“If we had wings we would fly to you”. Kiril Feferman

      CHAPTER 1.3

      The Holocaust in the North Caucasus¹

      1. JEWISH COUNCILS, GHETTOS, AND CAMPS

      In the North Caucasus, Jewish councils (Judenräte) were set up in the towns and cities with the largest Jewish communities: Essentuki, Kislovodsk, Krasnodar, and Stavropol.² In Cherkessk and Novorossiisk, their functions were assigned to a single person, the starosta.³ Jewish councils were set up soon after the beginning of the occupation. Occasionally, the Germans explained this by citing the need “to protect the interests of the Jewish population” (Stavropol),⁴ to ensure the proper arrangement of the Jewish community (Krasnodar),⁵ or even “to improve the life [byt] of the Jews and to enable them to trade” (Novorossiisk).⁶ Jewish Councils in the Caucasian towns were a convenient instrument in the German hands for the smooth enactment of the whole complex of anti-Jewish measures: from registration of the Jewish population⁷ to assigning Jews to forced labor.⁸ Finally, the Germans compelled the Jewish Councils to collaborate with them in gradually depriving fellow Jews of their property⁹ and in forcing the Jews to assembly places before being assigned to forced labor or killed.¹⁰

      In the North Caucasus, the policy of confining Jews to ghettos was applied only to a few of the towns containing medium-sized (some hundreds) and small-sized (up to one hundred people) Jewish communities.¹¹ In the ghettos, the Jews were placed in separate locations hardly fit for human habitation and were forbidden to leave without the authorization of the Germans or the local administration, unless they were sent to perform forced labor.¹² The Jewish councils were not involved in running the ghettos: there were no councils in the town that had ghettos. The life of the ghettoized Jews was regulated solely by the Germans. The ghetto inmates did not work in industrial production, but only in humiliating jobs, such as cleaning lavatories and sweeping streets.¹³ There were no payments in return for their labor. In order to survive, the Jews had to sell their possessions and rely on handouts from the local people when they went out to perform forced labor. As a result, the Jews suffered terribly from undernourishment.¹⁴ In almost all ghettos in the North Caucasus, Jews were subjected to physical mistreatment and continual theft of their property.¹⁵ Almost all the Jews in the ghettos were liquidated during the big wave of extermination in August–September 1942.¹⁶

      2. TOWNS

      The Germans’ initial methods for dealing with the Jewish population differed from place to place. At times, the Germans personally approached the Jewish public or individual Jews in order to assuage their fears that Jews would be singled out in German orders.¹⁷ The Germans also promised that absolute compliance with their orders would safeguard the Jews’ future.¹⁸ In many places, the Germans assured the Jews that the aim of “resettlement” was simply to send them to some other locality.¹⁹ This policy should be regarded as part of their camouflage tactics.

      Concurrently, the Germans’ policy sometimes also involved threats against entire communities or individual Jews, such as Judenräte members. In such instances, the Germans warned the Jews that non-compliance with their orders would lead to heavy retribution, including capital punishment.²⁰

      It must be emphasized that in all of the aforementioned cases, the Germans were determined to prevent Jews from escaping from the occupied areas. In terms of the Germans’ genocide policy—unlike an ordinary Soviet citizen, whose presence or absence usually mattered little to the Germans—a Jew was to be caught and killed in every town or village.

      The German onslaught against the Jews in the North Caucasus involved several steps. First, in most Caucasian towns, immediately after occupation, the Germans forced the entire Jewish population to register.²¹ This appeared to be a relatively mild step at first, because mass assembly of the Jews—for forced labor, ill-treatment, and eventual extermination—was not immediately ordered. Usually the registration process was organized by the Jewish Council, but sometimes the Germans themselves carried it out.²² The local police only rarely participated in enforcing the registration orders.²³

      After registration, the next stage involved forcing adult Jews, including children over twelve years old, to wear six-pointed stars as identification badges.²⁴ The Germans applied this policy in most Caucasian towns.²⁵ In most cases, Jews were ordered to wear the stars immediately upon registration.²⁶ However, sometimes there was a short interval between the two procedures, as the Germans faced problems in applying the identification order.²⁷ This was due to anti-Jewish measures being poorly synchronized in some Caucasian towns located close to one another.

      In the initial phases of the War, Caucasian Jews were occasionally physically ill-treated by their German oppressors.²⁸ This included German guards beating Jews and raping Jewish women in places where the non-Jewish population could not witness the abuse, such as in the apartments of Jews and in detention centers.²⁹ But sometimes Jews were beaten in public or while performing forced labor.³⁰

      If the Jews in the Caucasian towns were not killed immediately, they were compelled to perform forced labor.³¹ The forced labor orders applied to almost the whole Jewish population, including children over ten years old, pregnant women and those with small children, and old people up to ninety years of age.³² It was impossible to evade labor on medical grounds.³³

      The Jews were only occasionally exploited for relatively easy work, for example, maintaining satisfactory sanitary conditions in the occupied towns, such as cleaning and sweeping the streets³⁴ or burying the corpses of dead people and animals.³⁵ Jewish labor was sometimes used for construction projects of military significance.³⁶ However, for the most part, the Jewish population was exploited for the most difficult and most humiliating work: cleaning lavatories and carrying huge stones.³⁷ In some occupied Soviet territories, the Germans paid the Jewish forced laborers, either with money or food, but in the Caucasian towns there was no payment.³⁸ Jews were exploited over the course of a lengthy working day, often without breaks,³⁹ and with no food supplied.⁴⁰ Jews fared better if the labor order was enforced by the Jewish Councils or heads of Jewish communities.⁴¹ They fared far worse when either local collaborators or the Germans themselves were involved in enforcing the order.⁴² Jews herded into small ghettos underwent the harshest treatment during their forced labor, as their entire lives (before, during, and after the day’s labor) were regulated by a vicious German administration.⁴³

      In the North Caucasus, the Germans widely resorted to exerting economic pressure on the Jews. Imposition of monetary indemnity (kontributsiia) on the Jewish communities was one such measure.⁴⁴ The price of indemnity was high: for example, the community of Kislovodsk had to pay 100,000 rubles, the Jews of Cherkessk, 135,000 rubles, and the Jews of Mikoyanshakhar, 500,000 rubles.⁴⁵ The sum demanded bore no relationship to the actual number of Jewish inhabitants of the town in question: there were