The Russians Are Back
 
Chapter 6.

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we’ll have food to survive.

The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question:

Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not. The antisemitism of the Russians surfaced glaringly. It soon became all too clearly apparent that the liberators hated us as much as the Germans did. On the other hand, they needed personnel everywhere: for the army, the coal mines in the Ukraine, workers for the Northern Territory of Murmansk and Pechora, where the lend lease help from the U.S. arrived. Just as in the first week of war, in June 41 when they grabbed men to the armed forces, now they did the same and they took women and girls to go to the Donbas - the coal mines along the Don river, in the Ukraine. This was a very frightening time.

Some of the survivors from Transnistria started to drag themselves to return home, to Czernovitz. Cripples, beggars and some in reasonable shape returned. Most had their wretched bodies covered with tattered clothes, their legs and feet wrapped in rags. Most had no home to return to. We had a cousin, a woman Mother’s age, Mrs. Kreisel, who came to us, since her husband had died of typhoid fever during the first winter, her daughter and son had not returned yet. She was an absolute cripple, just hardly dragged herself up the stairs to our apartment. I gave her my bed and slept with the parents.

I started to work for the railroad, telephone and telegraph section, as an assistant to the personnel manager, who was a party official. My assignment consisted in obtaining bread ration cards for the workers and their dependents. Workers received larger daily portions than their children. When a worker was deployed from one station to another, from one village to another, I was supposed to provide him with a militia (police) permit to travel and a bread ration card for that particular location and for those certain days. The lines at Town Hall, where they issued ration cards, were long and unruly. People were pushing and shoving and squeezing and stepping on one’s toes; it was a daily stampede. Russians; military, militia, N.K.G.B. - all these people claimed that they did not have to stand in line, only the local people had to. Their ideas of democracy were such, it would have been a good joke, but the joke was played out on me, a local person. I with my knitted sandals, I had bloody toes every day.

The worst part of the job proved to be getting a 30 day bread ration card for a worker. I knew that when he was summoned to the central office in Czernovitz and my boss ordered me to get him a 30 day bread ration card, he would be put on a train to Murmansk or Pechora. It would take him 30 days to reach the location - an Arctic port, where American ships arrived and provided the Soviets, at that time allies, with military materiel, clothing and food.

The people in charge of each railroad division in the Soviet Union had to provide a certain number of workers to the Artic Railroad. Thus each section picked scapegoats. Some were sent to the North Pechora Railroad, an area in the tundra desert, a frozen waste land in the Russian Arctic, where the government endeavored to build a net of rail connections to the Kara Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean. Geographically, the latitude corresponds to Northern Siberia, except that it is West of the Ural Mountains, on the European Continent. The railroad was meant to be used as a supply line for Russia’s interior, when goods at the time could arrive only through the arctic sea lanes, north of Scandinavia. The Pacific Ocean was the American-Japanese theater of war. Russia was fighting in Europe, thus the help was needed on the European side of the Soviet Union.

When a worker from a village arrived in our town, he had no idea that he would be sent ten thousand miles away. Had he known, he might have run to join anticommunist bands in the woods. Who could imagine that a man who came for a day to the central office would be sent to the Arctic, without even saying good bye to his wife and children. He was given a bread to take along and a "propusk", a permit to travel. The peasants were illiterate; even if one heard destination Archangelsk, Murmansk or Pechora, a railroad worker wouldn’t know where those towns were. The viciousness of the regime was such that they sent a barefoot man, in a thin pair of pants and shirt and tricked him into going to the Arctic, with little chance to survive. Suddenly I realized that I may be sent to that same place any day, since every section had a quota to fulfill.

