Vera's memoirs

Lubensky memoirs

by Vera Lubensky (1914-2005)

translated by Aaron Korby

Extract from memoirs about pogroms

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I witnessed and was lucky to survive horrific Jewish pogroms in Chigirin in 1919.
It all started like that. At the time of my story, our family resided at my grandfather’s house in Matveevka. The family owned a small store.
One day quite late in the evening we saw a cart carrying 4 – 6 men stop at the entrance to our house.

Memoirs of Vera Lubensky

I was playing outside together with other kids when the men broke into the house and demanded money and other valuables from my parents. In rage they, hit my mother and my father repeatedly. While the robbers were busy taking their loot outside, which was everything they laid their eyes on, my father managed to get away from them, lock the bedroom door from inside, and escaped through the window. It was very dark outside, which helped my father to sneak into the safety of our neighbors’ yard. We, kids, hid behind the furniture, and scared to death sobbed quietly while the robbers were beating our mother severely. She was screaming, and sobbing and we were very scared. Hearing the screams from our house our neighbors, the peasants, rushed in and saved my mother’s life. Two brothers, Vasily and Sofran Zadorozhny, rescued our family from the thugs. The robbers slashed Sofran’s face in the fight. The thugs took off with all our belongings and our horse.

In town

Perhaps the town would provide safety, the place where Jews don’t live in constant fear of pogroms. Our parents had relatives in this town. So we moved. Settled in an old house that had a cellar, a barn, big yard and a garden. The house belonged to our relatives. Other relatives from other villages also joined us. One family brought in their cart the body of my uncle who had been killed in a pogrom the day before. My other uncle was badly wounded. He was attended to. Everybody was distraught, horrified: the war was going on, bandits, pogroms, the kids went hungry, and there were no jobs in sight to support the family.
Jews from surrounding houses gathered in our house every day, they prayed, took turns at night to guard the area to keep the kids safe. We had just a few calm days in Chigirin before we heard gunfire on the streets, saw fires, burned houses, witnessed thugs break into houses. Adults rushed us, kids, into the cellar. It unexpectedly became very scary to live in Chigirin as well. I still remember the names of the people who led the gangs, bands, and armed forces: Kotsupa, Denikin, Gonchriaev, Petlura. All of them marched through Chigirin, and on their way through the town, they all, with no exception, carried out violent anti-Jewish riots. Thugs from Petlura army broke into our house and killed my father and my brother. They were lying on the floor in a puddle of blood for a long time, to get outside I had to step over my father’s dead body. The puddle was so big that when trying to by step it I slipped and fell on the floor next to my father’s body. I was covered with blood all over and had to continue wearing these clothes soaked in my father’s blood since I didn’t have anything to change into. We did not have anybody to help us with the burials so the bodies were in the house for a long time until somebody finally came over, during a lol in the fighting, and buried our loved ones. There was no calm day, as soon as one gang left the town another one marched in and the violence continued.

Grigoriev and Petlura bands were the most vicious.
We continued staying with our relatives: aunt Rachel, Freida and Boris. One day Denickin thugs broke in, beat everybody up, and looted the house. They took off with our cloths, remaining money and valuables. We were lucky they did not kill us. A devastating tragedy came later when Petlura’s band got into the town. They were especially keen on murdering Jews, burning their houses.

