Ukraine 2007

Reassessing the Holocaust in Ukraine

Nov. 05	JTA	Priest hunts for Jewish dead in Ukraine's Nazi-era killing fields
Nov. 01	JTA	Unearthing mass graves unveils history
Sep. 09	AP	Elderly Ukrainians Testify on Holocaust
Aug. 19	AP	Holocaust Story Inspires Pride, Doubt
Aug. 16	JTA	Ghetto victims get Jewish reburial
Jul. 05	AP	French priest uncovers long-buried horrors
Jun. 14	Reuters	Jewish wartime dead reburied in Ukraine
Jun. 07	AP	Jews want control of grave in Ukraine
Jun. 05	AP	Mass grave from WWII found in Ukraine

 

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JTA: Global Jewish News Service - 11.05.2007

Priest hunts for Jewish dead in Ukraine's Nazi-era killing fields

By Michael J. Jordan 

USTIA, Ukraine (JTA) – The old man by the pig farm said Jews are buried there. Somewhere.

With that tip in mind, an unlikely French-Ukrainian team of investigators drives along a bumpy dirt track, past a watermelon patch ripening under the hot July sun. The road ends abruptly at the foot of a sunflower field.

Misha Strutinsky, a square-jawed Ukrainian ballistics expert, leaps into action. Decked out in a beret, fatigues and combat boots, Strutinsky clutches his spade in one hand and a metal detector in the other.

Trudging into knee-high sunflowers, he stomps on stalks, waving his detector inches above the ground.

Twenty minutes later the metal detector pings; Strutinsky plunges in his spade.

“Gilza!” he yells out in Ukrainian: bullet casings.

With that, the mystery of what happened to 1,600 Jews who disappeared in Ustia during the winter of 1941-42 may be at its end.

This question may be solved, but many such mysteries persist in Ukraine, the killing fields of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the so-called “Holocaust of bullets.”

For the time being, this is the only group conducting regular, methodical fieldwork tracing the last steps of these missing Jews, though several other groups have spent time searching for Jewish bodies here.

It’s led by a French Catholic priest.

“The Holocaust is not just a Jewish story because the killers were not Jews,” says the Rev. Patrick Desbois, head of Yahad-In Unum and a longtime activist in Catholic-Jewish reconciliation efforts. “This is why we should care about it.”

Inspired by the ordeal of his grandfather, a French soldier whom the Germans sent to a POW camp in Ukraine, Desbois and his colleagues have marked some 600 mass graves in the country over the past seven years.

Inching east to west, Desbois says another 2,000 more may remain undiscovered.

While a “mass grave” may contain a few dead, this summer the team found a killing field of some 48,000 Jews in the southern village of Bogdanovka. That eclipsed even the notorious Babi Yar, where Germans machine-gunned 34,000 over two days in September 1941.

The approach of Yahad-In Unum, which melds the Hebrew and Latin words for “together,” is simple detective work: Going door to door, the group’s members seek out elderly Ukrainian eyewitnesses, some of whom were as young as 6 during the war.

Desbois’ team of non-Jews interviews non-Jews, bringing dignity to dead Jews.

Desbois does not pass judgment or explore the interviewees’ sentiments about the killing, lest they refuse to share their knowledge. Instead he pursues the facts with unwavering single-mindedness: “What happened to the Jews? Where are they buried?”

After recording this oral history, Yahad-In Unum tracks down and marks the “martyr site” with GPS coordinates. It’s then up to world Jewry to decide if and how to commemorate.

For this approach, Desbois has earned deep praise: Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, calls him a tzaddik, a righteous person. The Florida Jew who raises funds for Desbois, Aryeh Rubin, dubs him “the most righteous of the righteous gentiles.”

Desbois does not do this exhaustive work alone. His colleagues all seem to possess a keen interest in history and historical justice, especially as they hear firsthand and in graphic detail about the extent of human cruelty: people burned alive, children thrown down wells, pits in which people were buried alive and “took three days to die.”

Among Desbois’ eight-member team this July were his field coordinator, Pierre-Philippe Preux, and photographer, Guillaume Ribot. Strutinsky, the Ukrainian ballistics expert, honed his skills searching for Soviet troops felled in the forests of western Ukraine.

Desbois’ Ukrainian translator Svetlana Biryulova is herself a historian.

“I’m a Christian,” Biryulova says, “and I believe every person should have a cross or some kind of memorial above their grave. They shouldn’t be forgotten like dogs.”

Desbois’ right-hand man on the ground is Andrej Umansky, 24, the archivist and lone team member with Jewish roots.

Umansky’s family is Ukrainian and Jewish. He immigrated to Germany in 1992. This work, he says, connects him to all three cultures. His Yiddish-speaking grandmother died in 2000, before Umansky was curious enough about the Holocaust to ask her.

Now Umansky learns up close what happened to Jews and their Ukrainian neighbors, a process he describes as “very difficult psychologically.”

