[Page 175]

The first months

In the same building where I lived on 15, Brancoveanu St., a Jewish couple, Chaim Moshe and Rosa Fischer, had an apartment. They were close neighbours and we met often, mostly for political discussions, especially after Stalingrad. After the Rumanian civil service and high-ranking military officers fled, many nice apartments became unoccupied. Some people decided to move into these better living quarters. It was still chaos and one had only to break the locks and move in. That is what the Fischers decided to do.

One day, Mr. Fischer came and told me that he got some news of a very nice abandoned bungalow on Strada Maramuresului (Marmarosh St). He said that they were going to move in there and asked me if I wanted to go with them. They were four people living in a very small apartment, him and his wife, his wife's sister-in-law Bertha and her little girl of 10, Mali. I agreed to go with them. A few days later, we were in the new house.

There were six rooms and a big backyard. Several household items had been left behind, and what was more important, a lot of food, mostly flour and dried meat. In the attic, we found three bags of flour, bags of 50kg or more, of wheat, rye and cornmeal flour. The owners must have fled in the last hours before the arrival of the Soviets. If I remember correctly, we have lived

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there for a period of three months, more or less. We will see later in my story why we had to leave.

This period of chaos was very difficult. First of all, the Soviets were very suspicious, looking for spies everywhere, going into houses and dragging people away after unfounded denunciations. Secondly, there were often razzias (roundups). The militia stopped people on the street and asked them for their identification documents. Often, they took away people's documents and brought them to their headquarters. A person, innocent or not, could be detained for days or weeks, until he was released or until he disappeared. There were cases where militiamen stopped a person in a nice coat or a person wearing a piece of expensive jewellery, then led that person into an inner courtyard of a building and took away the expensive item.

And here is what happened to me personally. A month or so before the Soviets arrived, I received a letter from the Swiss embassy in Bucharest saying that the Chilean government no longer represented the interests of Polish citizens in Rumania and that from now on, the Swiss government would represent us. I filled out a form, sent it back to them and waited for the new Swiss documents. In the meantime, the Soviets had arrived. My Chilean passport was no longer valid (the Soviets wouldn't respect that document anyway). So, I took out my old Soviet passport which I had received in Kuty. It was better for me to revert to being a Soviet citizen than to be without any legal document.

One day, I found myself caught up in the midst of an ongoing razzia and I was stopped by the

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militia. The first thing I heard was: “Dokumenty, pojalusta” (documents please”). I handed over my passport and was taken to their headquarters. There, I was led into a kind of makeshift prison. There were several young men inside. Some of them had already been held there for a few days. They told me that there were rumours that we would be sent deep into Eastern Ukraine for a few weeks of military training and from there, would be sent to the front. All of us being without any military experience, we would become the proverbial cannon fodder.

When I didn't come home that day and when the Fischers heard about the razzia, they understood what had happened to me. So, they set in motion their plan. When the Soviets arrived, Rosa Fischer got a job in a city office, in the same building where the militia were based. She was a very gregarious person and made friends everywhere. She found out where the seized documents were stored and also who was guarding them. She also learned that in a few days we would be allowed to go home to gather up some personal belongings before being sent away.

And so, Rosa bribed the guard to let her into the office with the documents after work. She found my passport and took it with her. Then, when the militia let me out a few days later, I simply didn't go back to jail. I had my passport and they had no trace of my arrest left.

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Progressive normalization

Czernowitz became a military centre and more and more troops and supplies passed throughout the city.

Some regiments stayed for short periods for different reasons. Also, more and more civilians continued to arrive from Ukraine and other Soviet republics. They were sent to replace the temporary civil service and the personnel in commercial establishments for which the Soviets had hired local people after their arrival. It was a pattern familiar to me from Kuty in 1939 when the Soviets had taken over there.

Now the army officers and the managerial staff needed apartments. They didn't bother with renting. When they saw or heard of an apartment to their liking, they just sent the militia or soldiers to order the occupants, owners or tenants to leave, and leave quickly. They usually allowed people 48 hours to get out. We were afraid that our apartment would be requisitioned. We hoped against hope that it wouldn't happen to us. But our apartment was too nice to be spared. One day, a few soldiers came and ordered us to leave in two days. The next day an officer showed up and he agreed to delay our eviction. He gave us a week. We were glad to hear that and started to look for another apartment right away.

A few days later, we found a small apartment on Strada Maresalului Foch (the former Pizelli Gasse). It was very small, so I would no longer be able to stay with the Fischers. Looking around on the same street, I luckily saw a sign “Room for rent”. I went in to have a look. In the apartment lived a couple in their 30's with a daughter of 16,

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and a sister of the owner of about 25 yrs old. They agreed to rent me a room and to take me as a boarder. Mr. Wolfer was a pastry chef and was in charge of the pastry bakery in one of the big hotels. He also prepared the many different salads there. I stayed with them until I left for Washkovitz to work in the distillery, and again in 1945 for another three months before leaving for Poland, as we shall see later.

When I was living at 15, Brancoveanu St. before moving in with the Fischers, there were also two other boarders with me, as I mentioned before: Chaim Mandel from Kuty and a Jewish woman from Bessarabia, Ms. Mina Raji. Everyday, she used to get up early and after a quick breakfast she left for work. When I asked her where she worked, she gave me an evasive answer. I could see that she was embarrassed and I didn't insist. When it became obvious that it wouldn't be long before the Soviets returned, she asked me one day to accompany her to work. I was surprised but I agreed. We arrived before a villa and she took out a set of keys. She opened the gate and we went in. There was neither an office nor a workshop. It was just a beautiful apartment. When I asked her what kind of work she was doing there, she started to cry and told me her story.

She was a chartered accountant and had to come to Czernowitz in 1940 under the Soviets to work for the Spirtoturst, the head office of a chain

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of distilleries in the Czernowitz region. When the Rumanians came in 1941, she lost her job and because of the new anti-Jewish laws, she couldn't get another job in her field. She had to make a living somehow so she found a job as a housekeeper for the wealthy Jewish family who lived in that villa. The family was away for a few days now. She told me that she was sure that she would get a job in her chosen profession, maybe even at the same company when the Soviets came back.

Now that the Soviets were here again, I went to see her. And, as she had hoped, she got her old job back at the Spirtotrust. I asked her if she could possibly recommend me for a job either in Czernowitz or in one of the other distilleries of the company. She promised to try.

