Юрій Сторожинський Yurii Storozhynskyi

And I was so impressed by that [watching Exodus 1947], because it turned out that I... I basically had a problem with the British. How so? You were allies, you fought against Germany. How could you do this to the Jews? And so on. I was so interested that I decided to do a little reading on the subject. I started reading various books, but I knew nothing about Jews at all. Who are Jews? What are their customs? Religion? And so on. I started looking for books to read, but Soviet people had only six volumes of Sholem Aleichem about Jews. And Sholem Aleichem mainly described the lives of Jewish artists; in short, from Sholem Aleichem one can understand little about how Jews lived, worked, and so on. I started looking for other books in libraries. There was nothing anywhere. Then I was told that there was a Jewish society that had its own library, and it was located on Vuhilna Street, and there was a synagogue there, called Jakob Glanzer Shul. I went there, and Olya Fadeeva was sitting there, she is now the head of the library, although now the organization has moved to 30 Kotliarevskoho [Street]. I went to her. “Are you a Jew?” I said, "Well, my mother was Jewish, so I'm very interested in the Jewish question, they say you have books.” — ”Yes, we have books, all books are exclusively on Jewish topics, we don't have Pushkin, we don't have Lermontov, but we have many books by Jewish authors.” I said, "Well, give me a book to read.” — “No, you know, if you were a Jew, but are you?” — "I am" — “No, do you have any documents that you are a Jew? A birth certificate.” I said, "No.” — “We cannot register you with the library and give you books.” Well, but I found my way. I found my relative, Hanna Vuytsyk. So, my grandmother Pavlina had a younger brother, even younger than her, his name was Yakub Lukanych. They lived in Brody, in the center, near the market. They had Jewish neighbors, their last name was Groiss. When the Germans began to form a column of Jews with suitcases to be loaded onto a train going to Belzec, to the concentration camp, well, it wasn't a concentration camp, but a death camp. So their neighbor brought the girl, this Hania, Hana, to my grandmother's brother, I don't even know how related he is to me, but my grandmother is my relative, and her brother is my relative. And that Jewish woman said, "Take the child, and when we come back, we will take it from you, we will thank you, that's all.” They didn't have time to talk for a long time, they took the child, the others left, and that was that. They adopted the child, she graduated from the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, she is an economist. She was an exceptionally intelligent woman because she was Jewish. Then she got a job here in Lviv, married a Ukrainian by the name of Vuytsyk, and then she looked for her cousins who were still alive. One was in Israel, the other in America. The one in Israel told her, "No, no, no, you can't come to us, we can't take you in, we are poor, so poor.” And the one from America came here on her own. To cut a long story short, I had this relative named Hania. And I didn't really keep in touch with her, but from time to time, we met somewhere. And then I turned to her. I said, "Listen, how do I get to that library?” She said, "I'm registered there.” I said, "Well, the one who sits there doesn't want to give me a book.” — ”Well, she won't give you one, let's meet with you.” So I met with her, and we went to that library together. She said, "Which one do you want to borrow?” And then I was told to read the very first book that I should read to get acquainted with the Jewish question, Golda Meir's memoirs My Life. I said, "I want to read Golda Meir.” Hania says to Olya, "Put Golda Meir on my card. Now, what should I take to read?” ”Well, I think that next to Golda Meir is Ben-Gurion. Take the one about Ben-Gurion, and then we'll swap." And that's how I got enrolled in that library, that is, Hania borrowed the books for me.

I will tell you one such example [of conversations that residents had with each other after the war in Lviv]. My parents and I, here in Lviv, I told you... we had one large room and one smaller room for a kitchen, and there were five of us living there. My father was a shoemaker, and he had a shoemaker friend from the village who used to come here to Lviv, place orders for my father, and the latter used to do work for him. And he moved to Lviv, found an apartment on Kostiushka Street, which is how you go from Zhovtneva [Street], from Sykstuska [Street] [now Petra Doroshenka Street] to the [Ivan Franko] University, there is a little street like that. He says to my father, “Vladek, come with me, I know, I talked to that janitor, there are two more empty apartments there. No one is watching those apartments. You can get in and live there, and no one will throw you out, especially since you have children." But my father also took my mother and went with Vasyl Chekh, went to look at those apartments, and my mother was also smart. She met a janitor, a Polish guard, who had been told by the Poles and Jews who lived there to watch their apartments. And my mother started a conversation with him, “Do you know, we heard that there are empty apartments here, we would like to, we have children”... and so on, and so forth. And he said, “I understand you, ma'am, but you should take into account the following: when the Bolsheviks are driven out and the Poles and Jews who used to live here return, you will be prosecuted for illegally moving into their apartment.” My mother was convinced, “Yes yes, yes yes.” Then my father went out on the balcony and shouted, “Dana, come and see what a nice apartment we have here, come, I want you to see it.” — ”Vladek, get down from there, we're leaving, I don't need any... I'm not moving into any apartments here, let's go home, that's it, we have an apartment and we'll live there, let's go.” And that guard scared my mother so much that someday she would be responsible if she moved into a good apartment without permission, that we... All our liberators who came from eastern Ukraine, they all lived in Jewish and Polish apartments, and we lived in those miserable apartments both before and after the war.

