Are Your Hands Covered in Jewish Blood? Jewish Red Army Soldiers Encountering the Aftermath of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Soldiers and officers of the Red Army were among the first military personnel to encounter the destruction of the Ukrainian and Belarussian Jewish communities late in World War II. A significant proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who served in the Red Army between 1943 and 1945 learned of the deaths of their own family members while they were in active duty. By examining the historical details and literary conventions of a small number of autobiographies and oral history interviews, the chapter discusses the range of reactions of these combatants to the destruction of their communities, from immediate retaliation to working with Soviet authorities to identify and convict collaborators. In addition, the chapter examines how a narrator’s current country of residence appears to influence the framing of his memoir.

Soldiers and officers of the Red Army were among the first military personnel to encounter the destruction of the Ukrainian and Belorussian Jewish communities during World War II. In the context of the ongoing military violence that they witnessed daily, as well as the enormous overall devastation, it is hard to say what kind of impression the mass graves, burned houses, and eyewitness accounts in the soldiers’ hometowns made on the average participant. For the hundreds of thousands of Jews who served in the Red Army between 1943 and 1945, ¹ however, it is clear that discovering the ruins of Jewish communities were life-transformative events—“before and after” rupture points ² that became ingrained in their memory. ³ Historian Vojin Majstоrović observes, for example, that many soldiers confronted the reality of the Holocaust’s impact on their families and communities, and in almost all cities that they liberated they desperately sought information about their relatives. ⁴ Historian Arkadi Zeltser suggests that some soldiers and officers felt an overwhelming urge to take revenge. He cites Efim Mashkov, a Jewish soldier, who in 1944 declared: “In the summer of 1941 in my native town in Belarus, outside Borisov, the Germans annihilated not only my whole family but the entire Jewish population, which was just short of 1,000 people. I swear that I will mercilessly destroy the fascist monsters and take terrible revenge for my people, for all the outrages they committed on Soviet territory.” ⁵

The entire scope of the reactions to sites of destruction, including the desire for revenge, dealing with trauma, transformation of identity, and other behavioral consequences, still need to be studied. The goal of my essay is to examine this social and metaphorical encounter. I propose a close reading of how Jewish Red Army soldiers and officers first learned about the destruction of their hometowns, what they did to look for relatives, what they did after they managed to (or were unable to) find them, and what trajectory their lives took in the aftermath. Conversely, I seek to examine what it was like for them to pass through the cities and villages where they had been born and stumble upon the annihilation of their communities, often including their parents, siblings, wives, children and friends. I will focus on a small number of stories depicting how individual discoveries of the Holocaust coincided with the realization of personal loss. Some liberators, for example, learned that they had lost parents and children. Others discovered that their friends or neighbors had betrayed them. Such moments of revelation became the proverbial “before” and “after” rupture points in their lives, especially vivid in their memories, enabling them to discuss such horrific events in detail. ⁶ Above all, I focus in how former Jewish combatants depict the acts of violence that they committed after learning the fate of their loved ones. I am interested both in what happened and in how they want these acts to be remembered.

This study is based on a combination of self-published and unpublished (written for family) autobiographies, created by authors sometime in the 1990s or later, mostly after they had left the Soviet Union and settled elsewhere. The study is a part of the large oral history project that I conducted between 1999 and 2007 in New York, Berlin, Moscow, Philadelphia and Toronto. Altogether, I completed 251 in-depth interviews with Soviet Jewish veterans (and another 223 Jews of that generation who did not serve in the Red Army). Of all interviewees, fifty-seven, all men, spoke about witnessing or conducting immediate retaliation against local Soviet citizens who collaborated with the German army. Of them, five went through their own hometowns at some point in 1944. At the time of the interviews, two lived in the United States, one in Germany, and one in Canada. Of the fifty-seven who spoke about taking violent revenge after witnessing destruction of Jews, thirty-five lived in the United States, thirteen in Canada, and nine in Germany. Though prompted, not a single one of the nineteen Moscow-based interviewees told me about retaliation or even about encountering it in the aftermath of violence against Jews. ⁷ Maybe the consistent absence of revenge stories among Moscow participants suggests a different pattern of memory formation—they focused primarily on the Soviet war effort rather than on the Holocaust—or maybe the blanket absence was a random coincidence. In general, I found that the country of current residence played the most important role in the construction of a veteran’s narrative. ⁸ The data relating the participant’s place of birth, level of education, and even where they were living immediately prior to emigrating I found to be irrelevant when it came to how they described their war experiences, including the violence they engaged in or witnessed.

