My name is Annique Dveirin, although legally it’s Ann because I became a citizen with that name. I was born Hania Beer, in Brzuchowice, Poland. We were part of Poland, but in an area where everyone spoke Ukrainian. Eventually that area became part of Ukraine. As I understand it, once the area became independent Ukraine, or during the Russian occupation, they changed the name to Boykovitso. My parents were Abram and Ruzia Beer.

We were six people living together in a three-room house: my parents, my father’s brother and sister, my little sister, and me. I slept in a cradle, my aunt slept next to her sewing machine in a daybed, my parents had the big bed, my uncle had the other room, and there was a kitchen. In the winter they often cooked in the corner of the big room, which created enough heat that it was sort of central heating for the house. There was a big baking oven in the kitchen that had a place on top, and I remember sitting up there watching my mother and aunt bake.

My earliest experience with the Holocaust was shortly before the Germans occupied Poland. The locals knew the Germans were coming, and they began attacking us. I was three years old, and one night I woke in the middle of the night to people pounding at our door yelling, “Jews! Open up!” I overheard my parents saying to put the two-month-old baby to the breast so she wouldn’t make noises while my aunt wrapped me in her shawl so the two of us could escape out the back window.

There was a river that ran through the village, and my aunt crossed the bridge with me. We went to a local Russian orthodox minister’s house. In that region there was either Catholic or Russian orthodox, and since he was married he must have been orthodox. My aunt took me to a back bedroom to let me sleep, but suddenly someone knocked. They must have seen us coming. My aunt put me on her back again and we went out the back window. A young man was milling about near the bridge, so we swam the river. On the other side, I could see our house in the distance with a big bonfire burning out front. Peoples’ shadows passed the bonfire, and they were throwing items into it. Then I went to sleep.

My aunt became startled, which woke me up. There was a big well in the village square for those who didn’t have wells on their property, and there was a very tall man standing at the well in the night, which turned out to be my uncle. I don’t remember when we returned to the house, but I remember that it was very empty. My parents’ bed was stripped, and for the next few weeks my mother was busy plucking feathers for feather beds.

The friends I used to play with suddenly started calling me a dirty Jew, or a stinking Jew. Some threw rocks, and my father would chase them off. The police came for my father once, and the next day, when he came home, he was swollen from being beaten. And then the Germans came.

I had a dog named Totus that looked like a cocker spaniel. He always slept under my crib, and when the Germans came they shot my dog when he barked. They sent my uncle to get the cattle from the pasture, and his dog followed him, a Siberian Husky looking dog. At some point, the Germans shot at my uncle, but the dog jumped and was hit by the bullet. This was my first acquaintance with the Germans.

Our family changed during this time, everyone was very tense. There was a lot of whispering. I think they were trying to figure out if we would survive, because shortly after that, in the middle of the night, there was knocking at the door. It was Nikolai Kuzhmakh, who my parents said had once babysat me. My parents wrapped me up and handed me to Nikolai. We drove through the woods at night, to Nikolai’s mother’s house in the smaller village of Plytenice, which a man from the United States Holocaust Museum told me is now called Plotonitsa. It’s no longer a part of Poland.

Mariya, Nikolai’s mother, and his two younger brothers Vasiliy and Fedko were waiting up for us. The brothers were ten and twelve years old. Mariya had a daughter, Hanka, a husband, and a son named Mechanko, who was over twenty years old. The husband and Mechanko worked for the Germans, but because I was a blue-eyed blond child I was passed off as being Hanka’s illegitimate child of a German soldier. She quietly took me to church, and I was baptized by a priest. So I became Hanka Kuzhmakh.

Most of the time I stayed inside the house. I had to learn new prayers and a new identity. I was confused, but after a bit I answered to Hanka. At first people smiled, and nobody was too tense. But no one had said I’d never see my home again, for the rest of my life, or my family as I knew it. I cried many days once I realized I wasn’t going back.

The house was one room, with a dirt floor and a cobbler’s bench under the window. I slept on top of the baking oven, Russian style, which forced Vasiliy to the family bed, and when I cried Fedko would say, “Give her back, she doesn’t want to be here!” I remember that their mother, Mariya, said I had a right to cry, that I’d lost everything.

I lived with them four years, and never went to school. I had chores to do, such as following after Mariya when she was hired out to cut wheat with a scythe. I would pick up any stalks that fell, and give them to her before she tied the sheath to put on a horse-drawn cart or a truck, depending on whose field it was. There was a well in the yard and fields that the boys ploughed in the summer. Mariya would poke at the ground with a big pole, and I’d put beans in the holes and cover them, or half a potato with the root down. As I got a little bigger I’d take the cattle to pasture: two cows, two horses, some sheep and goats.

Washing the boys shirts at the river one day, I watched as an airplane flew overhead. It was very low, and I could see a man who was pointing what looked like a rifle at me. The boys had taught me to swim, and when I saw that gun I jumped in the river and swam across. The funny thing is that I didn’t wonder why that man was wasting bullets on a child washing clothes on a rock; I wondered how it was he could tell I was born Jewish. These things become a part of you.

Fedko would often beat me, so the only way to survive was to stay close to his mother. I remember when I left home that my mother had told me to be a good girl, so I always tried to do that. One day Fedko said he was going to tell the Germans I was Jewish. His mother came out of the kitchen and told him they’d take all of us, because they’d taken me in. This was the beginning of my realization that I had some balance, that I had a way to defend myself. When Fedko hit me hard, I took a broomstick to him. I got a couple of knocks in. And this was my life there. One day I noticed that the family was doing something in the barn, digging a hole. I soon realized that my aunt was living there as well, the same aunt that I’d lived with at home.

