[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.

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¹⁾ See, Ruth Glasberg-Gold: "Time of Dried up Tears,"
Hasefer Publishing House, Bucharest, 2003, pp. 107-134.