Bakhmut. Two wars. Stories about the righteous, defenders and patriots of the city
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The inevitability of the punishment of evil
In the fall of 1941, Bakhmut (then Artemivsk) was captured by the Nazis. His occupation lasted almost two years. “The city was damaged in the amount of 700 million Soviet roubles, many residential buildings, enterprises, schools, public buildings, hospitals were destroyed. – says Ihor Kornatskyi, historian, chief custodian of the funds of the Bakhmut Museum of Local History. “A lot had to be rebuilt later from scratch.” But, according to the local historian, those destructions cannot be compared with the current ones caused by the Russians: “Now the city is uninhabitable, while at the end of the Nazi occupation it housed 50% of the pre-war population of Bakhmut.”
Most likely, having plans for the industrial potential of the city, the Nazis wanted to make a profit from it, and therefore did not hinder the work of factories, the educational process in the schools that survived… Life in Bakhmut continued, but one day a column of people appeared on the streets of the city, condemned to death. Thousands of Jews – women, children, elderly people – became victims of the mass execution organized and carried out by the Nazis in the alabaster tunnels of what was then Artemivsk.
Archival materials provided by the Bakhmut Museum of Local History
Not thieves, not mercenaries, but a commercial employee, an electrician, a clerk, a criminologist, a retired police chief as part of a Sonderkommando carried out the training and execution of almost three thousand people. Apparently, in a peaceful life, they would say about them: “But they wouldn’t even hurt a fly!” But the facts, the materials of the trial against them testified to something completely different. Thus, members of the Sonderkommando involved in the mass execution of Jews in Bakhmut were punished. It is important for both us and our enemies to know this now.
“They punished only a part of those Germans who organized and carried out [масову страту в алебастрових штольнях тодішнього Артемівська]. And the person who was in command of the SS squad that was shooting was Hans Johan Sommerfeld, he was 25 years old at the time. This was his first mass execution of people. He was tried in Dusseldorf in 1973 and sentenced to 6 years in prison,” wrote Yasmin Söhner, a German historian and lecturer at Heidelberg University.
The verdict in the trial against the organizers of the mass murder of Jews in Artemivsk was announced exactly three decades after the terrible crime was committed. Six defendants received from 3.5 to 9 years of imprisonment. The trial lasted in Dusseldorf from March 25, 1971 to January 12, 1973. The verdict was handed down after more than 150 hearings. There were six defendants in this trial. Most of them had higher education, there were also those who studied law. After the war, they lived quite quietly for almost 20 years, working in state institutions or doing business.
In the early 1960s, they began to be arrested for Nazi crimes, detained, released and arrested again. Did they realize all the inhuman horror of their actions? Did you try not to be cogs of the Nazi regime? Of course, historians place primary responsibility for the Holocaust on Hitler, but the decision to pull the trigger is always made by the person directly holding the weapon…
Art that captures memory
In 1941, Wehrmacht officer Harald von Fitinhof-Risch, an amateur documentary filmmaker, filmed his unit’s offensive that ended in Artemivsk/Bakhmut. Ten years will pass and these materials will fall into the hands of his grandson – Clemens von Wedemeyer.
In an attempt to rethink the past, he will go to Bakhmut in 2021. Clemens will try to record the angles that his grandfather shot, places related to the German occupation of the city. His works were included in the exposition of the exhibition “Bakhmut. The Face of Genocide 1942/2022”, which opened in Kyiv.
The work of Clemens von Wedemeyer
The exhibition project, which combined archival materials of the Bakhmut Museum of Local Lore, the works of famous Ukrainian documentary photographers Kostyantyn and Vlada Liberovy, Serhiy Korovayny, Andriy Dubchak, Heorhiy Ivanchenko, video art by Mykhailo Alekseenko, is designed to draw parallels between the actions of German Nazis and Russian invaders in Bakhmut.
According to Roza Tapanova, head of the “Babin Yar” NIMZ, the concept of the project includes the idea that evil has one and the same face, it is not measured in the dry language of numbers, because every human life is the highest value.
“This exhibition speaks not only about events that are eighty years old, but also about what is happening now. The building in which the exposition is located has the following words: “He who forgets his past is doomed to relive it.” The same the inscription is in Auschwitz. Many terrible events took place in Ukraine, which were hushed up for decades. The memory holocaust during the USSR became the basis for the distortion of history, which is now used by Russia to spread its propaganda narratives. Therefore, our goal as a National Historical and Memorial Reserve is to to make places of oblivion into places of memory,” explained Roza Tapanova.
