I am Manya Tepelboym, born into a Jewish family on December 31, 1928, in Proskurov (now Khmelnitsky), Ukraine. My mother was a housewife and my father was a tinsmith. I was twelve years old when the war began in June 1941.

My parents decided to evacuate from Ukraine, but we were unable to get on one of the trains leaving. On July 23, when the Germans had approached Proskurov, we ran from the city and stayed overnight in a house in a large village near the regional center of Derazhnya. The owner was nice. He woke us in the middle of the night and said the Germans were approaching Derazhnya. A nearby home was burning, and he said the people who lived there had set the fire themselves to keep the Germans back. He gave us a horse and a wagon, and thanks to that we were saved.

We arrived at a river with a bridge that was so overloaded with retreating troops that we couldn’t use it. One of the soldiers told us how to get to a nearby pontoon bridge and that they were going to blow up the main bridge once the troops crossed it. We crossed the river on the pontoon bridge, along with others fleeing, and entered the woods. We ran through the woods as German aircraft strafed us, and many people were killed. Leaving the woods, we continued to run. Near Vinnitsa, Ukraine, German pilots again strafed us from low level. I can still remember their faces as they fired at us. It was horrible. We only survived after hiding near a hill on the bank of a river. We continued on after the aircraft flew away. There were dead bodies everywhere and not many survivors.

We made it to Zolotonosha, where it was quiet. The station master there said the city had not been bombed. We boarded a train headed for Poltava, but the train stopped at Lozovaya station. All the trains had stopped. On the fourth day we caught another train.

Our ordeal is difficult to describe. My father was not well (which kept him from being drafted into the army) and could hardly stand. We finally started feeling better once we were able to get on a train. The train was heading across Russia and had stopped at Tashkent, Uzbekistan. My father died there, at the station, and my mother and I were left alone. We were taken from an evacuation center to a distant Uzbeki village, where the villagers didn’t like evacuees. We tried to buy food but they wouldn’t sell us anything. My mother was afraid they would kill us, and decided that we should return. We went to Saratov, where they asked her where we were going. She answered, “Ukraine,” but we hadn’t heard that Ukraine and part of Russia were then controlled by the Germans. We returned to the evacuation center.

From there we were taken to the Baranovka Atkarsky area in the Saratov region of Russia. We lived two-and-a-half years there, and I worked on a collective farm. My mother was sick the entire time and couldn’t work. I remember that I went hungry the whole time.

We returned home to Proskurov in June 1944, just after it had been liberated. There was a large crater where our house had been, and when my mother saw it she became sick. We found out that all of our relatives –18 people – had been killed. The Germans had shot all the Jews in the woods. These fascist monsters had not spared anyone, not even the elderly or the children. City authorities provided us with a room, and I went to school. My mother couldn’t work because of her health. I started working in 1945. I had studied to be a bookkeeper and at the same time graduated from school.

In 1991 my son, his wife, and I decided to go to America after being invited by one of our relatives. We had several reasons to leave. For one, there was anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, even in positions of power, which everyone knew. A second reason was that my son was not well. He suffered two heart attacks in Kiev and needed surgery, which was performed in America. So we found ourselves here, in Tucson, Arizona, where there’s a Holocaust Survivor program. The program helps me and supports me. I am very thankful for that.