Uncompleted interview with Basya Goldmacher

N. G. I have never heard such stories before. Why should the Jews have horns?
B. G. It was an interesting finding for me as well. I read somewhere later on why they called us horned. It is a matter of translation of the Bible by Greeks. It is known that the Old Testament was translated into Russian not from its original language (Hebrew), but from a 2000 year-old Greek language. The translation misinterpreted a lot of words. For example, they translated that Moses had….horns. In our Bible, the head of Moses was crowned with the ‘aureole of holiness’. In Hebrew this word has more meanings, one of which is horns. That is why the Greeks translated it this way. And Michelangelo painted Moses with horns. Even the priests would tell the people in church that the Jews are relatives of Devil with horns. At least, this is what I read regarding Jews with horns.
N. G. What followed afterwards? Did you starve in those places? How much time did you spend there?
B. G. Of course, we did not have enough food. The younger people worked in kolkhoz. That is the reason we had at least something to eat. We were sleeping on the floor, several families in one room. Every family had its own corner, with their packages and suitcases. Luckily, there were mostly relatives of ours in our room: my mother and I, Grisha with his family, somebody from my relatives with my cousins, and two other families – Peyrets’ relatives. So, we somehow lived ‘among friends’.

Still, we did not stay there for long. After about two months, the president of our kolkhoz, a young, energetic and very decent man, who felt sorry for the refugees, warned us that the German troupes are not that far anymore. He told us that it would be better if we leave the place and go deeper to the country, otherwise, according to the information they received, ‘the Germans kill all the Jews and communists’. He offered us a carriage with a horse and coacher to get to a rail road station. The closest one was at a distance of about 50 km.

We took the train to a town on the Volga River. The local authorities of this town told us they cannot shelter and feed us. In general, it is better for us to leave further to the country on a boat. But it was not that easy. There were tens of thousands of refugees. For about three weeks, we were lying around were we could find a place: at the railroad station, in the port, on the streets. I was sleeping under the bench, close to the toilet. During the night, people were stepping over me to reach the toilet. Still, I was satisfied with what I had, as it was worse to sleep under the open sky. Here we got really filthy. I never saw lice before, and I could not understand why my whole body was itching…

Finally our turn came to ‘shove in’ on some boat. We were sleeping on the deck. We were really hungry. My cousin, with a small child, Osyk, was giving away a silver set in exchange of a slice of bread for the child. But nobody would share their slice of bread, if they had some. Nobody knew what would happen in the next days and weeks. Maybe they would also have to walk around with their valuable things to exchange for a slice of bread…

N. G. A very tragic situation. I can imagine how small children were suffering. The adults were starving but at least understood what was going on around. What happened to the small Osyk?
B. G. He died of starvation. We could not save him. He was not the only one; some adults did not resist either, especially elderly people. Then I understood what my grandfather meant when he said that at his age he was not ready to become a refugee. Before those days of evacuations, I did not quite understand what the term ‘refugee’ hides in its meaning…
N. G. I perfectly understand you. How did you finally get there?
B. G. After sailing on the ship, we traveled to Makat, a city in Kazakhstan. It was a small town, but rich with oil, like other places in that region. At the beginning I didn’t understand why in such a small town there were so many outdoor street toilets. After a while everything was clear to me. Everybody had stomach disorders. The drinking water was terrible and smelled like oil. People boiled it, but apparently, this wasn’t enough. Everybody suffered from diarrhea.
N. G. For how long did you live in Makat? What did you do there?
B. G. We lived there for almost two years. I, like many other people, got a job. It was extremely important to get a ‘working card’. The whole country was on card system and people were getting food based on food cards. Those employed got their working cards and that allowed them to get 300 grams of bread a day. Besides that, the employed got cards for the family members as well. I also got 150 grams of bread for my mother. Not too much though, right?

N. G. How did you manage to survive under those conditions? That was ‘half dying meal’.
B. G. Everyone was looking for ways to survive, to earn more and to be able to buy food from the open market. Grisha and his family were also with us in Makat. He was a young, full of energy and got himself a job very fast. At the beginning he was bringing some white sacks and together with my mother we were tearing them to threads and knitting white socks to sell them on the open market in order to be able to buy more bread. Bread was our main ration.

