In the Shadow of Babyn Yar: Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Eyewitness Account of the Betrayal and Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in Kyiv

1.1 Individual Collaborators

From all accounts, it appears, that during the occupation of Kyiv, there were significantly more gentiles who betrayed Jews than those who rescued them. The motivations for betrayal varied: traditional antisemitism reinforced by Nazi propaganda, the desire to acquire Jewish property, to occupy Jewish apartments or to demonstrate loyalty to the Nazis. Betrayal of Jews was encouraged and rewarded by the Nazis and the Ukrainian police, while the rescue of Jews put the rescuers and their families in mortal danger.

Antisemitism exploded in Kyiv from the first days of the Nazi occupation. Poet Naum Korzhavin wrote in his memoir that the janitor of his apartment building, Mitrofan Kudritsky, so sadistically tortured Korzhavin’s elderly Jewish family members during the first nine or ten days of the Nazi occupation of Kyiv that their execution in Babyn Yar was a liberation (Korzhavin 2005, 109). Korzhavin described how Kudritsky organized “a personal Auschwitz in their home” for Korzhavin’s relatives:

Every day, every morning he came to our apartment… with one purpose, to commit outrages against them. He tortured these elderly people creatively, in many ways, beat them, forced them to clean the restroom in the yard with their bare hands and to do many other jobs that were humiliating and beyond their strength. He punished them if they did not fulfill his orders adequately. He was their master, and he enjoyed this situation. (Korzhavin 2005, 108–109)^[1]

Kudritsky had appeared in Kyiv with his family in 1934. He had been “dekulakized”^[2] and hated everybody who, in his opinion, lived better than he did. He was happy when people were arrested during Stalin’s repression. Kudritsky also hated the Soviet regime which, he believed, had ruined his life. He rejoiced when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and when Nazi aircraft bombed Kyiv. But why did Kudritsky choose elderly Jews, who did not have any connection with the Soviet authorities, as his victims? For Kudritsky, the Soviet authorities were distant and unreachable, so he directed all his anger toward his Jewish neighbors. In addition to Korzhavin’s relatives, Kudritsky sadistically tortured two other Jewish families who lived in the building: an elderly couple and a mother with a child. Kudritsky outlived his Jewish victims but did not survive the war: the Nazis, whom Kudritsky had praised at the beginning of the occupation, killed him for stealing from them (Korzhavin 2005, 104).

The Nazis encouraged local gentiles to denounce Jews hidden in the city. Holocaust survivor Veniamin Liberman testified that on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street, on the fifth day of the occupation of Kyiv (September 24, 1941), he saw “a car with a huge megaphone making frequent stops; a loud voice was coming over the megaphone, shouting, ‘Report the whereabouts of communists, partisans, and Jews to the Gestapo and to the police! Report them!’” (Ehrenburg and Grossman 2003, 4). Similar calls on gentiles to inform the German authorities about Jews, partisans, and communists were posted around Kyiv and promised a reward for their denunciation. Kuznetsov writes:

Notices were posted on the hoardings saying that anyone who informed the German authorities about Jews or partisans in hiding, about important Bolshevik officials who had not reported for registration as Communists, or about other enemies of the people, would receive ten thousand roubles in cash or in the form of foodstuffs or a cow. (Anatoli 1970, 156)

Kuznetsov recalls that many Kyivan Jews did not obey the Nazi order and did not go to Babyn Yar but hid in basements and storerooms:

In most cases the hidden people were discovered, because there were plenty of people glad enough to have the money or the cow. Near our market in Kurenyovka, for instance, there lived a certain Praskovya Derkach. She would nose around until she found out where some Jews were hiding and then go to them and say:

“Aha! So there you are! So you don’t want to go to Babi Yar? Out with your gold! Let’s have your cash!”

They would hand her over all they had. Then she would make a statement to the police and demand another reward. Her husband Vasili had a horse and cart and they usually took the Jews off to the Yar on it. On the way Praskovya and her husband would be snatching clothes and watches off the people, saying: “You will not need these any more!”

