APPENDIX I
In the early 1930s, during the interwar period, collectivization under Stalin triggered a Soviet man-made famine in Ukraine, often referred to as “Holodomor.” Since the Ukrainian opposition to collectivization was viewed by the Kremlin as a threat against Communism and a fight for independence, the powers-that-be retaliated by starving the population to death.
In a 1988 report by the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, case history SW34, an unnamed person who lived in Stavishche as a child in the 1930s explained the effects on the population who were forced onto collective farms and deliberately left without animals, tools, and farming implements, rendering them incapable of toiling the land and feeding themselves.
“At the time I lived close to the [Stavishche] hospital,” the witness reported. “People were being driven in from villages near and far, as well as from Stavishche, my native village. People were even bringing in their own children, who were already swollen…”
The interviewee then spoke about a large park beside the hospital where the cemetery was located. “Enormous open pits were dug and doctors carried on stretchers the bodies of those who had died [from starvation] and tossed them into the pits. The process would be repeated each day until the open pit was filled and covered over with dirt shoveled over it.… Later they didn’t bother with the morgue anymore, but took the corpses straight to the open pits on stretchers. Often nurses carried as many as ten children on stretchers and tossed them into the pit.”
The collectivization process that caused the deadly famine did not distinguish between its victims. Both the Jewish and Christian populations of Stavishche starved to death. Less than a decade later, the Jews of Stavishche were once again singled out, much like they were twenty years earlier during the pogroms. Arial photographs that gave the Nazis a bird’s-eye-view guided their entrance into the town. Jewish eyewitness accounts of the few survivors who were in Stavishche after the Nazis’ raid state that some of the local Ukrainians also collaborated with these evil killers by pointing out where the Jewish families lived, thus signing their death warrants.
On July 17, 1941, as loudspeakers and sirens went off in town centers in nearby Belaya Tserkov warning its residents of the impending attack by the Germans, the Jews who were isolated in the small shtetl of Stavishche were caught by surprise. Men of age were away in the army, but within two weeks, the young boys and elderly males were rounded up in front of the women and girls and were shot in the forest.
Two sisters from Belaya Tserkov, thirteen-year-old Raisa Bershadskaya and her seventeen-year-old sister, Ida, were spending the summer of 1941 in Stavishche visiting their paternal grandparents, Basya and Zelig, when Nazis invaded the town. After witnessing the murder of her grandfather, Raisa was able to escape by running for her life while both her grandmother and sister were captured, along with the remaining 150 Jewish women and children in the town.
Very little information has been documented about the genocide that occurred in Stavishche during the Holocaust, but a small handwritten entry found in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes Remembrance Authority, citing signature member in the Yad Vashem Archives, YVA M.52/235, frame 2045–2051, stated in Ukrainian:
Then the Gestapo came to the village. The population was deeply distressed by their savage treatment of the Jewish residents. Everybody from small children to old people were taken to the forest and shot near the hole that was made beforehand. Young people who were braver watched the bloody terror over the poor people. They were going along the road followed by (Fascist) policemen with guns. Women were carrying small children. In the forest, the executioners with machine guns were waiting for them already. The policemen took the victims to the hole and the executioners shot them with machine guns. Four Jewish families from our village were killed in such a way.
The same document gave a glimpse of what happened to some of Stavishche’s non-Jewish residents. “Three-hundred forty-four people from Stavishche were sent to Germany for hard labor.”I
Oppression of the Christian residents, although not as devastating as the mass murders that were committed against the Jewish ones, haunted those remaining in Stavishche. “Every week many people were caught and sent to hard labor. All of them were gathered in the town of Stavishche in a two-storied building. Very often young people jumped from the second floor and hurt themselves and became invalids just in order to stay in their native place. They also jumped out of carriages when the train was on its way. Fascists shot and often killed them. And only after some time relatives got to know the sad news about their children.”
After the war ended in 1945, ten Jewish families, all with loved ones living in Stavishche during the war, gathered in Belaya Tserkov. Together, they made the decision to return to Stavishche to discover the fate of their loved ones. A few older men led the group, which included Raisa Bershadskaya, her parents, and her younger sister, who were searching for Raisa’s older sister and grandmother, who were still alive when she fled from the town. They returned to the spot in the forest, located close to the Jewish cemetery, where Raisa had witnessed the shotgun murders of her grandfather and the other boys and men of the town.
