Frozen Mud and Red Ribbons: A Romanian Jewish Girl's Survival through the Holocaust in Transnistria and its Rippling Effect on the Second Generation

By Avital E. M. Baruch

When Sophica was abruptly separated from her father as a toddler, she found a haven in Grandmother Gitté. But one sunny day in July, when she was six years old, gendarmes marching and shouting in the streets stopped her dreamy childhood and her hopes to go to school and to be a big girl like her sister. She was deported together with her mother and the whole of the Jewish community of Mihaileni, Romania. On foot, through icy fields, they arrived in eastern Ukraine, a strip of land called Transnistria.

Death, illness, brutality, shame, became her daily scenes. Sophica suffered hunger and fear but kept her hopes and sanity, albeit losing her sister and her father and witnessing her mother being viciously attacked. She survived typhus and starvation by being strong and quiet. Herman was a jolly little boy who didn’t care much needing to wear the yellow star and being forbidden from school. He continued playing outside with his friends while his father and brother were sent to a labor camp. At the age of 14, when the Second World War ended, he joined a Jewish youth movement and embarked on a ship to the Promised Land. However, their journey was interrupted and they were taken to a British detention camp in Cyprus. Sophica and Herman were given new names, Shulamit and Tzvi. They met and made a home in Israel. Shulamit/Sophica never mentioned her sad childhood, but the essence of the past found its ways out. Sixty-five years after those events, her daughter comes across a family secret and starts asking questions, inducing Shulamit to break her silence and become again the frightened little Sophica. This book tells her moving childhood story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9783838269986

Book preview

9783838269986-cover

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

In memory of

Chaya, my beloved grandmother,

and of Tonie, Chaim, Gitté, and Esther,

who died without me knowing them

Table of Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Introduction

Family Tree

Maps

Note

Chapter One

Spring 1935: From Mihaileni to Iasi

Chapter Two

1938: Back to Mama Gitté

Chapter Three

Summer 1941: Deportation

Chapter Four

Herman’s story: Siret

Chapter Five

Autumn 1941: Mogilev and Luchinets

Chapter Six

1942: Shargorod

Chapter Seven

1943: Capusterna

Chapter Eight

Herman’s Story: Botosani

Chapter Nine

SPRING 1944: Back to no-Home

Chapter Ten

Herman’s Story: Bar Mitzvah

Chapter Eleven

1947-1949: Gura-Humorului

Chapter Twelve

Herman’s Story: On the Pan York to Cyprus

Chapter Thirteen

1949-1950: Bucharest

Chapter Fourteen

Herman’s story: The War of Independence

Chapter Fifteen

1950-1952: Newcomers to Israel

Chapter Sixteen

1954: Getting Married

Epilogue

Historical Background

Bibliography

Words of Thanks

About the Author

Notes

Foreword

In Jewish tradition, individuals bear a heavy responsibility to remember, recount, and record experiences for future generations. In Frozen Mud and Red Ribbons, Avital Baruch does more than just fulfil this obligation in her book of the generational experience of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. She interweaves oral history, memory, and documentary sources to create a compelling account of her family’s journey from Romania to Israel, while at the same time exorcising her own demons and recounting her own journey from confusion to understanding growing up in a household and community of survivors.

The book is part memoir, part history of the experience of a Romanian Jewish family immersed in the traditions and rituals of Romanian Jewish communities, often overlooked in the Holocaust literature, and sharing the experiences of the polyglot Central European Jewish world. In line with many emerging Holocaust narratives, it offers a view of the Holocaust from the perspective of the survivors’ children who, as Baruch demonstrates, might be counted as casualties as well, although of a different sort, haunted by the ghosts of the horrors of the past.