They put our synagogue on fire. My brother Nahim and I hand-in-hand rushed to the burning place. Nahim was 8, I was not yet 6. We, hungry and dirty, watched people fighting the fire, trying to safe old precious prayer books in leather jackets. We picked up two books from the ground to save them. A woman who was also watching the devastation and saw us take the books whispered to us with compassion in Ukrainian: “Get out of here, otherwise they’ll throw you in the fire, they want to burn all you Jews”. Many books that belonged to the synagogue, including holy Torah scrolls, were burned in a pyre in the middle of the street. We didn’t leave the two prayer books behind, brought them home instead. As we learned later, those two were very valuable books; they were in our possession until 1941.
We were completely on our own roaming the streets of the town in ruins: our father was dead, and we had no idea where our mother was. To our relief our mother came back, and aunt Peisya and Abram, and other familiar Jews. It was very cold outside, and in the house, and there was no food. And again, the already familiar agonizing sounds of gunfire, that were followed by another pogrom. By then we did not have anything for the robbers to take from us. The bandits beat Gedalia and other Jews before killing them. Nahim and I hid behind the stove when we heard the bandits coming in. Aunt Reiza overwhelmed with grief confronted one of the killers: “Why did you kill my son; how did he wrong you?”. The bandit shot her in the face, and she fell down. For many days afterwards, her dead body was laying on the floor in the puddle of blood right where she was shot. Her face had a huge wound. We roamed the yard and cried our eyes out.

Vera in WWII

I recall hiding in the cellar with other kids, there was a bathtub over there, huge, made of wood. That day Aunt Rachel, my father’s sister, and her children arrived from afar to join us. They came from Kniazi village, where Aunt Rachel’s husband was killed. Aunt Rachel came to us with six children, three of them, Motya, Klara and Issak were little. Issak, the youngest, was still a baby. The kids including me were playing in the bathtub when a bunch of thugs broke in. We immediately got very quiet, as luck would have it even the baby in Aunt Rachel lap did not make a sound, did not reveal our presence in the house. The bandits didn’t go down in the cellar to check it out, so we lived.
My mother and other grownups who lived in the house left the house at night to hide from the bandits. The kids were left behind, we all slept in one bed, without undressing, keeping our shoes on.

There were several dead bodies in the house. We suffered from cold, and hunger. At night our gentile neighbors would come in to steal whatever was left in the house. They took out wooden frames from the kitchen windows, looked through empty drawers, and cabinets, did not find anything. They came into the bedroom, saw the blanket that covered us all and left, stepping over the dead bodies, taking the only blanket we had with them. Those neighbors who robed us were Gritsko Hasan and his two sons. They had guns. It was winter, very cold outside, no heat to keep the house warm, and there was no food.
When our mother came back from hiding, she arranged moving us to another part of the town, which she hoped would be safer for us. So, we left. Everybody got to transport something, I was entrusted with carrying a heavy cast-iron kitchen pot, my hands got very cold and I was crying. On our way we had to cross a bridge, and because we heard gunshots everybody ran, and I was left behind, fell in the middle of the bridge with the treasure pot in my frozen hands.

Vera with her daughters in Minsk

My mother was all in tears, in panic, she could not reach me, but lucky me I managed to get to her on my own, my face covered with blood from falling, my legs barely moving, stiff from the severe cold.
At last we got to where we were heading. The house felt heavenly warm, the hosts were very friendly to us, they welcomed us with boiled potatoes. Those hot skin-on potatoes were delicious!

We slept on the bare floor, no beddings, but we were happy: the room was warm, and most of all – our mother was beside us. To this day I am immensely grateful to those kind people, who being impoverished themselves, shared with us the little they had. After staying with this family for a while our mother decided to leave Chigirin for good. Uncle Vasily Sadorozhny helped us to get to Krylow (Novogeorgievsk). Krylow was a small town, had housed Russian Army during World War I. The town’s military presence has since been lost. There were several churches in Krylow, but we felt safer there comparing to Chigirin. We heard sounds of gunfire, but not as often as in Chigirin, and pogroms here were smaller in scale. Eksler was the name of the family who owned the house. The house stood on the bank of Tiasmin River, the ground level of the house that we occupied would get flooded rather often as the river rose.

The year was 1920.

