Zipora Musicana Jacobson Musi-Ja
Relationet Project
Blog code:RelatioNetZIER34BARO
Interviewers: Arbel Rozman, Yuval Ynon, Danielle Yahav
Contact interviewers:
Danielle: yahavdanielle@gmail.com
Arbel: arbelrb2314@gmail.com
Yuval: yuviynon@gmail.com
Survivor information:
Last name: Schneider
Previous name: Musicanto-Jacobson
First name: Zipora
Father's name: Tzvi
Mothers’ name: Beti
Sisters’ name: Zuzi
Sister’s’ name: Ida
Brothers’ name: Hertzel
Date of birth: 10\02\1934
Place of birth: Banila, Romania
Current address: HaMaccabi 39, Raanana, IL
Place of residence:
Before the War:
-a Village called Banila- that borders Romania, Ukraine and Moldova.
During the War:
-Edinetz (Edineț) , northern Moldova, about 200 km north from the capital of
Chisinau. Edinetz is located in the historic region of Serbia.
-Kamionka, Lubartów County
-Mohiliv- Podilsky was formerly called Mogilev, Ukraine in Vinnitsa County.
Sub-District, east of the Dniester River on the border with Moldova.
-Chernivtsi, In northern Bukovina, formerly in Ukraine, near the border with
northern Romania.
-Storozhinets,in the Bukovina district during the Austro-Hungarian rule. Located
today in Ukraine.
-Bucharest, the capital of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and
financial center.
-Zagreb, is the capital and the largest city of Croatia (today). While the war was in
Yugoslavia.
After the War:
-Chernivtsi , a district at Bucovina, Ukraine
-Strozenof (until 46’) a town in the Ukraine
-Romania (Passover)
-Bucharest - the capital of Romania
-Yugoslavia (in July)- was a state that united Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,
Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
-The woods of Zagreb (3 weeks)- the capital of Croatia
-Sailed from the port in a ship named “Haagana” (six days)- The ship contained
2’600 illegal immigrants’ and she was meant to deliver cows.
-Caught by the british and they docked in Haifa, Israel
-“Atlit” detainee camp- a detention camp established by the British Mandatory
Government.
-“Mosinzon”- an educational and an agricultural institute at Magdiel
Before the War:
Zipora’s story, from her point of view:
Zipora Schneider was born in a Village called Banila- that borders Romania, Ukraine and Moldova.
Banila was a well- established community, also known to Bukovina Jews as "Bnilev" (Banilew). The first Jews settled in Banila in 1780 or so when they arrived from Austria and Russia. According to the stories of Jews, Jews began settling in Banila immediately after the annexation of Bukovina to Austria.
In the fall of 1940 almost all Germans left for Germany voluntarily, after the Russians gave them about eight months extension to decide on it. They were allowed to sell everything and take their money and valuables with them. In return to their homes and their lands they were given adequate compensation according to a decision of a joint German-Russian. In autumn of 1940 the German originators were driven by special trains to Germany, when German military units with medical staff organized their transportation. Many Jews from Banila and thousands of Bukovina Jews were accused by the Russians as Zionists and were sent to Siberia.
They were taken from their beds at night and transported by trucks and trains in terrible conditions to Siberia, where many died.
In Banila anti-Semitism almost did not exist. The town's Jews were diligent and honest, and they have won the respect of Christian residents. Until the Second World War anti-Semitic outbursts did not occur in Banila. The mayor, who was elected in 1939, was friendly to the Jews, and when members of the party claimed against them that they are not expelling Jews, they told them that the Banila Jews are honest and willing to help the poor Christians and to support them.
In June 1940, the Romanians robbed from the Jews cows and horses, and Jews were shot by Romanian soldiers.
Employment of the Banila Jews was related to the environment of the city, Jews were engaged in metalwork, carpentry, painting, shoemaking and hair dressing. Some Jews were truck drivers, and the town had three Jewish doctors and a Jewish pharmacist.
The first synagogue was opened, probably, between 1820 to 1830 and in the three synagogues there were libraries, though they had no rare writings. Almost all people with the ability have contributed to the "Keren Kayemet", and the Zionist branch frequently organized fellowship evenings or lectures. In the Zionist Organization Jacob Brecher was particularly active. The Banila community numbered about twelve hundred people, and two hundred of them paid community taxes. In the small communities near Banila, such as DAVIDANY, Hilcze, Koszczuja and other small villages, there was no community management, and they were annexed to the Banila community. Community revenues came mainly from community taxes and slaughtering fees.
