Taraz Hesed held different events for different age groups to commemorate victims of the Catastrophe. There were interesting discussions organized by our Librarian Ida Bukina and meetings with the war and labor veteran Hayunya Fishelevna Grinberg who has nine government awards. Hayunya Fishelevna told the children about the beginning of war. Her home town in the Ukraine, Kirovograd, was bombed. Fascists were outrageous, were killing Jews by whole families only because they were Jews. Her family fled to Krasnodar Region where they lived in poverty. After two months they moved further to unknown places, thus arrived in Kazakhstan in Dzhambyl Oblast, Chu Village. Here they were given shelter by a kind Russian family. Hayunya picked firewood, saltbush, nettle, and sorrel. Together with workers participated in the construction of a channel; she dug earth by a mattock and moved stones in a wheelbarrow. In a few months Hayunya started working in a military registration office where she drew documents for mobilized and accompanied them to the front line.
In our Hesed, talks about Holocaust are an integral part of Jewish education. On the memorial day of the Catastrophe, April 18, children came with their parents. Everybody was very quiet listening to a story about Hitler, how he came to power in 1933 and started annihilation of Jews. The World War II took lives of more than a third of all Jews. We presented books from our library. Everybody was particularly moved by "Black Book" published in Jerusalem edited by Vasiliy Grossman and Ilya Erenburg. It is not possible to read it calmly, it makes one’s blood curdle and tears run.
We read out poems by Lev Rozhetskiy, a schoolchild from Odessa, who went through all hardships of the fascist hell. We listened to the story how our beloved city Odessa struggled against fascism, talked about fascists’ crimes in Babiy Yar. Nazis, when they realized that they would have to flee from Kiev in the fall of 1943, tried to hide traces of their mass killings and burned over 70,000 dead bodies.
There is no Jewish family which did not lose relatives during the war. These are families of Bronislava Koshik, Elena Grinberg-Dmitriyeva, Lyudmila Kirshner, Getsel Sass, Antonina Kunetsova, Boris Futoryanskiy, Lyudmil Pronyayeva, Anna Kovalskaya, Anna Kebadze-Koyfman, Boguslava Kopchinskaya, Bronislava Shevchehno, Olga Fartushina-Rubinshtein, Valentina Gerr, and many others. To forget about these victims is the same as to betray them.
Of course, we were talking about how the Memorial Day is held in Israel. At 11 AM, a siren is switched on for a minute; people stop working, cars stop, all country gets quiet to commemorate the six million Jews who did not survive in Holocaust. We did the same as in Israel, we stood up in silence in memory of the victims.
We also talked about how Nazis tried to keep the doomed Jews in ignorance, spread rumors about moving people to agricultural works, asked to take warm clothes and a two-day food supply, formed people in columns and moved them to a rail way station, then secretly changed direction. All of a sudden people found themselves in front of open graves and here they were shot dead. Even most pessimistic people could not foresee the real plans of Nazis. Let the memory of the victims be the ferocious guard of good, and the ash of burned be in the hearts of living people calling for brotherhood of all people.