'Unknown Holocaust': Russian-speaking director made a series of films about the genocide of Jews in the USSR

Israeli film director Boris Maftsir has completed work on a series of documentaries about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The cycle consists of 9 films. Writes about it "Voice of America".

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Eight of them, with a total duration of 11 and a half hours, document about a hundred actions of mass extermination of Jews in vast areas from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. The victims of these actions, according to historians, were about 2 million 700 thousand people, about half of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their accomplices.

Boris Maftsir adheres to certain rules that characterize his creative method as a documentary filmmaker. All facts are voiced on camera by direct witnesses of the events from a specific place where they took place. Filming took place on approximately the same dates as the events themselves.

The first film in the series “Keepers of Memory” deals with the period from autumn 1941 to winter 1942, when mass extermination of Jews took place in Belarus. The shooting of Jews in 1941 in the city of Pushkin, not far from Leningrad, where the famous Catherine Palace is located, is described in the film "Holocaust: The Second Front". It refers to actions to exterminate Jews in Lyubavichy (Smolensk region), in Rostov-on-Don, in the region of Kislovodsk and Nalchik in the North Caucasus. The Road to Babi Yar tells about the first hundred days of the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis, when, with the active participation of accomplices from the local population, there were massacres of Jews, including women, children, and old people.

In other films of the series, Boris Maftsir documents the atrocities of the Nazis and their accomplices in Latvia, Belarus, Odessa, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed. The film "Gotenland" is about the extermination of Jews in Crimea.

The ninth film in the cycle, The Riddle of the Black Book, stands somewhat apart. Stalin banned the publication of the Black Book - the annals of the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR, which signaled a radical change in his attitude towards Jews. After the war, many Soviet Jews began to feel the rise of anti-Semitism, which was secretly encouraged by the authorities and peaked when Solomon Mikhoels was viciously killed and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was destroyed.

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Boris Maftsir was born in Riga. In 1970 he was arrested by the KGB and sentenced to one year in prison for "Zionist activities." He immigrated to Israel in 1971. Graduated from Tel Aviv University in the first graduation of the Faculty of Film and Television. He worked as a producer of the Israel Film Service, and from 1994 to 1999 - its director. He held leading positions in the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Absorption, and headed the delegation of the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) in Russia, Belarus and the Baltic countries.

In 2009 he founded and until 2014 directed the Department of Documentary Films at the WIZO College of Art in Haifa. From 2006 to 2012, he was the director of the Yad Vashem Museum's project to restore the names of Holocaust victims killed in the Soviet Union. Producer of over 200 documentaries and TV programs.

In recent years, he has focused on the film project "The Holocaust on the Territory of the Soviet Union."

Almost three years ago Boris Maftsir took part in the Film Festival of the Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora in New York, where his film "The Holocaust: Eastern Front" was shown.

In 2017, Boris called the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories "hidden, stolen, unknown", comparing the situation with Poland and other European countries, where almost everything is documented in detail. He told how he managed to get information about the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR

“My actions were subject to strict logic. It was important to have time to film witnesses who were already many years old. The starting point is an event. I arrive there and find eyewitnesses, at least one. The problem is that there is no archival film material about the Holocaust in the territories of the Soviet Union occupied by the Nazis. There are several minutes of archival footage, hackneyed and used many times. There are few photographs that are just as frequently reproduced and widely known. That's all. Any Holocaust denier will say: you claim that 2 million 700 thousand Jews were killed, but you show the same footage from Latvia, from Balti, from Gomel and from Babi Yar,” says Maftsir. “Now, looking at what I’ve done, I can say: I did everything I could.”

“Every event must be documented. We need witnesses. If I go to Dubossary, then the execution in Dubossary must be documented, and a person who can be trusted should talk about it. I couldn’t film the story about the execution in Slonim, in Belarus, because I couldn’t find any witnesses. For the same reason, I did not film a story about the executions in Mogilev and Gomel, and the Holocaust in Belarus is represented by a village called Sukhari,” continues Boris. — My family comes from Daugavpils. But even my local patriotism did not help. Daugavpils is not in the films, although there was a ghetto there, the inhabitants of which were shot. I didn't find the narrator there. That is, I found it, but he lived in Israel, was very ill and could not come to Latvia.”

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Boris explains the importance of day-to-day withdrawal with an event by authenticity.