For every interview or written narrative that I study, I do rigorous fact checking. I read people’s “military books” (official Soviet military records of each person), “work-history books” (trudovye knizhki), marriage certificates, Soviet letters of recommendation (kharakteristiki), evaluations, award certificates, and other personal documents. I also go to the podvig naroda website, which displays archival documents with information about military awards for World War II veterans. ⁹ I was able to find every single one of my respondents on that website, but not everyone’s documentation matched what they said they did. For example, some stated that they participated in the Battle of Stalingrad. Others claimed to have liberated Auschwitz. Still others reported seeing General Zhukov up close. None of the stories were true. If I catch such a discrepancy, I do not dismiss the interview entirely, but I do not quote from any interview that I cannot verify at least partially.

In this article, I focus on a few individuals. Mainly, I concentrate on Victor Kh., a Red Army veteran who both wrote an unpublished memoir and gave oral history interviews about his experience on returning to places where he grew up. I also touch on a handful of oral history narratives from people I interviewed at about the same time as Victor, people of similar background as him and who also described their encounters in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.

I Feel Sorry I Did Not Kill Kostomakha Right There: Encountering Perpetrators

Victor Kh., a resident of Brooklyn, NY, was a retired engineer and World War II veteran. He was born in 1916 in Piliava, a small Ukrainian town in the Starosinyavskiy district, within the Kamenetsk-Podolsky region of Ukraine. ¹⁰ When we met in 1999, he was eighty-three years old. Before we started the interview, Kh. said that a few years earlier, his niece gave him a typewriter as a gift, and he “sat down and typed, seventeen pages, all at once,” detailing his life. At first, he wanted to publish it but then decided that no one would be interested. “But my children read it and liked it, so I saved a copy,” he said. Kh. also gave me a copy. I interviewed him before I read the text and returned for a second interview to clarify some details. The written autobiography and the interviews were designed for different audiences. He wrote the memoir as a legacy for his children and gave the interviews as the public version of his story, his contribution to an understudied topic of history. I identified no significant factual discrepancies between the two narratives, but some details he mentioned in the autobiography were absent from the interviews, and vice versa. Both written and oral narratives strongly emphasized the importance of events that took place in March 1944 and the effect they had on the rest of Kh.’s life.

Kh.’s seventeen pages of single-spaced Russian text (with almost no margins) cover the history of his life and that of his family. He grew up without a father, who died in 1919, when Kh. was three years old. At the age of thirteen, he started work at a Jewish collective farm named after Vyacheslav Molotov. In the memoir, he describes how his family survived famine by selling gifts that uncles and aunts sent from the United States. He also recounts a series of arrests in 1933, when Kh.’s uncle Efim landed in jail for allegedly hiding gold. He details his draft into the cavalry unit of the Red Army in 1937 and his fears of the arrest of his family members during the purges of 1937 and 1938. In detail, he also recounts the beginning of the war, which coincided with the wedding of his older brother, Nissan. In June 1941, still enlisted in the Red Army, Kh. spent his month-long vacation in Pilyava. On June 22, after hearing of the German invasion, he returned to his unit, which was immediately deployed.

In 1942, Kh. was wounded and spent months recovering in hospital. On April 19, 1943, he returned to the front as head of provisions for the 17th artillery division. In March 1944, he was stationed at Starokonstantinov, located about thirty kilometers from his native Pilyava. On his first day off, Kh. commandeered a horse and set off for his hometown to visit his mother. He had neither seen her nor received letters from her in three years. The trip was to prove a life-changing event. In part, he describes it in the following way.

I left at about 3pm and made good time. Soon I was on the fields of the former Jewish collective farm where I worked as a young man. I entered to the outskirts of the village and saw an acquaintance, [named Timoshuk], standing by his house. He was an old communist. Before the war, he worked at the Pilyava Machine Tractor Station (MTS), together with my brother. It turned out that during the German occupation, that man had been in jail, where he had been constantly beaten up, had been sent for execution three times, and somehow, miraculously survived. In fact, he returned home just a few hours prior to me.