“There were bad people, of course,” he says, “but I also think at least half of the ordinary people were not indifferent to what happened to the Jews.”

Umansky has spent much of the past three years combing through archives in the Bundesarchiv in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Armed with research, Desbois descends on random towns and villages to pinpoint the precise locations of mass graves.

Late one afternoon Yahad-In Unum arrives in Ustia, a quiet village of crooked picket fences and apple, pear and cherry orchards. Asking around, team members quickly identify the home of an old-timer.

Desbois sends out Biryulova to cajole the target in their native Ukrainian tongue: “You’ll tell your story to the priest, won’t you?”

Of course, says the 85-year-old babushka.

“I told you – they’re waiting for us,” Desbois tells JTA.

In his years of offering this confessional opportunity, Desbois says only one villager has refused him.

Desbois says the Ukrainian villagers he encounters speak from a sense of “fraternity with the injustice of what happened to the Jews.” Many remember their own experience in the 1932-33 famine, which killed millions and for which they blame Mosow.

On this day the team also interviews two more women, 92 and 77. In each case, seated outside beside a cherry tree or beneath grape vines, children and grandchildren listen, sometimes hearing the story for the first time.

By nightfall the team finds the farm of Volodimir Oselsky, 72, who has lived his entire life up the road from the pig farm where the Jews were detained all winter.

He agrees to meet the next morning.

The next day, Oselsky recalls how on their last day, the Jews were marched from the pig farm across a small river and on to the clay mine two miles away.

He gets up and climbs into the van to guide the team to where it happened.

Once there, Strutinsky is quickly on the case. After he finds a second bullet casing, the ballistics expert pronounces himself “99 percent sure” Jews lie underfoot. Why else would German-made bullets be this far from the front?

“C’est incroyable,” Preux remarks.

More corroborating accounts are needed, but their work here is basically finished. Now it’s up to rabbinic authorities to handle any Jewish burial rites.

After lunch, Desbois’ team heads off to the next village – to record more interviews, to locate another grave.

“The bones have been in the ground a long time, so there’s time to make Kaddish or memorials,” Preux says. “The most important thing now are the testimonies, or the memories of these people will just disappear.”

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JTA: Global Jewish News Service - 11.01.2007

Unearthing mass graves unveils history

Marking and memorializing the Nazi killing fields of Eastern European Jews makes for far more than a macabre historical footnote. The fieldwork and research paints a clearer picture of how many Jews died during the Holocaust.

By Michael J. Jordan 

BERSHAD, Ukraine (JTA) – In May, Ukrainian workers laying a gas pipe in a southern village dug into a buried chamber of thousands of Jews killed during the Holocaust.

That same month, a construction crew building a new office complex in western Ukraine burrowed into the corpses of several dozen more Jews.

Stumbling upon such mass graves is not particularly unusual in Eastern Europe.

Less well known is how many more “martyr sites” lie undiscovered and unmarked in fields and forests across the region – wherever mobile Nazi killing units scorched the earth in the so-called “Holocaust of bullets.”

It seems momentum is growing in the search for such sites.

French Catholic priest Patrick Desbois has pinpointed 600 in Ukraine over the past seven years, and says he may find another 1,800 as he moves farther east.

The Killing Sites Project of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem has identified from archives some 700 settlements in Ukraine and 200 in Belarus where Jews likely were massacred.

Even on Polish soil, where it seems every aspect of the six Nazi death camps has been dissected and detailed, the country's chief rabbi says evidence is mounting that a number of unmarked mass graves remain in the country’s eastern woodlands.

“From time to time we’d hear about them,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich said. “But over the past two to three years, more have come forward to say, ‘Rabbi, there’s a mass grave over here’ and ‘Rabbi, there’s a mass grave over there.’ And one plus one plus one adds up. You begin to realize we may be talking about a much larger number than anyone was talking about previously.”

Marking and memorializing these killing fields makes for far more than a macabre historical footnote.

The fieldwork presents a belated opportunity to perform Jewish burials and say a proper Kaddish for the victims, and the research paints a clearer picture of how many Jews died during the Holocaust and how many survived.

That research may one day alter the historic 6 million figure of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as recently opened archives in Eastern Europe enable researchers to fill in the blanks of what had been a virtual black hole in Holocaust research: the genocide of Jews in the Soviet Union.

With archival materials and witness testimonies casting a spotlight on what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, eastern Romania and western Russia, scholars soon may be able to record a more accurate death toll from the Holocaust.

“The most conservative estimate of how many were killed overall – 5.2 million – can be documented,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“But then you have the question mark, precisely in this region: How many Jews were able to flee east? Or were evacuated by the Soviet authorities to the East? Or were drafted into the Red Army?”

Those who still lie buried in unmarked pits may help elucidate.

Defying researchers, most remain undiscovered – for reasons entangled with politics, perception and funding priorities.

The primary problem is the nature of the killings themselves, which began well before the first gas chamber was operational in Poland in 1942.

When Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941, paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen, or “special-duty groups,” trailed behind the front, systematically cleansing the countryside of Hitler’s “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemies.

The most notorious event occurred at Babi Yar, the city ravine in Kiev where nearly 34,000 Jews were shot over two days in September 1941.

In smaller towns and villages, the Germans often carried out the killing in plain view, pulling Jews from their homes and shooting them on the spot or in streets, in the Jewish cemetery or in the woods. Local collaborators sometimes joined in enthusiastically.

The Einsatzgruppen’s own records claim responsibility for 1 million deaths; historian Raul Hilberg puts the figure at 1.4 million.

After the Holocaust, relatives who might have memorialized these killing sites were dead themselves or had fled elsewhere.

Then, as the Iron Curtain came down on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union – which had lost 20 million of its own citizens during the war – ordered that no one ethnic or religious group be singled out for its victimization. Instead the carnage was portrayed as an ideological battle between communism and fascism.

This helps explain why the memorials the Soviets did build often were labeled generically for “Soviet victims of fascism.”

After Stalin launched his anti-Zionist crusade in the early 1950s, the topic of Jewish victimhood became taboo and probing it ran the risk of imprisonment.

Nevertheless, members of the Extraordinary Soviet Commission to Investigate the Crimes of the Nazi Occupiers were quite meticulous in documenting the Nazis’ vast crimes, Western researchers say, and their evidence was used in court to convict alleged collaborators.

Yet while Germany became a treasure trove for Holocaust research, the Soviet Union remained closed.

Only in recent years have researchers begun to reveal the stories Soviet archives have to tell.

“Political developments in the past 20 years have enabled us to focus on an area of the Holocaust that may not have been prioritized enough,” said Philip Carmel, international relations director for the Brussels-based Conference of European Rabbis, which is pursuing an ambitious project of its own to document the Jewish cemeteries of Europe.

“There was more to the Holocaust than the death camps,” Carmel said.

In the late 1990s, the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations in Ukraine, or Vaad, conducted its own limited search for unmarked sites of massacres. They discovered some 200, according to activist Igor Desner.

It’s like “finding dimes in the Manhattan sewage system: We know they’re there, but how many and how to find them is very difficult,” Desner said.

For Jewish groups with the resources for such an undertaking, the task of reviving communal Jewish life and assisting needy survivors took precedence over searching for unmarked graves.

“The priority has been for living Holocaust survivors, who need home care and other assistance,” said Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Claims Conference.

In 1998, the Claims Conference gave $40,000 to Vaad’s grave-searching efforts. More recently the organization contributed $100,000 to the work of the French priest Desbois.

One of the more critical breakthroughs in researching the unmarked graves came when the vast Soviet archives on the subject were copied and transferred to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When cross-referenced with other sources for reliability, these once-sealed archives illuminate a trail for researchers to follow and unravel the mystery of missing bodies.

A windfall of material also came from the International Tracing Service’s secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, which recently transferred its millions of images of concentration-camp survivors to the museum in Washington.

Buffered by this research, the mass-graves movement appears to be gathering speed.

Desbois soldiers on with his small but methodical project. Schudrich says the Polish Jewish community soon will be reaching out to non-Jewish Poles to help locate the last remaining mass graves.

The director of Yad Vashem’s Killing Sites project, David Bankier, says he and his colleagues plan to start field research next year in Ukraine.

“Why is this important? It’s important for the Jews who live in these countries,” said Bankier, who heads Yad Vashem’s International Institute of Holocaust Research. “They would like to have a gravestone on the site where their family members were assassinated. And these are the only cemeteries for them.”

But even if these graves are discovered and marked, what next?

With few or no Jews remaining in these areas to preserve and protect them, these sites left untended may become targets of vandalism or looting.

Some marked sites already have been spotted with bits of bone lying about. Experts suspect looters went excavating for gold, jewels and other valuables.

Marking these sites “kind of identifies for them where to dig, so rather than be helpful, it does the reverse,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

“If you create a memorial, have a ceremony, then go back to Israel or the United States, the concern is what happens to that site. You haven’t completed the task.”

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Associated Press - 09.09.2007

Associated Press 

Elderly Ukrainians Testify on Holocaust

By Maria Danilova and Randy Herschaft

BOGDANOVKA, Ukraine — From the porch of her mud hut, Vera Filonok saw tens of thousands of Jews shot, thrown in a ravine and set on fire. Many were still alive and they writhed in the flames "like flies and worms."

The memories of what she saw in 1941 have seared her soul for six decades, but until recently she had talked about it with no one except neighbors in her remote Ukrainian village. Then a soft-spoken French priest came to town.

Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois and his small team of investigators have spent six years canvassing the towns and villages of Ukraine to patiently hear elderly people tell of what they saw during those terrible years when they were young.

He says his team has pinpointed more than 600 mass execution sites, about 70 percent of them previously unknown. It has surveyed about a third of Ukraine, he says, and estimates there are at least 2,500 such sites throughout the Texas-sized country.

