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Oral history interview with Tsilya Radovolsky

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1996.A.0287.2 | RG Number: RG-50.198.0001

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    Oral history interview with Tsilya Radovolsky
    Transcript
    T-S-I-L-Y and the last name is R-O-D-O-V-O-L-S-K-Y.
    My name is Rita Gopstein, and the second interviewer is Masha
    Vengerov, and cameraperson is Laurie Sosna.
    [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
    Tsily, please tell us about yourself, about your childhood.
    [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
    There were five of us in our family, my father and mother,
    me, and my younger sister, and my older sister.
    My maiden family-- family name was Taft.
    When the war started, I finished the 10 classes
    in my high school.
    My sister was in Vinnytsia when the war started.
    She was finishing the second year
    of the teacher's university.
    I was 18.
    My younger sister was 14.
    When the war started, I finished 10 classes.
    And the war started five days later, on the 21st of June.
    I haven't even finished my diploma.
    The war started, and nobody needed the diploma.
    My mother was in Kyiv when the war started.
    She was very sick.
    They couldn't do an operation on her in our village.
    It is just a small village.
    They couldn't cure her, so they took her to Kyiv.
    And she was all in bandages.
    She was cut during the operation, and the war started.
    And they started bombing Kyiv, so my father barely
    made it back to our village with my mother.
    And my older sister could not get to the village.
    It took her eight days to get there.
    And our village had only 5,000 people in it.
    And they were all Ukrainian people, much more than 5,000.
    There was a village and the river.
    And in the middle of it, there was like a small village.
    It was a Jewish village.
    There was no means of communication
    when the war started.
    There was no railroad.
    The men were taken to the army immediately.
    And the younger, the boys, were taken on foot.
    But the girls were not needed by anybody.
    Nobody would take them.
    My father was 47, so he was not eligible for the army service.
    But they took him anyway to the labor army.
    And so there was three of us, three girls with a sick mother
    in our hands.
    And we had a Jewish soviet of the village.
    And we served there as nurses to help people who suffered.
    And the soviet-- the soviet--
    soviets were telling us not to leave, that there
    had to be discipline.
    And they were telling us that, in due order,
    they'll give us the papers to leave.
    Those who had cars or horses, they
    grabbed their families and possessions and left.
    But those who had no means of transportation could not move.
    And we were 30 miles from the nearest city, Uman.
    And we all wanted to be with our mother.
    My older sister said that she would not leave my sick mother.
    And so we were telling each other that we have to stay.
    Only a short time passed, less than two months,
    because the harvest was still in the fields.
    We lived in the central--
    on the central street of the village.
    And all the troops were passing through the village
    on that street.
    And our troops always went through that street.
    They told us that the troops would be on the center,
    going through the central street.
    And so we had to stay away, because if they see somebody,
    they will be shooting in the windows and the doors.
    Then the shooting started, the artillery shooting.
    We didn't know whether that was the front coming
    or it was some kind of paratroopers.
    We didn't know if Germans were coming.
    But my husband was--
    my future husband was passing by with the troops.
    We saw him on a tank.
    He said that he didn't know.
    We didn't know who was in front of us, who was behind us.
    When he passed through his house,
    he said goodbye to his family and just left with the troops.
    We heard very strong shooting.
    And we all ran to the street, away from the houses,
    from the central street.
    We were hiding in the halls.
    We couldn't lift our heads.
    And then we got into house where Michael was.
    And then we heard the German speech.
    We knew a lot about what they were doing with the Jews.
    There were a lot of people who passed through our village
    before the war, who left Czechoslovakia
    and Poland, a lot of refugees from Moldavia
    and from Ukraine, a lot of refugees.
    We knew what they were doing with the Jews.
    But we were still staying.
    And then I remember the first German.
    He was very dark, very somber.
    We understood German because I finished the high school.
    He said, for your information, you're--
    you're going to have a very bad future.
    Even that woman with the baby, we're going to kill you all.
    You're going to be killed, all.
    We knew it.
    And from that, our suffering started.
    They were coming to this house with the handguns.
    They would take everything they wanted.
    They beat us.
    We understood where we were.
    We had no-- no exit, no choice.
    We had our mother with us.
    We decided to go to our house from the house we were hiding.
    From the first day, they put the advertisements
    on that all the Jews--
    they immediately declared-- our village was like a half circle,
    and they gathered all the Jews on the one side of village--
    that we had no right to cross the road.
    We all had to have yellow stars on the front--
    on the back and the front so that they could see us
    from the far, that Jews and dogs could not
    walk into public offices, public buildings.
    We had to be in the ghetto, in that part of the village.
    And we have to obey the curfew.
    And even in the ghetto, we have to stay in the house.
    So they could walk in any time and grab us.
    And we were helpless.
    We couldn't leave.
    We couldn't buy any food, nothing.
    And that's when our suffering started.
    We were there for a long time.
    We were in our house.
    And we had a lot of people in our house.
    We had elderly people in our house,
    who came from other villages, who were laying
    in bed, who were very sick.
    And the mother with her children, she was the teacher.
    And I remember, during the time they lived there, they
    had a disease, like a typhus.
    I don't remember the name of it.
    We had no doctors.
    But we couldn't even bury people.
    It was not allowed to bury people.
    We had to do it in the night.
    When the girl died, my father took her, put her in the box
    and carried her at night.
    And we had another about 10 people,
    I don't remember their names, from Moldavia.
    They lived in our house.
    And they always stayed in the house.
    We had to eat something.
    We had to bathe ourselves.
    It was impossible.
    They always walked into the houses.
    They were hiding us because we were girls.
    I was 17.
    My sister was 19.
    We were dressed in rags.
    We couldn't do any laundry.
    It was inhumane.
    Then they started taking us to work with the whips.
    They would knock on the door and take everybody to work.
    And we went to work.
    But usually we would run away before the sunset--
    sun-- in the early morning.
    We thought that maybe the partisans will find us.
    Maybe we can bring some--
    we can be of some use.
    We saw some people, but they were afraid of us,
    and we were afraid of them.
    And we couldn't find anybody.
    My father was from a different village originally.
    And we would hide in some houses of some Russian people.
    There were some Russian people who hid us.
    But before the pogrom, they were taking everything from us.
    So the Germans decided to select the elderly from the Jews.
    They selected people and take everything from the people
    and beat the people if they wouldn't give them.
    And they took the children as hostages.
    And they called my father.
    I forgot to mention that my father was taken into the labor
    army, but he was taken prisoner by Germans near the river
    Dnieper.
    And they took him prisoner.
    But he was lucky that, in his camp, there was a teacher--
    my sister's teacher, who was Russian.
    And he recognized my father.
    And my father knew Russian very well and Ukrainian.
    And he told him that, if you're a Jew, you will never leave.
    There was no food there.
    There was raining-- it was raining.
    It was terrible conditions there.
    And he told him, I will try to get you out of here.
    And he really did.
    He took him out of there, but he couldn't come with him
    because my father actually was a Jew,
    and he was afraid that they could shoot him and my father.
    And they went on foot from Pavlodar.
    And when we were walking, my grandfather and his two sons
    lived in Zaporizhzhia.
    They were opening new lands there.
    And he lived in a 75 parcel in Zaporizhzhia.
    And they went on foot to see what's
    happening with our family.
    And they came there, and there was nobody alive there.
    And when they came to our village,
    they said that all of them were dead.
    So after some time passed, after the war--
    after the war started, we all were in ghetto.
    We couldn't do anything.
    We were hiding.
    Everybody knew us, and they were torturing us.
    They hated us.
    And so it happened that not too long ago there was Soviet power.
    We went to school.
    And most of the people in our school were Ukrainians.
    And when the war started, they stopped recognizing us, even
    our friends.
    The people who were sitting with me on the same table,
    they would not let me in the house.
    They would even show to the Germans that here are the Jews.
    We had nowhere to go.
    And then they started taking hostages.
    They took my father into their service.
    And my father refused.
    They took him to the Kommandantur.
    They beat him up so bad.
    Then the people carried him.
    His back was, like, torn apart.
    There were pieces of meat on his back.
    He could lie only on the back--
    on the stomach.
    He couldn't sit.
    He couldn't eat sitting.
    He could do it only on his knees, only on his knees.
    He was beaten so bad.
    And then they put a huge contribution on our village.
    I can't tell you what sum it was.
    There was not that much money.
    And they declared that if we do not pay,
    they will kill all the Jews.
    And they were trying to sell whatever they could.
    And they did find the money, and that didn't help.
    They were getting ready for the pogrom.
    They wanted to kill all the Jews.
    They were taking us to work.
    We heard that there were pogroms in other places.
