Mass killings

Rezmovits tells how the train taking his family from Debrecen stood for hours at Košice and was then sent to Austria instead of Auschwitz. He explains this from a historian's book based on German archives, which describes a mix-up of transport papers and an SS man's error, and gives the book's Hungarian title. He mentions that most Debrecen Jews survived, that his father was in forced labor, and that a camp commander picked men for a march toward Munkács, all of whom were killed when the Russians arrived. He ends by saying that surviving made him feel he had to do something for Jewry, and so he went to Israel.

Rezmovits recalls his Israeli army service, including a commander who had asked him to travel with him and who was later killed with five comrades. He mentions a friend from Hungary, named Reiner (?), whose father was shot into the Danube. Kerler asks about his family background and how long he served. Rezmovits then describes learning bricklaying and building water pipelines in the Safed (Tsfat) area, and says he took on any kind of work.

Gotlieb says her brother David studied at a yeshiva away from home and was clever, but he and all her brothers were unmarried and perished, as did her parents and relatives. She recalls fragments of a song her mother sang. Then she talks about the tsadik Yismach Moshe (Teitelbaum), whom people visit for blessings from around the world, and about her own visits to his grave.

Rezmovits and Kerler arrange a lunch invitation. Kerler asks about Rezmovits's years in Israel, and Rezmovits explains that he made a vow to meet Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He recounts a survivor's story of a transport toward Treblinka and an escape through the wagon, and then discusses Leon Uris and other American writers he read.

Herbst tells how the Carpathians changed hands several times (Czechoslovakia, Hungary) and how the Germans entered Hungary in March 1944. After Passover the Jews were ordered to Rakhiv and then taken to the ghetto at Mátészalka, where they lived for six weeks in the cemetery. From there the family was taken to Auschwitz in the first transport, where his sisters and their children, and probably his parents, were lost. He was selected at Mauthausen and sent to Ebensee, where he helped to build tunnels, and he mentions a cousin now in New York.

Pearl says he already had a trade and worked in Budapest, visiting Tállya for the holidays. He gives the size of the Jewish community in Tállya, about 200 people, and says the village was deported in 1944 and most did not return. His parents died in Auschwitz and his younger sister Edit died in Bergen-Belsen after liberation. His older sister lives in Paris and his brother, also a forced laborer, in France. He describes his own forced labor in the copper factory at Bor in Yugoslavia, where about six thousand Hungarian Jews were held, and the march in which many were shot. He mentions a book he co-wrote with an eleven-page contribution.

Pearl briefly describes the work groups in the labor service and how the younger men helped the older. Asked when he was born, he gives 1924. He recalls Polish refugees in Budapest and the return of the Mukachevo rebbe from Poland, whose sermon he heard, and mentions the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Poland. He tells of meeting a man who had escaped a massacre and later reached Bor, and describes Jewish life in Budapest before the German invasion in March 1944.

Pearl describes the mikveh in Tállya: a spring with water from the hillside, heated with an iron vessel and wood. He answers Kerler's terminology questions about it and says the pious men went there daily and that it was fully heated on Fridays. He names Rabbi Mordechai Rosenberg and three young men, Teitelbaum and Markovitsh among them, who went with him to Dachau on the march and were shot. Pearl also speaks of the death march at Bor and says he can show the photographs from the book.

Pearl describes attending synagogues in Budapest, including a Polish synagogue and the Belzer rebbe's, where he alone was let in at age twenty. He recalls the straw on the floor and the sleepless night there. He turns to Budapest during the German occupation, when people were seized and killed daily, and recalls Polish and Slovak refugees. He worked in a military factory but concluded it was not worth staying in Budapest.

Doman discusses his book on the Hungarian yeshivas, whose title refers to their secrets. It has not been translated into English. He wrote it because nobody had described daily life in these yeshivas. He then mentions the yeshiva in Galánta, now in Slovakia, whose four rabbis were killed in Auschwitz. He says Jews from the countryside were deported there and few returned.

Blobshteyn talks about Jewish families in the early 1940s, including a family with American relatives. Their journey to Kamianets-Podilskyi and a child's death in a car are mentioned. He recalls the 1941 roundup of Jews without Hungarian papers, including Polish ones, by Hungarian gendarmes, who deported them to Kamianets-Podilskyi, where they were shot. He notes a memorial there and a yearly commemoration.

Reti speaks about Nyírmada, a larger village than Rohod, where the rabbi lived and travelled to nearby villages. This was Rabbi Yankl Yosef Yungrays, from a family of rabbis. He says that the rabbi's family of twelve was sent to Auschwitz and killed together in the crematorium, and about the selection to left and right at Auschwitz.

Reti speaks about the war: the 1944 deportation from Rohod and forced labor on the front. He describes his arrival in Auschwitz and the burning of people, then Mauthausen and Melk, from which he was taken on a two-week march of about two hundred kilometres to Ebensee, naked and hungry. He then tells of his brothers, held in Auschwitz and working in a household of Mengele (?), and one at the stables.

David says her father was a shoemaker and her mother Sara a housewife, and that there were two children. Her brother was killed in Birkenau, apparently of illness and burned. They discuss the names in the family, Jewish versus Hungarian. Talk then turns to a rabbi from Israel who speaks Yiddish and to rabbis in Hungary and elsewhere who do not, and she mentions acquaintances in Vienna.

Galambos describes Purim in Vaja: going to the megillah and then going door to door with a Purim play for small coins. He says part of a Purim rhyme, which Kerler asks him to repeat so as to write it down. He answers that a chimney-sweep play was not done and that the shoykhet organized the Purim performance. He lists the festive meal, then answers Kerler's questions about the four questions at the Passover seder and the Haggadah, and links them to Auschwitz.

Galambos and Kerler discuss belief in God after the Holocaust. Galambos mentions prayers said by women, including the prayer to the God of Abraham at the end of the Sabbath, and Psalms. Kerler asks about the future of the Jewish people and whether he has relatives in Israel. Galambos answers about the Land of Israel and a story about Moses and the sea.

Galambos says he never knew his grandparents and describes tending the family graves in the Vaja cemetery. In answer to Kerler, he names his siblings, five sisters and three brothers (?), and says most died in Auschwitz. One sister who reached Palestine and a brother died after the war.

Boltykh says that all his grandparents died in the camps. His mother's father had been a letter writer, an advocate of sorts, who foresaw the war; he was thrown into a grave at Vertiujeni. Boltykh describes the yearly visit to Vertiujeni on the memorial day, travelling with a group from Bălți, with a kaddish and a rabbi who leads the prayer there.

Kalussky says that on Purim Christians with a fiddle played Jewish tunes on the street for pay. He cannot recall a tune to sing. He also says some non-Jews spoke Yiddish because they worked for Jews, and later some of them killed Jews.

Goldberg describes the return after evacuation: the house was destroyed, and the family lived with an uncle for two years, then in Bravicea, then Călărași, where they bought a house. One grandfather was killed by Romanians and Germans, and the other died in 1939. A grandmother died on the road and the other was shot with her husband. The remains were exhumed and reburied in Călărași, where a memorial now stands.

Roif talks about the present day: speaking and losing Yiddish and Hebrew, his daily unpaid community work, help to sick and elderly Jews through a German sponsor, and payments made to homebound people. He then speaks about Romania's official recognition of the Holocaust, the denial of it by ordinary Romanians, and the estimated numbers of Jews killed in Bessarabia. Kerler asks which government recognised it, and a passage on Jews without citizenship follows.

Roif speaks about the shooting of Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Chernivtsi, and says he and his wife spent three years in the ghetto and camp at Obodivka. A priest and his wife saved them from being shot while they were locked in a small building. He describes the Jewish badges they wore. Kerler asks about the priest's name and where the ghetto was; Roif places it in Ukraine, near Bershad'.

Roif describes his family's wartime ordeal. He mentions a wealthy local mill owner, Winkelstein (?), and his father's house built with money earned in America. The gendarmerie took over the house, then gathered the Jews of the village in the yard of a neighbor's house and took them to a camp at Rîșcani, where they spent three months. He describes the hunger, disease and lack of water, then the forced march toward Dubyna. Near Cosăuți the marchers were shot into pits, and Roif spent a night in a pit after falling in with a doomed group. He also recounts atrocities he witnessed, including the shooting of a pregnant woman.

Kerler asks about the term for a good Jew and the Yiddish name of a cemetery, which Roif gives as a holy place; Roif describes the winter in the camp near Rîșcani. People froze, starved or died of disease. The bodies could not be buried in the frozen ground and were left under snow, where dogs ate them. He then recalls a nearby site at a station where a Russian colonel was friendly and thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were shot.

Farber tells of his parents' wedding in Vertiujeni in 1948 (?), held with other couples, and of his birth in 1954 (?) with a mohel brought from Soroca. He recalls his grandfather's work in Romania and how his parents met after the war, when his mother returned from evacuation and his father from the Urals. He also describes how the family found their two benches in the house of a non-Jewish man who had shot Jews in their garden and was later jailed.

Answering Kerler's questions, Shpitalnik speaks about her paternal grandparents in Dumbrăveni and her visits there. Her childhood home in Chișinău stood in a courtyard of Jewish families (the transcript reads twenty-six) with a small prayer room. The grandfather, aged 87, was killed in Dumbrăveni; her maternal grandmother ran a household and worked as cashier at a slaughterhouse. Her parents loved reading and Jewishness.

Kishlyansky first speaks briefly about the outbreak of war: robbery, killings and beatings, then being driven in a column toward Ukraine. At Katz's request he returns to prewar life: Passover and burning the leaven, a cheder, a talmud torah, and the melamed Shaye. He lists the town's prayer houses, including the tailors' synagogue and the shoemakers' synagogue.

Kishlyansky recalls the return after the war, finding the house where the family had lived and speaking Yiddish with a neighbour. He grieves for the murdered Jews and asks where God was. He says he is now old.

Roif talks about a family tragedy involving two girls, one of them a Raya Bronshteyn (?), whose mother Rivka and brother Shike (?) died in a camp, and a ship on which many children were drowned. They came to Iași (?). Katz then asks what name to use for her: she gives it as Zelda (Zina in daily life), with the family name Roif. She also says she wrote to a Romanian organisation seeking information and got no answer.

Sherman gives his birth date and his parents' names and birth years, and says he lived in Telenești until the war and finished the lyceum in Orhei. His father had a small leather shop. He names his siblings, remembers his maternal grandmother, and tells how she stayed in Telenești and was killed with her son's family.

Answering Lemster and Kerler, Muchnik says the Yiddish actress Sidi Tal used to perform in Orhei before the war and she herself was not much at the theatre. She tells of the fate of her parents and a lawyer friend of the family during the war, who went to their death. She regrets that no memorial marks the place where Orhei's Jews were killed and buried.

Goldman gives his name, his Hebrew name and his birth year, and says he lived in Ialoveni until the war. He names his father, a merchant who traded at markets and was from a village in Bessarabia (name garbled, perhaps Cărpineni). He says his parents were killed in the war, his father buried alive at about age 59 and his mother at about 57. His mother came from Ialoveni and was a housewife. He did not know his grandparents and had two sisters.

Goldman tells how the family was caught by the arrival of the Soviets in 1940 and evacuated to the Caucasus in 1941, where she met her brother again. He was drafted and trained somewhere in the east. On the road her mother was killed in Makhachkala during bombing and her father was wounded. The family later learned of the brother's death in 1944 and the father died too.

An account of the killing of local Jewish women in Sarai in 1941. One mother fell on her child and the child survived; a local non-Jewish woman took the child, had him baptized and raised him. Kerler asks who the victims were and where the story comes from, and they say the neighbours told it.

Few Jews returned to Nisporeni after the war, and the speakers cannot say how many died. They were evacuated, he to Kazakhstan and she to Andijan (?). Lemster and Kerler ask about Transnistria; Benderskij says nobody can say who was killed there, and mentions Jews from Bukovina and elsewhere deported to Transnistria.

Rotner describes the return home in 1945: the house was gone and nothing remained. Her grandfather had been killed by neighbours the day after they left, and her father found the grave, reburied him in Orhei and visited every year. The family went straight to Chișinău, rented lodging and stayed with an acquaintance from the evacuation for a year before starting work and rebuilding their lives. She also recalls the hard work on the kolkhoz.

Gordin tells of the war years. In 1941 his father was drafted and the family fled to Kisnitsa to his grandparents, then on to Kryzhopil and Zabokrych. There the Germans arrived and Jews were rounded up and killed. They ended up in Myskivka (?), where a ghetto under Romanian administration held them for the rest of the war. His father worked at an oil press and later on forced labor building a bridge. Kerler asks who ran the ghetto.

Asked about singing in the ghetto, Gordin recalls a Jewish musician who played for the Romanians, and says Bessarabian Jews were driven from Myskivka to Kryzhopil while his father bought them a place. He recalls ghetto life with its killings, singing and dancing, but no camp song. He names the ghetto elder, Anshl, and his two daughters, whom he married off to men from Mărculești. Kerler asks whether people prayed there.

Leibelman tells how Bessarabia was taken by the Soviets in June 1940 and how the family fled on foot when the war began in 1941. The Germans caught up with them and her father was shot in 1942, leaving her with her mother and sister. She was taken daily to work, sewing, and brought food home, while others worked at stonework in Bershad. She describes arrival in Obodovka, where they were held in a horse stable full of Jewish people, and a terrible scene she witnessed there.

Kleyman talks about a holy rebbe in Stefanesti and another in Boyan, where people still go and light candles. She recalls a childhood game in Yiddish, then an encounter after the war in Ukraine with her father's former boss at a kolkhoz, who wept when she said she was his daughter. She returns to the rebbe and the grandmother who had been to America. She then tells the story of eight thousand Jews in Stryy, killed by the Germans, and of a holy man who spoke before being shot.

Iosif describes the Lipcani market where Jews sold everything before the war, and the Bershad ghetto where Romanian and German guards beat Jews, but Ukrainians helped with potatoes and food. His mother died in the ghetto, and he returned to Lipcani with his sister Tsili to find their house burned. He mentions about ten thousand people in the Bershad camp, few of whom survived.

Raisa begins her own interview. She recounts her family of five children, brothers and sisters who died in the camp or of hunger, and her father and brother shot by a German. She and her mother survived on a pig farm in Obodovka, and she describes the march to Bershad. After returning to Lipcani she worked washing floors and married at seventeen, and she describes Iosif's work making sausage.

Grinshpun speaks about life today, living alone and liking young people, and about the possible need to sell her house. She names her grandfathers, one of whom had a mill, and says two of her father's sisters and his parents were killed in Lublin. Her father worked as an accountant; she describes how he trained in Chișinău and worked there.

Sharhorodskij recalls Yiddish theater troupes coming to Rîbniţa from Odessa and Kyiv before the war, performing in a garden hall where tickets were hard to get. He was too young to attend, but his parents went. He mentions Sholem Aleichem and Mendele as sources of plays, and singers visiting. Asked about the postwar period, he mentions Epelbaum and the director of the Moscow Yiddish theater, Mikhoels, and a communal event. He then answers questions about Lithuanian Jews and speaks of the Warsaw ghetto survivors.

Asked whether people sang in the ghetto, Boiarskaia says nobody did, because people were afraid. She tells of a learned man named Yisroel (?), a fellow prisoner who wrote down life in the ghetto on scraps of paper and died after the war. She recounts how her family fled in 1941 toward Krasne (Krasni Okny), where Germans and Romanians seized thousands of people. The learned man collected gold from the prisoners to buy them off; the guards got drunk and the family escaped through the hills and villages back to their town, where a great slaughter was under way. She answers Kerler's questions about who carried out the killings, saying it was the Romanians, with the Germans passing through earlier. The passage ends with Kerler's question about vodka among Jews in her village.

Magetman recalls the Jewish town, which had more Jews than non-Jews, and a visit as a child to a tsadik, as well as a trip with her parents to Chernivtsi. She speaks of her mother's piety and descent, and of how her mother baked bread and gave food and money to poor people before the Sabbath, and held a meal for the poor. She then says her mother was killed in 1941 in the bombing at the start of the war.

