Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (28 page)

Even if the final status of Transnistria after an Axis victory was still uncertain, the Romanians were committed to managing affairs in ways that would appeal to local Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans. The major city streets were rechristened in forms consonant with the new order. Karl Marx Street became, a bit too obviously, Hitler Avenue. Jewish Street was renamed for Mussolini. One of the city’s great landmarks since the 1870s, the Opera, had been severely damaged during the siege. The roof was caved in, every window smashed, and heating and water systems broken. Already by the end of 1941, the city government had arranged for the windows to be replaced. Soon the theater’s magnificent organ, long dysfunctional under the Soviets, was in working order (a project overseen by the same deputy mayor who spent the rest of his time attending meetings on the liquidation of the ghetto). During the 1942–43 season, Odessans walked into a fully reoutfitted building, freshly plastered and painted, with the chance to buy tickets for one of fifty-eight separate productions, from
La Bohème
to
Eugene Onegin
. The city administration made no effort to “romanianize” the musical repertoire. Three-quarters of the productions were the standard European classics, while a quarter were Russian works.
²⁰

“Pântea was a popular man in Odessa,” recalled one local actress in the late 1950s, “and even today the population remembers him fondly.”
²¹
A constant stream of Romanians journeyed from the kingdom to see for themselves the new experiment in neighborly imperialism. Students and professors from Bucharest University, representatives from the Romanian Association of Teachers, delegations from Romanian villages, and choirs, dance groups, and journalists all visited the city at the expense of the government. The Lawn Tennis Section of the Sports Association of Romanian Railways organized a two-day match with guest invitees. Even a prize-winning group of Bucharest schoolchildren, selected as the Romanian capital’s most promising pupils, were rewarded with a tour around the province they would presumably one day rule.

Ion Antonescu visited on three occasions—once in 1942 and twice in 1943—to see the wonders being wrought on the eastern frontier.
²²
The flow of visitors became so great that lower-level functionaries called for the creation of special
cantine turistice
—tourist hostels—to accommodate the missions of artists, musicians, educators, students, and dignitaries coming weekly from the motherland.
²³
Overall the city exuded freshness and vitality, a place “full of young people,” as one visitor recalled, a marked contrast to the empty streets and squares in other parts of occupied eastern Europe.
²⁴

Pântea had nevertheless been perfectly aware of, and deeply troubled by, the events of the first year of the occupation. When the systematic removal of Jews from Odessa began, he wrote to Alexianu protesting the move. “I have reported to you verbally and in writing,” he said, “that this evacuation is wrong and inhuman, and since it is taking place in the depths of winter, it has become truly barbaric.” Repeating the argument he had made earlier to Antonescu, he complained that the governor’s advisors had mistakenly convinced him that Jews represented a security threat in the city. Pântea insisted that they were in fact working hard to rebuild it. But with the transport trains and columns of marching Jewish Odessans already on the way, Pântea wrote that he now wished to make “the last attempt to save as much as may be saved.” He asked specifically for Jewish craftsmen and teachers to be exempted from deportation, along with the roughly one thousand Karaim still living in the city. No sizable effort was made to sort out the first two categories, although the Karaim, as in the past, were generally passed over as not “racially” Jewish (a view developed by Nazi race theorists and adopted by the Romanians).
²⁵

But because of his protests against Romania’s Jewish policy, the mayor remained deeply suspect in the eyes of Alexianu and his other superiors, all the way to Bucharest. He was surrounded by Bessarabian Romanians, who—as people of the frontier and bilingual in Romanian and Russian—had always been considered by officials from the old kingdom as being of dubious loyalty and imperfectly versed in the ideals of Romanian nationalism. (As early as 1939, the Romanian ministry of defense was gathering intelligence reports assessing whether Bessarabians were likely to fraternize with Soviets rather than fight them.)
²⁶
Pântea used Russian as the working language of the mayor’s office and communicated decrees and other bureaucratic acts to Odessa’s population primarily in that language. This, again, raised suspicions about his nationalist credentials, even while certainly easing the task of city administration.