In her work that aims to bring ‘cleanliness’ or to clear up the loose ends of the past, Baruch captures a world of Holocaust memory from Mihaileni, Iasi, Botosani, Bucharest and Transnistria that includes the wanderings, deportations, deprivations, persecutions, and genocide of Romania’s Jews. Her book captures the personal aspects and individual experiences of the Romanian Holocaust as Romania followed a path from independent state, to Axis ally, and back to independent state, along the trail of German Nazis and Russian Communists. In stunning detail, she relates the sufferings of the transience of life—in names, places, homes—and the hopes and disappointments associated with alternating periods of tragedy and triumph. Periods of hunger and deprivation are punctuated by stories of celebration and the taste of Romanian delicacies including mamaliga, kigalé and honey cake, which alternates with the bitterness of hunger.

The overlapping voices of family members including Baruch’s mother, grandmother, father, and aunts offer a variety of perspectives on deportation, hiding, and flight, and on those who offered assistance, inflicted pain, resisted the catastrophe, collaborated or acquiesced. The style of the book, written almost as a stream of consciousness, reflects on the richness and variety of Jewish life, and reveals the conflicts, both internal and external, of Jewish communities from ultra-religious Jews in Romania to radical Zionists in Israel.

Baruch succeeds in bringing a sense of order and cleanliness, in recounting moments of great kindness and of unthinkable cruelty and in tracing the footsteps of black muddy feet and the fluttering of red ribbons.

Maura Hametz

Norfolk, Virginia

July 2016  

Prologue

Some people act in one chapter of our life story, and then disappear. Others reappear a few chapters later. And there are those who are holding the thread of the story, never letting go. Or maybe it is us, who won’t allow them to go.

We miss close people from previous chapters, we want to keep them connected, but the story line must roll on, because life itself is movement; it doesn’t stand still. Its holding strength is limited, and we do not have much power over it.

What we could do to keep and preserve our heroes with us is to write about them. Re-reading and ‘re-membering’ brings them back to life.

Avital E.M. Baruch

November 2016

Introduction

My mother had managed brilliantly to sweep her past under the carpet, concealing the fact that she had been in anything equivalent to a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. I knew that her family was exiled from Romania to Ukraine, that they had starved there, that they didn’t always have a roof over their heads, that it was freezing cold, and that her sister and her father died. What I did not know was that she had experienced the Romanian’s version of concentration camps. The Romanian’s Holocaust.

At school, in history lessons, we learnt about persecution, deportations, and concentration camps in Poland, Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Hungary, but there was never any mention of a place named Transnistria. I thought for a time that it was a secret word that only my grandmother and a few of her backanté (Yiddish for acquaintances) knew. In some ways it was a mystery mission, a quest, for me to find out about that secret place. Two years after learning to read, being eight years old, I had already started to comb our local library, in the suburbs of Haifa, and devoured every single book written by people who had experienced the Holocaust. I felt compelled to reveal what seemed to be an awful big secret, but I couldn’t find any mention of that place, or any clue about my own mother’s past. Her childhood whereabouts, as well as any details concerning her father’s side of the family, remained a black hole for me. By this I mean it was not only an unknown mystery, but, like a black hole in the cosmos, it sucked a lot of my emotional energy into it.

When my mother’s feet touched the Holy Land at the age of sixteen, she stood upright, looked up to the sky and said: Now I start a new life, and since then tried to forget the past. In smartphone terms you might say: She put her past on silence, or discreet, not to distract her from the here and now. Yet, so often an event occurred that cracked that wall of silence. I remember standing outside with a ‘Sab-re’ neighbour, a woman of my mother’s age who was born and brought up in Israel. They were talking about a film on the Second World War. Rinna, the neighbour, commented on how horrible its portrayal was in the film. My mother gave her a cranky look and said: This film makes it appear too beautiful, this is Hollywood; the reality was far worse, with no comparison at all. Some days later my mother said to me out of the blue: I could also write a book about what I went through. Her words and her attitude were factual, straightforward, without emotion. The seed for this book was probably planted on that very day.

