Soviets Get Grim Look at Holocaust

“We never knew,” the old man said as he looked at the gruesome pictures of the bodies of Jews killed by Nazi troops. “We had heard some things, a little bit then and more later, but we have never known the facts.”

Many have said that of the Holocaust, but this man, Yakov Kelman, now in his 70s, was Jewish himself--and from an area in the Ukraine where the Nazis’ special mobile killing squads had operated after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941.

Village Was Gone

Kelman recalled how he had managed to escape from his village before it was occupied by the advancing German troops. When he returned after the war, none of his family was left--two sisters and a brother were located later--but then little was left of the village.

“Everything had been burned, razed to the ground, and five years later even the ruins were overgrown,” Kelman said, preferring to speak in Yiddish rather than Russian. “We were never certain what had happened there. . . . For the first time, I see what was this Holocaust that people speak of.”

With his grandson translating the captions for him, Kelman was touring the photo exhibit on the Holocaust at the new Jewish cultural center, which opened here last month as part of the current resurgence of Jewish community life. The exhibit, “The Courage to Remember,” is composed of 40 panels of photographs, quotations, maps and other historical material brought to Moscow by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles.

Several thousand Jews have visited the exhibit--an unprecedented event for Moscow--since it opened Feb. 12. And many were clearly shocked by the magnitude of the story that it tells, because the Holocaust has remained a “blank spot of history,” an area so ideologically sensitive that Soviet authorities had, until now, banned any version except their own.

“Our knowledge of the Holocaust is very uncertain,” said Veniamin Belitsky, a mathematics teacher who conducts after-school classes on Jewish culture and history. “We know, of course, what the Holocaust is, but as historical fact it is rather abstract. We know, too, what the Great Patriotic War, as we call World War II, was for our country, but we do not fully understand how one related to the other.

“Many of us have a personal knowledge of the Holocaust as well--events we lived through, or our parents or aunts and uncles lived through and told us about--but again, we have difficulty relating these little pieces to the whole.

“This for any person would be a matter of shame, but for a Jew that shame should be very great.”

In the current Soviet history of World War II, the Nazis’ persecution and extermination of an estimated 6 million European Jews from 1933 to 1945 is treated not as Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question” but simply as further evidence of the evil nature of fascism and the need for the international struggle that finally defeated it.

Brief Mentions

The 1972 edition of the authoritative Great Soviet Encyclopedia summarizes the Holocaust in a single paragraph in a lengthy article on Jews and gives it only two lines in an even longer article on anti-Semitism. It is barely mentioned in the encyclopedia’s detailed history of World War II.

When the Wiesenthal center translated the panels into Russian for publication in a booklet, no single word could be found for holocaust.

“We had to use the phrase Jewish Catastrophe ,” Gerald Margolis, the center director, said. “The reason is that Soviet history has never dealt with the extermination of Jews as Jews, the way they were marked for elimination and the way that their annihilation was carried out. What happened to Jews in the Soviet Union is submerged in what happened to the country as a whole. Yet, quite clearly, quite objectively, what happened to Jews was different.”

Of an estimated 4.8 million Jews living on Soviet-held territory when Germany invaded in 1941, as many as half were killed, according to Alec Nove and J. A. Newth, British specialists on the Soviet Union.

Using Soviet census records, Nove and Newth have calculated that in some regions less than a fifth of the Jewish population survived the war.

“The Holocaust was no secret from us--we knew what had happened,” Mikhail Livshitz, another visitor, said as he toured the exhibit. “The survivors told us, and this became part of our identity as Jews that has been passed from father to son, from mother to daughter.

“But these were memories, not history. If you looked for the history of the Holocaust, you could not find it in the Soviet Union. Some writers, of course, have dealt bravely and sympathetically with what happened to Jews, but real knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust are still rare.”

Anatoly Kuznetzov, who later defected and died in the West, wrote a documentary novel that was published in 1966--with many changes by government censors--about the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev where 34,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed in two days in September, 1941.

