Berdichev, in the heart of darkness: from the worst Nazi atrocities to Putin's bombings

There is a small city in the center of Ukraine that few know beyond the borders of this country at war.

His name, Berdichev, is not familiar to most Europeans, but his history and present concentrate the soul and the pain shared by the peoples of the Old Continent.

Among its beehives of Soviet dwellings, there are still beautiful buildings from the 19th century, witnesses of a rich cultural and economic past.

Berdichev was the spiritual center of Judaism in Ukraine and the cradle of a refined local aristocracy that saw the birth of two literary geniuses such as Vasili Grossman and Joseph Conrad.

It was also the scene of the worst Nazi atrocities and fierce communist repression.

Today he lives under the threat of Russian missiles.

Warning sirens sound before a possible air attack and passers-by on the street of Europe continue on their way as if nothing had happened.

Weeks have passed since the start of the war and citizens have become accustomed to this gloomy sound, also accompanied by the tolling of church bells.

The alarms indicate that the Ukrainian Army's radars have detected aerial activity by the invader in the direction of the Yitómir province, where Berdichev is located.

They can be missiles, drones or planes.

Only on one occasion did the bombs fall on the urban area of ​​the city.

Houses along the banks of the Hnylopayatka River.Albert Garcia

The citizens of Berdichev feel confident in the last days of March and take advantage of the sunrise to walk along the main avenue, the one dedicated to Europe.

During air alarm hours, only access to the square in front of the town hall is prohibited because it is a possible enemy target.

The town hall is a huge building with Soviet dimensions more typical of a ministry than of a municipality of 75,000 inhabitants that left behind its most glorious era.

A few meters from the town hall is the church of Santa Bárbara.

In it, the Polish countess Éveline Hanska and the French writer Honoré de Balzac, one of the fathers of the modern novel, married in 1850.

Countess Hanska was one of Balzac's many admirers.

For two decades they maintained an epistolary relationship that began when she was the wife of the Ukrainian Count Vinceslas Hanski.

When he died, in 1841, the lovers alternated stays in Europe and especially in the palace that she had inherited, 60 kilometers from Berdichev.

They were married just three months before the writer's death.

She was later buried next to him in Paris and is remembered for being the recipient of the

, a posthumous compilation of the letters he wrote to him, texts that expose the capillarity of the peoples of Europe.

“Think that I will be sailing for fifteen days in the Mediterranean”, Balzac related in 1838 to his future wife, “from there to Odessa it is all sea, or, as we say in Paris, a paved road.

And from Odessa to Berdichev there is only one step.”

On Europa Street there is an office building named after Balzac.

A bust of the writer presides over access to the elevators that take visitors to the sixth floor, where the Dziuba family runs the Marioland playground, a local adaptation of the famous video game.

The children's activities area has been left without employees or children, most of whom have moved to provinces further from the front or abroad.

The restaurant does work, Luigi, which instead of families feeds the men who have stayed in the city.

Luda Dziuba is the owner's sister and during the war she runs the establishment.

Dziuba did not know the love story between Balzac and Hanska, and that she would end up giving her name to the building where she serves pizzas and hamburgers.

She admits that she knows little about her city's past in general,

Beneath these lines, a bus passes a monument made from a T-34 tank used in the Soviet liberation of Berdichev during World War II.Albert Garcia

Berdichev, like much of Ukraine, was for centuries a coveted piece of Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

In the middle of the 18th century it was the economic capital of the eastern territories of Poland, but it was possibly a century later, coinciding with the anniversary of the Balzac marriage, that Berdichev's sweetest moment.

The city was then part of the Russian Empire.

Local industry allowed an admired urbanism and an educated society to flourish.

In 1850, the School of Music and Hebrew Studies was built on Vinnitska Street, an elegant two-storey building, now abandoned, with stucco on the façade that reproduces a stage curtain.

When it was built there were 80 other Jewish educational centers, today only three remain.

At the end of the 19th century, 80% of the population, more than 55,000 people,

she was Jewish;

today these are only about 300 residents of Berdichev, 0.4% of the population.

The Russian pogroms at the end of the 19th century began the progressive disappearance of the city's Jewish society.

The Bolshevik revolution, which arrived in the Ukraine in 1920, brought religious repression, which was followed by something much worse, the Nazi extermination.

When the writer Vasili Grossman left his native Berdichev in the 1920s, 30,000 of its inhabitants, "just over half the total," were Jews.

When he returned in 1944 as a war correspondent with the Soviet troops, liberating Eastern Europe in the direction of Berlin, practically all of them had been shot and buried.

Grossman discovered at that time that one of the victims was his mother.

She dedicated her most important work,

, to her .

At number 14 Shevchenko Street is the only plaque in Berdichev's public space dedicated to one of his most distinguished sons, one of the most important Russian-language narrators of the second half of the 20th century.