During the War:
Zipora’s story, from her point of view:
It was an ordinary Friday in my village Nila and at about 12 o'clock the terrible cries started, we all woke up immediately and according to my father -Zvi, we stepped out of the back window of our house to the high cornfield and hid there until dawn. At dawn, we immediately joined a group of Jews that was waiting in the center of the village.
The look was awful: men and women were standing and their clothes full with blood from the beating of the Romanian guards. After a long anticipation, we were all transferred to the Great Synagogue and we were left there guarded for two days.
Then we marched towards Strozendz where all the Jews of the surrounding area were concentrated, food was not available and the conditions were terrible ; Finally, two sacks of inedible bread was brought to us, which was unworthy of human consumption, but in lack of food we had no choice and all the bread was eaten.
Diseases began to spread out and because of the lack of medication many people were dying. All of us started to break into abandoned homes to look for food. There we were held for about 8 days, (The world recognizes the famous death march and very few historians have written or noted in their captions the small death march of Northern Romania, Bucquina and the province of Zafnji which belonged to Austria),
until all the Jews from the surrounding area were concentrated, and then we all were forced to walk, not knowing where- women, babies, and old people, who ever was left behind was killed.
We were forced to walk 20 km a day, from morning to evening, every day we had to walk until we finished the daily quota.
By evening we would go to an abandoned field and there we spent the night. Every morning stacks of bodies in the field would pile up, we would see the little children who were deliberately abandoned if it was for their parent's lack of power or perhaps their hope that someone else would come and save them. This horrific death march lasted about two weeks until we arrived in the Serbian district, which is on the Ukrainian border, there we hurried in the city of Yedinac.In Yedinac a ghetto was set up for the Jews of Bukwina and the Jews of Sarabia.
The conditions were awful, we suspected that the wells in the area were poisoned. A real picture of looking at the impossible side of a human being, I was a young girl with severe intestinal infection and difficult lice that was raging on my head. Two weeks of the death march didn’t help my condition,nor my family’s health.The situation was horrible, death was found in every corner. My grandfather died in front of me, They had no mercy.
They told him what to do when they found it necessary to humiliate him miserably, the terminal violates the dignity of the most basic humanity (the details will be saved with me).
The year was 1941, the story began in the early Summer (June - July), We stayed in the ghetto until the holidays and just before Sukkot the worst frost had begun.The next day the march had started towards the Ukraine. At the time of the march the situation became increasingly difficult and the sights as well. We walked three times to the border of Nister (Naber-Nister) and three times we were sent back to where we were before. The reason was unknown to me at the time.
The third time we arrived to the river, we were shocked and horrified by the sight of hundreds of Jews corpses that floated on the water, probably the traffic from the concentration areas even the banks of the river conveyed their convoy, and without a command from a superior person they decided that the best way was to just get rid of the "cargo". (Keep in mind that in the aforementioned place, the semi-frozen river is up to a mile and this is the reason that the river has not completely frozen).
My father saw our situation and went to one of the officers and said to him: Give me my hat and I will fill it with gold and you will save us. The officer took us into the woods as my father went from person to person and filled the officer's hat with valuables and gold. As a reward we are given a full day of rest in the forest without any interruption.
The next morning we started again and in the evening we reached a bare hill and where we were told to spend the night there, about 50 meters from the hill was a forest (and it is known that in the woods it is warmer than the bare hill) but the officers would not let us stay in the warm forest that night. About six hundred people froze to death and in the morning a large pit was excavated,all the bodies that were frozen and those who were dying were thrown into the dirt.
The march continued. We reached the Nister River again and there we began to pass the river across the bridge to Moligum. The whole city was covered in very deep snow. (Almost up to the height of the neck).
At Moligum we met a Jewish population that was gathered together from other cities.
This population was concentrated mainly in the city by trains, the greater part of which came equipped with their personal belongings as passengers on the trains. (As part of the Nazi Satanic deception campaign). From Moligum sent the convoys to the heart of Ukraine. Within the city Jews who had money left with them managed to obtain the necessary license that proved that they were necessary for the army.
The rest of the Jews they continued to march throughout the cold winter.
Hundreds of thousands died on the road as a result of the frost, the terrible hunger, and the terrible diseases that raged around us.
