The Indianapolis Star , just an hour from Bloomington where Aimee was attending Indiana University. I loved the idea of moving back to basketball country and working for an editor, Tim Franklin, who believed in using the First Amendment. The job itself would be less time-consuming than my TV-critic and columnist gigs in Orlando, which I always brought home with me.
But despite the bonus of Aimee becoming eligible for in-state tuition and seeing her more often (not necessarily in that order), it was not a slam-dunk decision for us. We had moved several times and hated it. We had sworn Orlando would be our last stop. Moreover, I was taking a $13,000 pay cut to escape Captain Queeg in the editor’s office—though Candy would make that much more in Indianapolis for the same reading-specialist job she had in Orange County.
“Okay,” Candy said one day, “let’s do it—on one condition.”
“That I do all the packing?”
“That you use the extra time to write the book.”
“Deal,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
I n the autumn of 2000, I left behind the gold and crimson foliage of central Indiana and traveled to Atlanta for an interview with my mother that I hoped would lead to a book about her Holocaust experience. I had written to her sister, Frina, about the project and asked when I could visit her in Buffalo, NY, to get the story through her eyes. I was still waiting to hear back.
The interviews were conducted at the dining table in my mother’s condominium in northeast Atlanta using a Radio Shack cassette recorder with a plastic microphone stand. Having spent much of her life as a concert pianist, my mother was no stranger to microphones and performing on cue—to rehearsal and repetition until it was perfect. She was used to commanding the stage. At seventy-three, her memory and focus remained extraordinary. Only once in ten hours of questions and answers over two days did she succumb to emotion and stop momentarily to gather herself—when she spoke of her mother, “my greatest hero,” crisscrossing Nazi-occupied Kharkov on foot in a futile search for a Russian Orthodox priest to baptize her daughters, to de-Jewdify them.
Back home in Indiana, I found an executive secretary in a bank who transcribed tape recordings on the side and was pleased to receive such a large order, though she warned me she knew little about the Holocaust. A few weeks later she returned a fine transcript with a personal note. “I loved listening to your mother tell her story. It is truly amazing. She sounds like a truly incredible person.”
These unsolicited comments by a stranger were the first objective confirmation of my purely subjective view that an amazing story had fallen in my lap—or perhaps, more to the point, I had fallen in the story’s lap at Bloomington Hospital in December 1949. Leafing through the transcript, I had the same thought I had that day in 1978 in The Herald-Telephone newsroom, typing in disbelief as my mother related her story to me for the first time over the phone: “This is incredible copy.”
In fact, it was so incredible, so rich, I panicked. It was like finding a bag on your doorstep with a million dollars in unmarked bills. Now what? I didn’t want to do anything impulsive—I needed a plan. I put the transcript in a drawer for safekeeping and deep thought. Meanwhile, I returned to Atlanta for a followup interview, which produced another transcript for the drawer. About that time I received a note from Frina that left me perplexed. Politely, without explanation, she declined my request to be interviewed for the book.
The doorstep bounty was still in the drawer, untouched, when in 2003 we did the unthinkable—for the sixth time—uprooted. This time it was back to Orlando where, ironically, Tim Franklin had succeeded the Sentinel editor who caused me to flee to Indiana to work for Franklin at The Star. The transcripts went from the drawer to a moving box marked “den.” In Orlando we bought a house with an upstairs room with a view conducive to writing an overdue book. On my first official day as an “author,” the silence from upstairs was so deafening that after a few hours Candy looked in to see if I had fallen asleep at the keyboard. She found me staring at a stubbornly blank screen.
As I struggled to give narrative form to the material, to transfer the music of my mother’s words to the page, Candy repeated something she had said from the outset.
“You need to go to Ukraine.”
“No, I don’t,” I repeated.
There was nothing to be gained by going to Ukraine, I argued. Nothing to see there that I couldn’t see in pictures, no one left to talk to who knew my mother. I didn’t speak the language. It would be a long, expensive trip for nothing. I had the whole story right here in my mother’s words.
I was right—I had the story. And a year later, after writing in the mornings before work and on weekends, I had a manuscript. What I didn’t have, it turned out, was a book. Pleased to be “finished” and eager for feedback, I gave the 35,000-word manuscript to a Sentinel colleague, Jean Patteson, a constant reader and wonderful writer. She read it over the weekend and flagged me down on Monday morning.
“This is the most amazing story I’ve ever read,” Jean said.
My heart leapt. Then Jean dropped the hammer.
“But it’s not a book. What you have is a great outline for a book.”
The manuscript lacked emotion and sense of place, Jean said. The story felt distant, reportorial. The solution was obvious.
Candy was right. I had to go to Ukraine.
In September 2006, Candy and I traveled from Orlando to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine and unofficial line of demarcation between the west, where Ukrainian is the dominant language, and the east, where anything other than Russian raises bushy eyebrows. After two days in Kiev we hopped an eastbound train for Kharkov, where my mother had studied at the music conservatory. Later, we would travel south to her hometown of Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov where she had played her first public performance on the radio at age six.
To supplement my thirty words of Russian, which could be stitched together for basic greetings and questions, we were armed with a handwritten message of introduction, in Russian, from my mother, which we had printed on the back of cards to hand out to locals baffled by my pidgin Russian.