To try to influence my superior, a young woman party member, not to put me on any list to the North, I brought her my only good woolen pullover as a present. She liked it and asked me to help her with her hairdo, to look more attractive. I did that, too, while I saw lice crawling on her head. But I was scared to go home in the evenings, a regiment of Don Cossacks, who had come to town, came into homes, at night, and took able-bodied women into the army. A bookkeeper, an elderly man, which whom I had worked compulsory work during the Romanian occupation and was also working for the railroad, offered to let me stay inside the office during the night. He had keys to the office. After work, I went up. He left me inside and locked the door. Well, in June, if you sit all night in a chair and shiver with fright - life is awful. After two nights there, my parents and I decided that I would hide at home.

The first night, while I stayed over in the office, Cossacks had come to our house, in the middle of the night, and poked with bayonets into the beds; made crippled Mrs. Kreisdel stand up to see whether she was fit for military service, then left.

We had a storage closet, for winter clothes. It had a door, which was painted the same as the walls. A piece of furniture stood in front of it. We decided to leave the door accessible and if anybody knocked at the door at night, I would hide in the closet and the dressing table, with its high mirror would be put in place.

However, the situation deteriorated drastically for every able-bodied person. When I came home from work one day, I found a call-up from the army and another to go to the Donbas (Don Basin coal mines). Actually, the tug of war went on, I was called in three directions: the army-West; the coal mines-East; Arctic Pechora-North. How could I manage to remain in town until university would open in September? That summer of 1944 became a very desperate time. The Soviets let students in the third and fourth year finish their studies, while the first and second years were closed. I was a third year student, but the few months until September were endless. It turned into a fierce battle for survival.

I brought the two call-up notices to the office and showed them to an elderly colonel there. He admitted that they really needed me at the present job and promised to accompany me to the two different authorities. I mentioned that I had something special for him. Thus he followed me home, waited in front of the house. I went up to take the bottle of liqueur, that had been given to me, on my birthday in March, by the Romanian secret police commissar. When I came down with the French liqueur, he was beaming with delight. He achieved my release in no time, from both places - the army and the Donbas - he made me look very important in front of the authorities. Fine, I was saved again and continued at the Railroad Telephone and Telegraph station.

All through the summer, the curfew went on. At 7 p.m. nobody was supposed to be outdoors, all windows were blacked out, since the war proceeded in full swing towards the West, through Poland, Romania and the Baltic region. The Russians kept the town informed about the course of the war and their advance in Western Europe, by issuing every evening a military report direct from Moscow. It always started the same way: the national anthem, then the victories of the day and the praise of the supreme commander Iosif Visarionovich Stalin. That same daily report was heard all over the Soviet Union.

The Soviets expressed their displeasure about the Western allies and their lack of cooperation, namely by not starting a second front. They called the landing "dessant" (descent) and complained daily about the delay. By the time the landing happened, on June 6, 1944, the Russians made very light of its importance, just as they rarely mentioned the fighting in Italy and the considerable allied losses there. They minimized the contribution of the Western powers toward victory. In fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable.

My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator. Paper was extremely scarce, to the extent that we were writing on newspaper, between the printed lines.

At the end of August, I told my boss "the nachalnik" in Russian, that I would go to the university, in September. He could not officially prevent me from leaving, but he insisted that I did an outstanding job and was hard to be replaced. If he had only told me that sooner, I would have been spared so much aggravation and fear.

What happened to all those people who had gone to Russia, voluntarily or involuntarily? Many of the men, married or unmarried got involved with Russian women. They heard all along that the Germans had killed all the Jews in occupied territories. Many men had great difficulty surviving and were glad to find a woman, who would let them into the house and feed them. They were willing to accept the kindness and sometimes the responsibilities that followed. Many Russian men were at the front and morals during wars are low. As for myself, I am at peace with myself because I never compromised my morals, in no situation, all through the war.

Many of our Czernovitzer women, who survived, found out that their husbands were either married or lived with a Russian woman. There were untold tragedies, complications. Some would come back and couldn’t decide whether to return to the former wife or return to the new one in the Soviet Union. Some found out that the wife had saved his parents during the war and he got himself a Russian replacement.

