Reading the debate on April 10 in Facebook, I try not to express my opinion. Not because I do not have it, but because our society, alas, is not ready and now to the truth. This is a very terrible truth. Highly!.

And I'll just say a small part of the truth. I will only briefly say what the eyewitnesses told me or wrote in their memoirs. By the way, for those who do not know: this year on April 11 - the Holocaust Remembrance Day. The summer of the 41st is the period of the collapse of the USSR. My grandmother - father's mother - told me about how whole regions surrendered to the Germans without the slightest resistance. Germans saw liberators from the Bolsheviks. Then this mood passed. The Germans proved that people were wrong. My dad's family was evacuated from Odessa by a miracle - herself. But even in my father's family the older generation did not want to flee from the Germans: they remembered the First World and German occupation of Ukraine. The Germans then showed themselves to be better rulers than all those who were before and after them. Soviet newspapers and authorities who said that the Nazis are killing Jews, the older generation did not believe a penny. In general, the Bolsheviks did not believe in the family of my father: a part of the family fell under dekulakization, a part experienced all the delights of doing business in the USSR in the thirties. In the end, and not all left. There remained, for example, the father of my father's mother. In a place near Odessa. He was killed not by the Germans, but by fellow villagers - even before the arrival of the Germans. But most of the family on the carts managed to get to the railroad, and there they managed to get into the car. How - I do not know. I suspect that the bribe helped me, since they were allowed to enter the cars only by special documents. That is why the vast majority of Jews could not leave Odessa - only families of Soviet employees and employees of evacuees received documents. Favorite plot of Soviet films: people in the occupation find a secret receiver and listen to Moscow. For a long time I could not understand why so few radios. Before the war, the receivers were in almost every family. My mother told me that after the outbreak of the war, an order was issued: to hand over all the radio receivers, cars, bicycles and typewriters. That is why the Soviet people did not have radios. It was not the Germans who did it, but their own. My great-uncle told me in his childhood how he blew up Odessa. Unfortunately, I was ten at the time, and I do not remember much. He said that they were assembled - the young chief engineers of the Odessa plants. These were all new people - I do not know what happened to the old ones, but I can assume. They were people under the age of 30. They were handed lieutenants shoulder straps and gave explosives. And they went to blow up their factories. Then, at the age of ten, I had no questions. Now, having lived a life, I inevitably ask myself: how could the city be destroyed if there were people left here? None of these plants were military - those, in the mass, were evacuated. Blow up the water pipe. How were the hundreds of thousands of people who were left in the city to live? I could still understand if the authorities tried to get everyone out of Odessa, but did not have time. But this is not so. No one even set out to withdraw all. They were just left to die slowly. Odessites were lucky. The Romanian authorities, unlike many other German governors of the occupied areas during the Second World War on the Eastern Front, took care of Odessa. And I read a diary of a woman who lived in a city where the Germans simply left local Russians to survive among the ruins. Blown up by the retreating Bolsheviks. Explosion of peaceful production and life support systems. As far as I know, even the Nazis did not allow this. In relation to their. By the way, to fairy tales about the underground. In Mitrokhin's book, which brought to the West the KGB archive, there is a post-war KGB report on the Odessa underground that was left in the city. There were two groups: one from Moscow, another local. According to the KGB, these groups shot each other because of the money and valuables they left behind. This is not "liquidation" for you. This plot will never be delivered, while the "scoop" is alive. It is not even translated into Russian. One of the most terrible themes of that war is the fate of the Jews of Odessa, or rather the fate of the Jews of Transnistria. And here I can rely on the memoirs of Atom Viktorovich Morozov. I met this person in the years of Perestroika, when we created the first Odessa political organization - the Democratic Union for Promoting Perestroika. Atom Viktorovich preferred to be called Anatoly Viktorovich - the exotic name "Atom" did not warm him at all. I remember this delicate and intelligent person who never managed to get a higher education. Moreover, it was more educated than many owners of "floats". In the mid-1990s another prominent Odessaite, who in the years of Perestroika was truly one of the main moral authorities of our city, whose name, alas, now seems to be almost forgotten - Doctor of Philosophy Avenir Umov, appointed Anatoly Viktorovich Morozov Secretary of the Philosophical Society. I, alas, now do not remember when Anatoly Viktorovich died, it seems in the late 90's. But it so happened that he managed to get into Spielberg's "Shoah" program, and we still have his memory of the war. His memories were not included in the film, I myself read them only after the death of Anatoly Viktorovich - he was an insanely humble person and never told anything. And only from memories I saw all this fanatical picture. Anatoly Viktorovich was a Jew half-Jewish - his mother was, his