Avital E. M. Baruch - Frozen Mud and Red Ribbons: A Romanian Jewish Girls Survival through the Holocaust in Transnistria and its Rippling Effect on the Second Generation

My mother had managed brilliantly to sweep her past under the carp et , concealing the fact that she had been in a nything equivalent to a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World W ar. I knew that her family was exiled from Romania to Ukraine , that they had starved there , that they didnt always have a roof over their heads , that it was freezing cold, and that her sister and her father died. What I did not know was that she had experienced the Romanians version of concentration camps. The Romanians Holocaust.

At school, in history lessons, we learnt about persecution, depor ta tions , and concentration camps in Poland, Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Hungary, but there was never any mention of a place named Transnistria . I thought for a time that it was a secret word that only my grandmother and a few of her backant (Yiddish for acquaintances ) knew. In some ways it was a mystery mission , a quest, for me to find out about that secret place. Two years after learning to read, being eight years old , I had already started to comb our local l ibrary, in the suburbs of Haifa, and devoured every single book written by people who had experienced the Holocaust. I felt compelled to reveal what seemed to be an awful big secret, but I couldnt find any mention of that place, or any clue about my own mothers past . Her childhood whereabouts , as well as any details concerning her fathers side of the family, remained a black hole for me. By this I mean it was not only an unknown mystery, but, like a black hole in the cosmos, it sucked a lot of my emotional energy into it.

When my mothers feet touched the Holy Land at the age of sixteen, she stood upright, looked up to the sky an d said: Now I start a new life , and since then tried to forget the past. In smart phone terms you might say: She put her past on silence, or discreet, not to distract her from the here and now . Yet, so often an event occurred that cracked that wall of silence . I remember standing outside with a Sab-re neighbour, a woman of my mothers age who was born and brought up in Israel. They were talking about a film on the Second World War. Rinna , the neighbour, commented on how horrible it s portrayal was in the film . My mother gave her a cranky look and said : This film makes it appear too beautiful, this is Hollywood; the reality was far worse , with no comparison at all . Some days later my mother said to me out of the blue: I could also write a book about what I went through . Her words and her attitude were factual, straight forward, without emotion . The seed for this book was probably planted on that very day.

I always experienced my mother as very resilient , like a rock which will withstand any difficulty on earth. Once, when I had a tummy upset she muttered: My stomach will not get upset even if I would feed it stones. On the other hand, there was a more vulnerable side to her which I never encountered personally. If I happened to quarrel with my mother during my adolescence and we both became upset and moody, my father used to come to my room and talk with me for hours to restore the peace. H e used to be, and still is, a real pea ce maker, smoothing away conflicts ; he would ne ver let me go to sleep upset. On those occasions he would say : Please forgive your mother, please try not to annoy her, she has suffered enough, she still wakes up at night with nightmares . My heart would melt a little towards her, as I saw her in a different light for a second. So I forgave, but inherited having regular nightmares.

The first one I remember i s of a wolf coming to visit me in the night and standing near my bed , staring at me. Following my screams, m y father came to my room and assured me that he had sent the wolf away. Th ere , he would say, as he waved his muscular arm in the air, Its gone . I could still see the wolf staring at me , but my strong father near by made it look tame . As I grew up the nightmares kept changing: there were lots of episodes of shooting, hiding , and running away from the Nazis. At a later stage of my life , the theme transformed further, from falling off staircases without banisters to trying to find food and shelter for my family, with the Nazis threatening to invade the town.