Tag #153641 - Interview #78012 (Fenia Kleiman)

There was a typhoid epidemic in the village. My mother fell ill and then my father and I got typhoid. There was no medication. Many people died. We had high fever. When we regained consciousness we were told that my grandfather Pinkhas and my father's sister Adel had died of typhoid. Every morning dead corpses were picked up and put onto a horse-driven cart. My grandfather and Aunt Adel were buried in a common grave and we don't know where it is. Yuzik, Adel's son, was with us.

The Romanians took the adults to work. My parents began to earn money by replacing shoemakers or tailors, who could make money working at home. These people paid other inmates 1 mark per day to replace them at work. Adel's son Yuzik also made money by replacing other inmates at work. In winter 1942 the Romanians were taking people to the wood-cutting site. Yuzik replaced another worker. When the workers returned to town after work, Yuzik was found frozen to death on a cart.

I had poor Yiddish before the war, but in the ghetto I became fluent in Yiddish. In 1943 a Jewish community began to operate in the ghetto. Its head was a very decent Jewish man called Orenshtein. He even opened a Jewish school. This wasn't an official school. We just came to his house secretly to have classes. There was one class of about ten Jewish children. They studied Yiddish and mathematics at this school. Our teacher of mathematics was a young engineer, a very nice person. He praised me for my success in mathematics. This school operated until the liberation.