running in the dusty streets, their curls and eyes sparkling lists, lists that did not overlook hundred-year old elders or next to the pale hair and eyes of their Ukrainian counter- newborn babies. These lists ensured the death of every last parts and mingling like flowers generously scattered upon Jew in Ukraine. the rich, soft Ukrainian soil. Our grandfathers lived here; We must remember that mass murder was carried out our mothers, and the mothers of our sons were born here. uniformly, according to strict and elaborate instructions in So much sweat and so many tears have been shed here that which provisions were made for how to murder a person no one could think to call the Jew a stranger, or say that he who was too senile to walk, and one who hadn’t yet left is alien to this land. his mother’s arms or taken his first steps. It was announced I travelled and walked this land from the northern in hundreds of towns that Jews would be sent to ghettos Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the and were required to gather fifteen kilograms of baggage; Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along and in hundreds of towns, they were then led to the the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this outskirts and murdered with the latest automatic weapons. time, I met one single Jew. This was Lieutenant Shloyme Even now, even a year or two after the event, people who I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at iev nd during all this time, I met one single ew Shmilevich Kipershtein. He fell into German entrapment happened to see these executions still weep and lose their in September of 1941 near the city Iagotin. His wife Vasilina ability to speak upon recounting the images of horror and Grigorievna Sokur, a Christian, had tried to pass him off as madness to which they became witnesses. a Moldavian. The Gestapo brought her in for interrogation It is impossible to recount the names of all the several times and came to her home two different times colonels, generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants in the suspecting that her husband was a Jew, but she insisted German army who assisted the Gestapo by organising that her husband’s name was Stepan, and his family name the execution of a people. It is impossible to recount the Novak. I met him, spoke with him, spent an entire evening names of all the soldiers, lance-corporals, senior lance- listening to his stories, and all of us—Kipershtein, his wife, corporals, non-commissioned officers, security guards and his fellow Christian neighbours, and I marvelled at the fact policemen who carried out this murder. that Kipershtein is alive and has not been killed. I did not How is this murder different from the hundreds and meet any other Jews in Ukraine. Acquaintances told me thousands of people that the Germans executed elsewhere that they had seen one Jew in Kharkov and one in Kursk; in fascist-occupied Europe? There is a difference, and it lies the writer Ilya Ehrenburg told me that he had met a Jewish in the fact that the fascists execute French, Dutch, Serbian, female partisan somewhere in southern Ukraine. But that Ukrainian, Russian and Czech people for violating fascist is all. rules and laws—hiding a switchblade or an old revolver, Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth accidentally uttering an angry word, a young man refusing century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish to abandon his elderly parents for a German labour camp, people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds or offering a sip of water to a partisan. But the Germans of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are execute the Jews only because of the fact that they are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on Jews. In their view, Jews have no right to be alive. To this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians? be a Jew is the greatest transgression, a crime that can The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth. be punished only by death. That is why all the Jews in It is neither meaningful nor possible to list the names of Ukraine were murdered, and that is why they were killed every victim, for all of them are equally innocent and must in many countries in Europe. The majority of those killed be counted, regardless of whether they were famous and were old women, the elderly, sick people and children. The world-renowned scholars, or whether they were unknown, reason for this is that able-bodied men, women and youth barely literate women living in quiet shtetls far from any were able to retreat along with the Red Army and are now railroads. Why name some of the victims but remain silent either fighting in its ranks or working on its behalf. Those about others? But it is impossible to list an entire people who stayed behind in Ukraine did not have the strength by name. There is no sense in, and no possibility of naming to leave. It was these people—old people, sick people all the places where Jews were murdered in great numbers and children—whom the Germans killed in cold blood, during the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942. These annihilating all of them to a man. executions took place in every large and small city and in As long as humanity has existed on earth, there has every shtetl. The only thing that must be said is that if there never been a murder of innocent and defenceless people were 100 Jews living in a small town, then 100 Jews were as organised, massive, and as cruel as this one. This is the slaughtered, nowhere a single person less. If 55,000 Jews greatest crime ever committed in history, and history has lived in a city, then in that city 55,000 Jews were killed, known many crimes; it is written with blood. This is a and never a single person less. These massacres, we must matter of the murder of an entire people, the slaughter of understand, were carried out according to finely detailed millions of defenceless children, women and elders. Jewish Quarterly • 1…