Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:
I will never forget the war… The Germans invaded our village… Young and cheerful. With so much noise! They arrived in huge vehicles and their three-wheeled motorcycles. I’d never even laid eyes on a motorcycle before. All we had at the collective farm were these one-and-a-half-ton trucks with wooden beds, these machines that were low to the ground. You should have seen those German trucks! They were as tall as houses! Their horses—not horses, but mountains. They painted a message on the wall of our schoolhouse: “The Red Army has abandoned you!” We started living under German rule… There were a lot of Jews in our village: Avram, Yankel, Morduch… They rounded them all up and took them out to the shtetl. They’d brought their pillows and blankets, but they were all killed right away. They rounded up every Jew in the district and shot them all in a single day. Tossed them into a pit… thousands of them… thousands… People said that for three days afterward, their blood kept rising to the top of the pit… like the ground was breathing… it was alive… Now there’s a park there. A place of recreation. You can’t hear anyone from beyond the grave. No one can scream… So, that’s what I think…[ She cries.] I don’t know… How did it happen? Did they come to her, or did she find them in the forest? Our neighbor hid two little Jewish boys in her barn—adorable kids. Real cherubs! Everyone was shot, but they hid. They managed to run away. One was eight, and the other one was ten. My mother would bring them milk…“ Children, hush,” she told us. “Not a word of this to anyone.” In my neighbor’s family, there was an old, old grandfather, he remembered the other war with the Germans, the first one… He’d feed the boys and weep: “Oh, children, they’ll capture you and torture you. If I could stand to do it, you’d be better off if I killed you myself.” Those were his words… And the devil hears everything…[ She crosses herself.] Three Germans showed up on a black motorcycle with their big black dog. Someone had informed on them… There are always people willing to do things like this, people whose souls are black. They’re alive, but it’s like they are soulless… Their hearts are just medical, not human hearts. They have no pity for anyone. The kids ran into the field, into the grain… The Germans sent their dog in after them… Afterward, their remains had to be gathered up shred by shred… There were nothing but rags left of them… nothing to bury, no one even knew their last names. Then the Germans tied our neighbor to their motorcycle and made her run until her heart burst…[ She no longer wipes her tears.] In times of war, people fear one another.
I went to apply to the teacher training college like I had dreamed. I had to go there and fill out an application. I answered all of the questions and then I got to the one that said, “Were you or any of your relatives prisoners of war or under occupation?” I answered that yes, of course we were. The director called me into his office: “Young lady, please take your documents and go.” He’d fought at the front and lost one of his arms. He had an empty sleeve. That’s how I learned that we… everyone who’d survived the occupation… were unreliable elements. We were now under suspicion. No one was calling us brothers and sisters anymore… It took forty years for them to remove that question from the application form. Forty years! By the time they took it out, my life was already over.
At the front, we were afraid of speaking openly with one another. A lot of people had been arrested before the war… and during the war… My mother worked at a bread factory, and one day, during an inspection, they found breadcrumbs on her gloves. That was enough to constitute sabotage. They sentenced her to ten years in prison. I was at the front, my father was at the front, so my younger brothers and sisters had to go live with my grandmother. They’d beg her, “Granny, don’t die before Papa and Sashka (that’s me) come back from the war.” My father went missing in action. —What kind of heroes are we? No one ever treated us like heroes. My wife and I raised our kids in barracks and after that, all we got was a room in a communal apartment. Today, it’s kopecks… Tears instead of pensions. On television, they show us the Germans. They’re doing pretty well for themselves! The defeated are living one hundred times better than the victors.
More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
A substitute physics teacher at my secondary school was one of those tainted by the German occupation people. He was the school assistant school principal before the war. Since Germans advanced so quickly in 1941, he was not conscripted into the Red Army and found himself living under German occupation. Luckily for him, he was not Jewish, so Germans instead of just shooting him on spot shipped him in a cattle car, along with other folks, to work in Austria.
After having been liberated, he came back and was told that although he could not be a teacher anymore, he should count himself lucky not to be shipped in a similar cattle car to work in Siberia. Fortunately, quite a few folks signed a petition trying to explain to the Soviet authorities that the former teacher did not cooperate with Germans voluntarily but rather was rounded up and sent to work in Austria by force. The most amazing thing in this story, both for him and me, was that he was actually allowed to work as a teacher and not sent to Siberia along with those who signed the petition.
