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Some Romanian troops, led by legionnaire officers withdrawn from Basarabia, Northern Bucovina and the district of Hertza, savagely killed in the city 70 Jews, wounded many others, plundered Jewish stores and provoked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.