Translated material
During the war, the most important word is love. The feat of the mayor of the Chernivtsi
In the focus of the attention of the authors of the short film “Only loving people will survive. Trian Popovich and others” were the events of the fall of 1941, when more than a quarter of the population of the then Chernivtsi, about 20,000 people, were saved by the head of the Romanian civil administration of the city from the deportation in the ghetto and the camp of the slave labor of Transnistria. The film was the first attempt to tell a movie about the feat of the mayor of Popovich, for various reasons for a long time forgotten both in Ukraine and Romania. Filming took place in front -line Chernivtsi.
About the Chernivtsi mayor, about the war, love, memory and oblivion, and about the city, which has become almost the most vivid literary myth of Eastern Europe of the twentieth century, the RS correspondent talked with the authors of the film: reporter-documentary Vyacheslav Khabailo and journalist Sergei Vorontsov.
-Sergey, on the day of the premiere you wrote in social networks: “If you say that our film is only about Trajan Popovich, this will cause my regret; if they say that he is about history too. But for some reason I am sure that they will not say.” Having watched the film, I completely share your confidence. The topic that you touched, have many relevant contexts, including the use of the Russian Federation of criminal practices of World War II, including the violent movements of large groups of the civilian population of Ukraine. At the same time, the format of the short film in which you worked oblige to selectivity. What influenced the choice of accents that was eventually made?
Our film is primarily about how to resist evil
S. VORONTSOV: Considering the concept of the future film long until February 24, we chose the form of a poetic statement. We deliberately did not concentrate on the canvas of the events of the fall of 1941: after all, today about the history of salvation Popovich of thousands of disinterested fellow countrymen, it is easy to read in open sources. Our film is primarily about how to resist evil. The feat of the mayor of Chernivtsi was an impressive act of such a confrontation.
- And the most large -scale in Europe then by an example of mass salvation of Jews by an administrative person and administrative methods.
Sergey Vorontsov
S.V.: It is precisely-not an armed partisan detachment, not a businessman who received a carte blanche for recruiting a darm slabs, not embraced by a foreign diplomat, but an official of a fascist state. It is clear that the short film format did not allow us to dwell on the biographies of our hero in more detail. I do not exclude that this will become possible in the future. Indeed, outside of his central episode, the biography of Popovich is still not sufficiently studied. Few people know, for example, that the mayor dismissed for “abuse”, that is, for issuing the Chernivtsi Jews almost 5 thousand more saving “authorizations”, which was authorized, Popovich continued to defend the rights of his countrymen, returning to the bar. In subsequent years, he acted as a defender at the politically motivated processes of several Chernivtsi doctors - both Jews and the Ukrainian Oleksis Zagnitsky, who collected and sent humanitarian aid sent to transnistria. I am not a historian, but several times I had to fall into the documents related to Popovich, and far from always these were materials related to the Second World War or the Holocaust, already quite studied. For me, the circumstances of Popovich’s life before and after . What were his family, his student years, literary addictions? How deeply was this native of the Romanian spiritual and political elite of Bukovina in the culture of the German -speaking, which continued to dominate the interwar Chernivtsi? After all, until the story of a capital letter tapped at the door of his office, Trajan Popovich, like each of us, had an individual microistory. And I think it is very important. Heroes, as you know, are not born.
The frame from the film “Only loving will survive. Trajan Popovich and others”
-The soundtrack of the film includes quotes from an exciting document left by the ex-mayor shortly after the war-and shortly before his death. Sergei, you transferred this text to Ukrainian back in 2018 and probably noticed that it is difficult to predict genrovo: it is both a detailed chronicle of the events of the summer-ashen of 1941 and a very expressively expressed attitude of the narrator towards them, and a spiritual testament. It is no coincidence that the text entitled in the Romanian original does not require translation by the word Spovedania, in the English version prepared for the first edition by a separate book in 2002, was called TestAments. By which it is known to most foreign readers.
"Confession" orchestrated in the best oratory traditions of the jury institute
SV: I’ll risk saying that I have the key to a more accurate definition of the “confession” genre. And it was possible to find it just in the process of translation, in the work on which I was very helped by the brilliant expert on the history of Bukovina, the Chernivtsi archivist Dragosh Olar. It so happened that for technical reasons, we had to read out some passages out loud. And at some point it became clear to both: the text is almost designed for vocal sounding! This is an excellent example of a bright, felt and convincing lawyer speech! Today you can only guess if the author foresaw his ambulance; Whether it was expected that the new government would show interest in his stay, albeit short -term, in the first echelon of the administration of the Antonescu regime, but, one way or another, the “confession” was orchestrated in the best oratory traditions of the jury court.
- barely warming up in fascist Romania, and finally trampled - in the communist. But Trajan Popovich no longer saw this - as he did not find out what happened to his city next. The ex-mayor dies on June 4, 1946, having survived the ex-dictator who had been shot on the eve of three days. Just at this time, a mass expulsion of the surviving Chernivtsi population, officially executed as a “voluntary” departure or repatriation ...
The frame from the film “Only loving will survive. Trajan Popovich and others”
SV: And the real Czernowitz quickly disappears, plunging deeper into the abysses of mythology.
