Editorials
"My life is quite paradoxical"
Jewish Holocaust survivor Arkadi Chassin has mixed feelings living in Germany today.
January 26, 2012
Around 200,000 Jews from post-Soviet states have arrived in the Federal Republic since 1991 as so-called "continental refugees." However, Arkadi Chassin does not want ever to be considered one of them. He is still too attached to his home city of Odessa. And nothing drew him to Germany, the land of the erstwhile offenders. Chassin survived the misery of the Jewish ghetto following the German invasion, as well as forced labor in a concentration camp. Despite many reservations, he ultimately decided to leave the Ukraine. To this day, the former seaman and author has still not completely arrived.
In many respects, the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Worms is the exact opposite of Odessa, the city of a million inhabitants on the Black Sea - small, easy-going, and miles from the coast. The 82-year-old Chassin wears a stylish dark jacket and jeans, and his features are much softer than one would expect with someone who had spent decades sailing the seas. Still today, after a long, eventful life, he finds it quite extraordinary that it is precisely in Germany and precisely in Worms that he ended up: "My life is quite paradoxical."
Arkadi Chassin's parents didn't flee when German troops and their Romanian allies marched into Odessa in the summer of 1941. Until that time, the port city with its colorful mixture of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Armenians and Greeks was perhaps the most cosmopolitan metropolis of the Soviet Union. Chassin's Jewish family got along well with the educated Russian Germans in their neighborhood. Chassin's father took rumors that the Germans intended to murder all Jews to be Soviet propaganda.
Only a few days later, the young man saw the bodies of indiscriminately executed people strewing the streets. The occupant's hatred was especially directed against the city's Jews: in the Jewish ghetto, thousands of persons were packed into a tiny space. Chassin's entire family fell ill with typhus and his father died of it. It was only by a stroke of luck that Chassin escaped the massacres of the Jewish population of Odessa in retaliation for a partisan attack on the Romanian military headquarters.
He was later interned in a concentration camp set up on the site of a former pig farm. Here, there were no more deliberate mass executions, but many prisoners died of hunger and exhaustion. The young man did hard labor in road construction until 1944.
Following his liberation, the then 14-year-old was able to fulfill his dream and become a seaman; he also began to write books and short stories about his experiences during the war. As a ship mechanic, he traveled on freighters all over the world - a privilege for Soviet citizens who, normally, were never able to travel abroad. During his travels, Chassin also became acquainted with Russian emigrants. "They were all very unhappy people," he said "Leaving one's country is always a tragedy."
Chassin also still remembers his first contact with Germans after the war. When some German-speaking men came on board at Rostock, he suffered a nervous breakdown:" I began to shake all over and had to lock myself in my cabin for an hour."
In the 1990s, Chassin joined a Jewish association for Nazi victims, helping Holocaust survivors to apply for financial compensation. For health reasons, he finally decided to move to Germany, at least for a time. He was grievously ill and his doctors advised an urgent operation that would not have been possible in dilapidated Ukrainian state hospitals. In 2000, Chassin and his wife arrived at the reception camp in Osthofen near Worms.
At first, Chassin wanted to return to the Ukraine; his non-Jewish wife, who found the tranquil life in Germany to her liking, wanted to stay. He gave in: "We have been married for 55 years and until now I have always followed in her wake."
But incidents like the burning of the Worms synagogue in late 2010 frighten him. Because his wife and he have problems with the German language, their circle of acquaintances is mainly confined to the community of Russian-speaking emigrants. So he shares the same fate as all those who came to Germany at retirement age: "Those who say otherwise are deluding themselves."