“Dear Countrymen!” she wrote, “I am turning to you because my son Greg and his wife Candy don’t speak the language and need your help. He wrote a book about Ukraine and my family. My name is Zhanna Arshanskaya (married name Dawson). I was born in Berdyansk in 1927. Our family moved to Kharkov in 1935 and we were there when the Germans invaded. Everyone in my family was killed and it is only because of the help of the kind population in our wonderful country that my sister and I are still alive so the story of our life in Ukraine can be told. Greg’s book is about the heroism of our people. He and Candy know a lot about Ukraine and fell in love with the country and decided to fly to you even though they don’t know the language. Trust them 100%—they already love you the way their mother does. Thank you all for your generosity and colossal courage. Be happy and healthy. Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson, who would love to be going to see you.”
My mother could have been there. We invited her to come along, and she was in robust health, a daily walker with hand weights up and down the hills of her neighborhood in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. She declined, reminding us that she hated to travel. True. She had not left the country since arriving in 1946. It was hard enough getting my mother on a plane to Florida or Indiana, much less Ukraine. I ascribed her general aversion to travel to the fact she’d simply had her fill of it during the war. Yet, I wondered if turning down the opportunity to visit her homeland with us was rooted in something deeper than the hassle of going through security.
As stolid and unflinching as my mother had been through all our interviews, and despite her growing willingness to speak about her own experience, the fact was she had never read a book or seen a film about the Holocaust, even the less graphic and emotionally wrenching ones I recommended, such as Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful. I had the feeling she declined our invitation to Ukraine for the same unspoken reason.
As it turned out, her instincts probably served her well. The last time she had seen Kharkov, in December 1941, the city was in semi-ruins, occupied by Nazis. Returning to her former home and seeing the house down the street where she had been hidden for two weeks by a non-Jewish family would have been a mixed emotional moment, as would visiting the secondary school she attended and the music conservatory in the center of the city where she and her sister studied.
But around so many other corners lurked images freighted with nightmares for my mother, like the majestic statue of the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko which she saw festooned with Jewish corpses. The most terrible possibility is that she would have accompanied us to the memorial at Drobitsky Yar outside the city where her parents and grandparents were murdered—and where she and Frina were supposed to die, too—along with sixteen thousand other Jews.
I shudder to imagine my mother listening as the tour guide told how in summer there were strawberries and cranberries growing in the ravines, but when she looked at them all she could think of was blood. Worst of all would have been the subterranean “Mourning Hall” where on a wall engraved with the names of the dead she would have found the names of her grandparents, her parents, Dmitri and Sarah—and also her own and her sister’s. I am certain that no flicker of triumph at having cheated fate would have mitigated the horror of that moment for my mother. She might, however, have found some solace at the Kharkov Holocaust Museum. And though I might have originally gone to Ukraine for Hiding in the Spotlight , it was at the museum that I found the inspiration for this book.
The museum is housed in three high-ceilinged rooms on the second story of a pre-war building on Petrovskogo Street in downtown Kharkov. When opened in 1996 without government support by a band of Jewish activists led by Larisa Volovik, it became—and remains to this day—the only public Holocaust museum in Ukraine. That startling fact speaks volumes about denial of the Holocaust in the country where the mass extermination of Jews first began in 1941. That changed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It’s no longer official policy to pretend the Holocaust happened to 6 million random people of no particular ethnic or religious identity. There has been a revival of Jewish life. In Kharkov I visited the synagogue and several thriving Jewish organizations that offer books and programs on the Holocaust. It’s now taught in the schools. But there is still a long way to go.
I wish my mother had been with us the day we visited the museum in 2006. Volovik had put a story in the museum’s monthly publication about our upcoming research trip to Ukraine. When we arrived, there were two surprise guests waiting for us whose presence refuted my facile assertion to Candy that there was no one left in Kharkov who knew my mother. These two gray-haired women—sisters—did. But they knew Zhanna only as Anna Morozova, the fictitious name she used during the war while trying to hide her Jewish identity
Through a translator, the sisters explained that they had been in an entertainment troupe with Anna (Zhanna) and Marina (Frina) that performed for Nazi troops occupying the city of Kremenchug in central Ukraine. One of them gave us a picture she had taken of the troupe. My mother is in the middle of the large group, the only one looking away from the camera, in hopes of not being noticed. Frina had stayed in her room and refused to be in the photo.
The museum offered a variety of artifacts—eyeglasses, pocket watches, lockets—documents, photos, and exhibits, including a scale model of the abandoned tractor factory outside Kharkov where the doomed Jews were held for two weeks without food and water in late December 1941 before being marched to Drobitsky Yar.
Another exhibit that caught my eye featured a series of black-and-white photos. There were images of a courtroom, close-ups of various individuals, and—most striking—photos of a public execution, four men hanging by their necks at the end of long ropes. A huge crowd, thousands, surrounded the rough gallows in what appeared to be a public square. The accompanying text said the four men were three Nazi officers and a Russian collaborator. They had been tried by Soviet authorities in a makeshift courtroom in the Kharkov Opera House and been found guilty of heinous crimes against the people of Ukraine. I looked at the date under the photo of the hangings.
December 19, 1943.
I looked again—that couldn’t be right. 1943? The war in Europe didn’t end till May 1945. The war crime trials in Nuremberg began that November.
How was it possible, I wondered, that there was a Nazi war crime trial in Ukraine nearly two years before Nuremberg and that there seemed to be no record of it except this exhibit?
But then, how was it possible that nearly a million Ukrainian Jews were murdered before the chimneys at Auschwitz began belching human ash, and almost no one seemed to know about that either?
Near the photo exhibit of the trial was a glass case with two faded red ticket stubs, good for admission to the Kharkov Opera House, December 13, 1943, for a trial now as forgotten as the million Jews who, in the words of NBC anchor Brian Williams sixty-five years later, “simply vanished” from Ukraine.
