In October 2007 my wife, Jean, our youngest son, David, and I visited western Ukraine including the city of Lviv and the small town of Shchirets.
Shchirets is located 14 miles from Lviv and before the war was almost 90% Jewish. My paternal great grandparents lived there as did my grandparents.
My father was born there in 1902 and I lived there from 1939-1942.

I was born in Katowice in western Poland, where my father served as the community Rabbi. Shortly before the outbreak of WW II, my parents, my
older brother and I fled our home eastward. After living in Lviv for a short time, we joined our grandparents in Shchirets. The area was first occupied
by the Soviets and in June 1941 by the Germans. Shchirets was the town where I first learned the meaning of deprivation, of hunger, and of fear.
It was the town where I experienced my first pogrom, where I last saw my grandparents, and where I said good bye to my mother. I left Shchirets
with my father hidden in a truck full of forced Jewish laborers and went to Lviv where father had arranged for my brother and me to be hidden by the
Greek Catholic Church and its head, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky’i. I spent the next two years (1942-1944) in the Uniate Monastery in the nearby
town of Univ.

It was therefore with some emotion and mixed feelings that I returned with my family to Shchirets. The streets were now paved, the wagons pulled by
horses now had rubber tires, and there were no Jews. We found a few elderly women who remembered that Jews had lived here but, except for the
cemetery, there are no physical traces left of our long sojourn. They remembered how the Germans herded the Jews into the synagogue and kept
them locked up without food for 10 days before taking the survivors to the railway station. They remembered that the synagogue was then blown up
and one man told us that he recalled that his father had used the bricks to build the houses across the street. My grandparents’ little house was
now an alley, the place where our synagogue and mikveh stood was now a school and playground. Children were playing, laughing, clowning for our
camera and had no idea what had stood there once.

Since there were no traces of Jews among the living, we went over to the other side of town, past the Ukrainian church, over a stream, up the hill in
search of the Jewish cemetery. Near a well we met an old lady bent with age. She was filling two buckets with water and was carrying them down
the hill to her house. My son, Dave, got out of the car to help her but she would have none of it. It was a ritual she repeated twice a day and today
would be no exception. We followed her to her house where she stopped and in what seemed to be a ritual she scooped a handful of water from each
pail and spilled it on the ground. Her name is Stephania Kokurudza. She is in her eighties and takes care of the Jewish cemetery. Her parents did
it for pay for the Jewish community and when they died she took over the task even though she no longer gets paid. She told us that demons come
every night from the cemetery and jump through her window. She pointed to a flat area in the distance. “See those demons? They are the small
ones. Usually they are much bigger. Oh, you probably can’t see them!” She thought there were about 800 gravestones there and worries about
what will happen to them after she is gone. She pointed to a clearing and told us about a group of Jews who were herded there in 1942 and shot.