Timoshuk recognized me, then opened the gates of his yard, and I entered. His wife welcomed me too. [Timoshuk] made a visible effort to speak, his throat was severely injured, but he was able to tell me what happened to Jews in Pilyava when the Germans came. On July 19, 1941, the order had been issued that all people of Jewish origin must come to the square by the village council and bring their best clothing, documents and all valuables, in order to be evacuated. All elders, women and children showed up. Soon Germans came too and a pack of Ukrainian local polizei. Some felt this was going to be their last journey. Some polizeis had axes and shovels. When people gathered, they waited until someone checked whether anyone had remained home. Soon, people were forced to walk (гнали) to the nearby village of Alekseevka, home to many deep mines. Near the mines, people were undressed, their valuables taken from them, and alive, they were pushed down into these mines. People begged peasants, who gathered to look, “please save us!” Some [onlookers] cried, but the majority laughed. Those [Jews] who tried to resist, were shot right away. Especially violent were two [Kostomakha] brothers: Denis and Prokhor. Denis cut two Jews’ heads with his axe. My former classmates Stepan Kostomakha [Denis and Prokhor’s brother] and Semyon Savchuk were very active participants too.

I spent an hour in Timoshuk’s house. I spoke with this tortured, disfigured man. I learned a lot. He assured me that a day or two before the execution, my mother had died, but he did not know [by] who[m] and where she was buried. He told me that my cousin Dozya, Efim’s daughter, came to her father in Proskurov, with her two kids, but he had already been gone, her sisters had also been killed [there, in Proskurov]. She was mocked (violated) [над ней издевались], her kids were beaten up, and then when they took all things from her, she and her kids were forced to walk to the ghetto in Staro-Konstantinov. On the way to the ghetto, they were shot.

I decided to go to the center of the village, find and shoot at least one of the Kostomakha brothers. When I approached his house, I just saw his deaf mother. She recognized me and began crossing herself. I said nothing to her. A passerby told me he saw Stepan Kostomakha had gone to his wife’s parents’ house. [I went there] but he was not there. The hamlet was completely destroyed, and no old houses were around.

It was getting dark. I had to start thinking about finding a place to sleep, someone that I could trust. . . . I went to a house of a female acquaintance of mine, Anna Musat. I had not even gone into her house yet, but her neighbors started yelling: aunt Anna, Kh. is coming to you. She did not know which Kh. it was, but she ran out, hugged me and cried. Her son Panas, a cultured man, before the war had worked in Kiev. He came out and gave me his hand. Before I took it, I asked him, “No offense, but is your hand covered in Jewish blood,” and he answered: “No offense taken, but my hands are completely clean.” Although later, I learned he was in jail after the war, for 10 years, I do not know why though.

We entered the house, began to eat, drink. A few minutes later a neighbor came in . . . and asked me to see Kozlik, a new chairman of the village council.

When I arrived to Kozlik’s house, I saw a Captain [Gelman], with a pure Jewish face. He got up, and introduced himself, because I was a Major [I outranked him]. I told him everything that Timashuk had told me. He asked me whether I had been sure that these betrayers had not left with the Germans, had I been sure where they had lived? He suggested we would go and pick them up right now, at night.

Soon after midnight, two horse-wagons, filled with machine-gunners approached Kozlik’s house. During the next three hours we took eleven traitors, the killers, off Jewish beds. I feel sorry I did not kill Kostomakha right there, but I did hit him with my revolver a few times on his head. Brothers Denis and Prokhor lived in a new Jewish house, they tried to resist, but we took wires and tied their wrists and threw them onto the wagon. In each house there had been a lot of stolen Jewish possessions. We put all of the arrested ones in one house, put a few guards down, and then we went to rest. It was four o’clock in the morning.

A couple of hours later . . . a soldier told me that Captain Gelman said that he could keep those who we rounded up for no longer than 2 days, unless we have evidence against them. He needed witness testimonies from at least 10 people.

Meanwhile, people gathered in town’s square, getting ready for the mobilization. . . . I asked whether anyone would testify. In response many people raised their hands. I selected ten most trustworthy ones, wrote their names on the list, and then gave that list to the captain. He immediately began to follow up.

Suddenly a man approached me and told me that in the middle of the fall, when the hamlet had already been destroyed, he heard a knock on the window. He came out and saw no one, but then again, he heard the knock again, came out again, walked around the house and found my brother Nissan, who was all wet from the rain. He told me he invited him to his house, gave him food, let him sleep a little and then gave him an old coat. Early in the morning Nissan left. He did not know what happened to him after.

. . .

Before I left, I went to the village council and saw that my acquaintance Tatiana Grinkevich worked there. I left her my address, and went back to Staryi Konstantinov.