In the meantime, the Soviets were getting more and more organized. They took a rapid census of the population in order to mobilize the able-bodied men for service in the army. And so it didn't take long before I got an order to present myself to the “peresylnyi punkt” (transfer centre) where they kept the mobilized people until there was a sufficient number to justify a transfer to the military barracks.

I called Mina Raji and reminded her of her promise to me. She said that she had made the recommendation but that she would see what exactly was the status of my case, and that she would try to do something to move along the processing of my file. After I had already been at the centre for about a week, an officer came in one day and asked for someone who could do nice lettering on signs, posters, streamers, etc. I volunteered. I was brought to a room with some

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big tables and a lot of materials for writing and painting on plywood, cloth, etc. There were already a few people working there.

The themes of the slogans we copied were always more or less the same: adoration of Stalin and other Soviet VIPS, commissars, generals, Stachanovists, etc. There were slogans related to the war against the fascists, or to the commemoration of anniversaries of important events in the history of the post-revolutionary Soviet empire.

One transport of mobilized men went out and I was still working in this “propaganda mill”. After another three weeks or so, I was called to the offices. They showed me a paper with the logo of the Spirtotrust, requesting my release because the company needed me to work as a chemist in one of the distilleries. They also told me that I was now free to go. I took my bundle of things and left.

It still took a little time for all the details to be worked out. Two weeks later, the trust called me and told me that I was assigned to the distillery of Washkovitz, a village 25km from Czernowitz and that I would be sent there the next day. And, so it was.

The distillery in Washkovitz produced 90% pure alcohol. This alcohol still contained fusel oils (aldehydes) and had a particularly unpleasant taste. The production from this distillery and that of the village of Karapchiv (in the same region)

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was shipped every week to the main distillery in Zuczka (Zutchka), a suburb of Czernowitz. There, it was refined further and brought up to 96% beyond which no distillery can go. (For medical or other special uses, it is possible to obtain an absolutely pure 100% alcohol by passing the vapour over a compound of calcium, although I don't remember which one now).

The distillery in Washkovitz used potatoes as its raw material and also, periodically, corn. The potatoes were washed and then transferred into a tall cylindrical steel kettle. There they were boiled in hot steam under pressure until the whole thing became a kind of mush. Then came the transformation of the starch into sugar in the following manner: In the yard of the distillery stood a vast one-story building with a concrete floor. Bags of barley were brought in and the barley was spread on the floor in a layer of about 10 inches deep. The barley was sprayed with water periodically for nine days. When the barley had germinated well, it was put into a machine and crushed into a milky mush. This barley mush was then poured into the kettles containing the cooked potatoes. The temperature was adjusted to a prescribed degree and the whole left to simmer for a few hours. The barley germ contains an enzyme which converts the starch in the potatoes to sugar. When this cooking process was completed, yeast was added and the whole mass poured into large vats.

There the fermentation converted the sugar into alcohol in a few days. After that came the last step – the distillation. The fermented mass was boiled and the vapour passed through columns with several trays, (i.e., a giant still). The result

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was ethyl alcohol (ethanol) which could be of different strengths (up to 96%) depending on the exact distillation procedure used.

Once again, I became a boarder. I always preferred to have people around me rather than empty walls. This time, I stayed with a Jewish couple with two children, a boy of 13 and a girl of 10. They had a small apartment (if you could call it that) consisting of two rooms. One was the living and bedroom and the other served as the husband's workshop.

I don't remember what his profession or occupation had been before the war but now, he was a repairman. He was a real jack-of-all-trades. He could make everything, fix or repair everything, except as the saying goes, a broken heart. In practice, his workshop was mostly a shoemaker's shop. I still remember the sturdy soles he put on old shoes. His raw material was discarded tires. He would cut out a piece of a tire, straighten it out, cut the piece into the shape of a sole and then fasten it to the shoe with wooden pegs driven in with a hammer. These soles were solid and well-made and lasted for a very long time.

There was almost no normal furniture in their apartment. We slept on wooden planks covered with straw mattresses. The tables and chairs were old ones which the husband had recently repaired. The wife was a good cook and there was enough to eat. The only problem was with the daughter. She would wake up several times at night and cry non-stop, sometimes for 15 or 20 minutes or more, and nobody knew why. She was fine during the day, but the nights were

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unbearable for her and for us. There were only a few Jewish families in Washkovitz (all of whom had returned from Transnistria) and I couldn't stay with Ukrainians. So, I stayed with them until the end. They were very nice to me (like all the other people I had stayed with in my Bucovinian “exile”).

In the beginning when I first came to the distillery, the master-distiller was an elderly Jew who had worked there even under the Rumanians. He was very knowledgeable and a real gentleman. He taught me a lot of things and was very patient with me since I was a novice. However, he didn't last long. He was replaced by another Jewish distiller who had returned from Transnistria. There soon arrived a Soviet manager, Mr. Nazarewicz. With him began a new era. The man was originally a factory worker from Ukraine who had worked his way up thanks to party membership. He had come with his wife (whom we never saw) and a son of about 15 and a troublemaker (whom we saw all too often).

Here at the distillery, Mr. Nazarewicz was the “maître après Dieu”. In the Soviet Union it was customary for a plant or a big company to have a piece of farmland allotted to it for the use of the workers. Everyone was assigned a plot and worked it to get some supplementary food for their family. So, here too, the municipality allotted the distillery a piece of land for what was called “podsobne chaziastwo” (supplementary farm). But Mr. Nazarewicz did not assign everybody a plot. He made the employees work there collectively, mostly on weekends. Once a month, he made them load the farm food on a truck and sent it off to one of his cronies in Czernowitz where it was

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sold at the market, at black-market prices. He also gave or sold alcohol to a lot of people he did business with. On state holidays and on some weekends, he would order pails of alcohol to be put out in the yard and le let everybody get drunk.

There was not much to do in the way of chemistry. The main lab in Zuczka-Czernowitz took care of that, but I assisted the master-distiller. What was more important for Mr. Nazarewicz what that I helped him get away with his fraud and cheating, and the faking of the periodic reports concerning production. Here is a typical example of a faked report from the winter of 1944-45: We receive a shipment of potatoes of say 10 metric tons. The manager, Mr. Nazarewicz writes in the report that due to a hard winter, 20-25% of the potatoes froze or rotted. I co-sign the report. The accountant does too. This will show the plant as producing a higher yield of alcohol and there will be enough alcohol left for Mr. Nazarewicz's shady business.

In the Soviet Union, no official could steal alone. Neither a manager nor a foreman, nor an accountant could do it on their own, but two or three of them together could arrange it. The same was true of our faked reports.

