Simon Spatz: From Holocaust to Halifax, A Story of Survival and Success

By Michael Cobden

A fascinating biography of the high-profile Jewish Nova Scotian businessman—a man who not only survived but thrived against all odds.

In Simon Spatz, former journalism professor Michael Cobdon tells the remarkable story of a fighter, a survivor, an achiever, a man of extraordinary determination and spirit.

After bringing his family out of poverty in Poland, surviving the Holocaust in an area where 97 per cent of Jews were murdered, and immigrating to Canada at nearly forty with little money and no knowledge of English, Spatz would open a successful Halifax grocery business before entering into real estate in the 1950s. Known today as the magnate behind the international, multi-billion-dollar real estate development firm Southwest Properties, Spatz remains an inspiration to Nova Scotia’s business and Jewish communities.

What his family calls a “larger-than-family-pride human narrative,” Simon Spatz is the story of a man shaped, but not destroyed, by one of the cruelest events in human history; a no-holds-barred depiction of a man who did more than build a life for himself and his family: he left behind a legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781771084031

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COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2016, Southwest Properties

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Nimbus Publishing Limited

3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax, NS B3K 5A5

[phone] nimbus.ca

Printed and bound in Canada

NB1240

Cover photo: provided courtesy of Jim Spatz

Design: Peggy & Co. Design Inc.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cobden, Michael, 1940-, author

Simon Spatz : from Holocaust to Halifax,

a story of survival and success / Michael Cobden.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77108-402-4 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77108-403-1 (html)

1. Spatz, Simon, 1913-2007. 2. Holocaust survivors—Nova Scotia—Halifax—Biography. 3. Real estate developers—Nova Scotia—Halifax—Biography. 4. Immigrants—Nova Scotia—Halifax—Biography. 5. Real estate business—Nova Scotia—Halifax. 6. Success in business—Nova Scotia—Halifax. 7. Halifax (N.S.)—Biography. I. Title.

HD320.H34C62 2016 333.33092 C2016-903287-6

C2016-903288-4

Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

MAPS

FOREWORD

I wanted a book about Simon’s life for a couple of reasons. One, of course, is that he was my father, and he was always a heroic figure to me. But more than that, he was a remarkable person who lived a remarkable life—one filled with both great loss and sadness, and even in the face of that, great achievement.

He was, of course, not perfect. Who of us is? But he displayed unusual courage, resilience, boldness, and tenacity, which were at the root of both his survival and his success. He had a work ethic that went beyond the conventional measures of that and into the territory of doing whatever was required to achieve his goals.

As a young person, he took his family out of poverty in Poland; then, as a Jew, he survived the Holocaust in a part of Europe where 97 percent of Jews were murdered; and, finally, at almost forty years old, he came to Canada as an immigrant, without much money and with no knowledge of English.

His is also a fascinating, larger-than-family-pride human narrative: the story of a man who managed to construct, from the whole cloth of his own smarts, determination, and a little luck, a better life for himself and his family in a new place far from the ashes of the horrors of the Holocaust he’d survived.

When I managed the emergency room at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital in the 1980s, our patients included many elderly Holocaust survivors. Many were, understandably, badly bruised by their experiences, and had had difficulty moving on to have normal lives. At the time, I would sometimes contrast their situation with that of my father. They were bruised; he was not. That wasn’t completely true, of course, but my father buried his pain, and pushed on to construct his own better future. He was a very positive person.

He was also a complicated man, whose ambition and focus on building his future came at the expense of his closest relationships.

In 1997, when Simon was eighty-four, I sat down with a tape recorder and began to interview him about that life and his experiences of it. I thought at first I would write this book myself. For a variety of reasons—perhaps my own ambition and focus—I didn’t.

So when I first approached Michael Cobden, a journalist and friend, with the idea of taking on the story of my father’s life, we had a discussion about the kind of book it should be. Michael made the point that a person wouldn’t seem real if the portrait painted were varnished beyond recognition. I agreed, and so Michael’s book portrays my father in the fullness of his existence—warts and all.

And there were warts: Simon’s relationship with his daughter, my sister, was fraught. So, too, on a smaller scale, was his relationship with his own sister. Simon was loving, overprotective, and occasionally dismissive. He came from another place and another time, and he had a stereotypical view of women, including what women should try to accomplish.

