Book review: So they remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine
Maksim Goldenshteyn (2022)
In June 1996, Florida resident Ruth Glasberg Gold visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
At the Hall of Remembrance, she was struck by a major omission. The camps and ghettos of Transnistria, which Ruth herself had survived and described in her memoir, did not feature in a gallery of sites that included, among others, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Janowska. Ruth was appalled and decided to make it her mission to remedy this oversight. Several years of intense lobbying paid off; in 1999, Transnistria was engraved on the walls of the hall next to other, better known synonyms for industrial-scale murder.
Despite Ruth’s victory, Transnistria remains to this day one of the most sketchy chapters of the Holocaust. Various factors, including the nature of the camps, but also the post-war fate of their survivors, have meant that the ordeal of the hundreds of thousands of the Jews detained and killed in this strip of land in Romanian-occupied Soviet Ukraine remains veiled in fog, even for those fairly familiar with the Holocaust.
A new book published this month, written by Soviet-born Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, has the potential to partially correct this wrong. A family memoir, but also a rigorously documented history which at times reads like an exciting adventure novel, So they remember is built around the testimonies of the author’s maternal grandfather, Motl, and his older sister Etel. As a 12-year-old child, Motl and his family were uprooted and herded into the former sanatorium of Pechera, the most inhumane concentration site in the territory entrusted by the Germans to their Romanian allies.
Together with their Soviet-Jewish brethren and those deported to Transnistria from the newly gained territories Romania wanted to cleanse of Jews, Motl and his family found themselves in an archipelago of disorganised camps and ghettos where rules largely depended on the mood of the guards. Unlike the better known German-run camps, the sites in Transnistria were not operated according to any coherent set of guidelines. The Romanian authorities had no clear plan for extermination; in these camps, the ‘final solution’ was left to typhus, extreme weather conditions and starvation, punctuated by occasional mass executions and even the burning alive of those deemed too weak to walk to their graves.
Human sympathy
In order to save themselves money and trouble, the camp administrators did not provide sustenance or clothing to prisoners. Instead, the inmates had to barter their dwindling possessions for food with non-Jewish neighbours who came near the fence out of need, curiosity, hostility and, not infrequently, pure human sympathy. As the captives ran out of items, the youngest saw themselves forced to escape the loosely guarded camps to beg for food in nearby villages in the hope of helping to feed their families. Many were murdered embarking on such expeditions – shot by soldiers or guards who routinely beat or killed Jews just for fun.
Through his relatives’ recollections, notes written by Motl and accounts of other survivors, Goldenshteyn vividly reconstructs the story of how his grandfather and his sister Etel saved their mother and younger siblings from the fate of Motl’s father and grandfather, who were killed or died during their captivity. Motl’s experience in escaping from Pechera turned him into an expert guide and courier who brought several camp inmates to the relative safety of their more fortunate families in the ghettos.
The solitary treks, plodding through knee-deep snow across forests to evade Romanian gendarmes, are unforgettable tales of courage, determination and stubborn hope. His accounts offer a collection of individual stories encompassing a full range of human behaviour under extreme circumstances. They include numerous instances of solidarity from Christian Ukrainians, who defied the occupying forces to grant the fugitives food and shelter – widespread, anonymous acts of heroism without which few camp prisoners would have made it in Transnistria.
So they remember offers a nuanced picture of day-to-day life in the ‘Forgotten Cemetery’, as the more than 200 concentration camp sites of Transnistria, run by Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Romania, are still referred to. Besides shedding light on the relations between inmates and non-Jewish peasants, the book touches on the abuses of the self-appointed Jewish authorities in the ghettos and camps. Goldenshteyn also exposes the hierarchy among the victims – with the richer and assimilated deportees from urban Romania looking down on the more traditional, Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian artisans.
Agency and dignity
By retrieving these lives in all their complexity, Goldenshteyn restores agency and dignity to a vast group of people generally treated as a lump of shadowy outlines unworthy of the luxury of individuality. Unlike those who were gassed in Auschwitz or executed at Babi Yar, the Jews who went through hell in Transnistria do not have a place in the collective consciousness of the West; the world’s dignitaries do not honour their memory in speeches; they have not inspired bestselling novels and Hollywood movies, and their diaries and memoirs remain largely excluded from the cannon of testimonial literature of the Holocaust.
Many decades after a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking Soviet Army captain informed the incredulous inmates of the liberation of Pechera, Transnistria is still terra incognita for the wider public, even in the country of the direct perpetrators. One explanation is the disorderly fashion in which the camps operated. Lacking common and easily recognizable facets – such as chimneys, trains or tattoos – the Transnistria camps were harder to represent in cultural products for mass consumption.
Unlike survivors in Germany, Poland or Romania proper, who emigrated en masse to democratic countries after the war, Ukrainian Jews continued to live under Soviet rule for decades. Until Gorbachev loosened the grip in the mid-1980s, the Communist Party suppressed any public expression of the specificity of Jewish suffering. It did not fit in the official interpretation of the Great Patriotic War, so the regime diluted it into the granitic narrative of Soviet civic heroism.
Communist orthodoxy also crushed the Jewish identity of entire generations of Ukrainian Jews, including the author’s, and that of his parents and grandparents. The description of the psychological mechanisms of self-denial is another highlight of So they remember, which also gives an account of how the author’s family of Russian-speaking Jewish refugees gradually reclaimed their Jewishness in America.
Romania officially acknowledged its culpability in the Holocaust in Transnistria in 2004. But what happened in this bucolic region beyond the Dniester River – the Nistru River in Romanian – is still little more than a footnote in the Second World War history taught in the country. While the accounts of the Jews who were persecuted and massacred within Romania’s borders are frequently revisited in books, newspapers and television programmes, the human stories behind the victims of Transnistria are conspicuously absent from Romania’s social imaginary.
Nationalist apologists
The unfamiliarity with individual Transnistria tragedies has greatly contributed to the whitewashing of Romania’s philo-Nazi dictator. Antonescu’s nationalist apologists generally acknowledge only a fraction of his role in pogroms such as that of Iasi (a three-day combined action directed by the state which resulted in the slaughter of more than 13 000), overlooking the immense suffering caused by his regime, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that resulted beyond the country’s borders.
One of Transnistria’s worst massacres took place in Bogdanovka. Here, Goldenshteyn writes, ‘… when starvation, disease, and exposure did not reduce their numbers quickly enough, forty-eight thousand Jews—mostly from Odessa and also from Bessarabia—were shot at the edge of a ravine under the pretence of typhus prevention’.
‘The bodies were then cremated by a team of two hundred Jews, most of whom were killed in turn. Five thousand Jews deemed unable to walk to the execution site had already been burned alive in two stables. The killings were conducted by the Romanian gendarmes and a mix of ethnic German and Ukrainian policemen.’
Few people around the world know as much about the Holocaust as Nazi hunter and historian Efraim Zuroff, who is the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In a recent interview with The Times of Israel on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the massacre, Zuroff acknowledged that he had never heard about the crimes of Bogdanovka.
‘I’m embarrassed to say that I had no knowledge of that atrocity,’ Zuroff told the newspaper. ‘The question is not how gruesome it was, as numerous Holocaust atrocities were unvelievably horrific, but it’s a question of “coverage”, for lack of a better word,’ he added.
A few years before his death, Motl Braverman told the author: ‘You should write this so that no one forgets …. so they remember,’ thus giving a title to the book that was to come. Goldenshteyn has masterfully completed his grandfather’s assignment, and So they remember is a perfect antidote to this long neglected episode of the Holocaust.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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