[A few months later], when I was near Lvov . . . I received a letter from my brother Matvey, who found me after he sent an inquiry to the village council. . . . I was happy that at least one brother was alive. Two weeks later, I received another letter, now from Tatiana. She reported that there had been a trial, and all traitors had been convicted. Denis died in prison, Prokhor was hanged, and all of them received long jail terms. Kostomakha, for example, got 25 years in jail. ¹¹

Historical Reading

In both structure and content, Kh.’s typed narrative, although at times seemingly sporadic, offers insight into how he chooses to write about the process of learning what had happened to his family and community during the war. The narrative format includes various tales within one story and a variety of voices, including witnesses, suspected killers, and fellow military personnel. Each story leads to a consequence in Kh.’s behavior (e.g., based on someone’s words he attempts to execute revenge), and each of his actions leads to a reward (e.g., he learns of the fate of his family members after locating witnesses).

On reading Kh.’s written text only after I conducted the oral history interview, I was struck by how closely he told me the story in answer to my questions. During the interview, however, a number of additional details surfaced. First, he explained that he knew the region exceptionally well because he had worked in the Molotov Jewish collective farm as a teenager. There he got to know Trofim, a chairman of collectivized peasants before the war. For a long time, Trofim also worked as an entomologist. “He helped to fight bugs,” Kh. said. One of Trofim’s sons served in the Red Army. Another one, married to a Jewish woman, had also served in the army and was killed in a battle to protect Odessa. These details, especially the last one about a Jewish daughter-in-law, perhaps explain why Kh. was inclined to trust Trofim. In the written narrative, however, Kh. explains that he trusted Trofim because he was jailed and tortured, information he barely addressed in the oral history interview.

In the interview, Kh. also mentioned that before the war, he and his friends used to bully Victor Kostomakha because his mother was deaf. In the written narrative, this detail is omitted. The oral version also included other characteristics of the people involved. For example, in describing Denis and Prokhor, Kh. added that they had been extremely poor during the war, and that villagers had taken pity on them by providing them with bread and other food. The store-owner, Dudik, often fed them on credit, which he knew would never be repaid.

In the interview, Kh. also added one particular detail about his raid against the Kostomakhas with Captain Gelman that he left out of the written text. “I wanted to kill [Kostomakha] right away,” he said. “I told the captain that I have this thought, to kill him and leave. But he tells me: ‘You have no right to do this anymore. Our rule is here already [а он говорит, что Вы не имеете права, уже власть есть.] ¹² ’”

In the text, Kh. presents himself as fully in charge of the situation, whereas in the interview a more nuanced and complex set of factors interact. It is hard to pinpoint the exact source of these discrepancies, but a major factor might be that he wrote the memoir for “family” consumption and gave the interview for “academic research” purposes. Intended audience and mode of delivery cannot help but affect the way a narrative unfolds. An academic researcher is a person who listens to the immediate story, whereas the reader—his family member—is removed, even when the text is prepared solely for intimate consumption. Moreover, the goal of the text is both to educate the family and to provide a form of moral lesson, whereas giving an interview is a chance to include a personal story in the larger historical narrative about the Jews in the Soviet Union (which is how I articulated the purpose of the interview for Kh. before we sat down at the microphone).

The biggest discrepancy between the oral history and the written autobiography was not the information delivered, however, but the structure. I started the interview by saying that I was writing a book about Jewish life in the Soviet Union before the war. Before I asked my first question, Victor Kh. said, “I have not spoken Yiddish in so long. You are so young and speak Yiddish. In 1941, I received the last postcard from my mom, it was in Yiddish. On 15th of March 1944, I was stationed . . .” ¹³ and he proceeded to tell the story I recount above. Such a response was not unusual. Many people I interviewed insisted that the most interesting part of their life story, and the most relevant material for my research, lay in their memories of the war. In Kh.’s case, what happened during the war proved the rupture moment. He began to perceive himself as Jewish. Later in the chapter, I will argue that the events that transpired on one particular day in March 1944 transformed Victor Kh. not just as a person who realized he had lost his parents, but also as a Jew who could no longer trust non-Jews.

During the interview, although sometimes repeating exactly the same—probably memorized—lines, as he wrote in his text, Kh. occasionally could not contain his emotions. He cried, for example, when he spoke of the order to gather Jews in the central square. He also cried when he recalled receiving a letter from his brother Matvei. These two moments are crucial for understanding the most important points of the story: the narrator’s motivation to seek justice by killing the offender, and his ultimate reward for his failure to do so.

