My second daughter Alla dedicated herself to music. She failed to enter the Conservatory in Kiev and went to Gorkiy where there are no prejudiced attitudes to Jews. She finished the conservatory there and became a pianist.
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Sarrah Muller
Alla has two sons: Yuriy, born in 1979, and Vladimir, born in 1986. In the early 1990s they moved to Israel where they live in Ashdod. Alla’s sons had a circumcision ritual in Israel. Now their names are Uri (Yuriy) and Zeev (Vladimir).
We’ve often discussed the subject of emigration in our family. We’ve always been interested in Israel, particularly during the 6-Day War 28 and the War of Judgment Day 29. We’ve always been concerned about this country that we believe to be ours. However, we didn’t venture to emigrate. First my husband was ill and now it is my daughter. Besides, she cannot part with her pictures – there are about 100 of them and we won’t be allowed to take them with us. But what is most important is that Inna cannot imagine leaving Ukraine and Russia. She has grown up in this culture and became an artist and a writer. As for me, I wouldn’t mind moving to Israel despite my old age. I think that my grandson Maxim and his family will take this decision and will finally become citizens of Israel, though his cause of revival the Jewish religion and traditions in Ukraine is also very important.
Our family was very enthusiastic about perestroika 30. Finally all bans disappeared and people got to know the truth about the totalitarian regime and these infinite lies in which we had to live our lives. All borders were opened, the literature that was under a ban before came up and religious life was reborn. Of course, the material part of life has become more difficult, but I hope these are temporary hardships and Ukraine will become a free and prosperous country.
My daughter and I have not become religious. We do not observe traditions or celebrate holidays, but I order a memorial prayer for my dear ones at the synagogue every year on Yom Kippur. I took this vow back in 1944, when I got to know that my family perished.
My family came from Western Ukraine, the town of Kamenets-Podolskiy [about 400km from Kiev], an old town near the Romanian border. It’s a small town that has developed at the interfaces between different cultures. It has been a multinational town and absorbed all these cultures. There was a Christian church, a Catholic church, a Greek and an Armenian churches in the Old Town near the building of the Town Hall with an old clock on it. There were also two synagogues in this spot – located across the street from one another: the synagogue of tailors and the synagogue of shoemakers.
My maternal grandfather Avraam Melzer went to the big, beautiful, and decorated with old stained glass patterns, located on the steep bank of the Smotrich River, since his childhood. He was born to the family of a tailor in the 1860s and became a popular tailor in the town. His wife, my grandmother Sarrah, whose maiden name I don’t know, was also born in Kamenets-Podolskiy around the same period as my grandfather. My grandmother was a housewife that was common for Jewish families. The Melzer house was in the lower town. This neighborhood was called Karavassary, the district of merchants, craftsmen and balagula cabmen. My grandfather was working from morning till night. My mother told me that he started his day from a morning prayer with his tallit and tefillin on and went to the synagogue. On Saturday and on holidays my grandmother and the children went with him.
hey called my mother Tsina. Including her, there were six children in the family. The boys were given primary education and the girls had no education at all: my grandfather probably believed that the girls didn’t need any education and that they only had to learn to be a good mother and housewife.
In June 1941 she came to Kamenets on vacation with her little son, when the Great Patriotic War began. Ita and her husband and Tuba and her son perished in the shooting of Jews in 1941. Ita’s sons Isaac and Heva perished at the front. Only Ita’s son Gershl returned from the war and lived in Voronezh.
My mother’s younger sister Huva married a Romanian Jew in the early 1900s and moved to Romania. Her husband was a baker and owned a bakery. Before the Revolution of 1917 4 my mother visited her sister in Romania several times. After the Civil War 5 Huva’s family happened to be living abroad. This is all information we had about Huva. Most likely, they all perished during the Holocaust.
I don’t know how my parents met, but there was no shadkhan involved. The Halfin’s family was not happy with Avrum’s choice. Of course, they were not: a rich son married a poor tailor’s daughter. Their wedding took place in Kamenets-Podolskiy in 1904.
All I know about my father’s brothers and sisters is that four of them and their families perished during the Holocaust. Moisey, one of them, moved to Mexico in 1928 and also got lost.
My father went to work in the bakery and soon became one of the best bakers in the town making the most delicious and puffy rolls. My father grew up in a religious family. He and my mother went to the synagogue of tailors, observed Jewish traditions and celebrated holidays.
When WWI began, my father was recruited to Czarist army. He served for a shot while before he was captured by Austrians. My father enjoyed telling about how kind the Austrians, whom he worked for, were. My father returned home in 1917.
This was the hard period of the civil war and pogroms 6. My grandfather and grandmother Avraam and Sarrah Melzer perished in one of the biggest pogroms in early 1921. I don’t know any details – it was hard for my mother to talk about it.
