Odyssey into ancestry.
"It will be good. One must always have faith."
To an old Jewish cemetary in the tsarist-era Pale of Settlement for the Jews of Kiev where there is a memorial for an ancester, a nineteenth century Maggid, Mordechai of Chernobyl.
Next to a 1000 year old Bessarabian fortress city near the Dniester River on the outskirts of Khotyn where a 30 foot concrete slab with the names of 45 men, women and children includes a paternal grandfather, who was a holy rabbi and his son Aaron, all etched in Hebrew - it is one of three mass graves of some 1900 Jews killed in the early years of the Holocaust.
The story born in 1941 survived five labour camps before arriving at Ellis Island with the author's father, who also became a rabbi.
The story begins with the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina which the Nazi-Soviet pact allowed Stalin to detach from Romania. The Romanian army withdrew then re-invaded with German mobile SS killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, to rape, torture and murder the thriving Jewish population - 23,000 were deported from Khotyn to Transnistria, an occupied zone.
For three weeks from July to August in 1941, 50,000 were murdered - 280,000 to 380,000 died in Bessarabia and Bukovina in the war aided by an anti-Semitic Romanian government. Collaborators included Romanians and Ukrainians - the Romanian and German armies gathered all the Jews singling out their leaders. Testimony at a war crimes tribunal in Bucharest in 1945 recalled Jewish leaders including doctors, lawyers, teachers, scribes, pharmacists and butchers marched down the Dniester to a point where hundreds of Jews were shot. Twerskey's grandfather broke the line to spiritually cleanse in the water and was pulled back and beaten by soldiers.
The Jews dug their own graves.
El Moleh Rachamim (God Full of Compassion) Yiddish prayer for the dead.
Mordechai I. Twerskey
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