Yes, most of the functionaries in the mayor’s office were former Communists, he wrote to Alexianu, but that was to be expected in a city that had been under Soviet control for two decades. Moreover, the entire idea of Communist agents sneaking around in the city was largely a fiction. “It is not true that the local population is agitating [against Romania],” he wrote. “On the contrary locals have gotten down to business, going to work in all senses, and participating effectively in the rebuilding of Odessa. Fabrications about the ‘agitation’ of the population are circulated by various secret organs of the State, which have full interest in stirring up things in order to justify their existence and their expenditures. That is why these organs speak of the Communist threat to Odessa, of plots, of the catacombs’ being full of Communists, Jews, and so on.”
²⁷
Both the eager denunciations by locals and the equally eager receptivity on the part of Romanian security services, he suggested, were more a matter of self-interest than real threat. The former sought to ingratiate themselves with the new power. The latter hoped to convince their higher-ups that they were doing their job. As even the city’s mayor knew, Odessans and their occupiers were locked in a mutual, and at times mutually beneficial, embrace.

W
E KNOW THE DETAILS
of the careers of Alexianu and Pântea because both were put on trial after the war. Shortly after Romanian forces pulled out of Odessa, leaving the city and the wider Transnistria region notionally in the hands of the Germans, Romania itself switched sides. With the Soviets pushing ever westward and the Axis war effort crumbling, in August of 1944 the Romanian king, Mihai, overthrew Ion Antonescu and declared Romania’s accession to the Allies—just in time to stave off an all-out fight against the Red Army, now pursuing its own version of blitzkrieg. At the end of the war, the Soviets gradually installed a Communist government in Romania, which cemented its position by forcing Mihai to surrender the throne and leave the country at the end of 1947. One of the new government’s first tasks was to prosecute—or in many cases re-prosecute—the leaders of the old regime.

Alexianu was one of four defendants found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death, and executed by the Communists. The others—the powerful vice chairman of the Council of Ministers, Mihai Antonescu; the brutal deputy interior minister, Constantin Vasiliu; and the
conduc
tor
himself, Ion Antonescu—had been visible public figures, working in the central government in Bucharest and tacking back and forth between their own profound antisemitism, the exigencies of war, and the demands of their patron, Nazi Germany. Their hatred of Jews tended to be of the conservative kind found among traditional right-wing parties throughout central Europe, not necessarily the rabid, revolutionary variety preached by Nazi propagandists. It was activated into a political program by the experience of being an occupying power and by the infectious zeal of the SS, German liaison officers, and Hitler himself. However, what emerged in the trials was that of all the senior officials, the relatively obscure Alexianu, diligently issuing decrees from halls that had once hosted Lise Vorontsova’s famous soirees, was perhaps the truest of the true believers.

Alexianu denied having any role in the massacres of late 1941, attributing those to excesses by the secret police and the gendarmerie. But he stood by his efforts to administer Transnistria in ways beneficial to the Romanian state, especially by shipping as much of its wealth as possible to the motherland and, where necessary, removing Jewish populations he believed presented a threat to public order.
²⁸
Unlike many at the top of the administrative hierarchy, he seems not to have benefited personally from his role in the war. Investigators found him living in a modest apartment in Bucharest, with no major property holdings elsewhere in the country, no transfers of funds to foreign banks, and no hidden accounts in which he could have stashed the loot taken from the Jews who were deported and killed during his nearly three-year reign.

Most of his remorseless testimony was taken up with defending his husbandry of the provincial economy—the very issue that had meant the end of his career: Antonescu had sacked him from the governorship in January of 1944, shortly before the entire Transnistrian adventure came to an end, for being a bad manager.
²⁹
Even as he faced death, he was still defending the nobility of the national cause, a scene captured by a newsreel camera at the time. Standing before their joint firing squad, Vasiliu and Mihai Antonescu fidgeted, while Ion Antonescu raised his homburg in a theatrical salute to his fellow soldiers and executioners. Alexianu, thin and clean shaven, stood glum and ramrod straight.

Pântea’s fate was different. Already in 1945, he was discovered hiding under an assumed name in Romania and was put on trial for allegedly selling gravestones from one of Odessa’s Jewish cemeteries. He was acquitted and freed the next year, but went into hiding again with the advent of the new Communist government. He passed from one friend to another, carrying false identity papers and a signed copy of his letter to Antonescu protesting the “reprisals,” a talisman of sorts against the gathering storm.