My first childhood memories go back to our small two-bedroom apartment in the center of the town that we rented. Our family was very poor. One room was bigger, but the second one was dark and had no windows. The corridor served as a kitchen: there was a stove and a kerosene stove in it. In 1932 my sister Ena got married and her husband moved in with us. They lived in the dark room and we all plus their kids, who were born one after another, were gadding about in the bigger room. We slept on big iron beds. My father slept on a narrow couch in the corridor. Besides the beds, there was a big dinner table and a wardrobe in the room. The room was decorated with paper napkins – there were particularly many of them on the bookstand with textbooks. There were also old Jewish books on the bookstand: Siddur, Talmud and maybe Tannakh that grandfather Avraam left. My father liked reading books in Hebrew in the evenings. We must have been very poor since only the older children had more or less decent clothes. As for the others, the only places where we were dressed decently were school and the synagogue. We went to the synagogue with our parents on holidays.
My favorite holidays in my childhood were Pesach and Chanukkah, when it was very beautiful at the synagogue. There was a cantor singing, and I always associated attending the synagogue with a holiday. However, we stopped going to the synagogue in 1927, when my father was admitted to the party as a representative of the poor proletariat and we could not go to the synagogue. However, our life did not improve. I remember being often hungry, though we always had enough bread to eat. Our family consisted of ten of us at that time. My mother put just a quarter of a chicken to make soup for the whole family and not a bit more.
I remember how struck I was, when I visited my friend Elka and her parents gave her a quarter of a chicken and she didn’t want it, and her parents gave her money to make her eat it. Elka’s father Josef Lak wasn’t a communist. He made work robes selling them in Kamenets-Podolskiy and neighboring towns, but they were much better off than we. However, at the end of NEP 7, in 1928, Josef had to give away everything he had and he himself was sent away from the town nobody knew where.
My father, being a young communist and a promoted worker, was appointed director of a dining room for workers. My father was very honest and even during famine in 1932-33 8 he never ever brought anything home from his work. My mother begged him to bring at least soup leftovers, but he said that he wanted to sleep quietly and that he could not do any ‘machinations’. His honesty was not appreciated at its true value. An audit discovered extra stocks and accused my father of theft and off-records of stocks. My father felt very hurt, threw his party membership card on their table and quit work. His party management came several times offering their apologies and asking him to resume his work, but he refused. My father became a baker and this probably rescued us during the famine. We always had bread and also helped my older sister Basia, aunt Ita and even any person, who came in to beg for food. I remember my mother giving bread to a man from the street, who cried and kissed her hands. I saw the man again that night – only he was dead lying not far from our house. Early in the morning a special crew picked the dead and drove them to the cemetery where they were buried in common graves – Jews and Christians.
After my father gave up his communist career, the family resumed observation of Jewish traditions. We went to the synagogue on holidays, celebrated Sabbath at home and my father read his religious books again. However, I never saw him praying at home. We didn’t follow kashrut strictly either, though my mother or father never ate pork. As for the kids, we ate pork that our father’s Christian colleagues treated us to since we rarely had meat at home. As for the Sabbath celebration, it went like this: we went to school on Friday and Saturday, but when we came home, we entered a different world. There were challit, kicheleh and many other delicious things on the table that we never had on weekdays. For Pesach we had special kosher crockery and ate many dishes from matzah. We didn’t eat any bread through 8 days of the holiday. My father made ordinary and special egg matzah for the holiday and my mother made our favorite white cake. We particularly liked Kicheleh with matzah and potatoes.
Ita and Gershl’s family was even poorer than ours. Gershl was a harness maker. He also made leather sandals and his older children were assisting him. At first he obtained a license for this work, but when it turned out that he didn’t make enough money to pay for the license, he decided to work without a license. One of their neighbors reported on them and a financial inspector [state officer responsible for identification of illegal businesses] fined Gershl, but since they ha no money to pay the fine, they took away their belongings, which were few: all they had were iron beds with no bed sheets on them, a table and a bench and many pot plants. So they took these away. Gershl kept complaining saying that it was the Soviet power to blame and aunt Ita was calming him down pointing at their kids, who studied well, danced in a choreographic ensemble, and sang in the choir. She said it wasn’t possible during the old regime, and by the way, she was right.
Residents of the town spoke Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Romanian, but we lived in the Jewish surrounding. I remember our janitor was Ukrainian. We only spoke Yiddish, and our non-Jewish friends also knew Yiddish.
I went to the Jewish school in 10 minutes’ walk from our home right by a Ukrainian school in 1928. It was an ordinary Soviet school, but we studied in Yiddish. We didn’t have good practice in Russian and Ukrainian. I remember that our Russian teacher spoke Russian to us in our Russian classes and we replied in Yiddish. We had our textbooks in Yiddish. It was a secular school and we had no religious textbooks.
