BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Maksim Goldenshteyn recounts a story his late grandmother once told him about how, as a 4-year-old child, she snuck out of a Jewish ghetto during World War II to retrieve her favorite dolls that had been left behind the day her family was forcibly evicted from their home in occupied Soviet Ukraine.
“She knew even at that age that because she had lighter hair and blue eyes, she could pass for a local Ukrainian girl,” said Goldenshteyn. “She put on a kerchief and slipped out of the ghetto.”
It is one of the stories that Seattle native Goldenshteyn tells in his book, “ So They Remember,” which recounts — with a blend of intimate family memoir and vigorous historical research — the Holocaust in Transnistria, a territory in occupied southern Ukraine that was controlled by Romania, a close ally to Nazi Germany for most of the war.
In that territory, where around 150 camps and ghettos operated, there played out a lesser-known but equally sinister chapter of the Holocaust, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were brutalized, exploited, and murdered.
Many died of starvation; some succumbed to disease or exposure; some were executed.
Goldenshteyn, 33, whose family moved to the U.S. as refugees from the former Soviet Union in 1992, says he heard fragments of his family’s past while growing up, but he never linked it to one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
“They didn’t really align with the image of the Holocaust that I thought was representative,” he said. Then, 10 years ago, his mother told him the story. “I was shocked at first,” he said.
Moved by what he’d learned, Goldenshteyn embarked on a decade-long journey researching a part of the Holocaust he feels is largely overlooked.
His starting point was to interview his grandfather, Motl Braverman, in his Seattle home over a series of weekends. Braverman, who died in 2015, languished as an adolescent with his family in the remote Pechera death camp, which became known to…
Source : yahoo