We lived close to a church shelter and to a farmer’s market, the area was crammed with beggars and other destitute people. As I said before we lived in the basement. Slept on the floor, covered for warmth with rags. The always-wet part of the house attracted frogs, they were everywhere. I feared them. Every morning I would mop the floor, gather frogs in a pile, and transfer them into a huge basket, from which they easily escaped. Although my efforts to clear the floor were pretty useless, I stubbornly repeated the routine the next day again horrified by the sight of them jumping around us at night, touching our faces and legs.
I and other kids who also lived in the house fell ill with Epidemic typhus. We were kept together, Mother brought in a pack of straw, which became our mattress, and more rags to cover us up with. There was no food in the house. The mistress of the house, Ms. Eksler, stopped by and brought us a bowl of pickles and a slice of bread for each of us. The pickles made us thirsty. We gulped water from a big clay pot, the source of the water - Tiasmin River. That’s what we drank.
Mother took on herself by then my duty of fighting frogs. She diligently swept the floor around us several times a day, but they managed to hide from her and come out again, green and ugly, totally disgusting. A huge toad lived under the stove, she was the one that frightened me the most. It seemed she was staring at me. I imagined her jump on my face when I was asleep so I asked Mother to take out the creature, but Mother refused, and let her be. She told me it was a big sin to kill this toad. My brother Aaron was not afraid of frogs, he played with them, petted them, carried them around. If they bothered him, he picked them up and tossed away. Mother tried to ease my fear of frogs: “Some people like to eat them, and you are afraid of them!” We were sick for a long time before we got better. It was a miracle that we survived typhus.
Mother told us one day: “Children, don’t ask for food, hunger is upon us, if I find something to eat I will give it to you.” When she was lucky to get some buckwheat bran from a flower mill she baked “pancakes”, which we gobbled up. They made us vomit. One evening she saw a horse cart stopped at the gate. I recognized immediately that it was our friendly neighbor Vasily Zadorozhny, from Matveevka village. He brought us a sack of millet and a sack of apples. We were elated, millet porridge and apples!
What a delight it was our millet porridge, no milk no butter, no sugar, of course, just millet grains and water. We were so happy! Everything was changing for the better, we saw smile on Mother’s face. We used to see her sunk deep in her thoughts, overcome with worry and sadness.

Then came another good news: we received a parcel from America! From Uncle Yitzhak Smeliansky. He sent us rice, cans of condensed milk, and money. That was quite helpful, little by little our life started showing signs of normality. Our American uncle also sent clothes for us, children: a dress for me, and several pairs of pants for my bothers.

Vera with her grandchildren in Chicago

Shoemaker Staschenko made shoes for us all, I remember him fondly, he was a very kind man. His wife’s name was Frocya. They did not have children. One day they came over, and had a long conversation in private with our mother. Mother was crying, we overhead her say: “I have only one daughter, can’t give her away to anybody”. Childless Staschenko couple wanted to adopt me, but Mother stayed firm. Even at the time when the hardship was the worst and the hunger was unbearable she did everything she possibly could to save our lives, and keep us all together.
Mother’s father, our grandfather Munim Vereschatsky, was not with us at the time of horrific pogroms in Chigirin. He fled the town when the pogrom started, and we hadn’t known until we moved to Krylow if he were alive. There in Krylow Mother got the news that he had survived and was living in Knyazhna village. Mother got in contact with him, and asked him to move in with us.

We were expecting him for the Rosh Hashanah, but he didn’t arrive, and there was no word from him. Mother was overwhelmed with worry, was looking for him relentlessly. Finally, the news came that on the way to see us he stopped overnight at our relatives’ house in the village of Matveevka.
That night several bandits broke in, demanded money and gold, which nobody had. They started beating them up, then took them to the basement of the landlord Bespalov and killed them. Some peasant driving into Krylov met my mother and told her that grandpa Munin and a relative were killed. Their corpses were still in the basement. Mother went to Matveevka and brought the killed in a horse cart.
They were buried in Kamenka at the Jewish cemetery. Daughters Milka, and Zina sent some money for a tombstone from America. When I got older and began working as a teacher in Kamenka, I visited my grandpa’s grave often. He was 80 when he was killed.

Read the family stories:

Chazan Chernyak Kaplun Levin Mendelsohn Perelshteyn Reznik Reznichenko Rogowin Segal Spigel Spitkovsky Shenker