BYSTANDERS, PERPETRATORS, AND RESCUERS
TEACHING LESSON 8
HANDOUT 8B
SHELLY IN HIDING

The Germans invaded Soviet-occupied Poland in June 1941. In August, they came to Rovno, my city. Rovno was near the border with the Soviet Union and many of the people who lived there were Ukrainian. Of the 100,000 people who lived in Rovno, about 25,000 were Jews. Members of my family had lived in Rovno since the early 1700s. After the initial roundup of Jewish families for the death camps, German soldiers began collecting Jews for slave labor camps. Then, in the winter of 1940-41, the Nazis herded the city’s remaining Jews into the ghetto. I was four years old. My mother and I were in the ghetto for about three months where we were very closely watched. We were not even allowed to go outside. One time, I did go outside and a soldier pointed a gun at me, so I never went out again.

We were in the ghetto about three months when we heard rumors that there was going to be another roundup. My grandfather saw that things were getting very bad. He went to a Ukrainian farmer he knew in a small village about twelve kilometers away from Rovno. My grandfather offered to pay the farmer if he would hide me, my mother, my Aunt Sophie, and my cousin Rachel, age five. At first the farmer refused. “No, absolutely not,” he said. “It’s much too dangerous. I’ve got a young child. My daughter is only twelve years old.”   But my grandfather kept coming back and talking to him. Finally when the farmer saw Jews in the village being killed and his neighbors turning Jews in to the local police, he agreed to help us.

I think there were several reasons why the farmer took such a risk. His son was a resistance fighter in the Polish-Ukrainian Underground. The son’s strong commitment to helping other people may have influenced the father. Also this son had a special fondness for my Aunt Sophie who had been very kind to him when he was a young child. The farmer’s wife also liked my aunt because she used to help the farmer’s wife by milking her cow for her on Sundays so the wife could go to church. Also, once the farmer was hiding us, morally it was hard for him to turn us out because we were two young children, me and my cousin, who faced almost certain death.

Of course, we paid the farmer and his wife for their trouble, but they didn’t do it for the money. It was too dangerous a thing to do just for money. The farmer was putting his entire family at risk. The Nazis and their Polish and Ukrainian collaborators practiced collective responsibility.   If we had been found, the farmer would have been shot on the spot or taken into town and hanged as an example to other villagers. His wife and daughter would have been killed too. Besides, there were plenty of other people who took money for hiding Jews and after they got paid, they turned them in anyway. The farmer had a married son in a nearby village who was an anti-Semite. He never told his son about us.

At first, we hid in a small space in the top of the farmer’s barn. It was large enough only for us to sit or lie down. The farmer made a tunnel through which we were brought food. After about   eighteen months informers alerted the Nazis to our hiding place and we decided to make a run for it, taking off into the woods. We spent a sleepless night in the forest listening to the sounds of the Nazis searching for us.  

The next day, another farmer came to our aid. He had known my mother back in the days when she ran the small grocery store in Rovno. He was also a friend of the first farmer who helped us. The second farmer took us into the wheat fields near his home where we spent three days hiding until the Nazis got tired of searching. Then we went back to the first farmer. Our next hiding place was under a trough where horses drank. We lay there for several weeks, but it was horrible and we couldn’t take it. My mother said she would rather die than continue living there.

Next we moved to an underground tunnel where the farmer stored his grain. That was where we lived for three months. It was pretty bad because there was one hole that the farmer dug for air and in order to get the food we would have to crawl on our bellies through a tunnel. It was damp, dark, and frightening. Just candles and lots of rats.

• Two Ukrainian farmers helped hide Shelly and her mother during the war. According to Shelly, what reasons did each have for helping them?
• What risks were the farmers taking in helping Shelly and her mother?
• Would you consider these farmers heroes? Does the fact that the first farmer was paid for hiding the two of them make his actions less heroic? Explain your answer.

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/