THE HOLOCAUST
TEACHING LESSON 4
HANDOUT 4B
ANATOLY

The war between Germany and Russia started on June 22, 1941. Nobody expected the war. Most people didn’t have time to leave the city, Zmerinka. Besides, Jews thought that the German soldiers would be good to them. The German army had been there in World War I and had treated them decently. The place where we lived was in the Ukraine, one of the most anti-Semitic republics in the Soviet Union. So when the German Occupation started, many Jews did not try to leave because they didn’t believe what they had read about the Germans in the Russian newspaper. They thought it was the Soviet propaganda.  

The Germans divided Zmerinka into two parts. Under an agreement between Germany and Romania, which was a satellite of Germany, part of the city belonged to Romania. All the Jews living in the Rumanian part of the city were put in a ghetto. In the other part of the city, all were killed. My mother and I and my two younger sisters and brothers were sent to the ghetto. In the ghetto, adults were used for labor to work on the roads being built by the Germans or to fix bridges destroyed during the German invasion or by the Soviet army when they left.

It was not legal but you would exchange your clothes for a meal, for food. That was the only way to try and survive. Our house, a three-bedroom house, was crowded. Six families, including my own, squeezed into the same home, somehow managing to fit twenty people into a house meant for five.

It was only a place to sleep but our house had a big garden and we had a lot of vegetables. This gave us the chance to survive. We ate potatoes. That was all we had to eat. Another thing which helped us was that a lot of the Rumanian Jews were sent from Romania to our ghetto. The Rumanian government sent food and other things to the Jews from their nation. The Rumanian Jews shared with their fellow prisoners.

Anatoly’s family survived this way for three years until their ghetto was liberated by the Soviet Army in April 1944. By then only 300 of the 3,000 people sent to the ghetto at the beginning of the war were still alive.

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/