Submitted by Zina Costiner and her Daughters
The Life and Death of the Deported Jews from Bucovina (Roman Province) to Ukraine Across the Bug River: Memories from a 77-Year-Old Woman for Her Grandson and Granddaughters
Cernautzi, the capital of Bucovina, was a town where many ethnic groups lived (Romanians, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Croatians, and Polish). The people were friendly and happy. We were proud of our town. Even if it wasn't big, it was a cultural city with universities, high schools, music schools, theaters, cinemas, concert halls, and scientific conferences. Different people lived together peacefully. We didn't know about any feud or disputes based on racial difference. The mayor was a Romanian named Dr. Popovici, a well-read and wise man. We lived in peace till the early 1933 when anxious news began to come from Germany, whose language was ours from our childhood, whose culture we learned in school or college, and whose literature and art were our delight.
Fear, By Stan Kaplan
Beginning with the rise of fascism, we started to wonder whether it was possible for such changes to take place. What, in the beginning was difficult to believe, was later confirmed by refugees from Germany, who told, as witnesses of the inhumane things happening there. There you could be arrested only because you were a Jew, and the extermination in German camps had already begun. Despite all of this, we hadn't stopped to hope. Our hope was that the situation was not going to last for a long while. Actually, things were quite different. It didn't take long till the misfortune fell upon our own family. This happened in June 1944 when German soldiers started the persecutions of the Jews in Cernautzi. A wild hunt of innocent people began, people who were brutally taken out from their houses, hidden in places or synagogues, beaten, thrown to the ground, hung, and even shot. In the streets you could see numberless corpses. In three days the excesses were over and the Nazi order was installed.
In the beginning, the male Jews were taken out from their houses and synagogues and arrested in the street or led to the backyard of the Town Hall. From the windows of our house, we could see all that happened there. They missed us thanks to a German neighbor who told the soldiers we were Germans. The Jews taken that day were put into rows, two by two. Fathers and sons, brothers, relatives, friends were in the beginning side by side. Then they were driven apart, one line to the left and one to the right. The first group was taken by the German soldiers in an unknown direction while the second was commanded "Dismissed! Run!" But the moment the men arrived to the gate, they were ordered to stop. This maneuver was led by the SS members. Then, the men were taken in the street and put face to the wall. We heard an order: "Fire!" but nobody shot. SS members were only amusing themselves. The Jews were put to do military exercises and beaten with the arm butt. Then the officer shouted: "Here! And now the end!" Poor souls were ordered to throw themselves on the ground where they remained motionless, waiting for the final shot. "Fire!" but again nobody fired. SS men burst into laughter. They ordered the people to rise and run again and, while they were running, they were shot, now for real. Most of them died on the spot and remained in the street. Those being only wounded were shot again. Nevertheless, some managed to escape.
The windows of our house looked at the entrance of the Jewish Temple so we could see how it was burnt. One morning, some German soldiers brought some buckets with fuel. The next afternoon, a car arrived and the city's rabbi Dr. Mark, the cantor, and two more from the officials were pushed out. They were forced to pour the fuel in the whole Temple. Then they were loaded up in the car again and taken away. They put the Temple on fire, and it burnt till the next day. I remember the golden cupola of the Temple suddenly detached itself and, pushed by the flames, rose towards the sky, floating, and then fell again on the walls. It happened again and again as if the cupola was trying to stand against the people's craziness and to warn them. The second group of men was found some days later in a field out of the city, all shot. Among the corpses was found Dr. Mark and his friends. All this happened on the Lentesti Plain.
Another place for exercises was a park named Habsburgshöhe. There were groups of Jews taken, led by two policemen; arms firing was heard from far away. This was the beginning, more precisely a part of the beginning because all that I'm telling is based only one the facts we could see and hear from the window of our house on 2 University Street, across from the Temple.
