Selected text
I didn’t have to cover as long the distance as I had to back in 1941, but I was so weak that each kilometer or even meter seemed enormous to me. On 16 February I reached Bershad. There was still a ghetto there and I found my family there: my parents, my brother and sister. They survived the horrors of the ghetto, hunger, violence of policemen and Romanian guards and hard forced labor. They looked terrible and I looked no better after being kept in the camp. I sat at the table and mama gave me some thin soup that seemed more delicious than any prewar chicken soup, so starved I was. We talked in the evening. My parents told me how they managed to survive how they bribed the policemen and Romanian guards, and how Ukrainian villagers brought them potatoes and beans to the gate of the ghetto. They stayed in an empty house that belonged to some Jews who had evacuated. There were many such houses in the ghetto. Mama kept my sister in hiding in the basement to save her from evil eyes and raptorial eyes of the occupants who raped and killed young girls. There had been an action conducted shortly before I arrived. A traitor reported on a group of inmates who collected money for the partisan unit of Yasha Thales, a Komsomol activist from Bershad. They found the lists and killed all people whose names were on the list. My parents did not fully recover from the horror of this massacre and feared that fascists might kill all inmates of the ghetto before their retreat. Perhaps this was their intention, but they just didn’t have time to do this.
Period
Interview
Anatoliy Shor