I WAS LED BY THE NAZIS TO BE SHOT

I am Ida Sharovetskaya (nee – Akman). I was born in 1939. In July 1941 I was evacuated from the town of Bershad, Vinnitsa Region in Ukraine. My mother put her six children on the cart and fled from the town under fire of the Nazis. Bershad was bombed by the German planes, they fired on all the time and bombed the flow of refugees. Day and night, they were pursued: I remember the cries of despair, pain, attacks, bombings and death. All the time mom drove the horse and only God saved our lives. Finally, we got to Stalingrad, but the German troops were already there. They took away our cart with horses and all the things we had. They ordered the Jews to stand in lines, and then their armed guards with dogs took us to the Golodaevsky forest for execution. There, the Nazis forced women and elderly people to dig a huge pit in which we had to be buried. But they didn’t have time. Suddenly, the Soviet planes appeared and struck up a fight. The Nazis grabbed weapons, fired several shots at the Jews who were sitting on the ground, and fled. Then everyone went away. We had to hide our ethnical identity, so we were hiding under a fictitious surname, Dubrovsky. This let us survive until 1942 – in fear, hunger and cold. When the city of Stalingrad was liberated, we were already in the Rostov region where we were registered under our real surname – Akman. We stayed there until 1945. Being unable to withstand the stress, my mother died in February 1943 due to a heart attack. We, the small children, were saved thanks to our older sisters who were teenagers at that time. Three of them are already in the better world. They died of tuberculosis after the war. In 1945 we found our aunt and were brought to the town of Bershad. In 1991 we immigrated to Israel.