To the group’s surprise, their loved ones’ bodies were easily found. The scene of death, one of savage murder, remained strangely intact and untouched four years later. While the corpses had rotted and decomposed, the pits that they were thrown into were never covered, and the remains of the bodies were exposed. The skeletons of about two hundred Jewish men, women, and children, who had been heartlessly massacred, were now in the process of being claimed by surviving family members and friends who tried desperately to identify them by their clothing, hairpieces, shoes, and eyeglasses.
In an ironic twist of fate, these Jewish families were forced to pay the local Ukrainians—some who may have even helped to send their loved ones to their death—with money and liquor for their assistance in exhuming the bodies. The corpses were removed from the open holes and were brought to the nearby Jewish cemetery for a proper burial. Two mass graves, separating the bodies by gender, were used for their group burial. The Jewish people of Stavishche, who had died together at the ruthless hands of the Nazis in 1941, were finally laid to rest together four years later with a religious ceremony.
Today the mass graves, which are surrounded by chains,II each have an attractive memorial stone made of brown marble tablets engraved in both Russian and Hebrew with beautiful etchings, including one of an elderly grieving Jew wearing a tallis. In the 1970s, a Jewish man who was living in Belaya Tserkov named Michael Malin (Mikhail, son of Yosef) was instrumental in getting permission from the Soviet authorities to have the monuments erected in the Jewish cemetery in Stavishche. He also donated a large sum of money, along with other Stavishche families who had immigrated to America, toward the headstones that memorialize the local Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
It is unclear when the murders actually occurred as eyewitness, published, and archival accounts, as well as the dates on the actual memorial headstones, differ. A small entry in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and After the Holocaust reveals that in 1939, the Jewish population in the town was 319 under the Soviets. Stavishche was occupied in July 1941, and within a couple of weeks, most of the Jewish men were murdered. Three months later, the Jewish women and children followed a similar fate.
The number of Jews remaining in Stavishche by 1941 decreased significantly from the 1939 population figures because many of the young men were away in the army. All that is truly known is that the executions occurred between July and December of 1941 and that the old men and boys were killed before the women and girls.
Here is the inscription written on a plaque in Hebrew on both stones:
A memorial stone
To honor
The holy martyrs
Who were murdered by
The Fascist murderers
For the sanctification of God’s name
In the month of Tishrei
The year 5701
In the town of Stavishche
May God remember them in favor
And may He avenge the spilled blood of His servants.
The date is October 1941.
Written in Russian on the women’s mass grave:
Ponder, O Man!
These unfortunate people did not live to see victory.
German-Fascist executioners and their police
Viciously destroyed the life, breath, voice,
thoughts of 150 Soviet citizens—Jews
old, young, women and children.
These are your mothers, your sisters, daughters, and grandchildren.
[Pay] attention to the spiritual and physical sufferings
of these dead and you will know all the depth
and magnitude of their struggle
for your bright and happy life.
On the bottom plaque, written in Russian:
[Do] not suffer but penetrate [into] hatred
And suspicion toward Fascism and understand
That [you] never will allow
Repetition [of] such victims.
Maintain the memory of the martyrs
alive in your children.
Written in Russian on the men’s memorial gravestone:
Here rests the dust
Of fifty old men and children
Soviet citizens and Jews
Beastly slain by German
Fascists and their police
In September 1941 from the village of Stavishche
On the bottom plaque, written in Russian:
People be aware!
This should not happen again.
Let’s not forget nor forgive
The fascist murderers and their
policemen.
1. I. The daughter of Raisa Bershadskaya believes that her mother may have been the only Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in Stavishche who was sent with this group of young Christians from her town to Germany for hard labor.
2. II. Forty years later, grass covered the raised mounds, as described in an article that appeared on September 22, 1988, in the Jewish Journal North of Boston, page 9. It details Dr. Murry Rich’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial tablets and graves at the Jewish cemetery in Stavishche. (Rich is the grandson of Shika de Potch, the postmaster, and the son of Dvora Golditch, a classmate of Daniel Cutler’s at the Russian school.) Twenty years later, in May 2008, the grandson of another Stavishcher visited the same memorials. He reported that the mounds have since weathered and flattened out.