They carted off sick people, children and pregnant women. (Anatoli 1970, 156)

In the interwar period, Kyivan Jews were quite assimilated, and without the help of gentiles the Nazis would not have been able to identify and kill many Jews hidden in Kyiv. According to Timothy Snyder, “[i]n Kyiv, Ukrainians and Russians helped the German Order Police find and register Jews before the mass shooting at Babyi Iar” (Snyder 2015, 181).

Kruglov and Umansky point out that some Kyiv gentiles detained Jews before the Babyn Yar massacre, and assembled them in one place before handing them over to the German police. During the mass shooting, these gentiles delivered Jews directly to Babyn Yar. Historians assume that these people’s main motivation was greed and the desire to get rich by taking the Jews’ property (Kruglov, Umansky, and Shchupak 2016, 241).

The Kyiv gentile population’s reaction to the massacre of Jews in Babyn Yar varied from compassion with Jews to satisfaction at their death. Kyivan Oleg Minskii recalled that the news of the Nazi shooting of Jews in Babyn Yar had reached the city by 11 a.m. on September 29 (Levitas 2016, 66). Some saw the execution of Jews as an opportunity to acquire Jewish property. He said that there were not many of them, “but their greed did not have any limits. Without shame they put on the still warm clothes of murdered Jews” (Levitas 2016, 66). In his memoirs, Minskii wrote that on October 1 and 2, 1941,

these people stood in front of the row of German policemen and soldiers on Makarovskaia and Melnikov streets and asked to be given a coat, jacket or skirt from the huge pile of clothes [which belonged to executed Jews] laid on the street. … Germans threw the clothes to the crowd. People from the crowd caught them in the air, pulled them from each other and asked for more. (Levitas 2016, 66)

This scene reveals simultaneously the poverty of Kyiv gentiles, who fought for used clothes, and their lack of compassion for the fate of the Jews.

The local population also helped the Nazis “cleanse” Kyiv of Jews in hiding, who had not obeyed the Nazi order and had not come to Babyn Yar on September 29, 1941. On September 30–October 1, 1941, a crowd of several dozen people participated in a Jewish pogrom in Podil (Melnyk 2013, 226; Kruglov, Umansky, and Shchupak 2016, 241).^[3] Oleksandr Melnyk writes,

While protocols of the [Soviet] interrogation of defendants and witnesses leave little doubt that participating in the pogrom in one way or another were dozens of Kyivans, only the three most active perpetrators were brought to trial. (Melnyk 2013, 226)

Melnyk uses pseudonyms instead of the real names of defendants, witnesses, victims, and NKGB investigators. He explains his decision “by a combination of ethical considerations… and the possibility of false statements during NKGB interrogations” (Melnyk 2013, 223). However, Kruglov and Umansky, who describe the same pogrom in their 2019 book Babi Yar: zhertvy, spasiteli, palachi (Babyn Yar: victims, rescuers, perpetrators), use the real names of the perpetrators. To avoid confusion, I use the real names of the perpetrators and provide the pseudonyms in parentheses when I quote Melnyk’s article.

After the liberation of Kyiv by the Red Army, three people, Egor Ustinov, Nikifor Yushkov, and Venedikt Baranov, were charged with the murder of Jews during the pogrom in Podil on September 30–October 1, 1941 and with having betrayed Jews and gentiles hidden in the city to the Nazis. All three were sentenced to death and were publicly hanged in Kyiv on January 23, 1944. Other gentiles who participated in the Jewish pogrom in Podil did not receive any punishment (Melnyk 2013, 232, 244).

