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.
There was one time when I snuck out of the ghetto and I, uh, was lucky to obtain two eggs, and I remember I was wearing a dress with little puffed sleeves, and I put an egg in each sleeve and tried to make my way back into the ghetto. I paid for these two eggs with a small gold ring that had a ruby in it that my mother sewed into my coat. I was quite proud of myself, and I just could picture my mother's and my sister's faces when they came home and we had two eggs to eat. Just before I was entering the hole, the camouflaged hole back into the ghetto, a Ukrainian guard spotted me, and, uh, he ran over and he started screaming at me, and he found the two eggs and he threw them on the sidewalk and made me kneel down and rubbed my face in them, and screamed at me to get right back where I belong and never to show my face again on the outside. I was petrified, and I didn't give away the hiding place, the hiding entrance, I marched back into the ghetto, or he threw me back into the ghetto and that was the end of that. I guess he was one of the kind ones because he could have killed me, or he should have killed me. When I told my par...my parents...my mother and my sister that evening about my experience, she just hugged me.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.