The next step was to interdict the Jews to walk out, to impose the yellow star as a distinctive sign, and to send men and teenagers to compulsory work from where some haven't ever come back. Everyday they arrested people, the victims disappearing without a trace. Sometimes, some of the arrested ones could be redeemed by wealthy families, but soon they were arrested again. It was towards the end of November 1941; it was cold, there was sleet and snow. One day, without a warning, it was ordered that in a few hours all the Jews should leave their houses and go to the ghetto. The Quarter declared the ghetto was outside the city. The other people living in the former quarter moved into the houses left by the Jews. In the ghetto there weren't enough houses, stables, or barns to shelter the evacuated Jews. Frightened, desperate, and in a great hurry, people piled the most important things in backpacks, sacks, and baskets and tried to reach the far Quarter, fighting with the blizzard and the mud. Because it was forbidden to use any means of transportation, including a pram, one could see mothers carrying little babies and heavy luggage and children pulling packages too big and too heavy for them through the wet snow, blown by the wind.
In the ghetto, the question was where to find a shelter. Happy were those who could find a stable or a barn. The basements were full, too. Moreover, the water supply was stopped so the water had to be fetched from far away wells. Many people, hearing what was waiting for them in the ghetto, committed suicide in their own houses. After a few days, some engineers, doctors, and office workers were taken out of the ghetto but not their families. They had to leave them and not be in contact anymore. Many of them refused.
In a few days, the trains for deportation began to work. A part of the ghetto was surrounded by armed soldiers. The Jews formed a long convoy led to a railway station. In the convoy, one could see people carrying sacks and above them children or old men who couldn't walk. They didn't know where they were taken to but the suspected, towards DEATH. Piled up in wagons for cattle, without air or water, they were taken to Atachi, a town on the Nistru River, where they were pushed rudely into the temple, transformed into a stable by the army. It was dark and someone lighted a match. Then we could see on the walls, "Who's going to read these lines, written with blood, to learn that my parents, my grandma, and my two brothers (with names and date of execution), were killed in this temple, and I beg you to make a kaddish (prayer for dead) for them and for me, whose turn is right now." There were more inscriptions in Ukrainian and Yiddish.
The next day at dawn, after many of them committed suicide, especially doctors, the people were taken on a steep slope toward the Nistru River and loaded onto a ferryboat. After the ferry was full, the rest of the people were thrown into the water. The same happened to the crying children. The soldiers grasped them from their mothers' arms and threw them into the water. On the other side of the Nistru, Ukrainians with bats had come to rob us. They took all we had left. Those that fell on the road, the Ukrainians took their clothes. Most of those who reached Moghilev and the villages around died from hunger, cold, and typhoid fever. The few survivors were put into a part of the town destroyed by war. Here, they tried to build shelters and organize their life in order to survive. This was the fate of the Jews deported from the whole Bucovina in the autumn of 1941.
The deportations were resumed in June 1942. To the group taken then be longed Romanian Jews from Cernauti and a number of people from other camps in Romania. The people were taken, in the middle of the night, by the Romanian police -- which was the situation for our family, too. Quickly, we put in backpacks clothes and food found around. Our boy, Elmano, 14 years old, took a pot and a pan, which proved later to be very useful. We were taken to the Shiller Park in Cernauti and from there to the stadium, where many others like us, were taken too. We were not allowed to sit, not even the old or ill ones. It was a hot day, and people began to cry, asking for water. Suddenly, appeared Dr. Traian Popovici, the mayor, and for a moment we hoped again. He looked at us and his breath was taken away. Full of sorrow, he desperately said in a loud voice, "I didn't know anything," and made a helpless gesture. After that, he talked a long while on the phone with some army's officers and then he turned back to us. From his desperate gestures we understood our situation was hopeless. He managed to take only three men from among us. The rest remained. The children cried all the time and an old woman made a cry and died on the spot.
By Geoff Rennent
In the evening, I saw a train. We were crowded in cattle wagons. We tried to put the children to sleep on the dirty floor. All stank. We were so crowded that it was difficult even to turn around. We heard a woman's voice shouting, "Do not give up!" These words gave us the courage and calmed us. But again came an order, "Out!" Many of us thought that was the real end. Again, swears and blows with the rifle butt. When we were down, with the children awake in arms and the sacks on our backs, looking at the soldiers' faces, we realized that they were playing their "funny" game, again. But tired and indifferent to them, we remained standing. The soldiers burst into laughter and shouted, "Up!" After we were again in the wagon, the doors were shut, locked, and sealed. Finally the train moved again. To where? It was very dark. The children fell asleep. Two old men fell asleep forever and many of us envied them. Sighs and muffled cries. Lack of air, and only a small window with bars under the ceiling. No possibility to empty our bowls. The atmosphere grew intolerable. Looking up to the window, I saw it was already dawn.