“Somebody,” I thought, “needs to do a book about that someday.”
CHAPTER FOUR
H istory has done Holocaust deniers a great favor by largely deleting Ukraine from our collective memory and common knowledge. What makes the omission as significant as it is tragic is not just the fact that more than a million Jews in Ukraine were murdered; it’s the fact that these were the first of the 6 million. Ukraine is where the mass extermination of the Jews began, not Poland or Germany as nearly all Americans still believe.
The analogy is imperfect but will suffice: not placing Ukraine high up in Chapter 1 of the story of the Holocaust would be like teaching U.S. involvement in World War II by skipping Pearl Harbor and going straight to D-Day. The analogy is further imperfect because what Hitler did in Ukraine, and why, explains far more about the Holocaust than Pearl Harbor does about the war with Japan. Motive, weapons, plan—all the incontrovertible evidence of the greatest crime of the twentieth century is to be found at the start, in Ukraine. Allowing fate and circumstance to effectively quash the evidence—disconnecting the dots between motive and crime—helps deniers spread their fantasies in the court of public opinion.
I was not a student of the Holocaust—or much of anything, I’m sure my teachers would say—before writing Hiding in the Spotlight. I spent more time at the library doing research for the book than I did in all my years of high school and college combined. I was startled by what I found. I had gone in search of basic Holocaust history that would form the backdrop for my mother’s story of escape and survival. I found the first hours of the Final Solution—Operation Barbarossa. On June 22, 1941, three million German troops and three thousand tanks invaded the Soviet Union. Following behind the Wehrmacht were mobile killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, whose specific mission was to find and kill Jews in large numbers, the start of the fulfillment of Hitler’s malignant vision. By the end of the year, months before the gas chamber doors at Auschwitz would swing open, half a million Ukrainian Jews were already dead.
I was surprised by this information, but even more surprised—dumbfounded—that it was news to virtually everyone who heard it from me at events where I spoke about Hiding in the Spotlight. Between June 2009 when the book came out and January 2011, I made some 120 presentations at churches, synagogues, service clubs, retirement homes, private homes, middle schools, universities, museums, libraries, and bookstores in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Indiana. It would be generous to say that 10% of the listeners had a clue about the events in Ukraine in 1941.
At a middle school in Bloomington, Ind., my hometown, the percentage was half that, and would have been lower if I weren’t such an easy grader. Before my wife and I visited the school to discuss the book and to show Candy’s film about our trip to Ukraine in 2006, I had the teachers give a four-question pop quiz to the eighth-graders we would be addressing. No need for the kids to sign their papers, I told the teachers, I just want to see how much a group of typical middle schoolers knows about the Holocaust in 2010. These were not trick questions. They called for information that would be in chapter one of any history of the Holocaust in Ukraine—if only it were being taught.
1) In which country did the mass extermination of Jews begin? 2) What was the main method of killing in these exterminations? 3) What are Einsatzgruppen ? 4) What is Babi Yar? The answers: 1) Ukraine (or Soviet Union or Russia); 2) Shooting; 3) Nazi killing squads; 4) A killing field in Ukraine where the Nazis murdered 34,000 Jews.
Two hundred twenty students took the quiz. Not one student aced it. Two students answered three questions correctly, five got two right, and seven students scored one—meaning 205 students were not able to answer a single question correctly. Only one student knew that the mass exterminations began in “Russia.” The overwhelming majority said Germany. A dozen students identified Babi Yar as a Jewish holiday.
To put the dismal results in depressing perspective, this school is in a middle-class neighborhood in a university community with high rates of literacy and cultural awareness. The several classes of eighth-graders were brought to our presentation because they already were studying the Holocaust. Media students at the school have produced award-winning films of their visits to Auschwitz. If smart students with motivated teachers can’t pass a quiz about basic Holocaust history, who could?
Not the tanned, well-spoken residents, many of them retirees, of an affluent community outside Orlando who came to my presentation on a balmy, sun-splashed morning. Two women told me their husbands would have been there, but they had tee times. Though equipped with much longer memories and experience, this group did only slightly better than the middle-schoolers in Bloomington, and I thought I noticed two or three furtively researching on their iPhones.
The most startling confirmation for me that Ukraine Holocaust blindness cuts across all ethnic, religious and generational lines came on a rainy Sunday night in March when I traveled to Minneola, forty-five miles south of Orlando in what used to be orange groves, to speak at a new synagogue that had just opened in a small strip shopping center. It was an older congregation, many of them retirees from New York and others points north. After my usual riff on the Einsatzgruppen and how the mass killings had begun in Ukraine, I asked for a show of hands from all those who had heard this before. Not one hand went up.
This information about Ukraine is so widely un known that once you come into possession of it, you feel as if you belong to a secret society and begin to notice its absence everywhere. I could not help noticing that it’s virtually absent from the impressive Holocaust memorial in Miami Beach, an open-air exhibit with a plaza of Jerusalem stone, a meditation garden, a waterlily pond, and a magnificent sculpture—a giant hand and arm, tattooed with a number from Auschwitz, outstretched to the heavens. Nearby in “The Arbor of History” are fifty inscribed black granite slabs telling the history of the Jewish people and the Shoah in words and images.
