Miriam Bercovici
         Survivor of the deportation to Transnistria

         My name is Miriam Bercovici nee Korber; I was born on September 11, 1923. I am a pediatrician and I still work for the Community, doing house calls for the assisted patients; I also work for the Lauder kindergarten and school twice a week. I was born in Campulung Moldovenesc and I spent the first 18 years of my life in that town.

         On October 12, 1941, all the Jews in Campulung Moldovenesc, as well as all the Jews in the entire Bukovina, were deported to Transistria with their families. They didn’t tell us where we would be taken. They just gave us 48 hours to get used to the idea and to prepare ourselves for this trip; we had no idea what the trip would mean for us.

         Our small family was composed of myself, my sister, my parents, and, most importantly, my grandparents; my 84-year old grandmother was blind. They took us to the railroad station. We didn’t board in the town’s main station, but in Campulung Est, a marshalling yard only used by freight trains. The worst thing about our departure wasn’t the fact that we boarded freight cars, but the walk from the town to the marshalling yard. It was a Sunday morning and the locals were coming out of the church. We had known those people for ages and some of them were friends of my father’s, who had been born in Campulung. My grandfather had lived there too and it appears that even the grandparents of my grandparents are buried in Campulung. Well, none of these mattered. Those people, who had been our friends and whom we used to greet with ‘Good afternoon, neighbor’ or ‘How do you do, Ma’am’, had suddenly turned into strangers. They stood on both sides of the road and some of them expressed their hatred towards us in the most fowl way. This was the first truly painful thing that I experienced.

         The train ride lasted several days. I couldn’t tell whether there were three days and a half or four days and a half because I lost track of time. They crammed 40 of us in each car. Those were cattle cars that had been cleaned before we got on. We were randomly distributed. I found myself in the same car with the town’s lunatic – you see, every town has its own mad woman. The passengers in my car also included my grandparents, other old people, and a child in a wheelchair. The first time we got off was when we got to Cernauti. For three days and a half or four days and a half, we had to relieve ourselves on the train.

         The journey ended when we got by the River Dniester. They forced us to get off the cars and we found ourselves in the middle of an empty field, next to the river. It was raining. It must have been October 15 or 16. There was mud everywhere and no shelter. They told us they would take us further east, across the Dniester, and that we weren’t allowed to carry any valuables – money was out of the question. We had to exchange everything we owned for rubles. And so we were left with nothing at all.

         We had already realized that things were serious, but it was only then that we understood just how serious they were. In my first night there, I witnessed a man go insane; an absolutely normal man turned into a madman. He was Mr. Garai, the druggist, a respected gentleman from Campulung. My father was a craftsman, but the druggist was an important character in a small town like ours. Well, this man kept saying: ‘But I paid all my taxes. I am druggist Garai; what do you want from me?’

         Before long, everyone became everyone’s enemy. I remember that we were trying to avoid another group of deportees from Iedinetz who were full of lice, even though we were deportees ourselves. We began to fear the others. The process of dehumanization was at its best. That was the worst thing that could possibly happen. The moment I got off the train, I realized we were in for that. And I would like to skip to the end. Although I survived, I could never get over it completely. Even today, I dress warmer than the other people, because I still suffer from cold; even today, I store more bread than I need, for fear I would run out of it and starve; even today, I dread any form of authority.

         Yet, despite everything we endured there, on April 15, 1944, I set off for Romania together with 9 other youths like me. My father had been deported ahead of me, so he wasn’t with me.