The Monument at the Mass Graves Site in Kyseliv and Borivtsi
Alti Rodal

Kyseliv and Borivtsi are two adjoining villages, in the Kitsman raion, about 35 km northwest of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). This is where both my parents were born, and where their families had lived for generations. It is also where most members of their families were massacred in July 1941.

Family lore, corroborated by research of census records, indicates that for at least six generations, several hundred Jews had made their home in Kyseliv/Borivtsi, living alongside some three thousand non-Jews, mostly Ruthenian peasants who worked in the surrounding fields. These Jews, many of whom were related to each other, were simple, pious, rural folk, who eked out a livelihood by processing what grew in the fields (sunflowers, corn and sugar beets), some keeping cows, chickens and geese, others using their homes as "shops" from which to barter such items as sugar, oil, flour, potato starch, clothes and household goods. Among themselves, they spoke a Bukoviner Yiddish, which was richly sprinkled with Ukrainian words. With their non-Jewish neighbours they could converse in fluent Ukrainian, and, in some instances, even in Yiddish. Some older Jews took pride in speaking German, the language of nearby Czernowitz, the regional capital referred to as "the little Vienna" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the region came under Roumanian rule in the inter-war period, some, reluctantly, also learned to speak a fragmented Roumanian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, relations between the Jews and non-Jews of these villages were largely peaceful and friendly, with children playing together in each other's homes and adults interacting both for livelihood purposes and socially. But there were some exceptions, for example at Easter-time, when incited by the priest's sermon that the Jews were Christ-killers, some ruffians hurled rocks and shattered the windows of Jewish homes. The Jews knew it was a time when it would be best to lie low. Jewish children, such as my mother, who attended the local Ukrainian school, also knew that it would be wise to share a sandwich with a big (Ukrainian) boy, who would be their protector in the schoolyard.

My parents and their two young children moved to nearby Zastavna in 1939 – which is what saved them from the July 1941 massacre in Kyseliv/Borivtsi. They learned about the massacre very shortly after it had occurred from a cousin - a recently married woman who escaped the massacre and then made a 15 km. trek through the fields to her cousins in Zastavna – my parents. The image of her stumbling over the threshold, covered in blood, recounting the horror, was deeply etched in the surviving family’s memory. A few months later, my parents, brother and sister were deported to camps in Transnistria, where for the next two and a half years they endured brutal forced marches, hunger, typhus, and harsh winters in a series of concentration camps. Somehow they survived, and made their way to Czernowitz in mid-1944.

In July 2001, exactly sixty years after the massacre, I had occasion to return to the mythical Czernowitz – a place I had heard so much about, where I was born after the war, from where my family departed for Roumania when I was just four months old. The return journey occurred in the context of a project sponsored by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Ottawa, in which I was leading a small team whose mission was to digitally record the tombstones of Czernowitz’ Jewish cemetery. The team consisted of me and two young non-Jewish Canadian students, a brother and a sister, who were fluent in Ukrainian.

On that first drive from Lviv to Chernivtsi/ Czernowitz through the rolling Bukovinian countryside, I noticed on the map that Kyseliv and Borivtsi were directly on our route. I asked our driver to stop briefly, but expected to find little in this bucolic landscape that would relate to the massacre of my family, or their pre-war presence in this area so long ago. The best I could do, I thought, was to find and compensate a young local person for help in identifying elderly village people who might be willing to be interviewed over the following weeks, and who might have memories of my family or heard stories about the 1941 events.

The first person we met as we arrived in Kyseliv happened to be the village clerk, a friendly, intelligent-looking, middle-aged woman – Vasilena. She listened as my young interpreters explained my connection to this village, and, looking at me, asked that we follow her to her office in the Kyseliv administration building because she had something of interest to show me. To my amazement, out of her filing cabinet, she pulled out two lists, one of the Jews of Kyseliv and one of the Jews of Borivtsi, murdered in July 1941. These lists were familiar to me, because they were the same as those I had already obtained from the Washington Holocaust Memorial and the State Archives in Moscow a year earlier, when I was researching my family history. The lists came from the archival records of the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission”, which, from the time that it was established in November 1942 through to the early postwar years, was collecting information on crimes committed during the war in localities occupied by the Nazis, including lists of victims, names of perpetrators and eyewitness testimonies.

