Chechelnik, my native place - by Alexander Vishnevetskiy

Article appeared on News of week (Israel, Russian-language newspaper), on August 18, 2005
(Automatic translation from Russian)
Source: alvishnev8391.narod.ru/ghetto.htm

The place of Chechelnik, where I was born and grew, was during several centuries the place where the life went on established Jewish traditions since ancient times. The basic language of place was Yiddish; everyone spoke it, including children.

Among them there was local Ukrainian population which also was understood and even spoke Yiddish. The Jewish craftsmen of place produced everything required by the peasants of the surrounding villages, and they lived with the earned means.

In a word, in Chechelnik, as in many places of the Ukraine, Jews were completely integrated in ethnographical and economic reality. But, if someone now attempts to prove, that Jews did dwell sometime in Chechelnik, this will not be easily made.

Even in the brief Jewish encyclopedia is absent various articles about my native place, and in other reference publications it is possible to reveal perhaps that the reference about the fact that these are urban type “settlement, regional center in Vinnitsa region”, where there is a railway station and a sugar combine.

Recently attentively examined in the Internet in the Russian and Ukrainian language everything, what is connected with my native place Chechelnik, where I was born, it was in the ghetto during the war and then it learned in the school. And here it did not reveal the detailed references about the Jewish life in the place. Only on one of the American portals it was possible to find the photograph of the building of our synagogue. But one of the obtained materials there astonished and agitated me. On “Vinnitsa regional portal” www.portal.vinnitsa.com in the brief historical information on Chechelnik is contained sufficiently detailed information about the place, but there is not one word about the Jews, although entire documentary almost 500 year history of place is connected with the Jews. For example, in the place it in 1939 lived 1327 Jews, which composed 66% of the total population of place. And if now it doesn’t remain Jews there, does this mean that is necessary to ignore this theme generally? Probably, anyone desires to quiet our Jewish tragic fate in the diaspore, especially in light of the catastrophe; our, for example, connection with the Ukraine, its people, its history?

However, this tendency occurs in different countries and it is tightly connected with that growing by antisemitism and by hatred for the Jews and, in the first place, with attempts at the ignoring of the catastrophe, at which the big enough portion of fault lies on the countries and the peoples, where Jews lived. …

On the old unwritten traditions the inhabitants of each of place had their nickname. The inhabitants of Chechelnik were called “meshugim” (fools), although the only actually mentally deranged of the place was shot down by Germans during the first days of the Fascist occupation, when he ran on the place and screamed out in yiddish “mom, mom - Germans considerable people!”

The rest of my life I would memorize the people of the place, not only by their mind and humor, but also by their diligence, by the readiness to arrive to each other to help. Maybe; therefore after such terrible tests of war they managed without the psychological and medical rehabilitation and knew how to remain valuable people in spite of entire the fact that fell to their lot. Even now, when meeting with its compatriots through many years, you feel their heat, proximity and relationship.

In that place many generations on my father’s line conducted their life. When the war began and it became known that the Germans approached the place, they gave my father and family the urgent order to evacuate the kolkhoz horse and vehicle. But when we reached the Dnepr, german land forces have already been placed, cutting us the way off. It was necessary to return back. While returning home, we visited mid-way the village of Pokotilovo on the Kirovograd region, where lived the father of my mom, and her two sisters with their families. They proposed to my father to stay with them in Pokotilovo. But father refused, and this saved us. Already after release we learned, that all Jews in Pokotilovo were killed and that fascists especially jeered the father of mother before death.

The month after the beginning of war Chechelnik was seized by occupiers and, on the second day, they expelled inhabitants from their houses with the purpose of shooting them. People was driven to the area, and only the interference of the high German military rank, which arrived up to this moment to the place, saved people from the loss.

From that time there is a legend, that this serviceman was a disguised partisan. German and Rumanian servicemen with the aid of the Ukrainian police from the local population and several Jewish traitors began to rob, to kill Jews, to expel people from their houses. Frequently Ukrainian peasants from the adjacent villages were assigned to these actions.

Toward the end of August 1941, Germans transferred the control over territory between the rivers Bug and Dniester and Mogilev-Podol'sk to the Black sea to Rumanians, and this territory was called Transnistriya. In this territory before the war they lived 300 thousand Jews, 185 thousand of them were then killed by Germans and Rumanians. Rumanians deported to Transnistriya tens of thousands of Jews from Rumania and Moldavia.

