[Cz-L] Czernowitz after liberation

Dear Yossi-Jerry,

Your recent message trying to clarify the facts reported in Naftali Hertz
Kon's Report are welcome, in that little has been published about the fate
of the surviving Jews after the liberation of Czernowitz by the Red Army.
Having been in Czernowitz at that time and old enough (17) to remember those
chaotic days, I must disagree with your statement that "only Jews who did
not originate from Bukovina before the war were denied entrance to
Czernowitz". Indeed, many survivors from Transnistria were stopped at the
Pruth and made it into the town with great difficulty. It was obvious that
the intent of the "authorities" was to delay their return so that their
apartments were quickly occupied by the masses streaming in from the East.
The miserable housing conditions Kon found were in some measure the results
of these restrictions on the return of deportees.

Kon was also correct in describing the misery in which many returnees lived
and the "shanghaiing" by the authorities of people from the streets and
their dispatch to Donbas and other places, as de facto slave laborers. My
wife who was 16 years old at that time was apprehended on the street and
narrowly escaped being sent to the coal mines.

The fate of thousands of Jewish survivors who were drafted in the Army and
were killed or maimed on the fields of East Prussia or who labored in the
"raboczi bataliony" has yet to be properly documented. For this reason, it
is of great value when documents such as those mentioned in Mrs. Lancman's
letter are published.

As to the influx of many thousands of people from the USSR into Czernowitz,
you are probably right that the Soviet authorities tried to control it, in
keeping with their general practice of tightly regulating the movements of
the population. It must not have worked in the case of Czernowitz, because
the number of inhabitants rapidly increased. A substantial number of Jews
 from the Ukraine, Bessarabia, and Russia also made Czernowitz their home
after the war. The extent of this demographic change was evident when I
revisited Czernowitz for the first time in 1997. I was told (by Josef Burg
and others) that there were about 5,000 Jews then in Czernowitz, but fewer
than 10 had lived there before the war.

The memories of many of my generation of survivors from Czernowitz have been
dominated by two contradictory reactions: gratitude to the brave soldiers
who liberated us and made our survival possible and abhorrence with the
cruelties of the Stalinist regime.

Regards,

Alfred (Fred) Schneider
Professor Emeritus
Georgia Tech and MIT


----- Original Message -----
From: "yossi-jerry" <eshet1_at_netvision.net.il>
To: "czernowitz list" <czernowitz-l_at_cornell.edu>
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2007 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] Future Czernowitz online exhibition


> Hi Czernowitzers
> In order to clear up a few historical facts. Without trying to minimize
the
> atrocities inflicted by the Soviet regime on Jews in general, on Bukovinan
> Jews ( before and after the Fascist regime) in particular - The Jews who
> were denied entrance to Czernowitz after the Liberation were Jews who did
> not originate from Bukovina before the war. Jews (and others) tried to
flee
> the Soviet regime (or at least improve their life) all the time by moving
to
> the west of the (former) Soviet Union. The story of those Jews who
> sympathized with the Soviet system is a chapter by itself.
> Regards
> Yosef Eshet (Jerry Wolf)
> Raanana, Israel
>
 - snip -
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of Czernowitz and
Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. Messages sent to the group are archived at
<http://czernowitz.ehpes.com>. Please post in "Plain Text" if possible (help available at:
<http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/PlainText.html>).

To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/elist/lyris/leave.html

To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2007-10-22 18:28:23