Gilah denounces her family to the Nazis

Gilah Berkowitz’s denunciation of her family to the Germans is a pivotal act of betrayal whose consequences she later remembers as she faces death herself. Driven by envy and by the discovery that she is treated as an outsider within her own household, she sends the authorities her family’s names and address. The letter makes their Jewish roots known during the occupation; within days, they are ordered to report to the Jewish cemetery, and Gilah hides near Babi Yar to witness the violence that follows.

The discovery of exclusion

For years, Gilah thinks that people look at her and whisper because she is ugly or poorly dressed. Her brothers call her a mamzer, but she does not understand the word. The meaning becomes clear only after a girl at the greengrocer’s tells her that her mother spent ten years with a handsome painter who lived two blocks away. Gilah understands that she is illegitimate, not her father’s child, and not fully part of the family.

That knowledge gives a name to an exclusion she had already endured. Her brothers hit her when they are tired of hitting one another and treat her body as theirs to use. Though everyone else seems to know the truth, it has not been openly explained to her. When she finally understands, the word mamzer condenses family rejection into a status she cannot escape: she belongs neither securely to the household nor to the people who have made her an object of contempt.

The letter and its immediate consequences

The denunciation takes place against the background of an order posted near the Monastery of the Caves: all the Jews in the city are to go to the Jewish cemetery. The religious isolation of the monks, who live in small caves on bread and water, contrasts with the coercive order confronting the Jewish population. Gilah’s family had not lived in the Jewish quarter and were not particularly religious. Three days before the neighborhood learned their roots, their identity had not been publicly known. The day after Gilah sent the Germans a letter listing their names and address, it was.

The social change is swift and visible. Neighbors who had been friends spit at Gilah when she goes to the market. Her denunciation therefore does more than expose the family to the authorities: it abruptly changes how the surrounding community treats them, turning private information into a public basis for hostility. Gilah’s later recollection identifies envy as the motive for informing on them. The act grows out of her sense of exclusion, but it directs the consequences toward the people whose acceptance she had been denied.

The departure and the massacre

As the family prepares to leave, Gilah’s father tries to reassure her that deportation means being put on a train and taken somewhere else, perhaps east or north, where they will have to begin again. She tries to smile, but doubts whether she has done the right thing. The family packs its remaining belongings; the soup is cold, and her father gives her the last scrap of bread, warning that they do not know when they will eat again. These domestic details sit beside the official order and the impending removal, making the danger immediate without making the father’s hopeful explanation any more certain.

Gilah wants one last glimpse of her father and two older brothers. She hides in tall grass beside a clump of trees, less than twenty metres from the edge of the ravine, and witnesses the operation. German Sonderkommandos and two Ukrainian police battalions organize the logistics of the mass shooting, described in her recollection as systematic and almost industrial. She sees hundreds of people led to the ravine to be shot. The girl who sent the letter is thus also a witness to the machinery of violence her act helped bring upon her family; the account establishes her proximity to the massacre without reducing the atrocity to a private family tragedy.

Memory, guilt, and self-erasure

The episode returns while Gilah is dying. With seven minutes left to live and the pain in her finger nearly mute, she asks herself whether a person can regret an entire life. Her answer begins with the denunciation: it began when she betrayed her family during the occupation. The recollection joins the letter, the family’s forced journey, and the mass shooting in a single chain, while preserving envy and her status as a mamzer as the circumstances behind her choice.

That autumn day, Gilah decides to live the rest of her life as someone else. The decision follows the discovery that she has been treated as an outsider and the irreversible consequences of her betrayal; it is not presented as undoing either. In her final recollection, her attempt to escape the identity imposed on her remains bound to the act she cannot escape remembering. The episode makes that tension concrete: she is both a rejected child who learns that she does not belong and the person who reveals her family to the authorities, then watches the resulting persecution from hiding.