Were the Jews in Chechelnik?
"News Week" (Israel) on August 18, 2005. My native place - Chechelnik article published in the attachment "Jewish fork" to the Russian-language newspaper. At a reprint the reference to "News Week" is required.
Alexander Vishnevetsky
M estechko Chechelnik where I was born and grew up, was for centuries a place where life was on the set of old Jewish tradition. The main language was Yiddish shtetl, it said everyone, including children.
Among the local Ukrainian population were people who also understand and even spoke Yiddish. Jewish artisans producing village of all, what is needed the peasants surrounding villages, and earned money lived.
In short, Chechelnik, as in many parts of Ukraine, the Jews quite fit into the ethnographic and economic reality. But if someone tries to figure out now, ever lived in Chechelnik Jews, then it will not be easy.
Even in the Concise Jewish Encyclopedia is not a separate article about my home town, and in other reference books can be found except that the mention of the fact that this "urban village, district center in Vinnytsia region," where there is a railway station and a sugar refinery.
Recently, closely watched online in Russian and Ukrainian language everything connected with my native borough - Chechelnik where I was born, was the ghetto during the war and then in high school. Here, too, found no detailed mention of Jewish life in the town. Only one of the U.S. portals managed to find a picture of the building of our synagogue. And one of the materials found there, and I was surprised and angered. On the "Vinnytsia regional portal" www.portal.vinnitsa.com in a brief historical note on Chechelnik contains quite detailed information about the town, but no word about the Jews, although the whole documentary is almost 500-year history of the town is connected with the Jews. For example, in 1939, lived in a place of Jews in 1327, accounting for 66% of the total population of the town. And if now the Jews were gone, then does that mean that this issue should be ignored altogether? Probably, some people want to gloss over the tragic fate of our Jewish in the Diaspora, especially in light of the Holocaust, our example, the relationship with Ukraine, its people and its history? However, this trend is occurring in different countries and is closely linked with the growing anti-Semitism and hatred of the Jews, and, above all, attempts to silence the Holocaust, in which a considerable portion of the blame lies with the countries and peoples, where the Jews lived. By ... existing unwritten tradition of the inhabitants of each village had its nickname. Inhabitants Chechelnik nicknamed "meshugim" (stupid), but only really mad town was shot and killed by the Germans in the early days of Nazi occupation, when he ran for the town and shouted in Yiddish, "Mom, Mom - the Germans are decent people!" In rest of my life I People will remember the town not only for its wit and humor, and work ethic, willingness to come to each other for help. Maybe that's why, after such a terrible trials of war, they did without the psychological and medical rehabilitation, and managed to stay fully human in spite of all that fell to their lot. Even today, meeting with his countrymen after many years, they feel the warmth, intimacy and relationship. In the town spent their lives for many generations on the father. When the war started, and it became known that the Germans were approaching the little town, my father gave the farm horse and wagon, and the family was hastily evacuated. But we've just got to the Dnieper, and by this time of the Dnieper were already in the German paratroopers, cutting off our further journey. I had to go back. Returning home, they visited on their way to the village Pokotilov Kirovograd region, where he lived the father of my mother and her two sisters and their families. They offered my father to stay with them in Pokotilov. But his father refused, and it saved us. Even after the liberation, we learned that all Jews were exterminated in the Pokotilov polls and that the father of the mother specifically mocked the Nazis before he died. A month after the outbreak of war Chechelnik place was captured by invaders and on the second day, they opened fire and drove the inhabitants from their homes to their execution. People were herded into the square, and only the intervention of the German military high rank, who had arrived by this time in the place, save people from death. Since that time, there is a legend that it was disguised as a partisan war. German and Romanian military with Ukrainian policemen from the local population and the number of Jewish traitors began to rob, kill Jews, to expel people from their homes. Often, these actions involved the Ukrainian peasants from nearby villages. By the end of August 1941 the Germans transferred control over the territory between the rivers Bug and Dniester and the Mogilev-Podolsk to the Black Sea, Romanians, and the area became known as Transnistria. In this territory before the war, 300,000 Jews lived, 185,000 of them were later destroyed by the Germans and Romanians. The Romanians were deported to Transnistria tens of thousands of Jews from Romania and Moldova. Towns, trapped in the Romanian zone of