Our life changed for better after a while. Grisha, in that period, worked at the local regional executive committee and got connected to a bakery in town. He made an agreement to have 2-3 loafs of bread daily from their reserves. Each loaf weighted 2 kg…a fortune. We were leaving half of a loaf at home, the other half we had to sell and most of the money was going back to the bakers. I was not a good seller, but I had no other choice. We had to survive somehow. Instead of going to the open market, I went to the train station, as it was much safer there. I was selling slices of bread to the passengers of the trains. My mother was hiding with loafs, and I was selling slices or exchanging for a glass of beans or other food like vegetables. Vegetables were not affordable there. There was a chance to get sick with scurvy. So, everything was precious to us. After selling my slices, I was running to my mother for more slices…

This occupation was far from being pleasant to me. At least we were not starving as we used to. And if we managed to bring other products home as well, it was considered a true holiday…
N. G. How did you manage to get to Peyrets from Makat?
B. G. I started to look for the address of Peyrets and his family. I found out that in a town in Ural a ‘Soviet wide center of evacuated people’ was organized. I do not remember now the name of the town. I immediately wrote to that center. They registered my mother’s and my address in Makat. We also inquired about the evacuated family of Goldmachers. Within two weeks, we received an answer telling that, unfortunately, the address of Goldmachers was not listed.

However, a new possibility appeared on my way. Grysha’s wife’s family was also deported, together with other Bendery families. Raya, my brother’s wife, managed to locate the place of exile of her mother. It was a town not far from Omsk city. She began to persuade my brother to go to that town and ‘kidnap’ her mother. Moreover, she was living in a home for the elderly because of her age and inability to work.

My Grysha was a desperate man. He gathered some money and obtained an approval to travel to the city of Omsk, as an employee of the local executive committee. He found out about the location of the town once he got to Omsk city. It was winter of 1942. He hired a horse sleigh with a driver and headed to the town. He found his mother-in-law, and within half an hour, he was on his way back to Omsk. This way he managed to bring his mother-in-law back to Makat. It turned out that the people of that small town were aware of the address in Khanty-Mansyisk, where the Goldmachers were living. I immediately started my correspondence with Peyrets.
N. G. Did you manage to go from Makat to Khanty-Mansyisk right away?
B. G. It turned out not to be that easy. It was impossible to get train tickets and leave the town at that time without the permission of the authorities, due to official regulations. Peyrets asked his brother Samuel, who was in Ural at that time as a political functionary within the Red Army, for help, He was working with the General Political Directorate of the Red Army in camps for Italian prisoners. As an officer of the Red Army, Samuel sent me a document stating that I have the right to go to Khanty-Mansyisk to ‘reunite with his evacuated family’.
N. G. Basya, this was the first time you mentioned Peyrets’ older brother Samuel. How did it happen that he was a political functionary, moreover, within the General Political Directorate of the Red Army?
B. G. It is a long story. However, not to be too much distracted from our main subject, I will summarize what happened. Samuel was a doctor at that time already. He studied in France for one year and in Italy for 5 years, in the city of Modena. After graduating college, in the beginning of 1940 he came back to Romania and passed all the necessary exams in Bucharest to be eligible to practice medicine in Romania. By the way, while in Bucharest, he was living at my aunt’s Zyna. As soon as I found out that he was going to be in Bucharest for several weeks, I asked my aunt Zyna to let him live with them, and I moved to the dorm of our Halutzim. He received a Romanian doctor’s license (giving the right to practice medicine in Romania), after successfully passing all the exams. He went back to Bendery, to his parents. He found a job as a doctor in the Jewish hospital. At the time the Soviet power was established in Bendery, the local health department sent him into one of the regions of the country for elimination of typhus epidemic. Consequently, he was not living with his parents during the exile period. Samuel came back to Bendery on the third day of the war and told me that he decided to join the Red Army to fight the German Fascism. He even agitated me to join the army to fight the Germans.

I did not know what to do, but my mother told me: ‘You are a married woman, Basya. Your place is to be with your husband. Otherwise, you will repeat the story that happened to me – I lived the best years of my life without the husband, having a husband alive’.