However, during his interrogation Yushkov testified that several dozen gentiles, including children, participated in the Jewish pogrom in Podil:

On 30 September 1941 at around 4–5 p.m. I was walking along Mezhyhirs’ka Street towards 33 Nyzhnii Val Street when I noticed a crowd of people heading toward Nyzhnii Val. … In front of 37 Nyzhnii Val Street there sat a citizen of Jewish nationality. Children that surrounded her (10 in total, I do not know their names) hit her with stones, dispersed her belongings and otherwise abused her. On seeing this Grigorii (I do not know his surname), Ushakov [Ustinov], and myself approached the woman and started to beat her. I kept punching the old woman in the face until she fell to the ground. Grigorii, Ushakov [Ustinov], and I lifted her and hit her head several times against the lamp post. Together with Ushakov [Ustinov] and Grigorii we kicked the woman in the face and in the chest. As we beat her, we yelled “Iids sucked our blood for 23 years. Now it is our turn.” The crowd that gathered there cheered us on with jokes and shouts. (Melnyk 2013, 241–42)

According to eyewitness Evgeniia Beliaeva, these three perpetrators stopped tormenting the old woman, named Schwartz, only when they saw new victims: “an old Jewish man, an old woman and a young girl whom somebody had brought ‘from the lower numbers of Nyzhnii Val’” (Melnyk 2013, 242). Beliaeva also confirmed that many perpetrators participated in the Podil Jewish pogrom. During her interrogation, she provided “an extremely graphic and detailed account of the torture” of Jews. Beliaeva described “how Chusov [Yushkov] ordered his [ten-year-old] son and other children to bring sand, which he stuffed into victims’ mouths, or about how adult perpetrators instructed children to throw heavy rocks at Jews inside the grave in order to kill them before the burial” (Melnyk 2013, 242).

Ushakov (Ustinov) boasted to his neighbors that “he personally buried alive three Jewish women, that ‘he organically hated all Jews’ and would ‘happily exterminate their entire nation’” (Melnyk 2013, 229).

Ustinov testified during his interrogation on December 21, 1943, that he, along with several other gentiles, buried Jews alive in a garden in Kyiv. Ustinov stated,

We buried six or seven people total, some of them were still alive, they screamed and asked us not to bury them, but we hit them with shovels on their heads and buried them. A young girl about 20 years old and an old woman, who was dragged to the pit with a broken head, were especially screaming and begging us not to bury them. (Kruglov, Umansky, and Shchupak 2016, 241)

Yushkov, who participated in the murder of Jews in the garden, testified that the murders continued the second day with the participation of German soldiers. Yushkov said, “On the next day in the morning the janitor of the apartment building on 37 Nizhniy Val Street, whose name is Aleksei, dragged semi-alive Jews who had been beaten from apartment building 37 to another pit in the same garden, and Nazis shot the Jews in the pit” (Kruglov, Umansky, and Shchupak 2016, 241).

The torture and murder of Jews occurred openly on the city streets and in the gardens in daytime in front of their gentile neighbors’ eyes. Among many eyewitness testimonies of the Podil pogrom, only three people claimed that they were “opposed to the Nazi policies toward the Jews and openly castigated the ‘bandit’ Bulanov [Baranov] for his actions. In his turn, Bulanov [Baranov] responded with threats to bury them also, as ‘defenders of the yids’” (Melnyk 2013, 236).

During the pogrom in Podil on September 30–October 1, 1941, as in the pogrom of Kyiv in October 1905, a small group beat and killed the Jews, while a larger group robbed Jewish apartments and stole Jewish property, and an even larger number watched the pogrom and cheered the crowd on “with jokes and shouts” (Khiterer 1992, 21–37; Melnyk 2013, 242). Thus, the behavior of the pogromists and bystanders had changed little since the 1905 pogrom. However, the presence of the Nazis in the city, in combination with the local anti-Semites, left Kyivan Jews almost no chance of survival. During the September 30–October 1, 1941, pogrom in Podil at least seven Jews perished who had not obeyed the Nazi order and had not gone to Babyn Yar on September 29, 1941.^[4] They were tortured and killed by their gentile neighbors.