Six major elements in Kh.’s story, compiled from his memoir and the interviews, illuminate various aspects of the violence that took place both during the war, when Jews were being killed, and at the end of the war, when the Red Army persecuted local residents accused of collaborating with the Germans. First, the narrative highlights the intimate nature of the violence (to borrow the term from Jan Gross, Natalia Aleksiun, and Jeffrey Kopstein). ¹⁴ In Kh.’s story, all perpetrators and victims knew each other well, had studied and worked together, and had often even befriended or, in the case Kh. describes, sometimes bullied each other. Had any of the deaths in Kh.’s narrative occurred before the war, families of the perpetrators and victims would have attended each other’s funerals.

Second, Kh. describes the casual nature of the violence that takes place in both 1941 and 1944. The 1941 events are conveyed through a third-person narrative, “a story within a story,” when Timoschuk, who survived the war under occupation, tells Kh. about the brutal murder of the Jews. Because the story is told from the perspective of the victims, it is full of moving details of deportation and murder, such as “some people felt this was going to be their last journey.” In the description of the shooting itself, we learn about the last pleadings of the victims, and the reactions of the onlookers (laughing and crying). We also learn about sexual violence committed against Kh.’s cousin Dozya, as well as her and her children’s tragic deaths on the way to the ghetto. How Timoshuk came to know such information never becomes clear. How could he have been at the square where Jews were gathered, in another village with Dozya when she was violated and then deported, at the shooting place in Alekseevka, and in the house when Victor Kh.’s brother Nissan passed by? Kh.’s written narrative likely draws from his conversations with Timoshuk and other residents, as well as from figments of his imagination to fill in missing details. In all his descriptions, however, we see expressions of raw pain, anger, and devastation. By comparison, Kh.’s own actions in 1944, when he is the perpetrator rather than the victim of violence, seem cold-blooded. He describes using his revolver to hit one of the Kostomakha brothers a few times on the head and throwing both brothers, with their hands tied, onto a wagon. He expresses no soul-searching, only regret that he is not able to exercise the full scope of the vengeance that he desired. In all cases, violence is presented as something that people do to others without giving the matter a second thought (or a court order).

The story of Kh.’s desire to kill the Kostomakha brothers leaves a few questions unanswered. Why, for example, were the Kostomakhas not killed on the spot when they resisted arrest, and why was Kh. set to kill “one of them” rather than both?

A third element in Kh.’s story regarding the violence shows that chance, rather than choice, often determined—even within a family—who became a collaborator and who a Soviet hero. In the family Kh. describes, two brothers stayed and became polizeis, whereas the third one left Pilyava to become a Red Army soldier. None of them is presented as acting on conviction. All appear as victims of circumstance. Panas, for example, assured Kh. that his hands were “clean” because he was evacuated, not because he opposed ever hurting his Jewish neighbors.

Fourth, Kh.’s story includes a detailed description of how he obtained information about the atrocities: through detailed interviews with locals who witnessed what happened. Certainly, Soviet commissions for investigating Nazi crimes have used similar methods. ¹⁵ But Kh., although wearing a similar uniform to those of the official commissioners, operates differently. Unlike most investigators, he is deeply familiar with the people of his village. He knows whom to ask, what to ask, and where to find people of interest. His autobiography suggests, in fact, that representatives of the commission had already come to his town, but Kh., equipped with a better understanding of local specifics, obtained much more information. He was definitely not impartial. In fact, a representative of the extraordinary commission had to order him not to immediately retaliate. In Kh.’s story, written approximately fifty years after the events took place, compliance with that order remains a source of significant regret. “I feel sorry I did not kill Kostomakha right there,” he writes.

In short, for Kh., these investigations of military crimes were not impersonal. Rather, they were painful, emotional, shocking searches for his loved ones. Discovery of the collaborators meant not just punishing criminals, albeit with additional personal motivation, but also essentially re-evaluating his entire life and identity. Hence, the events represent the rupture between the “before” and “after” in his life story. In the narrative, Kh. stresses that his actions brought justice and that his military and insider status together made them possible. The question as to what extent the commissions relied on help from Jewish Red Army soldiers conducting personal investigations, especially regarding the destruction of Jewish communities, is never answered.

Noteworthy is how Kh.’s narrative addresses the fear and distrust he is met with by the locals. On the one hand, he reports his own suspicions of people he encounters. For example, before he talks to Panas, Kh. asks whether Panas’s hands were covered in Jewish blood. Kh. repeats the question to everyone who volunteered information to him. He knew that verifying people’s innocence would be difficult but he asked anyway, if only to assert that he no longer implicitly trusted his former neighbors and friends. At the same time, the locals seemed afraid of Kh. Although he never explicitly articulates it—in fact he articulates the opposite, that people ran to him with open arms—Kh. reports possible signs of fear. For example, when Kostomakha’s mother saw him, she crossed herself, something a person does when encountering something scary, such as a ghost. Later, when the time came for Kh. to look for a place to sleep, and he heads there, neighbors run to announce him to his potential host. The reader might infer that they are running to warn her about the arrival of a local Jewish soldier, because they are afraid whether he might retaliate for what happened to his family.

