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By Root 763 0

if one person turned around everybody had to turn, we were packed that close. It was a shallow dugout: we could sit up, but we couldn’t stand up. We were just lying there day and night, looking at each other, hardly talking. And eventually the coat with fur lining got full of lice, so we had to get rid of it. The lice got into our hair—I had very long hair, long pigtails, and my father and cousin both had knives, and they sat down, and they cut my hair off. One strand at a time, they would hold it out and cut it off.

We were cold and we were hungry and we were desperate. We had a little tiny stove of some sort; I don’t know where it came from. You could make a little fire. If my brother found potato peelings, you could lick it and stick it to the outside of the little stove, and you could cook the potato peelings that way and eat them. Of course we got so sick afterwards because they were garbage, we got them out of the garbage or a pig sty and they were smelly, and they were rotten, and then we would throw it all up anyway. But it filled us up momentarily, so we did it anyway.

At one point one of the Gentile people came and we thought it was the Germans or the Ukrainians that had found us, and nobody wanted to go to see who it is. We heard the footsteps right outside the opening. If they’d take one more step they’d fall in on top of us. My younger brother was asleep, and they woke him up and said, “Go see who’s there.” He didn’t know what was going on, so he went to see. He called back, “Oh it’s Yuzef.” That was our Polish friend. Yuzef came to tell us that he heard in his village that there’s a bunker of Jews hiding in the forest, and the Germans are going to come to get them tonight. He came to warn us that they found out about us.

We knew about another group from Trochenbrod who ran away also and were in a bunker about two miles away. So my father went out to visit that family to beg them to let us in their bunker because we had to leave our bunker because they were coming to kill us, and we’d freeze to death if we were outside a bunker. They said no, we couldn’t stay there because there was no room, and there really wasn’t any room there. My father came back and told us the news.

He said we can’t run, enough is enough, whatever will happen will happen. He sat us down, and he said, “Look, when they come here to kill us, here’s what we’re going to do: don’t wait; get out and run. You’ll get shot, but at least you’ll be shot on the run. If they find us alive, they’ll cut us to pieces.” That’s what they used to do, the Ukrainans. They used to find women and men in the woods, they’d cut their breasts off, their tongues out, their legs off, and hang them on the trees.

So we stayed there, and we waited, and we were ready to run when they came to kill us. We lay there, and waited, and nobody’s coming! All of a sudden we hear shooting. Grenades, and gunshots, terrible terrible sounds. What happened? It was the other bunker that they discovered, the one that had no room for us, and they killed all those people. If they had they taken us in, if they would have had room for us …

That was our luck. Go figure it out. A miracle that we survived. We were ready. We were so ready to die that we had all kissed each other good-bye. A funny thing, when my father kissed my mother good-bye he said in Yiddish, “Stay well.” We laughed, we really giggled when he said that. If not for a sense of humor I don’t think we would have survived, because that’s the only thing that kept us going. We laughed at ourselves and cried at ourselves, because we just ran out of emotions.

After that it was so bad, there was so much snow, we couldn’t go out. We stayed there because they didn’t find us, but we needed food, we needed food. The Polish people couldn’t come either because of the snow. We were so hungry, and so cold, so desperate, we had no clothes, our feet were wrapped in leaves. I still suffer because my toes were frozen. My mother would put my feet between her breasts to try to warm them up. My father would blow through his cupped hands on