I always experienced my mother as very resilient, like a rock which will withstand any difficulty on earth. Once, when I had a tummy upset she muttered: My stomach will not get upset even if I would feed it stones. On the other hand, there was a more vulnerable side to her which I never encountered personally. If I happened to quarrel with my mother during my adolescence and we both became upset and moody, my father used to come to my room and talk with me for hours to restore the peace. He used to be, and still is, a real peacemaker, smoothing away conflicts; he would never let me go to sleep upset. On those occasions he would say: Please forgive your mother, please try not to annoy her, she has suffered enough, she still wakes up at night with nightmares.  My heart would melt a little towards her, as I saw her in a different light for a second. So I forgave, but inherited having regular nightmares.

The first one I remember is of a wolf coming to visit me in the night and standing near my bed, staring at me. Following my screams, my father came to my room and assured me that he had sent the wolf away. There, he would say, as he waved his muscular arm in the air, It’s gone. I could still see the wolf staring at me, but my strong father nearby made it look tame. As I grew up the nightmares kept changing: there were lots of episodes of shooting, hiding, and running away from the Nazis. At a later stage of my life, the theme transformed further, from falling off staircases without banisters to trying to find food and shelter for my family, with the Nazis threatening to invade the town.

Now, after writing the whole story as my mother had told it to me, after conducting research in Holocaust museum libraries, and after reading testimonies of other survivors of the same places, I know that the reality was indeed much worse, and no words could do it any justice. So, I came to a certain conclusion about the matter. I decided I have no interest in analysing whose ‘fortune’ was worse, or what story is the most devastating. I started searching in my soul to try and discover for myself why it is so important for me to write this book, and why I think that although my mother kept distracting me from the ‘job’, it was of benefit to her too.

One conclusion of my search told me that it is all about cleanliness. I feel and believe that cleaning and tidying your house brings you peace of mind. It is easier to start working on a new project when your desk is clear. Therefore, when writing down all the mess from within, clearing all the disturbing memories out, organising and cataloguing them, we give the past its recognition, and our ancestors their honour. We clear our mind in order to be free to work on our own task in life.

My mother asserts that in order to be active, take part in the building of the new country, raise a family, be sane and normal, she had to forget the past and put it aside. I wish she had been given the chance to write it or record it somehow before ‘opening a new page’ of her life. If only she had been able to clean up a bit before I was born into that new page; before I came and experienced shadows of script from previous pages without knowing what they mean. Well, it was not an option at the time, since no one was concerned then with psychological issues. People wanted to live in the present and make plans for the future, and not dwell on the past. Since my mother never had the opportunity to record her experiences in any way, and since the painful memories rubbed off onto me too and fed into my soul, I feel responsible to write it all down. I do it for both of us, as well as for other survivors and their offspring, for the ones who perished and for anyone who is interested in people’s struggles and biographies. And beyond this, it is a story of a generation, of a culture, of a time which was, and will never return.

In a talk by Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former UK Chief Rabbi, about fertility treatments and maternal identity, the question arose: Who is the real mother, the genetic one or the one who carries the baby in her womb? There are two opposing views about it by two great Jewish scholars[1]. So, I asked myself, in the case of me giving birth to this book, which is mainly my mother’s story: Is she the genetic mother and am I the surrogate mother? I am my mother’s daughter, yet her life story became my baby.

I have asked my mother thousands of questions. Her answers were initially too short and factual, and then became convoluted, moving backwards and forwards in time. I took notes in Hebrew and Yiddish, as she narrated her story; I sorted them out chronologically and according to characters, trying to make sense of it all. I came back with more questions, trying different angles when I sensed that she was inclined to ‘close the door’, and finally re-wrote the Hebrew notes into an English narrative, so my children can read it. Ideally, my mother’s story should have been written in Yiddish—being the language of her childhood—but my Yiddish skills are not sufficiently honed. I have found it important to retain some phrases in Yiddish and in Hebrew; and at other times I translated, trying, as far as possible, to be true to the real ‘pulse’ of the characters.

