Relatives of the victims of the Holocaust told about their fate

January 27 - Holocaust Remembrance Day. During World War II, about 6 million Jews were killed by Nazis and their accomplices in the occupied territories. About many of them so far almost nothing is known.

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«Medusa»Collected stories 3 people whose relatives died during the Holocaust.

Irina Ruhletsova, music teacher, active volunteer of the Jewish community, retired; born in Minsk (Belarus).

I myself suffered all this horror. I remember myself as a little girl, a 4-year-old. We live opposite the Philharmonic in Minsk. My father works there, and I'm still trying to see what he does. We have a sandpit and a garden in the yard. I play with my little brother, then I run to my dad. The door opens and a man comes out with a baton.

Dad - Mikhail Ionovich Rivkin - in 1934, he was just beginning to work in the orchestra. Before that, he worked at the radio "Belradiocenter". There he met my mother, Eddie Rubinovna Kleingeviks, who came to Minsk from Poland and got a job with a radio translator from Polish to Belarusian. My memory of my mother is this: someone calls me home and says - sit down, you will listen to your mother on the radio. That's all I have left of the pre-war memories.

Then the war ... We fell into the ghetto. The whole family: father, mother, brother and me. Another aunt Sonya, father's sister. Most likely, it was she who helped get me out of the ghetto. I remember - we are being taken, a whole group of children. I remember how a man comes to the ghetto, wants to sell potatoes, but the patrol tells him - you can’t sell anything, there are only beggars. A woman with a dead child stretches out to him - give me potatoes. When he sees all this, he pours the potatoes on the ground and says: throw the children into the bags, I will take them out, just ask them not to scream. Here he brought us to the partisan detachment, from there we were already transferred to the Slutsk orphanage.

I never saw my parents again. Mom died in the Minsk ghetto. Until now, I have no information about her or her family. But I'm looking, do not lose hope. Papa's sister Sonia became an underground worker and also died, and her father reached Berlin with the Soviet army.

After the war, my father returned to Minsk and searched for us: he found his brother, but he did not. My brother told me that my father had been looking for me for many years, but he could not ... Maybe he was looking under his last name, Rivkin, and I lived all my life under my mother's. So my dad survived, but I lost him forever. I found my brother after the death of my father. I went to his grave in Pskov. Dad and his brother finally settled there - thanks to my dad, a symphony orchestra appeared in Pskov, with his participation a violin and orchestra school was created.

The fact that I began to collect information about the history of my family is entirely the merit of my eldest son. He started with the archives of the Slutsk orphanage, where he found information about me. One day he called me and asked what my brother’s name was - Alexander, Shura? He found out that my brother lives in Bremen. Alexander Rivkin is my brother. We met with him, he came to Brest, where my eldest son lives. But I still had to prove that he was my brother. At that moment, when my son began to look for information, I could not even indicate the exact last name of our family - either Ryvkin or Rybkin. We did a DNA test first in Belarus, and then in Germany - and there they definitely confirmed that we are brother and sister.

Raisa Stepanenko, 67 years old, engineer, retired; born in Bobruisk (Belarus).

I learned about the death of relatives from the stories of my mother Blum Moiseevna and Aunt Myths - the daughter of my grandmother's brother. She alone was left alive by chance, because she was in a children's sanatorium, which was evacuated. I seriously decided to study family history when my mother died - in 2009.

The family of my mother comes from the village of Old Roads in Belarus. I know the family tree only up to the grandmother and grandfather of the mother, and then only a little. My mother never saw her grandfather (maternal). His name was Joseph Grek, and he died before her birth - in 1920. Mom's grandmother, Matlya Grek, gave birth to 5 children.

I want to say that war and repression brought a lot of death to my mother's family. In the Old Roads in the ghetto, my grandfather's parents, my grandmother's sister Ginda, her husband, and her children were killed.

Hinda married in the Old Roads and stayed there to live. The Nazis killed her with her husband and 2 children in 1942 or in 1943. I do not know why they could not evacuate. Old Roads is a tiny place with a population of about 2 thousand people. Only in 1938, it became known as the city. In total, about 1,5 thousands of Jews perished in the ghetto of Old Roads.