1.2 The Ukrainian Police and the Bukovinian Battalion

The Ukrainian police played a significant role in the identification of Jews in Kyiv and in their murder in Babyn Yar. The Nazis created a Regional Administration of the Ukrainian police as soon as they occupied Kyiv in order to use the assistance of the local population to identify Jews, NKVD employees, and communists. Only volunteers from the local population served in the Ukrainian police. The Nazis announced the creation of the Ukrainian police in the newspaper Ukrains’ke Slovo (Ukrainian Word) published in Ukrainian. The announcement invited Ukrainian men to enroll if they were younger than 35, at least 165 cm tall, had a minimum of four years of education, had no previous criminal charges, had not served in the NKVD, and were not members of the VKP(b).^[5] People with higher education and former members of the Ukrainian National Army of Simon Petliura (petliurovtsy)^[6] were appointed to positions of command in the police. Deserters from the Red Army, prisoners of war, criminals, and people who hated the Soviet regime volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian police. The policemen were often dressed in Soviet uniforms with yellow and blue stripes attached to their hats and had a white armband (poviazka) with yellow and blue stripes. They were armed with Soviet rifles (Melnyk 2013, 229).

The Commandant of the Ukrainian Police of Kyiv City, Orlik, issued an order requiring that

all managers of apartment buildings deliver before midnight lists of all Yids, NKVD employees and members of the VKP(b) who lived in their apartment buildings, to the closest Commissariats and to the administration of the Ukrainian police of city Kyiv on 15 Korolenko Street, second floor.

Hiding of these people will be punished by death.

The managers of apartment buildings and janitors had the right themselves to deliver Yids to the Yids’ [concentration] camp, located at the POW camp on Kerosinnaia Street. (TsDAHO U)

This document has no date, but its content and location among other Nazi orders written in the autumn of 1941 suggests that it was issued in September or October 1941, just before or immediately after the Babyn Yar massacre.

Ukrainian policemen who guarded Jews walking on their last journey to Babyn Yar made sure that they did not escape (Berkhoff 2011, 6). Nachmanovich writes that members of the Ukrainian police, Sirosh, Muzyria, Grigor’ev, Shcherbina, and Grishka (whose last name he does not mention), gathered 15 Jews in a basement on September 29, 1941, brought them to Babyn Yar, and handed them over to the Nazis. The Ukrainian policemen then helped the Nazis undress the Jews before their murder (Nachmanovich 2007, 257–58).

Dina Pronicheva was one of the very few Jews who escaped from Babyn Yar. She testified that “the auxiliary policemen readied the Jews for their murder by stripping them.” The Ukrainian policemen, according to Pronicheva, “chased the completely naked people one by one up a hill” (Berkhoff 2008a, 303). German and Ukrainian policemen beat Jews on the way to execution. After the end of the shooting “Germans assisted by non-Germans walked across the bodies of the victims; with flashlights they sought out survivors and finished them off” (Berkhoff 2011, 7).

Historians Karel Berkhoff and Per Anders Rudling assume that the Bukovinskyi Kuren’ (Bukovinian Battalion) participated in the execution of Jews in Babyn Yar. Berkhoff writes about

new and newly found Ukrainian sources also named paramilitary and auxiliary police formations that were in Kiev at the time of massacre: a squad of what was then simply called the “Ukrainian police” and the Bukovinian Battalion. Both were created or commanded by activists of the Mel’nyk faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M), a militant group dominated by western Ukrainians who saw themselves engaged in a struggle to free Ukraine from “Muscovite-Jewish gangs.” (Berkhoff 2008a, 303)

Several sources mention that the Ukrainian police and the Bukovinian Battalion, which had approximately 700–800 members, arrived in Kyiv in the first days of the Nazi occupation. “Several newcomers took jobs in the city administration or went on to create police units in Vasylkiv, Bila Tserkva, and other places near Kyiv, but others joined Kyiv’s “Ukrainian police” (Berkhoff 2008a, 303). According to Per Anders Rudling,

The participation of the Bukovyns’kyi Kurin’ in massacres in Babyn Yar cannot be ruled out, as executions in Babyn Yar continued every Tuesday and Friday for the next 103 weeks, during which between 50 and 60 thousand people were murdered. After reinforcement by volunteers from Galicia and other parts of Ukraine, the Bukovyns’kyi Kurin’ had a total number of 1500–1700 soldiers by early November [1941]. (Rudling 2011a, 201)

