I was born in 1933 in the village of Verkhobka, in the district of Vinica, in the Ukraine. At the beginning of the war my father, David Leiderman, volunteered for the army and was killed at the front.
I, my mother and my three younger siblings stayed in the village. I saw all the difficulties and tribulations that befell my family and my relatives during the four years of the war.
1941 was a very difficult year. Everything imaginable happened to us. We suffered from the cold and many ailments; we starved and lived in great penury. During that year two of my younger brothers died. Only my mother, my younger brother, Aharon, and I remained.
Our village was occupied by the Romanian army. On the first day they expelled us from our homes, without food or clothing. It was fall and the weather was cold. They warned us that they would shoot anyone who tried to escape or who had arms.
We did not understand a word and we thought they wanted to expel us from the village, but we did not manage to take anything with us. My mother sent me home to try to get some clothes, but there were armed soldiers next to the house and when one of them noticed me, he threatened me with his gun and I was petrified. They kept us out in the street, without food or water, until the middle of the night, and only let us return to our homes in the morning.
The Nazis built a ghetto in our village and rounded up hundreds of families from Moldavia, Serbia and Romania. In addition to my family, 30 people lived in our house throughout the war. Even though our house was not small (three rooms, a large kitchen and a storeroom) it was very crowded, and during the whole of the war my family lived in the storeroom without heat in the winter.
I remember an event from that time:
In 1942 the Nazis began to round up all the men for enforced labor in the town of Nikolaev. There was a man living at our house who my uncle knew from before the war. He was a short, weak man with a limp.
In order to save him from having to do enforced labor, when the Nazis searched, we hid him under our skirts, and that’s how he survived. Only 2 men survived the labor.
Many frightening things happened to us during the course of the war. In 1943 partisans began to operate against the Germans in our region. Suddenly a Nazi reprisal battalion appeared. They searched for partisans. That day my mother was not at home and waiting for her I opened the door. I saw the armed soldiers lining the street. They drove everyone away and set some houses on fire. People began to say their goodbyes because they thought that the Nazis were going to burn them along with their homes. We only survived thanks to the village mayor who protected us from the Nazis. We lived in fear all through the four years of the war.
I could say a lot more about these kinds of events, but all these memories make me feel bad and it is hard for me to talk about all of that.
I only dream that our children and grandchildren should not go through what we experienced in our lives; all that terrible fear. But our children have to know about it all so that they can make sure that it will never happen again. That is why I am prepared to tell my life story.
