The War
On the Day of My Bar Mitzvah
in escaping. They apparently gathered all the weapons they could find and got ready for their action, but at the last minute, they were convinced by the community to abandon the plan. The Judenrat had gotten wind of it, and people were afraid that the Germans would retaliate and kill everyone in the ghetto. Of course, the Germans eventually killed most of us anyway. David Zuker and Israel Dobina eventually were arrested. While being taken for interrogation to another city, they over- whelmed and killed their Ukrainian guards, then escaped into the woods to join the Russian partisans. Unfortunately, they came across a group of Ukrainian renegades instead. These groups had been formed when some nationalist Ukrainians re- alized that the Germans were not going to keep their promise of a Ukrainian state. They broke away from the Germans to create their own partisan, or renegade, groups. They hated the Jews, like most Ukrainians, and they killed Israel Dobina and David Zuker. As a family, we did not discuss the possibility of armed resis- tance. We knew when David Zuker was arrested, because his wife was left alone with the baby in the room next to us. But the com- munity was not organized for any kind of resistance. A revolt was just not in the cards. Only a few young people thought it was even remotely possible. We were not equipped to organize a revolt, and our people were not ready for one. No one had any weapons at all. The people who had joined the militia in 1939, when the Russians came in, had been trained to use weapons, but they had left as soon as the Germans came in, knowing that they would be the first to be persecuted because they had supported the Russian government. Most of them retreated with the Red Army into Russia. Things were getting worse all the time. When winter came, it was cold — temperatures there could be minus thirty degrees Celsius — and there was no firewood. The snow was sometimes three feet deep. More than once, we could not open the outside door and had to climb out the window. Supplying wood to Jews was illegal, and Jews could not leave the ghetto to gather it themselves. Some
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