Experimental Blog #61

Comments on "Odessa - Genius and Death in a City of Dreams" by Charles King

They say that history should not be forgotten; so, the city of Odessa in today's Ukraine was founded during the reign of Catherine the Great in 1794, about 3 years after Washington, D.C. However, there was already a Tartar village at that site, which was named Khadjibey, whose origins are obscure, but the village of Khadjibey first appears in written sources in the early 1400s. The Tartar and Cossack inhabitants of Khadjibey became Ottoman subjects in the early 1500s.
By the beginning of the First World War the population of Odessa was around 650 thousand people, who were classified as about 39% Russian, 36% Jewish, and 17% Ukrainian, in spite of viscious pogroms and considerable emmigration of Jews in the earlier years of the century.
During the Second World War the "Responsibility for the Holocaust in Odessa and Transnistria rested squarely with Romania, the only country ... besides Nazi Germany to administer a major Soviet city. By the end of the war the Romanians had largely emptied Odessa of what remained of its Jewish population. One of Europe's greatest centers of Jewish life and culture had become, in the language of the Nazis, almost wholly judenrein."
In writing about the high numbers of collaborators the author further says that, "An urban population practised in unmasking class traitors, exposing the wreckers of socialism, and rooting out enemies of the people easily transferred those techniques to uncovering secret Jews."
Nonetheless, "Odessa was one of the first four Soviet cities ... to be awarded the title Gorod-Geroi, or "hero city."