Ukraine: Documentary, July 28
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Left Odessa last night after four days of filming and four nights of partying.
Odessa started off badly. My main reason for going was to film the new mass grave they found last month. More than 11,000 Jews had been executed and buried there, only discovered when workers were digging to lay wires. My contact with the Jewish center here said I could get in with a team that was going daily to the grave to examine it. He said that last week when I bought the ticket, but the day before, when I called to see if we were going the day I got off the train (I was arriving at 6 AM), he said just to come down, meet him at 10: 30 and we would talk about it.
I met him. He said work had already finished, but gave me information about how to get there. It was outside a village. There was only one bus there per day, 4.5 hours. Once there, I would need to find someone to take me in for the night. I called the contact there he gave me. She told me there wasn't much to see, but that I was welcome to come. The bones had been reburied, leaving only a dirt and sand patch. Was that worth spending two days going out to?
I talked to my contact. Aren't there photos, videos? Sure. Who has them? He's not sure.
***
Another frustration was a lack of a place to stay. I was crashing the first night with a Peace Corps Volunteer, but he was leaving the next day. I knew three other Ukrainians in Odessa (had dated two of them) and they knew I was coming down. Surely someone would have a place for me to sleep. I called. Two were leaving town that day, one rented a room from a woman and was not allowed to have guests. Hmm. Should have planned this all better. But then said Peace Corps volunteer introduced me to four other volunteers in Odessa on vacation. Together, we rented an apartment. Craziness ensued.
***
The next day I had a follow-up interview with a holocaust surivor that I had interviewed the previous day. He took me out to the spot where his family had been murdered, along with 10,000 other Jews. He, a boy at the time, had escaped in the melee. He was one of three holocaust survivors I interviewed in Odessa, all of their stories heartbreaking. One had a friend whose mother had saved her daughter by putting her back to the firing squad and holding her daughter in front of her. She fell into the pit dead, but the daughter was unharmed. When the daughter--whose name was Sofika--crawled out of the pit, she came face to face with a German soldier left to guard the pit. He pointed his gun at her, then lowered it, letting her leave. She came to a house and the woman there took her in, told her to forget she was a Jew and then raised her. Sofika--who did not look Jewish--changed her name to Dasha, grew up, married a Ukrainian and had two children, who never learned their Jewish heritage. When the woman I interviewed ran into her long after the war, Sofika/Dasha begged her to keep her heritage secret. It was only until after the fall of the Soviet Union and Sofika/Dasha felt it was okay to talk about.
***
With getting to the grave a bust, I decided to explore the other incident I thought would be worth filming:
Odessa had about 700 graves at the Jewish cemetary defaced withswastikas in May. I was told that they'd been cleaned and it wasn'tworth going out there, but I decided to see if I could at least speakto someone. I introduced myself to the caretaker and he said hedidn't want to talk about it, on camera or at all, and, no, there wasno one else I could talk to. He was being a bit of a dick, actually.So we stand there for a few minutes, me debating my options (none) andhe asks if I smoke. I say I do, thinking he's asking to have acigarette with me and maybe I'll massage this into him talking. Heasks if I have matches. Oh. I don't.
He complains he's askedeveryone coming into the cemetary for two hours and no one has, hencehim not smoking. I leave. It's on the outside of the city, but afterabout ten minutes of walking I find a kiosk, buy a pack of Malborosand two lighters and head back.I hand him a lighter and we both sit down on a bench. I smoke one I just bought, taking the smoke into my mouth without inhaling yet (BillClinton was right, it can be done) until we're both down to thefilter. We do this without speaking, and then he says "What do youwant to know?"
By now I have learned to not ask a single question or, in fact, letanyone speak until the camera is out. People have the tendency tojust start talking, camera or no, and when they start it's usually themost important stuff. So I take out the camera. He doesn't want tobe on camera. So I point it to the distance figuring I'll get shotsof his hands or whatever. He says it can record his voice, but thecamera has to be in the bag. So I hook up a shotgun mic, it's cordnow trailing into the bag, which he confirms is closed. Then hestarts talking. It's not top secret shit, either, just what he foundand how long it took them to clean it off and he's kind of annoyed athaving to do the work, and there's also a tinge that he doesn't likethe Jews either. Not that they deserved it, but that he's got toclean up graves because of something going on between them and theskinheads.So we wrap it up and I'm wondering what I'm going to do with just avoice. Overlay images of the defaced graves? Who do I get thosefrom?
