KARTUZ-BEREZA 1993 YZKOR
Chapter VIII - D
SURVIVAL
By
Moishe Bernshtein
In a morning of
summer in 1941, the airplanes of the Nazi murderers sowed death and destruction
on
One night as I was beside the train
station, I saw trains full of weapons and Germans running from here to there. I
broke into one of the freight cars that I thought was going to
As
the train moved, the noise was so deafening and I did not know to which place I
was traveling. Also I did not know if I would reach that place alive. I was
hungry, tired and depressed even as I dozed. Strong explosions aroused me and I
tried to look through one of the cracks. My eyes discovered many dead people, people hurt in all sides, screams and cries for
help. I still tremble remembering this vision. A bomb reached the train. The
car in which I was together with other cars flew into the air and the remains
were spread all over. The screams of the
wounded were on all sides, and the noise of the explosion of the bombs was
deafening. Hundreds of people ran and they fell and they fell and they crawled,
myself among them. I heard voices in German and in Russian, but I did not know
where I was and I was afraid to speak to anybody. The sense of survival took over me and I saw
a group of tree a little bit away from this tumult. By running and by crawling
I reached the trees and I leaned back on a thick tree trunk. My soul was not
with me.
During
the evening, when there was some silence, with my remaining strength I began to
walk in the direction of the tracks of the train. I was only acting by some
instinct that made me walk along the path parallel to the road. All that I felt was that I wanted to escape,
to escape, to escape. I am sorry to say
that I did not forget any detail of the psychological and physical pains that
attacked me and they didn't abandon me. Maybe one day I will be able to tell
everything in much more detail. After a
long night, the instinct of escaping took me to a parked train with its boxcars
loaded with cows. With my last strength I crawled into one of them and slept. I
woke up when the train began to move. Until today I do not know how far it
traveled until it stopped. I heard voices in Russian. I jumped off the train
and discovered that it had arrived at a great kolhoz in deep Russia, a place
called Novi-Borsi where they already had many Jewish refugees. A new link began
in my life and, with a lot of fear; I discovered what I had ignored.
I found different
kinds of work, and I lived in the house of a peasant who I helped in his work.
Little by little I became accustomed to my new situation, and to the routine of
life in the kolhoz. Then I decided to travel to a city of the district, called
Saratov. I walked around the city without any objective, and without knowing
what would be my destiny from now on. Suddenly I heard talk in the street that
Soviet forces had abandoned Kartuz Bereza after fierce combats. I lost
consciousness, fainted and fell dismayed in the street. When I recovered, I was
in a shop. People began to ask me: who I am, where I came from and where I was
going. There was a Jew that took me to his house that served as center for
refugees from Poland.
In
that city I lived until year 1945, when the war ended. Alone, without any
information, I registered, as did many Polish Jews, to return to Poland with
the hope of returning to my house in Bereza. We were informed that was not any
possibility to visit Bereza in Polish Russia. We went by train and arrived in
Krakov after many movements. There, in the train station, they were some Jewish
young boys that were mobilizing youths to go to a Kibbutz, which was the way to
emigrate to Israel. I was taken to an achshará (preparation place for the
entrance to a Kibbutz) of the Dror movement that was located in a big house in
Krakov. We were there until we began to go, avoiding migratory controls,
through the snowy Alps to Italy and Germany.
Finally we arrived in a port and embarked on the immigrant ship called
Hatikvá.
When
we neared Israel, the British stopped us and they sent the ship to Cyprus. We
were there a year and half until finally we arrived in Israel. I enlisted in
the Israeli army and I began to rebuild my life.
I
won't try to describe all my difficulties of adapting to life in Israel. Maybe
some day I will also tell this in detail