“I went to the filming locations at the same time of year, in the same month and preferably on the same day when the shooting took place. I didn't have the luxury of doing study tours and then returning to shoot. Everything had to be filmed in one short visit. That is, a lot depended on my contractors, local memory keepers, local historians, and historians,” Maftsir shared. — In eight films I shot about a hundred places, and on the real map of the Holocaust, in addition to death camps, concentration camps and ghettos in Central and Western Europe, there are more than a thousand Soviet cities and villages where Jews were killed. If I had more money and time, I would, of course, film something else.”

The director also managed to make a film about the extermination of the Jewish population of Crimea by the Nazis. Few people know about this episode of the Holocaust. It is not by chance that the film was named "Gotenland".

“In October-November 1941, the Germans captured most of Crimea. The Nazis considered the peninsula an integral part of the "Third Reich", which they called the "land of the Goths" - Gotenland. They planned to equip a recreation area there for the Aryans, a kind of German Riviera. And the German farmer settlers were supposed to receive large plots of land,” says Boris. — The local residents were going to be partly expelled, partly made into slaves. The plans of the occupiers did not come true - with the exception of the clause on the extermination of the Jews. Residents of Jewish collective farms, including representatives of the Crimean people, were shot.”

Boris also explained who the Krymchaks are.

“These are Jews, immigrants from Italy and other countries. Living in Crimea, they adopted the Tatar language and Tatar customs, but retained the Jewish faith. Local historian Boris Kazachenko shows in the film a table of the surname extermination of Crimeans and cannot hide his emotions. In fact, this entire people was destroyed during the Holocaust. Today there are several hundred Crimeans left,” says the director.

“As the writer Arkady Shulman from Vitebsk said, the end for all Jews was the same, but the road to it was different. It must be borne in mind that when the war began on the eastern front, the Germans did not yet have a plan for the total extermination of the Jews. But there was a general instruction according to which the residents of the occupied territories had to understand that there was a struggle against the Judeo-Bolshevik government, says Boris. — The detailed program “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was adopted by the Nazis in January 1942. And by the end of the year, approximately a million Jews had been shot on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Without the active cooperation of the local population with the occupiers, the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR would hardly have been possible. On average there were up to seven collaborators per German. Among them were inveterate anti-Semites, some were intimidated by severe punishments for harboring Jews, and there were simply envious people who coveted their neighbor’s property and housing. Historian and Yale University professor Timothy Snyder speaks about this on camera, noting that many Jews never saw the Germans, but remembered their neighbors well.”

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Although the film "The Riddle of the Black Book" can be considered as a separate film, it was not accidentally included in this cycle.

“I'm looking for answers to important questions. Why was information about the Holocaust on the territory of the Soviet Union hidden by Stalin? Why did there be an outbreak of state anti-Semitism after the war? It can be assumed that the Holocaust pushed Stalin to an anti-Jewish purge of the party, state apparatus, scientific and industrial circles, to the destruction of Jewish culture and its brightest bearers, starting with Solomon Mikhoels. This period, from 1948 to 1953, can be called Stalin’s anti-Jewish five-year plan,” says Boris.

“Very few people are interested in the Holocaust topic. I did this project until the memory was completely erased. It is important for me that these documents remain so that historians can work with them in the future. Our project is supported by donations and grants. It is absolutely non-commercial, we put all materials on the Internet, openly available on Holocaust in USSR website", the director shared.

Boris also told about the idea of ​​the new film.

“The conventional name of the film project is “The Fifth Point.” When “The Riddle of the Black Book” was shown in Israel and Moscow, viewers came up to me and asked me to explain the reasons for state anti-Semitism in the USSR after the end of the war. After all, then, in the late 40s and early 50s, Jews, active participants in revolutionary events, who were members of the government and the highest governing bodies, lost everything because of the ill-fated “fifth point.” And after Stalin’s death, anti-Semitism continued to be fueled by the authorities, which is well described in the works of historian Gennady Kostyrchenko,” says Maftsir. “The “fifth point,” like a filter, determined where you can study and where you can’t, where you can work and where you can’t. I decided to figure out why this was happening. These will be three films, their action takes place in Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv. In these three largest cities of the USSR, Jews were methodically purged; they, of course, remained in some positions, but not in the same proportion as before. The new project is still under development. Obviously, it will require a lot of effort and resources.”

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