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Survivors

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Hundreds of thousands of Jews survived
the Holocaust by escaping to the Soviet Union.
Fear, hunger and illness were their
constant companions.

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ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

Martin Ryba:
"I looked at
something I didn't
understand and there
was nobody to
explain it to me."

• II

t,r.-

`41

he train moved like
a heavy bear across
the tracks. Deep into
the Soviet Union it
lumbered, belching heavy
black smoke that filled the
bright sky.
Inside one baggage car, a
family of five waited with
their two suitcases. They'd
had to leave everything
else behind. Their apart-

Assistant Editor

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ment would be lost to them
forever.
The parents were named
Zalman and Freida Rifka
Yoffe. Their children were
aged 2, 8 and 12. The oldest
was Elkhonon.
Just hours before, the
family had been at their
home in Riga. The Yoffes
had lived there for genera-
tions. Frieda Rifka was a
seamstress; her husband
was a shoemaker who lov-
ed to sing. Elkhonon
studied at a Hebrew day
school.
But everything changed
when the Yoffes boarded
the train for the Soviet
Union.
As more and more of
Europe fell under Nazi con-
trol in the early 1940s,
Jews were faced with two
unattractive alternatives:
stay in their homes and fall
into the hands of the Ger-
man army, or flee to the
Soviet Union. The Com-

munist nation, headed by
dictator Josef Stalin, was
itself bleeding from the
war. Literally millions of
soldiers and citizens were
dying, and those that sur-
vived faced terrible food
shortages and agonizing
Winters.
Few today remember the
other Holocaust survivors:
the Jews who went to the
Soviet Union during World
War II. It was a painful
life. Most were imprisoned
in labor camps. Many wat-
ched their children work a
man's job, only to earn a
cup of rice as payment.
These survivors did not
smell the burning flesh of
the death camp
crematories; their arms
were not forever marked
with the Nazis' blue
tattoos. But they experi-
enced years of hardship —
of starvation, of torture
and beatings, of frostbitten
feet and hands and wounds