It is what it is.

But he was also much more than that. As you’ll discover in the pages of this book, my father could be charming, kind, harsh, generous, grudge-nursing, honest, obsessive. Those are all part of what made him such a memorable character.

What makes his story worth remembering is that he was a man who was shaped by one of the most awful events in human history, but he was not destroyed by it. He employed the same qualities that helped him survive the Holocaust to succeed and prosper in business and in life.

His was a life worth living, a story worth telling.

Jim Spatz

PREFACE

ON WRITING THIS BIOGRAPHY

It is an exhilarating experience to delve into the life of another person. It gives one the illusion of lifting a corner of the mystery that blankets humankind. Getting to know something of the life of Simon Spatz, and of some of those around him, was especially exhilarating. Here was a man who buzzed with energy. Here was a fighter, a survivor, an achiever, a man of extraordinary determination and spirit. Here was a man who charmed all manner of people: Jews and Gentiles; Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Canadians; rich and poor; educated and uneducated; working people and people with power; leaders and followers; good people and bad people. But here, too, was a man whose sights were so focused on proving to the world, and to himself, he was one to be reckoned with that he undermined his relationship with his own daughter, one of only two children, and with his sister, his only surviving sibling from the Holocaust. Here was a man who loved to tell stories of his life, but who hid from view—surely his own view, too—many memories, of darkness but also, if only he’d seen it, of happiness and light.

Writers are always searching for stories. It’s their way of telling the truth. You might think it an advantage, therefore, if the subject of a biography is a storyteller, as Simon Spatz was. But stories sometimes obstruct the truth, especially the truth of a life. Stories are made. In a sense, they are always made up. This does not mean that they are made of lies, but they are made of something other than the full and plain facts of what happened.

To make a story of something that has happened, we select the material and the form that suits our purpose. When we tell of an event in which we ourselves have played a part, we tend to tell it in a way that presents us as we want to be seen. And when a person tells stories of his own life over and over again, as Simon did, the stories become polished works of art. They take on a life of their own. They become the only truth of his life that the storyteller knows, the only meaning. They become his memory.

In a sense, they become his life. And they come readily to his mind, even as his memory starts to fail, because he has told them so often; the rest of his life he has forgotten or repressed or denied, or simply lost interest in.

Simon’s stories almost invariably depicted life as a battle, with him winning against the odds. To an extent, this was his life: overcoming adversity through determination, effort, ability, and charm. But Simon’s life, like everyone’s, had many strands that were not depicted in his stories, because he did not recognize them or because he found them too painful to countenance or simply because they didn’t suit his autobiographical purpose.

When I began talking to Simon in the summer of 1998, the Shoah Foundation had recently videotaped a series of interviews with him about his Holocaust experience, and his son Jim had taped a series of audio interviews. I watched and listened to all of these interviews, and I could hear that Simon had told the stories of his life many, many times. They were good stories, and he enjoyed telling them. He told them again to me. He talked to me many times. He was always ready to see me. He was almost always ready to go over again and again the events of his life and tell me about the people. But I could tell that many truths of his life remained forgotten or hidden behind the screen of his stories.

Most of our initial interviews took place in the house Simon lived in with his wife Riva for more than forty years, on Armcrescent East in Halifax’s middle-class West End. It’s a substantial house, but modest for a man of his wealth, with a shared driveway and an almost identical house next door. We talked in the dining room, a conventional room: carpeted, with crystal chandelier, display case with glasses, tea pots, coffee pots, bowls, and plates, and a large oval table and cane-backed chairs. The table was usually covered with a white cotton tablecloth with yellow flowers, and over it a plastic floral cloth. On the walls were four or five pictures, a mirror, and a September 1973 certificate of honour from the Israel Histadrut Campaign. Simon sat on one side of the table. I sat at the end, as close to him as I could. He spoke quietly and slowly, in a rather high-pitched voice, often pausing to collect his memory. His hair was thin and white, his eyes pale, his complexion ruddy. He often looked tired, but his energy never flagged. Even if he’d hidden from himself some of his experiences, he believed deeply in the humanitarian value of sharing with others whatever he could of what had happened to him in the Holocaust. Wil fargessen, zol nisht fargessen, kann nisht fargessen: You want to forget, but you shouldn’t forget, you cannot forget.