All true, even if in literary summarization form. That what was happening is large cities and significant towns. Of course, it is not like Germans could maintain large presence in every village, but probably in Belorussia they could. The took over it in a matter of days or weeks. I central-south Ukraine there were much harder battles in the summer of 1941 and more pushback and weeks long counter-strikes by better prepared and newly mobilized experienced troops and Germans had to exercise more caution when they finally took over the most of Ukraine in fall of 1941 after partially defeating Read Army. And they had to share south and west Ukraine with Romanian occupation forces (and maybe Hungarians). Also, by mid – 1970th nobody looked at “relatives prisoners of war or under occupation”. I knew plenty of college educated and PhDs with this line checked. And on the frontlines soldiers more or less acted freely and with camaraderie, even if they had to preface it with some communist meme BS during official events. Power (as in weapons of war) speaks.
Also I heard much scarier stories about German occupation from people who stayed on occupied territories than those cited in the post. And I recall family friends who stayed on occupied territories and were college educated in 1950-th USSR.
There’s a famous late-Soviet film, Come and See, about the Byelorussian invasion.
Roger Ebert called it “one of the most devastating films ever about anything”
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-come-and-see-1985
Worth watching.
My father was
(a) on occupied Ukraine,
(b) shipped to work in Germany
(c) sent to Buchenwald
(d) (voluntarily) returned by USA troops to USSR occupied zone
(e) refused to join communist party taking personal offense at Kruschev critics of Stalin
(e) finished college in 50s — no problem, in the 60s he was a PhD, in 70s he was a physics professor in the local university
lots of similar stories.
Alexievich sometimes … a bit biased in her opinions
What happens when societies break down and human beings return to their primal natures. I thank G*D that my grandparents emigrated from Belarus to the US just before the Russian revolution because no family that remained was ever heard from after 1945. And compare Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral with the Vietnam protesters likening Johnson and Nixon to Hitler and the US military to the SS. Svetlana Alexievich as I recall also has some pretty unpleasant stories about the Azeris and Armenians — again, people who had lived side by side for generations and then turned on each other like wild animals when society broke down.
A good interview with Svetlana Alexievich in the weekend FInancial Times 17 June 2017.
@mishka:
Your father’s lucky fate was an exception rather than the rule.
I used to know about a dozen, perhaps more, people who experienced multiple setbacks in their lives and carriers just because they happened to have lived in the German occupied territories and stated the fact in various documents – I gave one example above.
Another example is my uncle who was denied a University enrollment because he was shipped to Austria in the same cattle car as his physics teacher. Later in his life, after he spent several years in the Kazakhstan virgin lands and got a piece of paper saying that he “доблестным трудом смыл пятно пребывания в немецком трудовом лагере” (washed the German labor camp stain off his life by his hard labor in the virgin lands), he managed to re-apply and was admitted. He did joke about the situation — people are usually pretty resilient.
Those who avoided the consequences of the handicap simply lied on their application/job enrollment forms and managed to get away with that. I do not think, therefore, that Alexievich was biased much. Maybe a bit, but not much.
I do not wish to pass any judgment, but taking offence at Khrushchev for “criticizing” Stalin sounds rather bizarre, one would hope for obvious reasons.
Some of the worst atrocities were perpetrated not directly by the Germans but by their native auxiliaries like Khatyn in Belarus where the entire village was murdered by Ukrainian nationalist collaborators. The Ukrainian police also assisted in the Babi Yar massacre.
Fazal Majid 9:
True, but Germans selected, trained, commanded and shipped around these troops. During Babi Yar Nazis did not yet give them firearms and they were armed with clubs and sabers and such and acted as auxiliaries. Germans did the shooting. The Ukrainians did not act as Ukrainian force per se but were part of Nazi command and were not local. They did committed atrocities in one case cutting off hands of a boy whose parents figured out where they were led and try to throw him back into an open cab, according to an eyewitness. Ukrainian peasants also saved several children who climbed from the hole at night and raised them with their children. Many Jewish civilian women and children (not partizans) lived on occupied Ukraine because were in Romanian concentration camp and not in German camp.
mishka, short answer to your story: survivorship bias
Alexey: Good point. People describe Holocaust survival stories as “amazing” without considering that there were a lot of non-amazing stories that were never told due to the deaths of the protagonists.