We camped in a village called Khrymyonka where a few hundreds of Jews stayed in a 5X5 room. We stayed there all winter and only about 12 people managed to stay alive, we ate from the walls then we were all sick with Typhoid disease. During this time, convoys of Jews passed through the village. Our only food for the whole time was the leftover frozen sugar beets.
It is important to note that us being placed at the village while the Jews convoys pass every day near us was not clear, it may be possible to attribute this to that bad organization of the same forces that helped Germans, Ukrainians, Romanians and others. Because of the lack of organization stands that they could not or did not know if to force us to join the Jews convoys or that They came to the assumption that we will most likely die from starvation. The stay in the room (the starvation room) lasted for about 5 months (October-April) 1942.
Already in the first stages of this starvation room we were neglected by a guardian that believed we were all dead already, when we were imprisoned for 5 months.
We stayed at the starvation room for 5 months while at the first stages there were still passing convoys and slowly after January came, they stopped.
We were locked in the same desolate house at the end of the town, we never left the room because we knew that if the winter won't kill us then the hostility of the other residents will kill us.
At Pesach a special event took place inside the village, A little girl went lost and the peasants decided that we, the jews, killed her in order to use her blood for passover. And they were going to kill whoever survived, we were lucky and the girl appeared and so we survived. Then my father decided that there was no chance of staying alive in such a place and he devised a plan to start moving towards Mogilum because there was a bigger concentration of Jews and maybe there was someone there who could help us. He would let us not die like all the other Jews who died in this room. The plan was to leave at night and march till the day, then when sunrise we hid until night again and these were the words he said, "If we die the way at least we tried."
After several days of walking, we arrived to a town named Vandidan. There, we found a small group of jews, and among them were some men that knew my father. They explained to him that who comes to Mogilum- has no chance to live, but here he has an opportunity to join to the Jewish population from the local ghetto and walk with them tens of kilometers to the surrounding villages in order to find food. We went from house to house and asked from the residents to donate us some food. Most of the time they would donate some potato peels or leftovers, but sometimes if we were lucky we also got one slice of bread.
There were a lot of farmers that trained their dogs to hurt us, and that was our biggest fear. But beside that, there were also people who helped, and thanks to them we stayed alive. We lived in a building that used to be a bathhouse that had no windows, no doors and no floor. There, we invented a special dish called a nettle soup. (We would cook the nettles in boiling water and the thorns would fall and then we would eat everything.) we stayed there until 44’.
My father was a professional barber and the only thing that remained to him from home was his haircut’s scissors and a haircut machine. He would go out to the villages and give a haircut to the local toddlers in exchange for food.
One day, my father came across a group of Romanian soldiers with an officer who asked him what he was looking for. He told them he was a barber for a living, but the officer decided that a Jew should not have the tools of a barber and he took his tools. My father told him "It would be better for me if you would shoot me because without my tools I'm not coming home since this is a death sentence for me." Then the Romanian soldiers began to punch my father mainly in the chest with their gunstock. My father did not give up "kill me and give my tools back" and this was his end, since he was dying and then he passed away.
Before the spring of 1944, a rumor crept into the town that during the withdrawal of the Germans, they were killing more Jews. Then we searched for a hiding place from the retreating Germans. We found a basement with several other families and hid there until the Russians came to town.
After this tragic story, that full of the grief and extrusion of a Jewish family that lived in a village in northern Romania and lost my father-Zvi Hersh Musicant, the two parents of my mother-Zelik and Elka Horowitz, her two brothers -Theodor and Herzl Horowitz, each with a wife and children. All the Mozicantoes and Jacobsons, their cousins and cousins. From a town that contained about 30,000 people, only 100 survived. Complete but not complete misery story of I telling Zippora Schneider to the Musicanto-Jacobson.
After the War:
Zipora’s story, from her point of view:
when we left the basement, the world seemed to be very odd. We saw corpses of Germans at the side of the road. I do not know if we were happy or we were sorry , but we knew that we were saved. All the survivors began planning their return home. Towards the end of the war, it was very difficult to get on a train because at that time the trains were packed with soldiers and weapons. But after we waited at the train station for days, The long-awaited train arrived, we climbed it and boarded an open carriage.The war was still raging across the Nostrum River as we began our return journey home.
sometimes the train would stop for hours, but we didn't give up or move from the open carriage until we arrived (to Bukowina) to Czernowitz (which is the capital of Bukowina).
