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.
When my sister and my mother, when, when we got into the ghetto, my sister, uh, was very lucky to obtain a new job. My mother was still digging ditches and repairing roads, but my sister was able to get into a old warehouse where young women were knitting and crocheting articles of clothing for the, uh, soldiers on the front, and that was a very, a choice job because you were sitting inside and, uh, you know, it, it wasn't, uh, labor, you know, manual labor. One time she was, uh, ill and she didn't, she couldn't go in to work, and so she gave me her pass and I was to take her place in the warehouse. And so I gathered in front of the gate with all the other young women and, uh, passed as my sister. No one paid any attentions, you know, as long as you had the piece of the paper. And so when we got into the warehouse I took her place, her friends showed me where she was sitting, and picked up a scarf that she started knitting the day before. I was not very good at what I was doing, and one of the German guards started staring at me intently, and he kept watching me for quite a while, and then he started cursing and yelling at me, and I know he said I wasn't doing it fast enough, and I still didn't do it much faster 'cause I didn't know how, and he got very annoyed with me, and he grabbed one of the knitting needles out of my hand and pushed it in my forefinger, and, uh, this is what it looks like now. Uh, I passed out, and I got home that evening and that was a bitter lesson for me never to try and take my sister's place for the ration that I would have lost, she would have lost that day.
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