Roza Schevchenko was born in Moscow, Russia, on December 3, 1932. She was the only daughter of Michael Barandes and Maria Gubina Barandes. Roza’s mother died in 1936, and Roza’s father was arrested in 1937 by the Stalinist regime and sent to Magadan, Russia, near the Chinese border. Roza was raised by her paternal grandparents, Surka and Abram Barandes, in Mogilev (Mohyliv-Podilskyi), Ukraine.
After the occupation of the town by the Germans in 1941, Mogilev was incorporated into the region of Transnistria. During World War II, the largest concentration of Jews expelled by the Romanians from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria was to be found in Mogilev. In September 1943, these refugees, most of whom were from Bukovina, numbered 13,184. In July 1941, Roza and her grandparents tried to flee the advancing Germans and reached Kopai Gorod, Ukraine, where they stayed for a month and then returned to the Mogilev ghetto. In the spring of 1942 Surka and Abram Barandes and their granddaughter, Roza, were deported to the Pechora concentration camp, near Vinnytsia, Ukraine, where they were imprisoned in very hard conditions. Abram died of hunger and disease in December 1942. Abram’s sister, Rebeka Berenboym, her husband, and her daughter, Klara, were in the camp as well. Klara was taken for forced labor to Vinnytsia, and her father died in Pechora. In the spring of 1943 Surka and Roza Barandes along with Surka’s sister-in-law escaped the Pechora camp and returned to the Mogilev Podolski ghetto. They lived on Poltawskaya and Komsomolskaya Streets. Klara Berenboym managed to escape from Vinnytsia and joined her family in the ghetto. Her mother, Rebeka, died soon before the liberation of gangrene in her legs.
The Red Army liberated Mogilev Podolski in March 1944. Roza’s father returned from his exile in Magadan and took Roza with him, at first to Moscow and later to Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), Ukraine, and then placed Roza with his sister in Izmaïl, Ukraine, 80 miles from Odessa. Roza graduated from high school and technical school. In 1955, she married and settled in Czernowitz. Her father, Michael Barandes, was rehabilitated in 1968 and was allowed to live in Moscow again. Roza’s grandmother, Surka Barandes, died in 1968. Roza, who currently resides in Germany, has a son, Wladyslaw, and two grandchildren who live in Czernowitz, Ukraine.