I had already asked about them, but no one seemed to know who would have them. The caretaker--Sergei--seemed to think it was a waste of time to filmthe graves at this point, but I needed some kind of imagery. After mehassling him, he pointed to which area they were in. And I wasfucking jaw-dropped when I got there. Grave after fucking grave stillhad the swastikas on them. Some had been scrubbed to where there was only a ghost of them, some just had the red paint in between carvedletters, where scrubbing was too much effort, but a number seemed tohave not been cleaned at all. Within fifteen minutes I had shot atleast 40 graves with recognizable swastikas on them, all the worsebecause many of the graves had pictures of the deceased carved intothem, so there's a swastika right over their faces. One--of aswastika right over the face of this 8 year-old boy, was heartbreaking. Most of the graves had fencing around them, a traditionhere, so it meant the people who did it climbed over 700 differentfences to paint that many graves. Fucking A.
And the fact that anattempt had been made to clean them meant that they'll remain that wayuntil the paint is finally weathered off. You could probably come inten years and still see them.
Despite that, Odessa is quite anti-antisemitic. What few antisemiticgraffiti I saw was crossed out with ANTIFA painted below (which standsfor anitfasism) and I saw far more ANIFA graffiti, including stenciledspray paints of a silloutte tossing a swastika in a trash can andwriting like "death to fasisim" and "die Nazi scum". I also saw farmore anti-NATO graffiti and hammer and sickles, meaning Odessa'sconcerns are quite different from say, Zhytomyr and Lviv, which iswhere hard-core Nationalism is on the rise.In the end, I lucked out with Sergei. Another guy, Pavel, was therewhen I returned from the graves, carving a headstone set up on two sawhorses. That was visually interesting, so I asked to film it, and heagreed, provided I didn't show his face. He had helped clean thegraffiti on the graves as well, telling me about it with the camerapointed at the headstone. Sergei came over after a while and jokedwith Pavel, me making sure to keep the camera pointed down and not really seeing where it was pointed but hoping to catch anything goodthey might say on the mic. I looked at the footage later, though, andit's about three minutes of Sergei's hands on the shiny granite, halfhis body reflected but not is face. It was the perfect "anonymous"image to go with his voice and I didn't even mean for it to happen.
***
I spent three days hassling everyone I could meet about getting photos or videos of the mass graves or the cemetary defacement. The secretary at the Jewish Cultural Center took to glaring at me the second I walked in. I hated to be a problem to anyone, but at the same time if you don't push in this country, it doesn't happen.
Finally I got a hold of the press guy for the Synagogue. I met him at his office. He had deleted those photos, he told me. What? Well, maybe this other guy had them on his computer, but he was in Israel. Maybe my frustration leaked through, because he asked me to wait and went to make some calls. I really felt low. All the way down here, burning money that's not coming back anytime soon, to not get any useable evidence of this grave. The Holocaust testimonials and the footage from the cemetary was great, but I had pinned a lot of hope on this mass grave. I hoped to bookend the film with the grave's discovery. It made the film timely, that more than 60 years later, we were still finding graves from this relatively unknown part of the Holocaust.
The press guy comes back with a piece of paper with a code on it. Had he seriously just called this guy in Israel? He punches the code into this other guy's computer and is soon rooting through photos. He finds them and transfers them to my ipod. Then he says "maybe you could use this," and holds up a DVD. He pops it into the computer and it's RAW FOOTAGE of the graves the day they were found, including INTERVIEWS WITH THE PEOPLE WHO FOUND THEM. "You can take this and copy it if you want," he said, my eyes bugging out of my head. "Who shot this?" I asked. "Who do I need to ask for permission to use it?" "Oh, it's ours," he said, "we bought it off of a television station." "Can I get written permission from you to use this in my film?" "Yeah, I'll just get the rabbi to do it when he gets back."
I practically ran down the street to find an internet cafe and had them copy the disk. I had them check it twice before I gave it back and still occassionally find myself patting it in my backpack.
The next day, the press guy, who I still want to kiss as I type this (in a very hetero-masculine way), said he found where to get photos of the defaced headstones. He couldn't get them before I left, but he promised he'd put them on disk and give them to the volunteer in Odessa, who can mail them to me. And when the rabbi gets back he'll see about getting permission.
It was like a three day knot unwound from my body. I spent my last five hours in Odessa on a beach with another volunteer, playing beach volleyball, swimming in the Black Sea, listening to music pumped out from a PA system (interrupted repeatedly by offers of a free SIM card from the mobile company sponsoring the music) and oggling the many beautiful sights (Ukrainians don't have much problem with sunbathing topless).