It reads more like the history of Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto, both cited on many panels. Only two slabs contain any reference to Ukraine. (A third panel uses a photo of undressed women at a killing field in Ukraine, but it is not labeled as such.) One tells about the formation of the Einsatzgruppen but does not say where they operated. Panel #42 out of 50 has a photo of corpses in a ravine. “Many of these covered ravines were later discovered in the countryside of Poland and the Ukraine,” the caption says. “In one such ravine in Babi Yar, outside of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, over 30,000 Jews were killed in 2 days shortly after the Germans arrived.” (Every source I’ve seen gives a total closer to 34,000.)
The dates of the Babi Yar slaughter, Sept. 29–30, 1941, are not set in stone at the memorial. Nor is June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union with the Einsatzgruppen in tow and ignited the mass exterminations which became the impetus for use of gas chambers and ovens at places like Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had not even been built at the time of the Babi Yar massacre. I am not suggesting that the creators of the Miami memorial intentionally marginalized the Holocaust in Ukraine. That would be antithetical to their greater purpose. My point is illustrative: the memorial was a product of its times—conceived in 1984 when there was little public awareness in the U.S. of wartime events in Ukraine, and opened in 1990 before the implosion of the Soviet Union, which assiduously maintained the fiction that the Holocaust was not a Jewish event. Still, considering the substantial scholarship available at the time—Racel Hilberg wrote at great length about the Einsatzgruppen in The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961—the scant mention of Ukraine at the Miami memorial is startling.
All the history on the panels at the Miami Beach memorial was written by Helen Fagin, a Polish survivor and scholar who served as chair of the committee in charge of developing educational material for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In early 2011, I reached Fagin at her home in Sarasota, Fl., where she now lectures at the New College of Florida. After describing my project, I told Fagin I was puzzled by the fact that there was so little information on the memorial about events in Ukraine.
Fagin made no comment on the events themselves, these first mass exterminations of the Shoah, focusing instead on geography and national boundaries—Ukraine’s history as a geopolitical football fought over by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, which she noted had “absorbed” it. As a mere republic of the Soviet Union, Fagin suggested, it did not merit or require special attention on the memorial. Well then, I said, how about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union? Was not June 22, 1941 as consequential a date as others on the memorial such as May 8, 1943, when the leader of the Warsaw ghetto, Mordechai Anielewicz, was killed? Or January 22, 1942, when Hitler’s high command met at Wannsee to approve plans for the Final Solution, which had already consumed half a million Ukrainian Jews?
Getting no direct answer to that, either, I asked Fagin if she knew about the trial of three Nazi officers for war crimes in Kharkov in December 1943—the first such trial, long before the post-war trials at Nuremberg—and she confessed that she did not. She then proceeded to explain why the trial she had never heard of was of no special import. “These soldiers were not on trial for what they did to the Jews or Ukrainian people—they were put on trial because they were political enemies of the Soviet Union,” Fagin said.
This is a classic difference without a distinction. Yes, the Einsatzgruppen and the German army were “political enemies” of the Jews and other Ukrainians they murdered. But as Clausewitz said, war is the extension of politics by other means, and never was this more evident than it was in the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
“By Hitler’s definition, the war with the Soviet Union was different from the wars he had waged against Poland, France and the other countries in Europe,” writes historian Yitzhak Arad in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union . “General Alfred Jodl was ordered by Hitler to prepare an appendix to the ‘Special Orders to Directive No. 21’ (Operation Barbarossa), saying, ‘The forthcoming campaign is more than a mere armed conflict: it is a collision between two different ideologies.’”2 The document gave SS chief Himmler authority to eliminate all elements of the Soviet “political system,” including many Jews.
So, yes, Fagin was correct—indeed it’s a macabre understatement—to say the Nazis on trial in Kharkov were “political enemies” of the Soviet Union. It was a semantic point as irrelevant to the larger point as her geography lesson. The legal pretext for the Kharkov trial of the Nazis was less important than their alleged crimes. For the victims, dead was dead.
I asked Fagin if she would change or add anything if she were writing history for the memorial today. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have not seen the recent research. I no longer teach history. I am now teaching morality.”
Ukraine’s standing, until quite recently, as a distant, dark planet in the universe of the Holocaust knowledge—very much a self-imposed isolation by the secretive Kremlin masters—was evident in the itinerary of a 57-member commission President Carter appointed in 1979 to prepare a report that laid the foundation for the U.S. Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. The commission’s first stop on a fourteen-day fact-finding mission was Poland, where it visited the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, the death camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz, a Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, and was given a tour of Polish archives pertaining to the war. The commission, led by Elie Wiesel, met with a host of government and cultural ministers, viewed Polish documentaries about the Holocaust, and attended a performance at a Jewish theater in Warsaw.
The next stop, in the Soviet Union, was comparatively brief. The only Holocaust site the commission visited was Babi Yar, where the members—many of them distinguished scholars and authors of Holocaust books—were “shocked” to find no acknowledgement that nearly all the victims of the massacre had been Jewish—an indication of just how little was still known, even by experts, about this far-flung flashpoint of the Holocaust. In Moscow the commission met with various ministers and the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg, and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then it was off to Denmark.
The twenty years since Ukraine went from being a closed Soviet republic to an open, independent state has seen a profusion of literature, scholarship, and journalism about the Holocaust and its aftermath in Ukraine, but people are resistant to change and thinking outside the box; they love their fixed paradigms and rusty icons. It will take time for “news” and revelation from the Ukraine to penetrate the public’s holy trinity of Anne Frank, Auschwitz, and Schindler’s List. There is a lag—to borrow Wiesel’s formulation—between public “information” and the public’s “knowledge,” or awareness.
