Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (27 page)

Lack of political loyalty, employment in an administrative post in the previous illegitimate regime, abuse of power by government officials, or exhibition of a sexual peccadillo or other immoral behavior could all be grounds for denunciation, under both the Soviets and the Romanians. The temptation to inform on one’s neighbors and take over their living space—especially in overcrowded apartment buildings in the desirable city center—was also a direct inheritance from the Soviet system.
⁹
The difference now was the clear equation between being an enemy and being a Jew, a union that few Odessans seemed to have difficulty accepting. The city had been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and antisemitic propaganda for decades—from the supposed threat posed by Jewish self-defense organizations in the early 1900s to the more recent efforts of German and Romanian hearts-and-minds campaigns to portray the Soviets as an arm of world Jewry. Older cleavages between Jews and their neighbors now became canyons that only the most heroic Odessans were able to bridge. “They consider the Jews a very perfidious, wily, and unforgiving nation,” reported an agent, “and one that is still capable of a whole range of dirty tricks.”
¹⁰

The personal testimonies of survivors corroborate the stories told in the official documents. David Senyaver was born in the town of Balta, to the north of Odessa, where his family worked as fishmongers. When their house and business were requisitioned by the Soviets in the early 1930s, the family moved into a small shed, paying the price for having been denounced as bourgeois-class enemies. During the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, they decamped to the city, but life was equally hard there, since the family bore an undesirable and potentially deadly class label.

Senyaver was fifteen when Romania took control of Odessa, and he remembered distinctly the crowds that gathered when Jews were told to assemble in the Privoz marketplace near the city center. “The local population, especially the Ukrainians,” he recalled, “were eager to help the Germans and Romanians hunt down their victims, children and youths, hiding in cellars.” When he was expelled from the city in early 1942, destined for the camp at Domanevka, gangs of locals hurled rocks and called out, “You crucified Jesus Christ.” But in his testimony, Senyaver wanted to be clear on a particular point: a local villager, whose Slavic name he recalled decades later, had taken him in after his deportation. It was the Odessans, not the Ukrainian peasants in the countryside, whom he remembered shouting and throwing stones.
¹¹
An urban population practiced in unmasking class traitors, exposing the wreckers of socialism, and rooting out enemies of the people easily transferred those techniques to uncovering secret Jews.

Jews did manage to survive in Odessa throughout the war, but they were few. Some hid in plain sight by obtaining or forging official documents that certified their status as Karaim, the ethnically distinct pre-Talmudic Jews who were generally left alone by the authorities. Others passed as Ukrainians, Armenians, or members of other ethnic groups, especially if they were able to move to a part of the city where neighbors were unlikely to know their true identity. Careful planning and raw chance mattered in equal measure. Lyudmila Kalika, a teenage girl, survived with her family through a combination of luck and neighborly piety. When the war broke out, they were living in a communal apartment—common in the early Soviet period—and shared their space with another family.

That fact turned out to be a blessing. When the Kalikas decided to go into hiding rather than report to the ghetto, the other family simply expanded into the unused space, rather than have it expropriated by the building superintendent or the occupation authorities. The Kalikas’ flatmates were Jews who had managed to acquire papers that identified them, falsely, as Karaim. The apartment, located on the ground floor, had a cellar big enough to hold several people, and the small space became the Kalikas’ refuge as Jews were being shot or forced out of town. Another neighbor, a Ukrainian woman, provided food and water to the hidden Jews and assisted the putative “Karaim” in keeping control of the communal apartment. She convinced any nosy residents that the Kalika family was either deported or dead. This swirl of circumstance allowed Lyudmila and four other Jews to remain hidden in the cellar for 820 days, until the city was retaken by the Red Army.
¹²

There was a marked falloff in denunciations after early 1942. Most Jews had been identified and shipped out of the city. Most of the lethal, Soviet-funded partisan brigades had been scotched, their hiding places in the catacombs discovered and sealed. Agents and informants were still active, but their tasks now included delivering newspapers and posting propaganda fliers, not systematically reporting on their neighbors. People who remained in the city were learning how to get on with their daily lives.

Odessans were in no sense ignorant of what was happening in the camps and ghettos to the north. They had seen Jews hanged and shot en masse. Later, stories circulated in the bazaars about Jews being killed throughout Transnistria. Some people even worried about what would happen in the future if troops were not around to protect the city from Jewish avengers. “When you take off, the yids will be able to hurt us,” women were reported yelling at Romanian soldiers. “Why haven’t you made the yids kaput?”
¹³
Another agent wrote in the spring of 1942 that a few Jews had escaped back to Odessa and were spreading rumors about people being machine-gunned in a ravine at a place called Berezovka. We now know those rumors to have been true. The escapees were reporting one of the worst massacres to have taken place under Romania’s watch, the killing of about twenty-eight thousand Odessa Jews by SS units recruited from among the
Volksdeutsche
.
¹⁴
But with Jews no longer being hanged in the streets or crowding the squares before deportation to the countryside, it was easy for Russians and Ukrainians to pretend that news of further horrors could be easily ignored.

O
DESSA’S
H
OLOCAUST MEMORIAL
lies on a busy street near the green warren of Moldavanka. An alley of newly planted trees leads to a central fountain. At the top stands a tiny but haunting work by the sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, a cluster of naked men and women huddling before a small staircase, all surrounded by a jumble of barbed wire. The fountain doesn’t work, the pavement is cracked and broken, and the trees want watering. An inscription inaccurately reminds visitors of the crimes committed by the “Nazis,” not by Romanians or local Odessans. The small park in which it sits is littered with plastic bottles and overflowing trash bins.

