Witness to Genocide

"My family tried to decide what to do, to join the speedily retreating Russian troops and leave behind the property, the savings, the old furniture and keepsakes, the old books collected by my grandfather, the Torah which was in the  house for more than 150 years when my ancestors came from Germany."

"My family, meanwhile, was forced to go into the backyard and dig a pit. They were buried alive. An SS officer commanded the operation while the  youths of our neighbourhood threw children into the pit."

"[The occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union was] the most obscene decision of the Soviet leaderships in its post-war history, comparable only with the invasion of Afghanistan [statement predating the Russian invasion of Ukraine]."

Ilya Gerol, Born Riga, Latvia November 1940 - Died Montreal, Canada, August 2022

 

Ilya Gerol's family was prosperous, citizens of Riga, Latvia, but originally from Germany. Just before he was born the Soviet Red Army invaded and occupied Latvia. But then, while he was in his infancy, Operation Barbarossa was launched by Nazi Germany when its leadership decided to dissolve the Soviet Union's membership in the Axis Alliance and to invade Russia in June of 1941. 

When the Nazis were approaching the outskirts of Riga with mobile SS death squads, Einsatsgruppen joined by by Latvian auxiliaries shooting thousands of the city's Jewish population, his large extended family, disbelieving the underground news of Jewish slaughter taking place, held emergency discussions among themselves, trying to decide what they should do. In the end, because they believed they would come to no harm, they remained.

Ilya Gerol's mother believed otherwise, fearing for her life and that of her infant. Her trust in the cultured civil Germany that her larger family grasped at, was absent in her opinion. She took her child and rushed into the street where they were picked up by retreating Russians driving a truck. Only later would she learn that her entire extended family, deciding to remain where they felt they would be spared, were all murdered.

Having survived the war, Gerol studied at the University of Moscow and joined the Red Army Reserve. He was active in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. He set aside his private reservations and remained in Russia, becoming a journalist and by age 25 was chief editor for the Atlantica radio station in Russia. He became senior editor at the Russian language newspaper Sovetskaia Molodezh (Soviet Youth) and published two books on leaders of the Young Communist League.

As a journalist in the Soviet Union he prospered but could honour no principles he held dear: "There is only one condition; do not write what you have seen, write what we ask you to write", he later recalled. Eventually he published articles reflecting the reality in the U.S.S.R.; assaults on minority rights and personal freedoms, leading to his expulsion from the League of Journalists of the U.S.S.R.

Because his wife's father was a senior judge who intervened on his behalf, he was spared prison or forced exile. In 1979 he was allowed to leave the country. First to Vienna, then to Rome where he worked as a translator with the Canadian Embassy. There, he applied for refugee status in Canada, arriving in Vancouver a year later at age 39, fluent in English. 

He found work eventually as a journalist in Ottawa becoming a globe-trotting foreign affairs analyst with a number of significant interviews under his byline with leading world figures such as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Poland's Lech Walesa, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (former WWII member of the Nazi Youth, and later Secretary General of the UN from 1972 to 1981).