KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
“I crossed the river and went to a village where a good friend of my father, a farmer, lived. It was in the middle of the night when I knocked on his window to ask if he’d seen anyone from my family. He said he had not seen them, but that the mayor was going to the city, Ludvipol, the next day and maybe there would be some news soon. He let me stay overnight. The next night, he told me that there was a rumor that my father and two sisters had been killed. He also told me that I had to leave, because he did not trust the mayor or something like that. I stayed in his barn overnight and left the next night. “I went back towards Bistricht and the house of another farm- er, Schmidt, whose family was good friends with our family. On the way, a Ukrainian gave me food. I got to Schmidt’s house and knocked. They were all having dinner and I asked Schmidt if he’d seen my father and my family. ‘Where do you think your father is?’ he quizzed me. ‘I don’t know,’ I responded. And then he said to his daughter, Nadia, ‘Take him to his father!’ Nadia took me by the hand to the barn and showed me a ladder, and at the top of the ladder, in the hay, were my father, mother, brother, and two young- er sisters, all having a meal. “When the Germans had been rounding people up to kill, my mother had put up a ladder, and she, my father, my two sisters, and a cousin had climbed behind the chimney and hidden under the roof. My father’s mother had stayed in the house because she had a cough and was afraid she would cough and give away the hiding place. The Germans had come into the house and said, ‘Are you Jewish?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, and they picked her up and put her in front of everyone, a few thousand people, in the square. And they had her walk with everyone else, marching behind town to the soldiers’ barracks, where they made them dig their own graves, and killed them the next day. “In the barn, my family asked me, ‘Do you know where Riva is?’ but I did not know. We did not stay there for long because the farmer’s son was a policeman working for the Germans, and the
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