Riva would sometimes come in to take part in the conversation, or just to listen. She usually sat in an armchair in the corner of the room. When she was present, Simon steered clear of the Holocaust. She gets upset, he would say. Sometimes he would tell her to leave, and she would go into the kitchen to putter around or make lunch (usually a simple salad) or to the family room to lie down on a sofa and watch TV or listen to the radio or doze. She resisted being interviewed, and Simon didn’t encourage her. He didn’t want me to interview her. What did she know that he didn’t know? Lots, I thought, about her own life as a Holocaust survivor and as the wife of a driven man and mother of their two children. Lots, too, about Simon’s life with her since they met after the war, but also about his life before that, things he’d told her and had long since hidden from himself or forgotten. On the one occasion when she did submit to an interview, she sat in his place at the table, and he sat immediately behind her, his hand on the back of her chair as though to steer her, listening hard, pitching in, correcting her, controlling the interview. Simon felt comfortable only when he was in control—not just of my work, but of most things that touched him. I felt in the end that this book did not have the full benefit of Riva’s knowledge of the man whose life she shared for sixty years.

Simon also did not want me to talk to his sister, Ruzia (Rose) Argand. She was his only surviving sibling. Three sisters and two brothers died in the Holocaust; one brother was conscripted by the Soviets at the end of the war and never seen again. Simon was the fourth child, Ruzia the fifth, though seven years younger. They grew up in a Polish village that they called Unterwalden (now, in Ukrainian, Pidhaichyky), not far from the city they called Lemberg (Lwow in Polish, Lvov in Russian, now Lviv in Ukrainian). In 1942, they were interned by the Nazis in separate forced labour camps. In 1943, as the camps were about to be liquidated, they escaped and hid in the woods while the war and the Holocaust raged about them. They were there for a year together, along with two brothers who’d also escaped from the labour camp. Simon and Ruzia were together in Europe for several years after the war. They lived two short blocks apart in Halifax for decades. But they had a falling-out, and never made it up. When I told Simon I wanted to talk to Ruzia, he objected. What could she tell me that he hadn’t already told me? In the end, I did talk to Ruzia, briefly. She was cautious. She kept most memories of Simon, and most insights, to herself.

Simon and Riva’s daughter Shirley decided not to talk to me for this book. She invited me to send her questions, but when I did, she said she wouldn’t be interviewed. She was living in Massachusetts, estranged from her parents and from her brother Jim. She said she did not see this book as the forum to vent her feelings about her father and mother.

Jim, who commissioned this biography, was the principal source, other than Simon himself. We talked many times. He took me through his life with Simon; he helped clarify some of what I’d learned. He revealed his love and admiration for Simon, his hero; the pleasure (and some of the difficulty) of being Simon’s son and of joining him in business; his delight in his own family; his sadness about his father’s falling-out with Ruzia; and his own deep sadness about his sister Shirley’s estrangement.

One day in July 1999, after I’d done a year’s research for this book, Simon phoned me to say he didn’t want a book written about him. He said he hadn’t wanted one in the first place. No one would read it. He had three Holocaust books on his bedside table that he hadn’t read. There was no need for another one. It was a waste of money. And anyway, he’d told me all his stories. A few days later, I was at his company’s office, at that time on South Bland Street in Halifax, showing Jim some maps of the area where Simon was born and checking some facts, when Simon walked in. You’re the man I want to see, he said—but with a twinkle. And he sat down and started telling stories. He was still telling stories after Jim had left for a meeting at the Sunnyside Mall they owned in suburban Bedford. Later, I drove Simon out to the mall. He showed me around. We chatted to some of the merchants. There was a sale on. I told him I thought I’d bring my wife out to The Village Green, the women’s clothing store the Spatzes established when they rebuilt the mall. Simon told me not to spend too much money. He bought me a sandwich and a cup of coffee. And he told me some more stories. As always, I enjoyed them, even those I’d heard many times. And as always, I wished he could also tell me the truths he’d long since hidden.

Fortunately, I was able to interview a man, named Isak (Icio) Kanner, who grew up in the same village as Simon, hid in the same woods as Simon, knew him again in Munich after the war, and kept in touch after they both came to North America, Simon to Halifax, Icio to Vineland, New Jersey. Icio had a marvellous memory of life in pre-war Poland and of many of the people Simon knew.