The glacial progress was evident in two state-of-the-art world history textbooks I examined which are used in the Orange County (Fla.) school system, one of the largest in the U.S. The Ukraine is not mentioned directly in the chapter on the Holocaust. It is encouraging that the Einsatzgruppen killings are included, but they are described, vaguely, as having occurred “in eastern Europe.” To revisit my own analogy, can you imagine a textbook today saying that on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a U.S. naval base “in the Pacific”?
But the textbook writers are not so far behind the historical curve or cultural Zeitgeist, judging by story selection in the New York Times , which not only reports on the Zeitgeist, but is itself a part of it. On April 20, 2009, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I found a story about Ukraine on page 6A, with two photos, which took up half the page under the headline “New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews”—graphic testimony to the time warp from which the Holocaust in Ukraine is just now emerging.
“People know of Auschwitz and Sobibor,” wrote Ethan Bronner. “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.”
The story ran on the same day the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Jerusalem made public on its Web site new information about Nazi killing sites in a host of smaller towns and villages in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia. “In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German,” said the head researcher. “We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next.”
It is likely that my mother’s family was betrayed the same way, by friends, or at least acquaintances, in the building on Katsarskaya Street in Kharkov where they lived in December 1941 when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews—the ones who had not fled east—on the pretext of marching them to a labor camp. My mother and her sister escaped the march—my mother by her father’s bribe, and Frina by unknown means (she has never spoken of it to anyone, to my knowledge, except possibly her husband). The rest were murdered just after New Year’s at Drobitsky Yar, a larger cousin of the killing fields, which are still being discovered today in Ukraine, even as denier Web sites proliferate in cyberspace.
I had always regarded Holocaust deniers as the looniest of the lunatic fringes, peddlers of a theory so laughably, patently false that it made alien-abduction and telepathic spoon-bending look like good science. The notion that the Holocaust did not happen wasn’t worth my attention or acknowledgement, much less my concern five years ago. That all changed after Hiding in the Spotlight was published and I discovered the great void in common knowledge about the Holocaust in Ukraine. There were many more open, malleable minds up for grabs than I had ever imagined possible—targets for the deluded demagogues and sociopathic liars from Denial Land. And hadn’t we heard from the forefathers of these fabulists before—in Germany in the 1930s? I saw the opportunity to provide an antidote.
Hiding in the Spotlight took me to numerous middle schools and the most achingly vulnerable minds of all, soft clay waiting to be shaped—or misshapened. Nowhere was the response to my mother’s story so sharp or personal as it was in these classrooms, perhaps because it was about someone the same age as the students themselves. It could be their story.
A couple of weeks after a middle-school talk, we always received a large envelope with individual thank-you notes from the students. They were portraits of minds and sensibilities in uneasy transition from childhood to adult consciousness. The rainbow lettering, squiggly lines, blockletter THANK YOU’s and purple hearts on the front often belied a darker message inside.
“I learned so much. I never knew about the holes people got shot into. So sad.—Rachel.”
“Your mom’s story is the most earth-shattering thing I ever heard. I did not know about the killing fields. I only knew about the death camps, and to hear about what your mom went through just really hit me.—Lauren.”
“You taught me so much. I hardly knew anything about the Holocaust before you came to our school. Now I know way more than enough.—Drew.”
“I can’t imagine what it would be like living in Germany at that time. Never knowing if the Nazis will barge into your house, hearing screams for mercy when you are trying to sleep. You have changed how I look at the normal everyday things I have. I’m more grateful and thankful. I can’t wait until I get to share all I know about the Holocaust with my friends.—Katie.”
The words were different, but I think all four were saying the same thing: Never again.
CHAPTER FIVE
I realized this book needed a brief primer on Ukraine the day a neighbor, Ted, told me he thought Moscow was west of Ukraine. In fact, it’s the reverse. Most of Ukraine lies west of Moscow. Ted also thought that Moscow was south of Ukraine—again, quite the opposite.
In our small Orlando neighborhood of people smarter than me, Ted may be the smartest. He is a retired military man who tutors honors students headed for elite colleges. He does Soduku in his sleep, is a voracious reader, and would be my first pick when choosing teams for a neighborhood Jeopardy tournament. If Ted is confused about Ukraine, I decided, the general public is in deep trouble. This was final confirmation of a realization that had dawned on me in the course of my experience promoting Hiding in the Spotlight .
While there usually, but not always, were exceptions in every room, what I found was that even these reasonably well-informed Americans could not come within a thousand miles of finding Ukraine on an unmarked map. In part, you can blame America’s historic obliviousness to the rest of the world, separated as we are from most of it by two oceans. Our splendid isolation and relatively secure borders have made us blithely geo-phobic (and arrogantly monolingual). No doubt there are many other places Americans can’t find on that unmarked map.
But Ukraine poses a special challenge because of its history. For those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties, Ukraine for all practical purposes did not exist. It was invisible—a neat trick for a place nearly the size of Texas. There was only the enormous and forbidding Soviet Union, which most people including our teachers referred to as Russia. We had no more idea—probably less—that the Soviet Union was made up of republics such as the Ukraine and Belarus and Azerbaijan than an average Soviet student did that America was a collection of states like Idaho and Arkansas and Delaware.
In this monolithic yet nebulous “Russia” there was Moscow, and everything else was “Siberia” (thank you, Doctor Zhivago ). Cold War rhetoric deepened our confusion by making the “the Iron Curtain countries”—Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, et al.—synonymous with the Soviet Union, as if they, too, were part of “Russia.” So, given nearly a half century of misinformation and missed information, I was surprised but not shocked when Ted guessed that Ukraine was somewhere east of the Ural Mountains, where Siberia starts and unknown lands begin.
