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.
I remember it happened maybe two, three days after the actual war started, and I remember long lines of people, these were the refugees who were trying to escape from the German part of Poland, they were walk...I mean, there were people with bundles, children, and I mean it was a very sad picture, and that's what is in my mind, of all these people walking on the street, not even on the sidewalk, because there were so many of them. And then when they stopped, that's when the Germ...the Russians came in, and there they were, the soldiers and tanks. People greeted them with flowers, very happy, and it was sort of excited...exciting for me, not realizing what was happening, but there was no bloodshed in our town. You could hear the, the sound, I guess, of guns and all in the background, but for a very short time. They came in, and as far as I know, nothing really changed for us with one exception: the official language became Russian instead of Polish, because--and that was no problem, because most Europeans are bi- or trilingual because of necessity, our neighbors are all around us speaking a different language, so that was no problem. And my father still had his job. I mean, he kept his position at the university. I'm sure there were some, uh, very, uh, drastic changes, but I did not realize them. Some of the people who had businesses in stores, I guess, in town, uh, they are the ones who probably felt the change more drastically than I did, uh, because most of the stores, or all, became nationalized. And at first we had much of everything, and then all of a sudden things started to...there were shortages of bread, milk, clothing, and, uh, but that was not my problem, that was my parents' problems, and I did not sense any perceptible change in, in anything.
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