Fear and distrust of Jews has been discussed in detail in the context of Poland, ¹⁶ including cases when such fear catalyzed anti-Jewish violence. ¹⁷ With the exception of Diana Dumitru’s work on Moldova, however, the subject still has to be studied concerning the early post-war days and months in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union. ¹⁸

A fifth element of Kh.’s story speaks to both his burning need for revenge and his guilty conscience, again common emotions among veterans of his generation. In numerous oral history interviews that I recorded in the 1990s and 2000s, veterans spoke of feeling helpless and guilty at finding out that, while they served in the army, their parents and siblings, and often wives and children, had been killed. Perhaps best fictionalized in Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, through the character Viktor Shtrum, who lost his mother in a ghetto in Berdichev, the feeling of inadequacy and the desire for revenge dominated the state of mind of Soviet Jewish soldiers in 1944–1945. ¹⁹ Kh. and many of his peers reported that their motivation to fight the Germans was significantly boosted when they learned of the murders and other acts of violence against their family members. One veteran interviewed as part of the Blavatnik Archive project, for example, simply stated: “I only took consolation in the fact that I killed more Germans than they did of my own family.” ²⁰

Consider another testimony, also recorded in New York, by Ian D., born in 1923 in Berdichev and part of the unit that liberated Soviet Belarus. When the unit went to a district centre called “Krasnoe,” meaning “Red,” locals showed him the mass graves. His division was stationed at Rudnya, a small town near Smolensk. Before the war, Rudnya had a Jewish population of 1,640 people, who constituted about 2 percent of the population. About 1,200 of them were killed by 1943. ²¹ Ian D. remembered seeing poorly covered mass graves there as well. During his few days there, he once saw a woman in distress. He approached her and asked why she had been crying:

I asked her why. She said that this used to be her house, but people who lived there would not let her in. I asked her where she had been. She said she had been near Moscow. When she came home, the Gentiles would not let her in. I do not know what the end was. She did not know what to do. Her husband was at the front. She was there alone with her children. . . . It touched me a lot, what had happened to her. It really insulted me, so I started to think through the fate of my own people. The locals were very antisemitic there, despite the fact that it used to be a Jewish house. They lived not so bad there. But Germans left there such hostility towards the Jews, see, it was very serious there. This hostility was also acquired by the Communist Party. So, I began to think about the Jews. Everything was destroyed, so where the Jews were supposed to go. . . . It was useless. I felt useless. ²²

Like Victor Kh., Ian D. experienced feelings of uselessness and guilt, in his case expressed in the losses of an unknown woman, rather than those of his own family. The woman was Jewish, which prompted him to speak about Jewish solidarity, a “rupture” moment for a veteran who witnessed the immediate aftermath of anti-Jewish violence.

A sixth and final element of Kh.’s story is the narrative of transformation of his own Jewish sense of belonging. For example, the way he keeps asking people whether their hands were covered in Jewish blood might be a rhetorical device, rather than a recollection of actual conversations. The question is important whether Kh. actually verbalized it or not, because it illustrates how veterans began to see their former neighbours, pre-war friends, and colleagues. In such circumstances, “did he/she or did he/she not” becomes the unavoidable question, and until it is resolved, communal belonging for Jews becomes impossible.

In fact, in interviews, the moment an army veteran comes to the part where he discovered exactly what happened in his hometown, where he learned about the killings of Jews, is the moment of “rupture,” the divide between “before” and “after,” the moment he begins to talk about himself as a Jew rather than as a generic Soviet citizen. The rupture point is not the same for all Soviet Jews born in the 1920s and earlier. For those who survived the war in the ghettos and camps of Transnistria, the key moment was when they were rounded up and sent to a ghetto. For refugees, the rupture came when they made the decision to either leave or stay. For evacuees, the moment arrived when they returned home to discover they had no family left. For many war veterans and those evacuated by the Soviet government to the Soviet Rear, the point of rupture came in 1948, when they began to suffer from new anti-Jewish policies. For veterans who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, however, the moment of rupture manifested precisely as Kh. described it in his memoir. In the “before,” they would say of themselves “I was a Soviet citizen and there was no anti-Semitism” and in the “after” they would say “I became a Jew.”