N. G. This is another lesson of ‘Jewish wisdom’ for me. What happened with Samuel then?
G. B. He was first turned down, when he appeared in the military commandment’s office in Bendery, because they knew his biography and that his parents were ‘exiled’. Yet, he insisted. They finally enlisted him, because during the war doctors in the army were very much needed. He was assigned to serve in the Cavalry Regiment. He familiarized himself very quickly there, even though he barely saw a horse from a distance closer than 3-5 meters. Soon, he was appointed the Chief of the Medical Service of the Regiment. He served for a year in that Regiment. War is war, so he got close to death several times. Luckily, he had only a few light injuries during the first year.

Suddenly, one day he was called to Moscow, to the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army (GLAVPURKA). It turned out that they were recruiting officers with the knowledge of the Italian language. At the end of the first year of the war, there were a considerable number of Italian POWs, but there were not enough experts in the language to carry on a ‘political, communist propaganda’ for them.

He had an appointment with Manuilsky in Moscow, the representative of Comintern in ‘GLAVPURKA’. As Samuel told us later, after a long conversation, Manuilsky (in a rank of general) told him that he decided to recall him from his military unit and assign Samuel to work with the Ural Political Directorate of the Red Army. He was assigned to work with Italian military prisoners and was sent for two months to s special training for ‘political workers’. He was not even allowed to go back to his unit to properly resign.
Samuel already knew his parents’ address and was in constant correspondence with them. He knew that Peyrets was looking for Basya within the ‘whole Soviet Union’. As soon as Peyrets told him that he found Basya and that she and her mother wanted to move to Khanty-Mansyisk, he immediately sent me the necessary documents.
N. G. Did you and your mother finally get to Peyrets?
B. G. Yes, we did, still with many twists and turns. Autumn came in-between our intensive correspondence with Peyrets and Samuel. My mother and I took the train to Tyumen when we finally received all the necessary paperwork from Samuel. This was the closest place to Khanty-Mansyisk to have a railroad station. It was difficult to reach Tyumen, as we had to make two or three changes. There we found out that it was impossible to sail on Irtysh River as it was completely frozen. We had to make it through the winter in Tyumen. Do not forget that this was the end of 1943, and it was a very difficult period. Hunger was raging through the country. Moreover, we did not have food-coupons.

Good people advised me that it would be easier for me to find a job if I told everyone that I was a Komsomol member and lost my documents during our flight. Finally the administration approved me as a bursar in one of the local schools. I did not quite understand what a school bursar responsibility was, yet I was happy that I, at least, found a job. This way I received a ‘labor food-coupon’. Everybody’s greatest concern at that time was to survive and still the permanent feeling of hunger.

N. G. I found out about your epic of your 3-day working experience in a school from one of Peyrets’ interviews.
B. G. Indeed, I worked in the school only for three days, because the principle of the school fired me on the fourth day. The cause of this decision was that I categorically refused to give her 10 kg of bones from the 100 kg I received to feed the children of the school. They were cooking soup form those bones, moreover they were picking from the bones that had remains of meat on them. After all, those soups where ‘royal meals’ for the children during the war. Consequently, the principal fired me from school. Furthermore, we were left without the corner in the school, the place we were allowed to spend the nights in.

We fell again into a very critical situation. We were two helpless women; with no money; no provisions; no place to stay in a totally strange city in the beginning of the winter...

A ‘Holly Angel’ came to help again. It was an angel in the shape of a woman. When the janitress found out about the cause of my dismissal – refusal to give the principle the ‘bones for children’, she invited us, two vulnerable women, to leave in her apartment. She and her husband were also exiled from Leningrad. She was an educated woman working as a janitress, and her husband, an engineer by profession, was a stoker. No other jobs were available to the exiled in Tyumen…
N. G. What happened after, how did your mother and you manage to survive in Tyumen city?
B. G. I managed to find a job at the post office, to check the incoming telegrams. It was not a difficult work to do. I was constantly trying to get to Khanty-Mansyisk as soon as possible. I made an agreement with a sled driver to go to Khanty-Mansyisk by sledding. They told me they would get me to the destination in 9-10 days… I also agreed to their terms of payment, being a young and inexperienced woman, and I told my mother: ‘Get packed…We are sledging to Peyrets. After all, Grysha did the same when he stole his old woman…’

However, our hostess and my mother were more experienced people. The hostess warned my mother that the sledge drivers will not get us anywhere. They will kill us and take our entire luggage as soon as they will go farther from the city. We would not be found for years. Who would look for us in this strange city…?