“Dust 2014” by Mykhailo Alekseenko
According to the head of the “Babyn Yar” Children’s Hospital in Ukraine, historians count more than two thousand places where the crimes of the Holocaust took place.
“Babyn Yar” is the most famous of all. But not so many of our fellow citizens know about him, as they would like. Not talking about other cities means continuing the Holocaust of memory. Therefore, we see the mission of the National Historical and Memorial Reserve “Babyn Yar” as an all-Ukrainian center for the restoration and preservation of memory. Bakhmut is one of the places where mass murders of Jews took place. Now he has become a victim of a new genocide. But for us, Bakhmut is primarily a symbol of faith in the indomitability of our soldiers and victory over the enemy,” adds Roza Tapanova.
By the way, in the same tunnels where the Nazis killed thousands of Jews, and where the memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation was erected, the Wagnerites set up shooting ranges.
We will definitely come back home
“Bakhmut will definitely be a very beautiful city. We will rebuild. We will restore museums, libraries, ancient buildings. We will definitely return home!” – with an unshakable faith that brings tears to my eyes, says Svitlana Kravchenko. Her family survived two wars and has an incredible history.
Svitlana’s grandmother – Nataliya Kravchenko – posthumously received the title of Righteous Among the Nations from the Israeli National Institute for the Memory of the Yad Vashem Disaster and Heroism. During the occupation of Bakhmut by the Nazis, Natalia Kravchenko saved three Jewish children under the threat of death. The stories of righteous people who saved Jews from death are part of the exhibition “Bakhmut. The Face of Genocide 1942/2022”.
Before the beginning of the Second World War, her husband, the chief engineer of the Donetsk railway, was repressed by the Soviets. Natalia was left with three small sons. She sold the tin roof of her house to buy out a tuberculosis-stricken husband from the settlement. But the family home survived and became a shelter for three Jewish teenage boys. When the column was being led through the city to be shot, someone pushed two half-orphans and their friend out of it. They ran as hard as they could. The boys knocked on the door of the Kravchenkos, whose sons they most likely knew or were friends with.
“And the grandmother opened the door. Despite the fact that she and the whole family were threatened with death for hiding Jews. She risked the lives of her sons for the sake of other people’s boys! For many months, they hid in cellars on the border of the Kravchenkos’ garden and their neighbor Natalia Yakivna. How did they manage to survive the war with the six children and a grandfather suffering from tuberculosis, I can’t imagine!” – says Svitlana.
Svitlana Kravchenko, granddaughter of the Righteous Among the Nations Natalia Kravchenko
Perhaps, although it sounds scary, the illness of the head of the family helped, because the Germans were reluctant to settle in houses where it was possible to catch some disease. And that’s why they didn’t evict the Kravchenko family. After the war, the rescued boys were placed in a craft school, then one of them worked together with the eldest son of his savior.
Already in our time, before the full-scale invasion, in the attic of the same house, Svitlana Kravchenko and her sons found old photos and letters of her grandfather, which grandmother Natalya had kept for many years, apparently fearing persecution. One of them, sent even before the wedding, is written in Ukrainian…
“Bakhmut is everything to me. The best place on earth is near my home. It’s life, the smell of dust in the air, the warm bricks of the houses, the beautiful terracotta color all around, the marigolds. As soon as we win, I’ll go right back to Bakhmut and set up my tent, if will not live anywhere. I constantly think about my city, because that is where my life is,” Svitlana Kravchenko shares during the opening of the project.
“We plan to show this exhibition in other cities of Ukraine and in European countries. And then we will hand over part of the exposition to the Bakhmut Museum of Local History, which will definitely work in Bakhmut,” says Roza Tapanova.
Reviewing the exhibition “Bakhmut. Face of Genocide 1942/2022”, the chief custodian of the Bakhmut Museum of Local Lore, Ihor Kornatskyi, notes that most of the museum’s fund was evacuated, that the exhibition in Kyiv raises an important topic, he shares his impressions of how the exhibition was successfully built and formed… Kornatsky calmly and calmly says that “the war will end, territorial integrity will be restored, and our city will become a symbol of invincibility”. Could it be otherwise? No, because we have these and many, many other stories of faith, humanity and love for our land, which will certainly also be told and preserved, because memory is power.
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