    And people were running to our place, to our village.
    And they were always trying to frighten us.
    They would say, in a month there will be a pogrom.
    In two months there will be a pogrom.
    We knew-- we knew what was ahead.
    We knew that we were going to be killed.
    There was no solution, no exit.
    And when they started digging the large grave for the Jews,
    we saw that the commandant, with another German,
    they were driving on the same road all the time.
    It was called Uman Road.
    And there was a column of people following them.
    We didn't know what was happening.
    So we left the ghetto in the evening, past the village.
    And we saw a huge hole, like a grave.
    It was so big that the car to drive into it
    and get out, drive out.
    The car would drive in.
    They would load it with ground, and the car would take it out.
    We knew that that was for us.
    And we couldn't do anything,
    It lasted a long time.
    We knew.
    We told everybody in the ghetto what we saw.
    And one day-- it was three days before Shvues,
    the Jewish holiday, and we were tired of running
    in the forest and the fields.
    And we decided to come home before the holiday,
    to be with our family.
    We couldn't-- we didn't see our family for a long time.
    We were hiding all the time.
    And in that evening when we were all together,
    our father told us that there is not
    going to be nothing good here.
    I can't help you.
    I would take you somewhere, but I don't know where to take you.
    The Germans are everywhere.
    And they all know you, and the polizeis are around.
    And so we were sitting there.
    But my father also said--
    I'll remember his words for the rest of my life--
    that our Jews, we'll be beaten all the time
    until we're going to have our own land, our own country.
    And what I didn't tell you was that we had three sisters,
    and we were when we were hiding on those attics,
    we had like a townhouse.
    And when we were running from one place
    to another, my younger sister was taken by the polizei.
    They took her to the labor camp.
    And we couldn't take her out of there.
    It was like an underground stone digging facility.
    They took her to Ivangorod.
    It's not too far from Uman.
    There were stone-crushing factories there.
    And our mother would leave the ghetto
    and would go there, through the fields,
    to bring her some bread, a loaf of bread.
    But we felt obligated that, out of all our family,
    only she was taken.
    My father and my mother, they would run there.
    And then when we gathered all together before the holiday,
    we went to--
    went to sleep, but it wasn't really
    sleep because we were always waiting.
    We were waiting for the polizei to come in to take us out
    and not for us not to come back.
    And then we did hear the voices, and somebody
    was knocking on the door.
    And we saw the polizei.
    And we had a lot of people in our house.
    And we thought that they were taking us to work.
    And the youngest in the house were me and my sister.
    And my father told us, go hide.
    Maybe they will not take us.
    But if they see you, they'll take you.
    And my father said, I don't know what to do with you.
    We had the house.
    The kitchen was connected to the corridor.
    And there was a path to the basement from the kitchen.
    And so we went to the basement.
    And we saw the legs, the steps.
    And we heard the screams.
    And they took us all.
    We didn't know-- took them all.
    We were left, and we didn't know where to go.
    We thought that they went to work or--
    we didn't know whether they went to work
    or whether they were taken to the grave.
    We didn't know where to go.
    So me and my sister, we opened the door from the basement.
    And we went to the basement to wait what was going to happen.
    And we were like right out of the beds.
    So we went down, and there was a lot of time passed.
    And it started around seven o'clock.
    And around 10:00, we heard the shots.
    When we heard the shots, we knew that something terrible
    happened, that we lost all our relatives.
    But we couldn't help them.
    And we were sitting in the basement for a long time,
    several days, five or six days.
    But we did go out a couple of times to the attic
    to see if there is anybody else who hid in the attic.
    We were crying.
    We were asking for somebody.
    And we were waiting until--
    until--
    They came after the pogrom.
    And they put the--
    they closed all the windows and the doors.
    And then the polizei, the Russian polizei came,
    and they took everything away from the house.
    They opened the door of the basement,
    looking for something for themselves.
    And when they came down, they saw us, all in dirt,
    in shambles, scared.
    I was hitting my head on the wall.
    When they saw us, they kicked us out of there.
    The starosta, the head of the village
    came to kick us out of there.
    The Germans had a law.
    When there was a pogrom, they would call the SS.
    And the SS and the polizei and the Estonians and the Latvian,
    they would surround the places where there were pogroms.
    And it was happened on 27th of May.
    And it was in our village, in Ternovka,
    in Teplyk, and other place.
    And after that, on the third day, they did not kill anymore.
    They kicked us out of the basement
    and told us, go anywhere you want.
    We left, unhappy, scared.
    We didn't know where to go.
    Oh, I forgot one thing.
    When they dig that hole, after that, they
    started digging another one.
    They digged another one.
    They were afraid that there would be some people who
    would run away from that one.
    And so about five minutes from the village,
    they digged another one.
    And when the pogrom was, they took all the sick ones
    and all elderly--
    not that many, because most people were in the army or--
    the boys were in the army.
    And me and my sister left the basement.
    Using our intuition, we went to the direction of the grave.
    But we didn't make it there because we saw the polizei.
    And so we turned to the field.
    It was 27th of May, and there was still some bread
    on the fields.
    But it was pretty far from the village.
    And we laid down in the field.
    We did not know where to go.
    And we laid there for a couple of hours.
    And we saw a noise--
    we heard a noise.
    We heard that there were some more people there.
    There was another two people from our village
    who also ran away, just like ourselves.
    And we started talking to them.
    And they knew more than we did.
    We laid there for a couple of days in the field.
    We knew that we lost our whole family.
    There was an elderly man who--
    there was elderly people, and their children were lost.
    And then there was one polizei from our village,
    who was hitting us all.
    He came for us, and he said, who let you live?
    What am I going to do with you?
    Why didn't you die?
    So we came back to the ghetto.
    So we all came back to the ghetto.
    But they did not allow us to come back where we lived.
    They gave us two, three houses for all of us.
    There was only 12--
    about 200 people left out of the 5,000.
    And they let us come back to the ghetto,
    to the two or three houses, not more than that.
    And we came to this smaller ghetto.
    We knew.
    We found out what happened.
    It turned out that, from that grave,
    they left nine people, the specialists
    because the Jews were shoemakers,
    various kinds of special--
    had special skills.
    And they left nine people.
    My future husband's father was left.
    His whole family was killed.
    And so there were nine people left.
    They saw these nine people.
    They took them back to the village.
    They gave them a separate house, but only one house so
    that they could take them back any time.
    So these people, they would keep them in a special house
    to serve the German soldiers, including the watch master--
    the watch repairer, who was the father of my friend,
    my girlfriend.
    And he asked for us to live with him.
    His wife died, and his two children.
    And his daughter was saved.
    So my girlfriend was alive, his daughter.
    He was very intelligent person.
    He knew Pushkin and Lermontov.
    He took care of us as if we were his children because he knew us
    from the childhood.
    Some Ukrainians also took pity on us because we were orphans.
    And we lived with him for a long time.
    And then they told us to go to ghetto with him.
    And we all stayed there a long time.
    We tried to run away from there.
    We were hiding after the first pogrom, when we
    saw that it was getting so bad.
    Once we passed through the village, it was called Antonov.
    It was about 20 kilometers from Ternovka.
    And the peasant lady, the peasant woman who did not
    know us or our family, but she just saw us,
    and she took pity on us that we were very happy.
    And she took us to our house.
    Her name was Marina Svishchenkova.
    She was a saint, a saint woman.
    She took me and my sister, and she put us in her attic.
    And she had a son, Ivan, and her daughter, Zhenya.
    They would have killed them all.
    But she was Ukrainian, and she took care of us.
    And she would give us some bread, which she didn't have.
    And she would let us on the fresh air, children, children.
    And we would eat some wild cherry
    because we had nothing to eat.
    And we stayed there for about six weeks.
    And during that time, there was a huge pogrom in Uman.
    And we had to run away from there.
    And we couldn't go back to our ghetto.
    But not only in her house, we were hiding in other places.
    And we had another woman, Maria Shakel.
    Yeah, she also hid us.
    When they found out in ghetto, then people
    were trying to run away to Bershad.
    Then she went to find out what's happening.
    She told us that they hang three people, the father, and his son,
    and another person.
    Only because they wanted to go to Bershad, they hanged them.
    And so she kept us.
    We were in the village for a long time.
    Then the teacher who helped my father leave the camp,
    he respected us very much because we were his students.
    We were very good students, me and my sister.
    And he would come to our ghetto in secret.
    And he would tell us, go, go, go all the way,
    because there's going to be another pogrom,
    and you're going to die.
    my
    And my sister would always tell me,
    why is he putting salt on our wounds?
    We know that we're going to die, but we have nowhere to go.
    If we try to leave, they're going to kill us.