Mechanko and Mariya’s husband came home from working with the Germans, and I think they worked in a concentration camp. Though I’d learned my prayers and all the things to do for church, there came a time when Mariya and I kneeled down to pray for the souls of her husband and Mechanko. I asked if they knew their prayers, and she said they did, but that we’d pray for their souls anyways. I didn’t know about the camps, but I knew there were some sorts of prisons. And then Mechanko came home.

Mechanko was a cobbler. He worked at home and would go out drinking with his friends at night. Some of them showed up one night and hauled my aunt out of her hiding spot. I was huddling on top of the oven. The sounds of that night stayed with me forever; I knew the exact moment they murdered her.

Mariya sent the boys to dispose of the body, and after that I constantly looked for signs of fresh digging. Mechanko left with those men two days later. They were presented as partisans who supposedly fought the Germans, but all they did was hunt Jews. Whenever he’d come home to visit, Mechanko would fire his gun twice at the river, and Mariya would push me out of the house and tell me to stay out. I stayed in the cornfield, and slept there as well.

Another day, I went with Mariya to the post office in the village to see if her husband sent her money. On the way back, a skinny man and a short man asked Mariya if her son Nikolai was friends with Beerko in Brzuchowice. When she said yes, the men scoffed and said that the whole family was gone. I wondered what would happen to me, but I wasn’t allowed to cry when they bragged about killing Jews.

All sorts of scary things would happen. Once a German said I had Jewish eyes, and I skipped away until I was out of sight and then ran home. I also heard Germans talking about peasants hiding cattle and pigs, and that the Army needed food, so I told Mariya this. I remember that one morning I didn’t hear a thing, no people or even cows mooing. The world was too quiet, something wasn’t right. I didn’t want to take the cattle to the pasture, so Mariya made Fedko take them. Two hours later, there were bullets everywhere, big cannons on the main dirt road, Russian Katyushas spitting huge shells. The Germans were retreating and the Russians were coming.

Mariya took Vasiliy and me to a house with a basement, and a few hours later the people there were hungry, so Mariya sent me home for cheese and bread. I was walking between trucks and soldiers, and bullets, but when I tried to cross the road to her house something hit me in the hand and I bled and bled. I have a scar where it entered and exited. A Russian soldier came and looked at my hand, picked me up, and said that I looked like his daughter and that he’d take care of the bleeding. They cleaned me up at a medical truck, and the man gave me a nickname: kurnosaya, which means “short nose.”

The man told me to stay at the truck, and that he’d come back for me after the fighting. So I did. He left soup for me in the tin can attached to his belt. He asked me to show him where I lived, and I took him. There were two or three women there who looked upset, so he went in. When he came out, he told me that when Fedko was out in the field with the cattle they’d run into the woods because of the bullets. Fedko was hit in the stomach, and was going to die. Mariya asked me to come in and pray for Fedko, and gave me my rosary. I said whatever prayers I knew, though I had no idea what forgiveness meant. Fedko died that night and was buried next to the village church. And we were liberated.

The next day, when I went for water at the well, I tripped over a young German man in the grass who kept asking for water. So I unhooked the ladle from the well and tried to put water in his mouth. He said, “mutti,” which is mommy in German, then his head fell back and he died. I told Mariya that there was a dead German at the well, and she sent Vasiliy to tell the Russians. The Russians were not long on patience and she didn’t want them to think we had hidden a German soldier.

Several months later I found out that my father had survived. I found this out from a book that I read. They’d built a sort of underground bunker in the woods and stocked it, thinking the war would be over in two years. It took four. Of course, people get sick in winter, and they coughed enough that they thought the villagers may have heard them. My father and two first cousins, who later immigrated to Israel, went to look for a new hiding place. When they returned, all the others had been stripped naked and were murdered with axes and knives. My father and his cousins found over 60 bodies there. My mother was one of them. I don’t think my father ever recovered from that. He and the two others joined another bunker of Jews in hiding. I met a woman in Israel who’d been in that group. She told me they had very little food, but they took my father and the two others in. She married one of the cousins after the war.

Once we joined with our father, we moved more towards the center of Poland, away from that section of Ukraine that we were in. In Bielsko-Biala he put us in an orphanage. My sister had something on her lungs, so she was taken somewhere, but came back cured.

My sister had been given to a woman they would hire to help with laundry when my mother was pregnant. The woman was Polish, not Ukrainian, and she had three children plus my sister. But the Ukrainians attacked the woman’s home, and she ran off with her children, leaving my sister behind. A beggar took my sister in to get better alms, and the nuns recognized that the child wasn’t his. She was baptized Zosia Przebylska, and my father tracked her down. The nuns denied having anyone that young, but afterward he went back and found my sister. He put her in his backpack, and even though the police shot at him he made it out.

Most of the children in the Bielsko-Biala orphanage were from Auschwitz. From there, our father told me to bring my sister, and to bring all our warm clothes to meet him at the train station. He was arrested just as we were boarding, as the police were looking for hidden money. Once my father caught up with us, we could see that the hems of his clothing were torn from the police search. I made it on the train, and when they asked for papers on the Czechoslovakian border I told them my mother had them and had gone to the toilet. In Prague they arrested a whole bunch of people and put them on trucks. They tried to arrest me, but I said I was waiting for my mother long enough for the truck to leave. I asked at the station which train was going west, and we got on it.

They caught up with us just before we made it to the French border, but I can’t remember how we got through that. We wound up as refugees in Paris, and my sister and I went to an orphanage where all the schooling was done in Hebrew. My father wanted us to go to America, and in the meantime we lived in Fublaines, Verneuil, and Pontault-Combault.

Finally, our visas came through. I was fourteen years old when we arrived in Denver, Colorado. By then, my father was wiped out. I knew in America I needed an education, and worked very hard to get one, which is why I like to wear my Phi Beta Kappa Society pin.