The train stopped; the doors opened and the corpses, now five, were thrown in a chasm. Some of us managed to bribe the soldiers and we were allowed to go two-by-two behind some bushes there. Some unnatural cries made us shiver. A young woman, who kept her baby in her arms all night long, now discovered him dead. The young mother was almost crazy, and only by force she could be separated from her child. In the morning light, among the hills and forests, we were up again. We encouraged each other and we hoped we'd resist.
Again the doors closed, and nobody heard our begging for water. The train moved again. The road seemed without end and a question tortured us: to where?
Finally, late in the evening, we arrived to a dry field. Jumping off the wagons, we were driven running through some dusty bushes. It was a run accompanied by arm but blows. Many of us didn't manage to carry our luggage and left it there. So, we arrived to a flat place where there were some barracks without any doors or windows. We entered the barracks, ate whatever food we had left, and waited to see what would come next. The next morning some young people discovered a small river with fresh, cold water that gave us power. It didn't matter how much water we swallowed, however; our thirst couldn't be stopped.
Soon our new masters appeared. They were more human than our expectations. They showed us our new place of work, a quarry nearby. But our work was useless. We missed tools and something to exchange, such as wallets, soap, combs, socks, razors -- all very appreciated things by people living there. We threw them over the barbed wire fence and we received in the same way -- corn flour, boiled potatoes, millet, or peas porridge. We worked also in the field. The work began before dawn and lasted till after sunset. These were hot days without being allowed to go to drink water. All our food was the slice of bread we received in the morning. Once they brought us a barrel with water. All the people threw themselves over it, but those who drank water from it, vomited right away. The water stank of rotten corpses and was full of worms both dead and alive.
Once, on our way back from the he work, we passed next to a peasant house. In front of the gate was a quiet young peasant. On his face one could see he was a good and honest man. He moved from the gate and showed us the way to the well in his yard. There was a boy around 14 years old who gave us tin cups and took water from the well for us. Our guardians came swearing, but the peasant convinced them to let us drink. With tears in eyes, we thanked the good and brave man.
But after a while, to our misfortune, some Nazis came to our camp, inspected us and said that we would be taken to their German camps. "There is a lot of work for you and you'll have food and shelter there," he said. In front of us was a tall, slim officer and, because of our education, we thought him honest, which gave us a hope and many of us gave up the thought of suicide. Though others, more lucid, bribed the guard to let them hide, not to be taken in the Nazi camps. Not all of them managed to escape. Some were shot when they tried to go back to Moghilev.
And there came the day for us to be taken by the German soldiers. To our group belonged the patients of the Psychiatric Hospital from Cernauti. Those and other sick people or handicapped ones were drowned in the Bug River. Their relatives, who tried to grasp them, were thrown in the water too.
This incident was the beginning. We marched a long road toward the bank of the Bug River. They allowed us only a break and that was for the German soldiers to check our poor belongings and steal them. Finally, we arrived at the Bug River. We crossed it with a ferryboat. Those standing at the edge of the crowded ferryboat, not being able to clutch on something, fell into the water and we were not allowed to save them, even if we knew how to swim. On the other side of the river, there were some trucks waiting for us and we were taken to a collective farm that was almost in ruin.
By Michelle Dooley
From there, one could see some tall gallows. As we arrived, a small, fat SS man appeared, with a big head and rude features. He gave us a long talk: "You are beings without any rights or laws. You and all you have belong to us. Therefore, if you still have goods like gold, money, jewelry, objects of leather, good clothes, or underwear, and you don't hand them over immediately, you'll get up there." Laughing, he showed us the gallows. Then we started walking to our new shelter -- a long, dark, awful stinking stable. We cleaned it up as we could, trying to cast out to the field some families of rats, too. We were more crowded than in other camps. In the night, if we needed to go out, we were forced to step on others' bodies. In the beginning, the people got angry, but in time, they got used to it.