Magetman tells how the German bombing at the start of the war killed her mother and younger sister on 8 July 1941, and how she and her father were injured. They were held in the ghetto at Chechelnyk, Vinnytsya region, from July 1941 to March 1944. Her father and his mother froze to death on 28 November 1941, and she lost her fingers and hands that same night, when people were driven out into the snow and forty froze.

Rolshut speaks of prewar rabbis in Soroca, including Rabbi Kalker, shot in the woods at the war's start at about ninety years old. She learned to write and read Yiddish from an old woman tutor hired by her parents and read Sholem Aleichem, but has largely forgotten it. She spoke Yiddish with her husband and his family, but now speaks Russian with her children and has almost nobody to speak Yiddish with.

Rolshut recounts the war years in the Rîbniţa ghetto under Romanian guards, where Jews could go to the market only for a couple of hours, and gendarmes once took some Jews away. She tells of being sent toward a bridge over the Bug where Germans were, of two brothers hanged for trying to escape, and of the order that Jews over fifty be removed from the ghetto. She was held briefly in a stable and an attic, then sent to the Ulmu sovkhoz, fell ill with typhus and was taken back to Rîbniţa. On Antonescu's order Bessarabian Jews were sent back; she and a companion left the column, stayed with a family in a village and walked home to Soroca.

Mirenburg continues her war account. Her group was sent to Yampil instead of Rîbniţa, and she tells of a family friend from Sguritzy who survived a massacre of a column. Then come the march through Ukrainian towns, food rations, and the Potashna cowshed, where she fell ill with typhus and had a dream while ill. Her brother and then her father died. In Bershad the family begged in the villages, and a Ukrainian village elder beat her and her mother. She also tells of a boy who was tied to a motorcycle. Kerler asks about a song the village boys sang.

Mirenburg describes the liberation of the Bershad camp and the Jewish partisan Yashe, who told the prisoners what had happened. She recounts how he hid among the dead on a cart and how his family was tortured and killed. After the Dniester was crossed in March they returned home. Her mother and sister worked in a canteen in Soroca, and she herself was studying.

Luminskaia describes what happened to her grandfather during the war: he was taken to the forest by policemen and never seen again. She names her grandmothers and grandfathers, in part garbled, and says she had two brothers, one called Tsalik or Sasha.

Moisei recalls wartime service in a canning factory in Astrakhan, where he went barefoot in the frost. He was demobilised in 1947 and returned to a ruined Chişinău, where the family lived in a mud barrack. He then worked twenty years for the railway administration as a forwarding agent, got an apartment, and mentions the shooting of Jews.

Elizaveta says her sisters and brothers are all dead, some having gone to Israel, and that her father and two brothers were killed in the war. She talks about her mother Gitl, who died young, and the grandmothers she cannot name. She says the family speaks Yiddish, Moldovan and Russian, and Lemster asks about Sabbath candles.

Brief recalls Transnistria, where he was held in the ghetto at Mohyliv with his mother and grandmother. He describes violence by soldiers, a Jewish ghetto leader, typhus, and hunger that killed many. His grandmother died of hunger and was thrown into a common pit. He says the Ukrainians were worse than the Russians.

Hershkovich recalls being taken in 1942 into the army labor service, where he worked in construction without arms until October 1944 (?). His unit was all Jews, working long hours on poor food. His mother and sisters were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. He shows photographs of his family, of the Dej synagogue and of the head of the yeshiva (Panet), and mentions relatives in America.

Freundlich tells jokes: two Jews and a baker and a tailor, and a competition among forest animals. Kerler asks the Yiddish word for a monument. She says she was at a memorial and a Jewish monument in Dej (?) and visited the site of a mass killing of Jews, and a pilgrimage with a Swiss visitor. The place is partly unclear in the transcript.

Freundlich says she visited Auschwitz in 1969. At Kerler's request a Yiddish travel song about taking food for a journey is sung, apparently by another woman. Freundlich then speaks, partly in Hungarian, about Satmar, a mass killing and burial in a pit, and a history professor in Jerusalem originally from Satmar whose father was a shochet.

Kraus recalls eating at a different family's home each day in Lekhintsa, the market town, because his family was poor, and a sister who was a tailor there. He and Grunfeld discuss the war, in which both families' relatives were deported to Auschwitz, and the border near Cluj and Turda that divided Hungarian from Romanian territory. They also tell of the killing of 120 Jews of Sharmash in the last days of the war.

Asked about his childhood, Shaia describes the 1940 pogrom in Dorohoi as he and his brother heard it. Two soldiers, one Jewish and one Christian, were killed. The Jewish soldier was buried in the Jewish cemetery, and soldiers fired on the Jewish funeral procession. He cannot give the exact numbers killed. At the end Lemster asks about school and the year 1941.

Lipovici discusses the Ceaușescu period and the shooting of Jews during the war. Lemster and Kerler ask about his life with sheep in the field. They also ask whether kosher certification was needed for cheese and milk, and how cheese is made from lamb's rennet.

Isidor recalls the war years: crowded quarters, the dead carried out each morning in Mohyliv and Sharhorod, and his mother working in a canteen where staff could take nothing home. Asked about Yiddish, he says he learned it over time among Jewish children at school. He tells of a Passover when he and other boys drank water from a barrel, and of the rabbi's penalty for it. He then talks about kashrut, the need for a Jew to be present at milking, and his present household.

Lemster asks where Chajim worked as a forced laborer. Chajim says he walked about 70 kilometers from Edineț to Bălți. He tells how the Jews of Edineț were shot and buried when Romanian forces entered Bessarabia, and says he visited the cemetery and said kaddish there. Asked about wedding songs, he says he has forgotten them and speaks of his hope to live to a hundred.

Chajim says he was held and made to work in Vyzhnytsya (Ukraine) during the war, in transports and wagons. He tells of a young friend whose father was taken to a camp and mother to Auschwitz, where she was killed, and the boy died at about eighty in Rădăuți (Bukovina); the rabbi there sent a letter and Chajim said kaddish for him. He says he played trumpet in the military band and used to sing, and Kerler asks about a Purim play.

Chajim tells of working as a forced laborer in the Romanian army during the war, in and around Edineț, building bridges and doing other labor. He recalls Jews shot and buried in a pit there, among them his uncle. Lemster asks how many Jews lived in Hîrlău before the war. Chajim also mentions his friend Shmuel (whose father was sent to Auschwitz), with whom he worked in a Poland-related place, and that the boy later died in Rădăuți.

Finkelshteyn recalls the June 1941 Iași pogrom: he was taken from his home with his mother and siblings, men and women were separated, and he was put in a sealed train wagon with about 120 people in extreme heat without water. Many died, and at Podu Iloaiei (spelled unclearly) survivors were gathered in a synagogue where local Jews gave them water and food. He says they buried the dead themselves in pits without prayers and stayed until November. They then returned, six of the seven men having survived, and he describes his mother's grief and the court where they lived.

Karuel describes synagogue attendance at holidays and his saying kaddish for his father after the 1941 pogrom. He recalls Jews being rounded up and beaten, and searching for his father at the police station. He says he and his mother survived by his working, as a salesman, during the war.

Karuel speaks about Yiddish amateur theater during the war, in the Iași ghetto, with a Jewish troupe that also performed in Romanian. He gives population figures before the war and mentions Jews killed in the pogrom and sent to Transnistria. He also says there was Jewish life in the war years, including synagogue attendance, and is asked about Yiddish cinema.

Davidovich talks about his mother's father, the melamed Meir Hersh Shekhter (name as heard), and his wife Golda. The grandfather taught small children and older boys Hebrew, and gave lessons in Latin and Greek to students preparing for medical studies. He describes how the old people left behind in Siret at the deportation, eight in all, some blind, were murdered by legionnaires, beheaded and buried in sand. He also tells of his other grandfather, who visited a daughter in America in the 1930s and came back because he could not keep kosher there, and who died in a trench on the march. A large monument now stands in the Siret cemetery.

Resh says he was in Transnistria (near Mohyliv) during the war and then was drafted into the Soviet army; after demobilization in 1946 he returned home to Chernivtsi and the family left for Romania. He worked in the Iași meat industry as director for thirty-nine years (?). He speaks about Jewish Iași, its large prewar Jewish population and the 1941 pogrom, emigration to Israel after 1947, and his oldest sister's attempt to reach Palestine in 1948 when the British stopped her ship and she swam for hours.

Shwartz describes his family and what became of it. A brother went to Canada and died in the 1990s; an older brother was shot in the war, as was a younger brother, a soldier on the Ukrainian front whose frozen foot meant he could not retreat. A sister who lived in Krasznadorda (?) with two children died in Auschwitz, and the mother Perl also perished there. His father, who was Hungarian-born, a grain dealer and ill after the First World War, died in the 1920s.

Asked by Kerler whether she saw Mengele, Mezei describes being in the Birkenau C sector near the infirmary block, where Mengele came a few times a week and the women feared a selection. She tells how her mother was taken by Mengele in October. She reflects that the world knew and stayed silent, and that men suffered more in the camp, including the Sonderkommando and Russian prisoners of war. She tells of a friend's brother, a lawyer in the Sonderkommando, who asked her through the fence about his sister.

Sings the song about how what was is gone, with Kerler asking about the refrain's wording. She recalls the summer theater in Sighet, the Hungarian and Yiddish actors Strömer and his wife, and an actress who sang there. She sings a song that a Jewish girl needs a Jewish boy, tied to a woman who married a Romanian and later died in Auschwitz. She mentions her friends' fates after the war, including those who went to Israel, and the judge husband of the woman.

Kurtsberg talks about his mother's cupping (setting 'bankes') for colds and how it helped him as a child. He recalls a story from the Bershad ghetto, which was under Romanian and German command: a Romanian commandant had a young Jewish peddler who sold small wares dragged to death behind his motorcycle, and was later caught in Bucharest and shot at Siret. Lemster then asks about Jewish work in Transnistria.

The team greets Mehler in front of her house and chats with her, in Romanian and Yiddish, about her origin in Iași and whether other Yiddish speakers live in Vatra Dornei. She gives them an address to visit, on the street Podul Verde. She says her father was a professor and was killed in the Iași pogrom; the date is unclear in the transcript.

Galambos reads from the prayer book and says the verses recall Auschwitz, where children were thrown into the fire. He contrasts prewar life, when Jews lived peacefully with their neighbors, went to synagogue and cheder and walked freely day and night, with today.

Weinberger and Kerler discuss the fate of Jews in the region during the war. Kerler's family is mentioned: his parents served in the Red Army and his mother's relatives were murdered. Weinberger recalls the Babi Yar massacre and a book on it by Kuznetsov, which he read in Slovak. He says that after the war the Soviet authorities did not allow the killing of the Jews to be spoken of openly.

Khotenko says she was born and lived in Balta until the war, when the family was evacuated. She describes her street and the Jews who once lived there. Her father, a baker, came from a village called Nestoyita (?), and her mother sewed. She names her grandparents and a maternal uncle in Odessa, and recounts the killing of the paternal grandparents on a forced march and the evacuation by her uncle. She also mentions her son in Tiraspol, her seven siblings and her surviving sister.

Kerler asks about each sibling: they live in Israel (Beersheba), America and Kryvyi Rih, and most do not speak Yiddish. Epelman says his wife is Russian and they have lived together about fifty years. He then answers questions about Jewish trades and tells what he heard of a violin maker whose hands were beaten when Germans rounded up Jews. Kerler and Lemster also ask about Slavic-derived words and expressions.

The formal interview begins. Angelova says she was born in Topole in a region whose name is unclear in the transcript. She grew up there until the war, in about 1920, and her parents worked in a shop. She also mentions that Jews in Krasne Okny were killed.

Kerler asks how life was after the war and Katz asks her to tell something in Yiddish, but Kazakevich answers mostly in Ukrainian and Russian, helped by relatives. She says the family spoke Yiddish at home, that her mother looked Ukrainian and passed as one, and she recalls the Germans rounding up Jews to be shot in prepared pits and her escape. Very little coherent Yiddish speech is heard.

Vaynman recounts what her mother told her of her own family. Her grandfather returned from war on one leg and died, and her mother was the youngest of seven children, born after his death. She went to a Yiddish school and a Yiddish college. Her mother's brothers were all killed in the war, in a forest near Lviv, where a memorial stone was later put up. She names her grandmother and grandfather and recalls her grandmother's synagogue-going before the war.

Zhovtis tells in a long and hard-to-follow account of the German occupation. He describes the first killings of Jews and communists near Khmilnyk, and the roundup of Jews from the town and surrounding villages, including his mother, siblings and himself. He escaped while his mother was being beaten and was taken in by a non-Jewish villager, who gave him milk, but a local officer turned him in. He also describes forced labor for German and Romanian commanders, repeated escapes, and falling ill. He was taken to Mohyliv-Podilskyi. He names several places, but their spelling is not clear in the transcript.

Kerler asks whether Zhovtis's parents survived. Zhovtis says that his family were taken to be shot in a village near Khmilnyk, and describes a collective farm there with Jews and Christians. Kerler tries to clarify what he has understood.

Kerler asks Zhovtis to go through the occupation again and Zhovtis explains the killings in January and the forced labor on the roads and in a town. He describes his work, going to Zhmerynka and Murafa, harsh treatment, the dangers of bridge-building near Mykolaiv, being weak and ill, and being taken to the station and to Mohyliv-Podilskyi. When the Red Army arrived he left on foot for Khmilnyk, found no Jews left, and was then drafted. He served seven years, in the north near Murmansk, as the only Jew among many.

Bublitskaia talks about the war years. The Soviets arrived in 1940, and with the German advance her family fled to Siberia, leaving behind relatives who were shot. They worked, got a piece of bread a day, and shared one bucket of potatoes among ten. Her brother married the chief engineer's daughter, and they went to Kyiv in 1943. In 1945 they wrote inviting her to study there, and at the institute she met her husband in 1948.

Berman tells how, as a Red Army man, he took part in a delegation to Theresienstadt after liberation, where he spoke Yiddish with survivors and became a witness, and he reports on the Budapest ghetto and on Jews he met in Vienna. He recalls hearing President Beneš on the radio, and says he reported all of this to Mikhoels in his letters.

Isaak Vaisman says he was in Berdychiv before the war. His father, a tailor born in Berdychiv, died in 1928. Beyle Vaisman describes her father, born in Warsaw, who came to Russia as a child and graduated from two institutes. He knew many languages, played the violin, worked as chief accountant and was killed in the war. She kept some of his documents.

Talk about Jewish doctors in prewar Berdychiv, especially a much-loved doctor (named Barabán or similar) who treated people at any hour, took no money from Jews, and was reported to have been killed by the Germans. Many such doctors were murdered. Kerler then begins asking about word meanings.

Skobilitskii names his mother as Khane, daughter of Nakhmen, and speaks of the Kalushner rebbe in Chervone, where there was a sugar factory. His father came from Poland near Warsaw and was a metalworker. His mother did not work and there were five sons, whose names he gives; the youngest, Motele, was killed by the Germans.

Skobilitskii describes his school routine: cheder from nine to twelve, then the four-class Yiddish school from twelve to three. Some non-Jewish pupils spoke Yiddish well, and one later became a director and still spoke Yiddish with him after the war. He talks about the Yiddish alphabet and spelling and recites the letters when asked. Katz and Kerler ask about the "good and bad tsadik" letter forms, and he turns to the killing of his parents and the mass grave at the airfield.

Skobilitskii speaks of the killing of Jews at the airfield, where many thousands lie buried, and says visitors to Berdychiv should go to the memorial there. His son visits it. Katz and Kerler ask him to read the memorial prayer, and he looks in the prayer book, with spelling questions along the way, before beginning to say the prayer for his mother.

Fania talks about her husband's illness and the poor medical care he receives. She says her mother was born in a village (Pidhorodne?) and her father in Berdychiv, and that she has two children, one named Rosa. She speaks of her aunt Roze Gopiner, a Yiddish singer who performed in Berdychiv and on the radio and was killed by the Germans. Her brother Semyon went to a Jewish school but she did not.

