Irina Pecherskaya

Rather than tell you about myself, I’d like to talk about
my father, Boris Pechersky. My father was born in Ukraine, in the town of Efingar, near Nikolaev. His parents, Esther and Heinrich Pechersky, had three children, all boys: Mihai, Boris and Lev. My father was the middle child. Everyone in the shtetl, of course, spoke Yiddish, so the children spoke it fluently. Later, this saved my father’s life, since, thanks to his knowledge of Yiddish, he was also able to speak German.
When my father was seven years old, his mother died and his father was left with three young sons. After her death, the family moved to Kharkov, where his father married for the second time to a Ukrainian woman named Claudia Andrienko, who had a daughter from her first marriage.
On October 21, 1941 (my father was fifteen years old at the time), the Germans
occupied Kharkov. The family did not have time to evacuate as they missed the last
train. When they returned home, the apartment had already been robbed.
It was cold, there was no water, there was nothing to heat it with, so they went to
get water from a well located far from the house. On the way back, this laboriously
pumped water was taken away by either the Germans or the Ukrainian police.
In the winter, the Germans began to round up the Jews of Kharkov into the ghetto.
With a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, my father talked about how he,
his younger brother (his older brother had gone to the front), his father and his
stepmother walked in a column of Jews driven from the entire city and region. The
non-Jews stood on the sides of the road and watched, some with sympathy, and
some with gloating. Someone tore off my father’s hat, and he had to wrap himself in
a scarf so as not to freeze his ears.
Claudia's daughter, Vera, stayed at home, while her mother went to the ghetto with
her family. Entry into the ghetto was free for everyone, but Jews were prohibited from
leaving. Since my father’s stepmother was not Jewish and had the right to freely visit
the ghetto, she went home and brought food from there. Thanks to this, my father,
father and younger brother were able to survive.
There was terrible overcrowding in the ghetto barracks. There was a strong stench,
illnesses spread, and people began to die. Those who received food from the outside
were stronger, and the police forced them to dig a ditch – the future Drobitsky Yar,
where, as in Kiev's Babi Yar, mass executions of Jews took place. My father’s Ukrainian
stepmother decided to rescue the family from this hell. On the night of December 31,
when all the soldiers and policemen were drunk, they managed to escape. Claudia
took advantage of the right to leave the ghetto and, amid the general drunkenness
of the policemen, somehow managed to get the whole family out.
After that, my father's father went to the front. My father’s younger brother was taken
in by the family of a distant relative, who had two children of their own, but at that
time every piece of food was worth its weight in gold, and the presence of an extra
person was a big burden.
His stepmother placed my father with her friends, who themselves had nothing to
eat, so he decided to leave them. This fifteen year old boy walked throughout the
night wherever his eyes led him, through the biting frost, knee-deep snow, hungry,
without documents… he was going nowhere.
By morning he reached a village and, fortunately, ended up in the house of people
who had a large farm and were in need of a worker. Here it should be pointed out that
did not look particularly Jewish, and he spoke Ukrainian well. Caring for the numerous
livestock fell on the shoulders of the teenager. He got up earlier than everyone else,
removed snow, carried water from the well, cleaned the stable and cowshed, and
during the day helped the owner sew felt boots. Soon the Germans took all the living
creatures from the owner, and he no longer needed my father. He had to look for
another refuge, and his wanderings began again. He wandered from village to village
and ate whatever he could find. In severe frost he had to spend the night in a field in a
haystack. Sometimes kind people fed him and let him spend the night, not suspecting
that he was a Jew.
Twice Ukrainian police grabbed him and took him to the commandant’s office, but
both times he managed to escape. When he was caught a third time, he ended up
with a German officer who spoke Russian well. My father identified himself by his
stepmother's last name, and the officer wrote him official papers addressed to Boris
Mikhailovich Andrienko, and sent him to do agricultural work.
My father did not suffer from this hard labor for long, because in the summer of 1942
he, along with hundreds of other people, was put into cattle cars (200 people in each)
and sent to work in Germany. There was terrible stuffiness in the trains, and it was
forbidden to get off at the stations. The first time they were allowed to get off was in
Poland. There, the Germans forced everyone into the bathhouse, and for my father,
undressing was like a death sentence, since he was circumcised on the eighth day, in
accordance with Jewish tradition.


To be continued..