Most nights he slept at the Gara de Nord train station in Bucharest to avoid detection. He was arrested again in 1949, retried, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. It was a sign of the times that his chief transgression was now classed as “causing the deaths of thousands of workers,” not killing Jews or looting graves.
³⁰
Even though he was eventually released from prison, as late as the 1960s he was still being tailed by the Securitate, the Communist-era secret police, for hanging out with “anti-socialist” elements.
³¹

Pântea might have resigned his post as mayor. He might have done more than send his deputy to those unpleasant meetings on the deportations. He could have prevented Jews from being killed by simply notarizing their certificates of baptism as Christians, a last-ditch escape route that many attempted as the ghetto was being emptied.
³²
He might have done much more than send a few letters of protest. “I am no defender of Jews,” he declared flatly to Antonescu as bodies were still hanging from makeshift gallows.
³³
But for all these reasons, Pântea was uniquely representative of the city that he oversaw as mayor. Beyond the actions of the most abhorrent architects of the Holocaust, Pântea’s behavior was, in the end, close to that of many Odessans through war, occupation, and atrocity—born of a steely willingness to disregard what was happening right before his eyes.

Other parts of Ukraine suffered more in sheer numerical terms. In some regions, more than 90 percent of prewar Jewish populations were wiped out. An estimated 40 percent of Jewish citizens perished during the war years in the Odessa region, with the figure surely higher for those killed inside the city itself.
³⁴
In Transnistria as a whole, perhaps 50,000 of the 300,000 local Jews remained alive once the region came again under Soviet control.
³⁵
Individuals survived by falsifying their identity, relying on the kindness and propriety of a villager or neighbor, or living silently and fearfully inside cellars and attics. In time, some even returned to their old homes, where they were joined by evacuees returning from refuge in Central Asia or other parts of the Soviet Union. But communities were now gone. In November of 1944, after the Red Army had been in charge of Odessa for several months, Soviet officials counted forty-eight Jews living there.
³⁶

Memory and myth: Movie poster advertising the 1943 film
Two Warriors
starring Mark Bernes (left).
Russian State Library/Abamedia.

A
Romanian secret agent reported in the winter of 1941–42 that Odessans in the Privoz marketplace regularly speculated about their city’s return to greatness. With the Soviets out of power, one man allegedly proclaimed, “Odessa will once again be a free port and will return to the golden age of Count Vorontsov and the duc de Richelieu under the patronage of His Highness King Mihai of Romania and His Excellency the Supreme Leader of the German Empire Adolf Hitler.”
¹

Few people at the time were that mawkish or self-servingly deferential to the occupiers, but the general sentiment was not uncommon. With enough optimism and bravado, Odessans could imagine a future in which their city might be put back on the track it had left at some point in the nineteenth century. Nostalgia was not just a way of longing for the past. It was also a method of conjuring a distant but radiant future. Anyone who was paying attention knew that these were temporary fantasies, however. One cooperated with the occupiers when it made sense and found ways to avoid them when it didn’t. Ducking and weaving were Odessan habits, and the war years only sharpened old skills: skirting customs agents, buying off the police, studiously ignoring the entreaties of government officials, and generally bending to avoid breaking. Survival was a special kind of flourishing.

Odessa was not quite a blank slate at the end of the Second World War, but it was something close: a city denuded of a major ethnic and religious community and with much of the rest of its population hunkering in cellars or dispersed to outlying towns and villages. The city was still reeling from artillery hits, aerial bombing, partisan raids, and the ravaging of its Jewish core. Odessan evacuees could be found throughout the Soviet Union, some as far away as Uzbekistan. Barely 200,000 people remained in the city, perhaps a third of its prewar population. The buildings and infrastructure had been looted by the retreating Axis armies. The costumes and seats from the opera house were gone. The docklands and grain elevators were smoldering ruins. Even the trolley cars were now doing service in Romania.
²

Crime, which the Romanians had sought to control but never rooted out, returned in force. Former partisans became bandits, visiting on the restored Soviet authorities the same kind of raids they had inflicted on the Romanians. Theft and robbery were common, and the boldest of the criminals left messages to the Communist authorities scrawled on city walls. “The day is yours before seven o’clock,” declared one graffito, “but we own the night.”
³
Petty violence ran parallel to the state’s reckoning with those who had aided and benefitted from the occupation. Alleged collaborators were identified by Soviet archivists and apparatchiks who pored over the careful records kept by the Romanian authorities. Those without the good sense to have left with the fleeing Romanians were arrested, imprisoned, or shot. Even having lived in Odessa during the war was cause for suspicion, on the assumption that survival entailed some sort of compromise with the fascists. A new but short-lived wave of denunciations swept over the city, with neighbors fingering people who had supposedly worked for or sympathized with the “Romano-German barbarians,” as the language of the time cast the ousted occupiers.