occupation, were filled with refugees. Terrible cold winter 1941-1942 year, the famine, most people in the crowded homes has led to massive epidemics, especially typhus and dysentery. My mom told me that mortality among the Jews, especially the refugees, was here in the winter a mass scale. My mother in 1933, she graduated from medical school in the Gysin (where all instruction was in Yiddish), and even being in the ghetto, she worked at a local hospital. Here is an excerpt from the testimony of one of the deported Jews of Chernivtsi region in Chechelnik. His name - Israel Taygler, he born in 1918, his archival work at Yad Vashem under the number 03,246. (Translated from German, which he gave testimony and the presentation of this material - mine). He is from the village Kadobeshti, where the outbreak of war home to 20 Jewish families, were all deported. In living at the time of liberation there were only representatives of the five families. In November 1941 they were driven on foot for many days and drove in Chechelnik. On the way from hunger and cold, his mother died, her shot, because She could no longer walk. In Chechelnik he was with the first group of deportees, then drove another group from the sides and Bessarabia. Since 1939, there were already 10 families who had fled to Poland. The empty houses were filled with previously deported refugees. Immediately there was an epidemic among them fever and at least half of these people fell victim to this epidemic. His father died of typhus, one day after arrival. The corpse of the father was 8 days in the same room where Taygler and Israel, which lay close to the typhoid delirium. When he regained consciousness and was able to get up, he went to the local community and asked for help for the funeral of his father. But it could be done only in a few days, since the number of dead was very high and do not have enough people to dig graves, there was no vehicle for the delivery of corpses to the cemetery. In the town was a community committee, headed by Joseph Zaslavsky, Bilenky and Granovsky and the Jewish police, under the leadership of a certain Volokh. Jewish leadership ran the face of the Romanian Gendarmerie. By order of the gendarmerie Jews were sent to forced labor on the railway station, a sugar factory on the field. Some of the deportees were sent to Nikolaev to build bridges. For going beyond the ghetto, threatened to shoot. Despite this, many were in the adjoining villages and Ukrainian peasants or beg a meal, or tried to make her own labor. Sometimes, the community shared a small soldering products, funds for the acquisition of which came from the Jews who remained back in Romania. Among the deportees were their physicians willing to provide assistance for free, but they did not have drugs. This is the content of memories Tayglera Chechelnitsky ghetto. With the most vile of behaving Jewish traitors, served the invaders. Two residents of the town - and the Red Army Yankel Tentseru Motley Blumenthal managed to escape from German captivity in the town. Yankel, moreover, was wounded in the head. They gave Romanians Zaslavsky, Joseph surrendered himself to the commandant. In the eyes of some residents, including the wife of Yankel, they were shot by the Romanians. The Germans also periodically broke into the town and killed the Jews. Daily Terror was also performed Ukrainian police. One of the worst pages associated with them, was an attempt to exterminate the Jews of the town by provocation. At the wedding of his daughter, a local policeman killed Paul Hnida Assistant Commandant of the Romanian Gendarmerie, and then tried to throw the corpse into the territory of the ghetto. Fortunately, the Romanian soldiers caught him in this attempt, and then shot him and those policemen who were at the wedding. In my memories, a young child about those years, remained a sense of horror, fear, hunger and cold. I remember mother's hysterical laughter in the most dangerous moments associated with the threat of death. Often, in these days we stayed in the basement of my house, afraid to even cough. Even closer to the arrival of Soviet troops, we were hidden in the Ukrainian home on the outskirts of town. In general, parents had good relationships with local Ukrainians, and this was largely due to both the skills of his father, a barber, and a wealth of experience the mother as a nurse, ready at any time of day and night to help the people of the town and the surrounding Ukrainian villages. In our family, as a full member, had lived since 1935, our nanny, Ukrainian Anna Boyko. During the occupation, she also stayed with us, despite the danger to her of our living together. But do these factors somehow - that could affect the successful outcome for our family? Our parents, like all Jews of the town, were subjected to harassment from both the Germans, Romanians, Ukrainian policemen, and even their Jewish collaborators. Their lives have been transformed into hell. But they tried to do everything to protect us - children from all that fell upon them. My sister Dora with her friend Lisa Fischer, even in these terrible years were engaged in secret by Soviet textbooks with teacher Shura Spector, allowing them to start immediately after the release studies from the 4th