Irina Pecherskaya
Part 2
In Germany, my father was assigned to a car repair plant.
There, his documents were taken away, and a badge with
the number 228 was hung around his neck. We got up at
four in the morning, they gave us one loaf of bread for 8
people, and that was food for the whole day. They were
lined up in a column and began to count: they simply
hit them on the head with a whip. Upon returning to
the barracks, they were counted again, that is, they were
beaten again. My father was suffered from fatigue from
the exhausting work and lack of food. One day, in the
absence of the main supervisor, the foreman, seeing that
my father was collapsing from fatigue, allowed him to sit
near the stove. But the warmth revived the lice, and his
whole body began to itch unbearably. At this time the
main supervisor returned and, seeing that my father was sitting instead of working, beat
him terribly.
In the course of moving from camp to camp, my father lost his spoon, and it was forbidden
to give him a new one. Already starving, had to exchange his daily ration of bread for a
spoon so that he could eat. My father did not part with this spoon for sixty years, until
his last day. This spoon is passed down in our family as a memory for future generations.
One day, in a nearby camp, the Belgians, who were better fed, were given porridge with
worms. The Belgians went on strike, and the Germans gave this gruel to my father's
camp. What was going on here: people grabbed this disgusting “delicacy” with their
hands. This day became a holiday for them, which is difficult to describe and impossible
to forget.
One day, wagons of gravel were brought to the camp and my father was assigned to
unload it, since he was considered relatively strong. The gravel had to be thrown with large,
heavy shovels. One guy couldn't stand the hard labor and fell. Seeing this, the German
shouted: “You’re not doing a good job, are you a Jew?!” When my father heard the word
“Jew,” everything inside him broke, and he began throwing gravel with redoubled force.
The fallen man was never able to get up, and the Germans shot him to intimidate the
others. The Germans treated the unfortunate people very cruelly. Everything depended
on the mood of the guards and superiors. They could have been beaten to death for a
minor infraction or simply for fun.
In the autumn of 1944, American troops were approaching, and panic spread in the camp
and at the factory. They began to grab everyone to take them deeper into Germany.
My father, along with several other prisoners, managed to sneak into the camp police
department. They were able to tie up the guard, take their fingerprint documents and
escape into the forest. Having run into some village, my father and a friend stopped at an
abandoned house, where the owner’s farmhand remained. He hid them in the basement
and even brought them food.
At this time, the Americans began shelling the area, a shell hit the room where the
farm laborer lived, and he died. My father crawled out of the basement to examine the
situation. He saw that a nearby bakery had been bombed and there were loaves of bread
lying around it. My father jumped up and grabbed two loaves, but on the way back to
the house he encountered a small detachment of Germans. My father decided that the
end had come; he had survived all the horrors of the camps and would now die at the
very end of the war! Despair gave him courage, and my father spoke to the soldiers in
German, explaining that he was a farm laborer in a neighboring house. But the Germans
had no time to listen to my father’s confused explanations: they ran away in a hurry.
Neither alive nor dead, my father returned to the basement. It's hard to imagine what
would have happened if, instead of him, his comrade who did not speak German went
out looking for bread!
My father remembered the day of March 14, 1945 for the rest of his life. American troops
entered. Prisoners and farm laborers poured into the streets. The Americans fed everyone.
Then Russian officers arrived and began campaigning for the prisoners to return to their
homeland. The Americans, on the contrary, tried to persuade people not to return to
the Soviet Union. Indeed, everyone who returned to their homeland was subjected to
difficult, lengthy interrogations. Many did not survive these interrogations.
My father was lucky: the special officers saw that all the information he provided to them
was consistent with what was indicated in the documents, and they released him. He was
given a certificate that he had passed through a special department and was heading
to his place of residence in Kharkov. But my father didn’t know that their house had
survived, that his father had returned alive from the front, and so he decided to go with
a group from Central Asia to the Donbass to mine coal. There they began interrogating
him and the rest of the workers again. After these interrogations, not everyone came
back. My father randomly wrote a letter to Kharkov addressed to Vera, the daughter of
his stepmother, who stayed at home when the family was taken to the ghetto. The letter
arrived, and his father sent his younger brother Grisha Pechersky, a captain in the Soviet
army, to retrieve him. The decorated artilleryman appears, covered in medals, and, of
course, he managed to find a common language with the special officer. My father was
issued new documents, in his real name, Boris Genrikhovich Pechersky. When he finally
arrived home, the joy and tears knew no bounds. A new life was beginning.