In May 2000, Jim and I travelled to what is now Ukraine to visit the village of Pidhaichyky, where Simon was born and raised and lived until the Nazis stormed in. I use my account of our visit as the starting point of Simon’s life story. Simon did not come with us, and he tried to discourage Jim from going. In all the years since he’d seen his village for the last time, in 1945, and had run into a Ukrainian man he knew to have collaborated with the Nazis, he’d remained fearful of returning.

As it turned out, he was glad we went. It was one of the happy moments of the last years of his life, as he sank, slowly but relentlessly, fighting all the time, into Alzheimer’s disease, and at ninety-four into the end of a brave and vital life.

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

Simon Spatz grew up in a village in what was Poland from the end of the First World War until the start of the Second World War—which is to say, for almost all his years there. The village subsequently became part of Ukraine, but Simon continued to refer to the country as Poland; one might be inclined, therefore, to use Polish place names. However, there were few, if any, Poles in that part of Poland. There were Jews, who spoke Yiddish; Germans, who spoke their national language; and Ukrainians, the majority of people in the village, who spoke Ukrainian. Today, the village is almost entirely Ukrainian. I decided, therefore, to use the Ukrainian place names—Pidhaichyky, for Simon’s village, for example, rather than the Polish Podhajczyki or the German Unterwalden (which Simon always called it); and Lviv, for the capital city of the region, rather than the Polish Lwow or the German Lemberg (which Simon always called it). Where I could not find a village name on any map, I have rendered it as I think it might be pronounced in Ukrainian. In this connection, I appreciate the help of Olena Zakharova, of the Ukrainian Embassy in Ottawa, in deciding on English-language spellings of Ukrainian places and people.

Perhaps the most difficult question was how to render into English the many Yiddish names in the text. In many cases, the conventional spelling of these names reflects the most common Yiddish way of speaking them. However, in Galicia, the Yiddish pronunciation was often different. I chose to render Yiddish names so that they will be read (I hope) more or less as Simon spoke them. His sister Rosa, for example, Simon spoke of as Ruzia—pronounced, more or less, rouge-uh.

Finally, I translated some of Simon’s Yiddish into English. Where I have retained the Yiddish, or use Yiddish or Hebrew terms that would be familiar to Jews but not necessarily to other readers, I have also offered the English meaning.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their help on our visit to Ukraine, I thank Victor Yagoda of the United Israel Appeal of Canada in Israel and Dov Harris of the UIA in Toronto; Boris Mahtuk, at the time the Jewish Agency emissary in Lviv, an unstoppable Russian Israeli for whom everything we asked for was No problem, and his wife Marina; Boris Mirkin, principal of the Jewish School in Lviv, who served patiently as our interpreter on our visits to Unterwalden and other places important in Simon’s life; Ilya Kabanchik, a historian who accompanied us and helped us see things in historical context; and Alexandr Gregorievich, who picked us up in Warsaw in his VW van, drove us to Lviv and everywhere we wanted to go in Galicia. I also thank Kateryna Korothowa, a self-possessed and informed young woman, who showed me around some of the Jewish sites of Lviv; Professor Jakob Honigsman in Lviv for notes and an interview about the Holocaust in Galicia, and Betty Haigh of St. Mary’s University, Halifax, for translating his notes from the Russian and Ukrainian into English; Marina Chapoval, of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Halifax, for translating a piece of Russian for me that told of life in Nazi labour camps; Bracha Koren for translating a Holocaust testimony, and Yad Vashem in Israel for making it available to me; and Janet Ross of Dalhousie University, Dorota Glowacka of the University of King’s College, Marina Glazov of Dalhousie, and Rabbi Saul Aranov, for helping me with German, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, respectively.

When it comes to Simon’s life in Canada—more than half his life—sources have been plentiful and forthcoming: people who knew him when he owned a grocery store; people who knew him through his business in real estate development—most notably, Donnie Clow, formerly of Southwest Properties, Simon’s and Jim’s company—and also many, many contractors, architects, engineers, real estate people, lawyers, accountants, politicians, and others; people who knew Simon through the synagogue and the Halifax Jewish community; and Evelyn Martin, Iris Phillips, and Kim Kline, three of Simon’s many ladies (caregivers) who looked after him in his last years, and his wife Riva. I thank all of them for their help.

