Fedy Zomer Weisselberg

RelatioNet FE ZO 30 RA RO

Interviewer:
Shani Weisselberg
Yana Belskiy

Email: shaniwis@walla.com


Survivor:Code: RelatioNet FE ZO 30 RA RO
Family Name: Zomer
First Name: Fedi
Father Name: Mother Name:
Birth Date: 1930
Town In Holocaust: Radavtz/ Radauti/ Radowitz 
Country In Holocaust: Romania
Profession (Main) In Holocaust: Student 

Address Today: Living in Kfar Sava Weissman st 76

Interview 

My name is Fedi Weisselberg, before I got married my family's name was Zomer. I was born in 1930 in Romania, Kobina, Radawtz. I lived with my sister Ani, my mother and my father. I went to a private Jewish kinder garden and when I was 6 I went to an elementary school. Life till 1940 was very good. We had a wonderful lifestyle, every summer we took a vacation near the sea or on the mountains. I learned in that school till 1940, when the Jews had to wear a yellow star on their shirts and they weren’t allowed to go to school.

My parents had a store which sold equipment to other stores. We were very rich. We had everything, a maid and a huge house in the main street. I studied to play the piano for 5 years. We had my parent's partner who lived next door to us. My parents and their partner, Bochovsky had a hotel with a restaurant and sold wine, Bochovsky was Romanian and he wasn’t Jewish. We shared the hotel with him. The hotel was open to everyone until 1940 including Jews. It's true that the Romanians didn’t like the Jews, however, they hadn’t started to show it yet.

In 1940 it was forbidden for Jews to go to school, so my sister and I had a private teacher. The teacher lived far from us and my sister and I walked together to her house. I had friends, almost all of whom were Jews, however, the moment Jews weren’t allowed to go to school the Romanians acted like they didn’t know us. I had had 3 best friends since kinder garden, Mia Anchel(she immigrated to Israel but I am not in contact with her), Atel Bahar and Gaby Stern. We were always together. We kept in touch when I studied with the private teacher. I should have gone to high school however Jews weren’t allowed to go to school so they didn’t accept me.

 The situation got worse every day. Six months before they expelled us from our houses they took my dad and hit him all day. He was lucky because a policeman who knew my dad found him and brought him home. He would have died if the policeman hadn’t come. One day there were riots all over the city. People came from the village to kill Jews. We didn’t have a place to live after the riots. They expelled all the Jews from the villages and from the cities. Nobody could hide on it was a small city and everybody know everybody. The expulsions surprised us. We didn’t know what had happened in the villages.

On 13 October 1941  they took us out of the city, they gave us only 3 days to pack all the things we could take with us, they told us that they were sending us to a work camp. The city was empty of Jews. I was only 11 years old. My friends and I were separated. In my luggage I didn't take toys, I took clothes and food for 3 days. We went on a transport. My mother went home to bring a broom to sweep the train. I couldn't breathe there because it was horribly crowded. We travelled for 3 days in the transport. We didn’t know where we were or where we were going. It was full of people. During those 3 days nobody paid us any attention. It was so unreal to me, everybody was depressed and hopeless and they cried a lot.

After 3 days of driving we stopped in the middle of nowhere. It was an open place, we didn’t see anything as it was night. In the morning we saw that a pharmacist from our city had killed himself with his wife. The place was full of Jewish houses which were destroyed. They had killed all the Jews who lived there. They left only one person alive and told him to write the names of the people they had killed in the houses. We were there for 2 or 3 days in houses without doors or windows. This place was between Romania and Ukraine, called Ataki. We waited in this village for the Romanians to take us across the lake between the countries. We waited for 3 days, we ate the food we had taken from home. It was October do we didn’t have warm clothes. In Ukraine it was terribly cold.

On the other side of the lake was the city of Mogelof. They moved us to destroyed buildings that had been a university before the war. We were there only for a few days and they told us they were moving us to a new place. We begged not to go. My father paid someone to take us in a car to somewhere else. The cheated us, they left us in the middle of the road and took only my father. We drove to Mogelof and for one night I slept on the floor somewhere.  In the morning we took a car to where my father was. This place was called Kopigrate, a small town in Ukraine. All the men from this town had been taken to the war. We met my dad there.

We were all there: my parents, my sister, my grandfather, my uncle, his wife and 3 year old baby. We rented a room there. To stay in this room we had to beg them and pay every day. Those who didn’t have money stayed outside on the snow and the rain. Three-quarters of the people died that first winter. Many people got ill with typhus. Most of the people died because of the illness. There wasn’t any medicine at all. They had no chance to live. The poor kids of the parents who were sick went to ask for bread. They knocked on our door every day and begged. My mother used to feed them. I also had typhus. I was lying on the bed where I seemed to see colors moving on the wall. Most of the kids died because they had no food or medicines. We survived because we had money for food.  My cousin who was only 3 tears old died from typhus. She was a pretty girl called Rotti. Most of the kids died because they had no food or medicines. We survived because we had money for food.

