On April 20th, 2005 Andrew I. Sverdlove started a series of biographical telephone interviews with Sara Lifshitz's son, Mark Lifstone.
Sara was born in Shchedrin in 1913, during the period of worker unrest before the Russian Revolution. The town was then part of the Bobruisk Uyzed. By the time Sara was about seventeen or eighteen years old, (1931), she went to the university in Sverdlovsk, on the east side of the Ural Mountains on the Iset River. At the university Sara met Leyb Lebed. They married and lived in Sverdlovsk, where she gave birth to Boris (Berl/Barukh) Lebed in about 1936, and then to his younger sister, Tsare (Tsipora), in about 1939. Both Sara and Leyb (Lev) were 28-years-old when her family returned to Shchedrin in early 1941.
On June 22, 1941, war broke out. Leyb left Shchedrin to fight for the Mother Land. In a few months the Russian government contacted Sara and informed her that her husband was "missing in action" (MIA). There was hardly time to grieve, since the Nazis were advancing toward Byelorussia.
On a winter's day in early March 1942, the Jewish community was ordered into the school where Sara taught. The response of the Byelorussian Christians was either to remain silent in the face of this terror, or to comply in identifying their Jewish neighbors. The Germans realized there were almost 1,400 Jews. An order was given to build an anti-tank trench on the Parichi-Shchedrin highway. Sara was one of the few who seemed to recognize the larger German plan to exterminate the Jews. The following day the Jewish women and children and old men were marched to the roadway or perhaps to a clearing in the forest, "beyond the cemetery and Kutchiner Way at the site of freshly dug ditches." They were all shot and thrown into the ditch, massacred in the meticulous, orderly, efficient, cold-blooded, time-conscious and cruel way that has given the Holocaust its unique quality. "Some of those sacrificed were not quite dead and were buried alive." This became the final destination for Berl and Tzira and virtually all the Shchedrin Jews. They are remembered on Adar 19th, 20th, and 21st.
Sara, and a few others, managed to escape even the door-to-door, room-by-room, inspections by the Nazi soldiers. They joined a partisan group in the forests outside the shtetl. In the intense emotions of loss, grief, anger, Sara, 29-year-old widow whose children had been machine gunned, met 27-year-old, Mikhail Ass (we would pronounce and perhaps write 'Ace'). In 1943, in the partisan camp, Mayir Ass, now known as Mark Lifstone, was born.
During 1944 Sara returned to Shchedrin with baby in tow and a rifle on her shoulder. She was almost caught by the Nazis, who were in the town that day. Hidden in a closet she managed to escape by leaping out a window.
Before the war ended, Mikhail was asked by the Russians to start a factory in Bobruisk, the capital of the Bobruisk oblast in which they lived. He did this for three months — October to December 1944. But the anger to avenge the Nazis was so strong that Mikhail volunteered to fight and went to the Russian-German front. Two days before the end of the war, on March 7th, 1945, three years to the day that the Nazis had rounded up Shchedrin Jews, Mikhail was killed; he was barely thirty-years-old. Sara, at 32-years-old, was a widow again.
In 1949, a Shchedriner neighbor returned from a trip to Moscow where, as Kabala would have it, she had met Leyb Lifshitz! Impossible. He had been killed. No. Sara arranged for a friend to baby sit Mayir, and she took the train to Moscow and looked up the address of her first husband. It was a weekday during working hours. A young woman with a child answered the door. "Who are you?" she asked. "I am Leyb's first wife, Sara." "No. She died in a massacre of the village along with Leyb's children." There was a moment of silence. Then, Sara retold her heroic tale. She told of her second marriage because she thought Leyb was dead. She told how she, too, had a child by Mikhail Ass, who died in battle during the Great Patriotic War just two days before the end of the war.
Sara's strength of character came out. Moved by this new family, Sara told Leyb's wife, "You are his wife now; he is never to be told I survived. Go on with your life, as I must go on with mine." And Sara left Moscow and a life that was not meant to be and returned to Shchedrin.
Over the years, while raising Mark, Sara, a gifted intellect, had many marriage proposals through the '40's and '50's.
Sara and son took her maiden name of Lifshitz. Mayir was now called Mayir Lifshitz. He wanted no substitute father. At age 18 he realized his mother would soon be without him; he would go to work for two years to qualify for and attend a university. Life would change. With Mayir's blessing, Sara married a Mr. Kushner, a musician and a conductor of a band in the Red Army, a prestigious and well-paying position. They were a happy couple. Sara was 48.
Mr. Kushner died in 1967, and Sara became a widow for the third time.
In 1975, Sara visited her brother, Lloyd Livstone, formerly Leyb Lifshitz, for six months. She stayed with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and heard about the summer reunions organized by Harry L. Katz. At one of the meetings, Sara told her tale, in Yiddish, of hiding and escaping into the forest during those cold days in early March 1942; finding the partisans; marrying again; giving birth to Mayir in the partisan camp; and almost being caught a second time while visiting the shtetl of Shchedrin.
In the summer of 1976 Mayir and his wife, Eugenia, applied for exit visas for the whole family, including Sara. It only took three months to get the visas. Nine days before they were to leave Minsk, Sara Lifshitz Kushner, age 63, died. Mayir buried his beloved mother in Minsk, arranged for a monument, and on September thirtieth 1976, left for America with his family.