[Cz-L] Czernowitz, March 1944

Recent postings by members of Czernowitz-L prompted me to contribute the
following excerpt from my Memoir. The apartment house I referred to was on
Stefan Wolffgasse, facing the Volksgarten.

Fred Schneider

      Early in 1944, the Soviet army had broken through the German lines in
the Ukraine and hundreds of thousands German soldiers and their allies had
been surrounded. This started the large-scale retreat of the once
unstoppable German army. While we were quite excited by these rapid
developments, we realized that we also faced all kinds of problems. We heard
reports that the retreating soldiers and their erstwhile collaborators were
engaging in looting and violent actions against the civilian population,
especially Jews. By the end of March, there was a continuous rumbling of
German trucks, tanks and horse-drawn wagons through the city and the
Romanian authorities, including the police, had largely disappeared. I no
longer had access to the radio and did not know what was happening. After
some close encounters, I stopped walking outside the house and around the
25th of March joined the other inhabitants of the apartment house in the
cellar, hoping to escape injury if bombs or artillery shells were to fall in
our neighborhood. By the morning of the 28th, an eerie silence set in and
the people in the cellar were debating what we should do. Eventually, I
cracked the entrance door and carefully stuck my head out. Standing a few
feet in front of me was a soldier on a horse. He wore the traditional
Cossack cape and a fur-lined hat. Among the retreating Germans there were
many members of the Wlassoff army (Russians who had joined the German army)
and I did not know whether the man on the horse was one of them or a soldier
of the Red Army. The soldier had noticed me and I could no longer retreat
inside the house. I found enough courage to step out and then saw the red
star on the soldiers' cap. I WAS LIBERATED.
I approached the soldier on the horse, tipped my hat, and greeted him in my
broken Russian. When he noticed that I did not fully understand what he had
said he asked in Yiddish, "redst Yiddish?' (do you speak Yiddish?). When I
answered affirmatively in Yiddish and proceeded to thank him, he dismounted,
hugged me and I then noticed his major's insignia. He said that on his long
trek from Stalingrad I was the first young Jew he had encountered. Our tears
made it difficult for us to talk much, and after a long handshake and
another hug, he got on his horse and rode off….Now, 65 years later, I still
wonder how much poorer my memories would have been if I had not been able to
understand Yiddish on that fateful day.
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Received on 2009-12-28 20:02:47