father - Russian. Even before the war, my father abandoned them. Of course, neither he nor his mother could escape anywhere from Odessa. Anatoly Viktorovich could not understand until the end of his life why Providence kept him and his mother alive. When Romanians came to the city, it became completely impossible to hide. We must not forget which school the Odessa citizens went through. As people for decades accustomed to knock, betray, turn a blind eye to someone else's pain and death. It is hard to imagine that someone decided to hide the "enemies of the people". On the contrary, many sought to prove their loyalty to the authorities. With the Jews was exactly the same. Lists were compiled very quickly. There was no choice: the people themselves came to the Thirteenth Fountain station, where they were shot from machine guns. And in the courtyards, queues of those who were in a hurry to plunder those who had gone to death. Anatoly Viktorovich said that when he and his mother came to Thirteenth Fontana Station, the officer, the commander of the execution, looked at Anatoly Viktorovich's very beautiful mother and released them. He said that they are not Jews. We can not know why he did it. But these two men thanks to this officer remained alive. I thought for a long time that the fate of my grandmother's father, killed by fellow villagers, is an exception. Until I read the memories of Anatoly Viktorovich. He told me that even before the arrival of the Germans, many Jews were slaughtered on the way to Arkady. "Arkady went to the bodies of Jews," he said. During the war in Odessa, anti-Semitism. Anatoly Viktorovich wrote that on April 10, 1944, anti-Semites became quiet, but on April 11th everything ended - anti-Semitism in the city, according to Anatoly Viktorovich, prospered again. My father told me about constant fights with anti-Semites, but it's already the end of the 40's - the beginning of the 50's. During the years of total anti-Semitic campaign. But Anatoly Viktorovich wrote that it began much earlier. And, judging by everything, fairy tales about the international Odessa of the 1930s - ordinary Soviet tales. An interesting detail, which is also now not remembered. After the liberation of Odessa, an unspoken party order was issued to discourage the return of Jews to the city from evacuation. The official version - that Jews do not take revenge. Of course, like everything in Stalin's years, this order was bypassed - either with the help of a bribe, or with the help of blat. The easiest way was for those who had relatives in the army. The officer, who demanded to let his family to Odessa, in 44-46 years, no one interfered. Many bribed officials in the evacuation and received certificates for returning home. But there were those who did not succeed in this. There were such and in my family. A separate story is the insane terror that the Bolsheviks established after returning to Odessa. I think I can not prove it, it's just my feeling that the terror was caused, first of all, by the fact that Odessa without the Bolsheviks really lived relatively well. Well, of course, by the Soviet standards of those years. I wrote down the memories of a woman who fell under this hammer. For tens of thousands of people who simply lived in Odessa during the years of occupation and were victims of a machine of total suppression, April 10 became a terrible border. Someone survived in these camps and returned home. And to whom that Providence did not help. I believe that you can not shout about April 10, forgetting about these tens of thousands. By the way, the occupation proved that normal capitalism and a cheap state are able to build an oasis. The late Gridin described in detail how two or three Romanian officials performed very successfully the work that is now much less successfully done by hundreds of our officials. How could you open a business in two or three hours, as the entire trade department consisted of three people: a chief, a deputy and a ten's manager checking the quality of the premises in which the businessman planned to conduct his business. No bureaucracy. Of course, Odessa was very much helped by the fact that in other zones of occupation economic life was worse, and in many places it was almost non-existent. Therefore, peasants aspired to the Odessa market. But the main thing is that Romanians almost did not interfere with economic life and business in Odessa. But it should be understood that Nazism and fascism were and have not gone anywhere. This is not the First World War, when the German occupation seemed almost a paradise. When the Romanians entered Odessa, they on the Alexander prospect on the trees hung famous Jews. One of them, as Anatoly Viktorovich Morozov wrote, was the famous lawyer Brodsky before the war, who hated Soviet power and defended its enemies. The man whom the Romanians made the mayor of Odessa (I do not remember exactly what the post was called at that time), at one time was saved by this very Brodsky. Anatoly Viktorovich wrote that "they say that the person on his knees begged to spare Brodsky, insisted that he had struggled with the Bolsheviks all his life". But the Romanians, even delivered by the mayor on this issue did not listen - Brodsky was hanged on Alexander Prospekt.

I think in this story - a true assessment of the occupation. If even the burgomaster can not save the life of a doomed Jew, then the whole welfare of this occupation is a mirage. However, in the same way as in the case of the Bolsheviks. If they appointed "the enemy of the people," then not the head of the city council or executive committee, the first secretary of the regional committee could hardly do something. Unfortunately, Valeria Novodvorskaya was right: "Vorkuta defeated Auschwitz".