This is my mother Gusta Rudich's identity card, issued by the ?Association of the Former Deportees to Transnistria? in 1948. You can see from the photo, which was taken shortly after we returned from Transnistria, that she was in bad shape, tired and underfed.
This document was issued to serve as an identity card, because all our documents had been lost. It says that she was liberated from Copaigorod, that she is a housewife, and that she has an underaged child, Manin Rudich - at that time, I was under 16 years old. My sister had a separate identity card, she was older than me.
She had been deported to Transnistria in 1941 with my father, Iacob Rudich, me and my sister, Rozalia Adler, nee Rudich. We were in the ghettos of Snitkov, Shargorod and Copaigorod, and we were liberated by the Russian army in 1944. In Snitkov, because my father was the translator for the colonel there, my mother could be a cleaning woman of the offices. That was a good position; we sometimes got some extra bread. But she suffered a lot, especially from frostbite. And when I fell ill with with typhoid fever in the winter of 1941, she was desperate. I remember the sacrifices my parents made for me, they didn't eat so that I could have something to eat. My mother was crying because she couldn't help me more.
After the liberation we were sent back to Cuciurul Mare and we had to stay there for two more years, under the Russian government. In 1946 we were allowed to move to Romania, and we came to Brasov.