Finally, I thank Stephen Kimber for editing an earlier draft of this story and freelance copy editor Barry Norris for editing this final draft, and the folks at Nimbus Publishing, especially senior editor Whitney Moran; the Boys Book Club of the late Brian Crocker and friends for reading and critiquing an earlier draft; my wife, Jane, and my children for their support; Jim Spatz for commissioning this book and being a patient and candid source; and most especially, Simon.

CHAPTER 1

A TRIP TO THE PAST

On a summer’s day in 1944, Simon Spatz went home from the war, to the little Ukrainian village of Pidhaichyky where he was born and raised. He wanted to find out whether any of his family or friends had survived and to see what had happened to his family’s house.

As he made his way from the highway that he’d helped rebuild as a prisoner in a Nazi labour camp, down the old dusty roads towards the Spatz house, he spotted a Ukrainian villager named Mikhail Strembitsky. Simon had known this man all his life. Before the war, they’d been friendly. But after the Nazis came, Strembitsky had shown himself to be a virulent anti-Semite. Years later, Simon would recall how one of the three daughters of dear friends had begged Strembitsky to let her hide in his house from the Nazis. Instead, he had raped and murdered her—killed her with hammers and what else.

Now the war was over, and Simon wanted to settle a score with this man, to make my peace with him.

Strembitsky was standing on a corner with some friends. He saw Simon and said something to his friends. They all laughed. Right away, Simon would recall, I knew these men were going to kill me.

Simon had learned to trust his instincts when it came to people who hated Jews. He’d defied death many times: in the village after the Nazis came, in the labour camp where a shot in the head could come at any moment, on the day he escaped in a desperate dash across the fields, and in the woods where all around him people were hunted and killed by Ukrainians and Nazis or died of disease. He had survived.

But now fear overcame him. I said, ‘Goodbye Charlie, you’re not going to get me,’—and he fled to another village.

Somehow, in the frightening way a moment can affect us forever, can symbolize for us an immense and protracted horror, Simon could never again think of the village of his childhood without seeing Mikhail Strembitsky looking at him and laughing.

Simon never saw his house that day. He never went back to Pidhaichyky. And he would always discourage his son Jim from going there.

* * *

Today, however, on a bright, warm day at the end of April 2000, fifty-six years since Simon said goodbye to the village forever, Jim Spatz has come to Pidhaichyky to look for his father’s house and to find his roots.

He understands why Simon did not want him to make this trip. He was frightened for me. It was almost an irrational fear. Almost. If you look at that time—the war was just over, Germany was defeated—you’ll find there were pogroms in that part of eastern Europe; if not organized massacres, at least spontaneous killings: the locals getting rid of a few more Jews. It was a place to fear, to stay away from. But the years passed, and for Jim it’s now time to honour his father by visiting the village and finding the house where Simon was born and raised, the house Simon loved to remember.

Jim grew up with Simon’s stories about life in Pidhaichyky in the years before the war, about what happened when the Nazis came in 1941, and afterwards. He has never tired of his father’s stories, never lost his appetite for knowing more about Simon—for himself and for his two sons, Joshua and Avram. Simon’s story is their heritage.

It is also a story of the Jewish community of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Simon lived from 1950 until he died in 2007, and of the many Halifax people Simon did business with over all those years, first in his grocery store and then in his apartment business. It is a story for everyone who marvels at the indomitable spirit of people like Simon Spatz.

For many years, Jim had thought of visiting Pidhaichyky (or Unterwalden, as his father always called it). For Jim, as for many children of Holocaust survivors, this had been a desire to patch together some sense of who you were and where you came from.

He’d chosen Pidhaichyky, rather than his mother’s birthplace, Manevychi, because he grew up with his father’s stories. And, Jim explains simply, I’m here because Simon has always been my hero.

Why, then, had it taken him so long to make the trip? I don’t know. You get busy with life. Maybe you have to be a certain age before that sort of thing gets to the top of the list of what’s important.