Grossman and his mother lived in a two-story house adjacent to the medical school, both built by Grossman's uncle, where they spent their last moments together.

Grossman was a convinced revolutionary whom the crimes of Stalinism turned into a critic of the communist regime.

was banned in the Soviet Union and it wasn't until the 1980s that his mastery began to be recognized in his own land.

In Berdichev there is no shortage of those who maintain emotional ties with Russia.

Many others have broken them because of the war

None of the neighbors or authorities interviewed by

in Berdichev had read anything by Grossman.

His return to his hometown inspired what was his last novel,

(Galaxia Gutenberg), censored in the Soviet Union, but in 1970 it could be published in Western Europe.

It tells the story of a political prisoner in Siberia who benefits from the mass release of victims of Stalinism after the death of the tyrant, in 1953. Iván Grigórievich returns to his roots to find that his family forgot him: “He had disappeared from consciousness of the people, of their hearts, whether cold or hot;

he existed in secret, appearing with increasing difficulty in the memory of those who had known him.”

To get to the Khazhyn mass grave, you have to travel eight kilometers along a secondary road controlled by the patrols of the Territorial Defense Forces, the military division that mobilizes armed Ukrainian citizens.

Crows and pigeons hop on the shoulder, and on the trees, still bare from the winter that has just ended, only the round forms of the mistletoe turn green.

The forest, sparse and wet from the rain, leads to a promontory on which there are two memorial stelae: the most recent was erected three years ago by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe and the German Foreign Office.

It includes information about the place and the crimes committed there.

The oldest stele, from the 1980s, only indicates that it was raised “in memory of the Soviet citizens who fell here”.

Inhabitants of the city listen to the Ukrainian anthem played by an orchestra of teachers from the conservatory.Albert Garcia

A total of 12,000 people were executed in the Khazhyn pit.

Where the remains of the dead rest, the authorities recently deployed a wire net and dumped tons of stones on it.

Genadi Kisluk, president of the Berdichev Jewish community, explains that every year there were desecrations by thieves looking for jewelry and other valuables.

Kisluk is 55 years old and was born in Berdichev, like his parents and grandparents.

They were saved from the Holocaust because before the arrival of the Germans they were evacuated to Kazakhstan.

He manages the Berdichev Jewish Cemetery, one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Orthodox Hasidic Jews: Rabbi Levi Yitzchok, one of the leaders of Hasidism in the 18th century, is buried there.

One hundred thousand of his faithful from Israel and the United States visit the place every year, but this spring under the shadow of war, only the odd neighbor walks his dog.

Here the collaboration of part of the local population with the Nazis in the extermination of Jews remains a taboo subject

The oldest tombstones have a shape particular to the region, for which Kisluk says he has no explanation.

"We call them the shoes."

Many have been knocked down by inclement weather, others were vandalized.

Kisluk comments that there is nothing in his graveyard financed by the Germans, and points to an inconspicuous monument paid for by a Russian descendant of Berdichev.

Asked about his opinion on the Russian invasion, Kisluk replies that he does not talk about politics: "Russians will always be welcome in this place."

The administrator of the cemetery also emphasizes that during the Soviet Union the Jews never had any problems.

Genadi Kisluk, president of the now residual Berdichev Jewish community, walks through the Jewish cemetery.

albert garcia

"The phrase 'I don't go into politics' is the best way to know that someone is in favor of Russia," says Stanislav Shostak, the interpreter of this publication in the visit to Berdichev.

Shostak, the son of a Jewish Ukrainian resident in Israel, was angered by Kisluk's reaction.

"My father has broken many friendships with Israeli Russians who also told him they didn't want to talk about the war because they don't go into politics."

Kisluk is an example of the close cultural and identity roots that part of the Ukrainian population shares with Russia.

But the Kremlin-led invasion has caused many Ukrainians to renounce this shared legacy.

School number 8 in Berdichev has been set up as a reception center for displaced people from the Eastern Front and as a distribution point for humanitarian aid.

Classes are taught remotely and teachers intersperse teaching hours in front of the computer with volunteer work, from cooking breaded chops to preparing canned cucumbers, to weaving camouflage nets for the Army.

On the doors of the classrooms there are signs in three languages ​​indicating the subjects taught there: in Ukrainian, English and Hebrew.

Although it is the mother tongue of a third of the population,

"We would never have imagined that this would happen to us with our neighbors and brothers Russia and Belarus," says the deputy director of school number 8, Alina Ryzhko, through tears.

Her crying turns to rage as she remembers a recently fallen former student in front of her.

For her, as for millions of Ukrainians, Russia is evil.

"I have friends in Russia, rather, I had friends, it's very hard because they support this war," says this teacher.

"Russia had seen many things in a thousand years of history," Grossman noted in

with a lament similar to that of Ryzhko: "During the Soviet years the country had witnessed world military victories, huge constructions, new cities, dams that stopped the course of the Dnieper and the Volga and canals that linked the seas, the power of the tractors, skyscrapers… The only thing Russia had not seen in a thousand years was freedom.”