The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had already demanded, in an angry 1961 poem, why up to then no monument had been built at Babi Yar, where altogether at least 100,000 people--two-thirds of them Jews--were killed over two years.

Yevtushenko’s poem, still one of his best-known, was sharply attacked by Communist Party officials, including Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the party’s first secretary. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich later used the text for a choral symphony. But only in 1976 was a monument put up at Babi Yar, and its plaque said tersely that “Soviet citizens” had been executed there by the Nazis.

Story Appears in Books

Anatoly Rybakov, the author of the current best-selling novel “Children of the Arbat,” wrote in detail in a 1978 novel, “Heavy Sand,” about the fate of Jews under the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Published in a period of increasing anti-Semitism and rejected as “too provocative” by Novy Mir, the country’s premier literary journal, “Heavy Sand” was a sensation--but a brief one, as the book quickly sold out and was reprinted only eight years later.

In December, the literary journal Znamya published a story, described as the first of its kind in a Soviet publication, on an underground resistance group in the Jewish ghetto of the Byelorussian capital of Minsk during the Nazi occupation.

In the official Soviet assessment, however, the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis was no different than that of others, and theirs was a shared fate.

“Jews were marked for annihilation--that is clear and incontrovertible,” Margolis said. “And when someone, particularly a country from where many of the victims came, where much of the killing went on, cannot or will not face up to this, it raises many questions of why.”

The answer, some Soviet historians now acknowledge, lies first in the past needs of the Soviet Communist Party to identify the great nationalist struggle to defeat the Nazis with the party’s own need to defend socialism and its leadership of the country.

Elie Wiesel, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his efforts to ensure that the Holocaust is remembered, called on the Soviet leadership while speaking at the opening of the new Jewish cultural center to “stop this process of de-Judaizing the Holocaust.” He said it was “of the utmost importance to us as Jews” for the nature of the Holocaust to be recognized.

While looking at the monument at Babi Yar, Wiesel said, “I was angry and ashamed. Eighty thousand Jews were killed at Babi Yar, and the word Jew does not even appear on this monument.”

A second element in the Soviet attitude toward the Holocaust has been the recurrent waves of anti-Semitism in Soviet society over the past 40 years, some Soviet historians say frankly in recently published assessments.

In officially approved anti-Zionist propaganda, for example, little distinction was made between Zionism, which Soviet authorities continue to oppose as “reactionary” and “chauvinistic,” and Jews.

Some Soviet propaganda has asserted, as recently as four or five years ago, that the Holocaust not only has been exaggerated, but also that Zionist forces decided to use the Nazi campaign to help them establish a Jewish state. In such Soviet propaganda, Jewish financiers are said to have put Hitler in power in Germany, with the intention of using him to establish their own global political and economic control.

With the increased official Soviet tolerance for Soviet Jews to practice and develop their culture, many in the Jewish community here believe that a reevaluation of the Holocaust will come.

The Soviet Union’s Main Archival Administration signed an agreement last July with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to permit historians, archivists and curators to study Soviet archives on the Nazi genocide here. Many will be copied for inclusion in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which is scheduled to open in Washington in late 1991.

“When this information comes out--how it happened--then we will have to confront that it really did happen and search for the answer to why,” said a Soviet historian who helped promote the agreement, asking not to be quoted by name. “At that point, I think, we will acknowledge the annihilation of Jews--the Holocaust--as a particular crime of the Nazis.”

Last year for the first time, Soviet authorities permitted official observance, both here and in Kiev, of the anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar.

Jewish cultural groups, which are proliferating after years of suppression, also are expected to play a major role in educating Soviet Jews on the Holocaust.

“For Jews, knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust should be galvanizing,” the Wiesenthal center’s Margolis said. “That is why it is so distressing that even adults in the Jewish community have no sense of what happened.

“For them, this exhibit will be more than a history lesson, we hope. We expect that it will strengthen their identity as Jews, their solidarity as a community, their commitment.”