KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
He insisted that she go to the Russian border, which she did. She survived,” Leon explained. His father made arrangements for him to hide in a friend’s house. He himself kept moving, looking for hiding places and quick exits wherever he went. Moshe Furshpan, a ten-year-old boy from Ludvipol, stayed in the heated hut with the family that did not make room for Aharon as his feet froze. Furshpan had escaped the liquidation of the Jew- ish community of Ludvipol because he had been warned about it. “My parents,” he explained, “had arranged for me to be taken care of by a Gentile man who was a good friend of theirs, and I’d take his cow to pasture every day. That morning, the farmer brought me some food out in the field and said, ‘Don’t go home! Go to the for - est or they will kill you!”’ Furshpan’s entire family was killed that day, but he survived. In the forest, he found a woman from Ludvipol who had also escaped with two of her children. He stayed with them for about a week, after which she brought him to another Ludvipol family hiding in the forest. This was the Grosspish family, two children and their parents. He had not known them before the war, although they knew who he was. The father’s nickname, Furshpan recalled, was Diodia. He stayed with this family for the duration of the war. Discussing his life in the woods with the Grosspish family, Furshpan said, “I was like a nothing, worthless, just a child. They could use me. I was veiy polite in manner and did what they told me to do, sort of like paying my way. I had to do a lot of things to stay with them, unbelievable things like going by myself into the forest at night and to villages to beg for food and bring it back to them. The villagers would give me (a little kid) bread or potatoes. I had no one else to protect me, but I wasn’t considered part of the family and never felt like part of their family — honestly, I don’t know what I was to them. The situation was that they told me to do this, do that, behave like this or that. I had to stay with someone because by myself I wouldn’t survive.... I couldn’t say they were good people or bad people. I wasn’t looking for ‘nice’ people. I was very
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