The work of Desbois and his Yahad-In Unum group is adding important new information to the history of the Holocaust — a period exhaustively studied in some countries but still veiled in much of the former Soviet Union.

With the Soviet collapse, the declassification of Soviet war archives and the general opening up of this country of 47 million, it has now become possible to speak to the witnesses.

Vital to the effort, says Desbois, is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and its vast Soviet archival material available. That and Desbois' field work have expanded historians' knowledge about the public nature of the killings, the large variety of methods of execution, and the Nazis' forced recruitment of children to assist in their actions.

"You have a marriage of validation with the sources 60 years apart," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "Using the two sources together one can understand what happened on the ground in those towns and villages in Ukraine."

While the Soviet Union glorified its victory over the Nazis, it refused to acknowledge the massive and systematic killings of Jews. The refusal reflected both anti-Semitism and official resistance to singling out ethnic groups in what was supposed to be a single Soviet nation.

Historians say some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Their remains are strewn around the country in common graves, many of them ignored and unmarked.

The destruction of Ukrainian Jewry is epitomized by Babi Yar, a ravine in the capital Kiev where the Nazis killed about 34,000 Jews during just two days in September 1941. What happened in Bogdanovka was even bloodier — 48,000 killed. And the perpetrators were not Germans but Romanians and the Ukrainian police they enlisted to help them play their own part in Hitler's genocide.

In 1941, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis occupied a large part of what is now southern Ukraine and began exterminating Jews. Those who survived the initial killings were herded to Bogdanovka and placed in stables and pigsties teeming with fleas and manure.

The massacre began when the Romanians and Ukrainians nailed shut one of the pigsties' doors and windows, then torched it, burning all inside alive. The killing went on for three weeks in late December 1941 and early January 1942 — with a break for Christmas.

Vera Filonok was 16 when she witnessed the blaze from Konstantinovka, a village lying across the quiet Bug River. "We sensed the smell — of burning hair, clothes, bones — a very strong, acrid smell," she said, raising a hand to her wrinkled face. "People were being burned alive. For me that was the most terrifying thing."

After the fire came gunshots, recalled Filonok's neighbor Raya Trofimova. A German soldier living in her family's home lent her his binoculars; through them she saw victims kneel in front of a gully in their underwear, their valuables piled beside them.

"They would line them up before the ravine and shoot them ... they would tear away children from mothers and just throw them in there," said Trofimova, now 85. When her mother returned home that day, Trofimova recalled, she shut the windows and draped them with blankets to shield her three children from the sights and smells.

"Ta-ta-ta," Trofimova mimicked the gunshots ringing out across the river, day and night. "And what could we do? If you protested, you would be taken to the same pit."

Anatoly Veliminchuk was 11. He said he saw people thrown into two wells, many still alive.

"I felt bad, it was painful — what did it matter that they spoke their Jewish way and we spoke Ukrainian or Moldovan?" he asked as he pointed to what used to be the wells — now two small pits in a field covered with dry grass and discarded plastic bottles.

Desbois registers an event or killing site only after obtaining three independent witness accounts. His team has two translators, a photographer and cameraman, a ballistics specialist and a mapping expert.

The 52-year-old priest was raised on his grandfather's stories of surviving a Nazi prison camp in Ukraine, and has devoted his career to healing wounds between Catholics and Jews. His group, Yahad-In Unum — which combines the Hebrew and Latin words for "together" — was founded by influential Catholics and Jews.

Ukraine's Jewish leaders say the community is grateful for the effort. "What they are doing is holy work, because everybody is forgetting about this tragedy," said Yakov Blaikh, Ukraine's chief rabbi.

The Holocaust is still controversial and divisive in Ukraine because of the wartime collaboration with the Nazis, and the museum nearest to Bogdanovka commemorates those "who saved the motherland," but says nothing about the massacres of Jews.

Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, said Ukraine still needs to more fully confront the Holocaust, but that allowing Desbois to operate here shows that "there is no longer that endless untruthful silence that existed in Soviet Ukraine."

Shattering that silence is Desbois's goal.

At the end of a long day of talking with tearful witnesses, his shoes covered with dust, Desbois said his mission isn't to seek retribution — "I am not here to judge" — but to record the tragedy for the sake of its victims.

"God wants these poor people to be finally buried and rest in peace ... and that they receive the Jewish prayer they deserve," he said.

Associated Press Writer Randy Herschaft reported from New York. 

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Associated Press - 08.19.2007

Associated Press 

Holocaust Story Inspires Pride, Doubt

By Natasha Lisova, Maria Danilova and Randy Herschaft

ISPAS, Ukraine -- It is a story of courage and kindness during the first tragic days of the Holocaust in Ukraine – the tale of how a village rose up against an anti-Semitic gang of killers to save its Jewish neighbors.