In Osipovichi (a town in the Mogilev region of Belarus near Bobruisk), Liya’s grandmother's brother, Samuel, his wife Gisia, and their children, Solomon, Ida, Gishi’s mother, her disabled brother 2, her niece Myth and Isabella, died. The father of these girls, Aaron Judelson, was shot as an enemy of the people, his wife Basya spent 10 years in the camp. Grandmother Reuben's brother after the wedding moved to live in Moscow, in 1937, he was arrested and shot - at the time of his arrest, he worked as a house manager in the house where he lived. His wife Mirra served 10 for years in a camp and died after returning from cancer.

No details are known about the death of my relatives. Of all the people we see in this photo, only grandfather, grandmother and great-grandmother Matlya died of their death - she was gone in 1936 year, she did not even know about the war. I don’t know much about Matla. Mom told me that she was very religious, she lived with her daughter Leah’s family, first in Old Roads, and then in Bobruisk.

In Bobruisk, the 22 man from my dad's family still died. He died before his mother and never talked about anything like that. When I began to study genealogy, at the same time my cousin Nathan, who has long lived in Stockholm, became interested in my family history.

Natalia Chertok, 29 years, a sociologist; was born in Moscow (Russia).

My mom and I — she once started, I continued then — made up a family tree, where about 270 is a person from her side and about 200 from my dad. Thanks to the search function matches on the site MyHeritage we found a branch of a family of relatives living now in America - we believed that they died during the Holocaust (they lived in Latvia before the war, and then there was no information about them).

First we asked the next of kin of the older generation and recorded everything they said, then more distant ones. Then they saved the family tree on the computer, after some time transferred its part (only from the mother's side) to the site MyHeritage.

Two years ago I participated in the project “RODʼN“ I ”from the Institute Am haZikaron (Israel) - and added our data to the base on the JewAge website. One of the most important documentary sources is the site of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Complex. It contains data about 4,5 millions of people.

My dad and I, for example, thought that the name Avstreich (this is my maiden name) is very rare; among its owners, we only found relatives and just a few namesakes among its owners. But having scored Avstreykh in the search for Yad Vashem, I found that the dead people with the same name near 500, and if I add the region where my relatives came from (Polotsk, Vitebsk, Liozno), then 40 remained. There you can see who these people are with each other, and try to dock with their ancestry, although this is not always possible. In addition to information about the deceased (last name, first name, names of parents, wives, professions, places of death), in the Yad Vashem database there is information about the person who filled out - a list of testimonies with a mailing address. It happens that with the help of this person, people find long-lost relatives.

The victims of the Holocaust can also be found on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, USA), and there is a lot of information about evacuees. As a source, you can use data on Jewish cemeteries. There are many interesting things on the websites of genealogyindexer.org and jewishgen.org - I found there a lot of fragmentary and interesting information about namesakes, but I didn’t connect them to my relatives. Most searched on the site Raduraksti - search on the archives of Latvia: digitized archives of the XIX - early XX century.

I have a few stories about our relatives who survived the Holocaust, for example, about my great-grandmother’s cousin. When mother made the genealogical tree, in it was the name of Sima Shlyakhter - except for the name of nothing. When we transferred the pedigree to a computer program and you had to choose the sex of a person, we decided that Sima was a female name and put the female gender. On MyHeritage, there is an option to find namesakes from different pedigrees - you need to confirm that this is the right person or disprove. A lot was known about the other members of the Shlyakhter family: about parents, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and also about numerous aunts, uncles and their descendants. And about Sima only that he was born in Latvia and - unlike a large number of relatives in this branch - he did not move to Moscow in 20 – 30's, but he seemed to have stayed there.

And by chance in 2014, a woman from the United States, the granddaughter of this Sima Shlyakhtera, wrote us through the website MyHeritage. It turned out that she has a match with our family tree. Her grandfather Sima Shlyakhter with his wife Taube (Tanya) and little daughter Henrietta moved to Brussels before the war, became a jeweler, he had an antique shop. The history of Sima and Tanya is full of wonders and dangers - during the war, most of the time they hid on a farm in a cellar near Brussels, for which they gave the farmer a lot of jewelry. In 1964, the family left Belgium for the USA - their descendants live there now. Sima's granddaughter told us that after the war they were looking for relatives who remained in the USSR.

Before the war, Sima corresponded with his brothers and sisters, they sent photographs to each other. Sima's descendants carefully preserve them. Sima’s granddaughter sent several photographs of her cousin Isanochka from Moscow, in which she was 2 years old. This is amazing because this woman is now 83. Two years ago she went to America to reacquaint herself with her cousin, about whom she had not heard anything for more than 75 years.

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