Every getting out was with the guards' permission. One guard was an imbecile with a stupid grin, who loved to shoot at those who went to the bathroom. If he shot someone, the next morning he reported that the hurt or dead person had tried to escape -- as if such a thing were ever possible, with the camp being surrounded by a high barbed wire fence.
At 5:00 every morning we went out in the yard to take our lice off (we had no water to wash with) and we formed a line, four by four. Talk was forbidden. They counted us and we started on a long road until we reached a young hazel wood, where there were some small but very deep lakes, surrounded by huge cliffs. There we dug canals, for the water from the lakes to flow down and then one had to blow up the cliffs. The pieces of rocks were broken and the resulting stones had to be used for the pavement of the muddy roads where Hitler's army had to pass. But all the work done in the day was a Sisyphean one because during the night, the water flowed back in the lakes.
Our work continued in an unbelievable rhythm. The autumn came near with its rain making the roads impossible to be used. Our daily food consisted of a dish of millet or moldy peas for cattle soup, full of worms, and a slice of bread weighing 150 grams. We found out that the bread was one-fourth rye flour, one-fourth peas flour, one-fourth bran, and one-fourth sawdust. So fed, the people grew skinny and skinny, and more and more became sick or unable to work, which was the reason for the first wave of extermination.
In our camp, there was an old Jewish woman, more than 80 years old. She had come from Moscow to Ukraine and there was taken by Germans. She was a very tall person. Usually, she stayed alone in the yard looking far away. One day a woman came near and asked her to tell her future. The old woman made a move with her hand, saying, "Not today; I cannot tell it right now." I felt attracted by the old woman, and I sat in silence next to her. She continued to look in the distance for a while; then she turned toward me, looked at me for a while, and then she asked my name and where I came from. I told her my name was Ruth Costiner and that I was taken from the Cernauti city.
Her name was Hanna. In her youth, she studied palmistry at Moscow. She was a widow, and her only son was serving in the army, in the air force, and she called him "my pilot" (in Russian, moi lotchik). Without a word, she took my hand and looking at it her face became bright and she shouted in excitement, "Oi, mazel, mazel" (i.e., "Good luck, good luck")! She looked at me and took some cards out of her pocket, shuffled them, turned them face up and shouted again "Yes, yes, a real good luck; I see a roof upon your head." She took my hand, her eyes following the lines in my palm, and she said quietly, "You have a long life ahead; this is a sign you'll be saved." She spoke in Russian, but I understood. Thoughtful and skeptical, I remained by her side as suddenly I heard her saying, "And now, I'm going to ask the cards about the fate of this camp." Again she shuffled the cards with her old, nervous and quick fingers. After she turned them face up, she uttered in a slow voice, "Oi, oi, the great misfortune is already here. I saw black clouds." She remained thoughtful. After a moment, as if against her will, she shuffled the cards again, this time for herself. A short, sharp cry cut the air. She raised her beautiful head toward the sky and shouted, "My pilot, my dear pilot, be healthy! Your mother will never see you again!" She stroked my hand and waved me a gentle goodbye.
The next morning, the action of extermination began. We, who were able to work, were put aside. We were separated in two rows, face to face. At once, we suspected what was going to happen and we panicked. The children of able-to-work mothers, separated from them, began to cry. Mothers tried to pull their children from the opposite row. The adults looked in despair at their old and sick partners. In the middle, there were the German soldiers who, swearing and hitting with a whip, tried to keep the rows apart. In the middle of cries, some stood of stone, with wild eyes, as if they could not understand what happened. A Nazi officer, going up and down between the rows, stopped suddenly and shouted in a loud voice, stopping the cries. "Silence! Why do you cry, you stinky Jews? We take them to a school building, not to freeze here in the winter." Nobody listened to him; nobody believed him.
