Babi Yar, page 30
It was one of those mobile gas-chambers, known to everybody in Kiev, which the Germans called Gasenwagen. It looked something like the refrigerator vans you see about today. The body of the van was without windows or vents of any kind, boarded over and painted a dark colour. At the back there was a double, hermetically-sealed door. The body was lined inside with metal and there was a removable grating on the floor. Inside there was plenty of room for the ten men, and they put a young girl in with them as well, a very good-looking Jewess from Poland.
They all stood on the grating, holding on to the sides, the doors closed behind them to leave them in complete darkness, and the van moved off.
Davydov took it for granted that they would soon arrive at Babi Yar but that they would never see it, because the driver would let the gas come into the van through the opening.
Believing themselves about to die, the people in the van did not talk, but only awaited the moment when they would say good-bye to each other and, in the pitch darkness, suffocating, their tongues hanging out and their eyes protruding, they would begin the process of dying.
But the van kept moving, bumping about, stopping and starting and then appeared at last to come to a halt. But there was no gas, and Davydov thought that maybe something had gone wrong. Suddenly the door opened with a clang, light streamed in, and a voice said:
‘Get out!’
‘That means they’re going to shoot us after all,’ Davydov thought to himself. ‘That’s better, too—quicker.’
The prisoners hurried to get down, gulping in the air, and, out of habit, standing in a line. They were surrounded by barbed-wire fences, guard towers and buildings. And there were SS-men and police.
A tough, well-built young Russian in fur hat, breeches and highly polished riding boots came up to them (they learnt later that he was the brigadier, Vladimir Bystrov) carrying a big stick with which he proceeded to strike each one of them over the head.
‘That’s just to initiate you! Listen for the word of command. Physical exercises—quick march! At the trot! … Stop! … About turn! … Lie down! … Stand up! … Goose-step—quick march … Fish-step—quick march! …’
The policemen set about the prisoners, raining blows upon them with their sticks and their boots and shouting and swearing at them. It appeared that the ‘goose-step’ meant going along in a squatting position with your hands out in front, while the ‘fish-step’ meant crawling on your stomach and wriggling along with your hands behind your back. (It was only later that they learned that all new arrivals were made to do these exercises simply to scare them; they beat the prisoners as hard as they could, and when they broke their sticks on the men’s backs the guard went and cut fresh ones.)
They crawled as far as an enclosed space inside the camp, where they were again formed up and a Ukrainian lieutenant by the name of Kuribko delivered the following lecture:
‘Right. You know where you are. This is Babi Yar. You know the difference between a prison camp and a holiday resort? Find yourselves somewhere to live in the dugouts, and then you’re going to work. Anybody who works badly, breaks the rules or tries to escape will only have himself to blame.’
They took the girl aside and sent her off to the women’s part of the camp and the men were led off to a dugout.
There were two rows of these dugouts and they were divided into four types—the ordinary dugouts, the brigadiers’ dugout, the ‘Jewish’ one and the ‘hospital’ one.
The one that Davydov was taken to was an ordinary military earth-shelter without windows and with a single entrance and rows of two-tier bunks. The floor was bare earth, there was a stove at the far end, and a dim lamp was suspended from the roof. The atmosphere was unbearable, thick, like an animal’s lair. Each prisoner was allotted a place, and their camp life began.
Davydov wondered later why the Germans had not turned the gas on or shot them at once, instead of postponing their end by putting them in this strange camp. What was the place for, anyway?
[The camp had been built in the early spring of 1942 at the very top of Babi Yar and became a sort of ‘check-point’ on the way into it. Apparently for the sake of variety, the Germans called it the ‘Syretsky Camp’, although the Syrets district was really much farther on. Maybe they needed to find a different name because the words Babi Yar had acquired in Kiev the most abhorrent associations. The Germans’ name was later used also in official Soviet terminology, which caused further confusion. But the ravine and the camp were essentially, and in terms of territory, one and the same and the ordinary people had always only one name for the whole area—Babi Yar.]
The Germans did not arrive immediately at the regime they had in such camps as Buchenwald, Oświeçim and Dachau; they experimented, and in the U.S.S.R. they first simply shot people with machine-guns. It was only later that, like the capable and painstaking organizers they were, they set up in Babi Yar as well a ‘death factory’, where, before finishing people off, they extracted some further use from them.
The sorting out was done in one of the offices at 33 Vladimirskaya. People delivered in the van to Babi Yar might be sent off to the right into the ravine, or to the left, inside the barbed wire of the camp.
The ravine, Babi Yar itself, continued to function normally with its daily quota of executions. They executed immediately the sort of enemies who would only be a nuisance if they were kept in the camp. Such people would be driven into the ravine along a footpath, laid on the ground beneath the overhanging side of the ravine and sprayed with sub-machine-gun fire. Practically all of them shouted something, but you couldn’t make out what they said at that distance. Later on the side of the ravine was dynamited to cover up the corpses, and in that way they worked their way along the side of the ravine. They didn’t waste any bullets on people who were wounded but simply finished them off with a spade.