    And once, it was close to the New Years
    or after the New Years.
    He came on his horse.
    He had a radio.
    It was banned.
    And we had no idea what's going on the front or in the world.
    But we saw the troops.
    We saw the-- but we didn't know what was happening.
    We had no news.
    We had nothing to read.
    One day he came.
    He said, don't stay here.
    They are going to kill you.
    Go where your eyes can see.
    Just don't stay here.
    He came.
    It was a weekend.
    He said-- he came, he said--
    the Ukrainians were moving freely.
    They were not being killed.
    They were like in their house, like in their country.
    It was only for the Jews.
    And he was free.
    He was walking free.
    He had his house intact.
    Only we were torn apart.
    He said that, tonight, come to my house.
    He lived three kilometers from Ternovka.
    He said, come to me late at night.
    Stay in my house.
    We have to talk.
    We said-- we decided, with my sister, we have nothing to lose.
    It might be a pogrom this night.
    We will spend one night in his house.
    Maybe he will feed us, and we will sleep in good bed.
    We went there under the dark.
    There was another woman there, my future husband's aunt.
    He was a friend of hers.
    And he was hiding her.
    She was in a concentration camp.
    He carried her away from the concentration camp.
    And my sister was hanged in Tarasivka, from Ivangorod.
    They transferred her there.
    Because she couldn't work, so they hanged her.
    They hanged her in Tarasivka before the judgment days.
    And that's how I found out, because Maria Sheketova's
    son was going there every day to carry the stones.
    And so he was carrying the stones.
    And he told us that your sister was hanged on the judgment day.
    So when we went to the teacher, we saw the woman.
    They met us really well.
    They fed us.
    They cleaned-- they bathed us.
    They put a good bed for us.
    And he told us everything which was going on.
    He told us, for your information,
    there's very little time.
    The Germans will be beaten.
    All your family is dead.
    Your father is dead.
    And you need to survive.
    I will help you however I can.
    He said, you go to sleep.
    And tomorrow morning, early morning, I will wake you up.
    And he did.
    It all was happening in the occupied territory.
    There were Germans everywhere.
    He could have been killed for that, and ourselves.
    But he was risking his life and his wife's life
    And his children's life.
    But no, he did not have any children.
    But it was a noble act anyway.
    I could not forget that.
    In the morning he woke us up, and that woman.
    He put us on the sleighs.
    I will go with you.
    We did not know what he was about to do.
    We trusted him.
    He took us about seven, six, seven
    kilometers from the village to another village.
    It was called [RUSSIAN].
    The dark.
    He took us to the brother of his sister.
    And he took us there, and he said that he
    was going to go back home.
    And then he told his brother to send us on the same road
    where all the peasants were going to the bazaar, to the fair
    so that we would be going with the people.
    And in the house where he took us,
    they knew our grandfather and our family.
    So they were crying for us.
    They took pity on us.
    So we took that elderly woman, and three of us
    went on that road towards the Ternovka--
    Tyrlovka.
    We came there.
    There were polizei there, and some Jews.
    There was no pogroms.
    And Germans didn't get there.
    It was a very far away village.
    And we knew there were Jews there.
    We came to one house, which was a Jewish house.
    And they told us, go to Bershad.
    Bershad was considered-- just like the river Bug would divide
    our region, Bershad was considered like--
    Bershad was considered Transnistria.
    It wasn't German territory.
    It was the territory given to Romanians.
    And there wasn't that much killing there.
    There were Romanians there.
    And so our teacher decided to get us
    to the other side of the Bug River,
    to the Romanian territory.
    So when we came to the Tyrlovka, into that Jewish family,
    there was a Jewish lady, Sonya.
    And we told her that we want to go to Bershad to be saved.
    And she said, you can't stay in my house.
    There are a lot of Russian people coming to my house.
    She was a tailor.
    You can't stay here.
    They will see strangers.
    And there was some Ukrainian guy who saw us,
    and he knew who we were.
    He said, I will take them to my house.
    They'll stay in my house.
    We stood-- we were staying in the attic, on the mill.
    And we had to keep quiet.
    And we were afraid that the polizei
    would take us and kill us.
    So we sat there until the person, who was a Ukrainian
    and who was saving people by taking them across the frontier,
    he gathered us together and took us across the Bug at night.
    It was a long distance.
    We had no shoes.
    We were almost naked.
    It was ice underneath.
    And there was a little bit of land.
    And we were barefoot.
    There was about eight of us.
    I don't remember exactly.
    And he led us to the Bug River.
    There was Germans on one side and Romanians on the other side.
    It was like a frontier.
    And some people were killed on the frontier,
    and we had to cross the frontier.
    And we were going there, hoping that he
    would take us across the frontier, across the border.
    And when we saw the Romanian patrols,
    he went back and left us there.
    And we couldn't go back.
    We were trying to save ourselves.
    And if we go ahead, we could be caught by the Romanians.
    So the men went ahead first.
    The two men went ahead first.
    And so we reached the Bug River.
    It wasn't a very big river.
    But if it wasn't frozen, we couldn't have swam across.
    But Bug was basically frozen.
    There was a little bit of water, but you could walk through.
    And so we went through it one person at a time.
    And when we got across, the people
    were waiting for us on the other side.
    But we couldn't go to Bershad, all of us.
    We spread into two to three-people groups.
    And me and my sister went together.
    And so we were walking through some back roads
    to get to Bershad.
    And when you cross, there was the village Ust'e and some other
    village.
    It was about six kilometers, where
    we had to pass without being seen, to get to Bershad.
    We arrived to Bershad.
    And when we came to Bershad, we crossed the bridge.
    There was a lot of people there, from Moldavia, Western Ukraine,
    Belz, from Belz, from Poland, a lot of people.
    They did not want to kill them in their territory,
    so they took them--
    took them away.
    They kicked them out to the Bershad territory,
    to have them die there because there was a lot of disease
    and there was nothing to eat.
    There was typhus all over.
    People were lying one on top of the other,
    there were so many dead.
    who died.
    And when we came, there was a lot, a lot of typhus.
    But it was only in the ghetto, in the Jewish ghetto.
    And people started fighting with the disease.
    It was 1943 when we came to Bershad.
    When we came there, it was very hard to make it there.
    They would also take us to work.
    But there was no Germans.
    Romanians did not kill Jews.
    They would take the girls.
    They would ask for presents.
    But in the beginning, they did not kill.
    It was-- we felt so bad that all of our family was dead.
    And it was only 35 kilometers from Bershad.
    And now only me and my sister were left.
    It wasn't too long, about around March,
    they gathered up everybody from the second pogrom.
    They gathered up everybody except those
    who were in Bershad.
    They gathered them up into a big house where we used to live.
    And there was one murderer, lieutenant, the Germans,
    and the polizei.
    They surrounded that house.
    They put a machine gun and shot everybody
    in the house, everybody.
    But out of all these people, there
    was my girlfriend whose father helped us before.
    She stood near her father with her sister.
    And when they were shooting, she had a heart attack.
    She had sick heart.
    And so she fell with everybody else.
    But she just lost consciousness.
    She just laid there.
    And in the evening, she came back to life,
    and she saw the corpses.
    And she couldn't-- and she was crying.
    She was screaming.
    And there was another woman who answered
    her screams, who also was alive, who also came to life,
    came back to consciousness at night.
    So they decided where to go.
    Well, there were corpses everywhere,
    so they came out of the house.
    And they were staying in the village Chernavka.
    And so they went.
    This same woman who saved her before,
    in Chernavka, that woman helped them
    to cross the Bug River as well.
    And when she-- they came to Bershad, and she found us.
    And she was all in blood on her shoulder.
    She was all in blood.
    And she told us about the tragedy.
    We felt pity for our own family, but we also
    felt so bad that her father did not leave with us.
    He could have left with us, with his children,
    with his daughters.
    He was like a saint.
    He said that if I leave, they would kill everybody else.
    He was a very good watch master.
    And he said that, if I'm going to go,
    they're going to come there, and they're
    going to kill-- they're going to kill everybody.
    So we were very, very sad.
    So we found our countrymen from Ternovka,
    who came to Bershad before us.
    So we stayed in their basement.
    So they offered us a room near the toilet,
    near the city toilet.
    In that room we went there.
    And there were people called Sorokiny
    who lived there, a son, a father, and daughter,
    a total of five people.
    And they took us in.
    They took us in.
    And when they would sleep, we would sleep near the doors,
    near the door on an iron bed with the wooden--
    but when they would have to leave,
    we would have to wake up and let them pass through the door.
    So we would have to wake up.
    And then another woman from Bershad took us in as well.
    She invited us in.
