When not busy saving souls in Berlin and Brandenburg, Herr Kube was busy destroying lives by the thousands in the Minsk Ghetto, a job he appeared to relish. On July 31,1942, the good General boasted in writing to the Nazi High Command that he had personally overseen the killing of 55,000 Jews in Belarus in the preceding 10 weeks, including several thousand German Jews. He expressed hope that all the Jews of Belarus would be completely liquidated as soon as the German Wehrmacht no longer needed their labour.*
*FACT: Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
His worst atrocity occurred on March 2, 1942, when 5,000 Jews were murdered to mark the Jewish festival of Purim. While it is almost too horrible for me to relate even today, I must tell you the following terrible atrocity since it played a significant role in determining my fate.
[Here there is a long pause on the tape. At first I thought there was a technical problem, but he picked up his narrative again with a trembling voice.]
How could I ever forget the evening of the Purim slaughter? I had seen a large group of slaves forced to dig a deep pit at the Ratomskaya Street ravine in the center of the ghetto, which I presumed was to accommodate the bodies of some of those who had been shot that afternoon. I didn’t see what followed, but relate here only what was told to me by dozens of those forced to watch.
The SS had apparently decided the small school that was being used as an orphanage needed to be cleaned out in order to make way for a new batch of children on their way from Poland. So all of the Minsk Ghetto children, some as young as two and still in diapers, were herded by men with submachine guns out of the orphanage, down the street, and thrown into the pit.
As those poor little children screamed in terror, some crying for their dead mothers, that great man of God, Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, dressed, as usual, in an immaculate uniform, arrived on the scene with a group of laughing SS officers. Kube reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of candies, and tossed them to the terrified children below. Then waving cheerily at them, he ordered the pit to be filled and the children buried alive.*
*FACT: This atrocity is confirmed by Ernst Klee in Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Verlag 2005), page 346, as well as by M. Gilbert in The Holocaust, page 297, Fontana/Collins, 1987, and Reidlinger 1960 as quoted in Turonek 1989, page 118.
I could hear their screams several blocks away as I sorted through a room full of looted Jewish property in what was once one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe.
You can hear the sadness in my voice as I tell you this. It still provides nightmares. When you are faced with daily horror and unspeakable conditions such as existed in the Minsk Ghetto, you either develop an ability to block everything out or you die. You shut down a part of your brain. The more you endure, the more layers of a cocoon of denial you wrap around your soul. A dozen women machine-gunned on the street—the shock, the revulsion, and the rage get buried deeper and deeper. A body still twitching from the hangman’s noose—thank God it’s not me! Move on!
Nothing matters but your own survival. But children? How do you ever get used to the sight, or as with me, the sounds of terrified, helpless children being buried alive? There is no blanket of denial thick or heavy enough to repress those memories for long. Believe me, I know. Oh, how I know.
Many concentration camp survivors say they still feel vestiges of guilt. Why did they live when millions around them died? I have no such feeling. I have many painful memories that still haunt me, but no guilt. My guilt was cleansed by Satan’s blood!
Until the night of the Purim slaughter I now realize that I was in a state of shock. A zombie, I think, is how some would describe it. It’s a wonder I could function at all when you consider what happened.
The Rahachow Slaughter
THE GERMANS CAME TO RAHACHOW the morning of August 4, 1941, rounded up almost everyone over the age of 50, more than a thousand people, including my mother, father and two uncles, took them into the nearby woods and shot them. Those of us like myself, young and strong enough to work in their slave camps and factories, were forced to lie in the streets where we could hear the machine guns, then as the last bullet found its mark we were handed shovels and ordered to bury the dead.
I found my mother’s poor shattered body amidst the carnage and as l laid her gently in the shallow grave I had dug, an SS officer shouting “schnell, schnell” jabbed me viciously in the ribs with his rifle barrel as he urged by to hurry, hurry. I could not find my father or uncles. Perhaps because of the tears that obscured my eyesight.
The Nazis quickly discovered that thanks to a schoolteacher uncle, I possessed excellent handwriting in both German and Belarusian and had considerable clerical skills, so they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: Help unpack, sort, and carefully record all items looted from Jewish and other wealthy homes, churches, and institutions, which were brought to the Minsk Opera House prior to distribution to the Nazi hierarchy, or be shot. I chose not to be shot.
One of the few things I do remember of that terrible time is that I was ordered to write that fat turd Goebbels’ name on many of the more valuable items. Albert Speer once showed up with a military escort of about twenty SS officers and with much motorcycle revving, heel clicking and “Heil Hitlering,” Herr Speer picked out a Rubens, thus beating poor old Herr Goebbels to a choice prize!
I suppose it is amazing I can recall anything from those bleak and desperate days. I am unclear whether it is my advancing age or the deep fog into which I had descended at the time that clouds my memory of those few months in Minsk.
It was the screaming of the terrified children in the pit that awakened me from my slumbering fugue. I recall, as though it were only yesterday, looking up as the sounds of the terrified children pierced the windows of the opera house and seeing, as though for the first time, the poor emaciated slaves, clothes hanging from sharp shoulders, toiling around me. Some were surely only days from death.
As a non-Jew with light hair and blue eyes, one of the “cleaner” ones according to Himmler, I was given better rations and accommodation than those slated for eradication. No doubt the intent was that I should be kept alive in reasonable condition so that after the Nazis had won the war I would be shipped off to Germany or one of the conquered countries as a slave, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
The sound of the doomed children shook me free of the paralysis that had engulfed me and it was at that moment that I resolved to escape, despite the terrible fate that awaited those who were caught making a break for freedom. In the belief it would discourage further escape attempts, the Germans made sure we could hear the nightlong screams from those caught trying to flee. Hundreds of us were forced to view the public hangings that followed the torture. It was a very effective deterrent.
Many of those who escaped from the ghetto did so by slipping away from work parties sent outside the city to repair railway lines, roadways and bridges destroyed or damaged by the partisan attacks that had already begun to bedevil the Germans. Later, a highly organized underground was established in the ghetto that helped hundreds to escape through sewers, holes in the fence, and tunnels.* Since I worked well into the night at the Opera House labour camp just outside the ghetto, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, no such opportunity presented itself to me. My escape would have to be more creative.
*FACT: Many details concerning life in the Minsk Ghetto, the Opera House labour camp and the atrocities, including the above event, are all available from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Minsk after WWII, with the Opera House in the background
The Unasked Question
I WANT TO PAUSE HERE in my story for a moment to ask a question of you. How in the world could a young, fit, trained soldier of the Soviet Union end up in Ottawa in 1943? Because in that aspect, the history books