Literary Reading

The combination of documents and historical research verified most of Kh.’s story. His military record, the path his battalion took, and the fate of the residents of Pilyava all checked out. ²³ Beyond historical accuracy, I would now like to offer another way to read his story, by applying a formal narrative analysis.

First, let me draw attention to how Kh. describes people he encounters. For example, he calls the group of polizeis as “the pack,” (svora), a common figure of speech to describe wolves and other dangerous creatures. ²⁴ It is significant that the term comes up in Kh.’s text only when describing the collaborators who took part in killing Jews, as opposed to Germans in general. Use of the term “pack” signals that Kh. perceives such a collaborator as his personal enemy.

Next, let me look at Kh.’s narrative in terms of its literary components. Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp states that every story should have a hero (the main character), a goal (such as getting the princess), a mentor (someone who teaches the hero how to reach the goal), hero’s helpers, obstacles, an act of extraordinary ability, and a reward (a happy ending). ²⁵

In Kh.’s story, Kh. himself is the hero. His mentor is the captain with a Jewish face. His helpers are the soldiers (significantly, from the Red Army). His goal is to exact revenge for his murdered family members (a variation on the quest for justice). His enemies are the former friends who betrayed him. Physical revenge fails in the story, however, because while Kh. succeeds in finding his enemy, he cannot actually kill him. Yet several rewards come to him later. Kh.’s younger brother, Matvey, comes to Piliava to look for his family, and the brothers are reunited because Kh. left an address. Every time Kh. reports doing something that he perceives as “good,” or “right,” he learns more about his family. When he does not kill a witness, he learns that his mother died a peaceful death before the deportation. He then receives the complete information about the death of his niece. When he manages to secure witnesses to testify against rounded up collaborators, he also gets a—perhaps untrustworthy and incomplete—glimpse into what happened to his brother Nissan.

To every testimony that I collect, I assign a genre. The narrative might be a quest, a wonder-story, a lament, or a moral tale. Kh.’s story might be said to be one of cosmic justice, known in Hassidic tales. Kh. does not kill the one who killed his family, and thus his family gets restored through divine interference. There is also an element of a miracle. The brother essentially rises from the dead, as though in reward for Victor Kh.’s persistence in pursuing his feelings of revenge.

When most of the historical details of Kh.’s testimony are taken out, the alignment of characters resembles that in the stories of many of my US-based respondents, who tend to emphasize the motif of Jewish solidarity. For example, the “mentor,” who helps the protagonist find justice, is almost always Jewish. What saves a person is Jewish solidarity. Such solidarity is also praised and longed for in Ian D.’s story of encountering the Holocaust in Belarus.

The stories recorded in Canada are rarely quests for justice. Most often, they are laments. For example, Vladimir A., whom I interviewed in Toronto, told me a story similar in some ways to Kh.’s. He, too, returned to his hometown of Zhmerinka, where he discovered that all his family members and neighbours had been killed. He also talked to the locals. Unlike Kh., however, he actually went ahead and killed one perpetrator (when the man resisted arrest, he said later) and arrested two others. Yet, in his story, he emphasized that none of the perpetrators was properly punished. He also complained that their descendants live very well today, some of them also in Canada. Vladimir A.’s life story had no happy ending.

Canadian testimonies, almost entirely recorded by veterans who first immigrated to Israel, ²⁶ put the emphasis not on Jewish solidarity or a change in attitude toward their own Jewishness but instead on lack of appreciation of their personal heroism. ²⁷ They also emphasize being unafraid of such consequences as Soviet punishments (Vladimir A. kills whereas Kh. does not). Canadian testimonies also tend to incorporate elements of deep dissatisfaction with their lives in Canada, since—unlike their American counterparts—they do not receive government pensions. In the United States, most Russian-speaking veterans who were interviewed arrived in the late 1980s or early 1990s under refugee status; therefore, they were eligible for free medical care, subsidised housing, and food assistance programs. To contrast that, in Canada, most interviewees arrived as “sponsored” by their children or grandchildren (who had immigrated on a skilled-labour program, which allows immigration based on professional achievements, education, and age under thirty-five). The interviewees themselves were not eligible for any social benefits, not even healthcare. ²⁸ Most people who were interviewed in Canada consistently complained about being there, blaming their powerless situation and being, what they perceived as burden on their children. ²⁹ I think that this is partially why their stories of the discoveries of the Holocaust in the Red Army have almost always ended with disappointment, as in the case of Vladimir A.