I was just as disoriented before writing my mother’s story. She spoke often about “Russia” when I was growing up, but I recall almost no mention of Ukraine. Her persona is best described as a proud Russian who happened to have been born in Ukraine—rather like the slogan “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God” found on bumper stickers. Her self-identifying as Russian is natural since the Ukraine was a dot in the vast pointillist tapestry of the Russian Empire long before the Soviet Union in which she came of age, and did not become its own country until 1991—fifty years after she was ripped from the arms of her Mother Russia by the Nazis. The first research I did for the book was to get out a map and find my mother’s hometown of Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov in southeastern Ukraine, just north of the Black Sea. She spent her middle childhood before the war in Kharkov in northeast Ukraine, 420 miles due south of Moscow, nowhere near the Arctic Circle. Old impressions die hard. When I told friends I was going to Ukraine in December 2010, they gave me the “Siberia” look, but Chicago and New York certainly had much tougher winters.
As puzzling as it is, Ukraine’s geographic location is a day at a Black Sea beach next to its political history, a stupefying phantasmagoria of cultures, influences, princes, and nations stretching back to the ninth century and the Kievan Rus, a precursor to the Russian Empire, which for a time in the eleventh century was the largest state in Europe, with Kiev as the capital. For Ukraine as much as any place on Earth, situated at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and Asia, geography has been destiny—eternally traversed, invaded, settled, and abandoned. I’ve seen no better capsule biography of Ukraine than this from George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, a Texas-based geopolitical think tank, who has written extensively about the country where his grandfather was born:
“The name ‘Ukraine’ literally translates as ‘on the edge.’ It is a country on the edge of other countries, sometimes part of one, sometimes part of another, and more frequently divided. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was divided among Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century it was divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary. And in the twentieth century, save for a short period of independence after World War I, it became part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine has been on the edge of empires for centuries.”3
Such constant fluctuation is difficult to fathom for Americans who grew up in states with borders which have never changed and never been breached by a foreign army. In our lifetime, Ukraine’s longest period of geographic and political “stability”—some might call it arrested development—was as a captive republic of the Soviet Union. After the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the Ukraine declared independence, ditched the “the” and became, simply, Ukraine. At the same time it was gaining independence, Ukraine was regaining its stolen identity after years of anonymity as a Soviet cipher.
Many Americans probably first took notice while watching the opening ceremonies of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. The tortoise-paced procession of costumed delegations with their distinctive national flags has traditionally served as a handy, color-coded refresher course on the rest of the world for American TV viewers every four years (every two since the winter and summer games were staggered). For half a century the Cold War was fought on the playing fields and ice rinks of the Olympics. We became accustomed to the sight of the vast Soviet delegation marching stolidly into the stadium under the red hammer and sickle, then soaking up a lion’s share of medals during the games. Disappearance of the Soviet “team” was dramatic visible proof to Americans that the Cold War was over. Ukraine marched under its own blue-and-gold flag for the first time at Lillehammer. A decade later in the winter of 2004–05, the famously short American attention span was riveted by the spectacle of the Orange Revolution in Independence Square in Kiev, even if the average viewer did not know Yushchenko from Yanukovych.
One price of independence for Ukraine has been the revival—or continuation—of an ancient identity crisis. Ukraine can still be found at the intersection of gravitational forces, pondering its fate. As Friedman notes, the western third leans toward Europe, the eastern third toward Russia, and the remaining third in the center is pulled in both directions, with Kiev the capital of indecision. Should it tilt west and join the European Union? Or pay homage to its historic ties to Russia, so intimate and intertwined as to be familial?
“There are endless arguments over whether Ukraine created Russia or vice versa,” Friedman wrote. “Suffice it to say, they developed together.” And it seems they are destined to move forward together, separate yet indivisible like separated Siamese twins. Meanwhile, as Ukraine is pulled east and west into the future, it is subject to another powerful gravitational force—the past.
Before leaving Orlando for Ukraine, I made the acquaintance online of Victor Melikhov, a seventy-year-old Ukrainian who teaches English to university students in Kharkov. Ukrainian history is Victor’s hobby. In Kharkov we met at my hotel for pots of tea and a mini-seminar in his favorite subject. Is life better for him in independent Ukraine than it was in the Soviet Union?
“If life is just food and pleasure, maybe not,” Victor laughed. “Vodka and sausage were cheap in those days. But if life is reading good books popular in the world, not just what somebody in the Kremlin wants me to read, then I say we are on the right way. The difficult way.”
The “difficult way” includes facing historical truths about the Holocaust that were distorted and suppressed by Soviet authorities, with the connivance of anti-Semitic elements in Ukraine. Victor’s tutorial was illuminating about the primacy and the persistence of the past. When the Nazis learned that archaeologists had found bones of Goths—Germanic people—from 300 to 500 A.D. in Ukraine, he said, Hitler ordered a special exhibit to prove to his troops that this land—this fresh Lebensraum —had always belonged to Germany. They were merely taking back what was theirs. They failed, leaving the Russians and Ukrainians to resume their curious co-dependent dance.
“The last two centuries, the territory of northeastern Ukraine, especially the Kharkov region, was under strong Russian domination in politics, economics and culture,” Victor said. “The population of this region consisted of 60% Ukrainians and 40% Russians, but these Ukrainians were and are completely Russified. You see that the Russian language is still common in Kharkov. During World War II some Ukrainian and Russian political groups and leaders—and some common people—collaborated with the Nazis. And now in Russian and Ukrainian societies there is a very active and noisy discussion about this painful theme.”