    There was four families living in her room.
    And we also had a corner near the door.
    We were waiting for the pogrom every day.
    There was nothing to eat.
    And it was impossible to leave.
    And we lived there for--
    and we got sick with the typhus.
    It was no wonder.
    We lived in terrible conditions, and we got sick.
    And there was a Jewish hospital in Bershad,
    which was run by the Jews, Jewish doctors.
    And so they took us there, to the hospital.
    And we needed good food, but we had only dried bread.
    And when we would come back home, we would get sick again.
    And they shaved our heads.
    And everybody was saying, those dead people, those zombies.
    At the end of 1943, beginning of 1944,
    we knew that the front was coming back.
    But still they were killing people.
    They would send people to Mykolaiv, to the concentration
    camp to work.
    Some people were sent to--
    to-- those people who came from Moldavia,
    they would not touch them.
    But they would take only the people
    who came from German side.
    And they would send them there, and they would die there.
    But they did not touch us.
    Maybe they did not know we were there.
    We were very sick.
    We couldn't walk.
    And in 1944, on the 12th of March--
    it was about the 6th of March, we saw that the airplanes were
    dropping barrels with gasoline.
    They were getting ready to burn the city.
    But under Uman, there was a huge battle.
    There was a huge battle, and they were running.
    And that's what saved us.
    We saw, on the 12th of March, in the morning,
    we saw the Romanians and the Germans behind them.
    They were all dressed in blankets, in their underwear.
    They were running.
    We were triumphant.
    We saw them, and we saw them defeated.
    And in the morning, we saw Russian speech.
    But people would not take us.
    Nobody needed us.
    We were-- we were dying.
    They thought that they were zombies.
    We were dead.
    But we were so happy.
    We were freed.
    We were liberated.
    The German occupation was over.
    But we did not appreciate--
    we did not care that we were in the middle
    of the battle, that Germans were trying
    to take the territory back.
    We thought that we were liberated.
    We put our rags on and decided to go back to our village.
    But there was nobody there.
    There was just the grave.
    And we were sick, torn apart.
    We decided to go back home.
    We took our hands.
    I had one boot on.
    And we were holding hands, and it was very hard to go.
    And we saw the troops going.
    We went for-- we were walking for several days.
    We had no energy.
    But the soldiers saw us.
    They would give us some bread.
    And we reached our village.
    We did not expect anything.
    We tried to find somebody, somebody who came back.
    And luckily, fortunately, we found some people.
    But by the way, in our village, there was not a single Jew left.
    There was not a single Jew who was left.
    They even exterminated those people
    who had their spouses being Jewish
    and their children and their grandchildren,
    even if there were only half Jewish.
    Not a single person was left, not a single Jew.
    And when we came back, there was another family
    came back, who also left across the Bug with us.
    And we came to them, and they let us in.
    We had nowhere to go.
    And we decided to go to our house, whatever was left of it.
    We came back to our house.
    There was dirt up to our ankles.
    We couldn't get in the house.
    They did not-- nobody knew who we were.
    They were afraid to let us in.
    And we said we were Radovolsky.
    That was our house.
    And the people who lived in our house, they were--
    they were Germans.
    They were Germans who lived in Russia.
    They took our house.
    Even when we were in our house, they
    were waiting for us to be killed.
    And they were fixing things, waiting for us to be taken away.
    And they said, who are those beggars?
    We were very upset.
    And when their senior came out, we said, this is our house.
    They killed all our family.
    We said-- we told him, ask anybody around.
    This is our house.
    Ask our neighbors.
    They knew that they would say who we were,
    so they let us in the evening.
    They said, we will find out who you are.
    But we know who you are.
    You would not have any documents,
    but we'll find out in the archive in the [RUSSIAN]
    tomorrow.
    And so we let them live in our house
    because they knew who we were.
    And so other people started coming back
    from Bershad and other places.
    We were accepting everybody in.
    And we had a mission.
    There were a lot of people who died,
    but there were a lot of letters which were coming in, asking
    maybe that somebody survived.
    And they were asking us to do the list of everybody.
    And there are a lot of people who
    are in that grave whom we do not know.
    We were not sure.
    But we were making the list.
    It wasn't very-- but we found out that there should be 2,400
    people in the grave.
    And we lived in Ternovka.
    We should have left because there was blood of our family
    there.
    But we lived there.
    My sister went to work, to the school.
    No.
    She was working in a dairy factory.
    And then we decided that she had to go back to school.
    And she finished two years in university.
    So she went to Vinnytsia.
    And I was left in my house.
    And the lady, some friends of her-- family of her
    was found in Tashkent, so she left.
    And I was just staying in my house.
    And then my sister was in Vinnytsia.
    She was studying in Vinnytsia Teachers' University.
    And in 1944, in October, my future husband
    came back from war.
    He was an invalid.
    He was wounded.
    And we got married.
    And so I was staying with my husband in Ternovka.
    My sister was visiting us.
    And there was another guy, who came back
    from the war, who loved my sister for a long time.
    He came back from the front for a vacation,
    and they got married too.
    And he took her to Uman, to his parents.
    And they did not live there for a long time.
    They moved to Lwów.
    But she was still studying in Vinnytsia.
    And me and my husband lived in Ternovka until 1953.
    I tried to get into the university.
    I studied for a long time.
    And then we went to Odessa, and my son got sick.
    And I dropped out.
    I studied for two years.
    And my sister finished the university.
    She had two children.
    Her husband died in an auto accident.
    And she lived there, and she worked there.
    She was a good person.
    She was a good teacher.
    In 1983, she died.
    And I was left alone with my family.
    I had a good family.
    I have a daughter and a son.
    I have a husband.
    My son has two children.
    My son left Russia a long time ago.
    We were separated for 10 years.
    I was crying all the time.
    It was a hard torment.
    After all, these tortures in my younger years,
    now I had this separation.
    I was dreaming about joining him in America.
    And finally, I joined my family together.
    I don't need anything.
    I don't need any riches.
    I have my children, my family.
    I help my son to raise his children, my grandchildren.
    I'm very happy right now.
    I'm very grateful to this country for taking me so well.
    My children are working.
    I go to school, study the language, the English language.
    I don't think I can say any more.
    Tell us the name of your father and the date of his birth.
    My father, Moses Leontievich Taft, was born 1893.
    He died when he was 48 years old.
    My mother was born in 1900.
    Her mother's maiden name was Feglendler.
    She was 41 years old when the war started.
    Her name was Khaika Feglendler And my sister's name
    was Roza Moiseevna Taft.
    She was 19 when the war started.
    My younger sister's name was Khona.
    She was-- she was born in 1928.
    We all studied in the school.
    I finished seven classes of Jewish school,
    and they closed it.
    And so I went to the Ukrainian school,
    and I finished 11 years total.
    My sister finished the middle school--
    the high school, 10 classes.
    And then she went to the teachers university.
    And then after the war, she finished it.
    What else?
    There was about 15 boys in the Jewish school.
    And they all were taken to the front, and most of them
    died at war, not in the ghetto.
    And most of my girlfriends died in the ghetto.
    All my friends died.
    All my girlfriends died in the ghetto.
    It was a big village, approximately 6,000 people,
    very organized.
    All the Jews started the power station.
    We had a radio station.
    It was a big village.
    They all died.
    It was a terrible place.
    I don't know the coincidences.
    Some people survived by chance, but very few, only few people.
    Those people who I walked through across the Bug,
    they survived.
    Some people, they're in Israel.
    And some people are in Canada and in Los Angeles.
    But the mass of the people, they're all in the ground.
    In Teplyk, we have our people dead, all the--
    we were the prisoners, and they live like in their own land.
    It was only against the Jews.
    One day we were the citizens of the village,
    and the next day we were--
    it was impossible to understand.
    Just because we were Jews, we were the prisoners,
    just because we had the Jewish star.
    You've heard how many people were hiding me,
    but most of the time I was in the ghetto.
    I was afraid that they would take us.
    And we were saved by the miracle.
    It was just a miracle.
    It's a huge-- it's a big, big tragedy.
    It's impossible to describe.
    And those events are 50 years old.
    It was 50 years ago, and I can't remember everything.
    I could tell more, but it's impossible to understand
    what we went through and what our peoples went through.
    It wasn't the Ukrainians.
    It wasn't the Russians.
    It was the Jews.
    They were taking people to Germany
    to work, the Russian people.
    But in our village, nobody was saved.
    It was just very few.
    It was only the Jewish people.
    I can't even tell you.
    In that grave where all our people are lying,
    me and my husband and some of-- and a couple of other people,
    we--
    it's a big place with the dead people under it.
