Questions of Choice: The Soviet Case and the Absence of Gender Identity in Ordinary Jews

Ordinary Jews is the book that I wish I had had when, as a graduate student, I first read the work of Christopher Browning on the mindset of the perpetrators of the genocide of European Jewry and the choices they made as they actively partook in the murder operations. I recall that as I wrote my paper, I inquired about the choices of the victims, who were clustered together as a voiceless collectivity devoid of agency. Ordinary Jews is the book that I wish I had had when years later, in the city of Grodno, once home to a vibrant and old Jewish community, I met Hirsh Khosid, one of the only survivors of the Grodno ghetto. As I listened to Hirsh recap the events that led to his improbable survival, incredulous, I tried to understand how and why he made the sudden choice to leave his family and jump off the train traveling toward the death camp of Treblinka. Ordinary Jews is also the book that should be read in order to fully grasp some of the experiences recorded by Holocaust survivors like Ruth Kluger in her powerful memoir, Still Alive. When chronicling the anguish of the death marches, the forced evacuation of concentration camp prisoners toward the interior of the Reich, or the last phase in the genocide of European Jewry, Kluger described her choice to run, to evade instead of coping. “Our decision to escape was a real, a free, decision,” she explained. “Certainly there were reasons and causes why we found the energy to act—as there were reasons and causes why we could have continued on that desperate, doomed march. We made a choice: inebriated with hope and despair, a heady cocktail. I chose the freedom of birds that can be shot down by any hunter.”¹ Evgeny Finkel’s new book provides some answers as to why Kluger decided to run, reminding us that even under impossible constraints every individual chose how to respond to persecution and death, and that this choice was not as choiceless as we would assume.

Ordinary Jews represents, therefore, a major contribution to the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, primarily because it places the complexities of the victims’ agency at the center of the narrative; it identifies their survival strategies, dissecting, unpacking, and contextualizing them. But this study is also a major contribution because it includes a detailed discussion of the ways in which Soviet Jews experienced genocide. The focus is not only on the “Polish” ghettos of Białystok and Kraków, but also on the “Soviet” ghetto in Minsk, the largest one in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The tendency to forget the victims’ choices and relegate their voices to the margins of the events is most common when historians or political scientists discuss the Holocaust in the Soviet lands.

Finkel argues that the knowledge of persecution and murder shaped the victims’ behavior and choice in the face of death. But in the Soviet case he seems to slightly overstate the role that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed by the USSR and Germany in August 1939, had on the extent of knowledge of anti-Jewish violence available to Jews. While we know very little about the real effect that the nonaggression pact had on everyday Jewish life, as well as on the role of Jews in the Communist Party elites and government organization in the capital of Belarus at the time, its impact on the degree of information accessible to Soviet citizens should not be exaggerated. In other words, the Jews of Minsk had had access to information on the German treatment of Jews since 1933 and through August 1939: anti-Jewish violence and policies received extensive coverage in the press, both in Russian and in Yiddish. The movie Professor Mamlock, for example, featuring the experience of a Jewish doctor who fled Nazi Germany for Moscow, was widely released in the Minsk movie theaters in 1938 and 1939. So that when Polish Jewish refugees settled in Minsk after 1939 and shared their...