My Relatives in Kosiv

My mother, Alex, and I finished the day by visiting the Kosiv cemetery. Most of the graves were battered and broken, but some still stood. There was too much overgrowth to find any particular grave, and I was sure that only Mom's mother who died of TB before the War would still be there.

In a wrought iron enclosure which housed the intact grave of the Kosiver Rebbe, I found a siddur, and took it with me to the middle of the field.  Mom felt the overgrowth was too tall for her, so she and Alex waited for me at the entrance while I said Kaddish. We finished the day up on the highest mountain, which offsets Kosiv.  We visited the 3 memorials built to remember the bulk of Kosiv's Jews who were brutally murdered by Ukrainians and Nazis: marched up there on foot, shoved with butted rifles onto planks that spanned trenches hastily dug, and shot, falling onto each other with a lifeless wet thud.

We said Kaddish again, this time Mom joining in; it was the first time I can remember hearing her actually pray, though she never misses a Shabbos in shul.

The only other people up there were 3 kids knocking a soccer ball around, too close in my opinion to those mass graves. I asked them if they knew what was up here, not expecting an answer since generally Ukrainians speak no English, but one, who was visiting his 2 cousins from England, his emigrated homeland, spoke out in clear British tones: "Yes, it is a memorial to all the Muslims killed during the war." That speaks volumes, and I'll leave it at that. Those who didn't die up there, were either shot dead in Kosiv's streets or carted off to the Kolomayya ghetto, a bigger town nearby, from where they were ultimately deport to Belzec, one of the most notorious Nazi death camps, as the average stay there was less than 3 hours, no barracks, no bunks, just a railroad spur that brought you into the camp confines, where you were forced to jump down from the car, many children breaking their legs and trampled in the confusion, as the guards handed you spurious claim checks and relieved you of your personal items, only to herd you through the tube, a narrow sluiceway that conveyed human beings to the fake showers at the top of a hill, where you died standing up, two thousand to a single gassing, only to be violated again as Nazi doctors pried open your mouth, anus or vagina in their search for any last hidden vestiges of value.