We were in Kopigaret for 3 years. One day a man appeared. He had managed to get away and not be killed in a common grave where the Germans had stood them in line and shot all the others. The man who came to us had fallen in the grave and pretended he had been hit by the Germans. We didn’t believe him. He was insane. He was so insane, we didn’t know what to do with him. Finally somebody killed him, I can't remember who.

One day they told us to pack all our bags and go outside. They told us they were moving us to another place. We went 7-8 kilometers into a forest. My granddad had heart attac on the way. However he survived it. My dad paid somebody to drive us back to where we had been before. Everyone stayed there for almost 3 weeks. When somebody tried to runaway, they killed him. One of my friends went home to bring clothes and was killed immediately.

Life there was horrible, my father paid somebody to drive us back to the town. All our property had been stolen.

One day they got us all together in the middle of the ghetto. There were Germans with machine guns. We knew that this was our end. I could only think about my granddad, I didn’t want him to suffer. My heart was beating so fast; I couldn’t breathe, I was so worried. I stood there with this fear for so many hours. Finally they sent us back home, they had only wanted to scare us. So the years passed until the end of the war.

We stayed 9 people all the time until the Partisans arrived. The night before we saw that the Germans had started to move in the main road and we realized that something had happened. There were no news papers and no one to tell us about it. We were scared that the Germans would kill all the Jews until they left because they wandered around the Ghetto to keep us in. When they started to run away we were afraid that they would kill us. Then, the partisans came. When the first partisan came on a horse we looked at him as if he were a messiah. The feeling was so special. We had known all the time that there were partisans in the forest because the Germans always asked about them; they had come from a remote forest. After them, the Russian army came in. they were very poor, starving and miserable.  If the Americans hadn’t helped them they would have lost the war.

 I don’t remember any more details from the Ghetto as we were kids. During those three years we didn’t do anything all day. We just sat at home with friends.  I had one good friend who died not long ago in Haifa. My sister had a best friend who spent the time with her in the Ghetto. We used to play, talk about the situation that we didn’t really understand. My parents didn’t talk about the war. We just saw the dead people lying together on carts. I see those carts even now. The Germans had a mass grave and buried all the Jews together. We didn’t do anything, there was nothing to do. We just walked outside although it was very cold. We just had our clothes from our house. My dad had a lot of money from his grocery store and his hotel. This money lasted for three years for food, a place to live and basic needs. We didn’t know a lot about the war because we just saw that the Jews were being taken to work. We saw how the Germans hit them, killed them and took them to the graves. We saw all the terrible things that happened in the Ghetto, they couldn't hide it from us. We stopped thinking  about whether we would live or die. We didn’t have a sense of time during these years; we had no idea how the war moved on. We felt that the war continued forever. We didn’t know anything about the extermination camps. We knew only the details from a person we met. This person came from a place that was occupied by Germans. My mother cooked for the Germans in our Ghetto, but she didn’t get anything for her cooking.

During the war, people tried to kill my father because he was very rich. They told him to come to a basement and that they would take him to a better place. When he came in he saw that there was no escape from there and he was surrounded by criminals. He succeeded in running away. I didn’t ask about money and conditions because I was a little girl who didn’t think too much. I didn't take an interest in how my dad got his money and how he could help 9 people during the war. When the Russian came to the Ghetto we were so happy and calm. The Germans were not far away, but we had no idea where they were. After a week, my father was taken to the Russian army which took kids too. We were left with only the women in the Ghetto because all the men were taken to the army. The Russian army had only dry food and leftovers for all the soldiers. My mom baked bread and sent it with my aunt to the army. After two weeks we heard that all the men could come back to the Ghetto. We were so happy to see them again.

While my father was in the Russian army, he had left us all the money because he didn’t need it there. When he came home, he said that we had to leave quickly before they conscripted him again. We escaped in the night because we didn’t want them to see us. We hadn't told anyone that we were going to leave the town because we were afraid that someone would try to stop us. We bought a cart with horses that took our stuff and we started to walk along the road. I don’t remember how we got to Moglof. Later, we found a place to sleep on the floor. When we got to Moglof I couldn't sleep all night. The Germans came to bomb the place, but the Russians shot them first. The noise was so strong and scary that all night my heart was beating quickly. I heard shootings all through the night.

I don’t remember how we crossed the border, probably on a boat because there no was other way. I just remember that walking with the cart took a long time and we paid the Romans to get a place to sleep. One day when I walked in the forest I found myself alone and it started to get dark. I can't explain the fear that I felt because I didn’t know what had happened to my family and I couldn’t find my way back. While I was standing there I saw many solders and I was sure that they were going to kill me. I was 14 years old alone in the forest. Suddenly I saw my aunt looking for me. I run to her and we walked back together. She told me that our cart had broken and while they tried to fix it I moved on alone. My aunt bought us bread to eat and later we went to sleep on the floor in somebody's house. In the morning we walked for a long time until we came to a little town, Sert, not far from the place that we had come from. The Germans and the partisans didn’t let us back into our town. We were in Sert for 3 months in a house that we found.