The places, which fell into the Rumanian zone of occupation, were overfilled by refugees. The terribly cold winter of 1941-1942, hunger, large congestion of people in the houses led to the mass epidemics, first of all typhus and dysentery. My mom told me, that the mortality among the Jews, especially refugees, had here in that winter mass nature.

Mom in 1933 graduated from medical technical school in Gaysin (where all the instruction was conducted in Yiddish) and even, being located in the ghetto, she worked in the local hospital.

Here is a fragment from the testimony of one of the deported Jews from the Chernovitsky region to Chechelnik. His name was Israel Taygler, he was from 1918 generation. His record was stored at Yad Vashem archives under the number 03.246 (transfer from the Germans, on which it gave indications and account of this material). He was from the village of Kadobeshti, where at the beginning war lived 20 Jewish families. Everyone was deported. At the moment of release it remained only the representatives of 5 families. In November 1941 they were chased from home and were driven on foot for many days to Chechelnik. His mother perished along the road from hunger and cold, they shot her, when she could not walk anymore. In Chechelnik he fell with the first group of those deported, then drove home other groups from the [bokobiny: sidewall?] and Bessarabia. 10 families of those run from Poland since 1939 have already been located there. Those emptying earlier the house were overfilled by the deported refugees. Immediately an epidemy of typhus arose among them and at least half of these people died victim of this epidemy. His father died of typhus somedays after the arrival. The corpse of father was located 8 days in the same room, where was Israel Taygler, who laid next in a typhoid delirium. When consciousness returned to him, and he could rise, he went into the local community and asked for help for the burial of the father. But this was possible to make only after several days since the number of corpses was very large and people were not sufficient for digging the graves. There were no transportation means whatever for the delivery of corpses on the cemetery.

In the place there was communal committee, headed by Joseph Zaslavskiy, by [bilenkim] and [Granovskim] and the Jewish police under the management nobody [Volokha]. Rumanian gendarmery governed Jewish management. On the order of the gendarmery, Jews were sent to forced works to the railway station, to the sugar factory, to the fields. Part of those deported was sent to Nikolayev for the building of bridges.

The shooting threatened outside the limits of ghetto. In spite of this, many were dispatched to the adjacent Ukrainian villages and to peasants either to ask for food or to attempt to pay it by their labor. Sometimes, community divided the small solderings of products, means, for acquisition of which they came from Jews, who remained themselves even in Rumania. Among those deported there were physicians, ready to give assistance free of charge, but they did not have medicines. This is a part of the memories of Taygler about the Chechelnik ghetto.

From meanest side Jewish traitors, who wait to occupiers, behaved. To two inhabitants of place - To the [yankelyu] Red Army men To [tentseru] and For [motlu] to Blumenthal it was possible to escape from the German captivity into the place. Yankel was injured in the head. They gave out to Rumanians, Joseph Zaslavskiy himself returned to the kommendature. They were shot by Rumanians before the eyes of some inhabitants, including the wife of Yankel. Germans also periodically entered the place and killed Jews. Daily terror was also carried out by Ukrainian police. One of the most terrible pages about it was the attempt to destroy the Jews of place via provocation. On the wedding of his daughter, local police Pavel Gnid killed the assistant of the commandant of Rumanian gendarmery, and then attempted to toss up the corpse to the territory of ghetto. Fortunately, Rumanian soldiers caught him during the attempt and they shot him and those of the police that were on the wedding.

I recall, small child in those years, remained feelings of horror, fear, cold and hunger. I memorized the hysterical laughter of mother at the most dangerous moments, connected with the threat of loss. Frequently, during such days we stayed in the basement of our own house, fearing even to give a cough. Already nearer to the arrival of the Soviet troops we were hidden in the Ukrainian family in the outskirts of place. As a whole, my parents had not bad relations with the local Ukrainians, and this was in many respects connected as with the professional habits of my father as barber, and with the enormous experience of mother as nurse, prepared at any time of day and night to arrive to help the people of the place and surrounding Ukrainian villages.

In our family as full-fledged member, it was since 1935 a Ukrainian nurse, Anna Boyko. During the years of occupation she remained with us, disregarding of the danger for her to stay with us. But perhaps these factors although somehow could affect the happy end for our family? Our parents, and all Jews of place, underwent mockeries from the side of Germans, Rumanians, Ukrainian police and even Jewish traitors. Their life was converted into hell. But they attempted to do everything in order to fence us - children from all the fact that attacked them. My sister Dora with her friend Lisa Fischer even in these terrible years they were occupied secretly on the Soviet textbooks with instructor Shuroy of Spektor, which allowed them after the release to immediately begin studies from the 4th class instead of first. Two nephews of my father lost their health in the ghetto of Chechelnik. One of them, Sasha Makarevskiy was forcibly driven away at the shipyard into Nikolayev and returned several months after half-dead. Another, Khananya Vinokur was so beaten by police, that he remained stutterer for life. Both of them died young.

