Tag #130993 - Interview #78175 (manin rudich)

Just before the revolution broke out, in September 1989, I went on a trip to Chisinau, to visit my cousin there. This cousin, Leopold Weiselberg, was the one who left with the Russian army when they retreated. After he left, we were interested to keep in touch with him; we wrote letters, but got no answer. His mother, Cecilia, had been shot in front of her house when the Germans came, and his father had died, too: he had been on the Struma ship. Anyway, after several unanswered letters, my father wrote to the Soviet Red Cross, and they replied that there was no person by the name of Weiselberg in the Soviet Union. So we had no news of him until 1987, when the workers from Steagu revolted [see 1987 Workers Revolt of Brasov]
[19]
. In that year we had guests from Russia, from Cernauti. They were a young Jewish couple, husband and wife, and their parents had emigrated to Israel. They wanted to meet their parents, but they couldn't go to Israel, and the parents couldn't come to Russia. So they all came to Romania. The parents stayed at a hotel, and the couple over at my sister's. When I was taking their parents to the train station, we started talking about relatives, and I told the man about this cousin of mine. And he said, 'We were in the army together, I will give you his address!' I couldn't imagine this happening; after 40 years!

Leopold lived in Dubosar, near Nister, and then he moved to Chisinau. That's where I went to visit him. I took a vacation and I stayed in Chisinau for a month. I was there when the Berlin wall fell, on 7th November.