bending to avoid breaking. Survival was a special kind of flourishing.
Odessa was not quite a blank slate at the end of the Second World War, but it was something close: a city denuded of a major ethnic and religious community and with much of the rest of its population hunkering in cellars or dispersed to outlying towns and villages. The city was still reeling from artillery hits, aerial bombing, partisan raids, and the ravaging of its Jewish core. Odessan evacuees could be found throughout the Soviet Union, some as far away as Uzbekistan. Barely 200,000 people remained in the city, perhaps a third of its prewar population. The buildings and infrastructure had been looted by the retreating Axis armies. The costumes and seats from the opera house were gone. The docklands and grain elevators were smoldering ruins. Even the trolley cars were now doing service in Romania. 2
Crime, which the Romanians had sought to control but never rooted out, returned in force. Former partisans became bandits, visiting on the restored Soviet authorities the same kind of raids they had inflicted on the Romanians. Theft and robbery were common, and the boldest of the criminals left messages to the Communist authorities scrawled on city walls. “The day is yours before seven o’clock,” declared one graffito, “but we own the night.” 3 Petty violence ran parallel to the state’s reckoning with those who had aided and benefitted from the occupation. Alleged collaborators were identified by Soviet archivists and apparatchiks who pored over the careful records kept by the Romanian authorities. Those without the good sense to have left with the fleeing Romanians were arrested, imprisoned, or shot. Even having lived in Odessa during the war was cause for suspicion, on the assumption that survival entailed some sort of compromise with the fascists. A new but short-lived wave of denunciations swept over the city, with neighbors fingering people who had supposedly worked for or sympathized with the “Romano-German barbarians,” as the language of the time cast the ousted occupiers.
At the same time, Soviet officials worked to uncover the fate of those who had fallen victim during the war. In a massive effort at documenting human and material losses, an “extraordinary state commission,” working throughout much of the formerly occupied territory of the Soviet Union, assembled data on victims. Based on sworn oral affidavits, the commission’s reports were often rendered in striking detail. The lists of killed and deported still provide some of the most fine-grained assessments of the war’s toll, particularly on Odessa’s Jews. From these postwar assessments, for example, we know that sixteen people were removed from 74–76 Pushkin Street at some point during the war, including members of families identified as the Leidermans, Likermans, Kotliars, Shvartsmans, Kogans, Figelmans, Ashkenazis, and Katzes, among others. At 9 Shchepnoy Lane, twenty-three people—from sixty-five-year-old Chaim Tsyperman to nine-year-old Lusya Kravets—were “sent away by the fascists,” in the language of the affidavits. 4
No doubt some of the people who gave testimony to the commission were those who had enabled the deportation of the Jews in the first place. The same mix of motives that underlay the wartime denunciations were probably at work in the postwar accounting of victimhood. Goodness, neighborliness, and regret were present, but so too was rational self-interest. An official document certifying the displacement of residents from a precise address could also serve as a certification of abandonment, a key bureaucratic tool for neighbors seeking additional living space. There was a surfeit of housing in Odessa immediately after the war, given the relatively small population during the occupation period. But in the rush for housing after 1945—as both Jewish and non-Jewish evacuees returned home—empty properties were at a premium.
Sura Sturmak had
Odessa was not quite a blank slate at the end of the Second World War, but it was something close: a city denuded of a major ethnic and religious community and with much of the rest of its population hunkering in cellars or dispersed to outlying towns and villages. The city was still reeling from artillery hits, aerial bombing, partisan raids, and the ravaging of its Jewish core. Odessan evacuees could be found throughout the Soviet Union, some as far away as Uzbekistan. Barely 200,000 people remained in the city, perhaps a third of its prewar population. The buildings and infrastructure had been looted by the retreating Axis armies. The costumes and seats from the opera house were gone. The docklands and grain elevators were smoldering ruins. Even the trolley cars were now doing service in Romania. 2
Crime, which the Romanians had sought to control but never rooted out, returned in force. Former partisans became bandits, visiting on the restored Soviet authorities the same kind of raids they had inflicted on the Romanians. Theft and robbery were common, and the boldest of the criminals left messages to the Communist authorities scrawled on city walls. “The day is yours before seven o’clock,” declared one graffito, “but we own the night.” 3 Petty violence ran parallel to the state’s reckoning with those who had aided and benefitted from the occupation. Alleged collaborators were identified by Soviet archivists and apparatchiks who pored over the careful records kept by the Romanian authorities. Those without the good sense to have left with the fleeing Romanians were arrested, imprisoned, or shot. Even having lived in Odessa during the war was cause for suspicion, on the assumption that survival entailed some sort of compromise with the fascists. A new but short-lived wave of denunciations swept over the city, with neighbors fingering people who had supposedly worked for or sympathized with the “Romano-German barbarians,” as the language of the time cast the ousted occupiers.
At the same time, Soviet officials worked to uncover the fate of those who had fallen victim during the war. In a massive effort at documenting human and material losses, an “extraordinary state commission,” working throughout much of the formerly occupied territory of the Soviet Union, assembled data on victims. Based on sworn oral affidavits, the commission’s reports were often rendered in striking detail. The lists of killed and deported still provide some of the most fine-grained assessments of the war’s toll, particularly on Odessa’s Jews. From these postwar assessments, for example, we know that sixteen people were removed from 74–76 Pushkin Street at some point during the war, including members of families identified as the Leidermans, Likermans, Kotliars, Shvartsmans, Kogans, Figelmans, Ashkenazis, and Katzes, among others. At 9 Shchepnoy Lane, twenty-three people—from sixty-five-year-old Chaim Tsyperman to nine-year-old Lusya Kravets—were “sent away by the fascists,” in the language of the affidavits. 4
No doubt some of the people who gave testimony to the commission were those who had enabled the deportation of the Jews in the first place. The same mix of motives that underlay the wartime denunciations were probably at work in the postwar accounting of victimhood. Goodness, neighborliness, and regret were present, but so too was rational self-interest. An official document certifying the displacement of residents from a precise address could also serve as a certification of abandonment, a key bureaucratic tool for neighbors seeking additional living space. There was a surfeit of housing in Odessa immediately after the war, given the relatively small population during the occupation period. But in the rush for housing after 1945—as both Jewish and non-Jewish evacuees returned home—empty properties were at a premium.
Sura Sturmak had
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