There was no hope for rescue, although in the place there was the underground Jewish group, but in the adjacent scaffolding there were partisans. In the barbershop of my father worked a young fellow, Monya Zukerman, who heard everything that police and Germans said, and he transferred this information to underground workers. Underground in the place was headed by Isaac Granovskiy, being helped by Eugene Boroda. They have a close connection with the partisans, who stayed in the adjacent scaffolding. Specifically, from Granovsky’s parents we learned about the victory of the Soviet troops in the environs of Stalingrad. And, nevertheless, to us transported in the sense that we they proved to be in Transnistria. Indeed in the territories of the occupied with German occupiers even ghetto they were not created, but Jewish population underwent immediately general destruction.

On March 17, 1944 the place was freed. For the people remaining among the living, it was in prospect to still survive the hunger of years 1947-1948 in Ukraine. Experienced catastrophe, hunger, antisemitism, the disloyal relation of authorities, the tendency of Jews to leave the places because of the mass loss and of humiliations, and also the tendency to move to the large cities in order to give to children formation, led to the fact that the Jewish life began to cease even in those places, where part of the Jews survived to the war.

The disintegration of the USSR and the possibility to complete repatriation in Israel or to leave to the Western countries brought this process to the logical end. Such predominantly Jewish places, as Chechelnik, were completely deprived of Jews. But, the Jewish life of place continued and continues, although its former inhabitants proved to be in the different countries, and first of all in the USA and Israel.

Even in the Soviet times, in June 1985, former inhabitants of place gathered together in Odessa, where they were represented by about 40 people. But 10 years later, in the honor of the 50th anniversary of the victory above Fascist Germany, there were 80 former inhabitants of Chechelnik who gathered to the encounter in New York. At the encounter there were the people who had not seen during decades and even they did not know each other. Besides the present inhabitants of New York were represented the inhabitants of Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, [Maluoki]. People from Canada also arrived. Were located still many people who did not know about the encounter and that regretted not to participate. A film about this encounter was photographed and the cassettes given to participants.

As it would be healthy to conduct one additional such “international” Chechelnik encounter, but this time in Israel. Our generation of those survived the catastrophe, and this encounter must compulsorily be carried out with the participation of our children and grandsons. Let they know, from where we were, where are our roots, that for us it was necessary to survive.

I think that there is about which to have a talk at this encounter, and for those following us with change it will be a worthy story. My further life was connected with Tashkent, where our family moved completely in 1954. But, even for many years to me repeatedly they resembled about my stay in the ghetto. The Soviet regime up to 1970's saw the Jews who visited the ghetto as traitors! I remember numerous forms with questions like “where were you located during the war?” while entering to the institute, at its end, with the device to work.

Since 1988, when Tashkent Jewish cultural center was created, I was introduced into its management that headed the association of the prisoners of ghetto in Tashkent. We succeeded in designing for the former prisoners, including from the former inhabitants of Chechelnik, the German rent, which they obtained in Tashkent. In this large role played, my participation in the seminar in Jerusalem at “Yad Vashem” on the history of catastrophe in February - March 1992. With the assistance of “Yad Vashem” we obtained all necessary juridical consultations on the formulation of documents for subsequent obtaining the rent from Germany.

It passed already 60 years after the end of the Second World War. There is less and less people living in the present days that survived the terrible conditions in the concentration camps and the ghetto. The especially heavy and terrible load of memories remained in young prisoners, deprived of childhood, and now who compose the overwhelming majority of those who survived catastrophe. Their age is already more than 65 years and it doesn’t remain so much time in order to testify their experience. Time flies rapidly.

Now already for me according to the nature of public affairs in Jerusalem, where I arrived as new repatriate in December 2004, it is necessary to contend with those who survived catastrophe in the ghetto and the concentration camps. Many of them carry a pitiful existence. The years and those terrible tests, which fire in their portion during the years of war, are shown. Our state is obligated to recognize special status of the prisoners of ghetto and concentration camps, which can facilitate the conditions of their life. And it is still necessary to compulsorily gather documents and evidence about the populated areas in which there were, in other times, large Jewish communities. Indeed those, who still store in their memory, the information about other time flourishing places which disappeared in the flame of the Holocaust, become with each year less and less…

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* Historia: Chichelnik