My mother’s story is one amongst myriads of survival stories. Each single story not only represents another individual, but induces a different atmosphere, depending on the angle of the spotlight from which the author is observing it. We may cope with similar challenges in life, but we do it in our own unique way, ending up with diverse stories to tell. All survivors of the Holocaust became soul-damaged in one way or another. Some ‘utilized’ their pain in artistic ways and became famous painters, writers, and even, ironically, comedians. Other survivors could merely manage to keep up with being like everyone else, carrying their grief inside and their grumpiness as their daily expression, telling themselves that every extra day they are alive is a victory over those responsible for the shift in the script of their life.

We are born into a script, which we are obliged to follow. When we are forced off our script by external events (such as being evicted from our home at the age of six), we can take advantage of it, like surfing on a dangerous wave, and come back safely to the shore, standing upright and happy on the surf-board; or we can be swallowed by the wave, and even after surviving it, remain resentful for the rest of our lives. Everyone reacts differently to being forced off their script. There are no right or wrong reactions; rather there is instead a range of stories to tell.

However, I am probably explaining myself too much again. Perhaps ‘excessive amplification’ should be added to the symptoms of ‘The Second Generation of the Holocaust Syndrome’.

Family Tree

T:\0900\0998-2-Baruch_Avital_Noema\Ebook\Family_Trees_IBD_vl_Seite_1.jpgT:\0900\0998-2-Baruch_Avital_Noema\Ebook\Family_Trees_IBD_vl_Seite_2.jpg

Maps

Sophica’s Journey during the War

Map created by Avinoam Baruch with data from http://www.naturalearthdata.com and http://thematicmapping.org. The World Borders Dataset by thematicmapping.org is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (s. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The map shows modern country borders as of 2016.

Sophica’s and Herman’s Journeys to Israel

Map created by Avinoam Baruch with data from http://www.naturalearthdata.com and http://thematicmapping.org. The World Borders Dataset by thematicmapping.org is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (s. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The map shows modern country borders as of 2016.

Note

The historical facts and events described in this book, including those in the appendix, are based both on oral testimonies and on extensive library-based research. Although correct to the best knowledge of the author, these facts are presented here for background understanding of the context only. This work is not intended to be an accurate historical account or a validated source. Like all books about the past, there might be variances about certain facts and figures.

In addition, although this work is based on true family stories, names and personal details of people who are not in the Family Tree have been changed.

Chapter One

Spring 1935: From Mihaileni to Iasi

"Had I been asked to speak of it, I would have begun with the story of the generation that raised me, which is the only place to begin. If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully... The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life...

the stronger the daughter."

Anita Diamant, ‘The Red Tent’

Le-Chaim means ‘to life’ in Hebrew. It’s what you say when you celebrate and ‘toast’ your wine glasses together. Chaim is ‘life’, and it was my grandfather’s name. His surname was also Chaim. But this duality wasn’t in his favour, as he didn’t enjoy too much life and was destined to die a most horrible death at the age of thirty-three.

You might call it coincidence, but my grandmother happened to be called Chaya, meaning ‘she who is alive’. In her case, the name brought a bit of luck, so she was spared, and lived long after him. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here to tell you their story, as the backdrop to the stage on which my mother’s play of life took place.

My grandmother, Chaya, was born in Mihaileni, a very small town in Northwest Romania. Her parents, Avraham and Gitté, came from Transylvania. Gitté was born in Czernowitz, a famous city in the old Austro-Hungarian kingdom, where the language was a melange of German, Romanian, and Hungarian. Gitté probably didn’t have a formal maiden surname and as was the custom in those days, until around the mid-nineteenth century, she was called Gitté-daughter-of-Yerachmiel.

