Marcel Simon as a child

This is me, Marcel Simon. I was born in the village of Bosanci on the 23rd February 1940. My Jewish name is Mendel. They called me Marcel in the family. I only have a brother, his name is Benito Simon, but they call him Beno. My brother was born in Suceava on the 28th July, 1941, he is 1 year and 4 months younger than me.

From the 9th October 1941 until 15th April 1945 we were deported to Transnistria. So if the deportation was in October 1941, I was one year and 8 months old, and my brother was younger than 3 months. We were in a place called Sargorod, together with my parents, my brother, my maternal grandfather, my uncle Max Gingold and his wife and daughter, my aunt, my cousin and my mother's two cousins, Ghizela and Loti Strominger, and hundreds of other Jews.

My father told me what I am telling you. What can a one and a half years old child remember? I don't know what we lived of. We got some support from different places, they worked by the day. Mr. Pietraru, our former president of the community told me, he was 20 years old, he worked at a flock, had different jobs. But there were very difficult circumstances, lice filled us, people died one by one, because of the misery, froze to death, starved to death and died of illnesses. There weren't medicines, illnesses cut down the people. My father suffered of petechial typhus, he lost his toes, became handicapped.

Then there were the bombings when the German army passed, because the Russians were a couple kilometers behind them. And my father told me that there was a horrible bombing at that time, when everyone pulled back. We couldn't hide, both my father's legs were wounded, we were small children, and then he said: 'Come what it may!' And father told me that a German came in, I was small, blond, he took me in his arms and he started to cry and said that he had a child just like that at home and that the war was cruel and cursed. There were humans among them, too, not all the German army was made up of SS.