But others, like Davydov and his companions, especially those who looked fitter and about whose guilt there was some doubt, were put first of all into the camp, where they gained a certain postponement. A sort of process of natural selection took place as far as the executions and the type of camp life were concerned. The Germans were in no hurry to shoot those prisoners who persisted in surviving; they knew they would never get away from them.
Every morning at half past five the reveille was sounded by banging on the rails; it could be heard throughout the camp. The prisoners had to move fast; they had only a minute or so to get themselves dressed and, to the accompaniment of shouts from their brigadiers, tumble out of their dugouts, unshaven, scrawny, more like animals than men. They would fall quickly into line, number off and then get the command:
‘Quick march, with a song!’
Yes, with a song. Nobody marched anywhere in the camp without a song. The policemen wanted them to sing folk-songs —‘Unhook the horses, lads’, ‘Galya, lovely young Galya’, or a soldiers’ song about the nightingale and the canary, and they were especially fond of ‘Dunya, Dunya, Dunya, my little berry’. The brigadier himself used to sing out the vulgar verses and the whole column would take up the chorus. There were occasions when the marching men would lose their tempers and start singing ‘Katyusha’, and then they got some rough treatment.
In this way, singing their songs, they would stagger out on to the central parade ground and stand in a queue for breakfast. Each received a slice of ersatz bread and two glasses of coffee, or rather of a sort of lukewarm dirty water.
I asked Davydov what they drank their coffee from. After all, they had to have some kind of drinking vessel. He agreed that it had been a difficult problem for them—one man might have an old mess-tin, another might have found an empty tin in the rubbish, but the most important thing was that people kept dying off, so that their drinking mugs were inherited by others.
After breakfast they were led off by their brigadiers in groups of twenty, again with a song. And what sort of work did they perform?
I will tell you.
1. The inhabitants of the ‘Jewish’ dugout were sent off to dig soil in one place, load it on to barrows and transport it to another place. Guards armed with sticks were drawn up all along both sides of the route between the two places, and the prisoners had to run with their loads down this corridor.
They were supposed to put so much on their barrows that they could hardly lift them, and the Germans flayed them with their sticks, screaming and swearing at them: ‘Schnell! Schnell! Faster, faster!’—it wasn’t work but a sort of wild scramble.
Some would be reduced to a state of complete exhaustion and would fall to the ground. Such ‘dropouts’ would be led off immediately through the wire and into the ravine to be shot, or simply to have their skulls smashed in with an iron bar. Knowing this, they kept running until they had no strength left at all and they fell to the ground only when they had already lost consciousness. The guards themselves would get tired and be replaced, but the moving of the soil went on until it was dark. In this way everybody was kept busy and the place seethed with activity.
2. On a bare stretch of land some distance from the camp they were putting up some mysterious installation, and some of the prisoners were directed to that. The building work was being carried on in great secrecy, and consequently all those who went to work there said good-bye to their friends. They knew they would not be coming back. (The secret was revealed only later: the Germans had set up in Babi Yar an experimental soap factory for the production of soap from human corpses, but they did not have time to complete it.)
3. Another job was the dismantling of the tumbledown barracks which had been left by a Soviet military unit stationed there before the war. The camp bosses decided that they were ugly and reduced the field of vision. Incidentally, it was here, into the ‘nail-pullers’ brigade’, that they sent the ‘dropouts’ from the Russian dugouts when they were on their very last legs. They passed the last days before they finally expired pulling out rusty nails and straightening them.
4. So that the whole territory could be kept under close observation, all the trees were being cut down and the roots pulled up inside the camp and around the outside of it. The Germans felt happier when everything around them was bare.
5. A small group of skilled tradesmen—carpenters, bootmakers, tailors and fitters—were employed in the workshops, doing jobs for the German guards and carrying out odd jobs around the camp. These were jobs which offered many advantages on the side and it was reckoned a great achievement to get one of them.
6. ‘Outside’ brigades were taken under heavy guard to 5 Institutskaya, where a building was being put up for the Gestapo. Brigades were also sent sometimes to sort out the ruins on the Kreshchatik.
7. The women were used in place of horses—several of them would be harnessed to a cart and they would pull heavy loads or collect the sewage.
The officer in charge of the camp was Sturmbahnführer Paul von Radomsky, a German of about fifty with a raucous voice, smoothly-shaved head, and well-fed body, a thin, elongated face and horn-rimmed glasses. He usually travelled around in a small black motor-car, which he drove himself. In the seat next to him sat Rex, a dark grey Alsatian, well known to the whole camp, trained to rip the flesh, and especially the sexual organs, off human beings. On the back seat was Rein, the interpreter, who was one of the Volksdeutsche.
Radomsky had two deputies: Rieder, known by his nickname ‘Ginger’, a thorough sadist, and ‘Willy’, tall and thin, who specialized in executions.
The rest of the administration was made up from the prisoners themselves, some of whom were picked out to be brigadiers in charge of the others. One who distinguished himself particularly in this respect was a Czech by the name of Anton, who was Radomsky’s favourite and right-hand man. It was generally accepted that whatever Anton suggested to his boss would be carried out; indeed, Anton inspired more fear than Radomsky himself. The brigadier in the women’s part of the camp was the twenty-year-old Liza Loginova, formerly an actress in the Russian drama theatre. She was Anton’s mistress, and was his equal in sadism and in the brutal way she beat up the other women.