When we arrived, we got out of the train and started to look after relatives or familiar people.We heard that the survivors of the city were in the Strozniff so we drove there immediately.
in Strozniff, my mother worked in the Russian co-operative, my fifteen-year-old brother washed corpses, my sister went to the first grade, and I remained a housewife.
We were in Strozniff until 1946, when the Russians allowed Jews to reunite with their families in Romania, and cross the border.
At that time we also signed up for immigration, and when we arrived in Romania it was Passover. At this time, My family and i didnt know what is Palestine, And I didn't even know that it existed.
But on the first evening in Romania, the young people in Mulhane (where my father was born) invited us to the “ken”. We asked them what this word was, and they told us to come and see.
When we arrived to the "Ken," we became acquainted with the whole complex of the word Zionism, Israel, Judaism, aliyah and Hebrew. We slowly became proud Jews.
At this time, we were taken into orphanages and as a "Holocaust survivors" we were given the first priority for immigrating to israel.In July of 1946, some of the Jews and among them my sister and I were gathered and we began the process of immigrating to Israel.
In Bucharest, we boarded the trains and headed to the Yugoslavia border.
The drive duration was about 3 hours.
After arriving in Yugoslavia, all the survivors from all sorts of countries gathered together in a forest in Zagreb. There, we waited for the arrival of a ship. We stayed In the forest for about 3 weeks as well.
In my group there was a guide who organized various youth activities, such as: singing in public, games and quizzes. At that time we felt quite happy.
One night we got into trucks and drove all night. In the morning we arrived at the port where the ship docked.
We were alerted to leave all our packages on the sand and they would arrive the next day, we were not ready to give up our clothes (that we received from the Gyanat in Bucharest) so we decided put every item of clothing on us (The Holocaust Complex was still close to us) and then we got on the ship.
When we entered we received three packages of food, and on them were written in English morning, noon, and evening.
When we received the packages, we opened and ate them all immediately.
The main difficulty was swallowing the chewing gum (we never saw anything like it).
The ship was completely full. When we boarded the ship, the illegal immigrants (the miserable lonely survivors who managed to escape the Nazis) found a seat on the deck which was barely sufficient for sitting.
(in retrospect, it turned out that the name of the ship was the "Hagana". It contained about 2600 immigrants and was aimed to transport cattle and not humans).
At about six o'clock we left the port and were happy and excited to move from the same place.
Above our deck was another smaller deck. After a while, I saw a woman in front of me who started to vomit on me, and fifteen minutes later, there wasn't one person on the ship that didn't throw up. After that, No food was wanted, but the water we wanted so bad we didn't get.
The journey lasted about 6 days, and on the fourth day, a strong storm broke out and as a result of the engines stopped working.
We immediately threw into the sea anything superfluous in order to ease the load of the We jerked for a whole day as the ship tipped over.
At night the British apparently spotted us and in the morning two destroyers appeared
and carried the ship all the way to the port of Haifa.
At the port, we were not allowed to go ashore, we didn't know why.
so we did the only thing that we could do and it was a concentrated hunger strike against the British government's decision.
In fact, we were in the last ship the British allowed the people in it to go ashore. There, a second surprise awaited us in the form of another detention camp with watchtowers-Atlit camp that was notorious.
We stayed in Atlit until Rosh Hashanah. Our group has moved on to the rise of youth immigration, meaning that we have been released as having no parents and orphans who are unfamiliar with the language.
We were taken to an agricultural educational institution named Mosinzon in Magdiel. This is where a new chapter began in trying to build a new life.
Among us were many children who needed long-term medical care. We worked and learned, it was a very happy time. And it was a real shame to talk about our miserable past.
Under the misery of Europe during World War II, we also underwent partial military training. After the declaration of Israel, we were recruited to the Palmach. And as a result, some of us passed away and the rest went to the south and built a home and family.
For me, Israel signifies being a human as all human beings, because a Jew outside of Israel is only a Jew and not a human being like the rest.
Therefore, I taught my children that
Israel symbolizes being human as all human beings and living in Israel is a privilege - a privilege to take part of the Jewish nation and from the rest of the people.
My eldest son (may he rest in peace) was named after my father, and all the other boys in the family were also named after family members that passed away in the Holocaust.
Bibliography
