1 - “The Capital Is Being Settled All Over Again”: Resettlement from Fall 1943 to Fall 1944

Summary

In the fall of 1943, the Red Army advanced on Kyiv. Ahead of it, Stalin's secret police studied the population about to come under their control. At the end of September, Sergei Savchenko, the head of the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), wrote to his counterpart in the Ukrainian NKVD, Vasilii Riasnoi, about the Nazis’ arrests of Soviet citizens in Kyiv as well as their preparations to evacuate ethnic Germans. Two weeks later, Savchenko reported that the evacuation had begun. The Germans were sending whole enterprises and their workers out of Kyiv, and the roads to Zhytomyr and points west were jammed with cars and trucks. Then, a few days later, he reported, “Based on a message from the operative group of the Fourth Directorate of the Ukrainian NKGB ‘Eagle’ now active in the enemy's rear … Kyiv's population is being led away to the west. In the city, only German military units remain.”

Later that winter, high-school teacher Viktor Tverskii explained to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ “Commission on the History of the Patriotic War in Ukraine” how he had avoided the evacuation:

In the second half of September 1943, at first far away on the horizon, then closer and closer and more brightly, fires flared up on the left bank of the Dnipro. All of the nearby villages were burning. The retreating Germans had set them on fire… . Finally, the left-bank outskirts of Kyiv started to flare up, Darnitsa, Slobodka, and Trukanov Island… . One thought then gripped every living being: to last it out until our guys got here, to stay in one piece, to save oneself and to save one's family from death… . We decided to go in the direction of Demievka. We lived there until October 21, when another order appeared announcing the whole city was a war zone and obliging everyone to show up at the train station… . What should we do? Go to the station where the Germans wanted people to go? No way! That meant penal servitude.

Another person told neither of fleeing from nor evacuating with the Germans.