Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
the partisans and claimed that Dobina had taken a pair of boots from him during an attack on his village. Dobina was tried, found guilty, and executed by the Ukrainian partisans. Perhaps the most detailed and credible account of Zuker and Dobina is told by Boris Edelman, who connects them with the ac- tivities of his own father and brother. “On the road construction to Brezno in 1942, my father was put in charge of a road crew of about sixty girls. One day, the German commissar, a very bad person, went to watch the people work. He was riding my father’s big, beautiful horse, the nicest in the area, and sat on a little hill watch- ing. Some of the teenagers — my father knew every one of them — had to take a rest, and pee. When my father let them stop working for five minutes, the commissar rushed down on my father’s horse. I was a kid, working with the Gentile engineers, holding the tape while they measured, and I was standing there. The commissar could see that the engineers liked me and asked me to hold the horse for him. The horse knew me, of course, and when I touched the horse, the com- missar said, ‘Why are you touching my horse? I’m going to shoot you.’ Then for some reason he went over to my father and made him lie down there, and put his foot on my father’s neck, and took out his gun, and put it against the side of my father’s head. And then he pulled the trigger, but the gun refused to go off. He said, ‘God wants you to live still, your time is not up.’ My father got up and the commissar beat him a little, then came and took the horse and pushed me a bit. Oh, my father was carrying so much hate for him and planned to kill him. “He got together with a group of Ukrainians and two Jews, one of whom had lived with Aharon’s family (David Zuker] and Israel Dobina, who had been beaten up by the Germans a lot. The commissar had seen the wife [Manya] of one of the Jewish guys [David Zuker] and said, ‘Go and take a bath’ and then he had taken her and...raped her. The
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