Esfir Lupyan - December 17, 2007
Daily Occurrences
The, the Germans came in 1941.
Yeah.
In the summer of 1941 and you left the ghetto in 1943, is that...
Yeah, it was finished. This... I remember even when they killed gun uh, Jew from gun work. Gun work. Germans. They sent a big... a huge group of rich people from gun work...
German Jews.
German Jews. They don't, they don't talk in Russian. They were separated, they were... And they were rich. They finishes them very fast and my brother--he alive that time--he put me on shell? Shoulders?
Shoulders.
And he said, "Let's go. I will show you something." So, we go in their dorm, it's inside of ghetto. It was empty houses, empty... Open windows, you know, open door. No alive people, only small children from ghetto, like me, go around and find toys. Cups broken, you know, everything what was lost. And my brother said, "Okay Tira, you see everything is uh, you see uh, everybody killed? Everybody gone? They all go out from here." So, it was very ??? and we, and we go back to house.
Two years were day-to-day murder.
Yeah. Mm-hm.
Killing. And while you were in the ghetto, how did you manage to stay alive in the ghetto when they were shooting people all the time?
Nobody... They alive, I think, many people--adult people, adult--they plan to get out. They plan run away. We plan... They go in groups and they help each other, uh... We children, only my... like my brother from ten to and, and up years, they could do something. With five years... I was five year. Five, six years, I couldn't change anything, you know, I could not go. I just tried to be close to my mom and that's it. And my mom, my mom watch everything around her and they sent her to be a, a slave.
Mm-hm. So, that's how you survived...
But, but man--yeah--but man, people, they were very active. They, they make an underground organization. They try to fight. They go in forest. They make Jew, Jew partisans and they accept all Jew who come to them, but my mom never can ??? them. It was uh, famous, very famous, very re... result... resultative uh, partisans. Very success.
Mm-hm.
I explain very famous.
??? The Bielski brothers were uh, were not far away.
Okay, yeah, I have a book, I will show you.
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