Babi Yar, page 14
Consequently, when many years later Khrushchev took it upon himself to ‘expose’ Stalin, there was nothing new in it for people living in the Soviet Union. The only new aspect was the actual policy of ‘exposure’ and the unending series of monstrous details that were given.
At that point various ‘honest Communists’ started beating their breasts and declaring that as it happened they had not known anything of what was going on. Or that they had known but believed that the people being liquidated were real enemies. Or that they had thought that the N.K.V.D. was to blame for everything and that our beloved Stalin knew nothing and that the party was sacred. A lot of books appeared by such ‘honest Communists’, anxious to dissociate Stalin and the party from crimes which they attributed to Yezhov or Beria.
Hypocrites. If they told the truth, they all knew and understood perfectly well everything that was going on. Only a person who DID NOT WANT TO KNOW remained ‘unaware’. And such a person would go on playing the hypocrite and saving his skin by that means, remaining steadfast in his hypocrisy and surviving by means of it, and finishing up by being so deeply imbued with it that even today he still goes on lying, trying in effect to argue that millions of party members were mentally retarded.
In just the same way, following the defeat of Hitler, certain ‘honest’ Nazis declared that they had not known about the monstrous crimes committed in the death camps, or that they had believed that the Gestapo alone was to blame for everything. Hypocrites. Once more I repeat: The only people who did not know were those who did not want to know.
Because if one were for a moment to believe them and admit that the so-called ‘honest Communists’, who have taken it upon themselves to tell the rest of the world how to behave, understood what was going on around them as if they were five-year-old children, then it would be even more frightful.]
4. Pioneering
Because I could already read and write when I started school, I found the lessons very easy, had four good reports one after the other and was chosen to be chairman of the council of the Pioneer troop.
It was a piece of utter bureaucratic idiocy specially arranged for children: we held conferences, just like grown-ups, and we learnt to use all the dreary official language. Every now and again we had to parade, and the group leaders would have to report to me like this:
‘Chairman of the troop council: Group number one; ten men on the nominal roll, nine men present on parade. One absent on account of illness. Group leader Zhorik Gorokhovsky reporting.’
During which procedure I felt a fool, Zhorik felt a fool, and all the others simply stood there stock-still. The banner was brought out and the banner was carried back again, and then the troop leader would teach us how to be good young Leninists, like the famous Pioneer Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his own parents and was killed by the rich peasants.
Fortunately our troop leader, Misha, was a very agreeable Jew, who was fond of children, used to take us round the museums at the monastery, and sometimes took the whole lot of us bathing in the Dnieper. We travelled to Pushcha-Voditsa for the military manoeuvres, took part in athletic competitions, and we all belonged to hobby circles. This side of my life remains for me full of light and happy sounds and sunshine. It really seemed as if the future was wide open to us. People used to come to visit the school from various colleges and do their best to persuade the boys in the senior classes to go and study with them.
Being members of the photography group, Zhorik Gorokhovsky and I spent our time preparing a ‘Pioneer Chronicle’ and taking pictures of various activists and outstanding students. Our photo-montage, dedicated to Stalin, won us a place in an exhibition.
This was organized in the foyer of the October Cinema, and we had to be on duty at our exhibit all day long lest anything should be stolen. It was marvellous! One of us would stay by the stand while the other rushed off into the cinema to watch the film for nothing.
Every film was preceded by a showing of a news film, V. M. Molotov’s Visit to Berlin, which was a big hit at the time, I saw that film so many times that I knew it all off by heart.
What emerged from it was that the Soviet Union had no better friend than Hitler. The Soviet people had their Stalin; after him came Hitler. And here was Molotov, off to conclude a pact of friendship and non-aggression with Germany. In Berlin they greeted him with bands, flowers and much cheering. How marvellously the Nazi troops marched! How moving were the military marches! Hitler welcomes Molotov warmly like a long-lost brother, keeps shaking him by the hand; they are immediately immersed in conversation, and the photographers crowd around with their flash-guns busy. Then there were German soldiers marching again with marvellous precision, with their banners unfurled to show the swastika, symbol of strength and friendship.
I would simply gasp with delight as I watched that screen: I so wanted to be able to march like that. If only our Pioneer troop could learn to march like the Germans, then our games of soldiers would be like the Germans’ military operations in Europe! … Oh, the speed and style with which those Germans operated! The Soviet Union could only produce a rather clumsy imitation.
Then an absolutely fabulous war with Poland broke out. With Hitler coming from the west and us coming from the east, there was soon nothing left of Poland. Of course, for the sake of appearances we called it ‘the liberation of the Western Ukraine and Byelorussia’ and put up posters showing a ragged Ukrainian embracing a brave Red-Army man—his liberator. But that was the usual thing. Anyone who attacks is always liberating somebody from something or other.
