Tag #124549 - Interview #87368 (Miriam Bercovici )

My mother and father began inquiring about how we could go further. Bondy managed to associate us with some Germans who, for a fee, were taking truckloads of Jews further into the country, so we paid them and they took us on a German truck to Dzhurin. That wasn’t a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire; it was a Jewish zone known and acknowledged beforehand by the Jews from Dzhurin. The guards were Romanians; rarely did we see Germans who handled the mail and had administrative duties. I remember one of the guards, Costica, who had a terrible dog and always held a scourge in his hand; he was a cruel man.

At first we stayed 13 in a room and slept on the floor. We were together with the Horovitzs and the Hausvaters, but then my mother went looking for another room. We apportioned our food so we wouldn’t starve to death in the next months. It was raining all the time, there was mud all over the place, there were no toilets at all, so, just like in Ataki, we all dealt with this problem as best we could. We found a room on a hill filled with mud. There was mud constantly, both outside and inside the house.

The Ukrainian peasants are very different from the Romanian ones: they are more underdeveloped, and are behind some 10–20 years. For them everything nice and modern was at the sugar factory. It had electric lighting, doors with keys, and only the sugar factory had toilets, but it was outside the ghetto. The other houses, in which we were living, were just like the Gypsy houses: holes, houses in verge of collapse because they were too old to stand. We heard rumors all the time about us going home, but after a while we didn’t believe them any more. I offered to work for strangers, to do some knitting, but there was no one I could work for as there was no wool.