Finishing my mother’s journey
In a two-part series, the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn returns to his mother’s hometown in Ukraine, where her family was murdered during the Holocaust, and tells the story of her escape and unlikely survival inside Nazi Germany
Martin Regg Cohn visits Ukraine — where his mom’s entire family perished in the Holocaust — and recounts her unusual tale of survival.
RAVA RUSKA, UKRAINE— This is where my mother’s family died in the Holocaust. And where Helen Edel found the will to live.
Barely 16 years old, she survived by adopting a false identity to live among her Nazi enemies inside Germany. Living by her wits, she escaped the fate of her parents — my grandparents — who were buried in mass graves that have only recently been uncovered.
Now, a memorial has opened at the killing field where thousands of Jews like them were slaughtered more than 70 years ago, at the height of the Second World War.
An invitation to witness the dedication ceremony came too late for my mother. She died last year, leaving me to complete the journey without her.
Guiding me in her place today is an unlikely surrogate — a French priest who knows Rava Ruska’s story perhaps better than any Jew alive: Father Patrick Desbois has dedicated his life to investigating the mass executions of Europe’s Jews by German killing squads and their local henchmen.
His grandfather, a French PoW held in a camp outside my mother’s hometown, hinted darkly at Nazi atrocities against the Jews.
Like me, Desbois grew up hearing stories about this foreign-sounding place (pronounced Rava Rooska).
He wanted to learn what his grandfather lived through. I needed to know where my grandparents died.
During my years as a foreign correspondent, I came to understand the importance of place — of travelling to the scene of tragedy to bear witness and chronicle loss. Now I find myself thrust into a journalistic journey that is also an intensely personal quest.
Ahead of the memorial ceremony, Desbois asks me to join him on the route his research teams have taken countless times. Our destination, once a vital railway junction town, was transformed by the Nazis into a deadly crossroads for their war machine — a place for incarcerating PoWs while exterminating Jews.
Today, Rava Ruska is dilapidated and depopulated, its faded legacy kept alive by the families of the dead.
“There are so many Jews who don’t know what happened to their families,” Desbois tells me as our car approaches the town whose name has been on my lips since childhood. “In Rava Ruska the problem was that nobody knew where the graves were.”
The intrepid priest knows the way. Followed by bodyguards (protecting against threats on his life), our convoy bounces along a potholed road to a clearing on the outskirts of town, surrounded by pine forests.
It is this forgotten Holocaust that Desbois came upon a decade ago, and has documented ever since: the mass extermination site where victims were taken to be shot, one bullet per Jew, as part of Hitler’s Final Solution.
Overlooking the dead is a monument cobbled together from Hebrew headstones plundered long ago from an old Jewish cemetery. The site is cordoned off by a knee-high enclosure of sombre concrete and stone, but a grimly worded sign cautions visitors, “Human remains may be found scattered beyond the mass graves marked here.”
Tears flow easily as I look out at the grandparents I never knew.
It is hard to cover your own family’s funeral ceremony, even 70 years later. Were my mother still alive, I know she could not easily bear the pain of coming home to behold the graves of her parents.
Behind us, invited dignitaries are assembling to pay homage to the slain Jews of Rava Ruska. The German ambassador is here to atone. An estimated 4,000 souls are buried in this killing field, one of three execution sites in the area uncovered by Desbois and his Paris-based organization, Yahad—In Unum. A memorial pavilion is being unveiled today by the American Jewish Committee for a project underwritten by the German Foreign Ministry.
As the speeches begin, the question haunts me: is my grandfather, Abraham Edel, lying here under the scrubby earth? Is my grandmother, Regina — the inspiration for my middle name, Regg — listening all these years later? In a genocide, there are more questions than answers.
All these years later, we know much more. Local townsfolk have gathered to watch from the sidelines as Desbois takes the microphone to explain the reality of Rava Ruska’s history.
“You must understand that Rava Ruska was a huge killing centre, one big place here for the Jews,” the priest tells them.
Arabbi says Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Perhaps now they can rest in peace.
It is a dignified monument, designed with durable materials on the advice of Desbois to discourage desecration. He has seen too many other sites looted by locals carting off metal scraps or digging for gold teeth.
Led by their teacher, local high school students light candles at the site. The patchy ground is dotted with small purple flowers, prickly to the touch — Rava Ruska’s own field of thorns.
As the memorial ends, it is time to set off on my own search. Walking past the flickering candles, I wonder who will keep my grandparents’ memory from being extinguished after they are once again left behind. ‘We are looking for what happened’ He is an unlikely Holocaust sleuth.