    And one person who ran there after the shooting,
    he saw that the ground was moving up
    after they buried the people there because our neighbors,
    they would send their cattle to eat there, to graze there.
    And then all the people who were relatives of the dead,
    we made a huge--
    we built the obelisk.
    And those people were coming, and they were breaking it down.
    They would organize to come there and break it down.
    They were doing this.
    There were some people who were saving us.
    Those for the saint people.
    I call them saints.
    I respected them always.
    I would even come there from Odessa and meet them.
    And I respected them a lot for their kindness,
    for their humanity, for the risk they took.
    They were taking risk.
    They were risking their lives.
    But other people were not humane.
    My aunt, sister of my father, two of them,
    she had five children and a husband.
    The other had two children and a husband.
    She was a guest when the war started,
    and she got into the grave.
    But the other aunt, she went to the restroom for one second,
    and the Germans took the children.
    And she did not know.
    Maybe she would have.
    But her neighbor, her neighbor came out and said
    to the Germans, here she is.
    Take her.
    She's right there.
    Do you remember what was her name?
    Her name was Roza Daimon.
    That was my aunt.
    And the neighbor's name was Sasha Kolesnikova.
    She showed to the Germans, here she is.
    Take her.
    It's unbelievable.
    Do you remember the names?
    Fira, Munia, Danya.
    Her husband was Bel, Aunt Sarah, with the girl, Rayechka,
    I think.
    And they all got-- they all were killed.
    And after the war, there was only a grandmother left.
    If you remember, the Zaporizhzhia, the fields there,
    they were evacuated.
    They were not killed.
    And so most of them were evacuated, and my grandmother
    and her daughter.
    And when our territories were freed,
    liberated, they came back to their land.
    And her daughter died.
    And so the grandmother was left with the little grandson,
    who was about six years old.
    And she had also nowhere to go.
    So she came to us, to me and my sister.
    But my sister was not there anymore.
    And she brought her grandson, and she was raising him.
    The boy was seven years--
    seven years old.
    He went to school.
    And he lived with us all the time.
    And then I was married, and my husband
    was the teacher of the military discipline school.
    And we decided to leave that village.
    There was too much there.
    My husband had some relatives in Odessa, and so we went there.
    And when we decided to go, the grandmother died with us.
    My husband, his father married another woman,
    and they took us to Odessa.
    And there I had a son.
    And the boy lived with my aunt.
    And out of the whole family, there
    was three of us left, me, my sister, and my cousin--
    my stepbrother.
    And now there is only me and my stepbrother in Russia.
    He is old.
    And we are not considered to be direct relatives, so they are
    not going to let them in here.
    And he can't go to Israel because he's not
    too old to get pension there.
    And he can't find work there, so he is in Zaporizhzhia.
    Do you have any more questions?
    Do you remember your girlfriends who died in that grave?
    Chona Umanskaya, Mania Schnaider, Sheiva Zilberman.
    And their sisters and brothers, my friends.
    Several other girlfriends of mine, one left to Tashkent.
    She was evacuated.
    Another friend of mine crossed the front line,
    and she also got to Tashkent.
    The other one lives in Germany.
    She evacuated.
    She also was evacuated to Tashkent,
    and she emigrated later to Germany.
    But a lot of my friends died there--
    Chaika Raitin.
    Oh, Sheiva had a brother.
    He's Moisha Zilberman.
    In front of us, they lived in front of us.
    Vova.
    I don't remember-- and Sarah--
    I don't remember their last names.
    And Chaika Rudoi, across from-- one house from us--
    Chaika-- I can't remember--
    Chaika Guberman, my friend.
    And a lot more I don't remember.
    My head is dizzying a lot.
    I can tell you.
    [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
    What is your name, one more time?
    [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
    I'm from Ternovka, in the region of Vinnytsia.
    My father was born in Seredynka, 5 kilometers from there.
    It's a small village.
    It's not a city.
    There is no railroad, no big businesses, no big plants.
    There were two schools in the beginning,
    but then there was only one school, one big school.
    What did your father do?
    He was helping to build roads.
    And he was a farm worker, everything.
    He could do anything.
    He grew bread.
    He was a peasant.
    And my mom was the same way.
    She worked in a kindergarten.
    She was taking care of children, all the children.
    But last years, my mom was very sick.
    Then she could not do hard labor,
    so she worked in a kindergarten.
    We had a house.
    We had a-- we had a very good orchard.
    My father bought some trees, and the orchard was maturing.
    And he put a dog so that the neighboring peasants could not
    come in and steal things from there.
    And that was the memory of my father.
    And then there were Germans who lived there.
    And they have destroyed it while they lived there.
    We had a cow, pigs, chickens.
    We were doing a good job.
    My parents did not deserve to be buried alive.
    And not only my parents, everybody--
    everybody was doing something.
    There were tailors, and shoemakers, electricians.
    Everybody was doing something.
    What else?
    You were telling about the cold basement.
    Can you tell us more about the basement?
    It was a very deep basement.
    And my father dig it.
    We kept food in there, fruits, vegetables, cabbage,
    watermelons.
    And that was a place where they were kept.
    It was very cold in there.
    It had fallen a couple of times.
    When the war started, there were troops
    passing through our village.
    And the walls had fallen two times.
    My father fixed it during the war.
    He would put some pillars under it, in it.
    And so we went downstairs.
    We went there.
    We had nowhere else to go, until they kicked us out of there.
    Because the mayor of the village, who was
    placed by Germans, he knew us.
    People knew each other.
    And since they were not killing people anymore,
    the polizei beat us up and kicked us out.
    What could be in a basement?
    We were lying down several days.
    We put the rag on the ground and sat there.
    What could we do?
    Nothing.
    Did they beat you?
    Of course.
    How could they not beat Jews.
    They beat us with whips, and they kicked us.
    They could not kill our souls.
    They could not kill us because at that time,
    there was no more SS.
    The Germans were not there.
    The SS was not there.
    Those who were killing, they were not
    there, who were shooting from the machine gun
    at the hole where they were--
    it was at night when they were taking
    people out of their houses.
    Polizei were taking part in it, the polizei from our village.
    They beat us, of course.
    They did not need us.
    But they did not kill us, as a fact.
    By coincidence, we have lived.
    But who would know?
    There are so few of us.
    What kind of whips did they use?
    The rubber ones with the hard point on the end.
    It would rip the meat off.
    We had scars.
    They beat us because we were girls.
    When there was nobody, and we had no defense,
    they were taking--
    they were insulting us.
    We had to run away and hide from Germans and from polizei.
    It was an unbearable situation.
    From time to time, they would take us to work.
    And they would try to hit us there.
    They would kick us in the head.
    But the SS was not there.
    So we survived the first year like that during the summer,
    until they killed most of the people.
    After the pogrom, there was only about 200 left in the village.
    Those who were specialists, those who were absent by chance
    at that day--
    I don't remember how many.
    It was was like 160 people.
    And some people left to Bershad.
    And the rest were killed in the other pogrom,
    in the second pogrom.
    There was one person left, Lida, who was the witness.
    They took her to the process, to the formal process
    after the war.
    And she would show every polizei.
    That pogrom-- that pogrom was done mainly by the polizei.
    Of course, there were some Germans,
    but mainly they were polizei.
    And then the relatives of the polizei
    started to try to attack her, and she had to leave.
    She had to cover herself.
    She married, and she left, and she
    stopped coming to the village.
    And we lost all the contact with her.
    And for the last 30 years, I didn't
    know where she is because her husband was an officer,
    military officer, and because, probably,
    because his wife was under occupied territories,
    and she does not appear anymore.
    But we have to tell anyway.
    We need to know.
    It's our responsibility for people to know.
    We could not revenge the Germans.
    Who are we to do that?
    The only thing, that they gave us some compensation.
    They should have given it to us when
    we came back from the ghettos.
    But they said that-- but our government
    said that we did not need the money.
    Me and my sister, we came in two rags on ourselves.
    And they said that we did not need anything.
    And about food, who Fed us?
    Who gave us drinks and food?
    We could not even leave the house.
    If we could crawl somewhere, we could not find a single thing
    in our house.
    And then after the second pogrom, we lived an hour--
    we left our house.
    We lived far away.
    What did we have to eat?
    What did we have to wear?
    When they took us there, after the time we spent in the fields,
    we were naked.
    Some women found some old--
    what do you call it--
    coat, sort of coat-- jacket.
    And two of them sat down, and they sewed it, sewed the-- sewed
    the jacket.
    They made the jacket, so we could live somehow
    because it was cold, and we had nothing to come out in.
    That's how we lived for the four years.
    It's clear why they couldn't recognize us,
    because we would look different.
    We were not even paupers.