At the same time, Soviet officials worked to uncover the fate of those who had fallen victim during the war. In a massive effort at documenting human and material losses, an “extraordinary state commission,” working throughout much of the formerly occupied territory of the Soviet Union, assembled data on victims. Based on sworn oral affidavits, the commission’s reports were often rendered in striking detail. The lists of killed and deported still provide some of the most fine-grained assessments of the war’s toll, particularly on Odessa’s Jews. From these postwar assessments, for example, we know that sixteen people were removed from 74–76 Pushkin Street at some point during the war, including members of families identified as the Leidermans, Likermans, Kotliars, Shvartsmans, Kogans, Figelmans, Ashkenazis, and Katzes, among others. At 9 Shchepnoy Lane, twenty-three people—from sixty-five-year-old Chaim Tsyperman to nine-year-old Lusya Kravets—were “sent away by the fascists,” in the language of the affidavits.
⁴

No doubt some of the people who gave testimony to the commission were those who had enabled the deportation of the Jews in the first place. The same mix of motives that underlay the wartime denunciations were probably at work in the postwar accounting of victimhood. Goodness, neighborliness, and regret were present, but so too was rational self-interest. An official document certifying the displacement of residents from a precise address could also serve as a certification of abandonment, a key bureaucratic tool for neighbors seeking additional living space. There was a surfeit of housing in Odessa immediately after the war, given the relatively small population during the occupation period. But in the rush for housing after 1945—as both Jewish and non-Jewish evacuees returned home—empty properties were at a premium.

Sura Sturmak had been deported to the camp at Domanevka during the war. She ended up confined to an old farm where Jews were made to live in a repurposed pig shed. Her sisters, brother, and mother were killed; her husband, a Red Army soldier, was missing in action. When she returned to Odessa after the war, she found the family apartment occupied by ethnic Russians. But by assembling affidavits and other legal documents, she secured a court order that pitched out the squatters and restored the space to its former inhabitant.
⁵
For Jewish survivors, being on the lists of those “sent away” was a critical official validation of their claim to former property, now occupied by acquisitive neighbors. The commission affidavits, drawn up on old scraps of paper and pages torn from printed books, are a telling archival bookend to the denunciation reports of a few years earlier. In 1941 to be listed as a Jew, with a precise address and with all one’s family members named and accounted for, was the first step toward deportation and perhaps death. For the survivors after 1945, not being on a similar list meant effectively losing one’s apartment and residency status. In both cases, a bureaucrat’s scrawl meant the difference between being a real Odessan and an illegitimate one.

Jews would never again be a sizable ethnic group in the city. By the time of the 1959 Soviet census, they accounted for only 12 percent of the population in the Odessa region, which included the city itself and several small towns—an increase from the wartime era, to be sure, but only a fraction of the prewar figure. That percentage declined steadily as Jews migrated to other parts of the Soviet Union or left to build new lives abroad, and as ethnic Ukrainians and Russians took their place in the city center and the industrial suburbs. But just as local Odessans had worried about what would happen if the Romanian occupiers left and Jews were allowed to exact “revenge,” Soviet officials sought to limit the effects of Jewish return on the postwar city.

Official antisemitism, in both subtle and overt varieties, was a common feature of postwar life, in the Soviet Union and other newly Communist states in eastern Europe. A group that had been viewed as crypto-Communists by the Romanians was now seen as unreliable, rootlessly cosmopolitan, and—especially after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948—crypto-nationalists. Jewish religiosity was a particular target. Immediately after the war, the Soviets launched a campaign to “liquidate the minyans”—the groups of ten men required for ritual prayer—that had emerged spontaneously after the withdrawal of Romanian and German troops. By the early 1950s, even synagogues that had been allowed to reopen after the war were once again closed, part of a spiraling frenzy of antisemitism throughout the Soviet Union shortly before Stalin’s death. In an attempt to separate Jewish religious practice from Jewish national aspirations, the ritual phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” was ordered removed from prayers recited on Yom Kippur and Passover.
⁶