Vasilena volunteered to introduce me to several people in their seventies, several of whom remembered the round-ups of the Jews of the villages, though they were children at the time. Following the suggestion of one of these people, Vasilena and a local farm woman led us directly to the site of the massacre – an uncultivated small valley called Bulbon (which 60 years earlier had been a deep pond), marked by the remains of a wrecked truck, surrounded by cultivated fields of sunflowers. As I had long intended to make a personal pilgrimage to these villages, and had harboured a faint expectation that I might one day find the mass grave, I had with me a memorial candle in the event that I would actually find the site. But I did not expect, and felt overwhelmed, to be standing, within a half hour of arriving in the villages, at the site of two unmarked mass graves, where lie buried two grandmothers, a grandfather, aunts, uncles and at least seven little cousins – all of whom I would never know. I was also astounded to find that documents recording the massacre would be so readily accessible to ordinary contemporary inhabitants. As it was Friday afternoon, and the sun was setting, I lit the memorial candle and asked that we continue on our journey to Chernivtsi, knowing that I would be coming back to this place, that I would do what I could to mark and consecrate the site.

Over the next five weeks, I re-visited the villages five times, each time, accompanied either by the rabbi of Chernivtsi or an interpreter. In the course of these visits, I met many elderly people, some of whom sought me out in the street. Several had known my family. Two had been neighbours of my paternal grandparents, and as teenagers were close friends of two of my aunts. One recalled neighbours hauling furniture pieces and plants from my grandparents’ home as soon as the family was driven out. Another mentioned that an old Ukrainian lady, now senile, had rescued two Jewish children and brought them up as her own – they may now be in Israel, she said.

I was surprised by the warm, welcoming hospitality extended to me by some, as if I were a long lost daughter of the village returning home. On one visit, an eighty-six year old villager gave us a tour, as we walked arm-in-arm, of the houses where Jews had once lived. Most had been renovated or rebuilt; a few remained as they were sixty years ago, including the house of the aunt who survived the massacre and was now living in Israel. The house of my grandfather, Ankil (Yankel), had been torn down and another one built in its place only three years before my visit. The elderly mother of the current inhabitants was intrigued to meet "Ankil's granddaughter". I reassured her that I had no intention of reclaiming the property. The house sits on one side of an intersection where three roads meet. As I contemplated the vistas and the little brick mill where, as I was told, my grandfather once pressed oil from sunflower seeds, Vasilena remarked that as a teenager, she would meet up with her friends for dancing sessions in this square which they called “Ankil’s Place”. Now she understood how it got its name.

Several of the elderly stated that as children, they saw from their windows how the village Jews were rounded up and marched towards the fields. Two said that they actually witnessed the shootings. One, who said that he happened to be in the fields with his father at the time of the shootings, remarked that bullets were not wasted on small children – a blow to the head sufficed before they were thrown into the pond to drown. Whether the story is based on his personal memory or the collective memory of a generation of villagers, this is how it was being relayed to me in 2001. They seemed uninhibited in sharing their remarkably vivid memories of the terrible events of sixty years ago, including memories of arguments between their parents as to whether or not to shelter Jews who had escaped the round-ups, considering the risks this entailed. The thought that some of these kindly looking elderly people may have participated in the crimes, whether as informers or more directly, also crossed my mind, as did my mother’s accounts of a number of instances in which Ukrainians saved her life.

The animated accounts of the villagers in the summer of 2001, captured in over ten hours of taped interviews, corroborated the story that emerges from archival records and from what I had heard over the years from the few surviving family members, including my late parents. It is a story that seems typical of what happened in many villages in rural western Ukraine that fatal summer. Shortly after the Soviets retreated from their occupation of the region, organized large-scale massacres were carried out under German and Roumanian auspices in the larger towns. At about the same time, sweeping “ethnic cleansing” killing operations were organized in the more rural areas, according to archival evidence, primarily by local and regional Ukrainian nationalist agitators.ⁱ

On July 7, 1941, the Jews of Kyselev and Borivtsi were taken about 250 metres northwest of the center of Kyseliv, where there was a deep pond surrounded by fields. At that spot they were ordered to undress, and were then shot into the pond. After the massacre, the bodies were dragged out and buried in a mass grave alongside the pond. Another group of Jews was driven some 500 metres further north, where they were shot into a ditch that became a second mass grave. A few Jews, including another young aunt (who later lived in Montreal), managed to escape and hide in nearby forests, and were helped by local peasants throughout the war years.