A big truck approached. I saw the old Hanna, standing straight and with dignity. Her big, beautiful eyes kept looking with a sad, farewell smile at each of us. Then she raised her arms and blessed us, watching us from one end to the other.
The old mother of my husband, Heinrich, was thrown in the truck too. Old and honest, she could not understand what really happened. Trusting the officer's words, she hoped to reach better conditions. Suddenly, she remembered that, in the big mess, she forgot her ID and got off the truck to go and get it. Meanwhile, the truck went away and my old mother-in-law remained alive. We were lucky to take her back home, in Bucovina. Only in the evening, when we came back from the work, did we found out that this way she managed to save her life.
I still remember. I could see before my eyes the silhouette of a six-year-old boy, the youngest in a family with many children. He was small and skinny with big, curly hair, a little snub nose and round, shiny eyes. This boy used to run next to us as we went to work. All of us liked him. One day, the boy ran into the forest, got lost, and seeing some peasants' houses, went toward them. The Ukrainian peasants welcomed him in, let him have as much food as he could eat, and stuffed his shirt with cornmeal and tomatoes. The peasants then took him back into the forest, showed him the way home, and asked him to come again. While he had been gone, his parents and siblings had begun to despair of ever seeing him again. Suddenly, he appeared near them, and the family was reunited. After this experience, the child brought food to his family every day. He was not discovered although the edge of the forest was well guarded by Nazis fearful of partisans. (This situation was before a new wave of executions). At about this time, his parents, fearing the executions, hid the boy in a knapsack and left him in the stable that served as our shelter. He might have managed to escape (but for how long?), but one of the executioners, on entering the stable, saw a movement inside the sack. Laughing in amusement, he took the sack and threw it in a truck.
By Rachel Borbrow
Later, a Lithuanian soldier told us about the end of the child. Arriving at the place of execution, the child began to cry and begged to be allowed to return to his parents and siblings. The killers pretended to let him go, and when he started to run with the sack in his arms, they shot him.
Walking on the road toward our working place, we saw those waiting to be executed. Old men were holding hands, standing two by two. Some were wearing "tallis" (prayer shawls) and saying "kaddish" (the prayer for the dead), moving with raised heads and small steps. After this new execution, the atmosphere in the camp became more hopeless. All of us felt Damocles' sword above our heads.
I became more aware and attentive to what happened to each of us. I remember two sisters from the Ukraine. Maybe they were twins. They looked very much alike. It was difficult to guess their real age. They alone had been left after all of their relatives had been killed. Their skinny bodies wore thin, black clothes. They walked, one stuck to the other, shivering in the cold morning. When we arrived at the work site, one ran into a bush to empty her bowels. A guard fired, and his bullet touched her arm. She fell, screaming with pain, putting her other hand over the wound. She tried to smile and said, "hurebo, hurebo" ("it's alright"). The soldier drew near nonetheless, and pushed her toward the trees. We heard two shots and that was the end. Happy, the guard came back and sent two men to bury her. Her sister remained of stone, but began to handle her shovel with anger. When we returned to the camp, she threw herself, crying on the place she and her sister had slept together, then remained there, motionless. The next morning, she was found dead. Janek was a red-haired boy with two big, blue, clever and bright eyes. When the Germans invaded his town, Uman, in the Ukraine, they shot his parents and siblings in his presence, then took him to a labor camp. There, he was still strong, but completely powerless. He was tortured by diarrhea caused by continuous hunger. His trousers, now too large, were worn, allowing part of his bottom to show through, which was determined to immoral; therefore, Janek was to be shot. One of our boys gave him a pair of trousers. Janek was seventeen years old and had been a teacher in his town after all of the Russian teachers had been drafted into the red army. He talked with enthusiasm about his activities as a teacher. He kept his humor and good mood in even this worst of situations. He made many jokes and would mock the Nazis. He mimicked them, happy to make us smile at his antics. Janek knew very well that it would be his turn to die in the next wave of executions and would even joke about it.
A Polish prisoner who watched his execution told us that a red-haired boy on the edge of the common grave shouted at the soldiers, "You do a good job; don't you?" in German; then, in Russian, he shouted, "Long live freedom!" He had enough time to spit in disgust before the bullet hit him, and he fell into the common grave. I hope he didn't suffer too long.
