The War
The Mass Murders and Our Escape into the Forest
to our hiding place because I was afraid that the Ukrainian police might come back. A while later, when I estimated that the potatoes were baked, I made a dash to the campfire and pulled the potatoes out, and took them back to feed my mother. She was very weak and kept fainting. Somehow we slept through the night in the forest, just the two of us. We heard no other human voices. It was frightening to be there in the woods, alone with my badly injured mother. I tried to reas- sure myself, but did not have much time to think because I was busy trying to take care of her. We decided the next day to return to the forest where Masik lived because we did not know what else to do. It was a long way to walk. My mother leaned on me, and it took us a whole day because she kept fainting. On the way, I got some milk for her from some farmers. Some other farmers on the way told us that two little girls had passed through there the day before, and that one of them had said her name was Golub. The Ukrainians cannot pronounce the “G,” so they say “Holub.” I remember exactly how he said, “One of the little girls said she was Holub’s daughter.” So I knew my little sister Esther was alive. To my surprise, we found her when we arrived. God knows how a little girl ever man- aged to find her way from such a distance. She had escaped the attack. She was practically naked when I found her. Apparently, Esther had taken her shirt off and put it over the smoke of the fire to de-louse it just before the attack and had run away without her clothes, just a little underwear. Some decent farmers along the way had given her an old dress. When we arrived at the place near Masik’s house, I found a woman who had been hiding there with her two daughters and a son. They had stayed there when we left. There was also a single woman named Leah, so we were a little group and it felt better not to be alone anymore. My father had always kept a pocketknife with him, and it had been in his pocket when we made our escape from the ghetto. That
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