ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 18, 1997 TAG: 9702180056
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: KIEV, UKRAINE
SOURCE: ANGELA CHARLTON ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lidia Vitkovskaya turns a small tin tag around in her wrinkled fingers, stroking the faded number carved into it: 1052.
During World War II, that was her identity, her prisoner number at a Nazi concentration camp.
``It became a part of me,'' says Vitkovskaya, 71.
But after the war, she never told people she had been in a camp, and hid the tag in a cellar at her home in Kiev, fearing the anti-Semitism that pervaded the Soviet Union. The Nazis tattooed numbers on most prisoners' wrists, but she was among the lucky ones who escaped that branding.
Now, after decades of silence, Vitkovskaya and many other Holocaust survivors in the former Soviet Union are speaking publicly for the first time about their experiences for a video archive project launched by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation has gathered 24,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors since 1994, part of an ambitious $95 million project that has spanned more than 25 countries.
While the bulk of the filming has been in the United States and Canada, the project began shooting recently in the former Soviet republics despite difficulties in tracking down survivors, some of whom are still reluctant to speak.
The project, spawned by Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie ``Schindler's List,'' has no commercial aims. When it is completed, it will be made available to schools and libraries around the world.
``It gives these people a voice, and creates a more complete picture of what really happened during the war,'' says Anna Verkhovskaya, who coordinates the project in eastern Europe.
The foundation hopes to record at least 2,000 interviews over the next year in Ukraine, which has an estimated 4,000 Holocaust survivors. The country's Jewish population - about 500,000 out of a total of 52 million - is one of the largest in Europe. It was home to 2.7 million Jews before the war.
Most Ukrainian Jews detained by the Nazis were executed and, of those taken into custody, only a small number survived. Even before the Nazis arrived, Ukraine had a history of anti-Semitism, dating back to pogroms and persecutions in czarist times that killed or forced out Jews.
After the war, Soviet authorities accused some Holocaust survivors of collaborating with the Nazis or of being corrupted by years in the West. Many were sent to gulags in Siberia, where conditions were often little better than those in the Nazi camps.
As a result, some Holocaust survivors in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics are still reluctant to discuss their experiences, either because they find it painful or because they don't want others to know.
Some of those who agreed to give interviews for Spielberg's project refused to allow camera crews into their apartments, worried that neighbors would learn of their past.
But Vitkovskaya was ready to tell her tale.
Flipping through snapshots before her filmed interview, she points to a photo of her writing on a school blackboard. ``Eighth grade. Two weeks before the war started,'' she says.
Four years later, in 1943, 18-year-old Vitkovskaya was studying in her family's communal apartment when Nazi officers came to the door. For reasons unknown, they took only her, leaving her mother and younger sister behind.
Vitkovskaya was taken to a camp in Halle, Germany, where she and several hundred other women from Ukraine worked in factories building appliances.
``We had nothing. They even took away our hope,'' she says, her wavy white hair falling in her eyes. ``We didn't know if we were really still living in this world.''
She describes hungrily devouring moldy chunks of bread and washing in putrid water.
On April 22, 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated her camp, but then sent its inmates to work at a Soviet military hospital nearby. It was six more months before Vitkovskaya was able to return to Kiev.
``My mother hadn't heard from me in two years,'' she says, swallowing back tears from remembering her homecoming. ``I can't describe that moment.''
For decades she kept quiet, working as a bookkeeper in Kiev, where she lives with her daughter and 10-year-old grandson.
But time is running out for many Holocaust survivors. One elderly Ukrainian was scheduled for an interview in December, but died the day before he was to be filmed.
``We were devastated. Yet another memory has been lost,'' says Anya Yudkovskaya, an interviewer for the project.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Lidia Vitskovskaya was an 18-year-old Ukrainianby CNBstudent when Nazi officers took her away to a Germany prison camp.
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