Life is good.
Odessa started off badly. My main reason for going was to film the new mass grave they found last month. More than 11,000 Jews had been executed and buried there, only discovered when workers were digging to lay wires. My contact with the Jewish center here said I could get in with a team that was going daily to the grave to examine it. He said that last week when I bought the ticket, but the day before, when I called to see if we were going the day I got off the train (I was arriving at 6 AM), he said just to come down, meet him at 10: 30 and we would talk about it.
I met him. He said work had already finished, but gave me information about how to get there. It was outside a village. There was only one bus there per day, 4.5 hours. Once there, I would need to find someone to take me in for the night. I called the contact there he gave me. She told me there wasn't much to see, but that I was welcome to come. The bones had been reburied, leaving only a dirt and sand patch. Was that worth spending two days going out to?
I talked to my contact. Aren't there photos, videos? Sure. Who has them? He's not sure.
***
Another frustration was a lack of a place to stay. I was crashing the first night with a Peace Corps Volunteer, but he was leaving the next day. I knew three other Ukrainians in Odessa (had dated two of them) and they knew I was coming down. Surely someone would have a place for me to sleep. I called. Two were leaving town that day, one rented a room from a woman and was not allowed to have guests. Hmm. Should have planned this all better. But then said Peace Corps volunteer introduced me to four other volunteers in Odessa on vacation. Together, we rented an apartment. Craziness ensued.
***
The next day I had a follow-up interview with a holocaust surivor that I had interviewed the previous day. He took me out to the spot where his family had been murdered, along with 10,000 other Jews. He, a boy at the time, had escaped in the melee. He was one of three holocaust survivors I interviewed in Odessa, all of their stories heartbreaking. One had a friend whose mother had saved her daughter by putting her back to the firing squad and holding her daughter in front of her. She fell into the pit dead, but the daughter was unharmed. When the daughter--whose name was Sofika--crawled out of the pit, she came face to face with a German soldier left to guard the pit. He pointed his gun at her, then lowered it, letting her leave. She came to a house and the woman there took her in, told her to forget she was a Jew and then raised her. Sofika--who did not look Jewish--changed her name to Dasha, grew up, married a Ukrainian and had two children, who never learned their Jewish heritage. When the woman I interviewed ran into her long after the war, Sofika/Dasha begged her to keep her heritage secret. It was only until after the fall of the Soviet Union and Sofika/Dasha felt it was okay to talk about.
***
With getting to the grave a bust, I decided to explore the other incident I thought would be worth filming:
Odessa had about 700 graves at the Jewish cemetary defaced withswastikas in May. I was told that they'd been cleaned and it wasn'tworth going out there, but I decided to see if I could at least speakto someone. I introduced myself to the caretaker and he said hedidn't want to talk about it, on camera or at all, and, no, there wasno one else I could talk to. He was being a bit of a dick, actually.So we stand there for a few minutes, me debating my options (none) andhe asks if I smoke. I say I do, thinking he's asking to have acigarette with me and maybe I'll massage this into him talking. Heasks if I have matches. Oh. I don't.
He complains he's askedeveryone coming into the cemetary for two hours and no one has, hencehim not smoking. I leave. It's on the outside of the city, but afterabout ten minutes of walking I find a kiosk, buy a pack of Malborosand two lighters and head back.I hand him a lighter and we both sit down on a bench. I smoke one I just bought, taking the smoke into my mouth without inhaling yet (BillClinton was right, it can be done) until we're both down to thefilter. We do this without speaking, and then he says "What do youwant to know?"
By now I have learned to not ask a single question or, in fact, letanyone speak until the camera is out. People have the tendency tojust start talking, camera or no, and when they start it's usually themost important stuff. So I take out the camera. He doesn't want tobe on camera. So I point it to the distance figuring I'll get shotsof his hands or whatever. He says it can record his voice, but thecamera has to be in the bag. So I hook up a shotgun mic, it's cordnow trailing into the bag, which he confirms is closed. Then hestarts talking. It's not top secret shit, either, just what he foundand how long it took them to clean it off and he's kind of annoyed athaving to do the work, and there's also a tinge that he doesn't likethe Jews either. Not that they deserved it, but that he's got toclean up graves because of something going on between them and theskinheads.So we wrap it up and I'm wondering what I'm going to do with just avoice. Overlay images of the defaced graves? Who do I get thosefrom?
