Tag #120076 - Interview #87381 (Simon Meer)

And I worked in Tulcin until September 1943, when the front lines were broken at Stalingrad [16]. Had the front not been broken at Stalingrad, none of us would have returned home. They had received an order from Bucharest to prepare us – all the Jews up to the river Bug, meaning the territory that belonged to the Romanians – to get us ready to be repatriated. They released us from the construction site, and we returned to Caposterna from Tulcin, from where they took us. My eldest brother returned there, too. He had been sent elsewhere – I don’t remember anymore where he was taken. My aunt and the 2 younger brothers stayed in Caposterna, and we found them still there when we returned.

And carts, and automobiles were made available for us, and they took us to Shargorod, where they put us in train cars. Still cattle cars, not passenger cars. We were content. But we didn’t believe we would return home anymore. I kept saying to myself: “This is our doom! This is the end!” Especially there, at that peat bog, I remember there was an engineer, his name was Salveciu – he frightened everyone on the extraction site. All those who happened to fall ill, or not be able to carry on working anymore, he saw to it that they drowned in those bogs where the peat was extracted. What, you think they cared about human lives there?

And we came to Moghilev. We arrived in Moghilev in December 1943. The Federation in Bucharest had by then already sent aid for us in Moghilev: food, clothing. They gave us clothes to wear. We were all naked. I remember I wore a pair of pants made from burlap. They loaded us on special trains, and we came by train from Moghilev to Dorohoi. There was an entire train of people from Dorohoi alone. They had formed trains in Moghilev, when they put us on the trains, based on routes, destinations. We left there on December 22 or 23, for on December 24-25 – on the first day of Christmas – we were in the Dorohoi train station.