My salary was 750 rubbles. After taxes I was left with 450 rubbles. There were different taxes of which the war tax was the highest. To buy clothing or shoes, always of poor quality, you had to wait for hours in long lines. So, you were tempted to buy on the black market. I bought one expensive item, a pair of ankle-high American leather boots for 2,000 rubbles. The Americans supplied the Soviet Union mostly with food and

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military equipment. Already in Czernowitz, I ate mostly American canned goods when I was at the Transfer Centre. Periodically, we saw trains loaded with brand new American trucks passing on their way to the front.

So, to buy an expensive item like the boots I mentioned, it is obvious that I couldn't afford them on my salary. I had to look elsewhere to supplement my income and I did what everybody else did, I helped myself. Here is how: Twice a month, I set out for the Zuczka Distillery with a horse-drawn wagon loaded with several steel barrels of alcohol which we sent out to be refined there. The receiver was supposed to weight the full barrel, siphon off the alcohol and then weight the empty barrel. After a couple of trips, I made a deal with him not to empty the barrels completely but rather always leave a few litres at the bottom. This way, when he weighed each “empty barrel”, I had a few litres of alcohol left. We (me and my Ukrainian driver) had to send the night in a village near Zuczka on these trips. There we went to an acquaintance of my driver, emptied the barrels into gallon jugs, passed the night in the village and went back to Waszkovitz in the morning. We took the jugs of alcohol back to the driver's home in Czernowitz and sold them later. Naturally my accomplices had to be compensated (read bribed).

Note that we were paid at the distillery for 100% alcohol. The receiver at the scales had tables which showed how to convert whatever percentage alcohol was in the barrels to the equivalent of 100% alcohol. He only had to multiply the weight of the alcohol in the barrel by the factor in his tables.

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Back to Czernowitz

In May, 1945, came the news that the Soviet government had decided to let all refugees from Poland, Poles and Jews (but not Ukrainians) go back to Poland. This included the refugees from Eastern Galicia, as long as they had proof that they had lived there under the Polish government. They were eligible for this programme in spite of the fact that they now had a Soviet passport.

As soon as this news was confirmed, I returned to Czernowitz, went to the Spirtotrust headquarters and handed in my resignation. I went back to stay at the Wolfers on Marshal Foch Street where I had been a boarder before. It was a very pleasant house the. The women, Mr. Wolfer's sister and his daughter, now had boyfriends who often came, stayed late in the evening, all of them talking and singing popular Rumanian or German songs (some of which I still remember today). I spent the days, especially in August, waiting in line in front of different offices to fill out the forms I needed in order to get my “propusk” (laisser-passer) to cross the border into Poland.

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I decided to go back to Poland (the Western part, not Galicia), but not to stay there. My real desire was to return to France and to finish my studies at the Polytechnique in Grenoble. I thought that being in Poland, I would be closer to France and that it would be easier for me to get to France from there. In the end the facts proved right.

Around the first week of August, a huge crowd of refugees, including myself, finally boarded a train of several cars to start the journey to Poland. The train was supposed to follow the rail line Czernowitz-Lwow-Katowitz. However, it was not a passenger train but was a train composed of open cars used for the transport of bulk material. The cars were blackened and dirty with the coal dust of previous loads. For various reasons, the train made several s tops between Czernowitz and Lwow. In Lwow, the halt lasted a whole day. The next day we heard that the train was being redirected north and was going from Lwow to Warsaw before heading back south to Katowitz. And then it started a long, seemingly unending trip. The slow-running train, the innumerable stops and bad weather made the next days almost unbearable. We had to sit on our bags, suitcases and other belongings, dirty from the coal dust, often wet in the rain, covering ourselves with whatever we could find in our belongings.

After a week, we reached Warsaw where the train halted for two days. We were allowed to disembark. We wandered through the streets for

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hours and there was hardly any building left standing. Ruins, ruins everywhere! Not only the former ghetto was in ruins but the whole city. After two days, as had been announced before in Lwow, the train left Warsaw for Katowitz. After another few days, we finally arrived in Katowitz. The whole trip, Czernowitz-Lwow-Katowitz, only a few hundred kilometres, had taken two weeks. On the way we passed other trains going in different directions. Some carried Soviet troops going to the front, some carried Soviet soldiers going home on leave. We recognized these homeward bound trains by the quantity of goods stacked on the roofs of the cars: suitcases, bicycles and furniture. Other trains carried prisoners of war from various regions (such as Alsatians), who had been forcibly conscripted into the German army, to return them to their home region.

When we arrived in Katowitz, it was swarming with refugees of all sorts. We learned, on the first day there, that all the matters of repatriation were cleared by the Polish Red Cross. So, I hastened to go there. The employee who greeted me asked me: “Co mozemy dla Pana zrobic?” (What can we do for you?). I answered in French that I didn't understand Polish. I told her that I had been a student in France and had been deported from there in 1943 and that now I wanted to go back to finish my studies. She seemed not to believe me

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and asked me again: “Powiedz Pan prawde. Pan nie Polack?” (Tell me the truth: aren't you really Polish?”) I told her again that I didn't understand what she was saying. At the same time, I pulled out of my pocket my old identity card from the University of Grenoble on which there was no mention of nationality. This did convince her and she sent me over to see a colleague who spoke French.

It only took half an hour and I was in possession of a laisser-passer to Prague. This safe-conduct pass (which I still have to this day) is dated August 23, 1945. The next day, I took the train for Prague and arrived there a few hours later.

In Prague I went to the French Embassy and again presented my identity card from the Polytechnique of Grenoble. Once again, I pretended to be a Frenchman who had been deported and now wanted to be repatriated. Here again, after a short wait, I was in possession of a plane ticket for a flight to Paris a week later.

I used these few days to wander around Prague, visiting the old Jewish district and other famous historic sights. Prague, in contrast with Warsaw had suffered little destruction.

I spent the week with other refugees in a huge hall of the Red Cross where we were fed and housed.

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Paris-Nancy

This was my first trip by plane. I was a little nervous the day before the departure from Prague but once on the plane, I felt relaxed. And two hours later I was in Paris. I only stayed in Paris for one day. The next day I took the train to Nancy. Why Nancy and not Grenoble? This was the reason: I had not been deported from France in 1943 but had left voluntarily in 1939 to go on vacation. So, I thought that now I might have difficulty in claiming the status of a deportee.

I went to Nancy hoping that my friends, the Glasbergs, had survived and that I could find them. Mr. Glasberg was familiar with the Nancy police department and knew everybody there from the time before and after his naturalization. I hoped now that he could help me through any difficulties that might arise.

