Alexandra Zapruder: Salvaged Pages : Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust, Second Edition (Paperback); 2015 Edition by Alexandra Zapruder

Author:Alexandra Zapruder [Zapruder, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-12741-6
Amazon: B01FODBIS0
Publisher: Alexandra Zapruder
Published: 1672-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, November 4, 1941 [Djurin, Transnistria]

Who could have ever imagined that I would start this notebook, meant to be a poetry album, under these circumstances. When Bondy [a friend of Miriam’s] presented it to me as a gift, times were different, but now?!!! Four weeks ago this Thursday, at nine-thirty in the evening, Dad came home with the terrible news of the evacuation. But nothing was for certain. On Friday people heard that we would be evacuated on Sunday. And so, the fever of evacuation set in. Crying, gloom, packing, boiling, everything in great disarray. We did not realize what the future had in store for us. On Saturday, the shops were closed and so people started to sell their things clandestinely and give them away. Just like scavengers, peasants, city dwellers, neighbors, and strangers pounced upon us and in one morning we emptied the house of the most beautiful things.

At three in the afternoon rumors spread that everything was postponed for six months. Uncertainty; anxiety; are we leaving or not? Mother and Father were feeling sorry for the things we sold and gave away; even I was seized with grief. But in our hearts we wavered; we were not certain of the rumor. We had finished packing but we packed as if we were going on a trip. We could not imagine that they could have uprooted us entirely from our homes. In the evening we went to bed and until tonight this would be the last time we went to sleep in a bed.

On Sunday, at six in the morning, we found out that we were leaving. We started to realize the atrocity that had been inflicted upon us. But we could not even begin to imagine what we would live through; who could have such a dark imagination? At eleven in the morning, the wagons started to roll toward the train station located at the edge of the village. It was the first sight of our exile. The long road was muddy, strewn with wagons filled with bags, bundles, children, and old people. Gypsies live better than that. They have wagons; we don’t even have that. We leave Câmpulung behind and arrive at the train station. Here the scene is even more awful. Weeping, grief, bags, screams; we are loaded into cars that are actually used to transport horses. The cars had been cleaned of the hay and so we get in, thirty-eight people in a car, of whom four are over eighty years old and one is a paralyzed child. We were afraid that they would seal the cars. At the station bread was distributed to the people. From what we had thought and heard, we were going to a town somewhere in Bessarabia, Atachi; they said that we would resettle there and would be able to earn a living. We left at eight in the evening with the second transport. We spent the first night as if we were going on a trip. We were not aware of how dismal our situation was; we just sat on the luggage.

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