In the camp there was also a woman from Cernauti with her two-year-old daughter, Lucica. The pretty child grew skinnier and skinnier. Her mother managed to contact a Ukrainian woman and, one day, she threw her daughter over the barbed wire fence. She never saw her child again. In the next wave of executions, she was taken along with those too weak to work and she was killed.
Iaro was a fifteen-year-old boy, nice and happy, with intelligent eyes. He used to talk with pleasure about books, writers, and school. He would daydream about food. He still remembered the good meals from home. Once, at the work site, feeling a great need, he ran into a bush. Two of our guards saw him and a "funny" idea come to their heads. They bet over which one of them would manage to cut his nose with a bullet. Unhappily, a third guard came and spoiled their party; in the meantime, Iaro had disappeared from view. Iaro died of typhoid fever a short time before the last execution.
Before we were taken to the concentration camp, my mother-in-law, living in Radauti (a nearby town) and her nephew had visited us, so they were taken together with us. Her nephew, Jack, was a twenty-year-old student. He was a strong boy. In the concentration camp, he was given one of the toughest jobs. He was supposed to rotate a heavy seven-kilogram hammer above his head and strike a piece of rock to shatter the rock into small pieces for pavement. He hadn't managed to do this work, because he didn't know how it had to be done. He found later that he had to strike the rock in a special place; otherwise, it wouldn't crack. But Jack let the hammer fall at random on the rock; all his body shook with effort, but in vain.
Behind him stood a guard with a short whip hitting him on the naked shoulders and shouting, "Come on, split it, Moses!" After three days of unimaginable tortures, Jack told me, "I can't bear anymore. I have decided to commit suicide." All my objections, my fright and my despair couldn't change his decision. To gain time, I begged him, "One more day, please!" The next morning we were waiting in line to set out for work. The SS corporal, who was the commander of the camp too, came and took a look at our lines and called our nephew. We felt a cold perspiration when we heard, "You stay here to work for me." Jack and a Ukrainian were to build a pigsty in the village at his house. In fact, this was a good luck for all our family. That very day Jack found in the garbage a bit of pork skin and brought it to us. We cleaned it and shared it in fourths -- for Jack, Iarek, Jaro, and our son, Mano. Exchanging some other things, Jack received from his Ukrainian fellow potatoes, corn flour, and onions.
One Sunday we saw two older officers coming to our camp. They ordered us to take out all our belongings and spread them in front of us on the ground. One of them scratched through our things with a stick and chose all that could be of any use -- sheets, towels, shoes, and purses. The other one inspected the things on the ground, and when he discovered something interesting, he put on white leather gloves and took the thing, being disgusted to touch our dirty stuff with his bare hands. We were disgusted by his manners too. In front of me he stopped and took my last bit of laundry soap. I looked into his eyes and maybe this bothered him, so he explained, "We need these things for our sisters in the German army." The other officer added, "You don't need them any longer. Soon you'll be kaput (finished, killed)."
Our son, Elmano (whom we called Mano) was 14 years old. Once he had a high fever and was tired and weak. He probably caught typhoid fever, but he couldn't remain in the camp because if they found him, they would kill him. Every day we dragged him to the place where we worked; we hid him in a bush and covered him with branches and dried leaves. If an inspection had come we'd have taken him up quickly and put a shovel in his hands.
Soon, after he recovered, we saw with horror how two soldiers took our son in the woods. The soldiers were walking behind him, keeping their guns in shooting position. I ran after them, but I couldn't catch up with them. An Austrian, who was a specialist civil engineer, seeing our horror and worries, told us that nothing would happen to Mano, telling us that they just needed him to help them dig a fountain. I asked, "But why do they keep their guns in shooting position?" "Because the forest might be full of partisans and so the prisoner wouldn't try to escape," came his answer.
That evening, when Mano came home, he told us how he thought that he would be shot, and how he looked at us, saying goodbye with his eyes, since he thought he was seeing us for the last time.
