Chapter 4.
On June 26, the Russians gave Romania an ultimatum claiming Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Next day the territories were occupied. The former used to be Russian until 1918, but Bukovina was for hundreds of years Austrian. The Russians just rounded out the borderline that ran through Southern Poland toward Bessarabia. The Germans must have felt relieved that Russia had not occupied all of Romania, because there was nobody to stop them. The Germans bought oil from Ploecsti (Romania) and would have been in trouble without that supply.
Thus, on June 27, 1940, we became overnight Soviet subjects, with all that it implied. It implied plenty. Unexpectedly, overnight, we realized that we were in a different country, with a new regime, a new language - a change that was supposed to mean a new stability. After all, the Soviet Union is a world power and we will be part of an egalitarian society. After all, instead of getting into the clutches of a fiendish, fascist regime, we had escaped the antisemitism of Romania and our life as Jews would be the equal to anybody else’s, so we thought. Many Romanians fled overnight as did many wealthy Jews. On Friday, June 27, at about noon time, the first Russian troops arrived. Logically, I should have been overjoyed since my world views were in accordance with a socialist world order. However, the pact of nonaggression, the partition of Poland, the attack of Finland, the cynicism of Soviet politics had shaken my outlook. One did not know essentially what to expect. We had heard from some Polish Jews, who had fled from Galizia during the preceding year, that the Russian regime was cruel, oppressive and that prisons were overflowing with citizens who had not committed any crimes. The jails were filled with merchants, storekeepers or formerly members of political parties - right, left, center. The word "Siberia" crept in occasionally. As a result of these diverse strands of information, when the Russians came into our town, I felt some trepidation from the start.
Yet, all my friends were so overjoyed about our new situation, I felt that we had made a good change. After all, perhaps we’ll be spared the war altogether. My parents felt very apprehensive about the political change - a very radical, revolutionary dislocation of system, government, language, way of life.
When I confronted them, asking them about the specific fears, my Father quoted a Jewish saying: "Never pray for a new king." Historically, when oppressed Jews would pray for a political change, for a new king, the new king would often turn out to be worse than the previous one. They applied the old wisdom and they were right. In fact, the Soviet regime was worse than the years we lived under the Romanian regime. Luckily, we did not fully comprehend, in those first weeks, what suffering we were facing.
The Russian troops, making their appearance that first day, were poorly dressed and shod; they spoke only Russian or Ukrainian. Some of them asked passers-by what time it was and grabbed their watches. Local communists and the ubiquitous opportunists started to occupy high positions, as initially, everything was improvised. Little by little, Ukrainians from the central administration in Kiev came in as civilian authorities, replacing most local people. We started to figure out the different uniforms, insignia and epaulets of the military. We found out about the thousands, with similar insignia- they were mostly N.K.G.B., later renamed K.G.B.
Since Northern Bukovina became part of the Western Ukraine, the official language was Ukrainian. The unavailability of dictionaries presented the great obstacle in learning the new languages. We needed Russian, too. I envied my Mother her knowledge of Ukrainian. Although she could not read or write it, she could make herself understood. We used to have cleaning women and washerwomen and they were all Ukrainians. She could talk about daily objects or about foods but not the terminology of grammar or the explanation of abstract concepts, about history or philosophy.
I learned to read and write in the Slavic alphabet from a single sheet. Then, I proceeded to make up my own dictionary using a small notebook with every page a different letter. An added impediment was the difference between these two Slavic languages. The writing presented also slight differences, also the orthography. All this added to the difficulties and the confusion, at first. The new, Soviet administration never thought of offering language classes for the new citizens. I still remember how bravely we learned to read the new daily newspaper "Radianska Bukovina" (Red Bukovina), just trying to make out the headlines and slowly braving to comprehend the articles. By the beginning of September, barely two months from the occupation, we delved into the study of the History of the Party, meaning the communist party, according to the direction of the Stalin line, the official party line. The teacher was faced with an unusual task, namely, teaching a class, at a university, where practically nobody understood him or the textbook. After every few sentences he stopped to ask: Sie verstehen, Genossen? (Do you understand, comrades?) This was the extent of his knowledge of German. Most of us just picked up single words and wrote them down in the improvised dictionary. It was unusual, but not funny at all.