Their ancestors were descendants of the Jewish people who were exiled from Spain in 1492, wandered around eastern Europe, into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and found their way into villages in Romania in the 18th and 19th century. They lived in the high street of Mihaileni, where most of the other Jews lived. There, in one road, were nine synagogues, a Mikveh[2], a Jewish primary school, and at the far end, at the top of the hill, the Jewish cemetery. It was a jolly, very lively market town, with a well in the middle of the main road, being a centre for meetings and gossip. The Molnitza River, a tributary of the more well-known Siret River, was winding merrily through the town, and a beautiful forest was resting by its border, beyond the houses and the fields. There was a diverse social make up of people in that tiny village, all living together in exceptional harmony, with mutual respect. The Goyim[3] were generally more well off and most of them lived on the hill above the ‘village’. They usually owned some land and farms and brought their merchandise to the Jewish workshops every morning: milk, cheese, wool, and anything on the farm that needed fixing.

Mihaileni was on the border between Bessarabia and Bukovina regions. Before the First World War, Bessarabia belonged to Russia and Bukovina belonged to Austria-Hungary, but after it, both Bessarabia and Bukovina were annexed to Romania. When the town was founded in the end of the Eighteenth Century, only Jews from Bessarabia or Bukovina were permitted to settle there. Jewish merchants were exempt from paying taxes for the first year, to attract them to the area. In 1834, Mihaileni became the property of the prince of Moldova, who granted Jewish merchants further privileges, exempting them from taxes for five years and granting them loans. Exactly a hundred years later, the descendants of these traders were not permitted to get any credit or trade in the free market, due to new regulations of these same authorities.

In 1859 there were 2,472 Jews in Mihaileni, making up two thirds of the total population, most of them merchants, especially fur traders and manufacturers of wagons who supplied to the whole of the Moldova region. It became a centre of Yiddish and Hebrew culture. Even the Goyim could converse in Yiddish, being in strong trading and neighbourly relations with the Jews. In 1930, the Jewish Party obtained a majority in the municipal council elections, but then the election results were obliterated by the authorities. In 1940, when Bessarabia was annexed to the USSR, a group of Jews in Mihaileni were accused of treason and spying for the Russians and were consequently arrested by the Romanian authorities. After another year of threats, in June 1941, Mihaileni’s Jews were deported. Three years later, half of them were dead.

In history books they use the word deported, so I follow suit, but deported is a word commonly used for foreigners who need to leave a country that they entered illegally. The real word to describe the act of the authorities should have been exiled, or rather, thrown out, in my opinion, because the Jews were ordered to leave their legally owned homes and houses.

Each synagogue in Mihaileni was lead by a different rabbi and was a centre of a separate congregation usually divided according to their trade, occupation, or origin. My great-grandfather Avraham’s family belonged to a synagogue nicknamed Ingerishé (Yiddish for ‘the hungry people’), or in short: the Ingers. They used to pray so fast that people were joking and saying: These Blacksmiths are so Ingeric. They are in a rush to go home for dinner. In fact, I think that people were jealous at their genius and ability to read fast. Anyway, the story goes that when the time came to register with an official family name, they transformed their ‘nickname’ into the common Romanian name: Ungureanu. A nice story, but not necessarily authentic. Jews tended to adopt Romanian names as a means of belonging to Romanian society. Also, most likely, traders of all religions who used to travel to Hungary on business were given this name. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the story about the hungry blacksmiths was born after they were already called Ungureanu. In any case, Chaya’s maiden name was Ungureanu, and in short, Ungar. It wasn’t such a great honour to be called Ungureanu in Romania; Hungary was not considered an ally, to say the least.

The houses in Mihaileni had thatched roofs with round stocky chimneys, and windows that opened to the street, with wooden shutters to protect from the heavy snow in winter and from the scorching heat of summer. The Jewish families in Mihaileni usually lived in the flat above their workshop. My great-grandfather, Avraham Ungureanu, Chaya’s father, was a renowned blacksmith. People came to him from all the villages in the province to make wheels for their wagons and for horses’ shoes. He was a strong man, with muscular arms and an air of serene confidence about him, but years of hard physical work brought upon him the pains and aches of aging, much earlier than expected even in those days. His hands still worked perfectly with the metal, but Gitté his wife started to fear that his energy levels are not the same any more. He was breathing heavily when helping her