Tag #154371 - Interview #90535 (Leonid Kotliar)

We marched to Nikolaev. There was another lining in Berislav and again Germans ordered: ‘Zhydy and communists — come out!’ I stood quiet. Other prisoners pushed 2-3 of their fellow comrades out of the line. They gave them away. Nobody reported on me.  However, there was the fourth time on 12 September: an interpreter and a German officer ordered: ‘Russians, step out!’ The Russians did. ‘Ukrainians, step out!’ Ukrainians did. ‘Byelorussians, Uzbeks, step out!’ Then came Georgians, Tatars, Armenians and Kazakhs... I was thinking of stepping ahead with Ukrainians, but I feared that they would give me away. The line was getting thinner... And then I recalled when my fellow comrades from a mine unit asked me ‘What is your nationality?’ and I replied: ‘You guess’.  They made one effort after another, but failed. And then one of them said I was a gypsy. So I decided to say that my father was a gypsy and my mother was Ukrainian. I didn’t know yet that they were killing gypsies, too. There were two of us left. The other one had a big nose and bulging eyes… The interpreter asked him: ‘You?’ And Ukrainians were yelling: ‘Judas, Judas!’ Germans hit them on their heads with their sticks and they shut up. He answered: ‘We are Mariupol Greeks’. Everybody laughed: ‘ha-hah-ha!’ Again Germans hit them on their heads and there fell silence again. I didn’t wait until they asked me and said in Ukrainian: ‘My father is gypsy and my mother is Ukrainian’. The interpreter translated and the German officer said: ‘Ukrainian’ and the interpreter took me to the Ukrainian group.  Then we were ordered to disperse. The dusk was condensing. We settled down in a clearing in the woods. Then we went to sleep. The rule was simple: if one of us broke into run they would shoot everyone. I knew that I needed a legend of a biography. So I was lying there covered with my overcoat thinking. I decided to take the name of Kotliarchuk with a Ukrainian ending. –When next time they ordered: ‘zhydy, come out!’ one soldier said to me: ‘Why are you silent? You are a zhyd, aren’t you?’, but he looked like a Jew himself. I cursed at him and said: ‘You are a zhyd. Just look at yourself in the mirror’. He got scared and shut up. Nobody took his side. There were 8 or 9 other checks, but nobody gave me away.