KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
when he said, ‘No, you must crawl down the stairs,’ so I crawled. He didn’t give me anything to clean the pot and dishes with, but I did the best I could and then brought them back to him. He was sitting there, picking his teeth. He grabbed the pot and pushed it into my face, showing me some burnt part that was still there. Then he beat me in the face with the pot and said, ‘Go back and make it clean.’ I went back to the river and tried to get it cleaner, then came back, and he beat me some more. Finally I went home, my face all swollen. “My father was not a poor man, and when the Germans put all the Jewish people into the ghetto in Ludvipol, some of the local farmers said, ‘This is the best Jew. Don’t put him in the ghetto. We want him here because he knows how to run the mill and we have no one else to do it.’ So the Germans left us alone for a while. But one night, the Ukrainian police, who knew us, knocked on the door and then broke it and came in. They laid my brother, father, and me down in one of the bedrooms and said, ‘Put your hands over your eyes. We’re going to shoot you.’ My mother started to beg them not to. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘I’m going to give you gold!’ She went to a shack where the valuables had been hidden underneath some firewood, and gave them the box of gold, jewelry, and who knows what. They grabbed it and took everything out of our house, and loaded up an entire wagon with our belongings, even our clothes. The only thing they left was a little jacket of my sister’s that they dropped by mistake. “At some point, we moved into the ghetto [in Ludvipol], but our house faced out. Later, we were permitted to move out of the ghet- to, across the street. I suppose it was because my father was friends with some of the people on the Judenrat. “Early one morning, a friend of our family came to our window and told my mother, ‘They are assembling us and we are going to get killed.’ He used a Jewish expression for going to die, going to go ‘lulu.’ Immediately, we got very panicky. My sister Riva start- ed to put on one dress on top of another; I suppose we had gotten
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