Re: [Cz-L] Czernowitz after liberation

I, too, was in Czernowitz at the time of the "Soviet Liberation"
and fortunate enough to not have been in Transnistria.. My
father, Chaim Weinschenker, who at the time, was 48 years old
was "drafted" and sent to the aluminium mines in the Ural
mountains. Does any one know the particulars of that labor camp?
I was 13 at the time, remember him leaving and coming back. but
not much more .
Frieda Tabak
--- ALFRED SCHNEIDER <fred2_at_worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> 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
>
 - snip -
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Received on 2007-10-22 20:48:52