On this day, Pidhaichyky is at the top of Jim’s list. As he does with everything that’s important to him, Jim has tried to arrange the best chance of achieving the result he wants. We have four people with us: Boris Mahtuk, who runs the Jewish Agency office in nearby Lviv and has organized this group; Boris Mirkin, the principal of the Jewish school in Lviv, who acts as our interpreter; Ilya Kabanchik, a historian who’s written a study of Yaktoriv, the labour camp where Simon was interned; and Alexandr (Sergei) Gregorievich, our smiling, patient driver. Jim was able to arrange this support group through contacts developed during years of generous work for Israel.

Also with us is Frank Pulver of Toronto, the husband of Jim’s first cousin Annalee. He’s searching for his own roots in a community sixty or seventy kilometres east of Pidhaichyky.

The seven of us are together in a white Volkswagen kombi, heading east from Lviv along Highway H02. This is the same road the Nazis had forced Simon and many other Jewish prisoners to work on. The Nazis referred to it as Highway DG/4. In his Final Report on the Solution of the Jewish Question in the District of Galicia, SS-Gruppenführer Friedrich (Fritz) Katzmann, police and SS commander of the district, described DG/4 as extremely important and necessary for the whole of the southern part of the [Eastern] front, and said it had been in catastrophically bad condition. Despite the hardly imaginable difficulties occurring at this work, Katzmann reported, the Jewish prisoners had rebuilt 160 kilometres of the highway. The report was dated June 30, 1943, just before the final liquidation of all the labour camps in this part of Galicia. Simon had spent more than a year in one of these camps. We are going to try to find it.

This morning, we have left Lviv, a beautiful old city in western Ukraine. Simon had known the city as Lemberg, its German name. It had once been home to a thriving Jewish community. We’re headed to Pidhaichyky, thirty kilometres to the east, along roads dotted with personal memories and horrific history.

We take Lychakivska Street, which Simon walked up and down many times as a young man on his way to and from Lviv, and turn off to Lysiniecze, once a village just outside the city, now a suburb. This is where Simon sold meat to a Polish butcher before the war and launched a lifetime in business. Lysiniecze is also where, in mid-1943—as part of their plan for the total liquidation of all Jews in Galicia—the Nazis established extermination sites in forests and ravines along the 132-kilometre Lviv–Ternopil road we are travelling on. Thousands of Jews from Lviv, and thousands of Soviet soldiers, were murdered in Lysiniecze. The cremated bodies of tens of thousands of Jews were also brought here from the Janowska camp in Lviv. Today their ashes and bones remain in the earth beneath a vegetable factory farm, ominously walled around. By some estimates, seven hundred thousand Jews were murdered in the camps of eastern Galicia.1

Our next stop is Vynnyky, a town Simon went through every week on his way to sell meat or flour. He always spoke of it fondly as the place where his loving older brother Nisan came looking for him from Lviv one night in a snowstorm. But Vynnyky was also the site of a forced labour camp (Arbeitslager or Judenlager), one of twenty-one Lagers the Nazis set up between Lviv and Ternopil in the summer of 1941.2 There were eight hundred prisoners in the Vynnyky camp, brought in from Lviv and other places. They built roads, worked along the railway line, and cut firewood. As in all labour camps, when the prisoners died of exhaustion or starvation or disease, or when they were shot, replacements were brought in. The camp was run by twelve Ukrainian policemen under a German director. It was liquidated in July 1943. The healthier prisoners were sent to the Janowska camp in Lviv; the others were shot. The site of the Vynnyky camp is now a treed area, a little overgrown, with an old yellow-brick building where, our guides tell us, the Gestapo had their local headquarters. There’s a big memorial rock in front of the trees at the roadside. But it memorializes a Ukrainian church leader, not the Jews who were interned here and murdered.

We stop next to look across the fields to the village of Ostrov, site of another forced labour camp. On a wooded ridge in the distance, we can see some white buildings: there, our guides say, Jews from the Ostrov camp were executed.

Next we come to Kurovychi, where Simon’s younger sister Ruzia (Rose) was held for a year or more with three or four hundred other prisoners. The guards were Ukrainian police and Vlasovites, Soviet nationals who’d opposed Stalin, under the command of German officers. The prisoners there worked on farms, breaking rocks, hauling gravel, building bridges over streams, and laying roads. They also built elevators to store the grain the Nazis stole from local peasants and then sent to Germany. On the day