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Manya Auster Feldman - August 11, 1998

Todt. . .

They were strictly doing roads and railways. So they've alwaysworked around them. By these rails um, were bonfires that they had lit, theGermans while they work. It was in the winter, it was—no, it was—yeah,it was around April, May. It was still cold outside. So they had fires going.And uh, and they had barracks there where they slept near the railway. Whenwe came there, I and the, and the and the guide were assigned to one point.They'll go and they'll put the dynamite and they'll start running. And thiswill be our gathering point. And from there we'll run back. Okay. So um, wecame. And they're—all the, the, the partisans that were all my friends,they had their dynamite and they started, they started working on them. Buttheir matches got wet because it was so foggy, they couldn't use—theycouldn't light. So they started grabbing the hot coals. In the meantime therewas a commotion and the Germans heard that there's—something was goingon. So we ran out shooting. When they started shooting, the guide said tome, "Oh, I'm not staying here. I'm going to get killed. I'm running." I said,"But we have a, we have our order. We have to stay here. This will be ourgathering point." He said, "No." And so I ran after him, luckily, becausewhen I was started running, a German was chasing me and I saw the bulletscrossing—I saw the fire crossing. I saw the fire crossing. He was andhe was yelling "Halt!" He was very near me. And I came to a ditch. And therewas a tree. And I, I crossed the ditch. I ran. And when they came to the ditch,they stopped. Well, we're all, all the, the partisans came back. They were—wehad one casualty, one was killed. But they did a lot of damage. They did dynamitethe railway. For two kilometers they dynamited the railway. So that this JewishOtriad got already a good reputation, that the Jews are also fighters. Otherwisethey laughed at Jews, because Jews, Jews cannot—don't know how to fight.But that was already May. Around June, July, they um, the, the officers ontop came to a conclusion that it's not a healthy thing to, to um, keep a uh,group of Jews. We have to disperse them. Because there was a case of one guy,his wife became—unfortunately, she became pregnant in the forest. Sohe wanted to get a little bit nourishment from our Jewish group. So he wentto a farmer and asked for some honey. Somebody from the Vlasovists spottedhim and and they turned in his name to the um, higher echelon and they, theykilled him. They shot him. They took him out and he was like a, a this wasthe time when Stalin already gave an order not to touch the, the local population.They were assisting the partisans and nobody should uh, do uh, should robthem. So they, they—he was also served as an example. By that time wedecide—they decided to disperse us and they dispersed us in differentgentile groups. Some of the old people and the, the children and women theyleft behind. And we stayed—we were, we were assigned into a differentuh, mixed group, Jewish guys and gentiles. And um, we were doing our workthe same like in the, in the other partisans. I was, I was assigned to washtheir clothes and the cl. . . how do you wash clothes that is like um, um,what do you call the sacks are made of—I forgot that, that, that uh,material um, burlap. Burlap. When you wash burlap, it becomes like a pieceof uh, tin, you know, it's, it's terribly—it gets hard. They had an awfullot of lice, so they had—you had to cook thaturlap in big pots of water.And there were no soap. So we were using ashes from fires that softened thewater. So I had to—I was using this, I was using my handsto, to, to dragout the clothes or. . . and I had wounds all over. I had like holes in myhands and it was burning. That was one sack. Then, then, then they consideredme to be a very excellent worker and they promoted me to work in the kitchen,to cook the food for them. So I had to get up four o'clock in the morningand cook their soup. And our group was about uh, I would say about eightypeople and we lived like this, doing all kinds of damage to the German frontsand uh, uh, all kind of uh, uh, explosive uh, jobs. And we stayed until inApril of nineteen. . . no, not in April, in July of 1944, we were liberated.The, the, the Germans were already pushed back. The, the, the Russians werechasing them back into Germany. We were liberated in Pinsk.

In Pinsk, near the swamps?

Near—yeah, near—it was a big city. And I was assignedto work for the NKVD, the security, the Russian security. I worked there—oh,that was another episode in my life that I didn't have any food. They paidus, but there was nothing. They couldn't buy anything. I was really hungry.I was, I was, day and night. I had to work there until one o'clock at nightin a building where it was a um, uh, where nuns are, are uh, what do you call—wherenuns are um, monastery, monastery. All of a sudden I'm lacking words. A monastery.And it was built from cement. And they—there was no heat. Sitting untilone o'clock at night in, in temperature below zero, being hungry. There wasanother holocaust. You know, it was, it was, it was terrible. It was veryhard.

B. . . before we talk about the liberation, let me ask youto go back for a second.

Yeah.