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CALAMITIES IN OUR HIDING PLACES
By Regina Alex (Rivke Gershenberg)
When we saw clearly that the liquidation of our
ghetto was coming near, I and my husband
Moyshe decided to run away to a gentile whom
we knew.
Moyshe and I agreed to meet in the woods. But
I waited and waited, and Moyshe never came. I
was shaking with fear. I learned later that our
gentile acquaintance, who was taking my husband
and all our belongings to the tenth section in
the woods, had taken out a revolver, told my
husband to leave the wagon, and shot at him,
luckily missing him. I heard this from my husband,
whom I finally met in a forest grove.
In the morning I returned to the city to ask the
Judenrat to extend Moyshe's identification papers.
As I was nearing the city, I heard shots.
Suddenly I heard someone call my name. I
noticed from afar a young boy from Libivne, from
the Pitschinkes family. He told me that the previous
night the final action had taken place in the
ghetto. And so I returned to the grove.
The forester introduced us to a Pole, Andzhey
Armata, who lived on a farm nearby. He took us in
his wagon filled with logs and brought us to a
place where bushes grew in a swamp. We put
branches over part of the swamp, covered them
with straw, and lived there for more than six
weeks. The man would bring us food once a day.
We kept on begging him to take us into his barn,
but he was afraid of his wife.
At the beginning of November, there was not
302
a leaf left on the bushes. A gentile noticed us
through the naked branches and demanded that
we give him money (he carried an axe). We gave
him all the paper money we had with us. We
purposely asked him to bring us bread because
we wanted to buy time while he was gone.
We knew our own gentile man was working
in the fields nearby. I went to him and told him
everything, and that same night he took us into
his barn. Later he told us he heard shots in the
bushes where men were looking for us. Instead of
us, however, they had found other Jews from
Libivne who were hiding near the bushes and
killed all of them: Nute Fuks, Mendl Tsimerboym,
and Mirl the Fisherke's granddaughter. They
died on the night when our Christian took us into
his barn!
In 1943, Ukrainians attacked the village where
we were hiding and Vola Ostrovetska became as
"free" of Poles as Libivne was "free" of Jews. The
Ukrainians burned all the Poles alive, near the
public school. They forced the Poles to dig their
own graves before burning them.
We lay another three days without any food;
Neither did we have water. Moyshe, deciding to
look for another hiding place, left me and never
came back.
I was sent (as a Christian woman) together
with other Poles to Chelm to work in a factory. I
worked there under the name of Yanina Novak
until the Russians came in 1944.