So, straight from the train station, I went to 33, Faubourg des Trois Maisons, their last address which I still remembered. I rang the bell; my heart was pounding and my nerves on edge. Who would open the door? The Glasbergs or a stranger. To my amazement and delight, it was Mendel Glasberg's wife, Reine. She too was amazed to see me. We hugged each other. She led me into the living room and returned to her office which was in their apartment. She was a dentist, chirurgien-dentiste, as they call it in France. When Mr. Glasberg came home from his office, we sat down to talk and I told them my story and they told me theirs.

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In 1940, when the Germans came to Nancy, they wrote to Mr. Glasberg's parents in Kuty. They asked his parents to speak to the Armenian-Catholic priest and ask him for baptism certificates. I don't remember all the details of the story or how this was actually done, but they got the certificates.

Mr. Glasberg was very nice to me. He took a lot of time to accompany me to the police. I didn't know then and still don't know, what he told them. He spoke to many of them without me, going by himself from room-to-room to speak to different officers. Finally, I got a document certifying that I was indeed a deportee, repatriated from the east. I was given a paper to take to an organization called “Service d'Accueil des Déportés”. There, I received a few hundred francs, a new suit, a pair of shoes and some underwear and socks.

I only stayed a week in Nancy. I wanted to get to Grenoble as soon as possible. It was already September and it was time to pay a visit to my Institute and inquire about the new school year and the admission procedures. So, at the beginning of September, I left Nancy for Grenoble.

Back in Grenoble at the beginning of September, I went first to 45, rue de la Mutualité where I had been renting a room in 1939 until my departure for Poland a month before the outbreak of the war. The house was owned by two sisters, both spinsters, Mls Guichards. They

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were glad to see me and their first words to me were: “We always prayed that you would come back. Here is your suitcase which you left here before your departure”. I opened the suitcase. Inside were my books, photographs, old documents and my bank book. When I went to the bank a few days later, my few hundred francs were still in my account.

My next visit was to the University. At the Institute, my file was still there, in perfect order, as if I had only left the day before. I registered for the last year of the programme without difficulty after having proven my identity.

I was only one of many Jewish students at the faculties of the University of Grenoble who returned, either from the fronts or from deportation. As in other university cities in Europe, the American Joint Jewish Committee established offices to help the Jewish students finish the studies that had been interrupted because of the war. After proper identification, every student was put on a list of students who received a monthly sum for university fees, food and lodging, and this for as long as was necessary to finish his studies. I only had one year left to get my degree. There were some students who still had two, three or even more years to go. There was no time limit for this aid. After I registered, I received this allowance during the whole school year 1945-46.

Once again, I was studying together with students much younger than me. In the beginning it bothered me but I soon got used to it and blended in. We were only 15 students in our course and nobody made me feel that I was

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different. When I missed a class, there was always somebody to help me and lend me his notes.

The school year passed quickly and without any problems. At the beginning of 1946, my former colleague, Weisblüth came back from a German prison camp. He had joined a Polish regiment in France in 1939 and was taken prisoner in 1940. (Most Jews who were taken prisoner on the Western front survived the war). From all my former colleagues who went back home to Poland on vacation in 1939, as I had done, the only one who returned was Mr. Tejblum. He fled Warsaw to Lwow and was deported by the Soviets to Uzbekistan, and survived. After his return to France, he emigrated to Buenos Aires where he ran a successful business. In the 1960's, he emigrated once again, this time to New York, and we met each other in Montreal a few times. Several other of my former colleagues didn't make it back. And, a few others who joined the Polish regiment in France were killed at the front.

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In the summer of 1946, I met a young woman, Zita Kamerling, a refugee from Alsace. She was supposed to return home soon. We went out together a few times and after a few weeks, we decided that it wasn't such a bad idea to get married. She wrote to her parents. We took the train to Strasbourg and from there to the town of Bischwiller where they lived. We were married in Strasbourg on August 27^th, 1946.

This is where the story of my youth and the life and death of my hometown ends. I wrote this story of the first part of my life, of the war years and of my return to France until my marriage, for my wife, my sons, my daughter-in-laws and my granddaughters. The next part of my life since these events from 1946 on, in France and then in Canada is well known to them.

As for anyone outside the circle of my immediate family who, for whatever reason, will happen to read this book, I will add this very short and condensed version of my life after I married.

I explained earlier what electrochemistry and electrometallurgy means. There were in France in 1946, huge corporations where an immigrant engineer could seldom, or perhaps more accurately, could never, have a chance to be hired. So, I, like all the other eastern European immigrants who graduated as engineers in those years, had to find work in much smaller companies. Often, we had to accept jobs in positions different from what our education and

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our degrees had prepared us for, switching specialties or working as technicians instead of engineers, and always working for a lesser wage than we could expect based on our degrees. I ended up working in foundries, often in the laboratory.

When the Korean war broke out in 1950, many of us who had survived WWII, decided to emigrate. The Soviets at that time occupied all of central Europe and even East Germany and were at the height of their power.

It was not inconceivable that they might push further west, and perhaps even overrun France. I knew what life under the Soviets was like and so I decided to emigrate. After applying to various countries, mostly South American, I was finally accepted by Canada.

I had an uncle and some cousins in Montreal. My father's brother Shimon had emigrated to North America in 1915. I had never met him and I never knew how he ended up living in Montreal. In Montreal, I knew that I could get by with French while learned English. So, on the basis of my engineering degree, I applied for and was granted an immigrant visa for Canada. Although I had left eastern Europe in 1945 and settled in France, the Joint (Jewish American Committee) agreed to pay our passage to Canada. Later, when I was financially secure, I repaid them happily with donations to their fund.

So, on October 11, 1951, all three of us, me and my wife Zita, my son William (aged 4) boarded the “Homeland”, a ship transporting around 1000 immigrants. We landed in Halifax on October 18^th and took the train to

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Montreal where we arrived the next day after a trip of 24 hours.

As for every immigrant, the first few years were difficult, but one joy was the birth of my second son, Marc in 1952. Some of the problems of those first years were caused by the difficulty in getting my French engineering degrees recognized here, the struggle to learn yet another new language and periods of unemployment. I had to work in several different jobs in those first years, mostly non-engineering and non-technical jobs. Eventually, I was hired by the City of Montreal to work as an engineer in their Control and Research Laboratory.