A German soldier hit a woman so hard in her shoulder that her dress tore; her skin split and dark, thick blood began to flow on her dress. The woman didn't move and said in a calm voice, "Strike more! If I'm going to survive, I'll show my scar as a proof of your heroic deeds." To our surprise, the soldier stopped and went away. Another woman woke up in a night and touching the place where her son used to sleep, noticed it empty. Knowing he had bad diarrhea, she ran outside scared and found him fallen in the toilet. Being in a hurry, the child slipped and fell in. It took a hard time for her to get him out and once there, the child said shaking: "Mom, if something like this happens to someone, he cannot continue to live." His mother calmed him down and managed to drive these thoughts away. Then she tried to clean him with grass and leaves as much as she could. There wasn't any water in the camp. She then took her last sheet from the stable, wrapped her son in it, and they remained outside until the morning. Only at the working place did she manage to wash him in a small lake close by.
Elsa was a young, beautiful blonde. She married a year before. Both of the spouses were lawyers. Being in love, they looked always into each other eyes. He was very serious with a sad look, half-resigned; she was full of optimism and life. Her effort to get him out of his mood was very moving. She tried to convince him that their situation was transient; it would not last long and then a beautiful and happy life was waiting for them. He smiled, stroked her golden hair and kissed her. One day our corporal, Steier, kept her in the camp. After we left for work, an SS officer who used to inspect the camp came and pulled Else into his car, disappearing on the road. When we came back, we found Else crouched to the ground, with her face hidden in the hands, in despair. Seeing her made our hearts break. Nothing from the radiant and full of life Else was left. The warm words of her husband seemed not to reach her understanding. The officer took her again once or twice, and then Else didn't come back any more. Our people found her shot at the edge of the forest. We couldn't even bury her. Her husband went into severe depression, didn't want to go to work anymore, and was shot too.
Erika was a kindergarten teacher, almost a child, but married. Her husband was taken in the Soviet Army and had no time to bid her goodbye. She even had no possibility to tell him the great news of expecting a baby. She was caught in the street and taken to the camp. Because of her charm, innocence and natural way of being, everyone loved her. It was hard to notice the pregnancy, because the women hid her in the back of the stable and dressed her in a dark, large robe. She was so young, without experience, and so happy she'd have a baby, that she seemed not to notice the conditions we all lived in there. Nevertheless, this state of spirit didn't last for long. When she heard from some Ukrainian Jews about the extermination, her eyes got wide; she stared for a while, but her optimism won at an end: "No, such a thing -- it's quite impossible. It couldn't be true." In spite of the lice, the cramps of hungry and the exhausting work, the little Erika didn't lose her courage. She floated in bright dreams about the meeting with her husband and sometimes made us forget the reality too.
The uncommon conditions of living made the child born two months ahead the term. When labor started, the women hid her in the rear of the stable, covering her with straw and rags. Towards evening, the labor got harder and the women found some clean rugs. The man in charge with boiling the soup gave us a bucket of warm water (he was a Jew from the camp too) and told Erika not to scream. The birth was not easy and took time. Maybe the child didn't have enough power to make his way out. We needed a midwife, but there was none.
As if by a miracle, the prediction of the old, unforgettable Hanna, came to life. One day, only a day before the extermination, a truck entered the camp yard. At the wheel there was a Ukrainian driver and next to him a Romanian sergeant. We were already on our way to the stone quarry. To our luck, in the camp yard there was Jack who, was supposed to do some work for the SS corporal. The Romanian sergeant said something in Romanian to the corporal. The latter didn't understand and called our nephew, Jack, to translate. The Romanian sergeant wanted to know if there was a family named Abraham or Costiner in the camp. The SS officer didn't know any names because we hadn't been registered by names; we were just numbers. Jack, who didn't know what it was about, told him in a frighten voice, "Abraham is my family name." Then the sergeant took out a German-Romanian order and handed it to the SS corporal. He took a long look at it and then told Jack, "Come on, jump in the truck and gather your family. You'll go back across the Bug, to Moghilev."