One such example was a cousin of mine from Poland who was married and had a six year old son. He was called up to the army, where he fell in love with a Russian woman. His wife survived, their boy had been killed. When he returned, he found himself with two wives. His predicament was not enviable. He divorced his first wife who consequently married his best friend, a bachelor. Yet I know that the consequences of that entanglement were never completely resolved, although never mentioned to outsiders. At his funeral, I saw the grief on the faces of both women.

Many perished miserably at the front, others returned and found no family alive. The time of resolution impacted everybody differently. Besides, new situations were created by the fact that many men became separated from their families because they were in labor camps, in Romania. Their families remained behind in Czernovitz. Yuda, like many others in the camps, remained in Romania. Some tried to get to Palestine on small, illegal boats.

Yuda and his younger cousin Leiser were together in a labor camp and were frantically trying to reach Palestine. Leiser’s older brother Arieh had volunteered, as a parachutist with the English forces, to be dropped over Romania, behind the German lines, in order to help in Allied war effort and also to contact Jews and give them aid and comfort, to show them that they had not been forsaken by their brothers in Palestine. Arieh had been apprehended by the military near Ploecsti and was handed over to the Germans, as he was in the uniform of an English captain. He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. At the end of the war he was released and he returned to Kibbutz Beit Oren in Palestine, where his wife Yaffa awaited him. Leiser was favored to leave on the first available boat from the Romanian port Constancta, to reach Palestine. He left on the Mefkuere for the short trip through the Bosporus and Dardanelle Straights and on to the open Mediterranean. There the small boat was torpedoed by the Germans and sank, no survivors. When Yuda arrived in Bucharest, he found out about the good news about his cousin’s departure and soon after of Leiser’s tragic end at age 21. He had spent the last few months of his short life together with Yuda.

A few weeks later Yuda set out on his way to Palestine. He went through a harrowing experience from the port Constancta to Constantinople, on a boat that was taking water and almost sank. From there the refugees continued on by train through Turkey and Lebanon to Palestine. He intended to settle in Haifa, where he had an aunt and her family. Arieh had already been home from his prisoner of war years. The family mourned together the tragic fate of Leiser.

Coming back to my life in Czernovitz in the fall of 1944. I went back to the university; I received the scholarship, to which I was entitled for earning top grades and I tutored some Russian students in English. However, life was joyless, food was scarce and whatever was available was intolerable. By the end of September, after Rosh Hashannah, Father got sick with pneumonia. Since he suffered all his life with asthma, pneumonia was a dangerous disease. Penicillin was a new drug in the West, unavailable in the Soviet Union. There was sulfa but only for people with special privileges like party members or military personnel. We were neither.

An acquaintance of mine had returned from the front as an invalid, he had shrapnel bits lodged in his lungs. An invalid could possibly obtain the sulfa, on prescription. He went with me to the Polyclinic and demanded to have the prescription filled. Any rare medication could be obtained only if the director of the Polyclinic affixed the round stamp on it. Any bigshot who could use a round stamp at his discretion, used to carry it in his boot, for safety reasons. My invalid acquaintance knocked at the door of the "nachalnik", walked in with me and started yelling. His future father-in-law has pneumonia and he is entitled to get the round stamp on a prescription. I, the supposed fiancee stood by the whole scene. He got the stamp affixed, I received the drug within an hour for the sum of one ruble. On the black market it would have cost one hundred.

Father recovered slowly. On Yom Kippur, he was still so weak that he consented to eat and drink. He said that it was proper, to save his life. Mother asked whether she should ask the rabbi, Father explained that he did know what was proper and saving one’s life went before the fast.

Except for bread, which was rationed and available, everything else was scarce and if available, people stood in line for hours, sometimes days. The bread was baked from a mixture of grains and maize and the cobs ground in. A kilo bread (over two pounds) was a small loaf, heavy as a rock. You could not bite the bread, only gnaw. Nobody would eat that in normal times, but there was no alternative. Father suffered so, he could not digest it. We were hungry most of the time. If clothes or shoes were available, one had to stand in line for days. We didn’t. We made do with whatever we still possessed. That summer, I wore a pair of hand made sandals. The top was crocheted of thin string and attached to a sole. The hand made front of the sandals was tied to the ankles with shoe laces.

