Charlene Schiff (1929–2013) was born Shulamit Perlmutter and raised in Horochów, Poland (today Horokhiv, Ukraine). Charlene’s father, Simcha, was a philosophy professor at the nearby University of Lwów. After Nazi Germany occupied Horochów in June 1941, authorities began to target the town’s Jews. In August 1941, Simcha was rounded up and likely shot with other prominent Jews. In November, Charlene, her mother, and sister, Tchiya, were forced into the Horochów ghetto. In 1942, Charlene’s mother, Fruma, arranged two hiding places with local farmers: one for Tchiya and the other for herself and Charlene. Tchiya left first. As Charlene and her mother fled, the authorities began to massacre the ghetto’s Jews. The women hid in the underbrush of a riverbank. One day, Charlene awoke to find that her mother was gone. Charlene made her way to their hiding place, but the farmer had changed his mind and turned her away. Charlene survived alone in the local forests. She was liberated by Soviet troops in 1944. None of her family survived.
In the very beginning, my mother and several other women organized a clandestine school for children who were below the age of work, and it was a wonderful thing because we had something to look forward to. It made us forget about the hunger and about all the, the inadequacies of living such a primitive life, and this school existed for several months. Several of the ladies, including my mother, would barter on the outside and they came home with crayons, with writing paper, with some books, and I mean they would tell stories, we would sing and we would color, and it was something to look forward to. It was really, uh, if it, if it only could have lasted, but it didn't. It lasted a few months. And pretty soon there was not enough jewelry or money to barter with. There were no more supplies, school supplies, and the morale sort of sagged in the ghetto. And the women came home, and they were too tired, and too hungry, and too beaten up to be able to go and, and put on a happy face for us kids. So that disintegrated into nothing also.
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