This week's Yizkor book excerpt on the JewishGen Facebook page #yizkorbooks
Bruce Drake
As a young girl, Esther Brand was “Saved by Righteous Gentiles” — the
title of her account from the Yizkor book of Turka, a town that sat by the Stryj River in western Ukraine. At times, she walked the streets not wearing the yellow Star of David patch as ordered by the Germans on pain of death, but one day she was overtaken by fear and put it on her arm. She approached a farmer to ask if he would like to purchase kitchen utensils from her house in exchange for food, but once there, he said to her: “I saw announcements that you must be prepared to go to the Sambor Ghetto. We have no children at home, and we want to perform a good deed in this world and save a young soul from extermination.” And for two years, he did just that, hiding her in a crate, and then a haystack and then his attic. She witnessed the fate she had avoided befalling other Jews of Turka, watching from a window for hours as the Jews were being marched to the Sambor ghetto, “walking with suitcases, packages and sacks. Some wept, and others were just sad. From time to time, they peered backward, as if to cast a final glance at their houses in which they and their ancestors had lived - and who knew if they would see them again.” Esther did get to see Turka again after the Soviets drove out the Germans. But all that was left “was a heap of ruins, without any Jewish remnant.” URL: https://www.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/2551878231500983?__tn__=K-R Bruce Drake Silver Spring MD Researching: DRACH, EBERT, KIMMEL, ZLOTNICK Towns: Wojnilow, Kovel
|
|