My boy friend Sasha had survived; he had spent the three years in the military service. I could give him no explanation why his family was not alive. He too thought that everybody had survived, except his own. I could not give him any exact date, since I did not know where they had been deported to and what exactly had happened. They had a Popovici permit and were taken away in June 1942. Thousands had dropped by the roadside, dead from sickness, hunger, cold or plainly shot by the Germans. That was the fate of those taken across the Bug river. That locality was called "Cariera de piatra" (Stone Quarry) and most of the deportees lost their lives there.

I could not accept any responsibility for their tragic end. Even a situation like ours was rare. Parents and a daughter alive, still in the same town as before, even in the same apartment. The survival was achieved at great cost, with a lot of suffering. I had also become resentful. He and his sister and brothers went along with the Russians, to save themselves; none was willing to stay behind and try to help the parents. It surely was not my responsibility. Eventually, the correspondence stopped.

I remained burdened just facing every day with its new challenges and trying to go on. For years we received no mail from the family in the United States. The Red Cross may have functioned in some places, yet not under the Germans and the Russians in Czernovitz. We almost did not expect to hear from anybody until the end of the war.

In February 1945, we received a letter from Bernie. It had been sent a year earlier, on the occasion of his marriage to Connie. It was an invitation to the festive luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria. The menu sounded like fiction: meat, vegetables, wines, desserts, liqueurs - all this just French and American names. We had not seen any of these foods in years. The name Waldorf Astoria did not mean anything either. We did not know at the time that my sister Betty had given birth to a daughter Frances in 1942 and that Sali had borne a son Allan in 1943. My parents were not aware that they had become grandparents of two new off-spring.

The winter of 1944-45 continued to be bitterly cold; it was hard to acquire enough kindling wood to heat the apartment. Besides, when it was stored in the cellar, we had to carry it up 100 stairs. Life continued to be brutally hard, sullen and joyless. We had been cut off from the family for years. Life after the liberation offered little chance for improvement. Father’s family had been wiped out in Poland. We knew it from a reliable source, from a Jewish partisan, who had fought in the underground, in Galizia.

When this man, with a little red flag in the fur hat, came to look for us, he gave us all the bitter news that one could comprehend. My Father’s stepmother and some of her children and grandchildren were hidden in a bunker, in the ghetto in Kolomija. After the deportation of the entire community, the Germans suspected that there were some Jews hidden somewhere. They burned the entire section of town and the last survivors died by fire. After listening to the elaborate report, Father said: "I don’t think that I will every laugh, for the rest of my life." I don’t think he did.

The winter of 1944-45 found us also exhausted and demoralized, after years of daily wrangling for survival.

The war went well for the allies in all the theaters of war. People started to think about an end to this ongoing horror, which had started in 1939. There was an uncertainty as to the future of our province - whether it would remain Russian or would revert to Romania. That seemed to be on the minds of the politicians in the Kremlin, too. The rumor spread that once the war was over, the allies would demand a decision by plebiscite. In that case, the population would decide the future of Northern Bukovina, which had never been Russian in its history, up to 1940.

In order to insure that the plebiscite would result in the favor of the Soviet Union, the Soviets decided to let people apply for "repatriation". As soon as these people would leave, the Soviets would bring in Russians, to fill the town. In case of a plebiscite, in the near future, the votes would go in their favor.

When the news first spread, that people could apply at the militia, to leave for Romania, many careful people could not believe it. They feared that it was a ruse, a trick, a way to show up people as unpatriotic. They feared that if one applies to leave for the West, they would put you on a train going East, to Siberia. The very careful ones are still in Czernovitz.

My parents and myself talked it over and decided to register right away. There was no certainty that they would not send us all to Siberia, anyway. In case we are really lucky and leave, we may one day be united with the family in the United States.

