Tag #154745 - Interview #103607 (Riva Pizman Biography)

Mama was a strong woman and tried to hide her feelings from us, but we knew that Grigoriy and Mikhail were in great danger. Mama supported us as much as she could, but how much could she do having to care about two daughters and her paralyzed husband? Many people were saying that Germans would do us no harm and those, who wanted to leave the town were panic-strikers, but mama decided we should evacuate. Somebody told mama there was the last train at the station and we hardly had any time left to pack. We packed whatever there was at hand, put my father into a wheel cart and rushed to the station, but there was no train there. Some people waited at the station since morning, but there was no train at all. Later we got to know that the party town committee people had evacuated few days before, and that there was no town evacuation scheduled. People were leaving the town on foot, to find their relatives in the neighboring towns or villages, but we could not go far with our paralyzed father. So we stayed Mogilyov-Podolskiy. In the end of June German air raids became more frequent. We took shelter in the basement. Some local Ukrainians were robbing the Jewish houses abandoned by their owners. Even though we stayed in our house one night some people from the suburb came into our house. We knew them, they were from the Kozak family.  They broke down the door grabbing everything they could get. They wanted to kill mama to take away the sewing machine. Mama grabbed my sister and me and we ran outside and took hiding in a ditch. My father stayed in his bed. The robbers pulled down his mattress and pillow from under him. Our neighbors - sisters Romanenko also came into our apartment pretending they wanted something for themselves. They took few things, including the sewing machine, which they gave back to us, when we returned to the apartment in the morning. However, the robbers took away a lot more that the sisters managed to save for us.