Not a Jew, but a Catholic priest.
Not a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals long dead but a pursuer of witnesses still living, who are only now willing to talk.
Father Patrick Desbois has almost singlehandedly revolutionized Holocaust investigations. Documenting crimes against humanity, he has coaxed testimonials from thousands of ordinary villagers across Ukraine who were ordered to dig graves, pull out gold teeth, pile corpses and conceal genocide.
More than one million Jews were shot in the execution fields, pits and swamps of Nazi-occupied Ukraine and eastern Poland.
Like Nazi hunters of the past, Desbois is in a race against time: aging Ukrainian witnesses, many of them children compelled to do the dirty work of occupying soldiers seven decades ago, are dwindling rapidly.
They are ready to talk, if only someone listens without judging.
“We are not looking for good people or bad people; we are looking for what happened,” the priest explains.
His methodology is simple but powerful: videotape testimonials, identify the sites of mass graves, and search for Nazi-era bullet casings scattered in the soil — ballistic evidence of what Desbois describes in his groundbreaking book, The Holocaust by Bullets.
Rava Ruska provided a breakthrough for the mass graves he documented, the first but by no means the last. He has come back here more than a dozen times to dig, literally and figuratively, for physical and historical traces of the thousands of Jews slain in the hometown of my mother, Helen Edel.
For Desbois, the motives are not merely religious but intensely personal.
As a boy in France, he heard his grandfather — incarcerated as a prisoner of war outside Rava Ruska — hint of unspeakable atrocities against the Jews. As an adult, Desbois travelled here to unlock the secrets that his grandfather had never fully shared about what the PoWs had heard.
In his clerical collar, the priest commands instant respect wherever he goes. Aging witnesses open up to the man in the black shirt as if he is taking confession — though most have no sins to confess, just horror stories to tell.
For decades, it was a forgotten Holocaust. On a 2004 visit by Desbois, Rava Ruska’s then mayor, still steeped in Soviet-era evasions, stonewalled his questions.
But on a return trip the priest broke through the wall of silence. A local politician, Yaroslav Nadyak, led him to villagers who witnessed the Germans massacring the last few hundred Jews of Rava Ruska. They showed him a mass grave in the adjoining hamlet of Borove, the first of thousands of killing fields across Ukraine that he would investigate.
Desbois later documented two other nearby execution sites — the biggest situated alongside the frontiers of Ukraine and Poland, where several thousand Jews lie buried. The dead are trapped in the limbo of a no man’s land, unmarked, undisturbed — and inaccessible.
But the smaller execution site in Borove’s forest tells its own dark story. The Nazis forced Jews from the ghetto to dig their
own grave, then abruptly led them away for a rest break. Secretly, they placed dynamite in the pit, then brought their captives back to resume digging for their own demise.
“They extracted the Jews from the houses of Rava Ruska, and they put them in a line near the mass grave — and they shot them in the back,” Desbois explains at a memorial ceremony for the dead.
As they tumbled into the pit, “the 30 Jews exploded,” he tells the crowd. “It was the end of the Jews after this mass killing.”
Locals were ordered to collect the body parts, scattered on nearby branches, for final burial. Some victims were left to die of their wounds because the Germans refused to expend more than one bullet per Jew. As survivors gasped for air, the burial ground kept shifting.
“It took three days for a mass grave to die — I want you to know that,” the priest says slowly.
Desbois argues that the staggering efficiency and barbarity of extermination camps — where as many as 2.5 million Jews were gassed and cremated in places such as Auschwitz — has overshadowed the stark horror of individual deaths in villages like this one. Between those extremes of infamy and obscurity, an estimated six million Jews perished in the Holocaust.
After the ceremony at the main site, I ask Nadyak — the local politician who shared Rava Ruska’s dark secret with Desbois a decade ago — to show me the smaller burial ground at Borove, deep in the forest outside town. He drives me along winding village roads, past fields of poppies, stopping at an overgrown trail known only to a few locals. We pick our way past fallen logs, and thorns that shred our clothes, trailed by swarms of flies and ticks.
In a small clearing among the pine trees lies the final resting place of Rava Ruska’s last Jews, marked by a modest Star of David embedded in wood on the ground. Set deep in the forest, hidden by primrose shrubs that are eerily scentless, the gravesite is being reclaimed by nature as rapidly as it is fading from memory. Escape from Rava Ruska As the spectre of genocide descended on Helen Edel’s hometown, the Nazi security apparatus settled into its new headquarters in the local courthouse.