In that year 1944-45, the second time under Soviet administration, all my fears and disillusionment with that regime became fully defined. I harbored no doubts about my dislike of life in that society. My boy friend seemed to have a woman friend, a nurse, an assistant in the same regiment. They were not married and he wrote that he would definitely return to Czernovitz. Yet, he was a member of the Party and sent me a picture in uniform, proudly displaying his medals.

By the time he left, in June 41, I was a 21 year old girl. At this time, after almost four years of a tough school for survival, I was different; I could judge in a more detached manner. First, he would not leave for the West because of his political affiliation. If I were to stay, the parents would not depart alone, so they would be stuck, too. Their hopes would all be dashed. Also, the fact that his family had been lost would remain a dark shadow all along.

Thus, I did not let him know that I applied to leave. If I could live without him for four years, I’ll be able to do so for the rest of my life. I preferred to leave, without meeting again. I had made a clear, clean decision. I wanted to make sure to leave before we may meet again, for in that case, I was not completely sure of myself. As for life at the time, it was pure hell: the regime, the conditions of life and the hatred of the Soviets for surviving Jews, in particular.

In March, 1945, my Father and myself went to the militia, to apply for a permit to be repatriated to Romania. I knew that they could immediately expel me from the university, yet I didn’t mind taking the risk any more - life was insufferable. They put a stamp on our identification papers right then: Applied to go to Romania.

As soon as the official had registered us, he asked whether he could take our apartment. "Of course", we said. "The sooner you issue our papers, the faster you will get the apartment." He came next day to look things over. That was a good omen, they intended to let us leave. It took one month to receive the permits, we were among the first to leave Czernovitz.

An endless number of Russians wanted the apartment and it made no difference to us who would win in that tug of war that developed. We had to leave the furniture, the entire household, anyway. One could not sell anything; one could not take along anything, they took everything for free. The widow of an officer tried to get the apartment; the militia official tried for it; an N.K.G.B. officer made great efforts. We didn’t mind if they would fight over it, which they did. Later, we found out that two parties shared the apartment; they divided up the bedroom, namely one took a bed and a nightstand - the other took the other pieces; two families remained in the place, sharing the kitchen jointly. What they did with the dining room, I don’t know or care.

In the middle of April 1945, we paid for three spaces on a truck, that would take a few families to the border. The night before we left, all three knapsacks ready, we looked around the house: the furniture in the dining room and bedroom, all brought by the parents from Vienna, the beautiful grandfather clock that had to be wound once a month - all these were part of our lives. Father, without saying a word, opened the clock, cut through the spring, took the two beautifully engraved, gilded weights and threw them in the garbage. He did not want anybody to enjoy that clock, that was brought from Vienna in 1918 and was chiming the quarter, half and the hours for our entire life, in good times and bad. It was the only spiteful act that I ever saw him perform, this quiet, gentle man.

My dear friend, Luta, came to stay overnight with me. We talked and cried all night. We knew that we’d never see one another again. She felt the loss so keenly, as she remembered that my Father showed great sympathy for her and her family, when her parent passed away. They had only recently moved to our town; her mother was left with five children. Father made the arrangement for his funeral and for a week, he came daily to conduct mourning prayers, at their house. Luta and her family remained in Czernovitz to this day.

What happened to all my friends from my youth? Of the ones, who were deported to Transnistria, very few survived. The ones in the Soviet Union, all survived; some came West in the last ten years. I saw Martha and Malzia in Israel in 1983, after more than 40 years. We were 21 years old when we were scattered with the wind. We met again as women in our 60s. Rosl lives in Germany and visited me once in New York in 1982. I correspond with some to this day.

By the time we left Czernovitz, none of those friends had come home and thus, there were few people to miss - just my youth and my familiar surroundings from the day I was born, the memories of years of war and suffering. When we left, I was 25, my parents aged 62 and 65.