Before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, hundreds of visitors came to the country annually with Christians who sided with Israel, to meet with Jewish communities. A stop in the town of Tulchin was always on their itinerary, where Rita recounted, in stages, how she survived the Pechora death camp. She spoke for an entire generation of children imprisoned there, who themselves could never put the horror they had experienced into words. Among them is Moisej, who is still visited regularly by our CSI staff.
By Anemone Rüger
Moisej wants to join us for a toast right away. His wife has transformed the courtyard into a small botanical garden. We just barely manage to avoid the cognac, pointing out that it's still early and very warm. Moisej is delighted with the cake, his wife with the flowers. The most important thing for both of them is that they haven't been forgotten, that someone is sitting next to them on the garden bench, conveying greetings from Germany.
Moisej lives with his family – his wife and his disabled daughter – in Tulchin, a small Ukrainian town near Vinnytsia. Tulchin was once widely known. The Polish Count Potocki brought the town – and deliberately its Jewish life – to its peak from the late 18th century onward. There were more than 10,000 Jewish residents, 18 synagogues, and 70 Jewish schools before the October Revolution and the subsequent pogroms decimated the population and the Soviet state drove religious life underground. When the Wehrmacht invaded in the summer of 1941, Tulchin's Jewish community, with 5,600 members, was still the largest in the region.
“Dad was a shocher, a kosher butcher. His name was Naum,” Moisej tells us. “He came from a large family, three brothers and six sisters. Mom’s name was Riva, short for Rebecca; she was a seamstress. I was two years old at the time.” What exactly happened next, we will never learn from Moisej. He can’t tell us—not even after 80 years.
infected with typhus
Most of what we know about the Jews of Tulchin was told to us by Rita, Rita Schwejbysch. She was three years older than Moisej and she remembered everything. With the Germans came the ghetto. After months of humiliation and violence, the Jews were rounded up in the Jewish school at the beginning of December.
“We were held there for three days,” Rita recalled. “There was a Ukrainian doctor named Beretzki. He gave us injections. Injections with typhus pathogens. Then we had to shower. When we came out again and looked for our clothes, they were soaked and infested with lice—so the typhus would spread faster. Then they forced us on the death march.” Moisej’s mother was there too, with her little “Mosik” in her arms. And the other family members? Moisej begs not to be asked. Through tears.
The Death Road
In total, an estimated 12,000 Jews from the entire region were divided into three groups during the Advent weeks of that frigid December and then driven before them by German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian police with German Shepherds. "We had to walk, walk, walk," Rita recalls. "It was about twenty kilometers on the first day. Many of the older ones collapsed along the way; they were shot immediately. That's why the country road is called 'Death Road'."
That evening, the survivors of the first day's march reached the village of Torkiw, where they had to spend the night huddled together in a horse stable. "Some lost their minds," said Rita. "We had nothing—nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to relieve ourselves with. When it got light again, many had hanged themselves with the ropes meant for the livestock."
Pechora – the “death loop”
After another day's march, the Jews from Tulchin arrived in Pechora on the evening of December 8, 1941. A pretty little village on the edge of the forest, with a large sanatorium. Enclosed on three sides by a wall and bordered on the fourth by the Bug River, the grounds of the sanatorium were transformed overnight into a death camp, dubbed "Death Loop." It would later be considered by historians to be the most brutal concentration camp in the Romanian-occupied part of Ukraine. And this despite the fact that shots were rarely fired there. The prisoners were simply left to the elements without any provisions.
Moisej does reveal a few sentences about the camp. “In winter it was terrible: snow, ice, and bitter cold. The whole area was overcrowded with people huddled on the ground, barely surviving. Many contracted typhus and dysentery; fever and scabies were rampant. People were constantly searching for something to eat. They traded their clothes for it. They even fought over a few blades of grass.”
The only chance of survival was to get out occasionally and beg. “There were different guards,” Rita recounted. “When Ruschilo was on duty, he let us children out. There were others like Smetanski, who were cruel and beat the children to death. The river was the only way to get water. The Bug River was the border with the German zone. On the other bank, the soldiers played the harmonica. If someone from the camp managed to get near the river, they would practice target shooting.”
Unspeakable horror before the eyes of children
While some died, new groups of Jews were constantly being deported to the camp; from Bukovina, from Romania, from Bessarabia. They were somewhat wealthier and were able to survive for a while longer through bartering. Rita and Moisej soon had no family left. They had nothing to trade with the villagers at the fence. Their bellies were swollen with hunger. Every now and then, someone would slip something through the fence to them—a beetroot, some potato peelings, a sack of potatoes to cover themselves with.
They saw small children grabbed by the legs and smashed against a tree; their mothers collapsed beside them, and the children's bodies lay for a long time. They witnessed prisoners who had tried to escape being beaten to death by the guards at the entrance gate. They were there when everyone had to line up at the well: the old and children on one side, young laborers on the other. The latter never returned—when a group had completed a section of the new road to Voronovitsa, they were shot and buried under the road surface.
There was a larger building, inconceivably still used as a sanatorium. The prisoners sought refuge there. "Every morning the guards went through the rooms and carried out the corpses," Moisej recalls. "In winter we almost froze to death, in summer we died of thirst. There was nowhere to go. Even if someone escaped, they were usually handed over. The Germans were everywhere."
Liberation Day
Tens of thousands of murdered people lie in mass graves in the nearby forest. No one has exact figures. There aren't even any photos of the camp. On the day of liberation, March 14, 1944, only 330 Jews were still alive, mostly children. "The Nazis retreated so quickly that they didn't have time to kill us all," Rita said. "We had all barricaded ourselves in the morgue," Rita continued. "When there was a knock, we were afraid to open the door at first. But then we heard: 'It's us, the Red Army! We've come to liberate you!' So we cautiously opened the door. We couldn't believe our luck. We kissed the soldiers and the horses. Some of them fainted."
Eight-year-old Rita walked back to Tulchin, just as she had come. But there was no home or family for her anymore. In despair, she decided to drown herself in the river. A Ukrainian woman rescued her. Rita later became a midwife and helped bring thousands of Ukrainian babies into the world.
Rita's Promise
For each of our groups that came to Ukraine for an encounter trip, Rita told her story. We stood with her at the garage in Tulchin, where she stored our food parcels for her small community; then in the mud by the horse stable in Torkiv, in the icy wind at the gates of the death camp, on the mass graves overgrown with bluebells in the forest clearing, where Rita always spoke and cried with her mother in Yiddish.
“It’s hard for me to talk about it; I relive it all and don’t sleep for nights on end,” Rita once told us. “But I made a promise back then, there in the death camp, where I thought every day was my last. ‘Almighty,’ I said, ‘if I survive, I will tell everyone what I saw here.’”
Rita kept her promise until the end of her life. She did it for an entire generation—for her friend Raja and for Moisej, who were speechless with the horrors they had endured. Just hours before she passed away, returning to her God, to whom she had clung all her life, our team was able to be with her one last time, to thank her for everything she had entrusted to us.
Rita fulfilled her difficult task. Raja died a few weeks later. Moisej is still here. Whenever we are in the area, we visit him. We sit with him and his wife for a while on the garden bench and drink a glass of L'chaim, "To life!" On May 9th, we will congratulate him on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war and the return of the Jewish people to life.
This article first appeared in our newspaper "Israelaktuell," issue 140. You can order the newspaper here . We would also be happy to send you several copies for distribution.
