The Long (and Pot-holed) Road Home

I feel a need to start this blog update with some photos of the ubiquitous pot-holes on all of the roads we taken on this trip. I don't think any of us have ever driven through so many kilometres of pot-holed roads in our lives. Driving (thank goodness, our driver Alex was at the wheel
and not ourselves) requires dexterity, control, and nerves of steel to handle the swerving, deking, and weaving to get around potholes and cars approaching in the wrong lane. I sat in the front too!

The potholes of Ukraine are deep and plentiful

What I believe to be the only road crew in Ukraine. This is the only way to explain the roads.

The past two days have been quite phenomenal. After years of listening to my Bubi (Dora) Krafchek Waltman talk about Zhabokrich and Kryzhopil, we have finally been there! Actually, we haven't visited Zhabokrich yet, which is on the agenda for tomorrow. But so far we have been to three family towns, namely Shpykiv, Kniaze (now called Radyanske), and Kryzhopil. Family members from the Begler, Krafchek, Spektor, and Weltman families were born or were raised in at least one of these towns. It was exciting to walk down the streets where they lived, and to see the types of homes they would have lived in.

This is one of the kinds of house Jews in Kryzhopil lived in. See if you can find the robot face.

Bubi Dora used to always talk about the Kryzhopil railway station, which was the centre of town when the families lived there. They often took the train to Odessa and back, and many family stories centred around the train.

The train station of Kryzhopil, with a suprising number of trains running past it.

When trying to enter or leave Kryzhopil, you WILL have to stop let a train cross. Guaranteed.

What was also wonderful to see were the beautiful green fields that spread out before us over the kilometres as we drove from Shpykiv, past Kniaze, and then down south to Kryzhopil. It is still early in the season so most of the time we saw young fields of corn, potatoes, wheat, and other grains, as well as the occasional bright red poppies.  I understand now why my grandmother would sometimes talk about the beauty of Ukraine and the lands near her home, and how she missed them, despite loving her life in Toronto.
   

Fullsize image available for desktop images and art galleries upon request

One of the tasks I set out for myself on this trip was to find the house that my great-grandfather Levi-Bentzion Spektor built in Kryzhopil at the turn of the last century with the help of his sons. Sadly, we didn't have an address or a photograph to go on. So, at first we were content to just find where Jews lived in Kryzhopil in the pre-war years. Alex took us to the City Hall where were met some very helpful staff who tracked down one of the remaining Jews in the town. We met and spent some time with Nicholai Jacobovich Drubetsky, a remarkably agile 86, who walked us up and down a number of streets near the market and showed us Jewish homes that were still standing.  He was a lovely man and we enjoyed meeting him very much. I taped some of his conversations with us.

He is remarkably quick on his feet and in his speech. Our translator and guide, Alex, had a real workout keeping up!

Alex told us that he thought it would be very difficult to find the house but when we realized that I knew a relative had lived in the house until she died in 1974, we realized that we had a clue. We went to the local archives, which still holds recent records, and found a staff member willing to help us. She went into the stacks, within minutes brought out a handwritten death register for 1974, opened it and, low and behold, the record for Etlja Melman Spektor was on the first page! It was a remarkable series of coincidences (we think it was beshert) that we were able to then find the address of the Spektor house, which was, unbelievably, across the street from the archives.

Literally the easiest genealogy search ever.

We went to the address immediately and were greatly disappointed to discover that the house was no longer there! A small portion of the house seems to be part of another house built on the property and the rest of the land now stands vacant. *sad face*  According to neighbours who came out to speak to us, they remembered Etlja Spektor and her son Boris and wife Betya. Apparently another family lived in the house from 1975 to around 1998 or so when  they left. Then the house was torn down and not replaced.

The disappointment is palpable in this image of an empty lot.