The Russians changed the names of the streets and parks so as to wipe out the vestiges of capitalist decades. We used to call the streets by their old Austrian names after 22 years of life in Romania. We never got used to the Romanian names. Now, overnight, all the street signs bore names of Lenin, Stalin, Red Army and that was understandable. However, they put names to streets, names that baffled us. If a Russian would ask where Shevchenko street was, one did not know. They thought that we were saboteurs, anti-social elements.
Of course, I only realized the gravity of our predicament when instances of Soviet provocations occurred. A Russian would buy a small item in a store and pay with a bill, which people had heard that it was not in circulation any longer, was worthless. The new Soviet administration had heard or perhaps spread the rumors themselves. When the shopkeeper asked whether that bill was still in circulation, he was arrested on the spot for daring to question the validity of Soviet currency. The three shopkeepers that I know of, since one was my cousin, were tried within a few weeks, sentenced and sent to the "Far East" namely Siberia, for five years each. One of them survived and returned to Czernovitz. He was Leo Reiter, our cousin, an old time socialist, formerly a devoted sympathizer of the Soviets, who used to come to us to listen to the German broadcasts from the Soviet Union. After sentencing, the wife was told to bring warm clothes, as he would be sent away, to serve his five year prison term. She understood that he was going to "the white bears," to Siberia. When she brought a suit, a coat, shirts and shoes, the prison official gave her instructions to cut off all buttons, no suspenders, no shoe laces. These precautions were supposed to protect the prisoner, to prevent him from committing suicide: not to swallow the buttons and not to hang himself on the shoe laces or the suspenders.
That happened in August 1940, less than two months after the Soviet takeover. It needs little imagination to understand how a person could shield himself from the frosts of Siberia, when he could not button the shirt or coat or lace his shoes. Instances of this nature filled our first months under Stalin’s regime.
Everything was nationalized, everything became the property of the state. Thus the new administration was every citizen’s landlord. They hired "house administrators" to run the houses and collect the rent. About every ten houses had one administrator, overseer. These officials were responsible to the local "militia" or police. They were spying on everybody. They provided a dossier on every family, on each individual within each family.
Every citizen had to have a so-called "passport," an identification booklet, issued by the militia, with all the personal data: place and date of birth, nationality (for us was the label Jew, not Russian or Ukrainian or Moldavian), occupation and place of work, data on military service. People were supposed to carry that passport at all times and anybody in an official uniform or secret police could stop you for identification. The word "passport" was a misnomer, for you could not travel any place on the strength of this identification. Nobody had permission to travel from one town to another. If sent by the workplace, one was issued a "propusk," a permit with the data and destination of travel. Once at the arrival destination, one had to register at the local militia (police). Thus, nobody could travel anywhere without a special permit, even if it were at a distance of 50 miles.
Suddenly I became aware that the citizen was a kind of prisoner, the individual was somehow in confinement, with very limited personal freedom. At that time we didn’t think about crime in the streets, it was almost non-existent. Yet crime, on a gigantic scale, came not from the streets but from the top, from the Kremlin. Stalin and his most trusted man in power, Lavrenti Beria, the head of the N.K.V.D. (to-day K.G.B.) and the rest of the Politbureau had a stranglehold on the entire population. They exercised such unlimited control over the lives of the entire, vast, conglomerate of nations that make up the Soviet Union. It is impossible, at this point, to figure out how many millions of people were annihilated by them, at their whim.
In the first week or two, it was hard to figure out the nature of that regime. I remember walking in the street with a girl friend and a soldier started talking to us. It was mutual - he could not understand us just as we could not understand him. Yet, he meant to be friendly, so he gave us a book, which he was probably reading. Here are Russians bearing gifts. Somebody, who could read Russian told us that it was Gogol’s "Dead Souls." It was a book from a lending library in Odessa.
In the first week or so, they brought the Moysseiev Dancers, who performed in the Central Square of town, renamed "Red Square." They were magnificent folk dancers performing for the enjoyment of the newly liberated people, free people. Soon after came a group of outstanding Jewish writers, who delighted us with readings of their poetry and also sang some rousing, Jewish revolutionary songs. Within the next few years all these writers were put to death.