Chukh gives the date and place of the interview and says the Berdychiv tsadik's grave is a pilgrimage site for visitors. She says she was born in Berdychiv, as were her parents, and was evacuated to the Caucasus during the war. Trained as a nurse, she wanted to go to the front but was kept at hospital work because she had a small child. She worked as an operating-room nurse and was later recognised as a war participant. She names her parents (father Yosl/Iosif, a sieve-maker from a place in Poland whose name is unclear; mother Tsirl, a quilt-maker) and her brothers, one in Germany. She describes her Jewish school (school no. 13, seven grades), her later nursing school and her long postwar nursing career in a Berdychiv hospital. She recalls childhood games, dolls she makes today from broken ones, and home life with Yiddish-speaking parents. She tells of the hungry early 1930s, when her mother sewed quilts to feed the children and the school later fed them. She remembers Soviet-era closing of synagogues, the synagogues of Berdychiv, the Hasidic rebbe's prayer house and holiday observance at home but not in school. Chukh also recalls Yiddish literature and press, a large library, visiting Yiddish theaters, the seltzer seller Itsik, and about 60,000 Jews in the town. She describes weddings with music and a rhymester, and Sabbath and holiday foods. She then answers Kerler's dialectological questionnaire: translating Russian words and sentences into Yiddish (greetings, household words, animals, colours, adverbs, body and illness terms), plus words like dybbuk and golem.

Furman says he was born in Berdychiv and was drafted in 1939 to the Far East fleet, where he served until 1941. In the war he was sent to the front and fought at Stalingrad, where he lost a leg. He returned to Berdychiv in 1945 and found his parents, brothers and sisters killed. He says he is a war invalid, group II, and the interviewers record his name, David Zelikovich, from his father's name Zelik.

Furman talks about his childhood and school in Berdychiv. There were many Jewish schools alongside Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ones. About 60,000 Jews lived there, and many were killed at the airfield. He gives his siblings' birth years and says his friends were killed in the army. He studied in a Yiddish school, remembers Tolstoy and Sholem Aleichem, and says non-Jews also spoke Yiddish. He lived near the edge of town.

Soyfer describes being evacuated, in the Northern Caucasus with his grandmother, who was later killed by the Germans, and then to Kazakhstan, in Alma-Ata. He tells of antisemitism, being beaten, and working as a child. His uncles' fates are given, one killed in the war and one living in Moscow, and he says his grandmother had six children.

The interviewee tells of the war, in which she lost her father, mother and a young sister, and says some forty family members were killed. She speaks of her anger at God over the passing years and of her husband's help.

The speakers discuss the German occupation. Some say wealthy people stayed in Berdychiv and thought gold would protect them, but the Germans took their money and killed them. Vaisman tells of evacuation and army service from 1943 to 1946, and the woman recalls her trip to Kharkiv with her mother at the start of the war and her father's Jewishness.

Kogan speaks a poem about Deborah, the shochet's wife in the Bershad ghetto, and tells how many Jews were killed there. Kerler asks who Deborah was. He tells of his Bershad origins, the poems he wrote, and being taken into the army at seventeen.

Kogan and Kerler discuss Deborah and her husband Gedalye, the cantor at the High Holidays; Kogan tells of refugees from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Hungary in the ghetto, and of Romanians murdering Jews in a pit near Bershad and forcing a German to dig it.

The interviewee recounts leaving Berdychiv on 20 June to Kharkiv, where her grandfather lived, and how the war began two days later. A relative, a lawyer, came to take his family to Kharkiv, while her own family stayed in Berdychiv and was murdered. She evacuated with her grandfather to Uzbekistan and later found her husband through an address bureau.

She names the relatives lost in the war: her mother Sara, her sisters Ester and Zisl (the youngest was four), and her grandmother. She says she will show photographs. Kerler then asks about non-Jews in prewar Berdychiv and Yiddish. Both speakers say Yiddish was widely heard in the streets and that many non-Jews spoke it. They describe a Ukrainian locksmith who spoke good Yiddish, and say that few Jews now remain and Yiddish is spoken between themselves.

They discuss the war years. Wealthy Jews stayed in Berdychiv because the Germans had not harmed Jews in 1914 and they believed money would save them. One family lost its relatives, and they recall the interviewee searching for her family at the station. She also reflects on war today in Israel.

The couple shows and reads Yiddish letters and family photographs to Kerler, including a letter written in 1941. They identify her parents Sara and Moyshe Reinsdorf, her sisters Ester and Zisl, and a relative who died in Donetsk. They also remark on a photograph of a soldier.

Soyfer recounts that he fled in the war and went to the Caucasus, where Germans came and his grandmother was killed. His father was taken into the army. He says he served as a soldier and could not have killed an old person, and mentions that his wife died half a year earlier after twelve years of illness.

Asked what he wants remembered about Jewish Berdychiv, Soyfer describes it as a Jewish town of honest people with Jewish trades and small prayer houses on every street, where there was no pogrom because young men defended it. He speaks of Yiddish-speaking neighbours, his grandmother in a village near Zhytomyr and the Germans' killing of Jews. Kerler thanks him and asks about his daughter's Yiddish, which Soyfer explains, and the passage ends with comments on yeshiva students and mixed Jews, and Kerler handing over project information.

Vainshelboim says his father was a house painter and gives his mother's name, Faige. He names his two sisters, Polia and Tsivia, and two brothers, one young brother and one older brother who fell at the front. He says his mother and siblings were shot at an airfield, and begins to tell how the Germans entered Berdychiv in July 1941.

Vainshelboim recounts the first days of the German occupation. His mother was taken for forced labor and left him to watch her bread in the oven; Ukrainian policemen came in and he fled. He hid with a Ukrainian man, and later learned his mother and siblings had been killed. He tells of a roundup at the airfield and how he escaped it. He reached Novosilka, where a family took him in, and an encounter with a brigadier, Andrei Shcherbatiuk, led him to an old woman named Korshenyuk in a village whose name is unclear. He stayed with her for about a year. He says four members of that family were recognised by Yad Vashem.

Vainshelboim speaks of his wife making fish and baking bread, and invites the interviewers to visit again. Kerler and he exchange remarks about where they live and about the need to leave for Kyiv, so they cannot stay now. Vainshelboim then mentions a German photographer or artist who wrote a history of how he survived. He says he took the man to the place where Jews were shot and where he jumped down from the bank (details unclear).

Shveibish talks in Yiddish about the Pechera camp and the transports of Jews, especially from Tulchyn, with others from Shpykiv and Mohyliv. She mentions a local policeman and the liberation, when soldiers on horseback came. Kerler learns that about 330 survived. She recalls the forced march and the freezing, overcrowded night, the lack of water and toilets, and the deaths. Her father was killed and her mother died within a month. Near the end the talk turns to Russian as they approach the camp and a memorial plaque.

At the former camp, now a sanatorium, the guides explain in mostly Russian where the gate and guard towers stood. They describe the memorial plaque, changed after Ukraine's independence, and how the Germans selected victims. They say prisoners were harnessed to sleds to haul corpses to burial pits in the forest, and that anyone going to the river for water was shot. Kerler checks whether the interviewee understands Yiddish. They discuss the barbed-wire fence and begging at the gate, and the group then debates driving the car into the forest.

Mikhail tells of his wartime escapes from the police and from a shooting at a pit. His mother hid him in an oven behind baked bread when police came, and his father, a painter, was released. He tells of being held with thousands in a cellar and driven towards the airfield park. He crawled away naked under fire in October and walked to villages. A Ukrainian family hid him for about a year while he begged bread, despite a German reward for turning in Jews, and he escaped pursuers by swimming. He also gives the ages of his parents and siblings and says the elder brother was at the front.

Vainshelboim tells of his mother's sister, whose two children died during the war, one of hunger in the camp. She went into the town with a child and was shot there in the 1940s. The details of names and place are unclear in the transcript. Kerler asks what she was called.

Burmenko recalls her life after the war: a friend of her husband's, who had been in the army, wanted to marry her, and she married him in 1946 (?) after reluctance. He was Zalmen Mendelevich Dimant, and he died in 1948. Her son was born in 1947 and is now 62. She says she stood by the pit when people were shot, and that her mother and sister were taken.

Burmenko says her mother went into the pit with two grandchildren during the war and she herself was not taken. Kerler then returns to the topic of songs from childhood in Berdychiv. The passage is short and partly garbled.

Vainshelboim guides the team through Berdychiv and tells of the German occupation and the roundups and killings of Jews. He tells of the murder of 960 young men, the grave pits, and his own escape when his father was shot. His mother, sisters and brother lie in the mass grave. He also mentions a brick factory and a pit for hiding Jews, the Soviet memorials, the erection of the Star of David, and gold-seekers digging up bones.

Snook describes arriving at Auschwitz. A German snatched the child from her and sent it to one side while she was sent to the other. She says Jews were killed in the camps, and Lemster says he was born after the war. He then steers her back to prewar life.

Hodinger says he is from Vynohradiv (Seliš) and lived there until 1944, when the Germans and Hungarians came. He was in the ghetto for two months, from Passover to Shavuot, at age sixteen, and then taken to Auschwitz. He recalls Mengele at the selection and how he narrowly escaped death twice, and describes his fear and his heart pounding at night.

Bershadskaya recalls the Bershad ghetto, where it lay, and the night killings of people accused of being partisans. She describes being bombed and thrown down while running. Kerler arranges an interview with her later. She gives her name as Elizaveta Konstantinovna, with the Yiddish name Leyke.

Bershadskaya says she was not evacuated and lived with her father and younger brother until they were driven into the Bershad' ghetto, where their house burned. She describes hunger, roundups, the Jewish market and selling food, and her father's wood-sawing work. She tells of the Germans' rule, then the Romanians, and a pogrom shortly before the Germans left.

At Kerler's request Gvinter sings a Yiddish song about the Jewish cemetery and the sufferings of Jews under the Germans, which she links to the people she saw killed at Pechera. She then recalls the farewells at the pit.

Kerler asks her to set the events in order. Gvinter recalls the ghetto at the start of the war, the police and robbing by them, a bomb that fell on the family house, and a partisan (named Volodya?) who helped with bread and asked her to carry leaflets. She also remembers the partisans hanged along the bridge. She describes how she was taken to Pechera and was hit, with a black car and the camp journey.

Gvinter sings a song about winter days and a camp, repeating the first part at Kerler's request. She says it matters that children and grandchildren know about the pits, the forced labor carrying stones, and the starvation. Kerler asks about partisan detachments in the area. Gvinter names Yashe Talis as the leader, and a woman in the room mentions the ghetto.

Lemster asks about the war years, and Gvinter says he was in the Bershad' ghetto. Kerler asks about a man who carried the dead on a cart, and Gvinter recalls Germans dragging a corpse behind a motorcycle and a neighbour now living in Israel. The ghetto was liberated in March 1944 and the war ended in May 1945. After the war he worked in a sewing workshop and went to school from first grade, finishing ten classes. Kerler ends by asking whether people sang in the ghetto.

Gvinter talks with Kerler and Lemster about the song of going to Palestine, which was sung in secret in the ghetto and more openly after the war, and comments on politics and the Israel–Palestinian conflict today. He mentions his own illness and a daughter's family. He answers terminology questions about Bila Tserkva, about words for non-Jews and for a foolish or wicked person, and about a convert. He recalls the Bershad' ghetto, people from Chernivtsi held and shot at the stadium, and non-Jews who learned a few Yiddish words. He then speaks about his own life: neighbours and the shoe workshop, the sale of a building he was asked to sell, his marriage in 1958, his children, and his siblings. Finally he explains why one synagogue in Bershad' stayed open after the war while others were closed, and mentions the building turned into a cinema.

The second man opens by explaining that the synagogues were closed before the war and that after the war only a few were allowed. He recalls that a synagogue building stood on a spot in Bershad', and points out the main street, which became Lenin Street. Sklyarskiy then gives his name and patronymic and says he was orphaned young (his mother died when he was three, his father when he was seven) and brought up by an aunt and uncle in the shtetl Zhornysche, where about two thousand Jews lived. He tells how in 1942 the Jews were driven out by police, he was shot at and wounded, and the family hid in a dugout in a field. His sisters and their children were killed when he went out for food; he then joined the partisans and was wounded again. He describes his father as a carpenter, his sisters, and his schooling: a four-year Yiddish school, then a Russian one. He talks about the shtetl before the war, a rabbi, holidays in the synagogue and the postwar murder of a Jewish man. Kerler asks about the length of the hiding and the number of people in the dugout, and asks him to retell the first shooting and the forced labor under the Germans, including burying dead soldiers.

Sklyarskiy describes Zhornyshche as a small town in Lypovets district, with perhaps around fifteen hundred Jews (?). The synagogue was later made into a warehouse or kolkhoz store. He names the police chief Zavalinsky, who with a German collected the Jews in May 1942.

Sklyarskiy speaks of the German officer and the shooting after his flight, then of a dream in which a person told him to run into the field and not the forest. He tells how two men who joined the partisans hid in a secret hiding place near the pit where Jews were shot. He mentions help from local people and the driving of Jews on foot and in carts, and begins to speak about the ghetto. Parts of this are unclear.

Sklyarskiy speaks in Russian and Yiddish about the Bershad' ghetto, the Romanian zone, and the killings elsewhere. He recalls working on roads from 1941 with the police chief named Zavalinskiy (?), and the way the forced labourers were treated. Kerler asks when the Germans entered; he answers that it was at the start of the war. Kerler then asks him to talk about life after the war.

Sklyarskiy speaks about the village of Ivanky, where people were shot, and about a visit there about ten years earlier. He shows letters and talks about his granddaughter Lena, who recorded an interview with his wife. Kerler asks about Lena's surname and city in Israel, where she studied at a university, and about a number abroad.

Loyf says that during the war she lived with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in the Dzegovka ghetto. Her mother told her that the Jews were driven out to a square and were nearly killed, until the Romanians came. Many Jews were driven there from surrounding villages.

Pustilnik names her siblings and says there were eight children before the war and six after. She gives their approximate birth years, and a few siblings live in Israel (Haifa among the places mentioned). One sister, Yeyde (?), was caught after hiding and killed, and Pustilnik describes the mother's cooking in the camp, with the boy who cried from hunger now living in Israel. Kerler asks about the river and the camp near Pechera.

She describes the Jewish street near the monastery and a prayer house in the shtetl after the war, and thanks the interviewers for coming. She says she knows no Jewish story but recalls a song, and speaks about living among non-Jews and about killings of Jews at a place near the shtetl.

Rakhil, born 1919, speaks of her family's fate in the war. Her mother and two sisters were in a camp and her mother brought them back, her father was shot, and she herself was evacuated to Kyrgyzstan. She remembers prewar Bratslav, its streets, her Ukrainian school, and her father, a learned man who taught her Hebrew words.

She recalls the arrival of the Germans, who collected money, gold and clothing from Jewish homes, and then the Romanians, who fenced off a square by the school as a ghetto, six years long. She describes a woman accused of being a partisan because of a grenade and shot, and the memorial later built on the square from the bones.

Sofia gives her mother's and father's birth decades. She says that before the war over five thousand Jews lived in Bratslav and that most perished in the camps, while local policemen plundered Jewish houses. She recalls five synagogues, one with a mikveh. Asked by Katz about Bratslav Hasidim, she says she remembers none, though Nakhman and Nosn are mentioned. She also recalls her mother praying in Hebrew and telling stories at home in Yiddish.

Kupershmidt recalls working as a driver for a German in Nemyriv for about a year, and travelling on a pass between the ghettos of Nemyriv and Bratslav to see his wife and child. He found houses emptied and learned that people had been taken to the camp at Pechora. A benevolent German officer helped him, and he explains Russian and German terms for the permit. The passage ends with local families, including Dardik (?).

Kupershmidt continues the war narrative with his brother in Mohyliv-Podilskyy, where the family lived in the ghetto, and a labor levy of three hundred people for building a bridge. Kerler asks how the brother was called, and about seeing Jews drowned in the Bug.

Kupershmidt describes being held in a column near Zhytomyr, being stripped, a night alarm and how he hid in an attic. He says Jews were shot and carried off on carts. He then recounts signing up for a work gang, a former acquaintance who knew him, getting passes, and walking to Nemyriv and home. A woman he met there gave a harrowing account of the ghetto, and he mentions a Volksdeutsche family and a policeman.

Asked about songs, Kupershmidt recalls fragments of a camp song about children. He returns to the ghetto period and the German 'Judenaktion', and to anti-Jewish propaganda posters. He tells of a Polish Jewish officer who was mistreated by the police, and of a boy he rescued. The officer's later fate is unclear.