I had already asked about them, but no one seemed to know who would have them. The caretaker--Sergei--seemed to think it was a waste of time to filmthe graves at this point, but I needed some kind of imagery. After mehassling him, he pointed to which area they were in. And I wasfucking jaw-dropped when I got there. Grave after fucking grave stillhad the swastikas on them. Some had been scrubbed to where there was only a ghost of them, some just had the red paint in between carvedletters, where scrubbing was too much effort, but a number seemed tohave not been cleaned at all. Within fifteen minutes I had shot atleast 40 graves with recognizable swastikas on them, all the worsebecause many of the graves had pictures of the deceased carved intothem, so there's a swastika right over their faces. One--of aswastika right over the face of this 8 year-old boy, was heartbreaking. Most of the graves had fencing around them, a traditionhere, so it meant the people who did it climbed over 700 differentfences to paint that many graves. Fucking A.
And the fact that anattempt had been made to clean them meant that they'll remain that wayuntil the paint is finally weathered off. You could probably come inten years and still see them.
Despite that, Odessa is quite anti-antisemitic. What few antisemiticgraffiti I saw was crossed out with ANTIFA painted below (which standsfor anitfasism) and I saw far more ANIFA graffiti, including stenciledspray paints of a silloutte tossing a swastika in a trash can andwriting like "death to fasisim" and "die Nazi scum". I also saw farmore anti-NATO graffiti and hammer and sickles, meaning Odessa'sconcerns are quite different from say, Zhytomyr and Lviv, which iswhere hard-core Nationalism is on the rise.In the end, I lucked out with Sergei. Another guy, Pavel, was therewhen I returned from the graves, carving a headstone set up on two sawhorses. That was visually interesting, so I asked to film it, and heagreed, provided I didn't show his face. He had helped clean thegraffiti on the graves as well, telling me about it with the camerapointed at the headstone. Sergei came over after a while and jokedwith Pavel, me making sure to keep the camera pointed down and not really seeing where it was pointed but hoping to catch anything goodthey might say on the mic. I looked at the footage later, though, andit's about three minutes of Sergei's hands on the shiny granite, halfhis body reflected but not is face. It was the perfect "anonymous"image to go with his voice and I didn't even mean for it to happen.
***
I spent three days hassling everyone I could meet about getting photos or videos of the mass graves or the cemetary defacement. The secretary at the Jewish Cultural Center took to glaring at me the second I walked in. I hated to be a problem to anyone, but at the same time if you don't push in this country, it doesn't happen.
Finally I got a hold of the press guy for the Synagogue. I met him at his office. He had deleted those photos, he told me. What? Well, maybe this other guy had them on his computer, but he was in Israel. Maybe my frustration leaked through, because he asked me to wait and went to make some calls. I really felt low. All the way down here, burning money that's not coming back anytime soon, to not get any useable evidence of this grave. The Holocaust testimonials and the footage from the cemetary was great, but I had pinned a lot of hope on this mass grave. I hoped to bookend the film with the grave's discovery. It made the film timely, that more than 60 years later, we were still finding graves from this relatively unknown part of the Holocaust.
The press guy comes back with a piece of paper with a code on it. Had he seriously just called this guy in Israel? He punches the code into this other guy's computer and is soon rooting through photos. He finds them and transfers them to my ipod. Then he says "maybe you could use this," and holds up a DVD. He pops it into the computer and it's RAW FOOTAGE of the graves the day they were found, including INTERVIEWS WITH THE PEOPLE WHO FOUND THEM. "You can take this and copy it if you want," he said, my eyes bugging out of my head. "Who shot this?" I asked. "Who do I need to ask for permission to use it?" "Oh, it's ours," he said, "we bought it off of a television station." "Can I get written permission from you to use this in my film?" "Yeah, I'll just get the rabbi to do it when he gets back."
I practically ran down the street to find an internet cafe and had them copy the disk. I had them check it twice before I gave it back and still occassionally find myself patting it in my backpack.
The next day, the press guy, who I still want to kiss as I type this (in a very hetero-masculine way), said he found where to get photos of the defaced headstones. He couldn't get them before I left, but he promised he'd put them on disk and give them to the volunteer in Odessa, who can mail them to me. And when the rabbi gets back he'll see about getting permission.
It was like a three day knot unwound from my body. I spent my last five hours in Odessa on a beach with another volunteer, playing beach volleyball, swimming in the Black Sea, listening to music pumped out from a PA system (interrupted repeatedly by offers of a free SIM card from the mobile company sponsoring the music) and oggling the many beautiful sights (Ukrainians don't have much problem with sunbathing topless).
Life is good.
posted by Daniel Reynolds Riveiro at 2:08 AM
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