Jenine was the younger of two daughters born to Jewish parents. They lived in a small city with a large Jewish population in central Moldavia. Her father, a veteran of World War I, came from a large family and Jenine had more than 15 aunts and uncles, all living in Bacau. This extended family helped raise Jenine and her sister Sofia while their parents ran a grocery store.
1933-39: Just like every child her age, Jenine belonged to a national youth organization headed by Prince Michael. They wore special uniforms with berets and leather belts, and held patriotic rallies in the stadium. Jenine's father became ill; business suffered and he lost his store and everything that they owned. In 1938, they moved to the national capital, Bucharest, where her father got a new job as a factory clerk and Jenine went to a new school.
1940-44: The fascist Iron Guard was now in power, but Jenine's patriotism no longer made any difference. Because she was Jewish, she was forced out of public school. Although makeshift, their Jewish schools had excellent teachers; Jenine chose to study bookbinding. After Jews were excluded from public hospitals, a Jewish clinic was organized in Bucharest. Jenine worked in its cafeteria. New restrictions were imposed. There were pogroms. The government made her family provide clothing and bedding to the Romanian army.
Jenine was liberated by the Soviet army in August 1944. She continued to live in Romania until 1976, when she immigrated with her family to the United States.
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Paul was one of three children born to Jewish parents. They lived in a small city with a large Jewish population in central Moldavia. Paul's Ukrainian-born father had been stationed in Romania during World War I, and chose to remain there rather than return to Ukraine after the 1917 Russian Revolution.
1933-39: Paul's household observed the Jewish holidays. He loved Passover with its special meals and the opportunity to show off new clothes. On the radio his family heard about the Nazis in Germany; in their own country, the antisemitic Iron Guard was becoming more popular. One morning in September 1939 Paul saw signs of the war for the first time: retreating Polish soldiers rode down our street, looking hungry and thirsty.
1940-44: The fascist Iron Guard was in power. Being forced out of public school was the first of many measures Paul suffered because he was a Jew. Paul and his friends refused to remain passive. Building a radio and listening to foreign broadcasts were their first acts of defiance. They helped the underground by smuggling news inside soap bars and putting sand in German gas tanks. By cutting electric wires they sabotaged production at a factory where Paul was a forced laborer making uniforms for the German army.
Suspected of sabotage, Paul was arrested and tortured by Romanian police, but was released just before Soviet troops invaded Romania in 1944. He moved to the United States in 1972.
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Matvey was the youngest of three children born to a Jewish family. The Gredingers lived in the town of Vertujeni, which was located in Bessarabia, a region of Romania. His father was a kosher butcher, preparing meat, especially chicken, for sale in his kosher shop. Matvey attended a Jewish school where he studied Jewish history and Hebrew.
1933-39: The Gredingers heard stories from other towns about antisemitic groups, especially the League of National Christian Defense, harassing and sometimes attacking Romanian Jews. But only small groups tormented them in their town. After Matvey completed the seventh grade, he went to the Romanian capital of Bucharest in 1934 and secured a job working in a textile factory. While he was away, his family moved to the town of Vysoka.
1940-44: While Matvey was visiting his family in 1940, the Soviets occupied Bessarabia. Within a year the Germans occupied the area. At once, Romanian soldiers began shooting Jews. His family barricaded their house but the soldiers broke in. Matvey was dragged out and a soldier fired at him; the bullet passed through his neck. He collapsed, unconscious but alive, lying in a pool of blood. Later, the soldiers used a match to check his breathing. He feigned death. They heaped rocks on him and left. After dark, Matvey rose and ran through the woods.
Matvey fled to a nearby town, but the Germans came the next day. He was then deported to a forced-labor camp in Ukraine. In 1944 he was liberated by the Red Army.
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Eva was one of three children born to Jewish parents in Vertujeni, a Bessarabian town that was 90 percent Jewish. Eva attended a public school. Her family was religious, attending synagogue every day. Eva's father made his living as a kosher butcher, preparing chicken according to Jewish dietary laws.
1933-39: In 1936, when Eva was 15 years old, her family moved to Vysoka, where she later got a job as a seamstress. Vysoka was very different from her hometown. There were only about 15 Jewish families in Vysoka and Eva believed that people were less tolerant of Jews. While there were not any fights, tensions ran high.