In Russian with some Yiddish, Yatskova describes the Jewish theatre, Russian theatre and operetta on a street in Odesa, which she attended free of charge. She says she would like to go to Odesa to see where people were shot, but no longer has the strength. She also discusses relatives' inquiries about the fate of family there, and Kerler ends by asking the Yiddish word for cemetery. Kerler mentions an aunt who worked at a cinema.

Lifshitz recites or sings fragments of a song about being drawn to Palestine and Zionism versus staying in Russia, and a second song about the landlord and America. He then speaks of his brother, who was shot at some point in Birobidzhan by non-Jews or police, and says he had to work hard for years.

Kerler tries to establish when Lifshitz left Birobidzhan; Lifshitz says he arrived in 1936, was drafted into the war, and left in 1947 (?). He repeats that his brother was shot by police, in the taiga in 1945, because he was Jewish. The sequence of events remains unclear.

Khavin talks about the lack of work and the pain it causes him. Standing among the stones, Kerler and Khavin read gravestones, including one for Malka, and Kerler explains the formula of name and father's name. Khavin says some of those buried here did not get to live because of Hitler.

At a memorial Kerler and Khavin read the inscription asking passers-by to stop and bow to the memory of fellow citizens. Khavin says that 7,500 people are commemorated, but that the plaque says only Soviet citizens and does not name the Jews; he says the authorities did not want to show this. Kerler asks whether a new plaque is possible now, and Khavin says it needs to be redone. As they get back into the van he points out his technical school.

At the mass-grave site Khavin says the community gathers each year in September to pray, say the memorial prayer and Kaddish, since the Jews were killed in September (1941). Kerler and Katz read the monuments: one erected after the war names only Soviet citizens, and a separate community stone gives a number of Jews, which Khavin puts at about fifteen hundred and Kerler reads as 800. The number is unclear in the transcript. Khavin also jokes about money and pensions.

Khavin says that from the twelfth century (?) Jews gradually began to live in cities, and that none of the Jews in the villages survived the war, because Hitler killed them all.

Prompted by Kerler to discuss the Soviet period, Burg says he came to the Soviet Union already a writer. In evacuation in Chelyabinsk he wrote an article on Jews in industry, which he sent to Eynikayt, and he met its editor in Moscow in 1945. He learned from a reply that his mother and sister had been deported to Vinnytsia oblast and shot, so he did not return to Chernivtsi; he was sent to the pedagogical institute in Ivanovo, where Levin was prorector and he befriended a docent connected to Dovid Hofshteyn.

Burg reads aloud his own short Yiddish story "Eykho", about a train journey on which the narrator meets a Warsaw ghetto survivor who fought as a partisan. The reading turns to memories of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on the first day of Passover.

Shternberg describes Khotyn as a commercial town with many Jews. She tells how the town was bombed in the war and how the Jews in prayer shawls begged the Germans not to burn it. Her father was killed. She also recalls the Romanian school, where her Yiddish teacher Yanever came twice a week while the Christian children had religion lessons with a priest. She recites the Passover and Hanukkah songs that he composed, and sings other songs, including a Shavuot song of the cheder. Kerler asks whether non-Jews became Jews in Khotyn; she says this was not known.

Ziselis gives his name and patronymic and says he is from Khotyn. He recounts the war years: Tulchyn, hangings, forced labor, and escaping from the work column to hide in the barracks with the help of an acquaintance. He describes shootings, the death of acquaintances, and his father the shoykhet who was shot. The transcript is garbled and details are uncertain.

Shames says only Yiddish was spoken at home. Her mother was Jewish, her sister was killed by the Germans, her father was also killed, and her mother later died. She did not know her grandparents and does not know where her father was born. His family had lived earlier in Lube (?) and moved to Yanoshpol when she was small.

Kerler notes that her sister Niusye was killed not far from the town. Shames explains that the sister was handed to someone who took money to hide her but gave her up, and she was killed.

Kerler asks whether Gammer and her daughter can direct them to the forest killing site by car, and they discuss how far away it is and giving Russian directions. They also discuss a woman, Masha (?), who may speak Yiddish and be interviewed. They briefly mention a coming holiday visit.

Kapustina recalls her grandparents and childhood. She tells how her grandfather's son-in-law, her uncle, who had a mill in a village (Kirilovka), disappeared during the war and was found by the riverbank, recognised by his gold rings. She tells about the search for her grandmother's grave and says that childhood was poor. Kerler then asks about synagogues.

Kapustina talks about her work after the war. She says she did not read Yiddish. She was asked to take a job at a textile factory, using her ten years of school, and says her father was shot, in one of six graves. There was nowhere to live.

Kapustina describes being gathered in winter 1941–42: the family went to her aunt's house to be together, her father heard Germans on the road, and they were led in deep snow past the bridge toward a pit, with dead bodies lying about.

Shames says she spent the war in the Urals, alone. She did not return to Yanushpol because no one lived there and her mother had been killed there (?). She says many Jews were killed near Khmil'nyk. She trained as an accountant in Yanushpol before the war and says life was always hard.

Srulova describes the dairy products made from the cow's milk. She says her brothers did not attend cheder, but that they went to the synagogue to say Kaddish for their parents. She says there was no antisemitism or religious restriction at school or work, and that she was a Pioneer. Kerler and Katz question her about the delayed memorial in Chortkiv, which she says was funded from abroad.

Kerler opens the interview with Schreier, giving the date and place. Schreier was born in Drohobych in 1922 and says he is the last Jew born there before the war. His father, a chemist, studied in Germany and took his doctorate in Switzerland. The family lived for ten years in Jasło, where his father was chief chemist at an oil refinery. He lost the job in the Depression and the family returned to Drohobych in 1932. His mother, Leontina, was a pharmacist's daughter. The passage ends with the great action of 1942.

Schreier talks about Jewish streets and houses and the languages of his home, where Polish was spoken, his father knew Yiddish well and his mother did not; he describes his bar mitzvah in his uncle's small synagogue. He then speaks at length about Bruno Schulz: his walks in the poor Jewish quarter, his teaching of drawing and carpentry without a formal permit until 1936, his family, translations of his work and Schulz festivals in Drohobych. He then describes the German occupation, the 'Black Thursday' shooting, the Gestapo officers Landau and Günther, and Schulz's murder.

Khasidovich talks about the war years in Fastiv: she stayed in town with her small children and hid with them in a cellar, saying survival was a matter of fate. She mentions the killing site (garbled in the transcript, possibly Babi Yar in Kyiv), says she has no friends left from before and that her children are her only family, and describes working in the bakery at night to feed them. She says that non-Jews also helped her and that she helped others. Lemster closes by asking about Jews who visited the bakery.

Khasidovich speaks about the war years. She says some Jews hid because they feared being taken into the army, and that people hid from the Germans. Kerler and Lemster press her on who took her parents (the Germans) and who brought her food while she hid. She says many Jews of Fastiv perished and few remained. She says some people helped them, among them Jews who were with the Germans, and that bread was distributed in other ways. She mentions a family that did not hide and was lost.

Kopyt recalls the outbreak of war and the family's flight on foot toward Kyiv, and says seventeen relatives were killed. She talks about her mother, who was a baker, and her grandfather, a synagogue gabbai, and speaks about neighbours and Babi Yar. She describes her first husband's death after Chernobyl and her second marriage, her grandparents' hiding in the civil-war pogroms, and a visit to the site where her grandfather was killed. She also tells of her own fall.

Answering Kerler's questions about songs, Kopyt sings fragments of Yiddish songs she recalls from a non-Jewish shoemaker neighbour who worked with Jews, and a toast at a wedding. She sings the tailor song again in full, adding one on Sholem Aleichem. Kerler notes how to pronounce Yiddish words in the Ashkenazic way. Lemster then asks about gravestones, and she says she has photographs showing the Babi Yar-type memorials (a mass grave of Jews and one for kolkhoz peasants).

Burshtein says that many young Jews left Sobolivka after the revolution, and that about four hundred remained, of whom he says three hundred were shot in the war. After the war a few elderly Jews returned, and now no Jews are left in Sobolivka. He gives the number of people in Teplyk and the distances between the places, and mentions a woman from Sobolivka who works as a teacher.

Beigel recounts the war: the family went to her mother's parents but a week later killings began, so they fled to Krasne and were later sent back. The Dnister (?) river divided the German and Romanian zones. She was beaten in the ghetto. An elder of the community bought her out so that she would not be killed. She also escaped bandits and hid with a Pole, and three times escaped being killed.

The interview winds down with joking about Kerler's status and a local young man who learned Yiddish. Kerler notes that a Christian cannot convert from Judaism. Beigel then discusses Jews in Kopaihorod and Sharhorod: none are left in Sharhorod, which had a ghetto. She mentions a book about it by an author now in Israel, which she read in Russian.

Bukshtein recounts that his father was shot and the rest were in the ghetto; his mother, sister and brother survived in Bershad under the Romanians. He followed the factory by echelon to Novosibirsk with a friend, and the tailoring factory was set up again to sew for the army. He was drafted at the end of 1941, but the commanders sent him and his friend away because they were not yet eighteen.

Katz confirms that his parents and siblings were killed, and Kerler lists their names. He then describes life in Soviet Stanislav (later Ivano-Frankivs'k) after the war: no synagogues, private prayer in homes, a closed city. He says he has no relatives abroad but had friends in Israel from the Hashomer movement. Kerler ends by announcing a set of words to translate.

Kerler talks with several congregants about where they were born, the Yiddish they speak and the language of their region. One man from Proskurov (Khmelnytskyi) talks about the Jewish population there, the family members who perished in the war, and his Russian schooling. There are also remarks on Litvak Yiddish, on Yampil and on Jewish life in Proskurov today. Kerler explains that this is a short interview for an archive and that the recording will not be shown publicly.

Geller tells of his 2005 trip to Pyatka with a grandchild (the catalogue says great-grandchild) to visit the Jewish cemetery. A hundred or so gravestones remain. He describes the killing of Jews buried there and the survival of a boy and a girl who later lived in Berdychiv and emigrated to Israel. Kerler asks how many Jews lived in Pyatka, and the passage ends with a Jewish man with a surname like Pastovsky (?) who was killed by a car.

Lys describes a letter from a man researching the Lys family and his son-in-law's use of the internet. He arranged for photographs of old gravestones, since he cannot read the Hebrew inscriptions, and Kerler comments on how hard they are to read. In answer to S4's questions he gives Jewish population figures before and after the war. He describes how Jewish houses became few in the old town, and mentions intermarried neighbors and his own Jewish family.

Geller talks about his wife Feyge: a Kyiv university student evacuated to Tashkent, she volunteered for the army and served as an artilleryman and then radio operator. Her mother, siblings and grandparents were shot by the Germans, while her father and elder sister hid, the father surviving a pit during the shooting.

Geller explains a prewar kolkhoz brigade term and sugar beet quotas, naming several non-Jewish kolkhoz workers in Kuzmin. He then tells about the Jews of Kuzmin being driven into a ghetto and shot in a village nearby, where a memorial now stands; he no longer has relatives there and he and his wife visited several times.

Geller talks about police work and about thieves, with no Jews among them. Asked about his mother's songs, he says he was too young to remember. He tells how he later led the automobile and motorcycle society for years, describes his car and his pension, and his Yiddish learned from his parents in the Yiddish-speaking town of Kuz'myn. His first wife Feyge died in 1991; her parents were killed in the war. He remarried after meeting a woman by chance, they registered and have been together some fifteen years. He mentions his son in Moscow, his garden, and the Colorado beetle.

The passage begins with Later's postwar work as director of a large wholesale warehouse and chairman of a cooperative; he mentions a Yiddish journalist. He then tells his life story at Kerler's request: he went into the army in 1940, served at the front, and was twice wounded. He lists his many orders and medals, and mentions the extra pension he receives from the Ukrainian state. He names the places he passed through at the war's end, among them Warsaw, Germany, Vienna and Prague, and says he came on a camp soon after its liberation. He also says he came back to his home town on a short leave and found his mother, brother and other relatives had been killed. A Ukrainian friend of his had told him how this happened. He moved to Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyy in 1955 and worked there until his eighties. From about 14:00 Kerler turns to a questionnaire on foods and words, and on how Yiddish was spoken in Later's home area. Items asked include gefilte fish and sweet or sour dishes, potato pancakes, words for devil, golem, thanks, please, mouse, house, wife and husband, and numbers. They also cover bodily words, colours and emotions, plurals, 'flowers', 'store', 'attic', 'beam', 'rich man', 'enemy', and the phrase 'to come back'. Later gives local forms and says which ones his own family used.

Outside Gelman's house and on the drive to the old town, a speaker (probably Gelman) with Kerler discusses a small prayer house and the old buildings of the Jewish district of Kamianets-Podilskyi, when they were demolished and when the synagogue was closed by the Bolsheviks. At the former Great Synagogue, now a restaurant, they talk about its origin under Turkish rule and its later history, and local Russian speakers describe its fires and restoration, the old town, the prison, the burnt archive and the church. The speaker (apparently Gelman) tells how his family fled in the war, the sister died on the way and the father died in 1943 (?), and he found his mother and a brother on returning in 1946. From about 26 minutes Kaplan, in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, tells Kerler about the Jewish museum, the community room, the old cemetery with its tzadikim and the synagogue's weekly and Passover events, and about Polish volunteers, the monuments to victims of the camps and ghetto (Pechora, Skazyntsi), his army service and communism, and how prayer continued in homes until a synagogue opened in 1948. He discusses prewar Jewish numbers, synagogues, hasidim and shoykhets, relations with the Baptists who took over a synagogue building, the community leadership, and a critical view of Joint, Hesed and Sochnut aid and of emigration.

Gaiviker speaks about trades, then says that during the civil war a pogrom took place in 1919, with shooting between the houses and killing of old people and children. He mentions his father and aunt who, according to the transcript, ended up in Uzbekistan.

Yarmolnik starts a story about a Petliura-era pogrom that her mother's family experienced in Proskuriv, and then recounts the German arrival in July 1941, when her father got the family away just before the Germans entered. She tells how an aunt's non-Jewish husband's relative, a policeman, handed over the aunt and her two children, who were killed in the ghetto. She lists the deaths of her brother, husband and son, and describes working in a wartime munitions factory in evacuation up to eighteen hours a day.

Kaviner describes Derazhnya as a Jewish town of artisans and some merchants, poor but cheerful. He talks about the Yiddish school closed in 1939 and the yeshiva he attended in parallel, which the authorities knew of but tolerated before closing it; its teachers took other jobs, and kheyders went private until the war. He names the head of the yeshiva (David Nissenbaum) and many rebbes of the region (Medzhybizh/Baal Shem Tov circle, Zinkiv, Volodarka(?), Chernobyl, Bratslav), and says about 5,000 Jews lay in the mass graves.

Kaviner names lesser-known local writers: Itsik Sokol, a Yiddish teacher who published a book after the war, and Moyshe Zibnberg, who wrote in the school newspaper and was killed during the occupation. Lemster asks about culture leagues, and Kaviner says there was a Yiddish theatre and Jewish circles in the town.

Vaisblai recounts the German occupation of Chemerivtsi. The rabbi says the Jews must go to the slaughter for their sins, though Kerler's question shows it was unclear who said it. A man took Jews' gold, and his family was driven on foot fifty kilometres to the Kam''yanets'-Podil's'kyy ghetto. He describes hunger, an old and a new ghetto, escapes by day for food, narrow escapes and hiding, and flight to Dunaivtsi and beyond.

Vaisblai continues his escape narrative, moving from Kupyn and the surrounding district from village to village. He passes as a non-Jew, is tested by a drunk, is sheltered by peasants, and hides in barns and on stoves. Some are kind, others turn him away or threaten to denounce him; he meets a few Jews and narrowly escapes. Finally he gets back to Chemerivtsi, where a gendarme makes him clean his boots.

Kerler returns to the rabbi's words. Vaisblai says the rabbi, Dudye, told the Jews of Chemerivtsi that they must go to the slaughter for their sins, and that he heard it himself. They discuss people's faith in the rabbi, who was consulted in quarrels. Vaisblai ends with the cell in the Kam''yanets'-Podil's'kyy ghetto, where one man refused to go.