Of course, it reminds you of "pane et circensem" (bread and circus), the expression used by the Roman emperors 2000 years ago, meaning to give people subsistence and a little entertainment and they won’t think of anything else, of what plight they are in. That was what we got, at the start. After the initial few honeymoon weeks were over, they clamped down on the population. It was probably the accepted philosophy from the Kremlin that they would rather be feared than loved. Actually love was given a very short chance, but fear grew and deepened and took hold of our beings, our lives, no doubt about it. Yet people were afraid to confide in others, did not dare to express their doubts.
Another facet of Soviet society, absolutely unsuspected by us, started to unfold. Some young military men, some handsome officers, began to court Russian-speaking girls. Quite a number of Bessarabian Jews lived in
Czernovitz, some were students at the university. They spoke Russian and had an easier time handling matters. It didn’t take long and a number of these men married local girls. Shortly after, it turned out that some had families: wives and children. They had been called on this assignment and left their homes. Some of them took advantage of the fact that we were ignorant of conditions in the Soviet Union. Some may have had their families thousands of miles away and figure that they may not see them in years. They had their mail sent to a post office box, not a private address and their families wouldn’t know where they lived, just the town. Deceit and lying had become second nature, a means for survival. After all, in the Soviet Union, so many people spent time in prison and prison was mostly not for real crimes. There was a proverb coined under the Soviet regime, which in translation sounds like this: "Whoever was there won’t forget it; whoever was not yet, will still be."
People started to look for employment. Until September, when the university would open - I was supposed to enter the third year of studies - I worked in a book store, where we were making an inventory of the existing stock. I found out that students who achieved all A’s or A’s and one or two B’s, would earn a monthly scholarship of 150 or 125 rubles, depending on the grades. That sum was the equivalent of a clerk’s monthly salary. That was what I was aiming for and I received the scholarship.
People started realizing that the Russians, who were heading all the enterprises, were helping themselves to the merchandise, right and left. Of course, food became scarce because peasants were afraid of controls on the prices of their produce. As a result, they brought less food to market. Anybody working in a food store or restaurant or bakery or yeast factory was doing very well, while I, who couldn’t steal anything, except for a Romanian book or ink, was at a clear disadvantage. It takes experience to realize where to work in case of a communist take-over.
Well, I returned to school in September and tried hard to make sure to achieve top grades, in order to be the person, in our family, who had an income. University, organized on the Soviet system, was just like high school: daily classes from 9-2 p.m., daily written assignments; attendance strictly kept, no choice of courses beside the major. We studied Ukrainian, Russian grammar as well as literature. It sounds ridiculous, but we learned spelling in one lesson and had to read Pushkin, in the original text, next period. The same was repeated with Ukrainian spelling, grammar and also the reading of poetry by Taras Shevchenko. That was similar to learning the verbs to be or to have and read also Shakespeare. (Actually, that was how I learned English in 1938.)
The subjects that were most important: History of the Party and Dialectic Materialism. That had to be learned the way they explained it and no questions should be asked; no doubts were permitted. The history of the party had been revised several times, when Trotsky or others fell into disfavor and thus some pages or chapters had to be rewritten as heroes became thugs; as heroic revolutionaries became bourgeois lackeys. We had a teacher of linguistics who talked about language, meaning Russian or Ukrainian. Poor guy, young comrade Lysenko knew so little and felt so out of place when asked about romance or Germanic languages. He looked like a bantam fighter, small and chunky. When he got drunk at the New Year’s party, he, the comrade, kissed every girl’s hand like a little comic figure.
Among all the teachers from the Ukraine, one became fairly liked and close to some of us. He was relatively young, about 30, thin, pale, reminiscent of romantic heroes who die young of T.B. He played the piano and recited poetry, to our delight. He dared recite Yessenin, a symbolist poet, a poet not accepted by the official line. Officially, we were supposed to admire Mayakovsky, who glorified the Soviet Union. I still remember our teacher reciting, in private, in a lugubrious voice this verse by Yessenin: "I wish, oh, how I wish to shit on the moon," debunking romantic poets. Whether this Russian teacher was truly critical of the party line or whether he was trying to play a game, initiated by the N.K.G.B., will forever remain a question in my mind.