Victor is a master of understatement. Collaboration of “some” Ukrainians was vital to the Nazi campaign, especially in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa when the invading Germans were greeted with bread and salt and flowers. People in the towns and villages of western Ukraine welcomed the Nazis as their liberators from the tyranny of Stalin, with his purges and punitive famines that killed millions in the 1930s. At the same time, Nazi propaganda making Jews the primary agents of Stalin and Bolshevism unleashed the anti-Semitism that was never far below the surface in Ukraine. The Germans became puppet masters of “spontaneous” pogroms by Ukrainians, many of them nationalists who saw the moment as a pathway to independence.
How many Ukrainians collaborated? Enough that the Germans had a word for those who donned uniforms and took up rifles against their fellow Ukrainians: Schutzmannschaften. By 1942 more than 100,000 Ukrainians had volunteered to take orders from the Nazi occupiers.
“Basic anti-communist and nationalistic feelings and anti-Semitism, which were common to the majority of those who volunteered, served as fertile soil for the anti-Jewish indoctrination they received during their service,” wrote historian Yitzhak Arad. “They not only carried out orders from their German superiors but they also demonstrated initiative in hunting down and killing Jews…. The indigenous police forces became an essential tool for the implementation of the Final Solution in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.”4
Even before the Nazis had formalized a “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it should be added.
A hundred and forty-six years after the end of the American Civil War, there are still bitter debates about flying the Confederate flag at state capitols and football stadiums in the South. Is it any wonder, then, that only seventy years after Schutzmannschaften were hunting down and murdering their fellow Ukrainians, that this unspeakably dark chapter remains an open wound? Healing is slowed by the variety of wartime experiences within Ukraine—Ukrainians, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Poles, and others—observed Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies in Kiev. “Remembrance culture in Ukraine has reached a dead end,” he wrote in 2008. “Unconnected, isolated histories lead to the expression of memories that are isolated from one another. Each is in itself biased. The risk that aggression and intolerance in Ukrainian society will increase is considerable. The only solution is to accept history responsibly and to promote the exchange and reconciliation of competing narratives.”5
Ukraine will be searching for its soul, for reconciliation with itself and with its troubled history, as well as its place in the world—long after my friend Ted has found its place on the map.
CHAPTER SIX
I f the answer on Jeopardy! was “He sparked the Protestant Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany,” there is no doubt Alex Trebek would accept this as the correct question:
“Who was Martin Luther?”
And Martin Luther was that man, a figure I remember in heroic silhouette, if not great detail, from the course on the Reformation that I took in college in the sixties. I closed the book on Luther after that and did not open it again until 2010, when I began work on this book. While researching the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany, I ran across this same man and decided that there must be some mistake. Here are some of his words about Jews, written in 1543:
“They are thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom with full intent, now for more than fourteen hundred years, and indeed they were often burned to death upon the accusation that they had poisoned water and wells, stolen children, and torn and hacked them apart in order to cool their temper secretly with Christian blood.”
It went on.
“They hold us Christians captive in our country. They let us work in the sweat of our noses, to earn money and property for them, while they sit behind the oven, lazy, let off gas, bake pears, eat, drink, live softly and well from our wealth. They have captured us and our goods through their accursed usury; mock us and spit on us, because we work and permit them to be lazy squires who own us and our realm.”
And on.
“It is more than fourteen hundred years since Jerusalem was destroyed, and at this time it is almost three hundred years since we Christians have been tortured and persecuted by Jews all over the world, so that we might well complain that they had now captured and killed us all, which is the open truth. We do not know to this day which devil has brought them here into our country; we did not look for them in Jerusalem.”
I was in disbelief to discover that the name on this collection of virulent, operatic anti-Semitism, About the Jews and Their Lies , was Martin Luther—the same Martin Luther of my hagiographic undergraduate memory. There was no mistake—Raul Hilberg did not make mistakes about this. Even in the pantheon of Holocaust scholars the late Hilberg has no peer. His masterwork, The Destruction of the European Jews , is to the Holocaust what On the Origin of Species is to evolution.
Hilberg put Luther in the first pages of his three-volume, 1,388-page opus as the Johnny Appleseed of German anti-Semitism, quoting widely from his vile 65,000-word treatise. Yet this “other” Martin Luther basically does not exist today. He can be found, but only if you know where to look by Googling “Martin Luther and anti-Semitism” or “Martin Luther and Hitler.” A clueless middle-school student in search of a quick reference is likely to encounter only the sanitized Martin Luther.
The American Heritage College Dictionary says simply “German theologian and leader of the Reformation.” The online Encyclopedia Brittanica offers a 19-line capsule summary of Luther’s life without a hint of his anti-Semitic obsession, and it’s barely mentioned in a long article below the summary. Wikipedia gives the issue similar treatment and states vaguely that Luther was “a controversial figure among many historians and religious scholars.” To nonhistorians, Luther is a bland one-dimensional figure in a funny hat.
History is replete with anti-Semites and their malignant vituperations. Why dwell on Luther? Because, as Hilberg shows, Luther’s anti-Semitism was not just a personality tic or the evanescent ranting of an old man that was interred with his bones. It became the philosophical foundation for the great edifice of Nazi anti-Semitism and near extermination of the Jews. “The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void,” Hilberg wrote. “It was the culmination of a cyclical trend… The Nazis did not discard the past, they built upon it. They did not begin a development, they completed it.”6 And they were especially shrewd in manipulating the age-old anti-Semitism in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Like most Americans, I had internalized the simplistic idea that the Holocaust did indeed “come out of a void” as a unique event, an aberration, an original cancer with shallow roots in Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, his lust for power, and a unique set of socioeconomic conditions in the 1930s which lowered the Germans’ resistance to the poisonous prescriptions of a mesmerizing megalomaniac. There was no place in that tidy view for the more disturbing idea that Hitler represented something endemic in German culture—that Nazism was a continuation of an ancient contagion.
