The War
The Mass Murders and Our Escape into the Forest
semiautomatic machine guns, firing from every side, taking us by surprise. I saw a policeman standing with his rifle aimed right at me, and I thought that was it, I was a goner. My mother, who was lying in the little hut I had built, heard the commotion and crawled out. When she saw that he was about to shoot me, she screamed, startling the man with the gun. He whirled around to see what was going on, and he shot her to death instead of me. Somehow, I was able to run away in that split second. In a sit- uation like that, you become like an animal. You just run and you hope everyone else is running too. I ran like a gazelle. They shot after me continuously, but they missed me. I did not see what happened to my little sister Esther. But she was not around after that, and neither was the woman, nor the three children who were with her. I had to assume that they were all killed. As I was running deeper into the woods, I stumbled upon Leah. She was hysterical. Apparently, one of the bullets fired af - ter me had hit her in the thigh and she was bleeding profusely. She was lucky that the bullet had entered and exited her leg with- out damaging the bone, so I grabbed her hand and dragged her and she was able to limp along beside me until we finally felt we were a safe distance away. Since I already had the experience of handling my mother’s wound, I tied up her leg with cloth torn from her undergarment to stop the bleeding. We walked togeth- er during the daylight and in the evening, we saw light from a farmer’s house in the distance. We knocked on the door of the farmhouse and asked for food. He gave us some food and told us about a place in the woods where Jewish people from Koretz were hiding. The farmers knew every- thing that was going on in their area — you could not hide anything from them. If they wanted to tell a Ukrainian or German policeman where there were Jews, they could give explicit directions and the Germans would not even need to look for smoke from our little fires. The farmer gave us perfect directions, in an area of forest that
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