The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [53]
One time, after the Germans arrived, a strange person appeared in Sofiyovka: Dr. Klinger. He was about fifty years old when he came. To me as a child he seemed very old. He had a lot of scars around his face and on his hands, and some of his fingers were missing. He arrived in Sofiyovka as a German. He dressed in a very elegant way. He seemed to be an important person. The Germans showed him very great respect. He seemed to be a high-level German of some sort, so we wondered where he came from, and where he got his scars and lost his fingers. Was he a veteran from World War I?
He was very often a guest in our house. So we became friendly, and he began to trust us as friends, and he told us he is a Jew. He told us how he got the scars on his face and hands: he was studying somewhere in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht, and Germans attacked him with knives. He protected his face with his hands, and as a result he lost some fingers and has scars all over. The scars let him pretend he was a war veteran, and his wounds brought him a lot of honor among the Germans.
Dr. Klinger convinced the Germans that he needed some of the Jews for something, and protected a lot of them for a while that way. But some of the Schutsmen, Ukrainians, were suspicious about him. They insisted he should come with them for a drink at the end the day once. They got him very drunk. When he was so drunk he was helpless they took down his pants and saw he was circumcised. Then they dragged him to the street and shot him. His body stayed there overnight until Jews came and took him away to bury him the next day.
Before the Germans had the first liquidation they did a preparation of the townspeople. A big-shot German came and gave a speech that no one would be hurt if they followed orders and did not behave wrongly. The Germans were in charge of the town for a long time, and there had been murders, yes, but no mass killing. One day the special liquidation unit of German soldiers arrived in Sofiyovka with assistants of Ukrainian Schutsmen who surrounded the town. No one suspected that they would be killed. They thought, “Oh, another one of the German big-shots will give a speech, and that will be that.” So there was no big resistance.
During the first Aktion my mother hid sixty people in the attic of the post office. One of my mother’s friends, a Jewish woman, and her son were hiding in our house. The boy caught tuberculosis. The Schutsmen went from house to house looking for Jews, but by some miracle they didn’t come to our house, so this woman and her son escaped the roundup. But the son got worse and worse. Eventually he started coughing very hard, coughing up blood, got very weak and died. His mother became hysterical. She didn’t eat or drink, she just cried. My mother tried to get her to go hide in the attic, but she said she didn’t want to live. Then she just walked out the door and started walking up the street. Soon we heard the shot that killed her.
When Russians were in control, the Volksdeutsch [Germans] were allowed to leave under a clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. So a nearby Volksdeutsch village called Yosefin was emptied of Volksdeutsch, and Poles and Ukrainians were moved in there. There was a Polish man in Yosefin, a veteran of war under Pilsudski, a man who knew how to use weapons, a very strong man, and a very commanding person. He was working in his fields on the day of the first Aktion. He saw and he heard what was happening. Something snapped in his head, and he became a completely different person, walking around in a daze, mumbling words no one could understand. The next day he put on a coat and told people he was going to search for Free Poland. No one ever saw him again.
More people escaped into the forest from the second killing because it was not so well organized as before—for the Germans it looked easier because so many fewer people meant they didn’t have to