I was surprised not only that so many of the older people remembered, but also that younger people today know the location and meaning of the site and that it has been left uncultivated all these years. I was also very surprised by the willingness of the eye-witnesses to come forward and speak about the massacre, and to offer, indeed insist, that it was not Germans or Roumanian Fascists who had committed the terrible crimes, but their own local “bandits”. In the course of the interviews, I learned that this was due in part to a sense of guilt and a desire to 'come to terms' with a past they considered shameful. Several villagers also shared with me that when the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster traveled a long way from the north and concentrated on Kyseliv while sparing surrounding villages, this was clearly, in their view, punishment for what their people had done to the Jews that summer long ago.

With the help of Rabbi Kofmansky of Chernivtsi, Ilya Khotch, a deputy of the Chernivtsi municipal government, and the cooperation of the mayor of Kyseliv, I managed to have a monument placed at the site and a dedication ceremony arranged on the day before my departure from Ukraine. The monument consisted of a large, evocative red-stained stone found by the mayor of Kyseliv, onto which were cemented three plaques that had been painstakingly prepared by a Christian engraver in Chernivtsi – one in Hebrew/Yiddish, one in Ukrainian, and one in English. The plaques noted the presence in that place of two mass graves “in which lie over 150 Jews and several Christians from Kiselev-Borivtsi, among them most of the Prostak, Vidman and Brayar families, men, women and children, brutally murdered by Nazi Germans and local helpers in July 1941, IN ETERNAL REMEMBRANCE”.

The ceremony dedicating the monument took place at mid-day on a Sunday, an abnormally cold day for what had been a sweltering hot August, with a howling wind, following a night of unrelenting rain. Eighteen Jewish people came in from Chernivtsi for the ceremony, and, for the first time, Kaddish was recited in this place. Through an interpreter, I learned that the mayor of Kyseliv and others spoke of the shame that the village must bear because local people had committed such crimes. In the Yiddish language of my grandparents, I spoke of the heavens that cried that night, and the hope that the souls of those buried there might now be more tranquil, that they would now reinforce our prayers for a better world. Some forty villagers also turned up, including an elderly man I had not met before, who claimed that as a youngster he had witnessed the massacre. He recounted in detail what he had seen from his vantage point in the nearby fields, and walked me to the hill where the shooters had stood. A number of contemporary youngsters were listening, awestruck, to these stories. All this is captured on videotape. A group of middle-aged women in "babushke" kerchiefs approached the monument on their knees and prayed at the end of the ceremony, which was covered by Ukrainian television and national newspapers.

Seven years later, in 2008, I visited the villages again, to find that the monument had been vandalized: the plaque in Hebrew/Yiddish was missing, the one in English was cracked, but the one in Ukrainian was left intact. Last week (February 17, 2011), I learned that all three plaques are now gone. A Polish man, researching his family roots in Kyseliv, came upon a monument that had no inscription. Curious, he made inquiries with local people, who told him the tragic story behind this monument, and that some of the perpetrators continued to live in the village after the war “without any consequences”. His account and the photo of the monument taken in 2010 were posted on the “Ehpes” website of the Czernowitz-L Discussion Group, of which I am a member. Another member of the Cz-L Discussion Group, Albert Linder, reminded me that six members of his family also lie in these two mass graves. The names of others who lie there may be found in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’s Names on the Yad Vashem website.

My aim in offering this brief account and the accompanying images is to testify and acknowledge the murdered Jews of Kyseliv and Borivtsi, and to give them an enduring monument, if only in cyberspace, to replace the one that now sits mute, forlorn and vandalized in the middle of a field of sunflowers, half an hour drive from Czernowitz.