After that exciting but disappointing experience we went to the Kryhopil cemetery. Yesterday and today we spent considerable time walking through and photographing many of the gravestones in both cemeteries at Shpykiv and Kryzhopil.  The first was completely overgrown and on a hillside, which made walking extremely difficult. Much of the Kryzhopil cemetery was in better shape but still there are many tombstones that were hard to read or were broken. We were frustrated that we were unable to find the graves of Levi Bentzion Spektor and Sosya Begler, which I was told were in Kryzhopil. We did take photos of some Spektor, Weltman, one Krafcik, and a Mellman graves that I hope to translate after the trip. The gravestones were in Hebrew, Ukrainian or Russian or a combination.

While the cemetery may look nice here, try wading around in knee-high grass and brambles trying to read faded tombstones. It 's more fun than it sounds.

There is of course much more to say about this, and all the other parts of the trip, but this will have to do for now.  Tomorrow we visit another storied family village --- Zhabokrich --- which we are eager to see!

It may be Sunday but I'm still thinking about Saturday

As Lev wrote, our first full day in Kyiv was busy and covered a lot of historical, emotional, and cultural territory. I promised to write a bit about our visit to the killing ground known historically to Jews as Babi Yar (from the Russian) but now known officially as Babyn Yar in Ukrainian.

A map of the grounds. Sorry, it's all in Ukrainian

I first read about Babyn Yar when I was about 20 years old through the moving and evocative poem by the Soviet-Russian writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko. It memorialized the 33,711 Jews who were forcibly brought to the ravine in Kyiv, and then were brutally shot and killed on Yom Kippur between 29 and 30 September 1941. It was the largest mass slaughter of Jews in Ukraine at that point of the war but sadly would not be the last.
 
But Jews weren't the only ones who died at Babyn Yar. The Nazi's were equal opportunity murderers; there wasn't a minority (or majority) that they didn't hate. So approximately 100,000 and 150,000 Ukrainian nationalists, Roma, gays, and Soviet POW's also died there in the months after the murder of the Jewish population.

Babyn Yar is quite a large area covered by lawn, wild grasses, and many poplar and birch trees. The sound of the wind in the trees is beautiful and calming.

Not visible: The millions of little poplar seeds floating through the air. Apparently, female poplars douse the whole city with them.

There are a variety of monuments to the dead spread out over the grounds. We didn't see the giant menorah as it was in a different place but we did see a giant sculpture, put up by the Soviet government, to honour the small number of communists who died there.

And boy is it ugly. It might be hard to discern what it's supposed to be from this distance but, believe me, even up close it's a mess.

 There was also a permanent monument in the form of a large cross in memory of the Ukrainian nationalist dead.

While it is big, the perspective isn't doing the Jewish monument any favours.

 For the Jewish community, there was a small temporary trilingual (English, Hebrew, Ukrainian) monument put up by the Ukrainian government in 2001. I was disappointed that it was so small, but apparently I can blame the Jewish community for the lack of a permanent monument. Apparently, one European Jewish group wanted to build a community centre (which in reality would have been a business centre) on the spot! So there is no monument because they haven't been able to agree on something suitable. Get two Jews together and you'll have three opinions!
 

 Also distressing were the factories and administrative buildings built on top of Ukrainian and Jewish graves by the Soviets. In 1973, a giant TV tower was erected which still overshadows the memorial site. Now abandoned, it still serves as a reminder of how memory must be protected.

Build giant useless tower over the mass-graves of the victims of war crimes? Stay classy, Soviet Union, stay classy.

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We left Babyn Yar for a much more enjoyable entertainment in the evening, which took place in St. Sophia square. (Lev's note: With the sun setting behind the stage, it was beautiful to see the light play on the bell tower)

Big thanks to Myron and family for letting us know about this. We had a great time!

It was a classical music concert (that started almost 30 minutes late), but the square was packed with chairs and was standing room only for the unfortunate late-comers. There were a lot of opera performances including a group known as "The Three Basses", who did some comedic takes on opera. It was very Ukrainian humour.

Also there was a fire on a nearby street but the concert continued nonetheless.

The night ended with a laser light show using the stage and bell-tower as a screen. It told of the founding of Kyiv using a neat stylized cartoon style. Very cool.

Jewish Kyiv. No seriously, Jewish Kyiv projected on the side of a monastery belltower.

With that, we ended our Saturday and looked forward to Sunday.