Marion (Zitomersky) Wolf’s Memories of Volodarka and
Her Family’s Journey to the Goldene Medina (1982)
(Family interview courtesy of Ken Wolf)
For a fuller understanding of how the pogroms affected the Zitomersky family, please begin with the following narratives:
Marion (Zitomersky) Wolf was born in 1914 in Volodarka, a village with approximately 2,000 Jews comprising 400 families. It was one of 124 towns and cities within Kiev province. Located seventy-five miles southwest of Kiev, Volodarka is now part of Ukraine.
Marion’s father, Max Zitomersky, was born ca. 1885 in neighboring Borshchagovka. After marrying Rose Rybak*, he relocated to Volodarka to run her family’s dry goods store.
From 1918 to 1921, a wave of pogroms swept through Kiev, bringing unimaginable violence that obliterated more than eighty-five towns in the province. During the summer of 1919, Volodarka and Borshchagovka were among the villages completely destroyed. Every Jewish-owned home, store, and factory in the two shtetls was burned to the ground.
In Jewish Pogroms 1918-1921, Z.S. Ostrovsky chronicled the barbarity inflicted upon Borshchagovka, Volodarka, and numerous other Jewish settlements across Ukraine:
“The most populous and flourishing communities were turned into deserts. Jewish towns and shtetls looked like gloomy cemeteries - homes burnt and streets dead and desolate. The breath of death rushes from every corner. A number of Jewish settlements were completely wrecked and turned into ashes - Volodarka, Fastov, Borshchagovka, [...] and other places.”
The death count in Volodarka numbered in the hundreds. Rose's brother, along with his wife and little girl, were taken from their house and shot, while another brother, Pinchas, was also killed. Marion and her parents joined more than 1,000 landsleit who fled twenty miles north to Belaya Tserkov (now known as Bila Tserkva), Kiev’s second-largest city, which had a Jewish population exceeding 20,000. The influx of pogrom refugees from surrounding towns overcrowded the city, leading to a typhus epidemic that claimed the lives of many survivors.
Max's brother, Schloime, barely escaped the pogroms in Borshchagovka. In a letter to their brothers Joseph and Fawel in New York, he begged them to save the survivors, and depicted the dire circumstances of Max and his family: “Mordechai, Raiza [Rose], and their child are in Belaya Tserkov, and whatever they aren't given, they don't have.”
In a 1982 family interview, Marion reflected on her family’s life in Volodarka, surviving the pogroms, and their journey to America:
“We were supposed to be the richest people in town. I had a nurse, we had an apprentice, we had somebody who served us in the dining room. Dad’s business catered to all the local nobility … and then the massacres started … we fled and left everything.
“During the massacres my father was separated from us, and we didn't know where he was, because we were behind a wall and the soldiers made him come out. He was gone for two or three weeks. He went by hay cart to another town [probably Belaya Tserkov], which was very dangerous because when a hay cart would pass, the soldiers would bayonet it, thinking that a person might be there. Finally, we were reunited.
“The most traumatic part of my life was ... we were hidden in the cellar and they put coal over the trap door, and cigarettes in the far corner of the house so the soldiers would go there. Eventually we came out and were in a little courtyard, soldiers were shooting at us right through the window. The boy in front of me was on his mother's arm, and he had his right arm shot off right in front of me. I was very lucky I wasn't hurt. Then we went into the cellar, he was bleeding terribly. I also remember that we all had typhus, we were lying on the synagogue floor. We came through, and very often when I'm in extreme danger in a hospital, I always say, if God put me through that, and I lived with no medication, no hygiene, no nothing, I'll probably survive this time."
Marion and her parents were eventually “smuggled out in January 1921.” As with countless other refugees, their exodus likely began with a perilous 200-mile trek on foot, by wagon, and by train through a region rife with banditry, plagued by violence and chaos, desperate to reach the Romanian border. Marion described the danger they faced crossing the frozen Dniester River, seeking refuge within the Jewish community of Soroca, a Romanian port town: “We were lucky to get across. The guides knew you had money and jewelry. They'd take you across and then kill you and take your possessions.” After the crossing, they spent the night in a farmhouse in Soroca and were served mamaliga, a traditional Romanian dish made from polenta.
From Soroca, the group traveled eighty miles overnight by horse and wagon to the city of Kishinev (Chisinau), where Fawel was waiting. He took them to Bucharest, where they boarded the first of several trains that traversed 1,500 miles through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Germany, before reaching the port city of Antwerp, Belgium. After spending three days in a large waiting hall (possibly the Red Star Line Terminal) with no place to sleep, they embarked on a two week crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, en route to their final destination … the Goldene Medina.
*Rybak in Russian translates to fisherman: Рыбак
Click here to view a map detailing the route that Max, Rose, and Marion traveled.
Click here for a description of the Volodarka pogroms. (Site is in Russian. Use “Translate to English” option in Google Chrome browser)
Follow the links below to learn more about Volodarka:
Volodarka in My shtetl: Jewish Towns in Ukraine
Volodarka in JEWUA: History of Jewish Communities in Ukraine
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