At 5 o’clock in the morning, when our escort was supposed to come for us, the owner bent the electrical light tube, to make believe an accident happened at the electrical station. This way she saved our lives for the second time… She was a very special ‘Holly Angel’… She managed to save us twice in such a short period.
N. G. Your story is a little scary! I always knew that there were many cases of robbery during the evacuation period, but killing people…

It was the feature of the war period. Some people were ready to do everything it takes to survive those difficult times of hunger. What happened with you after?
B. G. My mother made them believe she did not want to prepare her luggage again. My ‘drivers’ said they would come back the next days, after we fix the problem. Yet, they never came back. The two women managed to convince me that such a trip with strange people was a deathful one.
N. G. I wander how could the two women survive that starving winter?
B. G. We were, of course, very hungry, even with our food-coupons. The woman recommended us to buy turnip at the open market, as a remedy against scurvy. We used to feed turnip to our cattle at home, in Bendery. People, surely, would never use turnip as food. In Tyumen, we were eating everything, everything that was possible to chew… Samuel helped us again. One evening someone knocked at our door. Our host would not usually open the door after sundown. She was afraid of robbery and killing. Robberies became more frequent during the war. However, the man at the door was very persistent. ‘It is cold, I am freezing. It is me, Samuel – screamed the man’. I opened the door to him. Samuel managed to receive a short break from work and come to Tyumen to visit us and help. He brought a full military suitcase with him, full of food provisions. There were three big loafs of bread, different fish and meat cans, and many other things. A true fortune… I immediately rushed to try the food, and invited the host’s daughter with whom I became friends. Samuel warned me that I should eat little by little and slowly, because if I would eat too much after a very long period of starving, I could get my stomach too full and get an intestinal torsion. He was a doctor, and he had seen many such cases that happened to starving people.

He stayed with us for three days, and it was a true holiday for my mother and me. We also fed the entire host family. We had a lot to talk about after being far from each other for such a long period. He also left us some money, as he did not have a chance to spend it being on a full military contentment.

N. G. This is another amazing story. Indeed, after listening to you, I start believing in angels. They were truly protecting you all the way.
B. G. I think this was more than enough. Although, perhaps you will be interested to listen another story about ‘Holly Angels’ that appeared in my life during our ship travel from Tyumen to Khanty-Mansyisk.
N. G. It seems like your grandmother delivered to you a share of Jewish optimism through these stories… She gave you faith that eventually comes alive in a very special way, the help of God…
B. G. As soon as the sailing season opened in spring on Irtysh River, my mother and I took the first ship to Khanty-Mansyisk. It was difficult to find two tickets for the ship, and we ended up sleeping on the deck. The early spring nights in the North are ‘not very warm’. Unfortunately, we did not have a choice. My mother laid down on the pile of luggage and packages, and I decided to breathe the fresh river air. I was enjoying the dense pine forests from the bank of the river. It was very light outside, because, as it is very well known, the ‘White Nights’ in the North last for weeks.

Photo #19. The Goldmacher family in Chernovtsy. Peyrets’ parents, brother Matus with his family and Peyrets with Basya and son Josef, 1951

Suddenly, a middle-aged man approaches me (at least he seemed to me, a 23 year old young lady, a middle-aged man) and asks me: ‘What are you doing alone on the deck that late, young lady? It is one o’clock in the morning!’

- What do you mean one o’clock, it is absolutely light outside! It is exactly as the day is! By the way, I am not a young lady; I am a married woman, even though I am only 23 years old.

One can tell that you are not local. You do not know when it is day and when it is night during this time of the year. One can tell that you are not local even by observing you clothing. Where are you exactly heading to, in the North?

I was small in stature and very skinny from starvation. It was not difficult to think I was looking like a girl. I was also dressed in European clothes. I did not have other cloths to wear at that time. None of us would buy local clothes during the evacuation period. This was not something to take into consideration then…

Photo #20. In Chernovtsy. Basya with Peyrets, son Josef and mother Feyga, 1965.