Coming of age, the only Martin Luther on my radar screen was Martin Luther King, Jr., and I never thought about his name. Now that I know its provenance, the irony is mind-boggling. King carried the name of a man who espoused views inimical to all that he stood and died for. Like his father Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born Michael King. When Michael was five, his father changed both their names in honor of the German priest he admired for his civil disobedience against Rome. The catalyst for that change elevates the story from ironic to macabre.
In 1934, Michael King joined ten other Baptist ministers on a trip to the Holy Land and Europe, including Berlin, for the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress. It was held at the Sportpalast, a favored venue for Hitler speeches, where the large hall was festooned with Nazi banners and Christian crosses for the Baptist event. By then, copies of About the Jews and Their Lies were being displayed in glass cases at the epic Nuremberg rallies glorified by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will, filmed the same year the Baptists gathered in Berlin.
It’s highly unlikely that Rev. King from Atlanta was aware of the rallies or knew of Luther’s repellent 400-year-old calumny. It was two years before Hitler would preside at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, four years before Kristallnacht shattered illusions about the Nazis once and for all. Moreover, Baptists at the Congress liked the fact that Hitler and his minions did not smoke or drink. Back home in Georgia, inspired by his visit to the homeland of Martin Luther, Michael King decided that from then on he and his son would carry the name of the great theologian. If only he had known then what most of us still don’t know today about Luther.
Hitler did. He praised Luther as one of the greatest reformers in history, and he was not referring to the priest’s crusade against indulgences in the Catholic Church. “He saw the Jew as we are only beginning to see him today,” Hitler said. Whether or not Kristallnacht —November 9–10, 1938—was actually dedicated to Luther’s birthday on November 10 as many suggest, it certainly fulfilled his marching orders to Christians four centuries earlier.
“Set fire to their synagogues or schools,” Luther had said. “Destroy their homes, confiscate all Jewish holy books, forbid rabbis to teach, force Jews to do physical labor, abolish their right to safe conduct on the highways, confiscate all Jewish money and gold so they cannot practice usury.” If necessary, Luther said, expel the Jews. “These anti-Semitic ravings were not peripheral jottings of Luther’s,” said Jewish writer Joseph Telushkin. “They became well-known throughout Germany.”
In 1895 a notorious anti-Semite, Hermann Ahlwardt, was debating a fellow Reichstag deputy who opposed his idea to expel all Jews from Germany. There are not enough Jews in Germany to cause trouble, the other deputy argued.
“Yes, gentlemen, Deputy Rickert would be right, if it were a matter of fighting with honest weapons against an honest enemy,” Ahlwardt retorted. “Then it would be a matter of course that the Germans would not fear a handful of such people. But the Jews, who operate like parasites, are a different kind of problem. Mr. Rickert, who is not as tall as I am, is afraid of a single cholera germ—and gentlemen, the Jews are cholera germs. It is the infectiousness and exploitive power of Jewry which is involved.”
Hilberg observes, “It is remarkable that two men, separated by a span of three hundred and fifty years, can still speak the same language. Ahlwardt’s picture of the Jews is in its basic features a replica of the Lutheran portrait. The Jew is still (1) an enemy who has accomplished what no external enemy has accomplished—he has driven the people of Frankfurt into the suburbs. (2) a criminal, a thug, a beast of prey who commits so many crimes that his elimination would enable the Reichstag to cut the criminal code in half. (3) a plague, or more precisely, a cholera germ. Under the Nazi regime these conceptions of the Jew were expounded and repeated in an almost endless flow of speeches, posters, letters, and memoranda.”7
Julius Streicher was editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer and among the most obstreperous and vehement anti-Semites in Hitler’s inner circle. It was a proud moment for Streicher when the city of Nuremberg presented him a first edition of On the Jews and Their Lies . In 1935, he addressed the Hitler Youth about Jews.
“This people has wandered about the world for centuries and millennia, marked with the sign of Cain. Boys and girls, even if they say that the Jews were once the chosen people, do not believe it. A chosen people does not go into the world to make others work for them, to suck blood. It does not go among the people to chase the peasants from the land. It does not go among the people to make your fathers poor and drive them to despair. A chosen people does not slay and torture animals to death. Boys and girls, for you we have always suffered. For you we had to accept mockery and insult, and became fighters against the Jewish people, against that organized body of world criminals against whom already Christ had fought, the greatest anti-Semite of all times.”
Streicher probably would have put Martin Luther at No. 2—though it would have been a tough call for him between Luther and the Führer. Testifying in his trial at Nuremberg, Streicher used Luther as a sort of celebrity witness in absentia to rationalize his actions. “Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants’ dock today, if this book (On the Jews and Their Lies ) had been taken into consideration by the prosecution.”
A prominent Anglican cleric and writer, Rev. William Ralph Inge, made the same argument from outside the dock in 1944. “If you wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world, I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.”8
After the war the memory of the “worst evil genius” and his seminal screed against the Jews vanished from public consciousness like the SS officers and death camp guards who escaped capture and melted into anonymity in places like Brazil and Cleveland. Some eventually were brought to justice; not so the muse of their unprecedented crimes.