A researcher stumbled on the inspiring story this year. Now some of Ukraine's Jewish leaders plan to raise a monument, host a delegation of students from Israel and stage a ceremony Wednesday honoring this small farming community in western Ukraine.

But 66 years later there are conflicting accounts of what happened in Ispas during that terrible summer of 1941, when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union triggered an outbreak of anti-Semitic violence.

Residents and one survivor say the 2,000 villagers risked their lives for the sake of about 100 Jews, an account supported by some leaders of Ukraine's Jewish community and the scholar who uncovered the tale.

But another survivor says there were no heroes in Ispas. And a leading Holocaust expert says that most of the Jews of Ispas were killed by fellow villagers.

At the start of World War II, Ukraine had a history of anti-Semitism, from the pogroms of the czarist era to the silent discrimination of Soviet times. As Nazi troops and their Romanian allies began occupying western territories under Soviet rule, the ancient bigotry boiled over into cases of local residents robbing and killing their Jewish neighbors.

It was an early outburst of the savagery that became the Holocaust.

More than 2,100 Ukrainians have been cited by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, but these were mostly individual acts of heroism. The Ispas story – if it could be confirmed – would be a unique case of an entire community in Ukraine defending its Jews.

A leader of Ukraine's Jewish community has led a drive to honor the village, including celebrations in which Israeli students are expected to participate.

"We are very proud that our village didn't allow bloodshed, didn't allow Jews to be killed," Vasylyna Kulyuk, a frail 80-year-old from Ispas, said in an interview. She described two of her former Jewish classmates – Geyntsya Rozenberg and Rifka Gerstel – with tears in her eyes.

"We were at the same class and we shared bread, "she said. "I would like so much at least to exchange letters with those girls. Only let them be alive."

Rozenberg apparently perished during the war. But Rifka Gerstel survived. And she does not recall Ispas fondly.

Gerstel, now 79 and living outside Tel Aviv, told the AP that her neighbors did stop a gang of anti-Semites from killing the village's Jews – but then some villagers turned around and robbed the Jews and drove them out of their homes.

"They came into the house and took everything," Gerstel said in a telephone interview. "We had such a beautiful house. We had a cow. We didn't say anything, because we were afraid for our lives. We knew that the Ukrainians slaughtered all the Jews in one of the villages nearby."

The next day, she said, the villagers marched the Jews away. Gerstel said she spent the rest of the war in a ghetto in central Ukraine. Her father, brother, grandfather and a baby nephew all died. "I suffered, I suffered very much," she said, her voice choking.

Told that Ispas was being honored for the treatment of its Jews, she said: "They don't deserve any monuments or any prizes."

There is no dispute over what happened in most of that area – now western Ukraine – that summer. Thousands of Jews were murdered and their houses looted.

Those still alive were rounded up by Romanian troops and deported eastward to camps and ghettos. Some of them survived the war, but many were executed or died of starvation and disease, according to Radu Ioanid, director for International Archival Programs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Israel Minster, another member of Ispas' long lost Jewish community, has a different recollection.

Minster, now 86 and living near Haifa, was staying in a neighboring village at the time of the attack, but other survivors later told him that the ethnic Ukrainians had rallied to the defense of the village Jews.

"In the neighboring village ... they cut everybody into pieces, they killed everyone," Minster said by telephone. "I was told that when they (the thugs) came to Ispas, our village, the elder – I know him, he is a decent (man) – he didn't allow it."

Minster said he was unaware of looting in Ispas, but heard through friends and neighbors that some residents of nearby areas had pillaged Jewish homes. "Not everybody helped: some helped and some looted," he said.

Mykhailo Andryuk, head of the Ispas village council, said residents of his small community did not loot their neighbors' homes. Gerstel's house, he speculated, might have been on the outskirts of the village and attacked by the retreating anti-Semitic gang.

Several Ukrainian villagers who were children in 1941 said they vividly recollect that day.

Tanas Shtefyuk was 15 when he heard that the killers were approaching and hurried home to spread the news. Shtefyuk recalled that his crippled father, Ivan, summoned the village elders.

They made a difficult and dangerous choice, Shtefyuk said, to stand together against the marauders and protect the Jews who lived among them.

Nadiya Vinnytska's father, Volodymyr, was the village priest. He ran from his house to confront the attackers barefoot, Vinnytska said, because he didn't have time to put on his shoes.

"Calm down. I will not allow you to kill Jews," the priest said, according to Vinnytska, now 83. "They are the same people as us."

Alexei Shtrai, the independent Israeli scholar who uncovered the story, regards Ispas as an inspirational tale. "I believe the fact of saving Jews took place; we just have to prove it," Shtrai said.

The database of victims' names at Israel's Yad Vashem, based mainly on testimony given by survivors and relatives, often years after the event, lists four people as having died in Ispas. Between 17 and 46 villagers perished elsewhere, the records show, suggesting – perhaps – that some Ispas Jews survived the initial pogroms.

Yad Vashem's encyclopedia of Jewish communities of that area, says most of Ispas' Jews were killed by the local population while the rest were deported eastward.