I was originally hired to organize the metallurgical department: chemical analysis of metals (steel, brass, bronze, aluminium alloys, etc.), metallography, strength of materials and so on. Over the years, I moved up until finally I ended up in charge of the laboratory. The lab was technically a division of the City Public Works Departments such as the Purchasing Dept., the Fire Dept., and Waterworks.

In 1979, I retired, not because I wanted to retire but because, at that time, there was a mandatory retirement age and it was 65. I retired from the City but for several years, I did some contract work for engineering offices. I specialized in preparing specifications for contracts and standards (“normes” in French) for the CSA (Canadian Standards Association) both in French and in English. I also did some technical translations into French or English from other European languages. After I stopped doing this work, my retirement became final. As long as I can

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read and understand what I read; I am not completely isolated. The two most important parts of my body, the engine-heart and the computer-brain are working, not perfectly but still working (and I hope they will continue to work for a while yet), I am satisfied.

There is another reason for me to be satisfied, the fact that my wife of 87 years, Zita, is still at my side. A survivor of the Shoah, like me, Zita and her parents fled from Alsace to the south of France where they lived through the German occupation. They managed to escape the Gestapo by being constantly on the move and hiding out in different places.

Also like me, Zita was forced to abandon her studies during the war. Unfortunately, she had to wait many years before being able to resume her studies. In the late 1950's, she enrolled in the faculty of Library Science at the University of Montreal. Studying at night, working in the day time and raising two sons, she graduated as a Librarian. Then, at the age of 40, she enrolled again at the University of Montreal, this time in the faculty of Pharmacy. Now she studied day and night, worked part time and went on with raising her family. She graduated as a pharmacist in 1964 and eventually became the chief of pharmacy at the Lachine General Hospital where she worked for many years until her retirement.

She has stood by me in good times and bad times, especially in the bad times. If I had to describe her in just a few words (an impossible task), I would say that she is both as a person and a wife, a cross between an old-fashioned dedicated spouse, a suffragette of the early 20^th century and a modern liberated woman. And that

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was fine with me. I wouldn't have wanted a submissive wife who only nodded her agreement to everything I said. Zita has always been independent without being aggressive and I appreciated that and still do. Like all couples we have had our differences, but fortunately, we have always been able to solve our problems in an “entente cordiale”.

So, my thanks go out to you, Zita, for 57 years of companionship and devotion. Let's hope that it will last a little longer.

And now my story must come to an end.

Abraham Klein
Montreal, December 2003

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Regrets

The French have a saying: “Regrets son stériles”, which in a free translation means: “It is no use crying over spilled milk”. So, wherever I use the word “regret” here, it doesn't mean exactly that I regret something. It only means that, when I consider certain events in the past, I should have acted differently even if I don't regret my action or lack of action.

1. My first “regret” is that I did not write my biographical history of Kuty in the 1950's or 1960's. The events were still fresh in my memory at that time. Writing this now, at the age of 88, without a diary, without any documentation, without any possibility of doing any research and relying only on my memory was very difficult. Especially since my memory is, for the first time in my life, becoming less and less reliable. Fortunately, my wife and my sons, who heard me tell and retell many stories about Kuty over the years, prodded and refreshed my memory. They constantly would say to me: “You should write about such and such an event that you told us long ago”. Thus, the remembering became teamwork and I am very happy about it.
2. My second “regret” concerns my return to France in 1945 from Czernowitz. As I said before, I re-enrolled at the University of Grenoble to finish

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My studies in engineering. I think now that this was a mistake. I should have returned to Nancy and the Faculty of Medicine rather than to Grenoble. It is true that it would have taken me several years, (6-7) to graduate in medicine. Although given my successful completion of the science courses at the Engineering Institute in Grenoble before the war, I feel certain that the Faculty of Medicine in Nancy would have accepted these credits instead of asking me to repeat the P.C.B. year. This would have saved me a year, but it was not the real issue. The American Jewish Committee (The Joint), paid all expenses of Jewish students who had their studies interrupted because of the war and who then returned from the ghettos. This was true no matter how many years it took the student to complete his studies. Even though the prospect of getting French citizenship and then exercising their profession in France were nil, those who did graduate later emigrated to Israel or to other countries and practiced there. It is true that I would have finished my studies at the age of 41, but plenty of time would have been left. There were students in Nancy when I arrived there in 1935 who had only started medicine when they were already in their thirties.

This being said, today I don't regret anything and I am satisfied with the life I have lived until now.

3. Another, perhaps small, “regret” goes back to the time of my youth. I always felt and still feel that I should have learned to play a musical instrument. For me, this always meant learning to play the violin. I have an ear for music. When I hear a tune two or three times, I remember it.

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Unfortunately, in Kuty, there was no possibility of music lessons for me. There was a lack of experienced music teachers in town. There were two teachers, though not very experienced, who might have taught me the violin, but they were too expensive for us. Good music (good to the ears of the listener), always gave me, and still does, give me the best relaxation. During my college years in Kolomyja there were good music teachers available, but it was too late for me then. I was busy tutoring my classmates to earn money that I needed to help pay my expenses, so I had neither the time nor the money for music lessons. But I envied some colleagues who took lessons with Mr. Hiram, a popular violinist in Kolomyja. My consolation was to go and listen to the famous cantors who came for the High Holidays.

There are some stories or events concerning our family which I didn't mention before and that I want to relate here. I want to point out that every one of these stories illustrates the way of life in a Shtetl of Eastern Galicia, and that Kuty was a perfectly typical Shtetl.

My uncle Hersh once told me a story about my father and a Hutzul who owed him some money. My grandmother, Rachel and her children, lived in the Dolina (the lower part of Kuty). Their house

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Was big, fenced in with front and back yards. Uncle Hersh didn't remember what the Hutzul who came to see my father had told my father. He only remembered seeing both of them arguing while they stood in the yard. Suddenly, he saw my father grab the Hutzul, lift him up and throw him over the fence onto the street. My father must have been around 18 years old then. He was a very strong man.

This is a story which happened in the late 1920's, already in my time a story which I remember personally. One of the Jewish butchers in Kuty (a Jewish butcher was, by definition, a Kosher butcher), was caught selling non-Kosher meat, although not to Jews. In addition, he chopped that meat on the same wooden block that he used for Kosher meat. The Rabbi sent a messenger to every synagogue in town and before the Torah reading on Sabbath, he warned the congregation not to buy any meat from this butcher. There was a lot of politicking associated with that story and my great-uncle Leiser was very much involved in it. Late one evening, a big rock was thrown through the window into uncle Leiser's living room. He and Aunt Rivtzia narrowly escaped injury. It was obvious who had done it. Everyone was convinced that it was the butcher. But there were no witnesses. My father was so mad that he went to see uncle Leiser and offered to testify in court that he had seen the butcher throw the rock. Uncle Leiser refused my father's

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offer. My father said to him: “Everyone knows the butcher did it. Things like this never happened before when you never were mixed up in community politics. But now that you are involved, this happened”. Still uncle Leiser refused my father's help.