After demobilization Kaviner returned to Derazhnya, saw the graves of the murdered including his parents', and soon moved to Khmel'nyts'kyy to work. He describes the postwar famine and his work as head of a carpentry workshop, and says there were good and bad years.

Kaviner tells legends about the Baal Shem Tov: his delay of Kol Nidre on the eve of Yom Kippur, and a note that he gave to an innkeeper for the later gabbai Yankl, which showed he could foresee the future. He also tells how the Besht forbade a gravestone, how the grave was marked and the state of the monument before and during the German occupation, when a cemetery guard was killed. Kaviner says he first came to Medzhibozh in 1946, after demobilization, while visiting the graves of holy men.

Vaisblai describes his wartime experiences as a boy of eleven. His family was taken to Kam"yanets'-Podil's'kyy, where his father, mother and grandparents are buried; he escaped on his father's urging and was held for a time by a German. He describes the old and new ghettos, bringing food to his father, the killing of children, and an uncle Zelik, a wealthy man. He then wandered among Dunaivtsi, Kupyn and other villages, hiding that he was a Jew and being helped by various non-Jews. Much of the passage is Russian or garbled.

Katz describes the war years. After his father was called up, he did the coachman work himself, carrying timber and hauling boards, until his father was released ill in 1943. In 1941 Hungarian gendarmes took Jews from the village, and a train went toward Stanislav, where the Poles were said to have been killed. Katz then recalls the Iza ghetto in 1944 (about three weeks), hunger, and how he slipped home at night for food. The family was then taken to the Khust brickworks, with beatings and searches, and sent by train to Auschwitz. He describes the selection, shaving, shower and clothing, then Birkenau, where he received a number, and then Monowitz with his father and the factory work.

Snook tells that her parents were taken in 1941 and that she carried a relative's small child on arrival at a camp. A German separated her from the child, and she saw the crematorium burning. Another woman told her she was spared because of her youth, and she says she was 22 years old. She closes with a remark on how little good is done today compared with the past.

Snook speaks of 1941, when her parents were taken away; she was staying with a relative and a neighbour, and the family went to Poland (?), where they were killed. Later she was taken to the camp, rescued by a German from the child, and freed in 1945. She returned home and lived hard years after the war; her family relations and her own illness are mentioned. Kerler tells of his birth in Moscow and move to Israel, and Snook talks about children and relatives in Israel and America.

In the Khust synagogue Repkin explains its history in Russian: construction began in 1861, much of it is original, the paintings are original, the lions part came from Oleksandrivka, and the wiring was replaced two years before the visit. He recounts the Khust Jewish population in 1940 and its losses in the Holocaust, the ghetto from April 1944 and deportations to Auschwitz, and that Soviet authorities tried to close it for a club in about 1965–66 and a protest by women and children, apparently, saved it. He describes the books found there, with stamps from villages in the region and Yiddish, Hungarian and Slovak printings, and his catalogue of owners for a future museum. He also describes the repair of doors, donors from abroad, the mikveh-side rooms and a slaughtering knife found in the building, and talks about his own career at the shoe factory and the synagogue's upkeep, caretaker and minyan.

Smelanskii recalls his grandfather, a respected man in Smila to whom people came with questions, and the six or seven synagogues that stood until 1941. He lists uncles, aunts and cousins with their names, occupations and places (Moscow, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Israel), says that relatives were evacuated or killed at Babi Yar in 1941, and mentions an uncle who ran the printing house of the Smila newspaper. He also says his father worked on the railway.

Braverman describes holiday food: buckwheat latkes with goose cracklings and fat for Hanukkah, and potato latkes for Passover. She then recounts how her father's younger brother, a Zionist who founded a Jewish gymnasium in Solkhov, fled during the civil-war period, went through Poland and settled in France, and how the relatives there lived. She talks about her cousins in France, a cousin's birthday, and her own parents' fates: her mother was killed in Kalinovka. A discussion of where Kalinovka is follows.

A man introduces a film about his family. He remembers his mother as a poor, pious widow with ten children and his brother Shmuel, who used the name Artur and was a Bund leader in Warsaw. Artur organized the underground, spoke against the ghetto, escaped through Belgium and France, and represented Polish Jews in the Polish government in London. He took his own life in protest in 1943 (?), and the film, in Polish with English subtitles, is about him. Part of the talk is translated into Russian by another speaker.

Kipnis speaks about the commemoration of her father, Itsik Kipnis, as a Yiddish writer, including a prize and media coverage. She recalls that after he came to Kyiv in 1944 (?), he went on the second day on foot to Babyn Yar. Kerler then sets up the microphone and explains the archive project at Indiana for recording spoken Yiddish, culture and literature. He says that they live near Chicago.

Kipnis speaks about her grandparents: her grandfather was a tanner who prepared hides, and the family's workshop was later taken by the Soviets. Her grandmother kept house, livestock and poultry and cared for the grandchildren, and visited Kyiv only briefly because she missed home. The grandfather stayed behind under the Germans and was killed in 1941. The segment ends with Kerler promising to return.

Torchinsky reads his poem about the Warsaw ghetto, dated 1992. It describes the German conquest, deportation, killings, burning of victims, and the uprising and the hope of liberation. Kerler then says he has a few questions and asks about non-Jews who spoke Yiddish.

Khandros recalls his service as a commissar in a cavalry regiment, quartered in the park of an estate at Bialy Wody in summer 1945. He describes the ruined town of Grabovets, where pavements were laid with Jewish gravestones, and a local priest who told him the history. He tells how he found a cellar with Jewish belongings and the names of an owner, his wife and two children, shot for hiding Jewish families. The Ukrainian police were alerted by a neighbour. Kerler establishes that this was summer 1945.

Khandros describes the first day of the German occupation of Ozarintsy, which he did not witness himself. The Germans drove the Jews of the town into the synagogue, and a German on a motorcycle brought petrol to burn it. Villagers took belongings from the houses and later brought some back. A maid in his family's house took their sewing machine and returned it in October 1941. Kerler asks whether she spoke Yiddish, and Khandros says she did not.

Khandros speaks of a non-Jewish Sabbath helper who grew up in the town and spoke good Yiddish. The Jews had helped his family in a famine, yet he was the only villager who took part in the action against the Jews on the first day. He was later imprisoned for ten years. Khandros says he wrote about this in his book and that the man's son told the story in front of the camera when a film was made in the early 1990s. He mentions that he has made more than thirty documentary films, including one on the history of the town.

Start of a second interview, with Grayf, born in Kolomyya in 1922. Grayf gives his parents' names (Gershon and Etl), names the seven surviving siblings, and says that his sister and parents were deported from the ghetto and perished, while a brother died in Israel. He says that he and his brother David live in Kolomyya and have a niece in Frankivsk. He then describes how the region passed between Poland, the Ukraine and Romania and where the Bukovina border lay, and begins to answer Kerler's questions about his father's work, his mother and his schooling.

Vider names his siblings (two sisters and four brothers) and what became of them: his father and a younger brother were killed, a sister was taken to Palestine by the Red Cross, and an older brother fled Romania before the war and ended up in Palestine as a tractor driver. Kerler asks what Jewish history he learned in school, and Vider says mostly ancient history such as Samson. Vider says he remembers cantorial melodies because he sang them to himself on long cycling trips to fish, and begins to sing.

Grayf says he worked on the railway when the war began and left for Russia within days, while his parents stayed. His parents were taken to the ghetto and deported; many Jews were shot nearby and others sent to Germany. His younger brother and sister jumped from a transport; the sister was caught, the brother hid in town and later reached Palestine and Tel Aviv. He says Ukrainians sheltered some Jews, and he blames Bandera's followers for antisemitism after the war.

Vider talks about his father, who studied at a yeshiva and qualified as a shoykhet but gave up after a half year because he pitied the animals. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army under Franz Joseph and was wounded in the leg. Vider left Romania in 1940; his mother had died earlier, and his father and brother were killed after the Germans arrived, as his brother-in-law, who served in Moscow, learned after the war. His two siblings were taken to Israel by the Red Cross.

Biter explains the reason for the name Biter, gives his birth year as 1918 and names his parents Kolmen and Yeti and his grandfathers; his father was a middle landowner. He describes the 1941 pogrom by Ukrainian nationalists, forced labor, deportation to Snyatyn and a train toward Ivano-Frankivs'k, from which he jumped through a window. He was helped by three student friends, got papers as a Ukrainian under a different name and worked for a German estate until the end of the war.

Krotsh recalls that his parents' town was wiped out and the Jews were driven to Botoşani. He had by then crossed over to the Russians, with his middle brother Michl. He names his sisters and brothers, and says his older brother served in the Romanian army or gendarmerie. He also mentions a cousin or niece now living in Israel.

Skop talks about his family. His father Yosl, who was born in a small town (Polonne?), was a gravestone maker, and his mother Reyzl came from near Moscow. His parents stayed in town during the war, and the local police killed his mother while the Germans commanded. He names his six brothers. Five of the seven brothers were killed in the war and one died earlier.

Skop speaks about Nune, the madman of Korosten', killed when the Germans entered the town, and about Meir the blind man, a beggar who recognised people by voice. He then mentions Meyshe the gravedigger at the cemetery, and a search for a grave by visitors from abroad. The talk of the cemetery is partly garbled.

Ocheretianyi talks about his uncle, a strong man who worked on a kolkhoz and at a factory before the war. Under the Germans he was killed, and the sons of the family were taken away as teenagers. The passage trails off.

Kislinskaia describes the problem of having no papers proving her wartime work, and her postwar work in a Korsun factory making candy, treacle cakes, wine and seltzer. Only two other Jewish women worked there, and she brought matzo to her Russian co-workers at Passover. She then talks about life today: prices, utilities, fuel, and the former Jewish houses of the town. Kerler asks about the Yiddish for a building, and she says many Jews were killed there. Kerler asks her brother's name.

Setting up the interview with Gershtein. He speaks of his brother in America, who was denied a visa for a visit, and of the search for Yiddish speakers in the region. Gershtein then shows his native village Holoby on the map. He says that thousands of Jews are buried in the woods near it, that he asked authorities in Luts'k for a memorial, and that many Jews lived there. Kerler begins filling in the personal-data form.

Gershtein gives personal and family details. His Yiddish name is Avrom, and he was eighteen during the war years. His father Motke(?) was born in Holoby in the 1870s (?) and worked at a slaughterhouse. His mother Gitl sewed at home on a machine together with another woman. There were six children. Gershtein names several siblings, among them Shmuel, Khave and Yankl, and says some family members went to America and Israel after the war while he was in the army. His grandfather Moyshe Itskhok died in America (Detroit?). Gershtein also recalls his uncle, aunt and three children killed in the woods, and says the town was called Kovel in Yiddish.

Gershtein names his siblings who ended up in America, including a brother who served in the Polish army and was wounded in Warsaw. His mother survived, but his father's fate is unclear in the transcript. He tells how his mother's sister Chaye Sore and her husband Rakhmil (the uncle) and their three children were killed; the uncle chose to go to the shooting with his family rather than save himself.

Kerler asks the friend about his home village of Rozhyshche, and he gives his name as Ignat Petrovich, surname spelled Olchowicz (?). He speaks about the town's Jewish population before the war, saying it was large and many were shot, and the Yiddish name of the town is discussed. Kerler asks how many synagogues there were, and the answer is one. The friend mentions a family named Pen and explains to the team that they are researchers recording interviews.

Asked about the Yiddish press in Odesa, Pensatii says he read a Yiddish newspaper published in Moscow, and a German-language paper. In Russian he describes using German as a Soviet officer in postwar Germany, where he hunted war criminals responsible for killing Jews and sat on a military tribunal. He retells an interrogation of a former Gestapo chief from Zaporizhzhia who explained Hitler's rise, and Kerler tries to bring him back to the interview questions.

In the town centre, Lebvol describes the former Polish magistrate building used as a prison, where nationalists were shot at the start of the war, and the former homes of Poles. She and her companion recall that King Jan Sobieski lived in Zhovkva and that a synagogue is named after him. The team says farewell and the visit ends; Lebvol gives her name, Pepe (Pesye) Shulmanovna Lebvol, and that Pesye was her sister's name.

Nisman says that as a girl she visited the rebbe at Purim, and that she remembers the Chernivtsi rabbi, Dr Mark, who was shot with her husband and his group by the Germans. Kerler then asks about the word for the cucumber brine and she answers; she turns to Passover.

The Meler interview starts, with Kerler talking with Meler about a Torah scroll and whether it is ritually fit, and about a local rabbi. Meler says that before the war his father, mother, three sisters and grandmother all perished and that he alone survived, having been taken into the army in the 1940s. He now has a new family and is going to see his daughter in Latvia. Russian side talk from others intrudes.

Meler talks about the prewar Jewish community in L'viv, its hospital and orphanage, and a holy site tied to a woman called the Golden Rose. He describes how Khrushchev had the old cemetery destroyed to make a market. He tells about an acquaintance who survived the war.

On the way, Dorfman describes the Kleparov railway station, from where Jews from Lviv, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were sent on to Belzec; he gives the figure of half a million and the memorial there. He tells of a man who escaped from a wagon as a boy and later became a professor in Melbourne. He then begins to talk about the Janowska camp.

At the Janowska camp site, Dorfman describes the sand pits, the camp for Jews, the uprising of November 1943 led by a poet, and the burning of corpses with a mill. He talks about the stone memorial put up with help from Freiburg, the Munich professor Alexander Schwarz, plans for a larger monument that he opposes, and Ukrainian recognition of rescuers. He also describes the camp's labor and the Nazi report that Galicia was free of Jews.

Passing the former ghetto area, Dorfman and bystanders discuss, in Russian and Yiddish, the killing of Jews by the Ukrainian police. He describes the conditions in the ghetto and the memorials: a monument unveiled in 1992, funds from Jews abroad, the Soviet-era plan for three monuments, and the sculptor and architect. He also speaks about prewar Jewish life in Lviv, the numbers in the city, the Soviet arrival and deportations, and what happened after the war, including the museum collection and the bridge known as the Gate of Death.

Kerler asks about Jewish life in Peremyshlyany. Brandler discusses the postwar Jewish presence there and how he and the partisan commander Shimon Zisser saved the cemetery and the small hall holding the tsadik's grave. He names the tsadik as Reb Meir (?) and compares him to the Belzer rebbe. He tells of Zisser's wartime partisan unit, and of a survivor named Kirzhner who escaped a shooting, along with other friends, and of Jewish police betraying people in hiding.

Diner talks about antisemitism, in the Polish period and in the army, where Jews were beaten, and his sister was injured. His older brother and his children, and his sister, were killed by the Germans. Kerler then explains in Yiddish that he lives in America, was earlier in England and Israel, and shows his Israeli passport.

She says a teacher, Fishl der Krimer, came to the house to teach her Yiddish and Hebrew for two or three years. She was also taught blessings and prayers, though she says she has forgotten most. She talks about her mother lighting the Sabbath candles, the Friday challah, and her father taking the children to the synagogue. Her mother and grandmothers could not read, and she says the teacher was later killed.

Shvardovskaia, asked by Kerler to speak of the war, describes first the Polish period, then two years of Soviet rule with closed shops, and the arrival of the Germans in 1941. Jews were confined as in a ghetto, forced to hand over valuables, and the first skilled Jewish worker was killed at once. She describes Jews thrown into pits and shot, her escape and flight into the woods, and a Ukrainian acquaintance who hid her in an attic, where her father and a sister joined her for three months. Later they hid for a year in the forest, fed at night by Ukrainians, escaped a second shooting, moved between villages, and finally joined Russian partisans. She mentions that her father and brother were killed; the details are unclear in the transcript.

She describes how she escaped from the execution pit where the Jews of the town were shot and fled while being shot at. Her father had told her to go to a Ukrainian acquaintance, who took her into the forest, where she spent about two years in cold and hardship. He brought food and, when Germans were near, left it in a canal. A younger sister also came. Kerler asks about the shooting and the Ukrainian nationalists.

Shoikhetman says the story of Derazhnya would fill a whole scroll. Thousands of its Jews were shot, and it took years to get a monument with three graves from the Soviet authorities. Kerler asks his year of birth, which is given as 1935, and then what his father was called.

