Abstract
This chapter is a summary of the aftermath of the massacre of Rovno Jews in November 1941, tracking the lives of some of the 30 known survivors.
In the last section of the book, I take a thread from a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer and explore the legacy of “hauntings” surrounding the Rovno massacre. As one of the survivors of the massacre recalled: “Those who survived that day on November 7th [1941] will never be able to erase it from their memories and hearts” The event haunted perpetrators, victims, and bystanders alike, and it continues to haunt the descendants of survivors and victims and their descendants today.
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Notes
Engineer Moshe Gildenman, “The Attitude of the Non-Jewish Population Toward the Jews,” translated from Yiddish by Naomi Gal, in Rowne; sefer zikaron, 518. Gildenman added that ethnic Belorussians were just as bad as the Ukrainians, but that ethnic Poles—who had also been attacked by the Germans and Ukrainians—were “civil” towards Jews in Rovno in 1941. Ethnic Czechs, Gildenman recalled, were also very supportive of the Jews. On the political economy of genocide, see Ad van Liempt, Hitler’s Bounty Hunters: The Betrayal of the Jews (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005).
Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006): 110–117
Place names have been edited for clarity. Hermann Graebe, The Trial of German Major War Criminals Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany, December 17, 1945 to January 4, 1946. Twenty-Fifth Day: Wednesday, January 2, 1946, Part 1, 201-202. On Graebe’s courageous efforts to save Jews, see Douglas K. Huneke, The Moses of Rovno: The Stirring Story of Fritz Graebe, a German Christian Who Risked His Life to Lead Hundreds to Safety During the Holocaust (New York: Dodd Mead, 1985).
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “A Wedding in Brownsville,” (1964) Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1961–1964): 238–245.
Eventually, Auksmen found one Jew, Leibl’ Halperin, whose story was recounted in Chapter Two above. Meir Auksmen [Meir Oxsman], “The Survivor from a Mass Grave,” Rowne; sefer zikaron, 544-545. Translated from the Hebrew by Sean Kiernan and Hannah Schwartz. On Soviet revenge on the Eastern front, see Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II,” published in a special issue on “Sexual Violence during War” in Politics and Society Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 2009): 47–55.
R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 227.
This theme of a hidden past that lies just beneath the surface of modern Ukrainian life has been explored by Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
On forensic science as politically contested territory in post-Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union, see Ivan Katchanovski, “The Politics of Soviet and Nazi Genocides in Orange Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 62, No. 6 (August 2010): 973–997
Nanci Adler, “The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Stalinist Symbols Amidst the Exhumation of Mass Graves,” Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 57, No. 8 (December 2005): 1093–1119
Irina Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror,” Representations Vol. 75 (Summer 2001): 89–118.
James Mark, “What Remains? Anti-Communism, Forensic Archeology, and the Retelling of the National Past in Lithuania and Romania,” Past & Present No. 206, Suppl. 5 (2010): 276–300
Katharine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1995): 133.
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 8.
Jonathan Schorsch, “Jewish Ghosts in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies Vol. 9 (Spring-Summer 2003): 139–169.
On Jewish vengeance for war crimes, see the controversial book by John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge against Germans in 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1993, 1995)
Jim G. Tobias and Peter Zinke, Jüdische Rache an NS-Tätern (Hamburg: Konkret Literaturverlag, 2000).
Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 2–3.
David Lee Preston, “A Bird in the Wind,” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine (May 8, 1983); David Lee Preston, “Journey to My Father’s Holocaust,” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine (April 21, 1985). There is a large literature on the trauma shared by offspring of Holocaust survivors. From the best of a very large literature, see Hannah Starman, “Generations of Trauma: Victimhood and the Perpetuation of Abuse in Holocaust Survivors,” History and Anthropology Vol. 17, No. 4 (December 2006); Naomi Berger and Alan J. Berger, Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001)
Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin Books, 1988)
Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Quoted in MacNair, “Psychological Reverberations for the Killers,” 276; Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986): 159.
Michael Salter, Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 86–87
Jochen von Lang and C. Sibyll, Der Adjutant, Karl Wolff: Der Mann zwischen Hitler und Himmler (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1989).
Andrei Voznesenskii, “Rov: Dukovnyi protsess,” Iunost’ (1986), No. 7. Translation and insights from Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 158–161
Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture, 132-135. On Polish excavation of mass graves of murdered Jews in search of gold and precious stones, see Jan Tomasz Gross with Irena Grudzińska Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2012).
On anti-Jewish culture and the exodus of Jews from Ukraine since 1990, see Jeffrey Burds, “Ethnic Conflict and Minority Refugee Flight from Post-Soviet Ukraine, 1991–2001” The International Journal of Human Rights Vol. 12, No. 5 (December 2008): 689–723
Per Anders Rudling, “Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Ukraine: Structure, Influence, Ideology,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLVIII, No. 1-2 (March–June 2006): 1–39
A. Burakovskiy, “Key Characteristics and Transformation of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations during the Period of Ukraine’s Independence: 1991–2008,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics Vol. 15, No. 1 (2009): 109–132
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© 2013 Jeffrey Burds
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Burds, J. (2013). Aftermath: The Legacies of the Rovno Massacre. In: Holocaust in Rovno: The Massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388407_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388407_4
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