From what I see today, my father would have made a good American judge, for whom any bit of evidence, real or circumstantial, is enough to condemn a person. And in this case, I agree with his decision.

When I was a boy, my mother used to keep her long hair in a ponytail which she then rolled into a ball and held in place with a hairpin. In the 1920's, styles changed and women started to wear their hair cut short. One day, after long deliberation and consultation, my mother decided to follow the new trend, which was generally considered a sign of progress or emancipation. She was 40 or 41 years old at that time and had never before worn her hair cut short. She went to the hairdresser but when she came back, she felt uncomfortable. For weeks, she didn't often venture outside the house. She had the impression, she said, that everybody was staring at her as though she had done something strange. It took her a long time to get used to her new hairdo.

The story of my mother's hair reminds me of myself when I first started to wear glasses at the age of 49. For weeks, when I was working at my desk in the office and I heard someone

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approaching, I would take off my glasses and hide them under some papers. I too thought that everybody was looking at me with a strange expression when I wore my glasses.

My grandmother was a skinny and frail woman. From time-to-time, she went to see Dr. Bartel. She was not exactly sick, but she was rather weak. Dr. Bartel seldom prescribed any medication for her and he usually advised her to take some fortifying food or drink. One day, his recommendation to my grandmother was: “Drink goat milk”. I suppose that today a doctor would be criticized for such an advice or even sued, given the fat content of goat milk and the universal horror of fat.

We bought a goat for my grandmother's milk and kept it around for several years until it was eight or nine years old. The goat had her place in the stable that we used to keep the Hutzuls' horses for a few hours when they came to town for the day. I remember being afraid that the goat would be kicked or injured by one of these horses, but that never happened.

We fed the goat three different kinds of food: a) the horses munched on their hay all day long but they left enough for me to feed the goad. b) when I had some free time, I used to take the goat out for an hour or so to graze for food along the streets, lanes and empty lots (like a little boy today who takes his dog out for a walk)

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c) We also fed the goat some of the kitchen leftovers. We washed all the potato peels, vegetable skins and so on and threw them into a pot with a little salt. We boiled these for a few minutes and added some bran that my mother had left over from her baking. And that was our homemade goat feed.

Once a year, I brought the goat to a peasant who had a he-goat so that she could be mated. He made me wait outside while he took the goat into his stable and then helped the animals along if necessary. The usual result was that the goat produced two kid-goats around Pesach and about four litres of milk a day for the whole year. The milking was done by my grandfather, but I learned how to milk a goat too. We kept the kids for a few weeks during which they shared the milk with my grandmother. After that, we slaughtered the kids and ate goat meat for several days.

Another thing which Dr. Bartel prescribed for my grandmother was a fortifying wine called: “Eisenwein” (wine containing iron). We bought a few bottles at a time. We kept them, like many other things, in our cellar which served as our refrigerator. There was generally a constant va-et-vient into and out of the cellar. My grandmother took a small glass of Eisenwein two times a day, and every time the bottle had to be returned to the cellar. Unfortunately for my grandmother, this wine had a delicious taste, and I discovered it. Every time I had to go into the cellar, I took a little sip of wine. My mother always wondered why the bottle, which was supposed to last a certain time, disappeared so fast. Naturally, I never revealed the secret.

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My grandmother passed away in 1931. She was in her early seventies and died of pleurisy. Her lungs filled up with fluid and Dr. Bartel came to see her (it was a time when doctors made house calls). He drained the fluid but couldn't save her. She was buried the same day she died and it was impossible for me to come home from Kolomyja for her funeral.

A few years after the death of my grandmother, if I remember correctly, it was in 1935, my great-uncle Leiser told my mother that his brother Leib was showing some signs of bizarre behaviour. He said that his brother was talking of buying a horse and buggy to make it easier for him to go to the surrounding villages (where he still did some business). Besides, Leise added, lowering his voice: “He is talking of remarrying”.

In fact, my grandfather did buy a horse and buggy soon after. He only used it a few times and sold it a few months later. He realized that it was still easier for him to walk than to have to take care of a horse.

As for the question of remarriage, my mother avoided direct discussions with her father. But she often spoke with her uncle and used him as an intermediary. He was the elder brother, respected by my grandfather, and the one who could persuade his younger brother not to do what she feared most, remarrying. She did not want to gain a step-mother to whom her father

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could possibly (God Forbid) leave some inheritance. But uncle Leiser was successful in his persuasion and soon the whole story was forgotten.

He liked to do business with the Hutzuls since the age of 10. This wasn't because he was unsuccessful in school, on the contrary, he always got very good marks, but he just loved business. He saved every penny he got and accumulated enough money to buy products from the Hutzuls which he would then resell. Had he survived and come here to Canada, to Israel or to the U.S., he would certainly have been successful in business.

We got along pretty well in general. Only once, when I came home from school in Kolomyja for a vacation, we had a conversation on some subject that I don't remember now, and my brother said to me: “You alone are costing our parents more than we spend here for all of us”. His remarks bothered me at that time, but later I understood what he meant.

I also forgave him for whatever he ever said or did to me. But did he pardon me?

When he was in his seventies, my uncle didn't do business any more. The couple had two sons and three daughters, all living in Buenos Aires.

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Their children sent them enough money so that they could live very comfortably. Sometime in the 1930's, Rivtzia said to her husband: “Don't you think it would be better for us to go and live near our children?” She nagged him constantly until one day, he lost his patience, put his foot down and said to his wife: “We got along well until now because I made compromises most of the time, but this is it”. It was true that he had to make compromises all the time because Rivtzia was authoritarian. She bought expensive clothes and always protested when uncle Leiser sent money to a daughter he had had from a first marriage to a widow with two daughters of her own. Rivtzia would tell him: “This money comes from MY children and I don't want you to give it away to these people”. Uncle Leizer would have to use some schemes to send them a little money from time-to-time, anyway.

Uncle Leiser told his wife: “I will never emigrate to Argentina or anywhere else. I have here my synagogue, my Talmud lessons every evening and my friends. I know most of the people here. It is true that there is a large Jewish community in Buenos Aires, but you do not make friends at our age. And this is final”. But still, these discussions dragged on for several years.

