EMIL DRAITSER
27
that he wouldn't touch those who, of their own will, would come under
the protection of the on ly true God, Jesus Christ, whom they had mur–
dered. Those who, in their stupidity, would not appreciate the lron–
man's mercy, would have their throats cut at once.
Once again, the Ironman would regret his soft heart. Far from rush–
ing to save their lives in exchange for an alien faith, the Jews began to
say farewell to one another and chant
Shema Israel.
Zheleznyak became
annoyed. Instead of giving his Haydamaks the rest they deserved after
many battles on the fie lds of Ukraine, he had to order them to work.
Finishing off twenty thousand unarmed people was hard labor, too.
They barely managed to complete the job in three days and three nights.
Jewish blood forever soaked the dirt of the square.
On June
18
(the fifth day of Tammuz), later generations of Jews
would pray and fast in memory of this Uman massacre. To bring peace
to the martyrs' souls thirty years after the massacre, Rabbi Nakhman,
the famous
tsadik
(Talmud scholar) from Breslaw, his last hour
approaching, came to Uman to die in their cemetery. To this day, every
year, on the holy day of Rosh Hashanah, Hassidic Jews clothed in white
robes arrive from all over the world to prostrate themselves on his
grave, to read the prescribed Psalms and have their sins forgiven.
On August
I, 1941,
some twenty years after Petlyura's raid, to con–
firm the bloody prediction of Ecclesiastes, General Guderian's tanks
would cross the shallow Umanka River. Their caterpillar tracks clank–
ing, smashing the cobb lestones, they rolled into the town's square. A
month and a half passed, and on September
15
they gathered all Uman
Jews and chased them toward the airport. There, on the square in front
of it, trenches resembling pits for potato storage were dug. The soldiers
put sacks of lime on the ground at regular intervals . One after another,
undressing and neatly fo lding their clothes, as if before bathing, Uman
Jews lined up in front of machine-gun muzzles. First, using the handles
of their Parabellums-their pistols-the Germans smashed the chil–
dren's heads as if they were coconuts. "Only after they inflicted on
mothers the most horrifying pain would they shoot them, freeing them
from unbearable torture. Grabbing the little legs, they threw the ...
children's little bodies after them into the trenches," wrote one German
army officer, Ober-Leutnant Bingel, to his superiors.
I read these lines in his report now and once again I wince, realizing
the power of chance over our fate.
If
my mama hadn't left Uman just a
few years earlier, if she had stayed in her native town, my still-soft skull
would have been crushed as well.