The English teacher, Mrs. Koppelmann, was the best English teacher in Czernovitz. She was an excellent language teacher, a very decent person, but not really a scholar, not trained to be a university professor. The level of the university had dropped considerably, compared to what I experienced before, in two years of studies. Yet, we had a difficult time with the two new languages and also a course in military preparedness. All the students, men and women, had to learn military tactics and had to train in the fields, to become efficient shots. The training was done out-of-doors, in rain, snow or sleet. At every session, one was given three bullets. If you did not achieve a good score, you got a low grade. Fear of losing the scholarship made me try very hard and I lay so long on the frozen ground or soggy field, in order to do it right. In the end, in May 1941, I got very sick with pleurisy and just barely made it through the exams in June 1941, that fateful month when the Germans attacked.
Coming back to the quality of our lives during that year. The invasion of privacy became more and more oppressive, as the teachers were watching whether Jewish students were absent during Jewish holidays. I remember on Yom Kippur, in October 1940, the teachers were especially paying attention to the attendance. Some zealous communists were even trying to find out whether anybody was fasting. That Yom Kippur was the first time I fasted, although I had to go to school. When I returned home, by 3 o’clock, my parents were in the synagogue. It was cold and rainy and I was shivering from cold, hunger and terrible disappointment with this cruel, petty regime that had no humane standards, no notion of freedom, no respect for human beings - a cruel, oppressive, invasive regime - where power was everything and human life was dirt cheap.
By this time, I presume, many of my friends realized what a bitter hoax Communism had played on decent people, what a deception, yet we feared to express our thoughts. We feared each other. Some were so anxious to believe and not waver, that they would deny the reality of our new regime. Thus everybody feared to open up in front of one’s closest friends.
My parents and myself spoke freely to one another, especially after the tragedy that had befallen our relative, Leo Reiter. I had a boy friend to whom I did not express my opinions freely. My girl friends from high school and my colleagues at the university just didn’t talk about the regime, for fear that somebody may possibly mention my name in front of a member of the Comsomol (Young Communist League) and one could end in prison. Since there was no third year, I studied English, in the second year. We were a small group of students, very much bound by close friendship. Martha, myself and Erich Einhorn would often study together. We spent most of our time either at the university or doing work together, after school. Erich was a close friend of Paul Antschel, who was in the second year in French. We shared most of the classes, except for the separate English and French courses. We often joked, made fun of everything except for political questions or judgment of the regime. We openly steered clear of that, but seemed to have similar feelings.
As teenagers, many of my friends had been part of anti-fascist groups, except for Erich. He was really a-political, but shared literary interests with Paul. During that school year Erich became a very dear friend. He had a keen sense of humor; was lively, witty and strong. We often studied together and enjoyed a kind of shorthand, the way we went over subjects, skipped the unnecessary, did not need particular explanations. He was as reliable and as decent as one expects a friend to be. Tall, broadshouldered, athletic looking, blond, with big, white teeth, exposed fully when he smiled or laughed. His was a hearty, loud laugh. Erich looked like a rather typical German. However, he was Jewish and could tell a good Jewish joke, too. Paul was shorter, slim, with dark hair and dark eyes, a handsome, poetic-looking man with a quiet, rare laughter. Erich’s exterior showed a person, who looked people and events straight in the face, as if nothing could ever go wrong. Paul was rather reserved, with an almond-shaped face, darkly handsome, extremely attractive. His voice melodious and soft evoked a desire to protect and yet, to listen to this soft lilting voice. His humor was sharp, biting and often condescending.
Our sentimental attachments went into different directions. Erich had a much younger girlfriend. Paul focused his attention for shorter periods of time, on girls that were intelligent, loved poetry or on a girl, who possessed all these qualities and also looked a little exotic, like Tanja; for a while, he lavished attention on a pretty Russian student who looked very naive, childlike.
We all labored hard on the Slavic languages; we read Pushkin and Shevchenko and started to enjoy some more recent writers and poets like Yessenin, Mayakovsky and Madelstamm. The latter was persona non grata at the time; his poems were forbidden since he had dared to write a satirical poem about Stalin. He ended up in prison and disappeared. Most of us achieved a stipendium, went about our daily work and didn’t plan too much ahead. All this lasted one full year.
It turned out to have been a stroke of luck that my Father had sold the store before the Communist take-over. Our house overseer registered that my Father had been a clerk. People, who had previously owned a house or an enterprise received a "passport 39" which assured one of a free trip of no return, namely to Siberia, as it turned out within the year.
