In June 1941 the Romanians, now on the Axis side, reoccupied the Bukovina. In the villages, the army and the local Ukrainians went into Jewish homes, helping themselves to anything they wanted. Tuleh had just been married and he and his wife, Toni, were visiting Sheindl. Shaja was away on business and the three decided to go to the Mihowa farm, where it might be safer, for a few days to check on the parents. Shaja, whose family lived on the outskirts of Mihowa, would know where to find them when he returned.
“We took nothing, as we thought we would come home in a few days, but we never came home,” Sheindl recalled. She never saw Shaja again.
When they reached the farm, Nachman and Devorah were already standing outside holding bundles, the coatless Nachman with a floor rug around his shoulders to remain warm. Nachman, Devorah, Marium, Feivel, Sheindl and her daughter, and Tuleh and Toni were deported on foot to Bessarabia along with other Jews from the area.
Tuleh eventually secured a place for Devorah on a wagon, while Nachman, in his late 60s, walked the entire way. It was then that Sheindl, too young to remember the family’s escape from Mihowa during the Great War, got her first lesson about wartime. Devorah, who saw her trying to figure out how to heat up water on Shabbos for her little girl, told her: “Tochter [daughter], when we are on the flucht [in flight] you can do everything. When we come home you can be religious again.”
The group was taken to Strojinet, Viznitz, and Yedenitz (Edinet), and in the autumn of 1941 reached Ataki in northern Moldavia on the Dniester River. Unlike the thousands of Bukovinian and Bessarabian Jews who had been murdered there and thrown into the river, they were permitted to cross the bridge to Mogilev in what was being called Transnistria – the area between the Dniester and the Bug rivers under German and Romanian control that became an area of mass ghettos and concentration camps.
In Mogilev, eighteen people from the family – including Toni’s parents; cousins from Mihowa; and Leibush and Frieda, who had been deported from the Czernowitz ghetto – shared two rooms. Like most of the Mogilev Jews, the family subsisted primarily on the fare from a soup kitchen, augmented by the few things they could buy through barter.
The remaining family members had remained in the Czernowitz ghetto, primarily because of the next generation. Srul’s Anna and Elish’s Lola were both expecting and escaped the transports to Transnistria because they wanted to give birth in the ghetto. Born seven weeks apart in late 1941, the two baby boys saved their parents from their other relatives’ fate. While the women remained with the babies, Srul and Elish were taken by the Romanians to labor camps where they spent most of the war.
In March 1942, as Freida Sima’s stepson Harry – who soon would be sent overseas – was sending her pictures of army life, the family in Mogilev was starving to death. Devorah and Nachman died of hunger one day after the other. Tuleh ensured that his parents were not buried in mass graves but given individual burials in the Moghilev cemetery, set aside for deported Jews. Risking his life, he later traded his portions of bread to put tombstones on his parents’ graves. Sheindl was left with three mementos she would one day pass on to the next generation: her mother’s sheitel (wig) and siddur (prayer book) and the floor rug that her father had worn over his shoulders for warmth since leaving Mihowa.
