Tag #124545 - Interview #87368 (Miriam Bercovici )

We managed to pull through the house-search, but the weather had broken, it began to rain and the mud was more than ankle-deep. We arrived by carriage at the Dnestr, at the place of embarkation. First my mother and my grandparents crossed, then me and my sister Sisi, and then my father with the luggage and Horovitz the pharmacist. We arrived in Mohilev-Podolsk [11], where everybody talked in Ukrainian, and among the Romanian soldiers one could see a few scattered Ukrainian militiamen.

Through rumors we found out we should stay away from the convoys; these would have taken us to the camp, so we tried to go or run away as far as we could. We struggled to carry our bags from the Dnepr to a yard where we stayed shivering for two hours until we found ourselves a shelter: 30 people in a room. We stayed in the same room with the Hausvaters, the Horovitzs, the Hellers, the Segals, the Javetzs and the Tartars, all of them Jews from Campulung. We exchanged our money in Ataki, at a rate of 40 lei for a ruble. In Mohilev we had exchanged our money at the rate of 10, 7 and 6 lei, so this reduced us to almost complete poverty. The first news we got was that we would walk, so we sold everything we couldn’t carry. We paid more than enough because we lived in constant fear of being taken to a camp, and the Russians knew how to exploit us.

When those deported to Mohilev began to organize themselves, they established an asylum for the helpless from all over Bukovina, people who were really unable to go further. I left my grandparents there with some money, and my aunt from Cernauti remained there to take care of them. Everything had to be done without papers because there weren’t any, only passes. The other deported brought them food three times a day; otherwise they would have perished, as they were unable even to get themselves a cup of tea. One of the leaders of the asylum was a doctor from Campulung my father knew, Theodor Melman, and he helped us with our grandparents.