Shoikhetman recalls the outbreak of war: a railway running by the house and a plane dropping three bombs. He speaks of the Jews of Derazhnya, with one synagogue and several small prayer rooms before the war, and says there was a cheder but no yeshiva. Kerler and Lemster press him on a yeshiva and on a man from Proskurov who studied in Derazhnya. He also quotes census-type population figures for Ukrainians, Russians and Jews, and says almost no Jews survived the occupation.

Shoikhetman speaks about his family. Many of his father's relatives were killed in the war, and some had gone earlier to Palestine. An aunt read Sholem Aleichem to him in Yiddish. At home they spoke Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian, he attended a Ukrainian school, and he knows some Yiddish and English. He says he came to Luts'k around Passover in 1959, and then begins to speak of his grandparents.

Outside the building, Shoikhetman and the others talk about the surrounding structures, once Jewish, now a repair workshop and car showroom. They also mention the charity administration (UEV) and the writer Dina Rubina. He says he worked in archives drawing plans of these buildings, and he speaks of mass graves, one without a marker and another with one, and of a possible visit to the cemetery area.

Kaplan argues that Jews should not be pushed to emigrate from Ukraine, Russia or Georgia, and criticizes the Joint and the Sochnut. He asks why Jewish research is left to Americans, and says that visiting leaders and Jewish organizations should come to the small towns to see the truth. He recounts conversations with Kerler about politics, communism and the Zionist aim of bringing Jews to Israel. He also complains about leaders in Kyiv and Vinnytsya who give little help, about unfair distribution of trips abroad, and about corruption in the Jewish movement. He describes the Sunday school run by a teacher from Vinnytsya who teaches Hebrew, history and tradition. He gives his parents' origins in Ozaryntsi and Slydy and says his paternal grandfather served as prayer leader and later as cantor. He mentions the burning of Jews at Ozaryntsi in the war, his twin brother, his army service from 1951 and the army service of his son and grandchildren. He recalls studying with the melamed Tseburskii for four years, and says he later forgot Yiddish in the army and relearned speaking it in the community.

Kaplan describes his father as a soap-maker and cantor, and talks about Sabbath food and customs, a Russian neighbour lighting the stove, Hanukkah, Purim, and Hebrew lessons. He tells of the camp at Pechera, the escape of a group of Jews with a Ukrainian guard's help, the walk home along the river, and the family's hiding in the cellar of Polish neighbours (Zbigin?) until 1944. He covers the Jewish police, the drowned orphans off Constanta, commemoration work led by the late rabbi Sobol, and a ghetto song. He also tells of secret Passover matzo baking after the war, the three cemetery fields, non-Jews who speak Yiddish, the word Litvak, and the term for a 'good Jew' (rebbe or tsadik).

Fiksler says she was taken into a ghetto in April 1944 and deported in May to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was in a camp block and had no number. Her parents were killed there. She was then sent to Austria, worked at machines in a factory near Linz, and was liberated by the Americans. She decided to go home to look for relatives.

Nayman describes coming home after the war to find his parents gone, not knowing where they were killed; he says Kaddish for them yearly. He gives approximate birth years for his parents and says he was taken into the military in October 1942. Kerler asks what he knew then of the killing of Jews; Nayman says he knew little and heard only of deportations to Germany.

Snook says the minyan today meets only on Sabbath, then names her mother Esther Fuks and recalls her paternal grandfather David, who lived to ninety. Her father Leyb Abramovitsh was born around 1899, and she gives the names of the siblings who were killed. She married in 1939, lived in a nearby village for forty years and moved to Khust in 1971 for a minyan and Jewish life. Her first husband was killed, and she has a son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Pasik talks about prewar cinema and theater visiting the village from Mykolayiv. She then speaks of her mother's brother Zuska (Hroisman family), who was a driver, married in the 1930s, had a daughter, and was killed in the war. She mentions other relatives who were killed or died, and who still speaks Yiddish in Mykolayiv, and Kerler notes the name and telephone number of a man there.

Pasik talks about the move to Mykolayiv in 1965 (?) and the Jewish life she found there: speaking Yiddish, the synagogue under Soviet pressure and a relative who was a ritual slaughterer. Passover matzo and fasting days are discussed, and she tells of a blood-libel story told by her mother. She says faith is hard after the killings, names her best time as before the war, and compares prices and pension then and now.

Trachtenberg describes prewar Jewish life in Novoseltsy, with the number of synagogues and the Jewish Culture House. His house, which had two floors, was burned down. He says he and his brother were the only survivors in the family, and that his mother and sisters died in the ghetto and camp. He describes living in barracks and a kolkhoz barn in the ghetto and the Mykolayiv camp, and the shooting of ten escapees.

A brief opening exchange whose first words are unclear. Dubinskaia then begins to say that the Germans killed her parents, and that her sister brought a child to her at the start of the war.

Bakmayev describes the arrival of the Germans in 1941 and the order for Jews to move and wear a star. His family hid in a cellar with other families. He went out to beg for food in villages, walking about twenty kilometres. They were freed by the Red Army in 1944. He also names the siblings he lived with there, and the passage includes a question on how many hid and survived.

Lerner speaks in Russian, with Yiddish interjections, about prewar Jewish Ostroh. Wealthy Jews lived in the center and the poor on the outskirts, working as porters, shoemakers and tailors. There were several synagogues, including a women's one; the main one survives, and he mentions photographs and a chandelier given from America, now in the museum. He then talks about Yiddish books and ritual objects in the museum and the Jewish calendar he owns. He also says the Jews were shot nearby and he can show the graves. Lemster and Kerler ask about Slavuta and Zaslav, and about distances.

Kipervaser speaks about her husband's family, whose three sisters and other children were killed; she says that she and her husband mark their yahrzeit every year. After the war they did not return to Berezdiv, as no Jews were left there, and came to Slavuta in 1944. She says the Yiddish name of the town is Slovite (?). She talks about Yiddish at home, a child named Itsik who died, and the Jews who came back from evacuation. Her daughter completed an institute. Lemster asks whether a Yiddish theater came to Berezdiv.

After the interview with Dorfman, the team greets Feldman and sets up the recording in his home. He gives his name and birth year, and says he was born in the village of Yanova Rudnya, about 20 km from Ovruch. He talks about his father, who leased a mill and farm from a landowner and was killed in 1919, and about his mother, sisters and five brothers who went to America. He tells of his melamedim and the Velednik tsadik, whom his father followed. He recalls his father's Sabbath tunes, studying and teaching at cheder in Luhyny, and recites prayers (kabbalat shabbat, kaddish, kiddush); the transcript is garbled for most of this. He also remembers Christian farmers in his village and begins to speak about Rosh Hashanah.

Feldman tells how his father was killed in 1919 by a band of local peasants, apparently Poles, who wanted his boots; he had refused. The band took him to the forest at night and killed him, and the family searched a week before finding the body. After that they moved to Skrebelychi.

Feldman says the family moved to Skrebelychi, where his grandfather had lived. When his brother in America died, the mother received a pension of 38 rubles for years (?). Using it, she bought half a flat in the 1930s. At the start of the war she stayed put, and her sisters from other towns were killed, including sixteen relatives.

Turovskaia describes her family. She lived with parents and siblings, and the family dwelling is described. She names her paternal and maternal grandparents and uncles. Several relatives were killed, among them her brother, shot by Germans, and her uncle Yitskhok, taken into the army. A man from Old Veledniki reported him, as she says. Kerler records the names.

In the Berdychiv synagogue Kerler and Lemster speak with several congregants about praying and about a minyan. They recall that the team had visited before, in winter and summer, for interviews, and mention a late rabbi (called a tsadik(?)) who was ill in 2005. A congregant relates that a Jew ran out of a mass-killing pit during the German occupation. A man introduces himself as Berzon, born in Berdychiv, says he lost an older brother, fought at the front and was invalided, and the interviewers ask to speak with him and his wife. Much of the stretch is garbled.

A Russian-language poem on the death of an actor and on the six million victims is read aloud, apparently from a recording of Markish's poetry. There is almost no discussion beyond it.

At an old wooden synagogue, Kerler and Fish and others discuss the building and what survives inside. They note that the original wooden structure is hidden behind brick walls, and Kerler hopes that Jews will pray there. Fish says that Jews were a large share of the population in the region and that they were all killed.

Fish continues listing his siblings and their fates: a brother who was a tailor, with his wife and a small daughter, and two sisters, one married shortly before the German attack on Poland. All the family were killed, and Fish says he had more than a hundred relatives. Kerler and Fish discuss the dates of the outbreak of the war and the Soviet and German entry into Rivne. A mention of a cousin in Israel and a visit to Yad Vashem opens the passage.

Khiterman says she had a Jewish wedding at home with a canopy, officiated by the rabbi of Berezhov (Berezov?), with many Jewish guests, music and singing. Kerler asks about the town, which had many Jews who were later killed. Her father was a forest overseer. Kerler then thanks her and winds down the interview.

Fish shows a 1928 family photograph and identifies his parents, aunts and siblings. His mother was Khaye, daughter of Yoyne(?); the siblings were Etl-Rayzl, Mordkhe-Yoyne, Leye and Mirl. He says the whole family was shot, including relatives in Lublin. His parents came from villages near Rivne; he was born in Rivne in 1922.

Pressed by Kerler to say what should be remembered rather than done, Fish says Jewish schools and the teaching of children to be Jews matter most. He adds that the millions of murdered Jews, including children, must be remembered. He recalls that under Polish rule Jews lived as Jews and spoke Yiddish from childhood, and worries about children of mixed families. The interview closes with thanks.

Vaisman says there was a ghetto in Sharhorod and recounts his sister's belief that Ukrainians helped the Jews. He names a Ukrainian woman, Ksenia Vasilovna Loyanich (spelling uncertain), who brought his family food and whom he wants recognised. He says he does not remember the war, and that the Romanians did not kill Jews in Sharhorod but brought their own Jews, thousands of whom starved and were buried in the local cemetery. He tells a Hershele Ostropolyer story about a poor guest at a Sabbath meal. He recalls the Passover seder, with his mother's matzo bagels and kugels and the bakery that needed official permission to bake matzo, and also Hanukkah, Purim and the Ninth of Av. Katz and Kerler ask many dialect questions on bird names (a dove, a small bird), the colour of the sky, words for ugly face, back, house, 'almost', Lithuanian Jews and converts to Christianity, the town as shtetl, and the word for life. Vaisman also recounts the case of a local Jewish man who converted. In the last part the daughter shows an album of Jewish childhood friends who spoke Yiddish and have mostly emigrated to Israel, America and Moscow. The talk turns to Yiddish and Jewish life in America and Israel, Vaisman's brother in Israel, and his father's relatives, who were killed during the war.

Kurman recalls going to the synagogue with her parents, her mother's knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew, and the lit interior, now gone. The synagogue closed before the war, and her father prayed at home. She says she was sent to a Russian school and cannot read Yiddish. She recalls the Passover seder and hiding the afikoymen, and that her older siblings preferred the cinema or theater. Kerler then puts a long series of vocabulary and translation questions: greetings, everyday objects, Passover and Hanukkah food and the dreidel game, a year in words, and the word for a gravestone. Kurman then tells of the war: the Germans' arrival, the family's hiding place under the stove, the Bukovinian Dr. Taykh who paid the contributions and saved them, and hunger deaths under the Romanians. After a short talk about her health, the camera moves to Shpykiv. The team meets a woman who gives her name as Sheyndele (Krasner), with mostly Russian talk, jokes and a Polish song. She tells of a rebbe of the town, her mother's family and her uncle's house, and her uncle's death at Pechera. She recites a counting rhyme and sings Yiddish songs learned from her mother.

Kerler asks the meaning of several words (a non-Jewish holiday, the cemetery, 'good place'), and about the sukkah in Yampil', and the house where the family lived. Kleiner recalls his older brother Nute, a learned young man who died. He remembers Sabbath songs and kiddush. Kleiner then sings the memorial prayer for those killed, with a few words about Yampil', Lyakhovtsy and Karnitsa. Kerler praises it.

Shvartsburg tells what he knows of Jewish Skvyra before the war from his grandmother's and parents' stories and from a book. The town had a large Jewish population, a dozen or so prayer houses, and a Jewish center. The Jews who lived there, about a thousand, were shot by the Germans, and Jews have since left for Israel, America and Australia.

Shvartsburg talks about his grandparents. One grandmother came from Pavoloch and the other from Kyiv. His grandfather Yokhanan Kogan was killed by the Germans, and the other grandfather's family was large. The family went to the rebbe before the Soviets, and the grandmother told him of Jewish life in Skvyra. He has two sons and talks about the war years when Jews were killed.

Kerler puts a few dialect questions, including expressions for a headache and a short sentence with the word for 'as soon as'. Vainshelboim then says he has family in Israel, and that he married in 1946 (?) a woman from Slavuta whose parents were killed there. He ends by saying a pit with sixty people was found in Ostroh.

Klein recalls her school: a Yiddish school that became Russian, with the same teachers. She mentions the Yiddish literature taught — Sholem Aleichem, Mendele and Peretz — and Yiddish theater visiting the town. She mentions that non-Jews spoke Yiddish, and that only Jewish children attended the Yiddish school. She notes that about 20,000 Jews were killed in the town.

Bivson says she returned to Polonne in 1945 from Birobidzhan. She answers questions about the Jews there, fewer than before the war because many were killed and tortured, and about relatives, neighbors and friends. She mentions the ghetto and non-Jews who rescued Jews.

Klein says her school taught many subjects and produced professors, and that many relatives were killed. Kerler and Klein discuss sending copies of photos and material through a Hesed. They talk about the great synagogue and about Gotlober, whose name she checked, and Kerler says he left memoirs and works in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish.

Burshtein says his mother, sister, brother and grandmother were killed in Sobolivka, where a mass grave holds several hundred Jews. He says life now is good. He worked many years at a factory in Haysyn, thirty-seven years as chief engineer, and received a house; his children now live in it.

Yakuta gives her name and birth in Teplyk in 1921 and says she lived there until the war. She names her father and says he was born in Teplyk, and that he and her mother and three children were killed by the Germans. Her father was a hatmaker, and she describes the lined caps and collars he made. She gives her grandfather's name and her parents' names and birth years, lists her siblings, and says two brothers were evacuated to Tashkent. One brother served as a military doctor, and the family is now partly in Tel Aviv.

Yakuta says her father refused to stay as a selected artisan when his wife and children were taken, and that he was killed with them. The other specialists were killed later. Kerler asks for the Yiddish for "later".

Veliye answers a few terminology questions, including the word for a priest and for one who converted. She says her sister, father and grandmother were baptized to avoid being caught. She then speaks about the war years in Sharhorod, where the occupiers were Germans, and about relatives who were shot there. She also tells of the fate of her mother in the ghetto. The details are hard to follow in the transcript.

Marinina speaks about the two Germans who helped Jews during the war: a Czech-born driver and an officer who rescued children and took them to Bershad'. She also tells of a non-Jewish woman who saved a Jewish boy, and of the difficulties of getting this confirmed. The passage deals mostly with rescue and not with the Dzhankoye song or Passover, as the catalogue describes.

The team drives around Teplyk with a Russian-speaking guide, probably the community director, who points out a cellar where more than a thousand people were shot on 27 May 1942 and where captives were held afterwards. He shows the sites of former synagogues, now a bathhouse and a dry cleaner, and the Jewish school of 1928. He discusses the old Jewish cemetery with its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graves, the history of Jews in Teplyk, the Potocki castle, and a former Jewish mill. From about 35:30 a woman begins an interview in Yiddish and Ukrainian, with a dialect question about "hayssn" versus "gayssn" and the Tisha b'Av bur-throwing custom.

Gliazer talks about the war and the Holocaust years, saying the atrocities were committed not only by Germans but also by local non-Jewish collaborators. He names one local man who helped the Germans search out Jews. Kerler also asks briefly about children's play in Yiddish.

Gliazer tells of the Jewish uprising in the Kremenets camp or ghetto, in which he says his mother's family came from; Jews attacked the guards en masse, many died and few survived. He heard of it from a participant but declines to name him, and says the uprising is recorded in the Ternopil' historical museum.

Gliazer continues on 1939–41, describing German officers visiting before the invasion, German spies on the border, and the Soviet failure to expect an attack. He reflects on the war as a whole, citing the six million Jewish victims and comparing Hitler and Stalin. Katz asks whether he believes in God.

