Hi Berti and Hardy ,
My Mother in law and husband were freed by Mongolian solders that came into the Ghetto in Mogilev at Easter 1945. My husband remembers distinctly when they were walking back to CZ the Rumanian peasents giving them Coloured Easter eggs and food along the way; they also offer them space on the horse and cuts when there was room.
When arriving back in CZ my husband's aunty hid them in a cupboard so that the Russians would not find them as people were being sent away to Siberia or the Red Army, or women taken into prostitution.
My husband rembers there was a parade and he wanted to go and March with the other children, his aunty locked him in a closet so he would not be able to attend.
I have found both the Brecher and Smatnick families on the list that the group has presented on your web site and checked with my husbands older cousin now living in Israel and the details of their departure are correct. Uzi was sent to Siberia and the rest of the Smatnick family commenced crossing into Rumania on the 17th March 1946 . They lived in Criova for approximately one year and then were smuggled into Treste Italy by the Bricha with the help of the Red Cross.
Their first DP camp was in Milano were the shlichim looked after them and my husband went to school for the first time.After one year they moved to Trani in the south of Italy were by husbsnd and his mother and step father waited for papers to come to Australia.Mr German had been in Palistine 1936 to 1939 went back to Poland and lost his family in Auswitich concentration camp , he did not want to go back to Palistine. The rest of the family were part of the original movement of illegal Jews to Palistine. His Uncle Shimon and his wife Clara were taken in 1947 to Palistine as Shimon could read and write several languges and the Brichah needed him in Palistine. They are considered among the founding fathers of Natanya. When they passed away flags were flown at half-mast in Netanya and an exhibition of their work was on display at the museum in Netanya.
His Aunty Lille and family were on the Exodus and interned on Cyprus until after the state of Israel was formed and the migrations started into Israel.
My Husband is the President of the Survivors, Partisans and Front Fighters of Australia and also the Australian delegate to the Jewish World Congress in New York.
This year on the 30th August he turns 80 years and we will be celebrating his second Bar Mitzvah. We hope to have a celebration with the family in Israel next year Bar Roch Hachem.
Best Regards.
Ljuba and Kurt Charles Smatnick/German.
Best Regards
Charles German
P O Box 120 Malvern 3144
Mob: 0438 332 232
Tel/Fax: 9530 9465
E: charles_at_kcharlesrealestate.com.au
W: www.kcharlesrealestate.com.au
Suite 6, 175 High Street Prahran 3181
-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-120608605-14489093_at_list.cornell.edu [mailto:bounce-120608605-14489093_at_list.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Berti Glaubach
Sent: Wednesday, 6 July 2016 10:59 PM
To: Edgar Hauster
Cc: Czernowitz Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] Repatriates at the USSR/Romanian Border - March/April 1946
The Altshuler report left me with an open question. I "repatriated" in April 1945 together with about half the Jewish population of Czernowitz the other half following in Spring 1946.
The report brings ample documentation about the situation in Bucovina along the war years but there is a gap in the description of the causality for the repatriation. The documents describe the antecedents of the 1946 period but take no note of the already performed transfer in 1945.
Except for this annotation No 21 of the Beria letter to Molotov that is not further commented by Altshuler.
21. On Jan. 13, 1945, Lavrenrti Beriia sent a letter to Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov which read, in part: "In regard to the issue of the resettlement in Romania of Romanian citizens who are Jewish and at present are residing on the territory of the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs, the NKVD of the USSR states the following: During the German-Romanian occupation, a number of ghettos and concentration camps were set up on the territory of Viortitsa, Kamenets Podoisk, and Odessa provinces of the Ukrainian SSR where Jews, including those who had formerly lived in Romania, were imprisoned. After the liberation of these provinces by the Red Army, those Jews who were Romanian citizens who had been liberated from the ghettos and camps began to arrive in Chernovtsy Province of the USSR with the intention of returning to Romania. Furthermore, in the border provinces of the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs there are now Romanian citizens who are Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and Germans, who arrived in these provinces during the occupation. The NKVD of the USSR believes it necessary to resettle in Romania all Romanian citizens (with the exception of the Germans among them) who are now on the territory of the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSRs, It would be useful to carry out their transfer across the border on the basis of lists [of them compiled] by the NKVT) of the Moldavian and Ukrainian SSRs.. ." (GARF, ibid., ci. 103, p. 14).
It is clear from the last part of the letter that repatriation was meant by the NKVD only " inter alia" for the Jewish population. That the Rumanian rural population did not jump on the occasion is another matter. Also the NKVD might have at that time sent quite a lot of agents to Rumania this way. The use of lists mentioned would give to that last motive a rational explanation.
No matter how strongly we, as being a part of all that, consider the move to be central to the Soviet decision - it makes more sense to believe that overall population changes for internal and partly external Soviet policy were the dominant factors that were in play.
[Berti Glaubach]
On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Edgar Hauser <bconcept_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hardy...
>
> You asked: "Why did they let us go?" - Well, while Mordechai Altshuler
> stated (p. 62/63 [9/10]) http://hauster.de/data/SovietTransfer.pdf
> http://radauti.blogspot.de/2009/12/repatriates-at-ussrromanian-border.
> html
>
> "To the best of our knowledge, the reasons that led the Soviet government and Stalin personally to decide in August 1945 an the transfer of thousands of Jews from Chernovtsy Province to Romania were not connected with a change in the negative Soviet attitude toward the Jewish community in Palestine (the yishuv). There are also good grounds for assuming that the decision was not motivated by concern for the suffering of the Jewish population. Rather the decision appears to have been primarily influenced by consideration for the hostility of the local population toward the Jews and the general tendency to Ukrainize areas that had been annexed to the Soviet Union."
>
> personally I tend to share Svitlana Frunchak's opinion, when she's
> stating in her dissertation (p. 342/3 [352/3])
> http://hauster.de/data/FrunchakSvitlana.pdf
> http://czernowitzbook.blogspot.de/2016/01/the-making-of-soviet-cherniv
> tsi.html
>
> "Ideology was only one important dimension of the 1945-1946 "evacuation." Another was the practical issue of expropriating the evacuees' possessions. Although often impoverished and having been deprived of many of their belongings during the first Sovietization of 1940-1941, the Romanian occupation, and the second Sovietization of 1944-1945, many Jews who survived the Holocaust in the city still occupied prestigious apartments - a commodity that was becoming more and more precious with the continuous arrival of Soviet in-migrants."
>
> However that may be, that's how it goes!
>
>
> Edgar Hauster
>
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Received on 2016-07-06 15:12:45