Bewildered, not knowing what happened, Jack got on the truck and began looking for us. We saw the truck coming to us and with great fear we saw Jack inside. In our situation, every new event was a good reason to be frightened. Jack jumped off the truck and told us we had to gather quickly, because we would return to Moghilev. Hearing that news, our fellows entered a great state of agitation. Without noticing the whip blows, they threw themselves upon us to bid goodbye and send good wishes to their relatives there; crying, they told us not to forget them and pray for them to be rescued, too.
Ghetto By Stan Kaplan
We were separated by force. My last image was of some bloody people, crying. This image awakens a feeling of culpability inside me. Was I allowed to leave them there? What a sad surviving! This way we headed to Moghilev, another hell we were supposed to live.
The driver was a good-hearted Ukrainian and shared our fear of the SS men we met on the road. Answering the sergeant's request, he stopped at a bar for the latter to drink a tzuica (Transnistrian-Romanian alcoholic drink). The driver got off too and gave us a loaf of bread and a bit of ham. We shared the bread in five pieces -- for me, my husband, my son, my mother-in-law, and Jack. We didn't have a knife to cut the ham, so we bit from it in turns. Continuing the way, being still in the German-occupied territory, the Romanian sergeant showed us a large swamp and told us that, at that very place, hundreds of Gypsies from Cernautzi were forced to enter -- threatened by guns -- and finding their deaths there.
I'd like to tell you some words about Moghilev, too. There we found most of our family alive. Jack's brother-in-law met in Moghilev a Romanian colleague. He was the lawyer F. who had an important job at a cast iron plant, opened recently for the German army's needs. This new plant needed specialists and under the pretext that Jack was one of them, this good-hearted man, risking his life, managed to take Jack and his family out of the Nazi extermination camp. Moghilev was on the Romanian-occupied territory, under Nazi control. At Moghilev, besides the iron plant, there was an electric plant. Those who found places of work escaped death by starvation. The Jews were allowed to rebuild two destroyed buildings belonging to the town's ex-hospital and to open there another hospital. We found shelter in a barracks of this hospital.
Moghilev was a Ukrainian town on the left bank of the Nistru (Dniester), conquered by the Romanian troops at the beginning of the World War II. It was on the territory between Nistru (Dniester) and Bug. This piece of land was called Transnistria. In this territory there were deported almost 150,000 Jews from Basarabia and Bucovina during the dictatorship of General Antonescu. At Moghilev, a part of the town was a ghetto. The ghetto was the part of the town used for the deported Jews, who were forbidden to leave the ghetto. Without any places of work and means of living, after they had sold all that could be sold, the Jews died of starvation, cold and diseases, especially exanthemum fever (typhus). Only those Jews who received underground help from Romania, or found some work, managed to survive. Almost 100,000 Jews died in all Transnistria, where there were many extermination camps and ghettoes.
One day, little after we arrived in Moghilev, we heard some strange, tiny voices. We got out of the house and what did we see? In the street, a group of three- or four-year-old children were running complete naked. They were walking bare-footed in the frozen street and were shouting in faintly, sharp voices: "bread, bread," (mamaliga), a Transnistrian-Romanian porridge made from corn flour, polenta). We took them quickly inside but we had nothing to cover their frozen little bodies. We could give them some warm lentil soup, and a bit of bread, and mamaliga. It was all we had. They sat down on the floor with their bodies full of wounds, shivering and crying. One of them cried all the time, "Mama, Mama."
Then some men came looking for them. The kids had run from an orphanage. We learned that there were three orphanages in the ghetto, and we visited them later. They were full of children sitting on wooden bunks, almost skeletons and every day getting weaker and weaker. A small number of those children was saved by American Jews who, through the Red Cross, managed to get the children adopted by some wealthy Romanian Jews. The fast advance of the Soviet army made the Germans run out of time in killing the Jews from the Moghilev ghetto. After the Germans retreated beyond Nistru, we could return to Cernauti. Asking there for our relatives, neighbors and friends, we found most of them died in Transnistria or across the Bug. We wondered how we managed to survive. People! People! 1984. Listen to the voice of a very old woman! Take care, so that your children become neither killers nor victims!
Ruth Costiner (Bucharest, June)