"The fact that the priest tried (to save the Jews) – I can believe it," says Jean Ancel, a leading scholar on Holocaust in the area who co-edited the encyclopedia.

"But the main question is – were the Jews of Ispas saved or not? The answer is clear and without any doubt: they were murdered by their neighbors, by the local population," he said in an interview.

Scholars say some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews died in Holocaust. Today about 400,000 live in Ukraine. No Jews remain in Ispas, residents say.

Oleksandr Feldman, head of the Kiev-based International Center for Tolerance, has urged President Viktor Yushchenko to honor Ispas for its actions during the Holocaust. The center plans to lay a stone in Ispas to commemorate the event.

Estee Yaari, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem said the story of Ispas needs to be investigated further.

"These are complex issues and events that took place and in the absence of conclusive documentary evidence or conclusive testimonies it is difficult to know exactly what happened," she said.

Maria Danilova reported from Kiev and Randy Herschaft from New York. Associated Press Writer Matti Friedman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.


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JTA: Global Jewish News Service - 08.16.2007

Ghetto victims get Jewish reburial

(JTA) The remains of 150 victims of the Kharkov ghetto were given a traditional Jewish burial.

The remains were discovered last year in this western Ukrainian city when construction of a new apartment complex began at the site of the former ghetto. Construction was halted after local Jews protested, and a sample dig turned up the human remains along with what appeared to be a siddur, or prayerbook. 

On Wednesday, the remains of the 150 victims were moved to Drobitzky Yar, a ravine on the city’s outskirts where Nazis murdered more than 15,000 Jews in December 1941 and January 1942. Foreign diplomats, local officials, Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community attended the ceremony.

Larisa Volovik, director of the Kharkov Holocaust Museum, told JTA she obtained classified archival records from 1943 verifying that the site proposed for the apartment complex was used to bury hundreds of Jews killed in the ghetto.

A memorial zone was dedicated at the site in 1992, containing several Holocaust markers including a Wall of Sorrow and a plaque honoring the Righteous Among the Nations. 

"We agreed to remove the remains to Drobitzky Yar and accepted a plan for a new memorial about 100 meters away from the existing Holocaust markers," Volovik said.

She and other Jewish leaders believe many more Jews were murdered on the site of the former ghetto.

"I believe that over 600 burial places are there," Moshe Moskowitz, chief rabbi of the Kharkov region, told JTA. "That is why I asked the mayor of Kharkov to allow representatives of our Jewish community to be present during further excavations."


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Associated Press - 07.05.2007

French priest uncovers long-buried horrors of Holocaust in Ukraine

PARIS (AP) Children, stomachs empty and knees quivering, saw and heard Nazis massacre Jews across the killing fields of Ukraine. Teenagers were forced to bury the victims, shoveling dirt over neighbors and playmates.

Today, these witnesses — now aged men and women — are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history, as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.

The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horrors in Ukraine. Last month, a team of rabbis visited a newly found grave site in the Ukrainian village of Gvozdavka-1 where thousands of Jews were killed during the Nazi occupation.

That was just one site among many: Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been criss-crossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves, many never before recorded.

At least 1.5 million Jews were killed on hills and in ravines across Nazi-occupied Ukraine, most slaughtered by submachine guns before the gas chambers became machines of mass death. Researchers are only now peeling back layers of Soviet-era silence about what they call the "Holocaust by bullets."

Part of Desbois' work so far — video interviews with Ukrainian villagers, photos of newly discovered mass graves, archival documents, and shell casings — is on public display for the first time in a haunting exhibit at Paris' Holocaust Memorial through Nov. 30.

"I'm not here to judge," Desbois, whose Catholic grandfather survived a Nazi camp, said in an interview with The Associated Press. The people whose stories Desbois records, he stresses, were "children, adolescents. They were poor. They were afraid."

And they stayed afraid for decades after World War II.

Soviet leaders gloried in victory over Hitler but focused on their nation's overall war losses, numbering as many as 27 million — barely mentioning the systematic slayings of Jews. Witnesses to the Holocaust and even survivors were considered suspect, with many accused of collaboration and sent to Soviet labor camps. Fear of speaking out about the Nazi occupation lingered even after the USSR collapsed in 1991.

The destruction of Ukrainian Jewry is symbolized by Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital, Kiev, where the Nazis killed about 34,000 Jews during just two days in September 1941. But there were many other killing fields. Desbois' group Yahad-In Unum has covered about a third of Ukraine so far, and the 500 mass graves it has uncovered is quickly approaching previous estimates that put the number in all of Ukraine at 726.

Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, predicts Desbois' team will reach a higher total. He calls their work "critical" to humanity's understanding of the Holocaust.

It fulfills a "memorial purpose, a scholarly research purpose, and a public education purpose," he said. The Paris exhibit, the first time Desbois' painstaking, behind-the-scenes work has been made public, serves the third goal.