My father worked as a shoemaker, and my mother was a housewife. She and my grandmother somehow got along very well because later, my grandmother Pavlina remembered my mother very fondly when she was gone. No one knows where my mother went. In order to support the family's financial situation, my mother also took up work. She and some women she knew from Brody went around the villages, bought flour, baked bread, and took it to Lviv to sell. And the best place to sell bread then was near the ghetto. Here, you know, the entrance to the ghetto was where the tram enters Zamarstynivska [Street], and the exit from the ghetto was where Chornovil Street is. And there, those women with bread, which they somehow passed to those Jews who were being taken to work or taken from work, would throw that bread over, and the Jews would throw over some payment. But the local police did not allow this, but, of course, as police, they sometimes turned a blind eye, and the bread trade went on. But in the end, my mother got caught in a raid, she was put in a car, and the last information that my father received about my mother was that someone he knew saw her... She was called Liolia in everyday life, her name was Leia, and her surname was Margulis. “Margulis" means “pearls” in Hebrew. Since Vyacheslav Molotov's wife was Zhemchuzhnaya ["made of pearl" in Russian], my mother, one might say, was also Zhemchuzhnaya in translation. My father was told that your Liolia was seen being taken by car to the Gestapo. And the Gestapo was located where our SBU is now on Vitovskoho Street. No. — Near the tram depot? — Yes, yes. Because before that, it was the Lviv Electrification Department, and then when the Soviets came in [19]39, they turned it into the NKVD, and the Germans then set up their Gestapo there. And so they said that they saw my mother being taken there, and then they never heard from her again. And in those days, they already knew that if a person disappeared or if a Jew disappeared and did not return for a long time, several months, then there was nothing to wait for, nothing to look for, it meant that the person was gone. And so I was left an orphan without a mother.

At that time, it was already known that the Germans treated Jews very cruelly. They rob them, they can kill them in the middle of the street if they think that a Jew is guilty of something. And I think that my parents decided not to register me with the local authorities, and the fact of my birth was registered with a blue seal only in 1948 when I had to go to school and did not have a birth certificate, so my grandfather and I went to the local registry office to get a birth certificate. Before going there, for that procedure, I was hanging out in the yard, and my grandfather had a, as they said back then, a lodger who rented one room with a kitchen from him. A military couple, it was [19]47, Uncle Kostia, I remember, and Aunt Vera. Aunt Vera came out and said, “Where are you going?” In Russian, of course. I said, “We're going to the registry office with my grandfather to get a birth certificate.” She said, “And when were you born?” I said, “Here, at the end of June in [19]41, when the Germans were throwing bombs at Brody.” And she said, “You know what, tell them you were born on August 18.” — “Why?” — “Because it's my birthday on August 18, and we'll buy you a cake, so delicious, you haven't eaten anything like it yet...” And she started describing to me what a cake was. My grandmother, like all the locals, knew how to make various honey cakes, poppyseed cakes, tsvibaky, God knows what, also very tasty, but cakes were not customary among us, and she intrigued me with this. When my grandfather and I came to that registry office, there was a woman in uniform sitting there and started asking questions. She asked my grandfather, “Well, when was the boy born?” And at that time, after the war, there were thousands of children and people in general who had lost their documents somewhere and were asking for new ones. That's why there was an order to issue birth certificates and other documents on the basis of citizens' statements. When asked when the boy was born, the grandfather said, “You know, ma'am, when the Germans were throwing bombs at Brody.” She said, “You tell me the exact month, the exact day.” — ‘Well, the month is June, and the day is somewhere around the end, maybe the thirtieth of June.’ — ”No, you tell me exactly.” And here I stood, listening to all this, listening, and I said, “Eighteenth of Avgusta [August in Russian].” The woman said, “You see, the child knows why you are messing with my head.” My grandfather said, “Well, write it down. What is 'Avgusta'? Serpnia? [August in Ukrainian] Let it be so.” And so now, in my passport, it is written that I was born on August 18, 1941. Aunt Vera never bought me any cake.