Anyway, I would hear about it continually until I left for France.

Nobody could have predicted the Russian occupation or the Shoah. In normal times, uncle Leiser would have been right, but these were not normal times.

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Reflections

My reflections here are mostly about Jewish problems, anti-Semitism, anti-Israel sentiment, false accusations of the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” variety, and so on.

The world has never understood the Jews. Already in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, neither the Romans nor the conquered Greeks who lived there, understood the Jewish beliefs and customs. In the ancient world where every population, every profession, every art had their own gods and divinities, the Jews were considered strange and even amoral.

The Roman soldiers who penetrated into the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Holiest place of all, could not believe what they saw, or rather what they didn't see. The official report to the emperor said: “Nulla imagine et sede vacante”, which means: There is no statue and the place is empty. To the Romans, this meant that the Jews are an amoral people because they have no gods. It was incomprehensible for them that the holiest place in the Temple, where even the High Priest could only enter once a year (on Yom Kippur), could be utterly empty, without any statues or other images.

The Romans considered the Jews a lazy people. A people who takes a day of rest one day a week, every week, were strange. This was still

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truer in a world where everyone, slaves and non-slaves, worked long hours every day of the week. The idea that a da of rest was sacred, and sacred for all, was revolutionary. Even more strange was the fact that this day of rest was not devoted to feasting or pleasure, but it truly was a day of rest, devoted only to prayer.

The Greeks could not understand why the Jews (except for a few Hellenised Jews) would not take part in sporting events in the nude (the usual Greek custom). The Jewish laws for keeping Kosher were also very strange to them.

Later, when Christianity became the established religion in the Roman world, a new charge was added to the list of complaints against the Jews. This was the infamous accusation of deicide. The idea that gained acceptance among the new Christians was that there now existed a new covenant and that the Christians are the new Israel. And consequently, that the Jews are repudiated and must wander the world until they “see the light”.

Saul of Tarsus, who became St. Paul, went out to proselytize the Gentiles of the Greco-Roman world. Paul was a Hellenised Jew and thus was familiar with the Gentile world. He knew that he would not be able to convince the Gentiles to convert unless he made some major changes to the essential Jewish beliefs. It was a time when the first Christians were still considered a Jewish sect. Paul understood that if he was to succeed in his attempts at conversion, he would have to make many Jewish beliefs more palatable to the converts. These radical changes turned Jewish beliefs into the new Christian religion. He

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softened the idea of one invisible (and indivisible) God, preparing the way for a tri-partite gold, which was more in tune with the polytheism of the day. He abandoned many of the restrictions that the Jewish religion demands of its followers, notably the complicated (for non-Jews) laws regulating the handling and eating of food. He removed the most ancient Jewish custom of circumcision. He kept the day of rest but moved it from Saturday to Sunday in order to differentiate it from the Jewish Sabbath.

I believe that this newly-transformed Judaism coupled with the strong push for converts by the early Christians, left the Gentiles with a bad impression of Judaism. The missionary could make the contrast between the “hard” Judaism and the “easy” Christianity. He could sell the new Christianity with promises of eternal life, which fit in well with most pagan religions. He could promise eternal forgiveness, no matter what wrongs were committed. This was in sharp contrast to a Judaism which punished the guilty. The strict rules of Judaism were thus softened for the convert. The end result was that the Gentile world could look at the Jewish religion as the source of any harshness in religious laws.

This initial attitude against the Jews would have far-reaching consequences. The current pope, John Paul II, has said that the Shoah was caused by German racist policies and had nothing to do with the church. He said that the church protected Jews wherever it was possible. There were some priests, bishops and other church officials who saved some Jews, but unfortunately, there were very few and Yad Vashem honours them. But the pope overlooks the fact that the

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Great majority of the catholic clergy and some protestant clergy, followed the Nazi in their hatred against the Jews. At best, they stood by and did nothing to protect Jews against the Nazi terror.

Hans Küng, the German philosopher and Jesuit priest wrote: “If there had been no inquisition, there would have been no Auschwitz”.

Pastor Niemoeller, a German pacifist, wrote: “When they came to arrest the communists, I didn't protest. I am not a communist. When they came to arrest the homosexuals, I didn't protest, I am not a homosexual, when they came to arrest the Gypsies, I didn't protest, I am not a Gypsy. When they came to arrest the Jews, I didn't protest, I am not a Jew. And when they came for me, it was too late”.

In 1948, the age-old anti-Semitism got a new partner, anti-Zionism. It spread throughout the Arab world and was eagerly adopted by the Christian world. In 1947, the United Nations gave the Palestinians a state, but they refused it and the Arab states attacked the newly created Israel. They started a war and they lost the war. In every war until then, the law or custom was that “To the victor go the spoils”. The Arab world has spent over 50 years trying to reverse this rule. They want to rewrite the rule to say: “To the loser, go the spoils”. And by spoils, they mean all of Israel, not just the part given to the Palestinians.

The Arabs and other Muslims just like the Christians have made false claims against the Jews. The claim of their filiation from Abraham through his son Ishamel is false. Ishmael's mother was Hagar, an Egyptian woman in the

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Pre-Islamic Egypt. Only the Coptic Egyptians are their direct descendants. The Muslim Egyptians are descendants from the Arab invaders from the Arabian Peninsula.

Another false claim is the appropriation of the name “Palestinian” by the Muslims living in Palestine. By using this name, they want to imply that they are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Cis and Trans-Jordan, the Philistines. But they are not. Just like the Muslim Egyptians, they are descendants of the Arab invaders who came long after the Philistines had disappeared.

For centuries, historians and ethnologists have known that the Jews descend from the Twelve Tribes that lived in the two states of Judah and Israel. The state of Israel was destroyed and most of its people were deported by the Assyrians in 720 B.C. The state of Judah met the same fate at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 B.C. This was also the date of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. But the Jews were able not only to resettle their land but also to rebuild the Temple. After the Roman conquest and the destruction of the second Temple, Jewish life in Israel could not recover. Jewish religious life, until then centred on the Temple in Jerusalem, the High Pries and the Levites, was ended. A new form of Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism based on prayer and study of the Torah and Talmud began to emerge. The

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importance of learning and of study became central to Judaism.

Roman deportations and Jewish emigration resulted in the establishment of Jewish communities everywhere around the edge of the Mediterranean. From there, eventually, Jewish settlement pushed north into central and eastern Europe.

