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Manya Auster Feldman - August 11, 1998

So you were liber. . . what was liberation like. I mean, did.. .

It was very, it was very exciting. We all marching and we wereso jubilant, you know. We helped the Russian Army win the war. We came intoPinsk, we marched in as partisans. And everybody cheered. But the populationwas, was terribly afraid, because they were uh, uh, helping the Germans. Theywere accomplices. So uh, I started working for the NKVD and then I s. . .I thought—I thought that's not for me. I'm going to die here on the job.So I got a—uh, I had, I always had bad eyes. I got a um, I got a paperfrom a doctor that I cannot be out and, and they, they let me go. And thenwe started planning not to stay in our area. I came back to my city. I foundmy cousin who was with my, my father, my brother and my sister. He came backfrom the Carpathian Mountains. That's when half of the uh, uh, Kovpak Otriadwas destroyed.

You found. . .

My cousin.

Your cousin. When did you find out about the rest of the family?

At that, at that time, he said, they, they—no—we were—Iwas hoping maybe, maybe they'll come back. It took about a year. Nobody cameback, so. . .

All three of them didn't survive?

No. They were killed in the—in—while they were fighting,they were killed. The Ukrainian population in the Carpathian area in the mountainswere extremely uh, anti-Semitic and anti-Russian and anti-everything. So theyhelped, they helped the Germans kill—you know, out of the 5,000—1,500survived from that area. He made a tremendous mistake. He shouldn't have got—gotteninto the mountains. That's when they—that's when they lost them.

1,500 of them?

Of the partisans survived out of 5,000. And my cousin was oneof them. He was left—at night he, he—they all fell asleep becausethey were exhausted from walking. And he, he woke up and the group was gone.So by himself he managed somehow to, to thread through the villages. And uh,they were united uh, not far from um, not far from uh, Warsaw. They were,you know, it's already by—when the, when the Russians were there. Butthen, then they dispersed the partisans. They took—eighty percent ofthem, they took into the army. Most of them were killed in the army, in theRussian army. That's the reward they had for saving the, the Russian Army.Well, but that's war.

And. . .

Most of my J. . . Jewish—and I must tell you that, becausewhenever I go to shul and I say Kaddish for my family, I, I remember eachand every one of them, how heroically they died. They, they, they died fighting.They died fighting. They attached themselves to trains with dynamite, withuh, uh, all kind of things. They were very brave soldiers. They were an assetto the Russian Army. Because they had nothing to lose, they really foughtbecause they knew what they were fighting for. Although the Russians—theRussian soldiers too, because they saw what's happening to them in the um,prisoners of war camps.

You told me once that there were actually—you rememberedsome songs, that there was some Zionist feeling among the partisans as well?

The Jewish.

Yeah.

But the Jewish—sure.

Yeah.

They all came from the same, same type of Shtetl where I comefrom form.

I mean, what—I know this sounds foolish, maybe, but you,you actually told me that you remembered good times during this period.

Yes. When, when, when we, when we thought that we're not in danger,when the Germans were not—we were singing Jewish songs and dancing. Andit was, it was lively in the forest with all this, with all what was goingon.

Was there talk about going to Palestine?

Yes. That was the dream. That's how we reached uh, Germany. Whenwe—when we were liberated and most of us saw that we have nothing tolive there, we have nothing to stay there. All the—all our cities wereone big uh, uh, cemetery. We are stepping on blood. We decided that we cannotstay there. So we heard about um, Jewish displaced persons camps in Germany.