I went there, and the non-Jewish woman told me that she believed my parents had been
taken away. I asked her how she knew it, since we were so far away.
She replied that she had been standing on the roof of the church, and she believed
that all the people had been taken out of the ghetto courtyard.
Rebecca does not think twice.
She puts on her "sack".
I am speaking of my modern dress: a sack held by two ropes and shoulder straps
. I also had a pair of wooden clogs, a bit like like flip-flops.
And so I went to the ghetto.
Why should I have stayed there, if my parents had been taken away?
[Speaker 2:] You spoke of the time when your father threw you out bodily - did that
happen before this particular murder operation? [Speaker 1:] Yes.
[Speaker 2:] How much time did you spend with the non-Jewish woman prior to that?
More than a week?
[Speaker 1:] Not there. Two days before that .
I mean, I spent a week there, but two days prior to that I had brought them what I
bought, the things he had given me. There was a chicken, a little oil.
They called it "a quarter oil".
It was sunflower oil.
So I went to the ghetto, and there were two Judenrat men standing near the ghetto gate.
They said: "Here is Yosef Waldman's daughter . Come in!" They took me straight to the
synagogue. Everyone was there, including Mom and Dad.
Hundreds of people. Where are Mom and Dad?
I told them that I wanted to go there.
One of the Judenrat men told me: "Such and such has given away the location of the
bunker." It was one of the daughters, who lived together with her parents and sister.
There were dozens of people there, living together.
They seized her in the street and told her: "If you give away the location of your
parents' hideout, we will leave you alone." So she went there straight away and revealed
the location of the bunker.
And all the people were taken out of the bunker.
My sister couldn't get out.
It was impossible for her to get out.
I don't know how they took my mother and grandfather out.
And so we met.
It was a coincidence.
We met at the execution.
All day long, Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, the old and the young - all this enormous
mass of people - huddled in the large synagogue building and in the courtyard.
The men were taken away to dig the graves, and they were executed during the night.
[Speaker 2:] What was Dad's reaction when he saw you?
[Speaker 1:] Terrible. I think it was he who threw me out of the common grave. [Speaker
2:] But when you got to the ghetto?
[Speaker 1:] I wasn't in the ghetto! I came to the synagogue, and he was there.
Suddenly... But I didn't know it.
The Judenrat prevented me from going.
I didn't get to meet him among the hundreds of people.
But at dawn all the Jews were taken out to be killed.
There were two enormous graves.
I don't know their exact size.
The grave where my parents were buried could accommodate 1500 bodies.
There was one large grave.
The Ukrainians were sitting to one side, with an orchestra and with buckets full of
lime. The Gestapo officers were sitting across from them, with their machine guns.
They told us to strip naked, at the cemetery .
[Speaker 2:] Wait, so first you came to the ghetto, and the you came to the synagogue
and moved about? [Speaker 1:] I
didn't go there, didn't meet anyone, I was alone.
The Judenrat man who had caught me refused to let me go.
He told me that my parents had been taken away, and that I should look for them here.
Everyone kept calling for their mothers and fathers.
I didn't meet them there. We all began to remove our clothes and pile them, putting
the shoes separately. That was in the cemetery [Speaker 2:] Did everyone know what
was going to happen?
[Speaker 1:] Of course they all did.
[Speaker 2:] You say that there were a lot of bunkers.
You didn't think to hide in one of them?
[Speaker 1:] I was staying with the non-Jewish woman.
[Speaker 2:] At that moment, when you were in the ghetto, and they told you to undress
- did you do it because you actually wanted to, and not because you had no choice?
[Speaker 1:] Yes, I had no wish to live. But I could not
find Mom and Dad.
I had run away from the non-Jewish woman, with whom I used to hide.
I wasn't in the bunker.
[Speaker 2:] But I ask you whether, instead of undressing, you thought of escape?
[Speaker 1:] Escape was impossible.
We were surrounded by the Gestapo.
Who could have escaped from them?
Apart from the Gestapo, we were also guarded by the Judenrat, the Jewish police.
[Speaker 2:] But you said you didn't even think of escape?
[Speaker 1:] I didn't even think of it. As soon as the Judenrat man told me to look for
them there, I realized that we were not going to a party, that were going to our
deaths, and I was prepared to die.
But where were they? The Jews had gotten undressed, and were about to enter the
grave. They were halfway into the grave. And I was a big girl.
I stood there, turned around, and I heard my father calling me: "Weissman, a curse upon
my life! What are you doing here?
How did you come here?
Now I'm going to die with the knowledge that you are here."
As we spoke, I asked him where my grandparents were.
He didn't know where Grandpa was.
Obviously, Mother had already been killed.
I asked him about Bronya, and he said that she could not be gotten out of the bunker,
so she was shot inside it, and her body was left there.
And while we were speaking, the killers fired a volley.
I remember nothing beyond that point.
They fired the volley, and it was a kind of light,
and I don't know what happened next.
The next morning...
The next day... I was lying in the open, naked and covered in blood.
Even the few hairs left on my head were bloody. And the bodies of people who had
been shot while trying to escape were scattered about me. This
was at the Jewish cemetery, not in the forest. They had carried out an operation of
some sort. I don't know exactly what it was.
The town was not yet "Judenrein". There would be further operations to finish off
the Jews.
They were prodding the bodies, trying to find if there were any survivors.
Those who were dead would be thrown into the pit.
When they prodded me, I got up and saw a long spray of blood, and there were non-Jews
standing there,
and the church bells were ringing.
And I ran away, to the non-Jewish woman with whom I'd previously sheltered.
She knew that I'd gone back to the ghetto.
When she saw me, she fainted.
I was bloody all over, so I assume I'd fallen.
I couldn't have crawled out of the grave on my own.
Either my father tossed me out, or...
I don't know. I stood up to my chest in the pit.
[Speaker 2:] So you remember yourself standing there?
[Speaker 1:] I stood there, and suddenly I heard: "Weissman, A curse upon my life!
What are you doing here?"
And he told me that Bronya had been left in the bunker.
I asked him where Mother was, and he said: "What do you mean?
They killed her on the spot, because she couldn't walk, and they did the same to
Grandma and Grandpa.
What have you done? Why have you come back?" And that was all. I don't remember anything
else. It took me years to reconstruct the sequence of events.
I did not get out of the pit.
He might have been injured.
As I would later learn (not in detail, but in general), the shooters fired from both
directions, so that the people would drop into the pit. And then, another group went
into the pit with buckets of lime, and they poured the lime on the wounded, to finish
them off, and all the bodies were then covered with layers of soil.
But afterward, the earth over the grave kept heaving, probably because of the wounded
people who were inside. The local non-Jews thought that this was a curse. The woman who
was sheltering me was scared, and she took me to the church straight away. [Speaker 2:]
But there was no lime on your body when you emerged? [Speaker 1:] I was naked and
covered in blood. So I ran from the cemetery to the residence of the non-Jewish woman. It
was quite a distance. There were people in the streets,
but no one touched me.
All who saw me just crossed themselves.
When I arrived at her home, she exclaimed: "Oh, goodness!
Where did you come from?"