- In the Brezhnevsky USSR, Chernivtsi had a double reputation. It was believed that almost the last refuge of the cultural life of Soviet Jews, which functioned in the idyt and Russian-speaking space, was a small and absolutely non-nonsense city pressed to the imperial border. I have heard a lot from childhood about the piercing incovenity of Chernivtsi. And not from any Komsomol members, but from the old Bessarabians-also not quite Soviet people. At the same time, it was added that although after the war the Chernivtsi population changed a lot, the newly arrived by some miracle managed to “fit” into this city. However, for the first time in Chernivtsi in adulthood, I did not find any special “inscription”. This happened, however, after the “big aliya” of the beginning of the nineties, which claimed a significant part of those who settled here after 1944. But what I did not have time to see, you probably remember. What did the city of your childhood be seen from the inside?
Colorless and shapeless Soviet clothing sat on them at all like everyone else
SV: For me, a surprise was an acquaintance with the popular myth of Chernivtsi’s incovenity in the USSR. Since I did not notice any “inscribed” inhabitants in the 70s. Rather, on the contrary: a very small, but bright group of decisively not entering the city crowd, decisively did not fit into the eyes. And although they were quite ordinary people by social standards-and some of them even replenished the ranks of street beggars and city madmen-they all looked like some kind of unwell. As if they were painted with a different paint. Even the colorless and shapeless Soviet clothing was not at all like everyone else. It seemed that these people tie these laces differently ...
The frame from the film “Only loving will survive. Trajan Popovich and others”
- At the end of the fifties, the first dandy of Magadan was Peter Demant - it seems that the only Chernovitzer in his generation, to whom was destined to become a Russian writer. Allow the authorities to explain to this loader in ten languages then to leave Kolyma yesterday, he would become an icon of careless elegance in a more civilized part of the “individual”. It was quite comparable to the one in which a little later in the free world his more famous fellow countryman and peer Gregor von Reztsori turned into, in 1940, happily located far from Bukovina. One way or another, the Kolyma photographs of the demante on mountain skis could well decorate the pages, if not Vogue, then at least Tatler. It is hard to believe that behind the athlete smiling at the lens in a snow -white jacket and sunglasses - not his native Alps. And not even the Carpathians ...
SV: Here are the ordinary old draftsmen, which I found, was characterized by some difficult to explain in ordinary words, the same thing from which woven elegance ...
- From the air. Which they continued to breathe. As the prisoner of Gulag Peter Demant continued to breathe alpine air.
SV: Most likely. But this could only be guessed. A memorial handful of Starozhilov was in no hurry to share stories about her past life. We even lived with any of them in the same house. It was known that they were not ordinary Jews, but the Austrian, that during the war they were deported to transnistria, from where they were happy to return. At the same time, we did not even really know what language they speak among themselves: in our presence it was invariably Russian. For goodwill and courtesy, a distance was felt, which seemed impossible to overcome ...
Authors of the book about Trajan Popovich
- So, for the first time about Trajan Popovich, you did not hear from them?
The more I studied the Chernivtsi events of the beginning of the Sorokovs, the more I was amazed at the scale of the figure of Popovich
SV: Oh, no! In addition, soon our neighbors emigrated, and I had no more living ties with the “Chernivtsi Atlantis”. But “the city where people and books lived,” about which we all read with Paul Tselan, not just a figure of poetic speech: sometimes it seems to me that there were many more books than people ... even when the people of the old draftsman disappeared, the books continued to emerge. Almost every sortie into the old attics brought impressive trophies: piles of books in German, in Polish, in Hebrew. In the lower part of the historical center, just where the ghetto was in 1941–42, I found “on the Western Front without changes” in one of the first editions of 1929. In the nineties, during the next cardinal change of urban population, attic expeditions could not have been bothering: the newcomers themselves carried out the books to them to garbage containers. There was also the so -called old market, where once I bought the first edition of the once sensational, which cost the author of life, the book of Hugo Bettauer “City without Jews” ...
“He must have read her carefully and remembered her carefully and remembered the main character of your film.” And - I hope that I do not exaggerate - your city.
V. Habailo: Do not exaggerate at all. The more I studied the Chernivtsi events of the beginning of the forties, the more I was amazed at the scale of this figure - and the courage of a call, abandoned by Popovich, those who expected only “effective management” of mass deportations. And of course, I consider it abnormal that the name of a person who actually defended Czernowitz at that terrible hour is known today to a very narrow circle of historians and intellectuals - and not only in the big world, but here, at the place of events. According to the long -standing habit of a reporter, which illuminated sprout -social plots, before filming I conducted several polls among the townspeople. AD HOC, without complaints about sociological representativeness. And still he was shocked, finding how few of my fellow countrymen heard this name in general. I suspect that in the rest of Ukraine there are generally an insignificant number ...
- Yes, and in Romania there are few of them. Despite the fact that Trajan Popovich is almost the main character of the II world war for the country, where the resistance to fascism has not taken shape in mass movement, as, for example, in Italy. Today, young generations of Romanian historians and civilian activists make a lot to include the mayor of Chernivtsi in the pantheon of national heroes, no matter how contradictory that pantheon still never remains. Popovich named Street in Central Bucharest, but it still says little to ordinary people.
