Holocaust Testimony: Malka Levine

I was born in 1939 in a town called Vladimir-Volinsk in western Ukraine. I am one of three children and my two brothers, Chaim and Shalom, also survived the Holocaust. The rest of my wider family – 78 people in all – were all killed, including my father. My mother also survived and this is very unusual: she is the only woman I know of who managed to bring three children through the Holocaust.

When I was only three years old, in 1942, we had to go into the ghetto, leaving our home and all our possessions. The Germans gathered all the 25,000 Jews in our town and put them into one quarter. They surrounded it with fences and put notices outside, saying that the people in the ghetto were suffering from typhus. This made sure that the Christian population would have no contact with us and would not try to come in or bring help. So we were cut off from the rest of the world.

Many of the Jews in the ghetto prepared hiding places because they could see what was going to happen. But my father didn’t believe that anything would happen to us. He just thought it was a terrible time that would eventually pass. Every day, he was taken out of the ghetto to work.

One Friday lunchtime, we were all sitting at the table – my grandparents on my mother’s side, my other grandmother, my two brothers, myself and my mother – when the SS and Gestapo suddenly rushed into the ghetto and started shooting at random. We hadn’t planned a place of shelter, but our house in the ghetto stood on stilts, about a foot off the ground, and there was a trapdoor leading to the area underneath the house. My mother grabbed a satchel, put in a bottle of water, some honey and a loaf of bread, and ushered us all down under the stilts. My mother’s sister and her husband decided not to come with us and went instead up into the rafters of the house because they thought that if their newborn baby started crying, everybody would be discovered. So they went into the roof of the house and we hid under the floor on the earth.

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