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.
My mother came home from work and she says, "It's time to go." And so, she made me dress in my best clothes, and, again, I still had that coat with a few sewn-in coins, and I put on my high-top shoes, and she got dressed in whatever she felt was still not threadbare, and she made two little bundles, one for myself and one for her. We ate our meager supper, and when it got dark, really dark--it was a dark night, it was very quiet--we stepped out of our room, we didn't tell anyone. At that point, no one shared information with anyone else. It seems like everyone was an entity unto oneself. We walked out, we didn't say goodbye to anyone. And pretty soon we were in the river. It was very quiet, and there were a lot of bulrushes and there's a lot of underbrush, and I held on tightly to my mother's hand, and all of a sudden shots rang out and we ducked, and when it stopped we proceeded a little further. But then, the gun...the gunshots were sporadic, but we could not move because it was still, and when we moved we made noise. And so, we just stayed there, and it turned out we stayed the entire night, because the sporadic gunshots were making it impossible for us to move. The next morning, there were no sporadic gunshots, it was regular now, and it seemed to come from every which side. We heard a lot of noise, a lot of commotion, we saw fire, we heard screams, we heard babies crying, and it seems that it was none too soon that we got out. At that point, a lot of other people from the ghetto tried to do the very same thing we did, and they ran towards the river. At that time, the guards started screaming, the Ukrainian guards, and this is a phrase in Ukrainian, "Wylaz Zyde Ya Tebe Bachu" and that means, "Crawl out, Jew, I can see you." That phrase rings in my ears constantly, and a lot of people came out. My mother held me down and we stayed put. And that went on for several days, and my mother made me eat the soggy bread that was in the bundle. It tasted awful, and she kept saying I have to be strong, and I can't give up now, and she kept giving me directions of how to get to the farmer's house on the other side of the river where that was, that was supposed to have been our hiding place. And I, I felt I knew and I, I told her, I mean, "Stop repeating it. I know how to get there," because we used to go there before the war and my mother used to buy some of the dairy products like milk and cheese and butter from that farmer, so I knew his name, I knew his family, and I knew where he lived. Only we didn't go through the river, went all around. That was in a little village called Skobelka. And we stayed pinned down and at that point the gunshots were working full time. There were screams from the ghetto, and fire, and it never let down even at night, night and day. I don't know how many days we stayed in the river, but it was several days, and I kept dozing off. And one time I woke up, or I thought I woke up, and I looked around, and my mother wasn't there. I really became panic-stricken, and I didn't know what to do, and I just stayed there until the very end of that day. And by that time, everything quieted down. There was no more sound except my own sobbing. I, I was crying. It was so still. And somehow, at that moment, I felt I let my mother down. I fell asleep, and she probably couldn't wake me up, and she had to leave. And so when it got real dark I made my way to the other side of the river, and by that time it was dawn. I was wet and petrified and utterly confused. I made my way to the farmer's house and the farmer saw me and he led me into the barn and I asked him, "Is my mother here?" He said, "No." I said, "Well, she's supposed to be here." He says, "Yes." I said, "Well, I'll wait, you know, until she comes." And he said, "No, you will not wait here. I'll feed you, you'll stay until it gets dark, and you better leave." And I looked at him. I said, "You made an agreement with my mother," and I asked--I mean I, I, I addressed him by his name, which I don't want to give now because I think I have a lot of questions and I would like to resolve them someday before I die, when I go back there, and I asked him, "You made an agreement." And he says, "I changed my mind," and he shrugged his shoulders and he said I have to go when it gets dark. If I don't go he'll report me to the authorities. It was very ironic, 'cause he was wearing a farmer's, like a coverall, and in the corner I saw my father's gold pocket watch with the chain, which I'm sure was part of the money that my mother tried to buy the hiding place for us.
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