V.Kh.: Why?
- The memory policy in Romania is full of “shameful questions”, satisfactory answers to which have not yet been sounded. The phenomenon of Romanian fascism has been studied well, and the consensus on this score in the global academic community has been reached a long time ago, but in the National Mass Infopol they are accustomed to be guided by the well -known consideration “Not everything is so unambiguous”. There is really enough ambiguous in the Romanian twentieth century, but healing and half -truths are dubious assistants in his understanding. A year ago, we talked about this with your colleague, director-publicist Florin Jepan, whose film “Odessa” is still not shown by Romanian public television . Although it was released nine years ago ... It would seem that everything is different with Trajan Popovich: there is nothing to be ashamed of, except to be proud of, but the context is very difficult. Yes, and Romanian politicians would be calmer, Popovich’s figure would not go beyond the borders of the academic field: it is clear that the enlightened audience usually reacts without stupid things. But to attract the attention of the masses to the forever lost northern Bukovina? To see the graffiti “Chernivtsi is Romania” tomorrow?! Enough that such slogans about Bessarabia are painted half the country - and fortunately, they do not take them seriously in Chisinau. But in Kyiv they could well, and would be right. The diplomatic relations of neighboring countries were not smooth . Is it not easier to leave the Chernivtsi in that distant closet of folk memory, where they dust almost 80 years? .. It is clear that not a single European -thinking Romanian does not agree with this approach. But the society of New Romania is still in the stage of formation. And today it is no less contradictory than Ukrainian until February 24th.
The frame from the film “Only loving will survive. Trajan Popovich and others”
Our society is experiencing an evolution, similar to the one that Trian Popovich once experienced
SV: We do not yet know how Ukrainian society will come out of this war, how traumatic it will be ... But now it is clear that it will become more open, inclusive. The theme of ethnic differences completely disappeared from the agenda, the war made all those living in Ukraine Ukrainians. It seems to me that in these months, our society is experiencing an evolution, similar to the one that Trian Popovich, educated as a Romanian nationalist, once experienced in L peace, volunteered in the Romanian army, although he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, and during the second saved people who did not identify themselves culturally with Romania. And with rare exceptions deprived of its citizenship in January 1938.
- The model of nationalism that professed the Romanian elite of the Austrian Bukovina, who gave Popovich, was unlikely to go beyond the liberal multicultural paradigm of the “Golden Age” of the Late Gababsburg monarchy. Even from these positions, aggressive ethno -nationalism, who triumphed in the thirties, was perceived by a rollback to medieval barbarism. It was clear to Popovich that the ideology of “blood and soil” would inevitably lead to “bloody lands”. At the same time, we understand that the rebellious mayor, in which colleagues and subordinates saw at best the eccentric old -fashioned idealist, personified not only “yesterday's Europe”. In Chernivtsi in 1941, he was also a “guest from the future”.
SV: From that Europe that we know today. Which owns both Romania and Ukraine. It is clear that she is not perfect, but much closer to the one that the lawyer Popovich, who lived in the interwar years on the wild, the only island of the disappeared Austria-Hungary in the interwar years, dreamed. The very existence of such an island was a challenge for fascist Romania, and for the Stalinist USSR, and both regimes did everything possible to destroy Czernowitz. And then erase the memory of him, turning the city into a dull Soviet province, albeit in spectacular decorations of “trophy” architecture. For more than half a century Czernowitz as a world -famous literary myth - as well as a conglomerate of oral legends about the “non -Soviet” city - existed as if parallel to real Chernivtsi. And it lasted exactly until the moment when Popovich's people began to come here ...
- actually becoming a living message.
Love is important in those days when hatred, rejection and disgust become the norm
S.V. They were a message. They came and said: “We are from here. We have not forgotten anything. We are ready to talk about what you probably do not know from the books.” And they were right. Even in our cultural community, not so ignorant, well -oriented in the interwar German -language poetry of Bukovina, largely translated by Peter Laid, a true story about the heroic mayor was first heard from them. Thanks to these living voices, Czernowitz again became reality.
The frame from the film “Only loving will survive. Trajan Popovich and others”
V.Kh.: И все же, слушая тогда рассказы людей, спасенных мэром Поповичем, мы не были готовы до конца осознать, насколько важна любовь именно в те времена, когда ненависть, неприятие и отвращение становятся нормой каждого дня. Как большинство людей, не знавших иной жизни, кроме мирной, мы полагали, что самое важное на войне – бесстрашие и мотивированность, и глубже не особо задумывались. Когда же война стала реальностью, когда Черновцы превратились в полный беженцев прифронтовой город, где ревут сирены воздушной тревоги, где в любой момент может погаснуть свет, и где почти ежедневно хоронят наших павших на фронте земляков, – мы увидели события осени 1941 года в несколько иной оптике. Мы поняли, что главное слово военного времени – любовь. И самые важные истории любой войны – это истории о любви и спасении.