Zhorik Gorokhovsky’s father was called up into the army and took part in that war, and on one occasion when he had had a drop too much to drink he told us the sort of welcome they really got in Poland. In the first place they all, from the most senior officer down to the lowest man in the ranks, burst into the textile and footwear shops and started stuffing sacks and cases full of loot. Lord, the things our brave soldiers brought back from Poland with them. A certain political officer brought out a case full of patent-leather shoes which were found to fall to pieces as soon as you took a few steps in them. It turned out that he had got his hands on some shoddily made footwear intended only for dressing corpses. And Zhorik’s dad even managed to bring home a lot of bicycle bells. We ran around with them, making a terrible noise and shouting happily:
‘Poland’s finished!’
And ‘bourgeois’ Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were also done for. We seized Bessarabia and took it away from Rumania. It was great to be strong. But this was nothing compared with the sort of feats that Hitler was performing.
Every day my grandfather demanded that I should read to him what the papers were saying about Hitler. Wherever the Germans went they were victorious. They bombed cities, sank ships of thousands of tons and occupied whole countries and capital cities with no apparent effort. The slow-moving and slow-thinking British might last a few more days; Belgium was finished, France was done for.
When Grandpa was resting, I used to draw up to him and we would play a very amusing game. Gramp would make his hand quite flat and hold it hovering in the air, and then making a noise like an aeroplane and crying ‘Bombers!’ he would dive on me with it. I laughed and laughed.
5. ’If it’s war tomorrow … ‘
My generation grew up with a song on their lips. I can’t think of the pre-war years without recalling it—
If it’s war tomorrow, and we have to fight,
And the forces of darkness attack us—
As one man, the whole Soviet people
Will rise to defend their land.
On land, in the skies and at sea
Our song rings out strong and fierce:
If it’s war tomorrow, and we have to fight,
Be ready for battle today!
The song was out of a film which appealed to people to be ready for war with a rather vague enemy, some kind of ‘bourgeois’ monster, who had invaded us. A fine Soviet soldier was shown, to the accompaniment of belly-laughs from a delighted audience, clouting him over the head with the butt of his rifle.
The machine-guns will fire and the aircraft will swoop
And the tanks will come rumbling in.
The trucks will start up and the troops will move off
And the dashing gun-carts will flash by.
These ‘gun-carts’, drawn by horses and with a machine-gun mounted on them, had been used in the Civil War period and had since become an inevitable feature of all parades until the real war started.
There were three of us in our gang on Peter-Paul Square —three friends, three musketeers, three tank-drivers. What drew us particularly close together was the fact that we had all been abandoned by our fathers and brought up by our mothers.
BOLIK KAMINSKY was the eldest. He used to clout us over the head; we used to tease him and call him ‘Bollibatty’, but at the same time were utterly devoted to him.
He was a tall, thin lad, with a gentle, soft face, like a girl’s. He would only go to films in which there was lots of fighting: he had seen Chapayev* twenty-five times, Shchors twenty times, If it’s war … seventeen, and Bogdan Khmelnitsky ten times over.
We were all mad about war, but Bolik was a fanatic on the subject. He was so carried away by the whole idea that he could talk about it for hours on end. For him even a game of chess was a form of warfare—a rook was a cannon, a knight a gun-cart, a bishop was a machine-gun and a queen a dive-bomber. You can imagine the sort of battle-sounds we produced in the course of a game of chess.
In the barn, up in the loft, Bolik had set up a machine-gun nest, the sort of thing Chapayev had in a bell-tower. We would poke sticks out of the little window in the roof and pretend to be firing on those undefined enemies who, ‘if it’s war tomorrow … ’
Bolik went off to an industrial training school and started to look down on us because he had become a member of the working class, [one of the lords of the land, if you were to believe the Constitution.] But then the real war broke out, and he was mobilized and sent off to labour on the construction of defence works—on the trenches, as they used to say then—and he was lost from sight altogether.
SHURKA KRYSAN was the same age as myself, small and lightly built, quick on his feet, very enterprising and an unbelievably good companion, ready to go through fire and water for the sake of his friends. In the military operations which took place regularly on our street between our gang and the neighbouring ‘leather-lads’ (another gang of warriors who lived near the tannery) Shurka would perform incredible feats of heroism but used always to suffer more than the rest.
For him the film If it’s war … was the one he liked most of all, and, of course, the song as well.
He used to be called ‘Shurka Matso’, and I always called him that, because, after all, you’ve got to call a chap something, but I was so naive that I had no idea that matzo was what Jews eat traditionally at the Passover. In my simplicity I thought that it was a way of teasing Shurka for his way of speaking fast, as if he was just repeating tsa-tsa-tsa …
At that time we were not in the least interested in the question of our origins and nationality. We all went to a Ukrainian school, and Ukrainian was our native tongue.
It was only later that I came to distinguish who was what and to realize that we were hybrids—one half-Polish, one half-Jewish and one half-Ukrainian. We later found out that one of our playmates, a girl called Lala who lived near by, was half-Finnish. I was very fond of her, but she wouldn’t join in our war games. She was just a girl—what could you expect?
In fairness I have to say that I used also to be teased; not very often, it’s true, but it deeply offended me. They nicknamed me ‘Semerik, troo-too-too—three buckets of milk’, because of my grandfather.