Yet the truly striking thing about the memorial is that most of it is a monument to people identified as Odessa’s ninety righteous, the men and women, mainly Ukrainians, who risked their own lives to save Jews. Each tree is labeled with a name of one of the heroes. It is all a singularly manufactured way of thinking about the city’s wartime experience, for the more somber truth is that an entire forest of Odessans behaved differently: cooperating with the Romanian authorities, eagerly denouncing Jews, or silently going about their lives as if unaware of where one in three of their neighbors had gone.

The heroes were there, certainly, but they are hard to spot among the betrayers and the whisperers, those whose formal letters and urgent notes peek out from archival files. One way to understand the vast number of Odessans not memorialized in the alley of the righteous is to come at the matter obliquely, through a person who spent longer in the city than Pushkin or many of the other famous figures now assumed into the pantheon of honorary Odessans: the Romanian mayor Gherman Pântea.

Whey-faced and stocky, with a thick head of hair that went from pompadour to mane in his old age, Pântea was one of the most qualified administrators the Romanian government could have placed in Transnistria. He was a product of the borderland, born in May of 1894 to a Romanian-speaking family in northern Bessarabia, a time when the region was still, as it had been for nearly a century, part of the Russian Empire. He served in the imperial army, but like many of his Bessarabian comrades he converted to the cause of Romanian nationalism during the breakdown of military discipline and the collapse of the eastern front in 1917.

He was elected as a military representative to the local parliament that formed when the Russian Empire disappeared and then worked as a minister in Bessarabia’s briefly independent government. He was part of the group that opted in 1918 for union with Romania, just as the Bolsheviks were preparing to descend on Kishinev, the Bessarabian provincial seat. Once absorbed into the Romanian kingdom, Pântea served three terms as Kishinev’s mayor. As the son of poor Bessarabian villagers but educated as a lawyer in the tsarist system, he was bilingual in Romanian and Russian. He even knew something of Ukraine, since he had studied briefly at Ilya Mechnikov’s old institution, the university in Odessa. When the Soviet army invaded Bessarabia in the summer of 1940, Pântea joined the masses of Romanian soldiers and officials retreating westward.
¹⁵

Although he did not know Ion Antonescu personally, the Romanian leader called him to a meeting at the train station in Kishinev in August of 1941. He was informed of Antonescu’s intention to name him mayor of Odessa once the city was captured by German and Romanian troops. His considerable experience in Bessarabia would have made him a reasonable choice; perhaps liberal politicians in Bucharest—those already concerned about Antonescu’s harsh policies at home—pushed him forward in hopes of softening the regime’s behavior in the occupied territories. In any case, when the city finally fell, Pântea was duly named to the mayoral post, arriving in Odessa on October 18, less than a week before the fateful bombing at the military headquarters.

Pântea was a direct witness to the “reprisals” carried out against Jews in the days following the attack. He wrote a personal letter to Antonescu—avoiding Alexianu and jumping up the chain of command—in which he recalled coming back from the recovery effort at the ruined building near Alexandrovsky Park to find people hanged along the major streets and intersections. He learned that the military command had ordered Jews to assemble for deportation to Dalnik, the place where many were eventually shot or burned alive. “If you were informed precisely about the situation, in particular that the population had no involvement in the act of October 22,…you would revoke the order for reprisals, and innocent people would not be punished,” he wrote. Pântea even requested that Antonescu name someone else as mayor since his power was dwarfed by that of the local military authorities. He stopped short of resigning, however.
¹⁶

For all his objections, Pântea nevertheless attended the crucial meeting that determined the fate of Odessa’s remaining Jewish population. Through Ordinance No. 34 in January of 1942, Alexianu had ordered the creation of a special “commission for selection and evacuation” to supervise the cleansing of the capital city. On January 6 the first session of the commission met, chaired by Colonel Matei Velcescu, the police prefect for the Odessa region. At that session the members decided the manner in which Alexianu’s order would be effected, including the systematic emptying of the ghetto in Slobodka. Although the people charged with doing the work on the ground were local police and gendarme units, Pântea had been present at the creation of what amounted to the final solution of the city’s Jewish problem. He attended no more sessions of the “selection and evacuation” committee and named one of his deputy mayors as a stand-in. He remained in post as mayor until briefly handing control of the city to German forces in the spring of 1944.
¹⁷

Pântea’s authority was severely circumscribed by the overweening power of Alexianu as well as by that of the Romanian military command, which had final say over local affairs. But within the areas under his control and within the bounds of a wartime economy, the city seemed to be on its way back. Public works were restarted, including the provision of water and electricity. Restaurants and markets reopened. For the first time in two decades, individual vendors were allowed to sell produce and manufactured goods in private shops and stalls. Cinemas offered films prohibited under the Soviets, and their upkeep became a particular concern to the occupation authorities.
¹⁸
Movies had the huge potential for keeping the local population happy and entertained, and Romanian propaganda films regularly highlighted the progress of the war and the depravities of Stalin—the latter, at least, a point about which many citizens did not need to be convinced.

Corruption was rampant in the newly energized economy, but then the city had hardly been a paragon of economic virtue under the Soviets. Citizens learned to respond with the dark and corny humor for which Odessa was already famous. In the open-air markets, sellers taunted strolling Romanian soldiers and bureaucrats with creative wordplay. The standard Romanian greeting “
Buna? diminea
a
”—“Good morning”—became the Russian “
Budem’te meniat’sia
”—“Let’s make a deal!”
¹⁹