In the steppes of southern Russia, lived a tribe called the Khazars. Were they of Mongol or Turkic origin? Yehuda Halevi, a Jewish poet and historian who lived in Spain during the Middle Ages wrote a history of the Khazars. According to him, the Khazars adopted Judaism sometime during the Middle Ages. Was this a legend or was it fact? Nobody knows for sure. In the 1980's, Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-Jewish author wrote a book called “The Thirteenth Tribe” in which he speculates that the Jews are descendants of the Khazars and not from the Twelve Tribes. He said that the Jews spread into Europe from the Eastern steppes and not from the Mediterranean. I don't know how many people believe Koestler's theory, but I certainly do not.

Linguistics very often points to the origins of peoples. In our Yiddish, which derives from German dialects of the Middle Ages, there are words or names of people which indicate our western origin.

Here are a few examples:

Names:	Yiddish		Origin
	Antchel	Angelo	(Italian)
	Szprintze	Speranza	(Italian)
	Bayla	Bella	(Italian)

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	Yenta	Jeannette	(French)
	Yenta	Janet	(English)
	Eisig	Isaac	(English)
Words:	koylen	kill	(English)
	Szkrap	scrap	(English)
	Chapen	capter	(French)
	Chapen	capere	(Latin)

Our languages through the ages

Since the days of Abraham, the Jews spoke different languages. Abraham himself, the first Jew, was a Chaldean born in Mesopotamia, and thus, must have spoken Chaldean. When his descendants, now living in Israel, acquired or adopted the Hebrew language, is not well known. By the time of the beginning of the Common Era, the Jewish people spoke Aramaic. Since the time of Alexander the Great, Hellenised Jews spoke Greek. Greek and Aramaic coexisted in the Jewish world for several centuries. The next important Jewish language was Arabic. There were large Jewish communities in most of the countries conquered by the Arabs and they spoke Arabic as long as they continued to live there (some until well into the 20^th century). Jews wrote in Arabic. Even religious and philosophical treatise (like Maimonides “The Guide for the Perplexed”) were written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew, later.

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As the Arabs were slowly driven out of Spain, they left behind an important Jewish community that became Spanish speaking. When the Spanish Jews were, in turn, driven out, many fled to German speaking countries where they adopted the language that became Yiddish.

All these local languages, when spoken by Jews, absorbed some Hebrew vocabulary (Hebrew always remained the language of prayer). Some to the point of becoming distinct dialects such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, and of course, Judeo-German or Yiddish.

As Yiddish was developing into a distinct language, the German Jews began to settle in Poland in large numbers. From the first Jewish immigrants to Poland in the 15^th century under the Polish King Casimir the Great of the Piast dynasty, the Polish Jewish population grew to be the largest in Europe. Inevitably, Slavic words found their way into the Yiddish that was the everyday language of Jews throughout eastern Europe.

Today, a great proportion of the Jewish people speak English. But in what is one of the most amazing turn-arounds in the history of the world, many Jews have returned to the ancient language of their ancestors, Hebrew, and made it a living language again for the first time in almost two thousand years.

My reflections are coming to an end here and I want to make a few remarks concerning the most

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tragic and destructive event to befall the Jewish people in our long history of exiles, persecutions and pogroms.

Over the centuries, Jews who were persecuted in one country often able to escape death by fleeing to another country where they were granted asylum. Even if this asylum was temporary, for it sometimes only lasted a few years, or a generation or two, it saved many Jews from certain death.

But this time, for the Jews of Europe from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Berlin to Rome, there was no escape. Caught in a gigantic trap, surrounded by hostile populations collaborating with the Nazi, there was nowhere to find asylum. Emigration was impossible. Doors, never wide open, slammed shut around the world. Even in one's hometown, among one's own neighbours and “friends”, there was nowhere to hide. We hear, from time-to-time, remarks, even from Jews, that “we went to slaughter like sheep”. What else could we do if no one would lift a finger to help us? What else could we do when our neighbours were the first to turn us into the Nazi? An underground or resistance movement can only exist if it has some support among the local population. During the Shoah, local populations joined the invading Nazi, enthusiastically, in attacking their own Jewish neighbours. And yet, in spite of this, there were cases of Jewish resistance not only in the Warsaw ghetto, but in other ghettos. Some resistance also occurred in towns located near forests where the Jewish fighters could hide out on their own, without having to rely on any outside help. Some of these

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Undergrounds were successful in committing acts of sabotage or in attacks against German soldiers.

Zvi Kolitz, a Jewish-American journalist who passed away last year, wrote a story called: “Yosel Rakover's Appeal to God”. Rakover was one of the fighters in the Warsaw ghetto. It is already the last days when very few of the fighters are still alive. Yosel sees his wife and six children die fighting after sneaking out of the ghetto to find something to eat and being shot by the S.S. He decides to pour his last bottle of gasoline on himself and light it. But before he does this, he is going to write down his appeal to, or quarrel with, God. Then he will hide it under the floor, in the building where he is now, the last building left standing on the street. Here is an excerpt from Yosel Rakover's “Appeal to God”:

“I bow my head before Your Greatness, but I will not kiss the lash with which You strike me. You say that we have sinned O Lord. It must surely be true. And therefore, we are punished. I can understand that too. But I should like You to tell me, is there any sin in the world deserving of such punishment as the one we received? You say that You will yet repay our enemies. I have no doubt on that either. I should like You to tell me, is there any punishment in the world capable of compensating for the crimes that have been committed against us? Do not put the rope under too much strain, lest, alas, it may snap. You put us to a test so severe, that You must forgive those of Your

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People, who in their misery have turned from you. The murderers will never escape the sentence of history but You will carry out a doubly severe sentence on those who condoned their murders. You will also punish with a doubly severe sentence those who have no fear of You, but fear only what people might say, unaware that people will say nothing. Those who express sympathy for the drowning man, but refuse to rescue him, O Lord, punish them.

And these are my last words, my wrathful God. Nothing will avail You in the least. You have everything to make me lose my faith in You, but I die exactly as I have lived, saying: Into Your hands I consign my soul, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”.

Some critics say that Zvi Kolitz wrote this story and that Yosel Rakover is a fictitious person. But it doesn't really matter because there were many Yosel Rakovers who, facing certain death in the last days of their battles, saw no alternative but to commit suicide. And I am sure that, in the Jewish tradition, that goes all the way back to Abraham, they too questioned God and that they quarrelled with Him.

There are still countries in the world today where Jews are in danger. And the most important Jewish community in danger is that of

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Israel. So let me finish my work with the cry that Jews have raised since the days of Solomon when placed in a dangerous situation:

“Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohainu, Adonai Echad”.