“If we had wings we would fly to you” - Kiril Feferman Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy

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there were 820 in Cherkessk and only 129 in Mikoyanshakhar. The enormous size of the indemnity can be explained by the German assumption that the Jewish population, which consisted mainly of the evacuees from large Soviet cities, was well-off.

      The indemnity order was combined with other German steps aimed at dispossessing the Jews. The example of Kislovodsk underscores this point. Alongside the indemnity worth “100,000 rubles in cash,” the German authorities demanded that the Jewish committee delivered “530 articles made of gold or silver, rings, watches, cigarette cases, 105 dozen silver spoons, 230 pairs of shoes, men’s suits, coats, and carpets.”46 Usually “organized” plunder took on the form of orderly arranged “requisitions,” effected largely by means of the Judenräte47 or under the pretext of legal searches of Jewish apartments for weapons or for unregistered Jews.48 It is noteworthy that there exists no record of “non-organized” plunder of Jewish property in the Caucasus. The reason is the strictly enforced discipline in the Wehrmacht, which was also extended to the local population of the Caucasian towns under German control. In many localities, the Germans confiscated all Jewish property.49 In other places, similarly to many other occupied Soviet regions, less valuable articles were left for the local policemen,50 and then sometimes distributed, sold, or left for the local population.51

      In a few Caucasian towns, regardless of the size of the Jewish population, Jews were subjected to various forms of economic or political boycott. However, this boycott was far from being a comprehensive and consistent policy in the Caucasian towns. Rather, it seems that, given the brevity of the period prior to the annihilation of the Jews in the North Caucasus, the majority of the Jewish population did not suffer from boycotting. Nevertheless, even single events of this kind could influence the public opinion about the Jewish population.

      As mentioned above, the Germans sometimes employed segregation, another component of their restrictive policy towards the Jews in the Caucasus, against the background of general residence and movement restrictions. The German restrictive policies were relatively lenient in the region, but there were several deviations from this pattern.52

      After the Germans occupied a town, it took them from one or two weeks to four months between registering the Jews and ordering their assembly and mass extermination.53 Jews were often threatened with severe physical punishment for failure to comply with register and assembly orders.54 Jews were required to leave most of their belongings in their apartments, but were permitted to take with them a certain amount of money, valuables, and personal possessions.55

      The German administration normally proclaimed the order to assemble, although very occasionally the local authorities or the Jewish Council issued the order.56 For the most part, the Germans openly intervened only at the assembly points, which they did by ordering armed guards to prevent the Jews from leaving these locations.57 In cities and bigger towns, the Germans assembled the Jews in the urban squares, and then immediately marched them out towards execution sites.58 In smaller towns, they herded the Jews into one location and kept them there for up to two days, usually without food or water, before driving them to extermination sites or placing them in gas vans.59

      The Germans conducted killing operations in the Caucasian cities and towns throughout almost the whole of the occupation period. Annihilation of the Jewish population was only limited by the logistics necessary for the Germans to prepare the ground, so that the extermination actions could be carried out smoothly (most specifically, by the deployment of the Einsatzgruppe forces). In August, killing operations began against the Jews of Stavropol and Krasnodar, the most populous and presumably the most important regional centers of the German-controlled Caucasus. In Stavropol, 4,000 Jews were murdered.60 The number of victims in Krasnodar was either 1,800 to more than 3,000 Jews, according to various estimations.61

      In one month, September 1942, the Germans wiped out the bulk of Caucasian Jewry, primarily in the four neighboring resorts of Stavropol region: Essentuki, Kislovodsk, Mineralnye vody, and Pyatigorsk. There were almost 10,000 victims in total.62 After that date, the pace of annihilation of the Jews in Caucasian towns slowed down. The last large-scale wave of actions swept the towns in the form of “mopping-up” operations, in light of a possible German withdrawal from the North Caucasus.63

      After the extermination actions in the Caucasian towns and cities, the Germans found some Jews still in hiding, following all-encompassing security steps directed against the general population. However, due to the relatively mild character of the occupation in the Caucasus, the Germans rarely conducted such searches. Round-ups of Jews in the Caucasian towns,64 in which whole areas were cordoned off for house-to-house searches in the wake of the extermination action,65 were rare. Most of the Jews in hiding were caught as a result of denunciations by Russian and Ukrainian civilians.66

      On the whole, the milder nature of the German occupational regime in the Caucasus in comparison to other areas67 and the short time that it lasted did enable some Jews to survive. The swift withdrawal of the German forces from the region in late 1942 contributed to the rescue of a certain number of people who were already in detention; in all probability, there were also some Jews amongst them.68

      3. RURAL AREAS

      In the rural Caucasian areas, Jews were required to register only in some villages. At times, German orders included explicit threats directed not only against any Jews who failed to register, but also against any local people who gave shelter to Jews.69 The registration of Jews was ordered primarily by the military administration.70 Sometimes it demanded that Jews wear identifying stars immediately upon having being registered.71 But infrequently, Jews were not required to register at all, only to wear identifying bands.72

      The Germans widely employed Jewish forced labor in rural areas, primarily for gathering the harvest73 and, to a much lesser extent, for military construction work74 or for humiliating cleaning jobs.75 Their conditions while performing forced labor depended on the extent to which the German occupying forces were present. When the Germans supervised the laborers, their existence was made unbearable and involved physical cruelty, allocation of the most difficult assignments, and dangerously unsanitary conditions, which resulted in a high mortality rate.76 Jews faced very long working days and unachievable production norms.77 The Germans gave them no food and stopped the local population from giving them any.78 The Jews were better off, relatively, when the local collaborators supervised their labor.79

      In contrast to the towns, in the villages the Germans and their local collaborators looted Jewish property, without restraint, in addition to carrying out orderly “requisitions.”80 The German military and security command seemed to tacitly approve of this free-hand policy. It applied not only to those whose direct responsibility it was to “handle” the Jewish question (the officers and soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen81 and Kommandaturen),82 but also to other sectors of the German army, which only had casual contacts with the Jewish population,83 and to local collaborators.84 The German commanders were less concerned with local public opinion in the countryside. Thus, they turned a blind eye to the lawless behavior of the Wehrmacht personnel, assisted by the local collaborators, who looted Jewish property. In addition, the German authorities hoped to gain the sympathies of the local inhabitants by distributing the looted property to those who the Germans defined as having been discriminated against under the Soviet regime.85 Furthermore, in many cases the local population in the rural areas was more ill-disposed towards Soviet power and everything associated with it, including Jews, and therefore was more inclined to adopt a favorable stance towards the German onslaught against the Jews.86

      Occasionally, Jews living in the rural areas were subjected to movement and residence restrictions. The Germans tried to register the entire rural population in the Caucasus, in order to prevent the infiltration of Soviet agents.87 The German regulations contained a special emphasis on idnetifying those who had arrived in a given locality after the outbreak of the War, meaning evacuees or refugees: “Heads of municipalities have to draw up [lists]. … The second list encompasses strangers

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