KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
opened. From there, I went to Stalingrad, the Urals, Siberia, all over. My parents stayed home with my sisters.” One sister intend- ed to leave for Russia, too, but missed her opportunity because she was working in the forest. Those who stayed were on their own and hoped for the best. Many of them did not want to leave their homes and community to become refugees. Many thought that the Russian army would regroup and return. Optimists reflected on past times and believed that the years ahead would be no worse than similar periods of war and anti-Semitism, or periods of illness and natural disasters, and that they would survive. Leon Rubinstein remembered his father’s ruminations, as the family observed Jewish refugees fleeing Ger - many and western Poland. His father shook his head and asked, “How do you pick up and move a family with seven children?” Katz recollected an odd incident that shows how complicated the times were. “There was a very rich little village, which was really just one extended family, called Outka, and the people there were very good friends to the Jews. Frequently, when an Outkan came on market day, he stayed at our house. We often exchanged presents. Well, because of the war we couldn’t keep our cow, so we tried to give it to this wealthy family. They were too afraid to take the cow because they might be seen as too friendly with us some- how. We couldn’t slaughter the cow because of complications with the shochet, either. We didn’t know what to do with the cow. We ended up giving it away to someone else.” Meanwhile, Ukrainian sentiment against Jews was intensifying, and Ukrainian nationalists claimed that their primary goal was the creation of a “normal” Ukraine, with a completely Ukrainian pop- ulation. The editor of a Ukrainian newspaper at the time wrote, “All the elements residing in our cities, whether Jews or Poles who were brought there, must disappear.” 4 According to former Ludvi- pol resident Bitya Akerman, “Here in Ludvipol we did not feel the anti-Semitism of the big cities, but the Ukrainians who ate challahs from our tables were the first ones to attack us.” 5
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