The Berdichev History Museum is a humble collection of colorful objects and praises to the most grandiose characters in the city.

It is a mansion on the fortified grounds of the convent of the Barefoot Carmelites, a religious community founded in the 17th century and currently made up of a dozen Polish nuns.

Thousands of families have taken refuge in Poland during the war thanks to the intercession of these nuns.

In the access patio to the convent, only stray dogs can be seen waiting for someone to give them some food.

Much of the museum is dedicated to Soviet glories, such as Russian Lieutenant General Georgy Petrovsky, who in January 1944 commanded a column of 20 tanks against the German occupier inside the city.

One of those armored vehicles, a T-34, presides over the tribute to that feat in a square in Berdichev.

A classroom at school number 8 in the city, converted into a clothing store for refugees.Albert Garcia

Eight decades after Petrovsky opened the gates of the municipality to Soviet troops, the museum has removed the most valuable pieces from its halls and placed them in a safe place.

The center's management specifies that they have not protected themselves for fear of bombing, but rather of possible looting in the event that Vladimir Putin's Army gains access to Berdichev.

In the main access to the exhibition there is a mural with the photographs of some twenty soldiers of the 26th Artillery Brigade, which has its headquarters in the municipality: they are those who died in the war that Russia provoked in 2014 to separate Donbas from Ukraine.

John Garrard is one of the foremost experts on the Berdichev story.

This professor emeritus of Russian Studies at the University of Arizona has written prolifically on the region's Jewish past and on Grossman.

Garrard recalls that the axis between Berdichev and Yitomir, the capital of the province, 40 kilometers to the north, was the scene of the most important victory of the German invasion of the Soviet Union: it was from there that the 11th Armored Division surrounded kyiv " in a matter of hours” in September 1941. “The Soviets lost 400,000 men, killed or taken prisoner, in their biggest defeat in World War II,” Garrard says, adding: “The Russians seem ignorant of their own history, their Army it is acting like the German Wehrmacht, and the Ukrainian Army is in the position of the Red Army.”

Garrard thinks that in a place like Berdichev other ignored memories come together.

For example, that of the local population that collaborated in the Jewish extermination, something that is not even contemplated to talk about yet, unlike what has happened in other European countries such as France, an attitude inherited from the Soviet era.

“When the Red Army retook the city, the Soviet discourse was to concentrate the blame on the Germans and ignore the Ukrainian collaboration.

Ukrainian peasants seized Jewish property, looted their homes.

This conscious forgetting has continued until today”, says Garrard.

“Who wants to acknowledge that their families benefited from the murder of their Jewish neighbors, or even, in some cases, instigated them?” he asks.

Soviet inertia also means that the figure of Grossman, a critical and incisive voice on crimes against the Jews, continues in the background, Garrard values: "Grossman's name was rehabilitated in the eighties, after the black hole that was the Soviet Union, but his work on the Holocaust, which also deals with the painful and unknown role of Ukrainian collaborationism, continues to be repressed”.

Vasili Grossman wrote in

some of his most celebrated reflections on the will of the individual to prevail, the same one that led him to ostracism: “However huge the skyscrapers are and powerful the cannons, however unlimited the power of the State and imposing the empires, all that is nothing more than smoke and fog that will disappear.

What remains, develops and lives is only one true force, which consists of only one thing, freedom.

To live means to be a free man.”

The family house in which the writer Vasili Grossman lived, one of Berdichev's literary glories.Albert Garcia

Berdichev's son Joseph Conrad also wanted to be free to go his own way.

Another exhibition space is dedicated to him in the premises of the Carmelite convent, financed with Polish capital.

Józef Teodor Konrad was born in 1857 into a landowning family from the local Polish minority.

As John Stape collected in his biography

(Penguin), Conrad himself had admitted that Berdichev, "such a remote place" from England, his adopted country, seemed "an impossible starting point" in his biography.

The Konrad family moved from Berdichev to Warsaw when little Józef was only three years old.

His father was an active opponent of Russian imperialism, a defender of Polish independence.

He was deported to Siberia.

His mother died when the little boy was 9 years old, and his father, when he was 11. An uncle took care of him, but soon, as a teenager, he began to carve out his profile as an adventurer that took him to England at the age of 21.

Conrad, like Balzac, would connect Berdichev with Western Europe.

One in French and the other in English, the first from the territory of realism and the second marked by romanticism, both authors would approach some of the harshest aspects of the human condition.

Conrad's most recognized work,

, provides paragraphs that sound like the echo of common and atavistic violence, whether in the Congo River of the book or in the grain fields of western Ukraine: "From time to time you see a military camp lost in the jungle, like a needle in the middle of a haystack;

cold, fog, storms, disease, exile and death, death lurking in the air, in the water and among the bushes.

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