In Russian, the guide gives figures for the Jews of Kremenets' killed in the war, including immigrants from Łódź who arrived in 1939, and says the intelligentsia were killed early in the war and buried on Cross Mountain. She points out the site of the old central synagogue and old Jewish houses, and says something was burned in September 1942. As they approach the slope with the old Jewish cemetery, Kerler adds that expeditions dated gravestones to the 16th century.

The guide leads the party up through the cemetery, describing its older sections and the many surviving gravestones. She says the Germans made ghetto Jews carry stones to pave roads and that locals took others for outbuildings. She compares the amphitheatre-like slope with a cemetery in Israel and with Mohyliv-Podil's'kyi, and says a local photographer, Valerii, photographed every stone for registration in America. The group looks at stone carving and dates, and discusses a site on the hill with 8 or 9 mass graves near a ski jump, as well as a stone with a Hebrew inscription and Ronald Doctor's reading of it. Kaddish is not clearly audible here.

Driving on, the guide says that nothing is visible at a supposed site and discusses where a trench with bodies lay. Approaching the main killing site, she says the road was used by trucks carrying victims and that Jews were piled in layers on the trucks. The site was chosen because trenches left from a regiment's firing range already existed. She says about 7,000 were killed in the field and points out a new Israeli-funded memorial before a Soviet-era one.

The group stops at a memorial at the killing site, and the guide mentions a yearly gathering there in September for young people from the town. Kerler and a second visitor speak about relatives' bones and family connections, and Katz asks about the Soviet monument.

Kaddish is recited at the memorial. Afterwards the guide and Kerler discuss a planned uprising in the Kremenets' ghetto, drawing on Samuel Schutzman's writing, and the manuscript held in Ternopil. She mentions eyewitnesses, and that Germans carried out the shootings openly, so local boys watched from trees. She recommends Stanisław Szeybel's (?) memoir in Polish held in the museum, and mentions a list with over 30 relatives of a named person (Paivol?). Katz asks about a rabbi and a shoykhet, and the area of the former ghetto is pointed out.

In the car, the guide mentions a thematic collection on the Jewish ghetto and photographs of the Battler-Kanner family. She describes the Lyceum and the museum, and says a diary kept as a boy by Roman Kravchenko-Berezhnoi (?) about Nazi crimes against Jews, now living in Murmansk oblast, is to be published in English. She also tells how the family hid in an attic, how a baby's crying during a roundup caused the mother to poison the child, and how she then hanged herself with her father's help. The planned visit of kobzars and the museum's opening hours are also mentioned.

Tkach, born in 1935 in the small town of Chernivtsi ("Kleyn Tshernovits"), talks about her parents, grandparents and the traditional Jewish house with its mezuzah. She recalls her uncle the gabbai, the synagogue with its women's gallery, her aunt reading tkhines, and the killing of another aunt's family. She describes the war years, refugees and the ghetto, the postwar schools and her brother's studies, and her forty years as a journalist in Yampil'. She then covers food customs for Sabbath, Passover, Purim and Hanukkah, children's games, Yiddish-speaking neighbors and friends, and weddings with their dances and musicians. She also talks about non-Jews who spoke Yiddish, the postwar fear of speaking Yiddish and the antisemitism of the Doctors' Plot, and Ukrainian literature. The last part is a dialectological questionnaire: she is asked how various Russian words, phrases and sentences would be said in Yiddish (greetings, house and window words, colors, comparatives).

The end of the conversation with Preger, in a mix of Yiddish and Russian-influenced speech. She talks about local non-Jews breaking into houses and stealing, about killings of Jews by Germans and nearby villagers, and about the war's end. She also addresses the emigration of Jews to America and Israel, the use of the term Erets Yisroel, and complaints about pensions, prices and politics, plus an unnamed local woman and the Jewish community in Vinnytsya. Kerler also arranges the next stops.

Formal interview with Sapozhnik, who says she is a native of Tomashpol' and speaks Yiddish with her brother in Israel. She talks about her parents Nusn and Rukhl and the kolkhoz, her siblings, the old synagogue and how women prayed, her father's siddur and her poor childhood. She recalls the war, with her brothers drafted and the killings and ghettos under Germans and Romanians. She also mentions the town's remaining Yiddish speakers, and answers Kerler's questions on Yiddish words and on fish, melay and Passover food. Katz adds a general question about the best years.

Interview with Sapozhnik in her yard. She describes how hard her life is now, living alone, not eating well and missing her teeth. She gives her name, birth in Tomashpol' in 1924, her parents Nusn and Rekhl and the family surname, and lists her brothers and sisters, with their birth years and where they ended up (Israel, Moscow, the Far East). She recalls the kolkhoz where her parents worked, the old house with mezuzahs, the Romanian occupation and the ghetto with refugees and killings, and her marriages and the deaths of her husband and son. She also describes Sabbath, Hanukkah and Passover food and fish dishes, the old synagogues and the Yiddish school she did not attend, Yiddish-speaking non-Jews, and a rabbi killed in the war. She tells of her garden and sea-buckthorn oil, and of her mother's folk healing and cupping.

Shveibish speaks of earlier persecution and pogroms, then of the Romanian-run Transnistria period. Local non-Jews looted Jewish property while police and soldiers with dogs and horses drove the Jews, shooting those who could not walk. At night the column was driven through a village called Torkiv, then on to Pechera.

Shveibish describes conditions in the Pechera camp until spring 1944: killings, rape, no food or water, lice and typhus, and the dead dragged away. Her father was the first of the family killed, in 1941, and her mother died a month later, leaving her with her older brother. She recalls begging, and old non-Jewish women who gave food or took rings for bread, and the Romanian guards. Germans on the far bank of the Bug fired at those who went to the water. Prisoners came from other towns, from Bukovina and from Bessarabia, and the Judenrat is criticised.

Shveibish says the Judenrat was bad and cared only for itself. She describes overcrowding in the camp, children buried alive, and able-bodied prisoners taken to build a road and buried alive once it was done. A place name for the labor site is garbled, and the catalogue gives Baranovich. She also describes how the dead were buried in the woods in a large pit when it grew warmer.

Presler talks about the first days at the Pechera camp. Small children were brought to the camp and then taken away, and a non-Jewish woman is mentioned in connection with them. Many children were killed, and a second woman asks questions and comments. Kerler asks about recording this on tape.

Presler tells how her sister Tsirl and another girl were brought back to the camp from Bortnyky, tied to a horse and dragged. The other girl's leg was torn and she died within two hours. Presler's mother and older sister were then questioned and beaten in a staged trial in the camp, and Tsirl was tortured, coughing blood for half a year. Kerler asks for the year, and Presler gives 1942.

Presler describes life in the camp. Her mother had six sisters and two brothers, and about forty relatives were driven into the camp together. Presler recounts a selection by the Germans, in which she says the sick and children were set aside, and shooting. She tells how her sisters hid under a wall during it, and how she and her mother stayed, and she describes the cruelty to a relative's child. Kerler asks about the time between arrival and the selection.

Presler returns to the episode in which the Romanian soldiers stopped the Germans, and then speaks about her sisters and daily life in the camp. People hid in the forest in winter, and corpses were laid out and carried off on carts by the inmates, sometimes pulled by people. She mentions a beating by a Jewish policeman and the dying and swollen people, and a second woman adds that no food was given.

A second woman and Presler, answering Kerler, speak about how many survived Pechera: about three hundred then, and twenty-three still living. Presler says people were brought from Romania, Bessarabia and Mohyliv. She describes conditions in the camp, including people lying one on top of another, swollen legs and dead bodies every day.

Golfeld talks about his limited Hebrew schooling and childhood in Tul'chyn, which was happy before the war. He mentions the bandits and killings of Jews, and says Tul'chyn was somewhat better than elsewhere. Asked about the ghetto and Pechora camp, he says that rich people could buy their way out and that non-Jews saved many, expressing gratitude.

Golfeld speaks again of the Chechelnyk rebbe and of the town after the war, when no Jews remained and houses were wrecked and occupied by Gypsies. He mentions Jews remaining in Bershad' and a friend from there who writes in Yiddish. He tells how Leybish Kishke was killed by the Germans in 1941, which he saw himself, and what happened when the Germans entered Tul'chyn.

Kogan recalls the Bershad' ghetto, including the Star of David armband he wore and being beaten by a Romanian soldier when he went out to buy potatoes. He then describes refugees from Bukovina and Bessarabia driven into the ghetto, including a family who collected bread and carried the dead. His mother cooked for refugees. He mentions beginning to compose Yiddish verse.

Kogan recites the text of his song 'Dos lagerl' about the Bershad' ghetto and the murder of the shoykhet Gedalye. He says the Romanians killed leading artisans and merchants. His home was shared with several families, and Jews from Chernivtsi stayed there; he mentions a refugee family who later went to Edinet in Moldova. Kogan recalls the lice and deaths among refugees and that he was called up at seventeen.

Kogan talks about a book of ghetto writings and says it is from the Vilna ghetto, with Kerler suggesting Sutskever. Kerler asks whether he can read Yiddish. Kogan sings 'Zog nit keyn mol' and explains that Hirsh Glik was captured after the ghetto's liquidation and killed in Estonia in 1944. Kerler asks him to repeat his three songs.

Kogan describes the ghetto market where refugees from Bessarabia and Bukovina sold bread and police drove them away. He quotes a song in Ukrainian or Romanian, recalls families killed after an informer's denunciation, and says Bershad' had good craftsmen. After liberation the survivors were buried. A cinema mechanic was killed by a sniper in a church.

Kogan describes marching with the Red Army through Poland. At a Wrocław-area (?) site soldiers died after drinking from a poisoned barrel. He mentions Warsaw destroyed and an attack on Germans by his unit, then Berlin and the Reichstag, where he wrote his family name. He recalls soldiers drowned in a bunker flooded with water in May 1945. Kerler asks about the Yiddish school.

Kogan answers questions about the Bershad ghetto song Dos lagerl, mentioning a poor man who collected the dead on a cart. He recalls that many people died of hunger and a policeman once threatened to throw him into the river when he was seventeen. He sings Aheym, briderlekh, aheym and explains that he wrote it down on paper but hid the texts, fearing he would be accused of being a communist. He answers Kerler's and Lemster's questions about when and in what script he wrote his songs.

Kogan recites or sings the song Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt, about refugees from Bukovina, Bessarabia and Hungary driven into the Bershad ghetto, and then Aheym, briderlekh, aheym. Kerler and Lemster press him to separate texts he wrote himself from ones he copied, and he says some are his own. He recalls that a fire at his mother's house in Bershad destroyed writings and sings Dos lagerl, naming a man from the Lechetser family who collected the dead. He says he took the song "Zog nit keyn mol" from a book by a Yiddish writer, and Kerler names Sutzkever and Glik.

Yurkovetskij says that about forty Jews live in Tul'chyn today, and that they speak Yiddish or Russian among themselves. He says only a few came back from Pechera (a few hundred of thousands, with the guide giving other figures). Lemster asks whether camp songs existed, and he answers about the ghetto, where he was also held in Bershad, and the lice-ridden conditions.

Yurkovetskij speaks of the Bershad ghetto, where he says he was held for a year. He recalls Reb Gedalye, the shochet, who was shot with about three hundred Jews after money was collected for the partisans and the Germans found the list. Lemster and Kerler ask him about the details.

A woman speaks of a man's seven years of service with many medals. After his death he was buried next to his mother, in a place that was kept for him. She then tells of Tomashpil, where his mother was killed and he found her among the dead by her bag. Kerler asks whether this is her husband. Who is meant at each point is not fully clear in the transcript.

Kerler asks the man's name and birthplace; the answer is Tomashpil, with the Russian name Mikhail (Misha). His birth year is established as 1927. The women tell of the Tomashpil ghetto, where about two hundred people were killed, and of the family left orphaned. Kerler asks about a Jewish kolkhoz near Tomashpil.

A man who says he was born in 1929 tells of the Pechera camp, including a woman who ate a dead person and the Romanian gendarmes and Germans. The women describe prisoners worked to death or killed, and a sixteen-year-old sister of a relative who was killed. They also tell of Jews forced to dig their own graves, and a gendarme overturning the soup.

The women describe being held crammed in the school building, without food, water or room to lie down, while Romanians shot at crying children. A Ukrainian doctor beat out the windows in the freezing cold. People died daily and survivors recall starvation. Kerler asks whether the doctor was German.

Kogan talks about relations with non-Jews, mass killings by the Romanians in Bershad', and a woman's fate in the ghetto (the transcript does not make clear whether it is his wife's). He mentions Jews from Bukovina and his love of Yiddish, and says he wrote in Yiddish and finished seven grades in a Jewish school.

Kogan speaks about Zhabokrych and Bershad' during the war, including killings in Zhabokrych and the Romanian occupation. He names local Jews such as the shoykhet Gedalye Shulman (?) and the hearse-driver Avrom'tse (?) and his wife, with Kerler asking who they were. He then recites parts of his songs 'Dos lagerl' and 'Aheym, briderlekh, aheym'.

Kogan sings his ghetto song about the camp near Obodivka and Bershad', about Jews, kapores and the Bershad' cemetery. He then says he wrote only part of another song and starts a further one, with Kerler and the second voice prompting.

Pesia tells how she nearly drowned in the river while a policeman watched, and how young Romanians from Bukovina made a chain of hands to rescue her. She describes daily deaths in the camp, among them a woman with six children, the burial and the pits. Kerler asks how many lie there, and a figure of fifteen thousand is mentioned (?).

Pecherskaia and the team try the dishes she has prepared. She speaks about her son, who lives in a new district of Tul'chyn, and about relatives in Israel and America, including half-sisters whose city she does not know. She describes going to Pechera every year at Rosh Hashanah, where her family lies, and being photographed and interviewed there. She names her family and gives her name, maiden name and birth year; her father Yosif worked as a coachman or carter. She had four siblings, including her brother Hershl, killed in the army at seventeen, and her sisters Shele and Rivele, who died in Pechera. She gives a long account of Pechera: her mother killed with shovels, her sisters' deaths, her escape and recapture, the German camp in Bratslav with its killings in the forest, and hiding in a pit and with a Polish woman until the partisans came. After the war she worked at a brewery in Bratslav and married in 1945. She talks about her husband Shune, her stepfather, her children and grandchildren, and a daughter in Israel. She recalls prewar Bratslav, a field wedding, her grandfather and prayer, Passover, the Bratslav tsadik's grave, and the hunger of 1933. She also talks about Tul'chyn after the war, her fasting, Passover matzo and gefilte fish.

The woman tells of surviving the killings in the Bershad' ghetto, lying wounded and escaping from the pit, and wandering from town to town. She says she lived in the synagogue building, tells of a sister who fell at the front, and says her mother left the house. She now lives with her husband, a Jewish shoemaker, while her daughter lives nearby; Kerler and others discuss compensation payments from Germany.

Gvinter recites a song she learned in the camp or ghetto, about the killing of a family at the pit, a child and the Jewish cemetery. She says she is an orphan who lived through it; Kerler comments on her strength.

Efim says a memorial was erected after the war at the killing site of the town's Jews and offers to drive there. Kerler asks about words for tombstone and Jewish and non-Jewish cemeteries. Motl says his mother took him to synagogue as a child. The closing of the Yiddish school in Buki is discussed, along with the father's work as shochet until the war and kosher meat.

Driving through Uman' toward the Jewish community center, with Russian talk about how to get into the courtyard. At the end a speaker tells of a visit by the German ambassador and his wife, who met former prisoners and went to the place where 25,000 Jews were shot.

Conversation in the community office about Teplitskaia and other possible interviewees. A woman called Manya Faynkold (?) is described in Russian as the one person in town who still speaks Yiddish perfectly; she went through the ghetto. They also discuss pilgrims coming to Rebbe Nachman's grave, the lack of a year-round rabbi, and Uman' before the war, when about 32,000 Jews lived there and about 25,000 were killed by the Germans.

The team and guide set out on foot toward Teplitskaia, who is already waiting for them. On the way they talk about a woman said to be the last good Yiddish speaker in the city, about Bratslav pilgrims and the lack of a resident rabbi. In Russian they speak of the old Jewish places, and a speaker gives the prewar Jewish population of Uman' as about 32,000, of whom 25,000 were killed.

