Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday November 9, 2007

The hunt is on

Newly opened archives point to more Holocaust-era graves

by michael j. jordan
jta

bershad, ukraine | In May, workers laying a gas pipe in a southern Ukrainian village dug into a buried chamber containing 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.”

Momentum is growing in the search for such sites.

French Catholic priest Patrick Desbois has pinpointed 600 in Ukraine during the past seven years. He 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.

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 figure of

6 million Jewish Holocaust victims, as recently opened archives in Eastern Europe enable researchers to explore a virtual black hole in Holocaust research: the genocide of Jews in the Soviet Union.

With archival material 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 Holocaust death toll.

“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 the matter.

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

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.

The Einsatzgruppen’s 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 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.

While Germany became a trove for Holocaust research, the Soviet Union remained closed. Only in recent years have researchers begun to reveal the stories in Soviet archives.

“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.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.