Desbois "discovered that elderly eyewitnesses who had never been asked about this, when speaking with a priest, opened up. If you are ever going to bare your thoughts, if you are a Christian, you will bare them to a priest," Shapiro said.

Given Ukraine's history of anti-Semitism, from imperial-era pogroms to modern-day vandalism of Jewish sites, some are reluctant to absolve these Ukrainian witnesses and participants of responsibility in the Holocaust.

Shapiro, however, said: "It is too late to be in a blame game. Our obligation is to understand."

Healing wounds between Jews and Christians has been central to Desbois' career. He heads a group called Yahad-In Unum (which combines the Hebrew and Latin words for "together") founded in 2004 by Paris' influential Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, whose Jewish mother died at Auschwitz, and Rabbi Israel Singer.

Troubled by his grandfather's stories of the Rava Ruska camp in western Ukraine, Desbois visited in the 1990s and asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he didn't know.

One year, Desbois returned to find a new mayor — and 110 farmers waiting to lead him to the grassy knoll.

"I was shocked. It was miserable. To see this place, and these old, weary faces," Desbois said.

Since then, Desbois has been on a mission to fill out historical records. Some of his interview subjects have looked out on grave sites from their kitchen windows for decades.

Some even helped dig those pits, or fill them in.

Samuel Arabski, in a video testimony at the Paris exhibit, described a massacre in his village near Zhytomyr in central Ukraine in 1941, when he was 14:

"A policeman gave me a shovel. ... When I saw people still moving in the grave, I fell sick. A neighbor pushed me away so I wouldn't fall in the pit. ... Then my mother came, and asked me questions I wasn't able to answer."

A few of those bodies stirring beneath the dirt managed to survive. Executioners were generally allowed one bullet per victim, but sometimes only managed to wound, not kill, Desbois said. Witnesses to numerous massacres told him of "stirring" graves and of victims who escaped only to be executed in a later massacre.

Nina Lisitsina was one of the survivors. At 5 years old, in 1944, she was rounded up near Simferopol in Crimea and forced along with other victims to strip off all her clothes to get ready for an execution.

"I remember a woman next to me, a child in her arms. I lost consciousness, and couldn't hear the shots. Apparently they weren't bothering to finish everyone off.

"When I regained consciousness, it was nighttime. I grabbed on to roots of a tree to get out of the ravine. I don't know how I managed."

Her story, too, is part of the Paris exhibit.

Desbois cross-checks every statement with Soviet archives at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and German records. He registers an event or site only after obtaining three independent witness accounts.

Many executions were never recorded, including those of Jewish women who acted as servants and sex slaves for Nazi officers, and those of children who were shot after failed attempts to gas them to death in trucks — an experimental precursor to the gas chambers, Desbois said.

Holocaust scholars say at least 1.5 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.7 million Jews were killed during World War II, and in later years Soviet anti-Semitism drove more away. Today, Ukraine officially has about 100,000 Jews, though the real number is believed to be about 500,000 of its 52 million people.

Yahad in-Unum's researchers rely heavily on family members of victims or survivors. At the Paris exhibit, which is displayed entirely in English and French, a sign near the exit asks anyone with information about someone killed by Nazis in Ukraine to leave a note in an adjacent box or to send an e-mail.

"I want to return dignity to the families," he said. "Every story helps us."


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Reuters - 06.14.2007

Jewish wartime dead reburied in Ukraine

By Ron Popeski

GVOZDAVKA, Ukraine (Reuters) The rabbi removed a small pile of human bones, one by one, from a cardboard box and placed them in a shallow grave in what was once a trench dug in vain by villagers to thwart the advance of Nazi tanks.

This, rabbi Shlomo Baksht said, was justice with dignity for Jewish victims of Nazi brutality whose remains were recently discovered in a post-Soviet Ukrainian village, one of dozens of sites of a systematic killing machine.

"I think the image of what we saw today will remain with me for the rest of my life," Baksht said after he and four other rabbis, dressed in traditional thick jackets and black hats, recited the kaddish prayer for the dead on a sunny hillside.

"Who could have imagined that we would see what we encountered today in just such a place?"

Human bones were dug up in Gvozdavka about a year ago, when the local authority extended gas pipelines into the village, 300 km (180 miles) south of Kiev and not far from the Black Sea port of Odessa, a traditional centre of Jewish culture.

Officials sought details on wartime events from archives in Moscow and found the Germans and their Romanian allies set up a concentration camp on marshland, now a woodworking plant.

"Everyone here knew very well there was a camp and everyone talked about it," said Mykhailo Panchenko, deputy head of the regional administration, who spearheaded the research. "But no one knew exactly where it was and how it was made up."

Data showed 4,772 inmates died in the 2 1/2 years the camp stood, most left to starve or succumb to disease. Accounts later detail shootings, with bodies removed and dumped in nearby pits.

Many came from other parts of Ukraine or from among the large Jewish population in nearby Moldova.

