Babi Yar, page 37
Topaide had not been there the previous day. He had only sent a plan of the sand-pits showing where the bodies had been buried, but the Germans on the spot had not been able to make any sense of it and had started digging in the wrong place. He shouted at them hysterically, called them all idiots, said they didn’t know how to read plans and had been looking in the wrong place. He ran across and kicked the earth with the toe of his boot, saying: ‘Here! Here!’
So they began to dig where he showed them. Half an hour later they came across the first corpses.
The Germans treated Topaide with great deference and among themselves, either seriously or ironically, they used to call him the ‘execution expert’. Now he had become an expert in excavations. He spent the whole day going around the ravine, pointing things out, giving orders and explanations. From time to time his whole face was violently contorted into a most unpleasant expression, a sort of tic, and he seemed to be a bundle of nerves, on the verge of hysteria. He couldn’t let a minute go by without shouting or rushing about or hitting someone. It was clear that his ‘expertise’ had not left him unscathed.
The work gathered speed. So that nobody should see what was going on the Germans quickly put up some screens around the ravine, camouflaged them with branches of trees and in some places made artificial plantations. It was quite obvious that whatever was going on there, it was intended to be kept the closest secret.
The road from the city to the ravine was blocked. Lorry drivers had to get down from the lorries well before the ravine and hand them over to guards who drove them on into the Yar. The lorries were loaded with rails, blocks of stone, timber and barrels of oil.
That was the way the final phase of Babi Yar began; that was the first attempt to erase it from the pages of history. From the very beginning nothing seemed to go right. Topaide rushed about the place, raging and fuming, and the Germans became more and more nervous, beating the prisoners horribly and even shooting some of them.
New groups arrived from the camp to help the first detachment, and in a few days there were more than three hundred prisoners at work there. They were divided up into brigades, and the carefully planned, productive labour of those brigades was a model of German order and method.
The DIGGERS dug the earth out of the pits and exposed the bodies; a sort of grey-blue in colour, they had been squashed down flat and caught up in each other. The job of hauling them out was the most frightful ordeal. [Some of the bodies, notably those of the children, had no injuries on them at all—they were the ones which had been buried alive. But the bodies of some of the women, especially of the younger ones, had, on the contrary, been sadistically mutilated, probably just before they died.]
The Germans held their noses on account of the stench, and some of them nearly fainted. The guards sat on the sides of the ravine, all of them with a bottle of vodka stuck in the sand between their legs which they would take a swig at from time to time. As a result all the Germans in the ravine were permanently drunk.
The diggers were not given any vodka, and at first they too felt sick. But they gradually grew accustomed to the work. They had no choice, anyway, but to keep at it, their chains clanking around their feet.
The HOOKERS pulled the bodies out and dragged them to the fires. They were issued with specially forged metal rods with a handle at one end and a hook at the other. The hooks had been made, incidentally, to Topaide’s own design.
After a good deal of experimenting Topaide had evolved a way of dragging the bodies out without them being torn to pieces. This involved sticking the hook under the chin and pulling on the lower jaw-bone. In that way the whole body came along and could be dragged to its destination.
Sometimes the bodies were so firmly stuck together that two or three of them came out on one hook. It was often necessary to hack them apart with axes, and the lower layers had to be dynamited several times.
The PROSPECTORS, or Goldsuchern, as the Germans called them, had pliers with which they pulled out gold fillings and crowns. Their job was to examine every corpse as it went to be burnt, remove any rings or other jewellery and see whether there were any coins or valuables in the pockets of those that had clothes on them. It was all collected in buckets. A guard stood near by and watched to see that no gold was stolen or thrown into the sand.
The CLOAKROOM ATTENDANTS removed from the dead everything that was still whole. Good quality boots which had been buried under the earth for a year or two were removed. Occasionally they came across woollen garments or kit-bags which had survived. The Germans loaded it all carefully into lorries and took it away, though for what purpose no one knew, since it all stank terribly. Anyway, they managed to gather up quite a lot of junk: only the very bottom layers—the Jews—were naked; the middle layers were in their underwear, while the more recently executed were fully dressed.
The BUILDERS had the job of constructing the fires. They were taken under strong guard across to the other side of the ravine to the Jewish cemetery, where the Germans showed them which granite tombstones to break up.
The prisoners pulled the graves and headstones to pieces, carried them into the ravine and laid the flat pieces out in rows. On these surfaces, again under the professional guidance of Topaide, the master of all trades, they built quite well-designed and technically efficient furnaces, with chimneys to make them draw, complicated flues and grids. They were first packed full of wood, and then the bodies were laid on top of it on the grid, heads outwards. The second layer of bodies was laid crosswise to the first, then came a layer of wood, and so on, until the pile was about ten feet high and twenty feet square.
Each pile consisted of roughly two thousand bodies. To complete the pile they laid planks up against it, as is done on building work, and the bodies were carried up them. The completed pile was sprayed with oil pumped from a barrel into a hose.