I met Yuda in the fall of 1940, during the Russian school year. His Father fell ill with typhoid fever and was in quarantine in the hospital for infectious diseases. The family was not permitted to visit the patient. One of his friends was a nurse in the hospital. She told him that a young doctor in that department was a friend of mine. Thus Yuda came to me, introduced himself as a student of mathematics at the university and then tried to find out whether he could see the doctor. Of course, I tried to be helpful and asked him to wait for my friend. For about ten days he came daily to find out about his Father’s recovery. That was how we met, surely unaware that we would share the rest of our lives.
The Russians settled in and learned a lot about us in the process. They realized that we were better educated than their own students, who only went through ten years of schooling before higher studies. They wondered at the difference in our housing, our customs, our food. Russians occupied vacant apartments from people who had fled to Romania and from Germans, who left officially for Germany. At the start of their occupation of Northern Bukovina, a delegation of German officers came to Czernovitz and were received as friends and allies. They registered all Germans who desired to leave for Germany. A number of their apartments became available.
There were stories, told about Ukrainians, who had never previously seen toilets. They washed their feet in the toilet bowl. Others bought fish and kept them alive in the bath tubs. They were faced with another problem. They realized that many people had radios and could hear news from all over Europe. In the Soviet Union they only had loudspeakers at every street corner and they played marches or propaganda from Moscow. At home, the population could enjoy a kind of news box (tochka-spot) which transmitted the same program as the loudspeakers. The length and breadth of that entire vast country everybody heard the same thing: propaganda. They were really cut off from the rest of the world and were indoctrinated to think that theirs was the best country in the world.
There happened instances, where Soviet students asked us whether we were rich.
They had been told that in capitalist countries only the rich went to school, while the children of workers and peasants remained illiterate. When we told them that school was free and compulsory for six years, they realized that there was something wrong, somewhere. It took them time to become aware that their regime had lied to them all along. We understood that serfdom had been abolished all over Europe after the revolution of 1848, yet in Russia it was still prevalent, not only for peasants but for everybody - save the party. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Among the ways to indoctrinate and also to entertain the population were big parades on holidays: May Day and November 7, the celebration of the October Revolution. Participation at the parades was compulsory. We had to come to the university, where attendance was taken, and march in a group with pictures and banners. On these holidays, as well as on New Year’s eve, were big parties in school, with dancing, food and drink. On New Year’s eve was a masquerade ball, dancing and drinking all night.
At that same time, the war raged in Western Europe; German u-boats were haunting all shipping, yet we knew little about the rest of the world. True, we could listen to the radio, in our homes, but were afraid of being found out. One could not talk about it since it was forbidden. The only newspaper in town continued to be "Radianska Bukovina" (Red Bukovina), a Ukrainian daily, which praised workers and peasants, glorified the party and Stalin.
In May 1941 the N.K.G.B., secret police, the ones with light blue epaulets and little red squares on them, descended one night into a great number of homes and deported many local families to Siberia. They came with an open truck, gave the family an hour to pack a few bundles, put them in the truck and they were gone. That same thing happened on two consecutive nights. A few thousand Czernoviters were deported, destination not mentioned, yet understood - Far East, Siberia.
In our apartment house, they deported a couple with a ten year old daughter. The man had owned a small furniture store, which had been nationalized by the government. Across the street from us, they deported a family, whose son and daughter had been known as communists. The father, Mr. Ippen was a socialist, the son had volunteered to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in Spain. It became known that the entire family was non-grata because the son was supposedly a Trotzkyite. The daughter and son-in-law were communists, but since they lived in her parent’s apartment, everybody in the house was taken away. They then sealed the place and a commissar or an officer moved in and inherited the entire household.
In May, at the time of these dread occurrences, we came to class in the morning and looked around to see whether anybody was missing. Since many of the Russians took part in these "actions," they knew that we knew about the night deportations, but nobody mentioned a word about it. I was aware about the disappearance of my neighbors; others had relatives among them and nobody knew when it would stop. Many Russians considered it a fact of life that people would disappear by the favor of their government. They had suffered through these spasms of their police state, at different times and now they saw the local population go through this baptism of sheer despair. It is, by no means certain, but it was said that if the war had not broken out in June 1941, all of us, local people, would have landed in Siberia, in gulag.