6. Kill Your Officers Yids and Wops
One day in beautiful weather Shurka Matso and I went swimming. There was a little lake, down by the meadow, called the Kovbanka which when translated out of the Kurenyovka dialect means something like ‘Froggypond’.
It was after the outbreak of war and there were military vehicles moving across the meadow, Red Army men chasing about, anti-aircraft guns in position and covered with green branches, and anti-aircraft balloons being inflated.
And just by our Kovbanka a couple of Red Army men were sunning themselves.
‘Listen, kids, you’d better get out of here, it’s too dangerous,’ they said.
We felt hurt and put on long faces, but we didn’t go away. We swam across to the other side and back, just to show off and demonstrate how well we could swim. In fact we swam like puppy-dogs, and on the way back, I got tired, started gasping for breath and beating about with my tired arms. My head began to swim, and I saw one of the soldiers on the shore watching my marathon efforts with interest. At that moment I felt the bottom with my foot and staggered out on to the shore, only to look round and find that Shurka was missing.
The soldier dived into the water just as he was, in his breeches and boots, and disappeared leaving only ripples on the surface. He re-emerged dragging with him a white-faced Shurka looking like a kitten, put him on the bank and then shook him so that the water came out of Matso’s stomach.
‘See what a nuisance you make of yourselves?’ he said. ‘Now get off home or I’ll hand you over to the police.’
At that we beat it at such a rate that the reeds rustled in our wake. We hid ourselves in a little hole in the ground and compared experiences.
‘Yeah,’ said Shurka, ‘he got in my way. You see, I had dived and was swimming along the bottom to the edge.’
German planes appeared in the sky, about thirty of them. The anti-aircraft guns quickly raised their barrels to the sky. The first shell-fire deafened us and the blast banged our faces against the ground.
There was absolutely nowhere for us to hide on that level meadow, so we stayed clinging tightly to one another in our little hole, listening to the sound of either shrapnel or bullets dropping around us: shpok, shpok, shpok.
Lying there completely exposed to the blue sky above, across which planes with black crosses were zooming, I had for the first time a physical sense of the vulnerability and helplessness of the frail human body, which only needed one of those ‘shpoks’ to land in it, as in a dish of jelly, to finish it off.
The anti-aircraft guns didn’t hit them, and the bombers went away without doing any damage. But thousands of sparkling white leaflets came floating down from the sky. The wind had obviously not carried them as far as the city and they were coming down right on top of us in the meadow. We rushed out to grab some of them, and found that every one had printed on it in big letters:
KILL YOUR OFFICERS YIDS AND WOPS
SLOSH ’em IN THEIR UGLY CHOPS
It was without any punctuation. Underneath in small letters it was explained that this was the password for anyone who wanted to give himself up as a prisoner. All you had to do was say those words clearly and distinctly on meeting a German soldier.
Men of the Red Army! (the leaflet’s appeal read). The Red Army has been smashed. The rule of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars in Russia is at an end. Arrest your commanders and commissars, lay down your arms and give yourselves up as prisoners. You will be treated well and you will all return to your homes to take up peaceful occupations. Those intending to surrender should take with them a change of underwear, soap, a bowl and a spoon.
I was very impressed by the leaflet, especially by the bit about the bowl and spoon. I began to feel how hungry I was after our swim, and I could just imagine what tasty porridge the Germans were cooking and ladling out generously to everyone who gave himself up.
Then I felt something was wrong and turned round. Shurka was sitting there, holding the leaflet, but pale, with terror in his eyes.
‘Tolik,’ he said. ‘But I’m—a Yid.’
7. A Second Tsaritsyn?
For several days we waited at home, our cases ready packed. The only people being evacuated were those connected with particular enterprises, and it was practically impossible for private individuals to get away.
My grandmother’s nephews had promised to take us along with the ‘Arsenal’ Factory. They had plenty of room on the flat trucks, and were even able to put some of their furniture in among the machines.
But when Uncle Peter came to say good-bye he told us:
‘We are on a special train, and the N.K.V.D. has forbidden us to take outsiders along.’
Grandma burst into tears and pushed a pot of lard into his hands, saying: ‘You can eat that on the way,’ then ran after him at the gate and pressed a little cushion on him: ‘You can use it to rest your head on on the train.’ Nobody ever went away from her empty-handed.
Meanwhile there was still no reply to the telegrams my mother had sent my father.
Mother and I picked up our cases and to the accompaniment of Grandma’s sorrowful lament caught a tram and set off for the railway station. The city had a strange look: all the windows were criss-crossed with strips of paper; sandbags were piled in front of the shop windows, and more were piled across the roads as barricades, with only narrow gaps, reinforced with wood, left for the trams. On all sides there were posters saying: MAKE KIEV A SECOND TSARITSYN*
We travelled one stop and the tram came to a halt: a young man had been badly hurt in an accident somewhere ahead. There was only just enough room for the tramcars to pass through the gaps in the barricades; one tramcar had been very full, and the young fellow had not been able to squeeze through. He had been squashed up against the boards, twisted round and his arm had been ripped off. They carried him off to the hospital, his arm still hanging by a shred of skin, dragging along the ground.