Davydov gave me a detailed account of this strange life, which was not so much a life as something between life and death, because you could die at any moment of any day. They died mostly in the evening.
After work was finished the prisoners would be brought together (with a song, of course) on the parade ground and formed up in three sides of a square. Then would take place the day’s most important event: Radomsky went through the various offences which had been committed during the course of the day.
If there had been an attempt to escape that meant that the man’s whole brigade would be executed on the spot. If Radomsky gave the order, they would shoot every tenth or every fifth man as they were formed up.
They all kept their eyes on the entrance gate. If machine-guns were being brought in, that meant there was going to be a ‘concert’ that evening, or some ‘amateur dramatics’, as the police used to say ironically.
Radomsky would come out into the centre of the parade-ground with his assistants and might announce that every fifth man was to be shot.
A furious but silent struggle would then take place among the first group of men standing at the end—every one could see where he stood in order. Rieder would begin to count them out, every one standing there stock still, making himself as small as possible, and, if the ‘Five!’ fell on him, Rieder would pull him out of the rank by the arm, and no amount of begging or pleading would have any effect whatsoever. If a man kept on importuning and crying: ‘Sir, have mercy, sir …’ Rieder would simply shoot him with his revolver on the spot and continue the count.
The greatest mistake was to look him straight in the face; he might pick on you then and pull you out whatever your position was, simply because he didn’t like the look of you.
Then the ones who had been picked out would be herded into the centre of the parade-ground and ordered: ‘On your knees.’ SS-men or police would go round behind them and kill each one of them neatly with a shot in the back of the head.
The prisoners would again march round the parade-ground, singing as they went, and move off to their dugouts. [Incidentally, according to Davydov’s story, it was by being pulled out like this one day that Trusevich, the Dynamo goalkeeper, finally met his end. The Germans held him in the camp for a long time without executing him.]
On one occasion a group of prisoners arrived from Poltava. The alarm was sounded in the middle of the day, everybody was assembled on the parade-ground and it was announced that some Ukrainian partisans were about to be executed by Ukrainian police. The prisoners wondered why they were putting on such a show: partisans were usually driven straight into the ravine under the cliff-side without coming into the camp at all.
In the centre of the parade-ground about sixty men were kneeling down with their hands behind them. Suddenly a very young policeman started shouting: ‘I won’t shoot!’ It turned out that his own brother was among the partisans and that the Germans had deliberately arranged the spectacle of brother shooting brother.
A German ran across to the policeman, drawing his revolver. Then the young man fired, but he fainted on the spot and they carried him off. He was nineteen and his dead brother had been twenty-five. For some reason or other the remainder were shot with explosive bullets, so that their brains spattered over the faces of the men standing on parade.
The punishment for minor offences was flogging. They would bring out a table specially made in the workshops with a cavity to take a man’s body; the victim was laid in it, a board was clamped down on him, covering the shoulders and head, and a couple of toughs from among the camp employees would set to work with a will to flay the prisoner with sticks which were jokingly called ‘automatics’. To be awarded two hundred with the ‘automatics’ was to be condemned to certain death.
When a certain brigade came to be checked one evening they found there was a man missing. One of the dogs quickly discovered him, hiding in a hole underneath the benches in the washroom. Apparently he had intended to wait until it was dark before trying to escape, but it was also possible that he simply lost his reason and curled up like an animal in the first place he came across. The brigadiers put him on the table and beat him until his flesh began to come away in pieces; they beat him even when he was dead, reducing his body to paste.
A young lad of seventeen went to the rubbish tip in search of food. Radomsky himself happened to notice him, crept up behind him very quietly, on tiptoe, drawing his revolver as he went, fired point-blank, put the revolver away and went off with a satisfied air, as if he had just shot a stray dog.
They shot people for standing in the meal queue for a second time; they beat men with ‘automatics’ for not removing their hats. When the ‘hospital’ dugout became overcrowded with sick people, they drove them outside, laid them on the ground and sprayed them with fire from submachine-guns. And the ‘physical exercises’ were not even regarded as a form of punishment—they went on all the time: ‘Stand up’, ‘Lie down’, ‘Fish-step’ …
Davydov witnessed all this with his own eyes; he was beaten, he joined in the songs, and he stood in line to be counted by Rieder, but the fatal number never fell on him.
[There was no prospect that they would ever regain their freedom. Only the brigadiers and those given jobs in the camp might possibly have some faint and very uncertain hope, which was why they strove so hard to please. Davydov was nearly put into the ‘Jewish’ dugout because it was his misfortune to be rather Jewish in appearance. Dina Pronicheva was helped to survive by her Russian surname and her appearance, although she was a Jewess. Davydov was in fact Russian, but nobody remembered any longer the results of his ‘medical examination’, and his appearance was his downfall.
By this time Jews constituted only an insignificant proportion of the people in Babi Yar. There was the odd one who had somehow managed to stay hidden through the winter and had