In that same blessed spring, I fell ill with pleurisy. Since there was no medication available, I lay in bed for six weeks, was told to sweat until the liquid on the pleura receded. Those were harsh times from every point of view. My poor, devoted Mother was told to feed me vegetables juices, which are rich in vitamins. She would grate carrots and beets by the kilos, squeeze the mass and feed me the juice. My parents did whatever they humanly could to see me on my feet again. Finally, I got out of bed, in May; suffered the scare of the deportations, passed the exams in June and on June 22, 1941 the Germans attacked the Soviet Union.
A few days before the actual attack, the English supposedly warned the Soviet Union that Germany was massing troops on the Eastern frontier - from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Day by day, Stalin was supposed to be informed, but disregarded the warnings as English propaganda, as an attempt to thrust a wedge between the two allies: Germany and the Soviet Union.
On Sunday morning, June 22, a few days before the first anniversary of our "liberation" by the Soviets, Germany staged a surprise attack all along the German-Russian border; they bombed the entire length of the frontier. Since Czernovitz was on that line, our small airport was attacked, all planes on fire in the first hour of the first day of the hostilities. On that Sunday, as people got up in the morning, rumors started about war. After a few hours the radio broadcast the official acknowledgement of the German attack. The first reaction of a well seasoned population was: "Do we have water? Do we still have electricity?" As these were still intact, one had to buy bread, flour, yeast.
It took no time to witness the panic that set in among the Russians. Some tried to leave right away, to go home, wherever home was. The military were going hither and thither in their trucks. Within two, three days it became apparent that they were not even trying to hold the line and a stampede Eastward started. Panic set in. Officers and their families ran away; any official, who could put a hand on a truck, loaded it with all they had acquired in such a short time and fled. In different sections of town, the military stopped young and middle aged men in the streets, loaded them on trucks and took them into the army. Those men just disappeared, they were not granted permission to say good bye to their families. Yuda’s only brother, Michael (Muniu) was snatched that way. He had got married a few months previously to Sonia, with whom he was reunited 10 years later. They waited for one another. Yuda saw him just once more, in 1971, in Israel, after 30 years. That was the only time I had occasion to meet my brother-in-law. At that reunion, the heartache was so visible on everybody’s face. They knew that they were the closest blood relatives and had been apart for most of their lives. They knew that they were brothers, yet they were in essence strangers, molded by completely different conditions. Both had gone through inhuman hardships, but in different places, in different surroundings. That was the only time spent together with this frail, thin, soft spoken man, a collector of dolls. He passed away in September 1982.
Coming back to that last week of June 1941, people were petrified at the imminent arrival of the German troops. Many, who had openly avowed to be communists, were afraid of being denounced to the Germans or Romanians; others were in fear of retribution from some who held grudges against them. They tried to flee with the Russians, to be evacuated into the Soviet Union, escape Eastward, escape coming battles or bombings or pogroms or all of these.
As soon as the war had broken out, the Russians decreed, in the interest of national security, that all private citizens had to deliver their radios to the authorities, at the building of the former stock exchange. The threat, in case of non-delivery was so severe, that nobody would have dared to be found in possession of one. On the day, before the abandonment of the town, the building with the radios was set on fire. Not a single radio was left in town. Before the retreat, they also destroyed the electric utility station, the railroad bridge as well as the pedestrian bridge over the river Prut, the post office and the stocks of arms which they could not evacuate. Of course, we were left without electricity; no water pumping station. Those were inconveniences; we were left in a much more desperate state, unsure of our lives from that day on.
The Russians were gone within 8 days. They offered no resistance against the German troops. The students, at the university, were offered to be evacuated, together with the Russian teaching staff and with the Soviet students. I had a knapsack packed from the second day, like almost everybody else that I knew.
My friend, the doctor, left with the hospital staff. When he said good bye, he asked me to take care of his parents and sister and her child just as I would of my parents.
Next day, when my long time friend Martha came, with her knapsack on her back, asking me to come along with the students at the university,
I looked at my crying Mother and my destitute Father and I realized that they would be lost without me. At that moment, I threw down my pack and said: "I’ll stay. Whatever happens to them will happen to me." Martha left. The die was cast. I chose to share my fate with my parents and I never regretted it