Ten days after her parents’ death, Marium succumbed to typhus. Sheindl recalled: “Everyone had typhus. First Tuleh and Toni and then Leibush and Frieda and their baby, and then me. My sister-in-law’s father died of typhus too, the same day as my mother. The doctor refused to come into the house as he said we would die anyway, but we didn’t.”
Other cousins with them perished of starvation and their two children were taken to a Mogilev orphanage. One died there and the other was sent to Palestine with a group of Transnistrian orphans. He was the one (as mentioned in last month’s installment) who sent the letter to Abie that contained the yahrzeit dates of Devorah, Nachman, and Marium – the first letter the American relatives had received from Europe since the beginning of the war.
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In the summer of 1942 the family in Moghilev split up. Leibush, Frieda, and their daughter born in Mogilev were sent to the labor camps of Skazenitz and Derechin (Dziarcecyn), where another daughter was born. Both children died there of starvation.
As the Jews were being deported to labor camps, Tuleh, who worked for a local engineer, secured permission for himself and his remaining family to live in the engineer’s home, thus escaping deportation. Tuleh continued working for the engineer throughout the war, while the women hid there, sewing, and tending the engineer’s home, garden, and cows.
Even there, starvation was fierce. At the same time that Freida Sima was fighting her war in her Bronx kitchen to keep the American family’s morale up while their children fought overseas, Sheindl’s daughter at four was too weak from hunger to walk. Toni was so hungry that she had a recurring dream: “When the war is over I’m going to cook a whole pot of potatoes and eat them all by myself.” Since the cousins in the Moghilev ghetto had more food than the Enzenbergs who were in hiding, Sheindl would occasionally risk her life going to the ghetto to get food for her daughter.
In April 1944 Transnistria finally fell to the Soviets. Leibush and Frieda returned to Moghilev and soon afterward he and Tuleh and the other Jewish men in town were taken by the Russians to work at the front. The women and children were free to return home.
Sheindl traveled to Behromet, looked at her house from the outside, and after speaking to a neighbor realized the danger she would face being there alone with her daughter. She spent the night at the Mihowa farm and left in the morning, never looking back. Continuing to Czernowitz, she joined her sisters-in-law and waited for her brothers’ return. Srul and Elish had already returned from labor camps and were joined by Tuleh and Leibush. Eventually the various family members made their way out of Soviet-occupied Czernowitz to Bucharest where they remained for the next few years before continuing on their journeys to Israel or the United States.
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Holding the first letter from her siblings in her hands after the war, Freida Sima thought how greatly the Scharf and Enzenberg families in Europe had suffered during the past years. They had lost Nachman and Devorah, Marium, Leibush’s daughters, and some of Nachman and Devorah’s siblings and their families who had remained in Europe.
The family of Freida Sima’s husband, Mordche, had also been touched by tragedy. The same week the Enzenbergs were herded across the bridge from Ataki to Moghilev, Mordche’s oldest sister, Mata – who’d refused to come to America because she had heard that “there Jews can’t keep Shabbos” – and her family were being murdered by the Nazis at Babi Yar, along with the 34,000 Jews of Kiev.