The STOKERS got the fire going underneath and also carried burning torches along the rows of projecting heads. The hair, soaked in oil, immediately burst into bright flame—that was why they had arranged the heads that way. The stack of bodies then became one gigantic bonfire, and the heat given out became quite unbearable. In the ravine and for a long way around it there was a heavy smell of burning hair and roasting meat. The stokers stirred it all around with long pokers such as metal-workers use, then raked up the ashes and cinders. When the stove had cooled down they cleaned it out, laid the fire again, replaced the burnt-out grid and prepared to load up again.
The CRUSHERS were the ones who dealt with the ashes. Using ordinary wooden rams on granite blocks from the cemetery, they crushed any bones which had not been completely burnt by the fire and then passed them through a wire sieve, again looking for gold.
The GARDENERS were so called because their job was to load the ashes on to barrows and distribute them under escort around the environs of Babi Yar and scatter them over the vegetable gardens. They were better off than the others, because they had a chance to dig up potatoes in the gardens, bring them back to the ravine and cook them in old tins over the heat still remaining in the furnaces.
This was a very important additional source of food to sustain the prisoners. Because after having fed them well the first day, the Germans never did so again, and the prisoners were ravenously hungry.
One of them, for example, unable to bear the smell of roasting meat any longer, started to eat the human flesh, pulling pieces of it out of the fire. At first the Germans didn’t notice him, but when by chance they found what he was doing they shot him on the spot, and threw him on the fire. Moreover they were terribly embarrassed by the degree of savagery which he had displayed.
Davydov spent time in several different brigades. He worked at the cemetery, dragged corpses and helped build the fires. He recalls that at first the terrible smell and all the business with the corpses made him feel sick and that he nearly fainted, but that he became accustomed to it as time went on. Apparently a man can get used eventually to anything.
They worked till they dropped during the day, then at night slept the sleep of the dead in the dugout. They shaved their scraggly beards off by fire—a well-tried method of shaving that had been used in Soviet concentration camps. The day was spent in a state of feverish anxiety not to stop a bullet and to get hold of some potatoes. They quarrelled among themselves, made it up again, played tricks and cracked jokes. ‘Do you think we didn’t tell each other jokes?’ says Davydov. ‘Whenever anyone went to piss, they would all roar with laughter. The laughter of the gallows. And if the guards saw what was happening they also had to grin. They could also, apparently, see the funny side.’
Meanwhile routine executions went on as before in Babi Yar, except that the dead were no longer buried but thrown straight on the fire. And any prisoner already on his last legs and no longer able to work was also thrown on to it. Alive.
The Germans were in a great hurry. It was nothing but ‘Quickly! Quickly! Schnell!’ But there was such an enormous number of corpses. Davydov had to work on clearing a pit in which there were exactly four hundred of the hostages who had been shot on Eberhard’s orders. He also opened up graves with a hundred and with three hundred hostages. Everything was very precise, and Topaide knew everything; it was he who pointed out the places—he remembered absolutely everything.
(Incidentally, the name of Topaide never featured among the Nazi criminals who were later brought to trial. It is possible that he was killed, although Gestapo men like him, who were working back behind the lines, usually succeeded in going into hiding. Therefore it is by no means impossible that he is still alive … I wonder if he has cured himself of his nervous tic? But nobody was in fact tried specifically for Babi Yar, and nobody knows what happened to the German and Russian administration of the camp, headed by Radomsky and Rieder.)
[Before the curtain came down on Babi Yar all sorts and kinds of ‘enemies’ were thrown into the fire, ranging from some crank who had merely told a joke, and such ‘saboteurs’ as a baker who had kept a loaf of bread aside, to the genuine partisans and the very last Communists. There were some members of the Communist Party who had succeeded in proving that they had joined the party, like the majority of people, for purely careerist reasons—‘We were just on the books and paid our dues’—and who for nearly two years had not been arrested. They had simply had to report regularly to the police. But it didn’t save them. Now they were all sent to Babi Yar. The Germans killed off even their own servants and hangers-on, because they knew too much.]
The process of liquidating people now followed a different pattern. The mobile gas-chambers arrived from the city with people alive in them, and it was only at Babi Yar that the gas was turned on. Stifled cries could be heard coming from the body of the van and then wild banging on the door. The van would stand there, the motor running and the Germans smoking away quite calmly. Then everything would be silent, the Germans would open the doors, and some prisoners would set about unloading the van. The bodies inside would still be warm, dripping with sweat, practically all of them with excreta and urine over them, and some of them might be not quite dead. They would be put on the fire. Davydov recalls that some of them would writhe in the fire and throw themselves about as if they were alive.
On one occasion a gas-van arrived full of women. When the usual procedure was over and the shouting and banging had died down, the door was opened. After the fumes had cleared the van was seen to be packed full of naked girls.
There were more than a hundred of them, pressed tightly together, sitting on each other’s knees. They all had their hair done up in scarves, as women do when they take a bath. They had probably been told when they were put into the van that they were on their way to the baths. Many were found to have rings and watches, lipsticks and other small things hidden in their headscarves. The drunken Germans hooted with laughter, explaining that they were waitresses from the Kiev night-clubs, and shouted to the prisoners: ‘Take one for yourself! Go on—try fucking one, have a go at her!’ When Davydov lifted them and laid them on the stack, covered in filth and still warm, the breath would come out of their mouths with a faint noise, and he got the impression again that they were alive but had simply lost consciousness. They were all burnt on the fire.