grade, not first. Two nephews father lost his health in a ghetto town. One Sasha Makarevsky was forcibly hijacked at the shipyard in Nikolayev and returned a few months there half dead. Another Hanani Winokur was so beaten up by policemen that he was a stutterer all my life. Both of them died quite young then. Hope of salvation was no, although the town was a Jewish underground group, and in the surrounding forests were guerrillas. In the barber his father worked as a young boy Monya Zuckerman, eavesdropper to all that the police were told the Germans, and the information conveyed underground workers. Hiding in the village led by Isaac Granovsky, he helped Eugene Beard. They had close links with the guerrillas, who were in the nearby woods. It is up to Granovsky's parents learned of the victory of Soviet troops at Stalingrad. And yet, we are fortunate in the sense that we were in Transnistria. After all the territories occupied by the German occupiers, even the ghetto were created, and the Jewish population was subjected to immediate extermination. March 17, 1944 spot has been released. Survivors people still had to survive a famine in the Ukraine 1947 -1948 year. Experienced by the disaster, hunger, anti-Semitism, disloyal attitude of the authorities, the desire of Jews to leave the place of mass destruction and humiliation, as well as the desire to move to big cities, to give children an education led to the fact that Jewish life has stopped, even in those villages, where some Jews survived during the war. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the opportunity to make aliyah, or go to the Western countries have brought this process to its logical conclusion. These predominantly Jewish towns as Chechelnik completely lost Jews. However, the Jewish shtetl life goes on and on, although its former residents were in different countries, and especially in the U.S. and Israel. Even in Soviet times, in June 1985, former residents of the town gathered for a meeting in Odessa, where they presented about 40 people. And 10 years later in honor of the 50th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany for 80 former residents Chechelnik met in New York. At the meeting there were people who had not seen for decades and did not even know each other. In addition to the current residents of New York City residents were represented by Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Maluoki. Also, people came from Canada. Found many more people then, who did not know about the meeting and were sorry that did not take part in it. It was filmed a movie about the meeting and its participants remained the tape. Would not it be cool to have one such "international" Chechelnitsky meeting, but this time in Israel. Our generation of Holocaust survivors leave, and such meeting shall always be with our children and grandchildren. Let them know where we are, where our roots, we had to go through. I think we have something to talk about at such a meeting and we going to replace it would be a worthy story. My subsequent life has been linked to Tashkent, where our family moved completely in 1954. But even for many years, I have repeatedly reminded of my stay in the ghetto. The Soviet authorities to the 70-ies of the 20 - century belonged to the Jews has been in a ghetto, as traitors! I well remember the many users with questions, "Where were you during the war?" When entering the institution, upon its completion, when applying for a job. Since 1988, when it was created by the Tashkent Jewish Cultural Center, I was introduced to his leadership and led the association of the ghetto in Tashkent. We were able to arrange for former prisoners, including former residents Chechelnik, German rents, which they received in Tashkent. This important role was played by my participation in a seminar in Jerusalem in the "Yad - Vashem" Holocaust history in February and March 1992. With the assistance of "Yad Va - Shem," we have received all necessary legal advice in drawing up documents for the subsequent receipt of rent from Germany. It's been 60 years since the end of World War II. Are fewer and fewer people who, despite the terrible conditions in the camps and ghettos, have survived to this day. Especially hard and terrible burden of memories stayed with juvenile prisoners, deprived childhood, and now make up the vast majority of Holocaust survivors. Their age is more than 65 years and not much time left for them to bear witness to their experiences. Time flies quickly. Now to me the nature of public affairs in Jerusalem, where I arrived as a new immigrant in December 2004, faced with the survivors of the Holocaust in the ghettos and concentration camps. Many of them eke out a miserable existence. Effect during those terrible ordeals that have fallen to their lot during the war. Our State is obliged to recognize the special status of prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps, which can alleviate their living conditions. And be sure to collect the documents and evidence of human settlements, which were once large Jewish community. After all, those who still keeps in memory information about the once prosperous towns, disappeared in the flames of the Holocaust, with each passing year it becomes less and less ... |
