Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
alive. “While in the woods, I got sick with typhus. I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink. We were living in holes in the ground and I almost died,” he remembered. “Everybody had fled away, fearing that the Germans were nearby. I was on my own.” At some point, shepherds sur- rounded his hiding place, an underground bunker made of wood, and were about to set it on fire, but he managed to call out to them and, instead of burning the shelter down, they gave him bread and left. Kleinman started to crawl away. “I knew there was a path Jews used, but I couldn’t crawl more than a mile. Suddenly I heard voices coming and I realized I needed to prepare myself to die.” He was wrong. It was his father, coming to bury him with a group of friends. They carried him away and he recovered. “I have no words to describe that meeting,” he said. They told him that his mother, grandmother, and sister had been murdered while looking for es- cape routes from town. Pesach, his father, and his uncle continued to live in the woods, changing locations often for two years. They constantly lacked one necessity, he said: salt. They needed salt in order to preserve the meat they found, killed, or stole. When the partisans came from inner Russia, they traded them homemade wine for salt. In the summer, he recalled, they gathered black berries, red berries, car- rots, potatoes, and mushrooms. Winters were harder. “We wore one filthy cloth on top of the other. We had millions of lice. We used to walk to the villagers’ houses and ask for food. They gave us from their mouth a piece of bread, or a hot doughnut from the oven.” Mordechai joined the partisans and survived the war. 12 Judah Raber spent the early part of the war with Chava and Usher Edelman, he wrote in the Yizkor book. He and his wife, Devorah, were being sheltered by a Christian friend, Adaska Shzigedla, when Usher arrived one night and urged the Rabers to join what remained of his family in the woods. They agreed and Shzigedla gave them food and directions to his potato field. 13 In the woods, they met Chava Edelman with her two sons and
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