I was the best pupil at school. I became a pioneer. During the period of famine pioneers went to gather spikelets and I was the best at gathering them. I was awarded a coat from a Joint 9 parcel. This was the first coat in my life. I had worn a thick woolen jacket that my mother knitted for me before.
I loved theater. There was an amateur Jewish theater in Kamenets-Podolskiy. Young people of all nationalities staged Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian classics in the ‘Sovrabotnik’ [Soviet worker] club. Sholom Aleichem’s ‘Tevie the milkman’ was the hit (my future second husband Wolf Muller and his brother Gershl also played in this theater). I watched their performances. I sang in the ensemble lead my Gurfinkel, a music teacher, in the club of the military unit deployed in the town. I had a very good voice, when I was young. There were three violinists, a pianist and a tambourine player in the orchestra: eight musicians from the military units, ad we, 8 girls, sang. We mainly sang Jewish folk songs and Soviet Jewish patriotic songs. However, we had to attend rehearsals in secret to avoid Jewish scandal-mongers, who were not appreciative of young girls going to the military unit. The patriarchal standards of the town were very strong. However, I need to mention here that we really became friends with the military guys and they treated us with much respect.
In 1936 I finished the 7th form and had to quit school to go to work to help my parents. My uncle helped me to become an apprentice in a bank and soon I became an operator there. However, I had to improve my Russian, I realized. I learned Russian and Ukrainian in a short time. In 1939 I was sent for training in Odessa 14, and after finishing this course of training I became an instructor. I worked in the bank till 1941. I became secretary of the Komsomol unit and took an active part in public activities.
This was the period of Stalin’s arrests. My mother was very concerned about my father’s experience in the dining room and about having relatives in America. My parents never discussed the situation in the country with us. We even didn’t know that our distant relative became a victim during this period. My father’s cousin brother Anatoliy Havkin, chief engineer of the Solikamsk plant, was arrested and sentenced to ‘10 years without the right to correspondence’ that meant death sentence. His wife changed her surname back to her maiden’s name and came to her homeland with her 8-year old son to avoid arrest. This boy had no idea what happened to his father. His mother just told him she had divorced him.
Many residents of Kamenets-Podolskiy were arrested. Some of them were accused of having been rich before the revolution, others – of ties with the Bund members 15 an Zionists 16, and somebody else of membership in Maccabi 17, the Zionist organization of young people in the town that existed in the 1920s. People went to sleep in fear that the ‘Black Raven’ (‘Black Mary’) [a special black car called ‘Voron’ – ‘raven’ in Russian, bringing trouble] would not miss their house that night. Fortunately, this disaster had no impact on our family.
Many residents of Kamenets-Podolskiy were arrested. Some of them were accused of having been rich before the revolution, others – of ties with the Bund members 15 an Zionists 16, and somebody else of membership in Maccabi 17, the Zionist organization of young people in the town that existed in the 1920s. People went to sleep in fear that the ‘Black Raven’ (‘Black Mary’) [a special black car called ‘Voron’ – ‘raven’ in Russian, bringing trouble] would not miss their house that night. Fortunately, this disaster had no impact on our family.
I became very fond of cinema like many other young people. There was a big cinema theater named after Vuykov in our town, tickets cost 20 kopeck and we could afford to watch the movies that we liked 5-6 times. They were Soviet comedies ‘Circus’, ‘Merry Guys’ and others. There were also serious movies: ‘Professor Mamlock’ 18, a film about Nazis and Hitler’s hatred of Jews. I remember how deeply impressed we were, though older people, who remembered WWI, used to say this was the Soviet propaganda and that Germans could not be what they were shown like in this movie.
In 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 19 was executed, the moves showing the truth about fascists disappeared from screens. Newspapers and radio talked about Hitler as a friend of the Soviet Union. This was at least strange, but at this young age I didn’t give much thought to such serious things, though there were many things happening to give an impulse to consideration.
When Poland was occupied by fascists from the west and Soviet troops from the east 20 many refugees were coming from there. They were Polish Jews mainly. They didn’t know yet about future shootings of Jews and were escaping from Suppression: ghettos, barbed wire and a ban on trade. Many of these Jews settled down in Lvov [today Lviv, Ukraine], Lutsk, Rovno, and there were some in our town. Some Jews from western parts of Poland wanted to go back home – and were sent in the opposite direction – to Stalin’s camps, to the gulag 21. The convoys of them passed Kamenets-Podolskiy and I can still remember trucks full of people with bags and packs. Many of them perished in the camps, and only during the war the polish Government that escaped to London entered into an agreement with Stalin. The Polish survivors were released and formed the Polish army that was our ally in the war.