The Author's
Testimony as a Survivor of the Holocaust in
Transnistria
--Stolen Childhood--
I
was born the 20th of March 1930 in the Northern Moldavian
city of Dorohoi. I lived in a humble house, together with
my parents (Iancu and Malvina Rozen), and with a smaller
brother (Sorel Rozen) and a grandmother. In my family,
like in all other Jewish families, the ancient customs
and traditions were respected. At home, we used to speak
not only in Romanian, but also in Yiddish.
The Dorohoi county, whose
capital was the city of Dorohoi, was a part of The Old
Kingdom. Not only in the Independence War of 1877, but
also in World War I of 1916-1918, an important number of
people from Dorohoi participated and many of them died on
the front. My grandfather, Meer Peretz, also fought on
the battlefield, and died afterwards because of a disease
that he had contracted during the war.
In Dorohoi used to live between
the two world wars, about 5800 Jewish people,
representing about 37% of the total population of the
city. The great number of Jewish people gave the city an
important Jewish personality. A great number of
synagogues, a Jewish school, a hospital, an asylum, a
ritual communal bath and other Jewish institutions were
functioning in the city. In the streets it was currently
heard speaking not only Romanian but also
Yiddish.
Between the Romanian and the
Jewish community there was generally a good understanding
with only a few violent anti-Semitic
manifestations.
The beginning of the year 1938,
after the installment of the Goga-Cuza government and the
promulgation of the first anti-Semitic laws, brought
anxiety and fear into the Jewish population of
Dorohoi.
As a result of the anti Jewish
politics carried on by the governments that succeeded,
the anti-Semitic manifestations amplified, and the
legionnaires and the extremists incited the majority of
the population to hatred and persecution against the
Jewish population.
On the 1st, of July 1940, being
only 10 years old, I witnessed the first anti Jewish
pogrom that took place in Dorohoi.
Some Romanian troops, led by
legionnaire officers withdrawn from Basarabia, Northern
Bucovina and the district of Hertza, savagely killed in
the city 70 Jews, wounded many others, plundered Jewish
stores and provoked many other hateful manifestations
that remained deeply in my memory for the rest of my
life.
Starting with September 1940-
after the proclamation of the national-legionnaire state-
new reprisals and anti-Semitic measures were took against
the Jewish people of Dorohoi. Soon afterwards I was
forced to leave the Romanian primary school and I had to
take the 4th primary grade at the Jewish school from
Dorohoi. I cannot forget a winter night of the year 1940,
when the principal of the Jewish school, Meer Hershcovici
was beaten and tortured with bestiality by the
legionnaires and for a few months he found himself
between life and death.
The threats, the terror and the
fear became day by day more and more devilish.
On the 22nd of June 1941 the
beginning of the war brought a new wave of persecutions.
Thousands of Jews from the entire county, Darabani,
Saveni, Mihaileni, Radauti-Prut and from the rural area
were brought to Dorohoi, so that the Jewish population of
the city doubled. As a consequence many problems appeared
concerning sheltering and helping them because the
evacuated ones could only took what they could carry.
They were robbed from all other goods accumulated from
one generation to another.
At the beginning of November
1941, the Jewish people from Dorohoi were announced that
they would be evacuated to Transnistria.
The deportation began on
November 7th, 1941. Thousands of Jews, crowded in cattle
wagons, only with what they could carry, began their
journey on the road of wandering.
My family left on November 12th,
1941. This is how the hell started, the road to
Holocaust.
The transport in the cattle
wagons, in the conditions of an early and cold winter was
a real nightmare. We arrived after two days at Atachi on
the shore of the river Dnestr near a completely destroyed
bridge. We were thrown out of the wagons, and then
grouped we crossed the river Dnestr in a ferryboat.
On the other side of the river
was the city Moghilev, where we were quartered in a camp
from which we should have left for the interior region of
Transnistria.
Tired, frozen and hungered we
left next day, on foot, by forming a column, on a road
that for the majority of us would be without return. On
the road, the first people died the first victims of
deportation. After three days of walking, we arrived at
the city of Sargorod. My entire family was exhausted.
Together with other Jews, we hid, but the column
continued its road to other settlements, on the river
Bug.
Sargorod was a small Ukrainian
village, which counted about 1800 native Jews, and to
which there was gathered about 7000 deported Jews from
Basarabia, Bucovina and Dorohoi. Sheltering the deported
became a problem. Many of the deported, especially those
from Dorohoi, who arrived the last, were living in
common, improvised dwellings, which didn't dispose of the
elementary conditions of hygiene and warmth.
The public wholesomeness didn't
existed at all.
The houses were old, most of
them made out of clay, with small rooms, poorly
ventilated, with permanently shut windows, the
ventilation being made only through a single hole. In
total, there were 337 houses, each of them having 2-3
small rooms, a total of about 800-900 rooms, which meant
10-11 people in a single room.
The population was underfed,
there were no means of gaining any money and the food was
earned in exchange for clothes. As a consequence most of
the people remained almost naked, so they wouldn't die of
hunger.
