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.
It seems every day from then on there were decrees. At first, it was for the Jews. We were always, we always had to congregate in the, uh, marketplace, that's the central place. And, each day there were new decrees. First, we had to bring all the gold, all the silver, all the radios, all the furs, all the rugs, the Persian, Persian rugs, everything that was of any value, we had to bring to the marketplace to give to the Germans. It was an organized thing, and everyone, there was so much chaos, and so much, uh, panic, that it, it's almost like people were going in a trance. All of a sudden, most of the heads of the families were gone. We didn't know where, when, or if we'll ever see our fathers and brothers again. Uh, I, I know now that when they took my father away, my mother was still a very young woman and she turned gray overnight, but she tried very much to camouflage her feelings, and she did not want us to, uh, to, to feel the despair that she probably felt, and everyone else there, too. We were gathered every day for different things. First, I mean, we had to part with all our dearest possessions. Then, they gathered us in the marketplace and we had to watch when they burned the main synagogue and the little...there were little, they call them shtiebels [small houses of worship], they were separate synagogues. They burned all our Torahs. They burned all the books of prayer, and we had to stand and watch. Everyone who was over 14 years of age was sent to slave labor, and that was right from the beginning after they, they, they, you know, allowed us to bring all the things to the marketplace. My mother and my sister ended up working. My mother was digging ditches, and so was my sister, and they marched them, they met at the marketplace in the begin...in the early morning, and they were marched back at night, and sometimes my sister and both my mother were black and blue from beatings, from, from, uh, uh, uh, you know, awful treatment that they endured during the day. This lasted about two weeks. I'm not quite sure of the exact time, but then one day people were told not to go to work, and we were given approximately an hour to take whatever we could carry with us, and we had to congregate again at the marketplace. There, we were told we are going to move, we are going to live, in a new place, and this is, this was the ghetto. They marched us into one of the poorest sections of town, and we were assigned a place to live.
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