Emanuel Garber meets me at his apartment door with a smile. After I enter, we chat for a bit before we sit down.
Behind him hangs a painting of Lviv’s scenic Ploshcha Rynok, and he starts to show me the books he has written about his life so far.
The first book covers his experiences during World War II from his family’s attempt to flee, to the time they spent interned in a ghetto, and finally their liberation.
That book he has painstakingly translated into English so that his grandchildren can understand what he went through.
Next the conversation turns to his life.
Emanuel was born in 1932, in the shtetl of Zhabokrich located in Vinnitsa Region. In his adult life he came to speak Russian, Ukrainian, and English fluently, but at least his English “w”s hint at the Yiddish of his childhood.
He was nine when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
In the first days of the war his father was conscripted into a labor brigade tasked with constructing a military airstrip. As other families began to flee, his family chose to stay and wait for Emanuel’s father.
It took weeks before the authorities gave up trying to build the airstrip, finally realizing that the German army would reach them long before it was finished.
Upon Emanuel’s father release, they had to decide what to do. Emanuel’s uncle was able to acquire several horses and a wagon, so the family headed south to Odesa where it had relatives.
Emanuel can still clearly remember the roads and so-called evacuation. “There were thousands of people on the roads, people walking, people on horses. It wasn’t an evacuation, they were just running away,” he says.
After heading south, German air raids forced Emanuel’s family to give up trying to reach Odesa and instead seek shelter with a local Jewish family. After a close run in with German patrols going door to door, they realized they could not flee further and decided the best they could do was head home.
Emanuel’s father went ahead and the family eventually followed, spending a night along the way with a Ukrainian peasant family who offered them shelter and milk.
It was that decision which saved their lives. After the Germans took Zhabokrich and moved on, Romanian soldiers began rounding up and shooting Jews.
Between July 26 and July 28, 1941, 331 Jews were killed in Zhabokrich.
Returning after the mass-shootings, Emanuel’s family was spared, but soon trapped in the newly organized ghetto where the dangers of starvation and disease were just as deadly.
Without medicine, typhoid fever raged through ghettos across Eastern Europe, and Zhabokrich was no exception. Both Emanuel and his sister fell ill with the disease, but eventually recovered.
Food was scarce, but the Jews of the ghetto made boots and mittens they could trade for food with the villagers living outside the ghetto.
What stands out in Emanuel’s memory, however, is the day the ghetto was liberated, which for him has become synonymous with Victory Day.
After the Germans began to retreat, Emanuel’s family built a secret room they could hide in, unsure of what would happen next. While the family hid in the room his aunt waited above. She had lost her family in one of the earlier shootings and as Emanuel writes “her own life was not dear to her,” and she was determined to face whatever came.
Finally, word came that the Soviet army was approaching and everyone went to meet them. “They were dirty and exhausted, but they were speaking Russian and you can’t imagine how excited we were,” Emanuel reminisces.
Though there was little in the village, that night everyone found food and, of course, vodka for the soldiers.
The colonel from the unit was himself from Zhabokrich and had two brothers still in the ghetto when he arrived.
The great irony was that after being liberated Emanuel was often required to hide what happened to him because of prejudice against those who stayed behind in occupied territory. His experience was one he was forced to conceal to be admitted to university in Soviet Ukraine, but now one he freely shares.
Before I leave his apartment Emanuel takes me into his bedroom to show me the framed map of the Zhabokrich Ghetto he has carefully worked on with other survivors to reconstruct. He also tells me about a friend who received a grant to create an exhibition on the Zhabokrich Ghetto. In Israel though, not the U.S. or Ukraine.
As I leave his apartment building and head for the Coney Island boardwalk, I wonder about the other Brooklyn Holocaust survivors from Ukraine and all the other former Soviet Republics. They meet every Victory Day, remember, and celebrate the war’s end. They will be meeting again soon.
Ian Bateson is a freelance American journalist. He can be reached by email at [email protected], or on Twitter at @ianbateson.