1940-44: Eva married in 1940, the year the USSR annexed Bessarabia. Her husband was drafted into the Red Army a year later when Germany attacked the USSR. Eva, pregnant, remained in Vysoka and was deported with the town's Jews by the Romanian army, allies of the Germans. The Jews were marched for days without food or water. One day in a forest, the soldiers raped some of the girls. In the Vertujeni transit camp, Eva gave birth on the floor, without a doctor. A week later, during a march to Transnistria, her baby died.
Eva was liberated in 1944 in a labor camp in Transnistria. After the war, she returned to Bessarabia, where she was informed that her husband was missing in action.
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Edith's village of Kriesciatik was located on the border between Romania and Poland. Her Jewish parents owned a large ranch where they raised cattle and grew sugar beets. They also owned a grocery store. Edith had a brother, Jacob, and a sister, Martha. At home the family spoke Yiddish and German, and Edith learned Romanian after she began school.
1933-39: Edith's village was by a river, and she spent summer days by the water with her friends, swimming and playing. Her mother would pack her bread and butter sandwiches and cherries. Sometimes she would go to the forest with her best friend, Fritzie, to pick wild strawberries and flowers. During Easter, Edith's parents made sure that they stayed inside because the local peasants would get drunk and sometimes attacked Jews, blaming them for killing Jesus.
1940-44: In 1940, a year after the war began, Romania became Germany's ally. Edith was 9 when Romanian police expelled the Jews from her village and sent them, on foot, to a place in Ukraine where Jews were concentrated. Edith and the others were brought to a huge barracks where there were thousands of Jews. Nothing seemed organized. They learned that every day, 1,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to Ukrainian ghettos. When Edith's father heard about this, he told them to stall until he could arrange their escape.
Edith's family spent more than three years sheltered by Jewish families in a Ukrainian village, and they survived the war. In 1959 Edith immigrated to America.
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Max was raised in the Romanian town of Radauti, a trading and woodworking center near the Ukrainian border. The Gutmanns had a traditional Jewish home, and Max's father was on the board of directors of the local Jewish community. Max's father dealt in grain, feed, and livestock and he was a purveyor of horses for the Romanian military.
1933-39: Max's pony, Lisa, was kept in his family's stables with the other horses. The secondary school he attended was semi-private; it was governed by the state, but each student had to pay a tax to attend. After school he sometimes studied Hebrew with a tutor. In 1938, when Max was 15, he read in the newspaper how Jews in Germany were losing their rights and their property. His family was afraid that similar constraints would be imposed on them in Romania.
1940-44: In June 1940 Max's father was injured after being thrown from a train by Romanian fascist Iron Guard members. Six months later he died of his wounds. When the Romanians deported Radauti's Jews in October 1941, Max's famly was sent east to a ghetto in Transnistria. There they lived in one room with 16 people, mostly relatives. Max worked in a slaughterhouse. When they threw away the bones, skin and organs, hundreds of starving people gathered and fought over them. After three years of suffering, they were liberated by the Soviets in March 1944.
After the war, Max returned to Radauti. In 1958 he left for Vienna, and immigrated to the United States in 1959.
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Erika was born in Znojmo, a town in the Czech region of Moravia with a Jewish community dating back to the 13th century. Her father was a respected attorney and an ardent Zionist who hoped to immigrate with his family to Palestine. In 1931 the Neumans moved to Stanesti, a town in the Romanian province of Bukovina, where Erika's paternal grandparents lived.
1933–39: In Stanesti, Erika attended the public school as well as the Hebrew school, which her father had helped to found. She loved to play with her sister Beatrice and the other children in the town, and enjoyed being with her grandfather. Her childhood was filled with hopes and dreams for the future. In 1937, however, members of the fascist Iron Guard tried to remove Erika's father from his position as the chief civil official in Stanesti. Eventually, a court cleared him of the fabricated charges and he was restored to his post.
1940–45: In 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Bukovina. A year later, when Romania joined Nazi Germany in the war against the Soviet Union, the Soviets were driven from Stanesti. Mobs then carried out bloody attacks on the town's Jews. During the violence, Erika and her family fled to Czernowitz with the aid of the local police chief. In fall 1941, the Neumans were forced to settle in the Czernowitz ghetto, where living conditions were poor and the Jews there were subject to deportation to Transnistria. In 1943 Erika and Beatrice escaped from the ghetto on false papers that their father had obtained.
After escaping to the Soviet Union, Erika and Beatrice returned to Czechoslovakia, where they were eventually reunited with their parents. Erika married an officer in the Czech army and raised two children. After many years of hard effort and her mother and sister's appeals to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, she was permitted to immigrate to the United States in 1960, three years after the death of her husband. Erika became a supervisor of a pathology lab.
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