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

Often, the locals were forced to billet evacuees in their homes free of charge; there were fewer allocations from local budgets, which now had to be shared between the local residents and the incoming evacuees. So resentment against was the newcomers stirred up among the local administration and the local residents, as well as inter-regional and inter-ethnic animosity.¹⁹

      2. THE NORTH CAUCASUS

      2.1. The Local Population and the Jewish Evacuees

      In the North Caucasus, Jewish evacuees came to constitute a considerable proportion of the newcomers who started moving into the region after the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. On October 1, 1941, a local agency in charge of evacuation in the Krasnodar territory stated in its internal memorandum that Jews made up 73% of the 218,000 people who were received and given accommodation in the area.²⁰ Data of the Council for Evacuation pertaining to other areas indicates that, in summer and fall 1941, Jews constituted a majority of the newcomers throughout the North Caucasus:

      Distribution of the Registered Evacuated Population in the Regions of the North Caucasus, as of November 15, 1941, by Gender and Age, as a Percentage of the Total

      Source: calculated by the author on the basis of data of Resettlement Departments processed by the Council for Evacuation, 1941. YVA: JM/24678. Source: GARF: A-259/40/3091. Note: There is no information for the Rostov District.

      This finding seems to contradict the widely held view that the Soviet government did not prioritize the evacuation of Jews²¹ and must be explained. As mentioned above, in Soviet planning the region served as a reception area. However, the number of “unofficial” refugees who flooded into the Caucasus was considerably higher than the figures set for the organized evacuation. The reason for this influx of refugees was the geographical proximity of the North Caucasus to the Ukraine region with its sizeable Jewish population. Thus, the apparent contradiction may be reconciled in the following manner: although the Soviets did not prioritize the evacuation of Jews insofar as organized evacuation was concerned, they evidently allowed those Jews who had escaped independently and had reached the North Caucasus region to avail themselves of the facilities offered by the Soviet evacuation program such as provision of food, work, housing, warm clothes, fuel, medical aid, and school education for children.

      It became apparent that the arrival of masses of predominantly Jewish evacuees led to an upsurge of anti-Jewish sentiments amongst the local population. This involved, among other factors, the refusal to allow Jewish evacuees to move into a place (the local inhabitants were recorded as saying: “We’ll let Russians in, but not Jews”),²² and the attempts to get rid of Jewish tenants with the tacit approval of local functionaries.²³

      Many Jewish testimonies also mention the atmosphere of anti-Semitism in the North Caucasus towards the Jewish evacuees.²⁴ This is how Vladimir Gel’fand who was evacuated to Essentuki, described the situation in his diary:

      In the streets and in the park, at a bread store, and in a line for kerosene, everywhere can one hear whispering—quiet, dreadful, cheerful, but hateful. They are talking about Jews. So far they speak awkwardly, while looking around. Jews are thieves. … Jews have money. … Jews don’t like working. Jews don’t want to serve in the Red Army. Jews live without being registered. Jews walk all over them [seli im na golovu]. In brief, Jews are the root of all misfortune.²⁵

      A Jewish refugee, who fled from Rostov-on-Don when it was captured by the Germans for the first time (late November 1941), stated in a postwar interview that, when:

      we entered local villages to seek food, the population was ill-disposed towards us and even behaved in a belligerent fashion. We were never invited to enter a house in order to clean ourselves up. There was even a feeling of terror.

      Such attitudes did not diminish, but rather intensified, from May 1942 onwards, possibly in view of some change in the balance of forces in the region in favor of the Germans and the way that the local people perceived the situation. This was noted by a Jewish evacuee: “When [we] moved around North Caucasian localities, we sensed hostile attitudes on the part of the local population. ‘Hitler will shoot you all the same,’ they said. Often, we were denied water.”²⁶

      Yet, in many cases it cannot be established whether the hostile attitude was due to the fact that the witnesses was Jewish, or the fact that they were refugees. In contrast, a very limited number of sources noted that the Russian population displayed neutral or even positive attitudes towards Jewish refugees.²⁷ However, these few examples stand out as the exception to the trend, which was indicative of the increase in anti-Semitism among the local Slavic people on the eve of the German occupation of the North Caucasus.

      More generally, the local authorities recorded an increase in anti-Semitic feelings as a reaction to the growing predominantly Jewish evacuation into the region. From the early stages of the War, many Jewish evacuees, especially those from recently annexed territories, were not conscripted into the Red Army. This could be explained by the Soviet concern about the political reliability of their new citizens, and also, by the general chaos surrounding the Soviet evacuation policy and its implementation. The local population in the North Caucasus was outraged to see many young Jews among the newcomers, whereas their own sons had already been drafted into the Soviet army.²⁸

      As the German army approached the North Caucasus, animosity towards the Jews increased, as indicated by the following two quotes from Stavropol records. According to the memorandum of the District Committee of the VKP(b) prepared in September 1941, “the hostility towards Jews on the part of anti-Soviet elements was clearly on the rise in recent times in a number of areas.”²⁹ On January 6, 1942, a lecturer in the VKP(b) Department of Agitation and Propaganda in the Stavropol territory communicated to the NKVD regional administration: “In the Libknekht area, the departure of draftees to the front took place in an anti-Soviet mood: ‘Beat Yids and Communists!’”³⁰

      Official Soviet records indicate that quite a number of ordinary people, and especially low-level functionaries, were convicted for “instigating nationally motivated animosity, namely anti-Semitism” in the context of the evacuation into the North Caucasus.³¹ We get little understanding, however, of what the NKVD in the North Caucasus regarded as manifestations of anti-Semitism subject to legal prosecution. Overall, the impression is that the central Soviet government tended to suppress anti-Jewish attitudes among the local elite and the inhabitants of the region (contrary to what we know about other evacuation reception areas³²). Often viewed in conjunction with, or as explicit expressions of resentment against the Soviet regime and all too reminiscent of Nazi messages (to quote the Council for Evacuation envoy, “the enemy’s hand is behind [these activities],”)³³ they could not be ignored as in other regions: in late October 1941, the Wehrmacht had reached the gates of the North Caucasus.

      2.2. The Macro View

      2.2.1. 1941

      Initially, the North Caucasus emerged as an important evacuation destination in early July 1941. Later, the Council for Evacuation designated three Russian districts of the North Caucasus (Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, and Stavropol) for the reception of 100,000 people in each city, to be evacuated from the Western Ukraine.³⁴

      In addition to the officially sanctioned plan, thousands of independent refugees thronged to the North Caucasus in summer and fall of 1941 because the region was situated on a natural escape route from Ukraine into the Soviet interior.³⁵ According to the data of a local agency in charge of the resettlement, 37,165 evacuees arrived in the Krasnodar territory from July 19 to 25, 1941.³⁶ By early fall, this number had swelled considerably, and by September 10, it had reached 205,000.³⁷ The unofficial evacuees continued to arrive (see Table 1), despite the growing threat of a German thrust into the region. At that time, it was entirely unclear whether the German advance towards this region could be halted. The Soviet authorities considered the area to be under threat, as can be inferred from their intensive defensive preparations starting from mid-August 1941 in the Stavropol territory³⁸ and especially