In Berlin, the stories I recorded were almost always wonder-stories, with twists and happy endings. For example, Vladimir Y., a triple-decorated war hero, went to liberate his hometown in Belarus. There, he was caught in a battle and was wounded. A nurse saved him and carried him from the battlefield. She was from the village and German soldiers had killed her family. She was not Jewish but Vladimir said he “took care” of the offenders, meaning he killed them in revenge. He later married the nurse, who also happened to be a former classmate of his sister. The story is full of twists yet ultimately ends on a happy note. ³⁰

I also noticed that in Germany, oral histories speak of violence against both Jews and non-Jews, and revenge, if it comes, is taken on behalf of the Soviet people, not just for the Jews. Also, very often, if not always, interviewees portray non–Soviet-born Jews negatively. Veterans spoke especially harshly about their encounters with Polish and Romanian Jews in Germany, ³¹ whom they described as greedy, dishonest, stand-offish and, at times, “too Jewish.” ³² I can partially explain these attitudes by the fact that in the early 2000s, when I conducted these interviews, these veterans received generous government benefits and pensions from the German government. Meanwhile, Jewish community organizations that distribute these benefits, usually run by non–Soviet-born Jews, often treated them without perceived respect. Thus, the past becomes a story of fighting against Polish and Romanian Jews, rather than a story of fighting against Nazi Germany. In fact, German-based veterans do not usually speak about fighting against “Germany” but of fighting against fascism.

As sociologist George Mead said, each testimony, even if it deals with the distant past, is still the story of the present. Present circumstances determine what people remember and choose to tell about their past. If one indulges into broad strokes, a following partial explanation can be considered. In the United States, their interaction with society happens largely via Jewish communities, synagogues, and community centers. Jewish solidarity is important in the present and becomes important in descriptions of the past. In Canada, Jewish veterans depend on their children, often perceive themselves as not contributing sufficiently to the present, and therefore their stories often turn into laments. In Germany, when former Soviet Jews of the war generation are asked how they could live among descendants of people who had killed their family members, they tend to provide stories that fit a “nothing is what it seems” narrative. Their stories seem to assert that they are feeling comfortable living in the land of the former enemy. ³³

Conclusions

Narratives of Soviet Jewish soldiers encountering the destruction of their communities during the war provide a number of important insights regarding the end of the Holocaust. First, they expand our understanding of the process of liberation, and how individuals and groups reacted to Red Army units entering their places of residence after the German army retreated. Some narratives, for example, suggest that locals feared Jewish Soviet soldiers and that such fears were justified. What role Jewish soldiers and officers played in formal Soviet investigations of Nazi crimes remains unclear, an important avenue of further research. Second, an analysis of narratives about encounters in the aftermath of the Holocaust suggests that the concept of intimate violence should be applied not just to studies of eastern Poland or Baltic states but also to those of the “old” Soviet territories, where the role of local collaborators is still not fully studied. Third, the narratives indicate that Soviet Jews marching through their own destroyed towns and villages might have been much more likely than other soldiers to conduct acts of immediate retaliation against offenders, as opposed to waiting for proper forms of justice. More in-depth analysis of interviews and narratives is needed. Fourth, the autobiographies provide an important insight into how the veterans’ Jewish identity, their sense of belonging and culture, both as an emotion and a memory, changed after they encountered the destruction of their home communities.

Close reading of testimonies as literary sources through formal analysis enables us to learn things that they do not articulate directly. The narrative of violence changes depending on where the person currently lives, and a central part of his life gets reinterpreted to fit in with the ideology and culture of the new place of residence. It is especially remarkable that the story changes radically despite the fact that most of my interviewees do not speak the language of their host country, and, indeed, they get their information about local culture and politics through Russian-language information sources.

Above all, analyzing oral histories and autobiographies of violence, although incomplete as a source of exact facts of how things happened and why, reminds us of something that we, as historians and literary scholars, would often rather ignore: the humanity of everyone involved in the everyday violence of World War II, whether they be victims, perpetrators, bystanders, liberators, resisters, soldiers, officers, or witnesses. In fact, a close reading of Kh.’s story and an analysis of the oral histories of his peers complicates our view of every single one of these players. There are no easy ways to identify heroes or villains, even when one uses Propp’s methodology of analyzing stories as fairy tales. One thing is clear: we simply cannot ignore life stories like Kh.’s simply because they are written or told in Russian or Yiddish, or because they are otherwise obscure. If we do, the full history of how European Jews dealt with the aftermath of the Holocaust will remain incomplete.