In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

8. Life beyond the River: Transnistria

186 S 8 An American immigrant originally from Tulchyn, Manya Ganiyevva, wrote down her recollection of her wartime experiences in Transnistria and deposited that memoir through the Jewish Family Service of Cincinnati with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , D.C. She begins her memoir with the lament that “after the war I often happened to read about the camps in the territories of Poland and Germany: Buchenwald, Maidanek, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and many others, where many thousands of Jews were exterminated and cremated. But in all these years, I have never read about those German concentration camps in which I was held, in which many thousands of Jews from all of Ukraine, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were detained.”1 Her memoir is remarkable in that in all the interviews we conducted with former inmates of camps and ghettos in Transnistria, we never heard such references made to the notorious extermination and concentration camps of Germany and Poland. When survivors relocate—usually to America, Israel or one of the larger cities of Ukraine or Russia—as Ganiyevva did, they come to understand their experiences within a wider context, and begin k Life beyond the River transnIstrIa Life beyond the River 187 to compare their own fates with those from other regions. They come to understand their wartime memories in relation to a prevailing narrative of the Holocaust. They become aware that their own experiences in Transnistria do not fit comfortably into the Holocaust as it is commonly understood in the West. In the previous chapter I noted that many of the most recognized symbols of Holocaust experiences were largely absent from the Soviet experience. Instead, Soviet Jewish victims of the Holocaust tended to be killed closer to home, in ravines and cemeteries on the outskirts of their towns. However, the experiences of the local Jews in Transnistria also do not fit this model. With few exceptions—such as the murder of 150 Jews in Tomashpil on August 11, 1941—Jewish communities of Transnistria were spared such massacres. Even the “Holocaust by bullets” was largely foreign to the experiences of Transnistrian Jews. Second World War Transnistria—not to be confused with the current breakaway republic of contemporary Moldova—was established on August 19, 1941 when German military officials ceded the area between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers to Romania in return for Romania’s continued cooperation in Operation Barbarossa.2 This territory had no political history as a united region and was a completely arbitrary creation . Some 300,000 Jews lived in the region that became Transnistria before the war, 180,000 of whom lived in Odessa, the only major metropolis .3 The rest of the Jewish population was scattered across various towns and villages in what had been the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the southern portions of Vinnytsya Province. The largest of these towns—among them Tiraspol, Dubosar, MohylivPodilskyy , Zhmerynka, Balta, and Ribnitsa—had Jewish populations of 3,000–7,000, and total populations of 10,000–30,000. The region also included numerous smaller shtetls, including Tulchyn, Sharhorod, Tomashpil , and Kopayhorod, each of which had prewar Jewish populations of 2,000–5,000, and in which Jews often constituted up to three-quarters of the total population of the town. The Romanian authorities who seized control of Transnistria hoped to use it as a dumping ground for the Jews they were expelling from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina—the provinces that Romania had acquired from Russia and Austria in the aftermath of the First World War, which were then seized by the Soviet Union in 1940 before being recaptured by Romania the following year. Romanian authorities sought 188 in the shadow of the shtetl to expel the Jews ostensibly in retaliation for the alleged Jewish support of the Soviet occupation. In reality, the Jews were victims of an extensive Romanian ethnic purification campaign. The little that has been written on Transnistria has focused on the fate of these approximately 150,000 Jewish deportees.4 The deportations began in late July 1941, when about 20,000 Jews arrived in Mohyliv-Podilskyy, a town that became the main transit point across the Dniester River. Many among the initial wave of deportees were subsequently returned to Bessarabia, where they were imprisoned in several camps and ghettos, but about 700 were either shot or died during the journey.5 Between October 13 and November...