Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
Our Two-Year Reprieve
had in our house. When the Russians established a paramili- tary youth organization at school, the Pioneers, and all the chil- dren in our school joined, children like myself, whose father had the number eleven, were excluded. We could go to school and we could study, but we could not take part in the extracurricular activities. We began to feel like outcasts. Nobody wanted us. We had al- most no income. We did not go hungry, though; we used our jew- elry and other valuables to buy food from the farmers. My Uncle Usher, who still lived in another village and had his own gardens, provided us with food. The Russians had entered his village, but they apparently did not bother him because his business, just a small flourmill, was much more modest than my father’s. They left him alone. Every so often Uncle Usher came to visit with a wagon full of food. Our friends also stood by us. Then the Russians decided that our house was big enough to convert into a medical clinic, so they threw us out. It was terrible. We had to leave on short notice, and there was no one to whom we could appeal. We just gathered our possessions, whatever we could carry, and left for the apartment we were assigned. Things for us were very tense since we were considered upper class and the number eleven placed us on the undesirable list. It was essential to try to get ourselves removed from the list because it was constantly reviewed to determine who would be deported next. I remember the nights during that time. People in our cir- cle of friends were disappearing during the night. The Russians came and threw them into wagons and sent them off to Siberia. They were merchants or big lumber dealers, people whom the Russians felt they could not trust. During the night, any scratch or noise made us expect a knock on the door. We lived in terrible fear, not for our lives, but of exile to Siberia. We did not yet know that things would be much worse later on. We had nothing. We, who had been somebodies, became poor nobodies. We lived in fear and were very unhappy. I could not even
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