    We were naked paupers.
    We did not know where to spend the night.
    We expected-- expecting to be killed.
    We had to steal some vegetable.
    And we could not--
    we could steal some vegetables, and we could do it only
    when some people would leave and leave some fire
    so we could have some fire.
    We could go for a week without any food.
    Who would be-- who was interested in us?
    There were so many people, and we
    had nothing to eat, nowhere to clean ourselves.
    We got the typhus.
    And constant fear-- constant fear.
    But we survived-- by accident.
    What else?
    Maybe I should go now.
    The Jew who worked for the polizei, with the whip--
    When they were trying to take people from the village,
    people were--
    a lot of stuff was taken from the people.
    The last of what they had was taken from them.
    He would come often when we were in the ghetto.
    And we had nothing to cover ourselves.
    He could come and take the last blanket at the winter.
    Not everybody could agree to do that.
    But if not him, somebody else had to do it.
    He was in prison before the war.
    They let him go when the war started.
    He was a thief or a gangster, not from the good people.
    And he agreed.
    And he was doing it.
    He would get everything they needed.
    When I went to Bershad, he had a wife.
    He had second wife.
    He had a wife and a son.
    And he had a father, and the mother died.
    When I left, he was still alive, and his father was alive.
    He was drinking until, really, he died from alcoholism,
    from overdrinking.
    He died because he overdrank.
    And his father was killed after the second pogrom.
    But he was helping the Germans.
    Somebody had to do it.
    They would have had somebody else to do it.
    They did not want to do everything themselves.
    But they did a lot of things themselves.
    But the official commandant did not
    want to go through the houses.
    He knew where to send soldiers.
    He would get everything through him.
    But some people did not want to go for it.
    And he went for it.
    His father was killed.
    They killed everybody.
    They did not count anybody.
    They did not consider anybody.
    Murderers.
    Monsters.
    They could not have done so many crimes if the local population
    did not help them.
    They had to do it.
    I told you that my aunt would not
    have been killed if the neighbors would not
    have shown her.
    But the fact that she had lived all her life with that person,
    and she knew that they were taking them to be killed.
    She knew about the pogrom.
    But they saw.
    They knew that there was a pogrom.
    And she showed her to Germans.
    So it's clear.
    You said the Germans could walk naked.
    Very simple, the first time they came in, 22nd of June the war
    started.
    Around August, I think they were there.
    It was warm.
    It was very warm.
    And they would get naked--
    no underwear.
    And they had to wash themselves.
    There was no sewage.
    There was no piping.
    They would take it from the well.
    They would put like a machine, like a--
    they would put some machine, and they would wash their clothes,
    and they would wash themselves.
    They were doing it naked.
    There were women walking around, children.
    He could go to the restroom in the middle of the street.
    They did not count us as people.
    They could ask for a couple of women.
    They did not consider us people, like we did not exist.
    She would show, with everything they did, that we were not
    people, just like that.
    In Bershad, Romanians also asked for girls.
    But there were people who were polizei, Romanian polizei, who
    were Romanians, who watched the order.
    But there were Romanian Jews who could talk to them.
    And they could find girls for them who would do it,
    who would agree to do that.
    But whoever was in the ghetto, they did not kill.
    A lot of people survived.
    But in order to survive, we came through the Bug River
    without anything.
    And we had nothing to live on.
    Our neighbor had two pieces of cloth from our mother.
    We took that, and we exchanged it for the potatoes.
    And it was very, very expensive to us.
    We would cut the potato, and would cook it
    on a piece of iron.
    That's how we survived for a year.
    No wonder we had the typhus.
    And the same in Ternovka--
    nothing to wear, cold, winter.
    I don't know if the unhappiness makes the people stronger,
    but we did not have any colds.
    We did not cough.
    We did not have--
    we did not have any of that.
    We were in the most terrible conditions in Bershad.
    We slept on the floor.
    And we had two rugs.
    But what kind of hygiene could be there?
    We lived near the door, and the door would not close,
    and there were holes in it.
    And I don't know what kind of defense a human being can work,
    can have.
    We were healthy.
    We could fight the disease faster.
    We were young.
    Did you have the menstruation?
    Of course.
    It was very hard.
    Everything was a problem.
    Everything was a problem, big problems.
    You go to-- you go to a person for yourselves.
    When we lived at our friend's, Lida, father's house,
    there was a lot of books there to read,
    but there was nowhere to go.
    And then they made us go to the ghetto.
    And in one room, there was the father of my husband, two girls,
    and the sister, and another shoemaker, another old man.
    They were making ropes.
    People who can make ropes from flax,
    from what they would make clothes from,
    but they would make ropes.
    It was like a clan, a group of people, strick works,
    strick dress.
    So they left one person as a specialist.
    He was very old.
    But there was no people like that around.
    Those people were unique.
    They did not have those people from Russians.
    But they needed the ropes to tighten the bags
    and get the bread, the grains out.
    And they had nobody to fill their positions with.
    So we had so many people in the same room, Lida, me, my sister,
    my sister, another girl, my husband's aunt.
    All the women slept in the middle,
    and they slept around them, around the corners.
    How?
    Well, where could you wash yourself?
    No water, no cold-- no hot water.
    The shoemakers would get something.
    But we were not their relatives.
    We were not their children, and we were shy.
    We were suffering.
    I cannot even understand how I could survive this.
    And of course, you can't compare that health and my health now.
    But even the moral side of it, they did not consider us people.
    Every day we had death hanging on our heads.
    When you go to fight and you can get a bullet,
    you know why you go and fight.
    And we were just waiting for the pogrom every night.
    What for?
    My father was always saying, if there is God
    and he sees that a lot of people are being buried alive,
    he should send the iron on these people's heads.
    And all those villages, in Teplyk and Gaisin and Uman,
    throughout the city, there were many pogroms, many times--
    Babi Yar.
    All of it happened in one time during the occupation.
    A lot of people died.
    And in our village, it was in a smaller, to a smaller degree.
    And in bigger places, there was more Jews.
    So what else?
    What was the name of your teacher?
    He was a saint.
    He need to be written into Yad Vashem.
    His name was Michailo Naumovich Martynuk.
    His wife was Irina Grigorievna Martynuk.
    He was a teacher for many years.
    He was teaching Russian language.
    When I came from Jewish school to Russian school,
    I got a lot of bad grades.
    Once I knew everything in Yiddish,
    and I had to start in Russian.
    And I got a lot of, once, bad grades.
    And then I switched over, and I started studying.
    My sister, she finished seven classes in Jewish school.
    Then she went to Odessa, into a technicum,
    a machine-building technicum.
    She was studying a profession there.
    And she studied there for two years.
    And then she decided, why would a girl work at the machine
    plant?
    And my father wanted to give us the higher education.
    And so he went to Odessa.
    He brought her back to Ternovka.
    And she did not finish the third year.
    She went back to the high school.
    She finished the 10th grade.
    And it was hard for her because she had, really,
    nine years of Jewish school and one year of Russian.
    And my teacher was so proud of my sister.
    And she was a very good mathematician.
    And he could not understand how could she make it.
    So she finished better than anybody could imagine,
    not because she was a girl, but he really liked her.
    He liked us.
    We could come out winners to the best students.
    When the war started, he took my father out
    of the prisoners camp.
    And my father was a very bright man.
    It's so bad that we all died for nothing.
    But he decided to show that--
    he did not take us to Bershad.
    But at least he helped us to walk there.
    He helped, showed us the road to get to Bershad.
    He left us, but we went ahead.
    And by miracle, we actually got there.
    But he had a mission.
    I think that he did a lot for us.
    He is a saint.
    And I would write it, but I don't know the--
    but I don't know the address.
    And I would have told--
    --Maria Sheketova.
    And even in Bershad, there were people
    who thought that there could be a pogrom.
    It wasn't heaven.
    But they, in the village of Piliponovka,
    there were katsaps, people who grew watermelons.
    They were called katsaps.
    They were Russians.
    They had the best watermelons, melons, cabbage.
    They live in the Piliponovka.
    And I do not remember how we got there.
    It was many years ago.
    And they invited us to their house and kept us there
    a couple of days on their attic for a couple of days.
    And then it appeared that we knew their relatives
    in Ternovka.
    And they-- and they respect us even more.
    And then we lost touch in them-- with them.
    They did not-- I did not come to them,
    but I came to many, many of those people I mentioned before.
    We were like relatives.
    They did not have to help us.
    They were strangers.
    They were risking their lives.
    They would come to us to visit us.
    But most of them are dead.
    Only their children are there.
    Martynyuk had died in Berezovka.
    There was one old woman, I wrote her letters.
    When I came to visit the grave in Ternovka, I visited her.
