Turning history on its head.
During clandestine operations sprung from the catacombs of Odesa, Ukraine, he was called “Cyrus,” after Cyrus the Great, the founder of the ancient Persian Empire.
For it was Cyrus the Great who had freed Jews held captive in ancient Babylon and given them money to rebuild their temple.
And in his name, Vladimir Molodtsov, a thirty-year-old Soviet intelligence officer, led the resistance fighters of Odesa, the pre-war home of two hundred thousand Jews, in desperate efforts to free the city from the cruel occupation of the Nazi-allied Romanian army.
Ukraine was then a region of the Soviet Union, and many residents of Odesa had fled as Hitler began his invasion.
But nearly ninety thousand Jews remained in the city when the Romanian army wrested control.
But Molodtsov was already there.
He had come to Odesa during the first days of the invasion to organize Odesa’s partisan factions to conduct sabotage operations against the occupiers.
Molodtsov’s headquarters were deep in the sixteen-hundred-mile labyrinth of tunnels and caves two hundred feet beneath Odesa which miners had dug in the late 1700s to extract a special limestone, called coquina, to build the Black Sea port city which the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, had desired.
Unmapped, with untold numbers of secret entrances, the series of tunnels and caves is the longest system of catacombs in the world.
It housed storerooms, lodgings, kitchens and a military hospital for the seventy-five to eighty men and women resistance fighters under Molodtsov’s command.
Their fight was brave and desperate and was waged against an overwhelming enemy.
Just days after the Romanians assumed control, the Odesa partisans detonated a bomb in the Romanian military commander’s headquarters, killing scores of people.
The Romanians blamed ‘Jews and Communists.’
And a Nazi SS "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile death squad, assembled nineteen thousand Jews in a public square near the Odesa harbor, shooting some and setting the rest on fire.
Twenty thousand more Jews were driven to a small village where some were shot and the rest were locked in a warehouse which was set ablaze.
The thirty-five thousand Jews who then remained in Odesa were sent to ghettos on the outskirts of the city, where many died of exposure, starvation or illness.
Ghetto survivors were sent to Transnistria, where they were killed.
The back-and-forth between the partisans and the Romanian and Nazi occupiers continued throughout 1941.
The partisans cut power lines, bombed trains, destroyed railroads, seaport infrastructure, roads and military equipment, and gathered reconnaissance for Soviet aerial bombing strikes.
And the occupiers bombed and blockaded entrances to the catacombs, released poisonous gas into the tunnels, poisoned well water and left booby-traps.
Molodtsov and his partisans achieved some tactical successes.
But they faced an overwhelming force and failed to rout the Nazi occupiers from Odesa.
Molodtsov’s story ends sadly, with betrayal, arrest, torture and death.
He would be hailed as a Hero of the Soviet Union, but his body was never found.
And now, it is the memory of Nazi wartime atrocities in Odesa and elsewhere in Ukraine which Putin has turned on its head.
Once again, the people of Odesa suffer.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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