Parfeniy Bogopolsky, one of a handful of residents to remember the occupation, burst into tears outside his modest farmhouse as he recalled daily misery and death at the camp.

"The poor souls, they were all in a marsh. I was sent there with a cart and four bodies were loaded onto it. We took them off to a trench. Our villagers buried them with the others," Bogopolsky, now 85, told the visiting rabbis.

"What had they done wrong? Nothing at all. They all starved to death. Have you seen those trenches? No one does any field work there. Why should they? There are bodies there."

RETRIBUTION

Shielding Jewish neighbours was no easy option.

"People were afraid," he said. The Romanians went from house to house asking questions about anyone who might have been inside. People gave what they could - bread, potatoes, squash."

Life today in Gvozdavka remains slow-moving, with little sign that the relative prosperity of consumer-oriented Kiev and other post-Soviet cities has filtered down to the district.

There is no running water, only wells. Women in kerchiefs drive one, or at most two, cows down dusty roads to pasture. Those with business in nearby villages move about in horse-drawn carts.

After the latest discoveries, forensic experts examined the bones for age, sex and signs of violence. Recent rains uncovered new caches as authorities informed Jewish leaders in Odessa.

Six mass graves were already known and officials escorted the rabbis to newly-found sites of human remains. Agreement was reached to conduct further research and erect a monument to victims to complement a modest Soviet-era marker in a copse.

Jews had accounted for about half the population in the area, part of the Pale of Settlement to which they were confined in tsarist Russia. The holocaust and post-war mass emigration have reduced their numbers to a handful.

For historians, the discoveries underscored the systematic murder of Jews undertaken by "Einsatzgruppe C", one of four such Nazi units. And unlike better known cases like Babiy Yar, the Kiev ravine where more than 33,000 died in two days in September 1941, mass killings were routine in towns and villages.

"Each major town had a ghetto and its own Babiy Yar. This was the case in Odessa and in Lviv (western Ukraine)," said Viktor Korol, history professor at Kiev's National University of Culture and Art.

"It was done secretly, at night. Hardly any witnesses were left alive. Historians and others want the truth established on this tragic episode."

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Associated Press - 06.07.2007

Jews want control of grave in Ukraine

By NATASHA LISOVA

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) Jewish community leaders in southern Ukraine asked Thursday for control over the land where a mass grave believed to contain thousands of Holocaust victims was found.

The community asked local authorities to cede the land so the site could be commemorated and respected properly, said Avraam Volf, the leading rabbi for Odessa and southern Ukraine.

"People have been walking on this territory, cars passing it, cattle driven," Volf said in a statement. "We must do everything possible to prevent such blasphemy."

The mass grave was discovered by chance last month by workers digging gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, northwest of Odessa, regional Jewish leaders said earlier this week.

Jewish leaders in Ukraine and Holocaust scholars said thousands of Jews were brought to the area in November 1941, and that as many as 10,000 were killed.

Village council leader Vera Kryzhanivska pledged to help the Jewish community, and said the council would discuss the land request next week.

"I can predict that the decision will positive," she said.

The Jewish community said it planned to erect a fence around the site, rebury the victims and put up a monument. Experts from Europe and Israel are expected to come to the site next week to consider identification and reburial efforts.

"Not only the dead need this, the living need it most of all. All people regardless of nationality or belief need it," Volf said.

Jewish community members held a commemorative service at the site Thursday and met with local officials.

Roman Shvartsman, from Odessa, said three additional sites with remains had been found, and that residents had suggested there were likely two more.

"Anywhere you dig you find bones — teeth and craniums," Shvartsman said. "It was terrifying."

Kryzhanivska said part of the land was used for grazing and farming and part for keeping tractors and other machinery.

"We knew about this mass grave along the river. But we didn't know where exactly it was located," she said.

Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust — a tragedy powerfully symbolized by Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital of Kiev, where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941.

About 240,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Odessa region, which was occupied by the German-allied Romanians, according to Shvartsman. A mass grave with remains of about 3,500 Jews was found in the region last year.

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Associated Press - 06.05.2007

Mass grave from WWII found in Ukraine

Remains of thousands of Jews killed by Nazis found near concentration camp site

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine near the site of what was once a concentration camp, a Jewish community representative said today.

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were laying gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community. He said that Nazis established a concentration camp near the village in November 1941 killed about 5,000 Jews at or near the site.

"Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there," Shvartsman told The Associated Press.

Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he did not recall Gvozdavka-1 specifically, but was not shocked by the findings.

"I'm not surprised that even in these days there are discoveries such as these, it underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in eastern Europe," he said. "This is an area that Jews were not deported from to concentration camps but rather murdered on the spot."

"The scope is enormous, the number of places where murders were carried out is very large and that is why even now at this point, so late after the events, graves are still being discovered," he added.

"Ukraine was an enormous killing field, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered and the entire region is literally filled with hundreds of mass graves all over, a testament to the enormous scope of the Nazis implementation of the final solution."

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