When we got back in 1944 we couldn’t find anything except for walls, they had taken everything.  Everything was closed, neglected without people, just like a ghost town. When we came home, we didn’t talk about the war it was like nothing had happened. Walking home was in carts too. We started our life from the beginning. I just remember that we had nothing and I went to my neighbor to take water. There were huge rats around me and I was so afraid. These rats I will remember all my life. Even the hotel near us was empty. The hotel owner and her sister had died because they were Jews too.

I can't remember how we started our life again. I just remember that my dad rebuilt his grocery store so that we would have an income. The Romanians came back and everybody wanted to rebuild the town and their life. My friends came back alone too. In the town a new school for boys and girls together was built because we were only a few children there. In the summer I needed to complete all studies for 3 years that I had lost when we were in the Ghetto. I finished school when I was 19 years old instead of 18 years old because of my time in the Ghetto.

In the town nobody talked about the war and what had happened there. There were many places that the Germans hadn’t got to and the Jews stayed there, for example in Bucharest. Nobody told us what was happening with the war, and we didn’t have newspapers, radio or television. We saw the horrors only after the war. In our town there were a lot of Germans who moved to Germany because the Germans had promised them that they would get lands and their life would be better.  The stupid Germans believed them and left the town, but when they got to Germany they got nothing and all the men were taken to the army. My seamstress's son moved to Germany, when the war started and was immediately killed, he had been a beautiful boy. He was so enthusiastic about Hitler that he had to go to Germany to support him. When we got back home, we didn’t see my seamstress anymore. When we started to rebuild our life, we were so lucky that my father was rich because there were no places to work and earn money.

I remember that I had scabies, a skin disease especially on my arms. I had more diseases that made me see monsters on walls and creatures that I remember until now. I had a high fever and my skin was orange.                

My mother took care of me while I was ill. When we came back from the war we had money to build the store again. We moved on with our lives. It was very hard, we had nothing to eat. It was a tough year for us. We had no T.V or radio, we didn’t know what was happening outside.

My family immigrated to Israel and I lived alone for 10 months. I cooked for myself and had my own apartment. I lived in Bucharest, studied at school, however, I knew that I didn’t have enough time to learn a serious profession because I knew that I had to leave. I was an excellent student at chemistry. When I got permission to immigrate to Israel I packed all my stuff immediately.

In 1950 I immigrated to Israel alone, my parents had already immigrated. I wrote them a letter before I came. I immigrated on a Transilvania ship. I was on that ship for 3 days. It was very nice there. I had a private room of my own.

My parents were waiting for me at the refugee camp in Israel. My new life started from that moment.

Town:

Radavti (Romanian – radavti, German – Radavtz, Yiddish – Radowitz) , a city in Bukovina, northern Romanian, near the Ukrainian. The first Jews who settled there came from Bohemia in the late 18^th century, later others joined from Galicia and Russia. There were 3 Jewish families listed in the tax register of 1807.

The Jewish of Radavti were, at first, affiliated with the first Jewish community in Suceava. In 1830 they opened their first synagogue. After that they bought some land for a Jewish cemetery. Before they bought the land, the cemetery in Siret was used.

After Radavti became an independent community, the community opened its own institutions. In 1880,30.97% of the population in Radavti were Jewish (3452 people). In 1880 there were 8 prayer houses (Shtiblenk ) in addition to the central synagogue. In the same year another  523 families were registered in the community.

Religion had a very strong influence on the Jewish life in Radavti, mostly the Vizhnitz, Bojan and sadagora dynasties. Those very religions people were the main cause of arguments due to their objection to Zionism. From the beginning of Zionism in Radavti the bile movement was established. And in 1892 a local group called Achavat Zion, was founded. At the beginning of the 20^th century this movement became popular. 

When the city became a part of Romania in 1918, the Zionist parties took part in the community leadership. Members of the bund were also active in the municipal and community councils. A Hebrew school was supported by the community. From 1919 to 1926 a private Jewish high school also opened in Radavti. In 1930 the Jews were 31% of the population. Some of the Rabbis of Radavti were Eliezer Lifmann Kunstadt (officiated 1894-1907), Jacob Hoffman (1912-1923) and the Hebrew author and investigator Jacob Nacht (1925-1928). The anti-Semites in Radavti became more and active in 1939. In 1942  all the Jewish of Radavti numbering 4,763 people (32% of the population) were deported to death camps. In 1942 there were only 42 Jews left in the town.

Some survivors went back to Radavti in 1944, and in 1947 there were 6000 Jews on the city. The Zionist movement also returned after the war; however in 1949 the government stopped them. With aid from organizations such as OSE, the American Jewish joint distribution committee, and the world, the community went back to Radavti. However, from 1948 more and more Jews left for Israel and to other countries. In 1971 only 700 Jews were left in the city (3.5% at the population).