The sprawling edifice still stands, its red tile roof intact, though the interior was gutted years ago. It is my first stop as I try to retrace my mother’s escape route, searching for clues about her life here — and her parents’ death.
This is where agents of the Gestapo, SS, police and their local collaborators joined hands to choreograph — and meticulously chronicle — the slaughter of the Jews, including my mother’s family. Within its cloistered walls, German commanders processed weekly reports about the eradication of a Jewish population that had once constituted a majority of Rava Ruska’s 12,000 residents — in a place known to local Ukrainians and Poles as “Rava the Jew.”
I walk along the route my mother took home from school before the Nazis shut it down. This is where her Polish teacher had started every class by sniffing the air and complaining, “I can smell stinky Jewish feet.”
Her old school still stands, but the classrooms are long gone, the roof gutted, the walls crumbling — a metaphor for a town in decline. Today, Rava Ruska’s economy is slumping, its prewar population shrunken to a mere 8,000 people.
The town has become a village. And most of my mother’s reminiscences have been reduced to rubble.
I continue along desolate streets with shuttered shops to the town’s main market square, holding an address in my hand that my mother never forgot — 24 Rynek St. — though a street number is of little use when there are no houses left. Her family home, and those of all Jews, were long ago razed, replaced by a lowrise apartment block and a vast emptiness that bespeaks an aching gap in the town’s collective memory.
In mid-1942, the old market area where she grew up was transformed by the Nazis into an overcrowded Jewish ghetto whose inhabitants were penned in. To avoid panic in the early days they could come and go for work, but soon the ghetto was sealed off from the outside world.
I can only imagine my mother’s final days here as she sensed impending doom. She had witnessed the Nazi Aktions — the German phrase for terrifying roundups of local Jews who were grabbed off the streets or pulled from their homes, killed if they resisted or marched off to certain death if they acquiesced.
The first, in March 1942, sent more than 1,000 Jews to their deaths in the Belzec extermination camp, 22 kilometres away. In July of 1942, the Nazis mounted their second deadly Aktion, rounding up another 2,000 Jews.
As security forces combed the streets, my mother hid in the nursery of a garden. Wondering if her parents were still alive, she hurried home to find her mother had hidden in a cellar. Her father had eluded the sweep while at work.
There were more Aktions to come. Thousands of Jews from surrounding villages were being crammed into the ghetto. Water and bread were in short supply.
This is where they endured a slow death as waves of typhus engulfed them and executions loomed.
Barred from the sidewalks, Jews were made to walk on the roads alongside horse carts. And forced to wear the Star of David patch, the Nazi way of designating and demonizing them.
As Rava Ruska’s Jews were slowly suffocating, my mother came home one day in late 1942 to find her family huddled in the house. Her bags were packed, a plan mapped out.
Only one escape route remained, and only one among them could avoid detection. By virtue of her appearance, demeanour and diction — her unaccented Polish and her command of German — my mother was deemed most likely to pass as a non-Jew. Her parents had arranged for her to assume a false identity as a Polish Catholic girl seeking work in Germany.
The discussion was hushed, the decision hurried.
A clean-cut man in his mid-20s stepped forward from the living room. Antoni (Antek) Chruszczyk was the smuggler hired to guide my mother to safety. After the introductions, he headed to the train station ahead of her.
Family members lined up for a final farewell, trying to reassure her with predictions that the war would be over in three months. Nearly three years later, the war finally over, none would be left in Rava Ruska.
First to bid goodbye was Aunt Hela Schipper, with her 5-year-old son, Janek. She would be killed within weeks in an Aktion, and her son shot the next day.
Next was Aunt Klara Losberg, a university-educated math teacher who had always been a role model. That night in the living room she was nursing her 3-week-old child. Mother and daughter would die within two months.
Grandmother Matylda, looking sad and mournful, kissed her goodbye. She too would perish in the ghetto.
Tearing up, her father, Abraham, embraced her tightly, wordlessly.
Her mother, Regina, wearing an expression of frozen anguish, kissed her on the forehead and gave a last hug. They promised to write — a promise they kept, though not for long.
Helen was only 16, leaving home for the first and last time. With a train to catch — an escape route that would soon be closed off — there was no time for emotional farewells. Steeling themselves, mother and father ushered their teenage daughter out of the house.
But no sooner had she departed than the ache in her heart made her turn back for a final embrace. The tortured look in her parents’ eyes told her that she must continue on her way.
My mother knew what her parents were trying to tell her. She must survive.
How Helen Edel escaped to Germany and survived the war