Investigation Visit n° 29 to Ukraine
Dates: October 27-December 10, 2011
Region: administrative area of Rovno
Participants: Geoffroy Lauby (team leader and interviewer), Jessica Solis (assistant), Svetlana Biryukova (interpreter), Kateryna Duzenko (interpreter), Oleksii Kosarevskyi (interpreter) Denis Mouravitski (investigator), Micha Strutinsky (ballistics expert), Alexey Kosyanov (photographer), Oscar Blanco (cameraman), Vassyl (driver), Nazar (driver).
Investigated towns and villages: Boremel, Khreniki, Demidovka, Smordva, Mlinov, Klevan, Dubno, and Kremenets.
From October 27 to December 10, 2011, a Yahad In Unum team went for a 29th investigation visit to Ukraine, the third one in the region of Rovno, this time focused south of the city of Lutsk.
One important background element is that the studied area had been part of Poland between 1920 and 1939. As a result, a sizable proportion of the population was Polish.
This district was quickly occupied by the Germans (as early as June 1941), and the occupation lasted until June 1944.
Below are the major findings Yahad wishes to share.
Rather hermetic ghettos and numerous victims
Ghettos were generally first created in the spring of 1942. In most cases, they were surrounded by a wooden fence with barbed wire on the top. Sometimes there were watchtowers, for example in Kremenets. Jews were not able to get out, except for forced labor. The ghettos were generally guarded by local policemen. They sometimes allowed other inhabitants to pass food to the people locked up in the ghetto.
In Kramenets, Yahad found Nina (born 1927). Her house’s balcony overlooked the ghetto. From time to time, she would roll up over a stone a piece of paper with a message on it and throw it over to a Jewish girl, a friend of hers, saying they were to meet at some point of the fence under which she was to slip a bottle of milk.
In some cases, however, some specialized craftsmen continued to work outside the ghetto. In Dubno, Lyudmila (born 1924) recalled it remained possible to ask services from a Jewish mechanic who lived and worked not in the ghetto.
The region of Rovno is one in Ukraine where the Jewish victims were most numerous proportionally to the original Jewish population. For example, researches by the Ukrainian historian Alexander Kruglov show that 16,000 Jews were killed in the small town of Dubno. The team was able to identify five major shooting sites. In Kremenets, more than 8,000 victims were killed just outside of the town in a huge ditch dating back to before the war. A monument has been erected, but it does not protect the whole site.
Most of the shootings took place in 1942. For example in Demidovka, which at that time was a small Jewish town, there were mentions of more than 600 victims. The Yahad team found several witnesses of the mass shootings of Jews. The testimonies agree on the killing process. Trucks came and went between the ghetto and the execution site. When the victims got down from the trucks, they had to take off their clothes. Then they were obliged to walk down the steps that had been fashioned on one side of the pit, and when the reached the bottom, they were forced to lie down with their faces on the soil. Olga (born 1930) said, “I was hidden in the wood. I could see the marksman perched on a tree above the pit. He shot the Jews with a machine-gun.”
The case of Klevan: a complex investigation
This is an interesting example, because it show how important investigations on the field, and especially interviews with witnesses, can be to clarify certain obscure areas in Soviet or German archives, or in historical researches. Klevan was a small Jewish town on the road to Kiev – that is, a key strategic corridor. According to researches carried out by both the Ukrainian historian Alexander Kruglov and the American historian Martin Dean, mass shootings of Jews occurred on different locations in the town when the Germans arrived. But the identity of the murderers is not so clear, and the researchers remain evasive. The killing may have been the work of the Wehrmacht as well as a pogrom organized by the local population.
On the field, our team found several witnesses of the massacres perpetrated when the occupiers arrived. These witnesses said they had sought shelter in neighboring hamlets when the Germans attacked, and that, when they came back to the town, they saw corpses lying on the ground in different places. The dead has been shot. A portrait of Stalin was planted on one of the bodies. The shops had been plundered. The corpses were then buried in a mass grave.
The available documents and the testimonies gathered in Klevan do not allow to determine who is to blame for these murders. However, the operating mode suggests that nothing had been planned and that the action was uncontrolled.
After these events, there remained a few Jews in Klevan, and they were able to survive more or less freely for a while. They were then locked up in one building for a short time before they were shot in 1942. The team found Irina (born 1930). She led the team to the shooting site, which is located at a clearing in the forest, in order to explain what she had seen as she had followed discreetly with a few classmates to watch the tragedy that was to take place. She reported seeing a column of some fifty Jews walking one behind the other with their heads bent down. In the clearing, a pit had been dug out with a piece of wood across it. The Jews were led one by one to that piece of wood where they had to stand until they were shot by a young German soldier. He had a machine-gun in one hand, and in the other hand an apple into which he bit when he did not use his weapon…
Irina also said that there were posters everywhere in the town, ordering people not to hide Jews.
There is a monument today on this killing site. What is written on it recalls 1,500 victims without providing any details. A. Kruglov also quotes this figure. According to the data gathered by the Yahad team, it seems highly unlikely that as many Jews were shot at this place. The question then remains where all the other victims had come from.
Undocumented shooting sites
One of Yahad’s missions is to pay special attention to undocumented or endangered shooting sites.
In Boremel, as was often the case, the Jews were locked up in a ghetto. The Judenrat’s members were shot first. The day of the mass shootings of Jews, Galina (born 1926) saw they had gathered inside the ghetto and were listening to the rabbis before they were forced to climb on trucks.
The shooting site was a small natural ravine on the edge of a cliff, not far from the river. Te Yahad team found several witnesses who saw a pit which had not yet been filled and contained naked, bleeding bodies. The site is not protected today, and the cliff is being eroded by the water of a lake behind a dam that was built after the war. There were holes in the ground, were human bones could be seen pointing out. With the help of Mendel Samama, its rabbinic consultant, the Yahad team filled these holes, which had been dug out by plunderers.
In Mlinov, over 1,000 Jews were killed after the ghetto was closed down, near a lake on the edge of the town; The Yahad team met Yadviga (born 1919) who had seen the shooting from far away. The Jews had to undress on the trucks. Once they had climbed down, they were forced to run up to a ditch and line up there, in front of two Germans lying on a small mound of earth with a machine-gun on legs. According to the witness, that ditch had been dug out before the war in order to build a small dam. Yadviga took the team to that site. There was no monument. It was a hollow place, covered with bushes.
In order to make sure that was the actual site of the shooting, the Yahad team launched on an hour’s drive away to find Petro (born 1926) and bring him to Mlinov. Petro had lived there during the war. The day when the Jews were shot, his mother told him that a Ukrainian of the local government had called and asked him to go to the shooting site with his shovel and help fill the ditch. When he reached the site, he found fifteen other men who had also been commandeered, and a policeman to control them. He could see naked bodies in the ditch, with their faces against the ground, on top of one another. From time to time, moaning rose from the ditch, and the policeman shot at the mass. Petro had never come back to the shooting site over the last 70 years. The team drove him all around the town for a long time so as to refresh his memories and to see whether he could identify the site of the tragedy. Finally, he was not absolutely sure the place shown by Yadviga was the one, even though he agreed that that may well have been the place where he had performed that macabre task decade before.
On the whole, in the course of this visit the Yahad team led investigations on 8 locations and interviewed 49 witnesses.