Tag #121220 - Interview #101947 (Saul Rotariu)

In November, both my father’s and my mother’s parents received a written order to be somewhere in the city of Saveni in 24 hours with what hand luggage they could carry. And what could my mother carry? She had a two-year-old baby, I was four, and a baby girl only a few months old. So my mother carried the baby girl in her arms, while my father’s and mother’s parents were holding my hand. And what could my grandparents carry back then? They certainly weren’t young anymore – if my father was 27, my grandparents were around 50-55 years old. [The grandparents on the father’s side were 58 and 59, respectively, while the grandparents on the mother’s side were 71.]

They told us they were taking us somewhere where they could put us together as we couldn’t live in those areas anymore, since there were too many Jews there, the village was no place for Jews to be living in. Well now, they didn’t offer too many explanations, for they had called the army to handle this. And they took us by cart to the nearest train station. These carts had been rented by the local Town Hall. Whether my parents paid for them or not, I couldn’t tell. When we arrived at the first train station – there is a train station some 10 km away from Saveni, it is called Ungureni – they put us aboard freight cars and took us to Transnistria. They took us by train to Moghilev [3]. Everybody ate whatever food they managed to grab when they left their homes – for they had told people to take food to last them three days. We weren’t given any food whatsoever on the train. It just kept moving on – it stopped, then started moving again, depending on how they needed to switch tracks.