    I would bring her some presents, something to wear,
    something to eat.
    And when I was leaving Russia, they were afraid.
    They were afraid to receive letters from us.
    And so I lost contact with them.
    And now, it's freedom.
    But I don't know.
    Maybe they're still afraid.
    They never had their own children.
    Because when the war was over in 1947, it was hunger in Ukraine.
    And my teacher, Mikhail Naumovich, he
    always dreamed to have children.
    But these woman would lose women.
    They were very cultured people.
    They had a good life.
    He was a teacher.
    He had a good orchard.
    And when that happened, they came to the hospital.
    And they saw those hungry people.
    And they liked one girl.
    And they decided to adopt her.
    They took her in their house.
    They took care of her when she was sick.
    She was very young.
    She was before the school age.
    They took her in good conditions.
    She finished school with them.
    They sent her to the university.
    And she finished the university of teachers.
    And then she came back.
    She lived there.
    She taught in school.
    She got married.
    He was a dentist.
    She had two children.
    And then she taught her own children's school.
    And my caretaker, Irina Grigorievna
    and Mikhail Naumovich were helping them.
    They would come to the sanatorium, to the retreat,
    to get some medical treatments.
    And we were like relatives.
    They were like my relatives.
    And it was before I came here.
    And here, I lost the contact.
    If I knew that nothing would happen to them, I would--
    I would write to them.
    And then they can make up some story about them.
    I treasured them.
    I do not want them to have any troubles.
    I can only get them in trouble if I write.
    Maybe I will.
    If I-- if I still be healthy, I'll write to them.
    But there is nobody else there in that-- in that village,
    except the grave and those people.
    But there's nobody left.
    Well, ask me something.
    Or I can go home.
    They wait for me.
    Thank you very much.
    Maybe you have some more questions I can answer.
    That Ukrainian-- that Ukrainian who transported you
    through the frontier.
    His name was Mikhalka.
    Mikhalka was the guy who was taking people across the board.
    I don't know his last name.
    Or I don't know what that name is.
    He brought the father of my husband there.
    He was afraid to leave because he was a specialist.
    So Mikhalka would come to the village to took people
    and carry them through the border.
    And they would make pair of shoes for him.
    But because we would not give him anything,
    he just left us at the frontier.
    But with them, he actually took them right into Bershad.
    But it didn't work for us.
    So we knew him as Mikhalka.
    By the way, my friend, Lida, who was left alive up
    in that house, where there was a second pogrom,
    but the woman who saved her could not
    take her through the frontier.
    It was very dangerous because there were guards on this side.
    But there were some places where you could cross.
    But he did not take us through the border.
    But we managed to pass between the guards.
    And she was also--
    she couldn't give him anything.
    So he-- but there was another woman.
    She-- they called her Gittel Doroba.
    She also survived.
    And she was suffering just like ourselves.
    And after the war, she had nothing to live on.
    And so she went--
    she went to work in the mines on Donbas.
    And she died in a mine.
    There was-- there was an accident in the mine.
    And she died there.
    She was a witness of the second pogrom.
    And she was called to testify, to Vinnytsia, to Haisyn.
    She was like ourselves.
    She wanted to revenge.
    And she agreed.
    And the people were on her case.
    And she left to Tashkent.
    And they found her there.
    She was threatened.
    And they said, if you're not going to stop,
    we going to-- we going to strangle you.
    When we lived there, the people from the KGB came down there.
    And they were told that me and Sonia Zhornitskaia, who
    was evacuated-- we were friends with Lida.
    But Sonia was evacuated.
    And I went through half of the war with her.
    And they came to me.
    And they asked me, do I know where Lida is?
    And I told them that she left.
    And she wrote a couple of letters to us.
    And then she disappeared.
    She got married.
    And he's a military man.
    And we do not know.
    And we had a-- we had a tradition that on the 27th
    of May, everybody who had relatives in that grave would
    come there.
    And we would all gather together and go to the grave.
    We would remember them.
    We would bring flowers.
    And where our graves was there, the other--
    it became a burial site.
    It became a cemetery.
    And everybody was surprised that Lida wasn't there.
    But why didn't she come?
    One day from KGB or whatever--
    and they told them that I was her friend,
    that I told them that I received a couple of letters.
    And so a couple of years, we had some communications.
    And then she disappeared.
    And she told-- they told me that we are trying to find her.
    And she disappeared.
    In Soviet Union, there is no such thing
    as a person disappearing.
    But she got married.
    We don't to whom.
    And we can't find her.
    And they said that somebody whose name
    was Medvedchuk, who was a lieutenant in our army--
    and he participated in the pogrom.
    He participated in it.
    And apparently, he had some relatives where she lived.
    And they were threatening her.
    And we-- I have the pictures.
    Everybody was there.
    Not all of them were in the occupation.
    They would-- but they would come to visit from Tashkent,
    from Kharkiv, from all the cities, whoever had
    some relations, some relatives.
    But she never came.
    Probably, she was afraid.
    Do you know her husband's name, relatives?
    No, I don't know.
    She left to Tashkent to her aunt.
    She went to the university.
    And she finished it, the law--
    in the area of law.
    And then she married some relative.
    I never went to Tashkent.
    I do not know the address of her aunt.
    And we totally lost her.
    She never came.
    Everybody else was keeping relations.
    And I felt bad whenever we were leaving.
    And we still went there, even before we
    were getting ready to leave.
    My husband drove a car.
    And we went there often.
    But last couple of years, we would hire somebody
    to take us there.
    Or we would gather together several couples.
    And my son, Michael, Misha, drove us in his car.
    And we went there in November.
    And then that-- it was over.
    People from Soroka-- the husband, son, and mother?
    I do not remember the names.
    They got to Bershad not like ourselves.
    They came from Bessarabia, from Moldavia.
    And their mother died on the road.
    And they got to Bershad.
    There were-- they could do very good things.
    They were specialists.
    They could do furniture.
    And they had a girl about our age.
    And they used them in Bershad on the furniture factory.
    But they came to work there.
    They did not pay them.
    But they were working.
    We spent not that much time.
    We spent little time with them.
    There was only one room in-- out of all the ruins.
    They could bring some pieces of wood to warm up the room.
    There were some boxes for us.
    They did that.
    But what-- they probably came back.
    There was a lot of people.
    It's not like a peacetime.
    We left.
    And we got sick.
    And we would never see them again.
    And probably, when the Bershad was freed, they went back home.
    There was people from other places, Ploiesti, other places.
    And nobody knows that they were there.
    Our neighbors had refugees who were from Czechoslovakia.
    We don't remember them.
    But they were also in that grave.
    And throughout the whole village,
    there were people who were evacuated.
    But they could not get any further.
    And Germans caught them there.
    My relatives from Teplyk, they went
    through to Syniukha village, a little bit farther
    than Pidvysoke.
    And then Germans came.
    And they could only live for about three days from us.
    And that's that.
    And they were in the occupied territories.
    They came back.
    And they died in a grave, all of my family.
    It was a hard time.
    It was worse than the front.
    It was worse than, actually, the war.
    When my husband saw it and he heard about it, then
    his father told him.
    But he said that this is really terrible,
    all the time to be under the occupation
    and being afraid that you're going to be taken to the grave.
    And there was a hole dug already.
    That was for three years.
    That's called life.
    That's called survived, suffered, no life, and no death.
    When they were talking about pogroms every day,
    every night, if they would remember somebody who died,
    who died from fear, from poverty, from hunger, from cold,
    they would say, but he died in his own death.
    He did not get a bullet in his back.
    He died.
    There's that.
    And we couldn't-- it was hard to bury people.
    They would not allow us to the cemetery.
    My husband's grandmother died after the pogrom.
    We dressed her up.
    We washed her.
    She was so scared, she died.
    And we buried her.
    Well, she was old.
    She died in her own death.
    And we buried her.
    But there were young people, children, alive--
    were thrown alive into the hole, into the grave.
    That was-- that was the scariest thing of all.
    For what?
    We were not criminals.
    For what?
    I have a headache.
    Do you have any more questions?
    Please, give it to me.
    You mentioned a woman who also was saved by your teacher.
    Her name was Fania Schwartzman.
    She was in Haisyn.
    The camp was not far away from Haisyn.
    That's where my sister died.
    It was a big stone mine.
    And they were taking those stones out.
    It was a very hard labor for a woman.
    And she wasn't very young.
    She wasn't very old either.
    She was 40-45 years old or so.
    But she wasn't young to work to carry the stones.
    And she was in that camp in very hard conditions.
    Moreover, my husband's father, he was a shoemaker.
    And he was making shoes to Germans and to Russians.