According to SS Reichsfürer and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler’s order of November 6, 1941, the Ukrainian police were renamed the “Schutzmannschaft” (Auxiliary Police) reporting to the “Ordundspolizei” (German police). In January 1942, “Schutzmannschaft” members received their police identification cards and began to draw a salary of 30 Reichsmarks per month plus provisions. They received special benefits: free local transportation, reduction of rent by half (the rest was paid by the City Council from the city budget), and free movement in Kyiv at any time, while other Kyivans lived under martial law. Most of the policemen were non-Kyivans (Dereiko 2004, 797–98). Ivan Dereiko wrote that in 1942 the total number of policemen in Kyiv General District was over six thousand. “About one thousand policemen were German, 200 Baltic German (Volksdeutsche) and the rest, about five thousand, Ukrainians” (Dereiko 2004, 799). So, the Auxiliary Police, formed from collaborators, played an important role in the establishment of the new Nazi order and in the discovery and murder of Jews, Roma, and other “undesirables.”

After the massacre of September 29–30, 1941, Schutzmänner delivered hidden Kyivan Jews and Jewish prisoners of war to Babyn Yar for execution. Dereiko wrote that one of the Schutzmänner testified that they convoyed columns of Jews from the concentration camp on Kerosinnaia Street to Babyn Yar (Dereiko 2004, 799; Kruglov, Umansky, and Shchupak 2016, 249).^[7]

1.3 OUN-M and Pro-Nazi Ukrainian Press

The brutal Soviet policy in interwar Ukraine, the Holodomor, political repression, and suppression of the Ukrainian national movement created strong hatred among much of the Ukrainian population toward the Soviet regime. This explains why some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi invasion and collaborated with the Nazis. Oleksandr Melnyk points out that of the 320,000 individuals charged with collaboration with the Nazis by Soviet military tribunals and other special courts between 1943 and 1953, “[a]bout 90,000 … originated on the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic” (Melnyk 2013, 224).

According to historian Paul Robert Magocsi, “[i]nitially, some Ukrainians welcomed the German invasion, because they hoped that with the end of Soviet Rule their country would enjoy a better life and perhaps some form of national sovereignty” (Magocsi 2010, 670). Thus, two factions of the OUN, the Banderites and the Melnykites, originally cooperated with the Nazis. However, the cooperation of the former was cut short when they declared an independent Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941. Ukrainian independence was not in accord with Nazis plans. As a result, the Germans arrested faction leader Stepan Bandera and other leading Banderites in July 1941, and held them in German prisons and concentration camps for most of the war (Magocsi 2010, 671).

At the same time, the Nazis tolerated the OUN-M faction (the Melnykites) longer because they offered the Nazis their cooperation in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Magocsi writes, “The faction leader, Andrii Mel’nyk, was joined by former officers from the army of the Ukrainian National Republic who on 6 July 1941 appealed to Hitler to allow them to take part in the ‘crusade against Bolshevik barbarism’” (Magocsi 2010, 672). The German military considered the cooperation with OUN-M on the occupied territories useful. The Nazis first supported the activities of OUN-M, especially their efforts of “cleansing” Kyiv and Ukraine of Jews. The German military also counted on the assistance of Ukrainian nationalists in their fight against the Red Army and Soviet partisans. However, the Nazi leadership “rejected on racially motivated ideological grounds… any serious cooperation with the local ethnic Ukrainian population, which it believed should be conquered and remain totally subordinated within Nazi Germany’s new world order” (Magocsi 2010, 671). Nevertheless, the OUN-M formed the Ukrainian National Council and continued to promote the Ukrainian national idea and culture, which clashed with Nazi plans. This is why the members of the Ukrainian National Council and Ivan Rogach, one of the OUN-M leaders and editor of the newspaper Ukrains’ke slovo, were arrested by the Gestapo and executed in December 1941–February 1942 (Berkhoff and Marco 1999, 149–84; Rudling 2011b, 3; Radchenko 2016, 2017, 215–39). Mel’nyk was kept under house arrest in Berlin until January 1944, and then taken with the other leading members of the OUN-M to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Yurkevich 1993, 709).