Teplitskaia names her family: her parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery, and her sisters and brother live abroad, in Dimona (?). She speaks of her children, one son in Germany, and of raising them alone after her husband left. She describes four years under the Germans, hiding in cellars and attics, hungry, naked and lice-ridden, and two pogroms she lived through.

Answers Kerler's questions about Hanukkah food in her mother's house: latkes, grated potatoes, and baked goods. Kerler describes a pastry from a woman in Bershad', and Teplitskaia recalls a teacher from Ternovka who lives there. She asks the team to be discreet about a pension matter and about aid from abroad. She then begins to speak of the pit in Ternovka where Jews were killed, a visit to it, and her relatives buried there.

Teplitskaia describes the mass grave in the forest near Ternovka, where her father's relatives lie. She says the site is neglected and that this year she brought flowers. She says she bought a burial plot beside her mother in the Jewish cemetery and stresses honouring the dead. She says she visits the grave of Nahman of Bratslav and pleads for her children's health there, and that she went in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing her son.

Rubin says that 25,000 Jews were murdered and lie in a long dry ditch about five kilometres from Uman', which S3 names as Sukhoyar (?). Many of his friends lie there, and he asks Kerler to write the names down.

Katz and Kerler try to draw Krasheny out about his childhood before the war, and Zoya answers for him. She says his father was killed (apparently shot in the Petliura period), that his mother raised many children, and that he was born in 1912 (apparently). She says his mother and sisters were shot and that he was at Babi Yar and got out of it, and that he served in the army and was taken prisoner. She also gives his name and surname, a telephone number, and says she is named after his mother Zisel.

Krasheny talks about his mother Zisl, his younger brother, and how the whole family was murdered, leaving only him. He describes being old and hard of hearing, and says visitors from America and Israel come to see him. He then reflects on few Jews being left in Ukraine, young people emigrating to Israel and America, and intermarriage. Using the example of his own grandchildren and their children, he speaks of Jewish identity being lost through marriage to non-Jews. Kerler thanks him and wishes him health as the team leaves.

Naybauer names his brothers and sister killed in the camps. He recalls arriving at Auschwitz around Shavuot in June 1944, the separation from his father and youngest siblings, the tattooing, and being driven to Monowitz and Gleiwitz. He describes Dora, the hospital barrack, the work details and the meager food, and the daily marches.

Chirkova speaks of her grandfather, who was tormented and killed during the war, and of Jews of the ghetto who were forced to dig their own graves and thrown in alive. She says she returned with her son and was helped through the ordeal, and she speaks of God keeping her alive. She also mentions an album of pictures about the Jews and the people who came to take things.

Furer says his father was a tailor. There were three brothers, he the eldest, with Nusem and Gabriel named. One brother was killed in the war near Odessa. Furer also describes the roundup of Jews by the Romanians in Kryzhopil'.

Barshteyn describes the great synagogue of Sharhorod and her mother's story that a wall was found in the earth when it was built. She recounts how the Soviets took it over for a factory, and how, during the Romanian occupation, deported Jews were forced into the synagogue and beit midrash and many froze to death in the winter; the bodies were thrown into a pit. She also mentions a German unit's short stay and a German who worked in the mill.

Barshteyn tells of the German troops' first two weeks in Sharhorod, when they seized Jews off the streets, including children and old people, and held them in a large building. An ethnic German named Julius, who had worked at the mill and lived on good terms with the Jews, talked to the Germans, and the Jews were released without being shot.

Barshteyn says the Romanian Jews went home after the war and names several towns they came from. She returns to describing how many of them froze to death and were taken to a mass grave. Kerler asks whether 'Romanian Jews' meant Bessarabian Jews.

Katz says she never knew her grandparents. Asked about the happiest time of her life, she names her wedding after the war, and tells how she met her husband, a film mechanic, through his first wife, who was killed in the ghetto with their children. She also recalls meeting him in Kyiv, and tending the wounded General Vatutin, who died there.

Fishman gives his birth in Odesa in 1931 and speaks about his parents. His father Yankl, son of Mordkhe, was born in Stara Ushytsia and worked as a photographer in Odesa. His mother Malke, daughter of Itsik Hershl Eyzik, worked in a Yiddish kindergarten on the Moldavanka and later as a kindergarten head. At home the family spoke Russian, and he learned a little Yiddish from his parents and from a grandmother in evacuation. He says his mother was born in Medzhibozh and that his grandfather's family was shot there. He tells how his mother, as a young Komsomol member, joined a May Day demonstration and her father chased after her, and how she later went to Odesa and studied at a pedagogical technikum.

Fishman discusses where his Yiddish comes from, mainly from Yampil, and then his career moves. He was sent to Yampil after the institute in 1953, was transferred to head a bank office in a district centre where Jews had been shot, probably Tyvriv, and moved to Vinnytsya in 1959. He describes Jewish life in Vinnytsya, with one synagogue on Krasovsky street that was crowded on holidays, and says that before the war there were many synagogues.

Khazin explains that his surname derives from 'khazn' (cantor) and that his grandfather told him the family are kohanim. He says his Yiddish comes from his grandmothers: his mother's mother lived in Nemyriv and his father's mother Khaike came from near Tyvriv (?). His paternal grandfather sold Singer sewing machines to support twelve people and died in besieged Leningrad. His other grandfather was a bookbinder in Nemyriv working for a princess's library, and died of angina; he was not observant. An aunt's husband, a barber named Rozenberg, believed the Germans civilized and the family did not evacuate and were killed. Lemster asks whether the Leningrad grandfather attended synagogue.

Khazin talks about his mother's mother, who traded in pots and fed a pig before the war and was buried alive by the Germans. He answers Lemster's question about antisemitism in the army and later, recalling being asked to join the Party in Budapest and a fight at a technical school in Chelyabinsk, after which he left. He mentions his job in industrial supply, a telephone he believes was tapped, and a daughter and a son Boris in Israel (the daughter's married name is unclear in the transcript).

Yatskova says her parents spoke Yiddish and Russian at home and that her father read Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish to the children, including Wandering Stars and Yosele Solovey. She says her grandfather was an educated pharmacist, that he and his relatives were in Odessa and that the Germans killed them all. She has one brother, Hershele Kremer, two years younger, who lives in Israel and does not write to her. The talk turns to phone numbers.

Yatskova says her grandparents were all shot during the occupation. One grandfather was in Odessa and the other in Murafa, where he died long before, and he was a pharmacist. She remembers him as very religious and praying. Kerler checks whether she knows the Yiddish word for 'pious', and she recognizes it after a moment. Which grandfather is called Yankl is unclear in the transcript.

Nayman answers questions about Simchat Torah and Hoshanah customs, the sukkah, and pre–Yom Kippur food, and names the Christian holidays. She says relations with non-Jewish neighbours were good. She describes Studenyy in the Mizhhirya district, where she lived for thirty years after the war and where there were eighty Jewish families and three synagogues before the war. She tells how her husband was in camps and in Poland from 1941 to 1945 and how he escaped.

Nayman tells of her husband's and his family's arrest by Hungarian gendarmes after he hid at home, their time in camps, and the later deportation of the whole community to a ghetto and then to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz she tried to save a small child from the crematorium selection and a German soldier intervened. She describes the overcrowded barracks and starvation food, selection for labor in a camp in the woods, welding work at a factory, the bombing of the town, a march lasting five days and trench digging in a field, and says she was liberated on 9 May.

Dorfman points out the monument and the site of the L'viv Jewish ghetto, and says a memorial was put up in 1992 (?). He describes the crowded housing, the twenty months of the ghetto and the number of Jews who died. He also recalls a London filmmaker and a family that survived in the sewers, the Margolis (?) family. Kerler asks him to tell it in Yiddish for the others.

S2 asks Lebvol about the memorials in town, which she attended with the opening of the memorial where Jews were murdered. Kerler then asks about prewar weddings: the chuppah, music, klezmer musicians (local ones), and a song about a fiddler and bass player.

Answering Kerler's questions about his childhood family, Shpitz names his siblings, six brothers and two sisters, and tells that the sisters were killed in 1941 because they could not be evacuated. He recalls his schooling in the Yiddish school no. 24 on Sadova street and the poverty that sent him to work at the Stalin factory before being drafted in 1939. He says that the language of instruction was Yiddish, and mentions a rich friend and his own studies.

Geller recalls the Jews who stayed behind in the shtetl in 1941 and were killed by a few Germans and local policemen. After the war a list of victims was compiled and a monument put up. He still has the list, and says some families went to Israel and America.

Burshtein tells of the start of the war in 1939: Poles shooting from the roofs, the family's week of praying in the prayer house under bombing, and his father's decision to leave by night for an aunt's town about thirty kilometres away. He describes the flight past Polish cavalry, being taken in by Jewish families, then German roundups of Jews onto the square, when he was ten and escaped a soldier. His father and brothers were taken, his older brother was missing for days, and Germans threw bread to Polish prisoners while another photographed them. In the aunt's town a Jewish shoemaker negotiated with German officers for the family's safety.

Burshtein recounts the start of the war in Goworowo (Govrove) and the arrival of the Soviets and then of the Germans, who began killing Jews. His father refused to gather with the others and led the family toward the Russians. He describes crossing a bridge past German guards and meeting Soviet soldiers. He recalls the testimony of an elderly woman about the killings and burning of Goworowo. He then describes the journey via Zambrów and a committee that fed refugees, to Białystok, where refugees stayed in a club and later in empty apartments, a Polish village and a slaughterhouse. His father decided they should register to go further into Russia, and the family was taken to Babruysk, where they were disinfected and helped by local people.

Geller recalls reaching Babruisk in 1939 and telling people what the Germans were doing to Jews; they did not believe him. He describes Hitler's speeches and the cruelty of the Germans toward Jews. He then tells a story he says he read, in which a Romanian Jew promised Hitler's father a dowry that was never paid, so that Hitler turned against the Jews. Katz and Kerler question him on when he heard this and whether Hitler was Jewish, and Kerler mentions Adolf Shayevich. Geller then sings a Polish-era Yiddish song addressed to young men about love.

At the mass-grave site and memorial near the old airfield, Russian voices say where Jews were shot and where the pits and the obelisk are. Skobilitskii recites Kaddish and discusses how many Jews were killed in the area. The figure is heard as roughly eighteen thousand six hundred (uncertain). Most of the Yiddish here is garbled.

Geller describes the prayer houses of Pyatka: a shul, a beys-medresh and a kloyz. He explains the differences when Katz asks, saying the kloyz was small and used for a minyan. In 1941, 169 people were gathered from the kloyz and driven to the river and killed. The beys-medresh was closed around 1931–32, was used as a carpentry shop, and was then burned, with a local man named Itsik the Krimer blamed. The shul stood until the war, and a wooden building from it was taken to Berdychiv.

Mostly Russian conversation outside, about the state of Jewish cemeteries, documentation of cemeteries and mass-shooting sites, and a church being built on a cemetery. It also covers a speaker's name (Sergey, Baruch in Hebrew), a hotel, and farewells in Yiddish. The Yiddish lines are largely garbled.

Shraibman describes the war: they fled in the summer, were taken to Tambov and then to Uzbekistan, where hunger killed six of twelve family members. One grandmother stayed behind and was killed by the Germans together with the remaining Jews. Kerler asks for the grandmothers' names (Beyle, Gitl).

Shraibman recalls two very pious Jews, Moshe Yosl and Zelik, killed by the Germans; at eleven this was a tragedy for him. He describes holidays in his childhood and the grandmothers' Sabbath. Kerler asks about holiday food: foods for Yom Kippur eve, the sukkah of Moshe Yosl, dairy foods and blintzes for Shavuot, latkes for Hanukkah and hamantashn for Purim. He mentions his grandfather, the tailor, who walked on foot to Chernyakhiv, 25 km away, and shows photographs of his family.

Burshtein recalls the start of the war and the bombing of his town. His family took refuge in the prayer-house, where the Torah scroll was opened and psalms said. After Polish soldiers announced the Germans' approach, the family fled by night with his father, mother, two sisters and two brothers. They ran into German motorcyclists and reached Ostrów Mazowiecka, where Jews were driven out of their homes and assembled and some were held for days. He describes hunger, bread thrown over the fence, shooting and a curfew, a German officer's cruel jokes, and the Germans' searches. His father and a brother were held, and the family searched for them. They crossed a bridge to the Russians' side, where the rabbi's wife told how Goworowo's synagogue was burned with people inside.

Burshtein talks about the German Jewish refugees in Russia and the Soviet-German pact, after which nothing negative could be said about the Germans. He tells how people on arrival in Babruysk would not believe the accounts of killings, and recalls Hitler's speeches heard on the one radio in town, in the school. He also recalls a Jewish forced-labour episode and his brother's return home, and reflects on why the Germans were so cruel to Jews.

Geller talks about his schooling. There was a Jewish school, but its lower classes were closed as pupils dwindled; his elder brother finished seven classes there in 1933, and he was moved to a Ukrainian school. He says non-Jewish neighbours spoke Yiddish, and mentions the killing of the town's Jews in 1941 and a list of the victims.

Geller says the town's other inhabitants were Ukrainians with a few Polish families, and that no Jews remain. He describes a visit to Pyatka around 2005 with his daughter and grandchild, to his father's grave. The Jewish cemetery's gravestones had been gathered in one place and he could not find his father's. He also recounts the town's early history and a Jew from Berdychiv who began the settlement.

Burshtein says he worked in a printing house in Zhytomyr after the war, after arriving in June 1944 from the Urals. He tells how the war began in Gorovo, with bombing and the family sheltering in the beis-medresh. They fled toward Ostrów Mazowiecka, where an aunt lived. There the Germans entered, rounded up the Jewish men, and drove his father and brothers away. Only one brother died, in Bobruisk, and the others survived.

Burshtein describes the German entry into Gorovo, when the synagogue was undermined and the Jews were herded together. He says a great rebbe had blessed Ostrów Mazowiecka, and that many people tried to flee there. The rebbe was thrown into a fire. He was a child and studying gemara at the time and does not remember details.

Sandler talks about postwar life in Zhytomyr, where he says few Jews remained and not all spoke Yiddish. He spoke Yiddish with his mother and sisters before the sisters left for Germany, and his brother went to Jerusalem. He returns to his father's death from cholera in Uzbekistan and the mass grave where the dead were thrown. Kerler steers him back to prewar Oltkonstantin and notes that he was fifteen when the war began.

Nibulskiy says the Germans murdered Pulen's Jews. After the war the bones were dug up and moved to the Jewish cemetery, where a large monument stands. Kerler asks the year, which he gives as 1956. He and his father helped restore the memorials.

Nibulskiy describes the mass grave at the Jewish cemetery, with men on one side and women on the other, and says he visits to light a candle and recite a prayer. He recalls the killing of his grandfather by bandits, who cut off his beard and beat him. He mentions his brother who fell in the war and his parents, and that he himself did heavy construction work throughout the war.

The speaker says no Jews are left in Pyotke, only the cemetery, which he visits with his daughter and grandchildren; the mass graves of the murdered are there. He tells of the postwar trial of local policemen who took part in the killings, with long prison sentences and releases in the 1950s (the numbers of victims are unclear). He also mentions a list of Jewish families drawn up after the war, which he passed on to his children.

Nibulskiy tells how his grandfather Avrom, a tailor, burned a hole in a customer's garment, and the Veledniki rebbe, who happened to arrive, advised him how to repair it. He then explains the family: his great-grandfather Shimonke and grandfather Avrom Alters, who was killed by the Germans in 1941 after refusing evacuation. Avrom was a synagogue warden and supported a poor shoemaker's family on the Sabbath. Nibulskiy compares this with the complaints about aid today.

Shraibman, born 1930, was eleven when the war began and was hidden by non-Jews for about a week and a half. He tells of his maternal grandfather, a tailor who worked in the surrounding villages with a Singer machine, and of another grandfather killed in 1918 by Petliura's men. He describes sheltering with a customer in the village of Dvorishche (?) and the decision to return to town despite warnings. He recounts the arrival of Soviet scouts, the German entry, the formation of a police force, the shooting of Jews and the roundup of about 700 Jews in the militia stable.