Antisemitism in Odessa long predated the arrival of the Axis powers, and it was still there when the city came back into the Soviet fold. “The vermin have returned,” Saul Borovoi heard Odessans saying about the arrival of evacuated Jews after the war.
⁷
The writer Emil Draitser came back to the city with his parents after the war and lived there throughout the postwar reconstruction. “All Jews are cowards,” he recalled his schoolmates jeering. “During the war, they hid in Tashkent.”
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For some Jews, part of the cruel taunt was true, and providentially so. The ships that left the packed quayside in the autumn of 1941 carried tens of thousands of Jewish Odessans toward safety in other parts of the Soviet Union, the beginning of what would become, throughout the rest of the twentieth century, a mass exodus of Jews to other Russian and Ukrainian cities as well as to Israel, the United States, and other foreign countries. Between 1968 and 1980 alone, more than twenty-four thousand Odessan Jews—a little under a quarter of the Jewish population—left the Soviet Union for good. More followed during the Gorbachev era and after.
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The end of Jewish Odessa produced an Odessan diaspora that gave the city a new kind of life well beyond the harbor and Deribasovskaya. In time, Odessa became revered as the Soviet Union’s imaginary Mississippi Delta, a remarkable incubator for music and dreamy nostalgia, yet also a place whose creative power really became evident once people managed to escape it. The city already had its Mark Twain in Isaac Babel, a writer who grasped the distinctive speech, social mores, and colorful characters of an age whose passing few people actually regretted. What it lacked was its Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters—the musicians who provided the soundtrack for a lost world. After the Second World War, Soviet officialdom and popular culture managed to do something that Babel, shot by his Stalinist captors nearly two years before the Romanians had marched into his hometown, could not have foreseen: to transform the old city into an object of schmaltzy and melodic longing.

W
HEN
S
ERGEI
E
ISENSTEIN
sat down to compile his fragmentary and poetic memoirs, he wondered somberly about the fate of the hundreds of extras in
Battleship Potemkin
, the men and women he had sent racing up and down the Odessa steps with a few shouts through his megaphone. He could remember many of them, since he had always made a point of learning the names of as many people on set as possible. But the identity of the film’s most famous actor—the baby in the carriage that bounces down the bloody staircase—remained a mystery. “He would be twenty now,” Eisenstein wrote in 1946.

Any of those fates would have been possible, but the city had had enough of villains and victims. By the time the Red Army goose-stepped down Richelieu Street, with smiling faces and submachine guns strapped across worn tunics, a pantheon of heroes was already emerging in popular lore and Communist Party history-writing. There were NKVD agents such as the famed Molodtsov-Badayev gang who launched daring strikes from their hideouts in the catacombs during the defense of Odessa. The almond-eyed sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko chalked up more recorded kills than any other Soviet soldier. The boy-patriot Yakov Gordiyenko, a graduate of the school the Bolsheviks had built out of marble quarried from the defunct Preobrazhensky Cathedral, ferried secret messages to the Communist underground before being shot by the fascists in 1942.

None of these stories was exactly untrue. Partisan units, outfitted and directed by Moscow, had disrupted the early months of the Romanian occupation. But the postwar tales of sacrifice and derring-do often exalted minor figures in Odessa’s wartime experience, marshaling bit players as evidence of the city’s valiant, if only belatedly successful, stand against fascism and foreign domination. In the rebuilt city, commemorative plaques and statues served as public surrogates for private and more complex memories. An apartment where partisans hatched their plans and a building from which Soviet commanders directed the countersiege became everyday monuments to Odessa’s misremembered heroism. These tales of sacrifice and achievement were put on display in a new Museum of the Defense of Odessa, which registered tens of thousands of visitors annually.
¹¹

Odessa was one of the first four Soviet cities—along with Leningrad, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad—to be awarded the title
Gorod-Geroi
, or “hero city.” Leningrad held out against a withering German siege for nearly two and a half years. Sevastopol withstood nine months of heavy artillery barrages. Stalingrad was the anvil on which Germany’s war on the eastern front was eventually crushed. Odessa was an oddity in that illustrious group. Most of the population spent the war safely evacuated to the east. Much of the rest found ways of cooperating, either actively or grudgingly, with the Romanians. But Odessa was the only major Soviet center held captive by an invader other than Nazi Germany, and being a martyr, however ambiguous, conferred a special kind of status.