The members of both OUN factions considered Jews and other national minorities the enemies of Ukraine. OUN members participated in the murder of Jews and the spreading of anti-Semitic propaganda. The OUN-M newspaper Ukrains’ke slovo and other pro-Nazi Ukrainian press further fueled anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for the crimes of the communist regime and called upon readers to denounce them. Immediately after the mass murder of Jews in Babyn Yar, on October 2, 1941, the newspaper Ukrains’ke slovo published an article under the title: “The foremost enemy of Ukraine – the YID!” (Ukrains’ke slovo 1941a) which claimed that Jews had brutally ruled Ukraine for 23 years and deserved to be killed. On October 9, 1941, Ukrains’ke Slovo published an article “Malen’kyi budynok” (The Little House), which stated that many Jews were still hiding in the city, “disguising themselves as Greeks, Armenians, Ukrainians or Russians and paying thousands of rubles for such documents and making diversions” (Ukrains’ke slovo 1941b). The article called on all Ukrainian patriots to report Jews to the “little house,” 48 Taras Shevchenko Boulevard.

Nazi propaganda depicted all Jews as Bolsheviks and exploiters of the gentile population. Nazis and their local collaborators also blamed Jews for organizing the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–1933 and falsely claimed that Jews themselves had not suffered from the famine. The newspaper Vidrodzhennia (The Revival), which was published under Nazi rule in occupied Ukraine, wrote on December 6, 1942:

Only one part of the population did not feel the famine. Those were the Jews. They calmly used the services of “Torgsin,”^[8] in whose stores there was everything one could want, including produce. But it could only be bought with gold and foreign currency. And the Jews lacked neither gold, nor dollars. (Berkhoff 2008b, 166)

Similar publications, which blamed Jews for the famine, appeared in Dnipropetrovs’ka hazeta (Dnipropetrovsk Gazette) during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine (Berkhoff 2008b, 166).

Kyivan Valentin Terno “recalled seeing in Kyiv… in the summer of 1942 a feature film in Ukrainian called Ostannii udar (The last blow), about collectivization and the famine” (Berkhoff 2008b, 167). Terno described the film “as fiercely anti-Semitic, it showed corpses of famine victims and ended with the killing of a Jewish NKVD officer” (Berkhoff 2008b, 166).

Only a small percentage of collaborators faced criminal charges after the liberation of Kyiv by the Red Army. In Kyiv, 82 policemen were accused of collaboration, among whom 73 were Ukrainians, six Russians, two ethnic Germans and one Pole (Chornyi; Penter 2012 195–97). Many civilians who denounced Jews and stole Jewish property avoided punishment. In 1966, Kuznetsov wrote about Praskovya Derkach, who had denounced hidden Jews to the Nazis:

It is a curious fact that Praskovya continues to flourish to this day. She lives on Menzhinsky Street and has never been punished in any way, maybe because she did not betray any N.K.V.D. agents or Communists, but just a few Jews. She is, of course, older now, but only in her body, not in her mind. The neighbours often hear her giving her views: “You think that’s the end of the war? Oh, no, not yet. The Germans will come back from over there, and the Chinese will come from over there—then we’ll give the Yids something worse than Babi Yar!” (Anatoli 1970, 157)

The Communist leaders of Ukraine were quite lenient regarding crimes of collaboration, especially if they were directed only against Jews. Vladimir Shcherbitsky, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1972–1989, appealed to the Party Central Committee to keep secret information on the involvement of his countryman in the brutal slaughter of civilians (Rudling 2011a; Khatyn b 201–202). The request was received “with understanding,” and information about local collaborationists was classified as secret in the Ukrainian archives until the collapse of communism.