[Continuation
--1]
Ruth Glasberg presently
lives in Miami, Florida, USA.
In November 1941, she was 11
years old and she was deported together with her parents
and an older brother, by the Romanian authorities from
Cernowitz, to Transnistria.
After they were taken by train,
in cattle wagons, to the Marculesti transit camp in
Basarabia, a painful walk of almost 2 weeks started, in
an early winter, to reach the Bersad ghetto, in the
district of Balta, near the river Bug.
On the road, many sick and
exhausted people, unable to remain in the column, were
shot by the gendarmes, who accompanied them.
This is a short abstract of how
this surviving witness describes a part of the suffering
she endured in this ghetto:
"Bersad was the
biggest and worst camp in Transnistria. It earned its
fame as the camp with the worst conditions, the
greatest number of victims, and the most sadistic
administrator, Florin Ghinararu.
Not with the greatest
efforts, the imagination couldn't visualize the
inhuman conditions in which we lived.
We were twenty people in a
small room of a partially demolished house, with a
pierced roof, without any doors or
windows.
The only comfort we had
was a so called stove, called "trinicika", improvised
with two bricks put on the floor, at approximately a
half meter distance, in witch we made
fire.
Besides the unbearable
frost and the tiredness after the two weeks of
walking, the worst thing was the
hunger.
Slowly, quietly, one by
one, those besides us were passing
away.
For days lifeless bodies
were remaining among us, until the grave diggers come
to pick them up.
The inhuman conditions in
which we were living were favorable to diseases, the
typhus was invading us in a frightful rhythm, becoming
the main enemy, followed by famine, dysentery,
freezing, and periodical executions.
My father was an easy
prey. He died peacefully, unobserved, like the flame
of a candle, with that expression of kindness forever
imprinted upon his face.
Considering the high
mortality rate, the grave diggers were coming once in
a few days and sometimes weeks. An important part of
the room became a temporary morgue, with dead bodies
all over the room, piled near the wall.
Waiting for the grave
diggers became an obsession for the
living.
Nobody was leading the
dead, and nobody knew what happened with them once
they were taken from us.
Few of us had the physical
strength to walk and follow the sledge to the city
borders.
Almost two weeks after my
father's death, my elder brother, who hadn't spoken or
moved for days, passed away.
The mortality was
increasing daily. In the house, especially in our
room, after a month, from twenty people remained only
four survivors.
With an iron will, I
fought with the sleep for two weeks, to make my mother
stay alive.
In the fourteenth night
since I hadn't sleep, my will was defeated and I felt
asleep.
When I abruptly woke up, I
shook her and crying: Mother! Mother!
Silence. She had chosen to
die at the moment when I ceased to call her, letting
her die in silence.
She took that chance to
leave this cruel world.
I felt something like a
stitch in my heart when I understood I had become
nobody's child. There was no one left to love me
unconditionally, or to care of me. My soul was
deserted.
January the 27th, 1942
&endash; at the age of eleven I was left alone on this
world." 1)
Many Jews in the ghettos were
shot by the gendarmes.
On the 20th of March 1942, six
Jews walking to Moghilev to find their families were shot
in the cemetery of Sargorod by the order of the chief
officer Dindelegan.
In the ghetto of Bersad,
shooting Jews by gendarmes, on different, imaginary
reasons, was a common practice.
An important number of labor
active Jews from the ghettos were sent on different
working sites, where they have been submitted to a regime
of hard labor in totally unsuitable housing and
nourishing conditions.
Those sent to labor in the
German camps from other side of the river Bug, after
finishing their labor period were shot by the German
troops.
The Antonescu authorities
organized in Transnistria labor camps and colonies among
which the best known were Peciora, Scazinet, Vapniarka,
Bogdanovka, Domanovka, Acmecetka, the quarry from Ladija
and many others.
Into the camp Peciora, named the
death camp, were deported many Jews from the ghetto
Moghilev. This camp sited on the banks of the Bug, was
surrounded by three rows of barbed wire and guarded by a
heavy watch. Many times, German trucks coming from the
other bank of the Bug were loaded with detainees from the
camp and transported to extermination places. The living
conditions in this camp were among the most barbarians.
As M. Katz, former president of The Jewish community of
Moghilev, relates: "those confined in the camp, deprived
of the possibility to supply food, fed themselves with
human corpses." The number of dead in this camp reached
80%, the rest of 20% succeeded to escape.
1)
See, Ruth Glasberg-Gold: "Time of Dried up
Tears,"
Hasefer Publishing House, Bucharest, 2003, pp.
107-134.