The winter of 1941-1942 was
terribly cold. The frost, the hunger, the different
diseases, and first of all the epidemic of exanthematous
typhus surrounded the entire Jewish community from the
ghetto, leaving them helpless in the arms of despair. The
death was showing its ugly face and its dimensions became
bigger and bigger.
A sledge carried by a hungered
jade surrounded the ghetto every morning, caring the
bodies of those who couldn't survive suffering and
misery.
In February 1942, hundreds of
bodies were lying in the Sargorod graveyard, and couldn't
be buried because of the frozen land.
We were living in an unheated
room (a former summer store), about 15 people.
We were sleeping on the floor,
covered with a little straw collected from the market,
dressed in our daily clothes, because we gradually sold
our things to the Ukrainian peasants for some
food.
The hunger, the cold and the
diseases (especially the typhus) started to make victims
in our room and in my family.
The first who passed away was my
grandmother. I still remember that before the war she was
often carrying in her hand, praising it to the children,
the medal her husband (my grandfather) received at
Marasesti. Her elder son too (my mother's brother) fought
in the First World War and was awarded the Commemorative
War Cross. When she died, I found in her frozen hand only
a potato rind, which she hadn't had the power to
eat.
Only a month after the death of
my grandmother, on a cold February night, my mother
passed away, too. She was only 38 years old.
Weakened and exhausted, because
the little food that our father brought, she gave it to
us, (the children) so she wasn't able to resist anymore
to the cold and to the diseases.
Being left alone with us, my
father was making desperate efforts to bring us, from
time to time, some food, in order to be able to
survive.
When the first warm rays of sun
were announcing the imminent arrival of the spring, my
father got sick and because of the high fever he fell
into a deep sleep. After only three days, he passed away,
having the clear conscience that he did everything he
could to safely get, at least us, the children, through
that damn winter.
We remained alone in that room,
I was 12 years old and my little brother 6 years old,
because from the other inhabitants the majority died and
the survivors moved in better rooms taking the place of
the dead ones.
Considering our situation, our
aunt, Dora Peretz, herself in a bad situation, with two
children and no help, took us with her.
In the summer of 1942, my
younger brother's situation and mine became
dramatic.
In order not to die of hunger,
we were begging for food, or we were collecting wastes,
such as potato rinds.
At the beginning of September my
smaller brother became sick and couldn't be saved any
more.
He died at the age of only 6 in
a dark and cold autumn day.
I remember that shortly after
the community was announced, in the front of the
ramshackle house where we lived, a wagon arrived to take
my brother's body to the graveyard.
He was the only deceased of that
day. I put the body of my brother in the wagon, and I
went, on foot, after it, together with my aunt. The train
conductor looked sometimes at me with mercy but he didn't
say anything. The road to the graveyard was crossing a
steep, impassable and hard to climb hill. Dark clouds
were covering the sky and soon afterwards a thick and
cold rain began. We continued our slowly walk, without
saying anything.
At the graveyard was only one
person who helped the train conductor to take the body
and to put it in a common grave together with other
bodies that were brought during the last days.
A few clods of earth thrown over
the body, and that was everything. Not prayer or other
ceremony. The grave remained opened for the dead to come
during the next days.
This is how the last member of
my family was gone. I went back home depressed and
hopeless. It was the darkest day of my entire
life.
Remaining alone, I had the luck
that in the end of autumn of 1942, the Jewish Community
in Sargorod, thanks to the help received by the Jews from
the country, managed to organize an orphanage, in which I
was received.
In the orphanage were gathered
about 100 orphans from Basarabia, Bucovina and Dorohoi,
who were alone and helpless. In here, thanks to the help
of a few kind educators we were reborn.
In here I made my first friends
from deportation, children with whom I shared the same
fillings of suffering and hope.
Sometimes, when I look into a
small notebook of memories from the orphanage I remember
those I used to live for more than a year, and with whom
I discussed and made plans for the future.
I don't know where they are, how
many of them are still alive or whether they still
remember me.
These are only a few names: Sidi
Picker, Carol Ruhm, Ester Stein, Betti Klein, Betti
Gasner, Pepi Grunfeld, Harry Lessner, Mina Leibovici,
Tina Fruht, Misu Sapira, Iosif Tesler, Iancu Katz, M.
Benthal, and many others.
In the autumn of 1943, when the
front got close to Transnistria, the Antonescu government
accepted the repatriation of the Jews from
Dorohoi.
On the 23th of December 1943, a
train with less than half of those who were deported
arrived in the Dorohoi station.
In the station there were lots
of people, not only Jews, who came to welcome the
survivors. Embraces, cries of pain and sorrow, together
with joy and hope.
I descended in the middle of
this tumult and for a moment I stopped and I watched with
tears in my eyes to the place from which, two years ago,
we left five persons, and only one returned.
That was, in a few words, my
unhappy childhood from the sorrow years of the Second
World War.
To all of us deported in
Transnistria who were part of my generation, the fascist
regime in Romania stole the most beautiful part of every
person's life: the childhood, and not only that but much
much more.