EMIL DRAITSER
33
were rounded up in a ghetto created in Siobodka, on the city's outskirts.
The death camp, one of several in the region, was organized northeast
of the city, near the banks of the Southern Bug river, in the village of
Domanevka.
In January
1942,
they took the Jews by train to Berezovka station,
forty miles away from Domanevka. From the station, they forced them
to walk all the way to the camp. It was the harshest winter in the his–
tory of the region. When they inhaled, their nostrils were glued together.
They were up to their knees in snow. A blizzard howled. The German
soldiers on the scene wanted to send some pictures to their wives and
children but they had trouble focusing their Leica cameras; they were
roaring with laughter at the old men, women, and children crawling
helplessly over snowdrifts, falling topsy-turvy.
The column of prisoners had to cross an area suddenly flooded when
a dam was blown up. The prisoners stopped, shifting their feet to stay
out of the water, but the convoy forced them ahead. Grandfather Wolf
could have died just from cold and exhaustion. Not even aiming at him,
a Romanian guard could have finished him off. To kill a yid with one
shot meant to do him a favor-to spare him the torments of slow death
in the bone-chilling winds of the icy steppe.
Of the three thousand taken from Odessa, on ly a few reached
Domanevka . It's hard to imagine that Grandfather Wolf, my vanished
root, was one of them.
As Starodinsky tells us, the road to the death camp was strewn with
photos of the captives and their loved ones, thrown away in hope that
someday someone would learn of their fate. Few could afford a camera.
They took pictures for passports and weddings and other special occa–
sions. It's possible that my grandfather had my first picture. In it, I'm
four months old, lying on a bearskin, my plump leg raised slightly. I can
imagine this picture, blown by the wind over the thin icy crust of the
steppe, rolling away from the shoulder of the last road along which,
whispering his
Shema Israel,
my Grandfather Wolf walked.