    But from our village, they were taking people
    to carry the stones.
    That's how I found out that my sister was hanged.
    And so he made couple of shoes to that person.
    But he walked there.
    And he stole her.
    And she couldn't walk.
    He carried her on his shoulders.
    Now, when he brought her where we lived, she couldn't even eat.
    [RUSSIAN]
    Volodya's, my husband's father, he had something to eat.
    And that woman was a sister of his wife.
    And he had something to eat.
    So he gave her a piece of--
    the piece of bread.
    She couldn't eat that, she was so swollen from hunger.
    We had several girls there.
    There were several of us.
    And they were trying to warm us up and help.
    And she came back to life.
    And our teacher was her-- was her husband's friend as well.
    And he came.
    And he took her before we came in that evening.
    And Ukrainians did not suffer like ourselves.
    They had-- they had food.
    And he fed her.
    And we were spending-- we spent the night there.
    That morning, he asked us to take her with us.
    Because we could not keep her here.
    And they could find her.
    And she will suffer.
    Let her go with you.
    And there, she will survive.
    And we took her with us.
    And later, we found out that he had a radio, which was banned.
    And on his attic, when we slept there,
    there was-- there were two more people in his attic.
    When we were downstairs, there were two people upstairs.
    They were partisans.
    And he kept-- he had connections with them.
    He helped them.
    And it is-- maybe, when we came back to Ternovka, we found out,
    my sister worked in a butter factory.
    And there was a man there who was a partisan.
    And he told us that when we were there, they were also there.
    And maybe that's why he couldn't keep us anymore.
    Because he couldn't keep all of us.
    Because if they would find us, they would find them as well.
    And then those people were doing their job.
    But that time, we were in Bershad.
    And they probably died.
    Tell us when you found those two, the old man with two
    children in the fields, and they were hiding in the fields.
    His last name was?
    I don't remember.
    It was the same as with us, with the same-- the same thing
    happened to them as to us.
    There was only three houses left.
    There were houses, but they would not let us live there.
    But they showed us those three houses
    where we were allowed to stay.
    And so they were with us.
    And then there was a pogrom.
    And they were caught in the second pogrom, the old man.
    I can't remember the name--
    the old man and two of his daughters.
    They were-- they were old maids.
    And they were caught in the second pogrom,
    If not in Bershad, people were-- if they were not in Bershad,
    they would be in a second--
    they would be in some kind of pogrom.
    All the-- the peasants--
    the peasants could not save anybody.
    When we came back, there, they didn't even know who we were.
    What was the name of the--
    what was the name of the watchmaster?
    Berka Kravitz, Lida, and Fania.
    He was a very rare man.
    I was worshipping him when we left.
    There was-- there was very little--
    very few people like that.
    He was an extraordinary.
    He got caught in the second pogrom as well with the younger
    daughter.
    And the older one survived.
    He was a self-taught man.
    He was a master of watches, a watchmaster.
    He could fix any watch.
    And they needed him.
    And he had no labs, no tools.
    So they thanked him.
    They killed him.
    They buried him alive.
    There was only one man who survived
    and who went to Australia after the war.
    Some went to Bershad and survived.
    And some died in the second pogrom.
    And my-- Volodya is my husband uncle and father survived.
    And they died later, after the war.
    Those pictures were taken during the war?
    Yes, of course.
    How could they make those pictures after the war?
    Those people were not alive.
    Show them one after another.
    This is my mother.
    She was killed in 1942 on the 27th of May.
    This is my father.
    This is me, my sister, myself, my older sister.
    And this is my younger sister.
    I was 17.
    She was 19.
    And the youngest sister was 13.
    This is me and my sister before the war.
    It was April 1941.
    It was in Vinnytsia.
    We couldn't take those pictures in Ternovka.
    We probably don't need those.
    This is me and my sister after the war.
    And those are guys from--
    who came from the war, our former co-students--
    classmates.
    This was called [RUSSIAN] and me and my sister.
    That was a good time.
    And this is our-- the grave picture.
    This is the first picture.
    It's a common ground, where there are 2,400 people.
    And all of these people are those
    who came to visit the grave.
    We had-- we had--
    we had a fence around the grave so they could not
    take their animals--
    their cattle there.
    And so we made a gate.
    And they would still get into the grave.
    And they would start throwing things around in the grave.
    This is my husband.
    This is the man who was a specialist who
    went to Australia, Gedalia Umansky, his name was.
    This is the man who went through Bug River with me.
    He lives in Israel now.
    His name is Sasha Linetsky--
    Alex Linetsky.
    She came from Kyiv.
    She came-- she went through the front line.
    She lives in Kyiv.
    She-- her name is Rosa.
    She's from Tashkent.
    Shunia Zaks, I think.
    And this is Misha Bolotny.
    What is that monument again?
    That's the monument that--
    which we made with our own money, our own labor.
    We would hire people to do that.
    It is far away from the village.
    We needed to pay.
    The government did not help us at all.
    They would not help us when we would ask.
    We had to do everything ourselves.
    And we would-- this is another picture.
    There could be different people every year.
    Bolotny.
    This is-- where's Mikhail Bolotny?
    Here he is.
    They would come from all the places.
    Many of them were in occupation.
    This man was in occupation.
    His name is Heme Voskoboynikov.
    He was in occupation--
    and this one, and Misha, and Musya.
    This man, his mother was killed by a bomb when--
    the last day of the occupation, when Russia's-- when Red Army
    was coming.
    Her name is Hina.
    This guy was really young during occupation.
    Here's the two guys, two brothers.
    There was-- and they came.
    He came from Minsk.
    He came from Leningrad.
    They all came to visit the grave.
    Because they had a lot of close people there.
    This is the memory place, the memory wall in the village.
    And there are all the-- all the names are there.
    We would go there.
    We would place flowers.
    And we would let our people know.
    Those are my school friends.
    This is Lida, who I was-- whom I was talking about.
    This is me.
    This is the red one.
    She died.
    And this is Adel.
    She was evacuated.
    She was in Tashkent.
    They-- she came back.
    And then she was in Odesa.
    This is my sister, her husband, two of their children.
    They were born after the war.
    One of them is in Israel.
    And there is another one who wants to come here.
    And I can't--
    I can't help him.
    I'm only an aunt.
    I can't bring him here.
    And those are, again, our people from our village, from our land.
    Is that monument still there?
    Well, it's being disintegrated.
    But it's still there.
    But even when we were there, look how much grass is there.
    And somebody has to cut the grass.
    And we would do it.
    This is the monument.
    And you see other graves.
    And my grandmother is near that monument.
    And when I came to the mass grave,
    I would also visit my grandmother's grave.
    And this is me before we left Russia and my children,
    my husband, my son, his wife, and my grandson, and myself.
    My son was going there every year with us.
    We got him involved and my son-in-law.
    And when we were leaving, we had to say goodbye to the grave.
    And this is after we left.
    This is what happened after we left.
    Look at the wall.
    They started-- they started to destroy the grave.
    Those are the local people.
    Do you think they were not robbing us?
    They were robbing us, the Ukrainians.
    They were stealing the doors.
    I saw, when I was in Lida's house,
    the neighbors were running around taking--
    they would take things away.
    They would cut something and take it.
    Oh, here is-- here is the monument.
    You could see the--
    you could see the names, the engravings.
    The sign was made by the person who is also from Ternovka.
    He was a artist.
    When he came here, he said that I can't help--
    I can't fix the monument.
    But I can send you the sign.
    And we were-- we carelessly wrote on that sign
    that there were Jews in that wall.
    And they were vandalizing the monument all these years
    because there were Jews in there.
    Look.
    They took off the basement, the top couple of times.
    They were constantly vandalizing it.
    But now, there is not much we can do.
    But my friend from Bershad sent me a letter.
    She's trying to come here too to New York.
    But she wrote me that they were talking to people to make
    a new one, the new monument.
    And there was some delegation from America
    who came from Kyiv to look at the monument.
    And they said that they were going to make another monument.
    And my friend went there with her husband.
    And that's how people told me.
    Because they're not writing to me anymore.
    They're trying to leave.
    They even said that they brought the money.
    And we said-- and we wrote back that we will send the money.
    And it's very quiet right now.
    Nobody is very interested.
    Nothing is happening.
    Why is she laughing?

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Tsily Radovolsky
    Date
    interview:  1992 February 27

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 videocassettes (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Radovolsky, Tsily.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Tsilya Radovolsky, Ida Radovolsky, and Michael Radovolsky donated this oral testimony to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in June 1996. This interview was originally accessioned as RG-50.477*0782 through the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project. This is an English translation of the original in Russian
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:21:28
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn520380

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