Some very important officials drove up in elegant limousines, and shouted at the Germans working in the Yar that the work was going too slowly. There were not enough people to cope with it so on several occasions they simply let the new arrivals out of the gas-vans, put them straight into chains and set them to work.
They started taking the prisoners outside the camp limits, to a near-by anti-tank trench some two hundred yards long. It was crammed full to the very top with the bodies of Red Army officers—the prisoners could tell that from the uniforms, kit-bags and binoculars. There were apparently between twenty-five and thirty thousand of them. Prisoners were also sent to open up the graves at the Kirillov Hospital. The ground in the ravine and all around it for nearly half a square mile was literally stuffed with corpses.
In Babi Yar they could hear the distant sound of gunfire come from the other side of the Dnieper. The prisoners knew that the final fire would be lit for them. The Germans did not in any case regard them seriously as human beings and at the morning roll-call they would report:
‘Three hundred and twenty-five Figuren on parade!’
Figuren meant what it said—figures, shapes, something which could not be regarded as a human being. That was also a form of humour.
The prisoners did not wash, because they were not given any water; many of them could hardly stay on their feet and were covered with festering wounds, burns and filth from the corpses. [Some among them were old enough to have served sentences in Soviet concentration camps before the war, and they said there was no comparison. Compared with Babi Yar any Soviet camp was a health resort.
However, there is no camp in the whole world from which it is impossible to escape. This was, incidentally, the opinion of a former secret police agent, who had been a senior official in the security services, and had had a lot to do with prison camps in the Ukraine. He was so to speak an expert on the subject, and he now worked as a stoker on the furnaces.
They called him Fyodor Yershov. All that was known about him was that he had been in charge of various explosions and acts of sabotage, and had been caught. Who knows—maybe it was he who blew up the monastery. All particulars about him must have been kept at 33 Vladimirskaya, but for some reason the security service did not reveal the name of this particular employee or give him a posthumous award.
In other circumstances Fyodor Yershov would have been a man for the prisoners to fear. But he was now in the same position as they were; he tried fanatically to persuade them to organize a revolt, and the others listened closely to what he, as an expert, had to say.] He discussed it with the men who were working next to him or who slept on neighbouring bunks in the dugout. Little groups of conspirators were formed who debated the various escape plans at every convenient moment.
Some put forward the idea of attacking the guards in broad daylight, seizing their guns and scattering in all directions under cover of fire. Fyodor Yershov was against this idea. The guards in a concentration camp were always ready for that sort of thing, he said, and moreover the prisoners were all in chains, and too weak to deal with the burly Germans.
Among the prisoners there were some former lorry-drivers. One of them, Vladislav Kuklya, proposed seizing a couple of the lorries which brought wood to the camp, or even a gas-van, and crashing through the guard in them. It was a fantastic plan, and very tempting because of the daring involved. But it would have involved far too long a drive through the ravine and then through the city, with Germans and police everywhere. It would have been simply a very dramatic form of suicide.
The group which had been sent to work at the Kirillov Hospital requested permission to make their dash for freedom independently, because their guard was relatively small. It is possible that they might have succeeded, but Yershov was strongly opposed to it. ‘You will get away yourselves, but it will be curtains for the rest of us then. No, we must all act at the same moment.’
In a separate corner of the dugout, however, some young lads put their heads together and, without consulting anyone else, started desperately digging a trench through which to escape at night. They did not have time to finish it in one night, and next day the Germans discovered the whole plot [and lined all seventeen of them up outside. One of them turned out to be Kuklya, who denied he had had any part in it. Topaide demanded:
‘Was this man with you?’
‘I think so …’ muttered one of the lads.
Topaide didn’t understand what he said and turned to another prisoner who knew German and had been an interpreter:
‘What did he say?’
‘He says he wasn’t among them.’
They let Kuklya go back to his work, but the other sixteen were made to kneel down on the spot and] were killed by a bullet in the back of the head.
There was also the case of a man who had kept himself to himself, and who carried out a very daring escape in daylight. Nobody knew his name. He was working apart from the others and moved off, apparently to relieve himself. Suddenly he jumped into the ravine, dashed off and hid in one of the gullies leading to the cemetery. The alarm was raised; there was a burst of shooting, work was stopped, and dozens of Germans raced after him, but they did not find him. He had managed to undo his chains and was thus able to run fast. In their fury that day the Germans killed twelve prisoners and shot the officer who had been in command of the patrol and was responsible for guarding the escaped man. After that they mounted machine-guns at the entrances to the gullies.
The various escape plans were dropped one after the other, and it was Fyodor Yershov’s plan which was accepted in the end: to break out of the dugout and attack the guard at night. This was also likely to end in disaster, but doing it in darkness offered at least the hope that a few of them might get away.
