Tag #144399 - Interview #78227 (frieda stoyanovskaya)

In October 1919 military units of the White Army that was in opposition to the Bolshevik order came to Borispol. Those units looked more like gangs [2], involved in robberies and murders, although there were quite a few tsarist officers in them. At first they executed Bolsheviks and then started beating and murdering Jewish people and burning their houses. This pogrom happened at the same time as the Simchat Torah holiday. Almost the entire Jewish population was in the synagogue, and that's where the slaughter started. All those who couldn't run away were killed there. My grandfather Zalman perished there, as well as his younger son and my uncle Shaya. My daddy and mamma with my two-year-old brother Semyon were hiding in the house of some villagers that they knew. My sister Ida and I ran to our teacher. She was Polish and she had been teaching us for a year before these events. She lived in the yard of the parish school and she kept us in some cellar for several days. When it got colder she took us to her house. She had two daughters. We knew nothing about our daddy and mamma.

The pogrom lasted for a few days, and the screams of the executed people could be heard at night and during the day. After a few days we left our rescuer. We were on the way home when our parents found us. Our house and our grandparents' house were burned, and we couldn't find shelter anywhere. Denikin soldiers were still in town. We were hiding in the gardens and haystacks. My ten-year-old sister and I witnessed an officer beating an elderly man with a rifle-butt until he fell down dead. Aunt Gisia told me later that some bandit was trying to rape her and only her monthly indisposition saved her.