Iacob Rudich

This is a photo of my father, Iacob Rudich, taken in Brasov, after we arrived from Transnistria in 1945 and moved to Brasov from Cuciurul Mare, where we lived before being taken away. He probably needed the photo for an ID or a certificate, I?m not sure. My father was born in Cernauti in 1900. He spoke Yiddish, Romanian and German, and also some Ukrainian. When he was young he had worked as a clerk for a lumber station, and he had to come and work in Cuciurul Mare. He used to come to the shop my maternal grandparents kept, and that's how he met my mother, Gusta Rudich, nee Weiselberg. They married in the synagogue, but I don't know exactly when. My father had been in the Romanian army during World War I. He told us he had traveled a lot, he had been in Czechoslovakia and in Italy, where people used to eat cats. But he didn't talk much about the war; they weren't things for a child to hear, I assume. In 1944 he was deported to Transnistria with the rest of us, me, my mother and my sister. In Snitkov he became the translator for the colonel there, Lange, because my father knew Ukrainian and German, so the situation was a little bit better for us. We returned to Cuciurul Mare in the same year, and had to stay there two more years. In these two years my father was supervisor at a food warehouse, he distributed food to different shops. We stayed in Cuciuru Mare until March 1946, when the Russian authorities announced that everybody who had been deported and was Romanian citizen could emigrate to Romania, so we moved to Brasov. In Brasov, my father worked as a shift supervisor in a food shop. He worked there from 1946 until he retired in 1960. My father died here, in Brasov, in 1973. We buried him in the Jewish cemetery and I recited the Kaddish at the funeral.