Ușer, Carl and Ușer, Isac

Child Survivors

Burdujeni, Ploiești (Romania); Mohyliv-Podil’s’kyi, Vinnytsia Oblast (Transnitria, Ukraine)

Moscu and Estera Ușer [Ușer-Segal] and their three sons, Carl (Carol, b. April 18, 1933), Saul (Strul, b. February 9, 1937), and Isac (b. July 22, 1938), lived in Burdujeni, Romania, a small city of around 200 families. The majority were Jewish, and it was a quiet city. Moscu owned two stores.

“On October 9, 1941, a drummer came and made noise in such a way that everybody had to come out. He announced, ‘Everybody take whatever you can and go to the rail station. You will have to leave house keys at the entry.’ And that’s it.

“We, along with our paternal grandparents, Hersh and Ana Ber, and all of the other Jews from Burdujeni, were deported by a cattle train from Burdujeni to Otaci.” Isac remembers “that when I got off the train it was deep mud and people couldn’t walk so a lot of the people just abandoned their kids. My father borrowed a backpack and put me in the backpack and carried me…. Unlike other people, he didn’t just get rid of us. He was young and strong, and he wanted to preserve the family.”

“In Otaci, everybody went out from the train, and we were conveyed to a synagogue, where we were given water. Everybody started to get scared, and people started throwing away all their jewelry because we got information that, in the morning, we have cross over the Dniester River to get into Mohyliv-Podil’s’kyi, in Vinnytsia Oblast, Transnitria, where we stayed until around 1944. 

“Mohyliv-Podil’s’kyi was a concentration camp managed by the Romanian Army. The Romanian Army was not like the German Army. They were a very small number of people, and they were very interested to be bribed. So, as a result life was a lot easier than in German areas….  

“[Isac] The camp was an abandoned village where others had fled to escape the Nazis. [Carl] The Ukrainian Jewish people were moved into the German part. We found whatever houses we could get there. When the grandparents arrived, they were also with us in the house…. 

“It was definitely different than home. We were fortunate that we were not robbed of our money. We had some money, and the local people were happy to sell us whatever we paid for.” Carl remembers, “During the transfer over the Dniester my father succeeded to get in touch with a Romanian officer. And he was very friendly and, later on, my father asked what we can do to help the Romanian Army. They said, ‘Oh we prefer if we can get some special quality bread.’ So, my father was able to contact some remaining local Jews from Transnistria, and he was able to find a baker and a bakery. So, they created a bakery for the army. Because I worked at the bakery, I later got a pension from the Germans. I received only about 100 and some dollar because I exceeded the minimum income to get a real pension.”

Isac recalls, “People stayed inside; they weren’t free to roam around the camp. Our father, Moscu, was able to hide some gold coins with him in the camp. He was able to bribe a commander with gold…. He also had buried a large amount of gold before leaving home in Burdujeni and they were not able to locate it many years later when some family members searched for it…. Moscu did have connections with a bakery. He was permitted to go get ingredients from the village for the bakery that provided bread for the army. Not prisoners… just the soldiers. They were Romanian Nazi iron guards.

“All the young men in the camp were rounded up to dig ditches in the woods and chop wood for heat/wood burning stoves. People within the camp pleaded with Moscu to help save their young male family members who were away in the woods working for days and nights. Moscu succeeded in bribing the same commander with gold to get people from the woods returned to their families inside the camp.”

Lice and typhus were the biggest problems. Isac remembers when he and Saul “had to be kicked out of the house so we wouldn’t get typhus. It was terribly cold, and we were walking on the streets. We couldn’t be home. We had a hard time understanding why they didn’t want us in the house. But we understood later. They explained to us why they kicked us out of the house; they were doing it to protect us…. Saul and I didn’t get sick through a miracle or whatever happened…. Our grandfather, Hersh Ber, died from typhus.”

“Of course, we knew what was going on, but we didn’t have radios. We didn’t have any information.... The Jews from Bucharest tried to solve the problem for us to leave and some people were repatriated to Romania, especially some kids. However, our turn officially didn’t come until 1944 when the Russian Army was close by.  

“The Russians used to send all the people to Siberia. It was not better. So, we ran away in the middle of the night. My father had two horses and a carriage and tried to cross the Dniester River by the bridge that was built by a lot of Jews. Our escape was also connected to exchanging gold for freedom. After giving the commander some gold, the family escaped on horses through the fence, which the commander opened. However, after getting outside, the commander came up behind us and violently beat Moscu. The commander’s wife took pity on the brothers and took us in and pleaded for the commander to stop beating Moscu. Moscu then gave them a lot more gold. We were then allowed to flee in the middle of the night.

“My father was a good carriage driver. We crossed the bridge and the border into Romania. We arrived first to Burdujeni, and in Burdujeni, we were able to find an empty house. We were there for about one week. After this, we went to Dorohoi, where my mother’s sister lived. My father was not happy with Dorohoi, so we moved from Dorohoi to Bacău and from Bacău we moved to Bucharest. And in Bucharest there were no homes. The homes that were available were terrible. So, my father went to Ploiești, where he decided that he can make a better living. He found this guy just finished building a house and so he rented the house. We lived in Ploiești until we left Romania, until 1965.”

In Ploiești, Moscu had all kinds of jobs. He was independent and he was able to accumulate trucks and he hired drivers. He was able to get an autobus and competed to drive people from Ploiești to Bucharest. Carl was a lot of the time on the bus to collect the money; he was the cashier. 

Carl went to school for the first time in January ‘44 – a Jewish school. “It was Tu b'Shevat. I was directly put in the school of my age. The problem was that I had to catch up a lot and it was not easy. Fortunately, my father was able to make some money and hired a tutor, Liviu Librescu (who sadly was killed at Virginia Tech on April 16. 2007).”

Saul and Isac also went to school. “They tried to send me to kindergarten in Dorohoi, but I couldn’t really socialize with kids. My mother would take me there and I would run away. When we got to Ploiești, they sent me to first grade and again, I had a hard time to get along with other kids. After third grade I started making friends. I saw other kids were friends. But it took me a few years and when I was nine years old, I started to make friends and I started to do better in school. It was hard for me the first two years of school because the other kids had their parents to help them out. But my parents did not help any of us because they had enough problems of their own. But we adapted. We start to fit in.”

“My father decided that we are not going back to Burdujeni….  There wasn’t much left there…. My mother, returned to Burdujeni from Ploiești to see what she could salvage. But unfortunately, it was too late after the war ended and she was still able to find very few things…. When we were deported, my father had the dry goods store and by the time we got to the train station people were already looting and not much was left from any of the goods…. He looked for a different way of making a living. Most likely he had at least ten or fifteen professions and he was very fast to move, if this profession didn’t make money, he changed immediately to a different profession to make money. He even had a mill where we cut the cornflour. And Isac remembers having to carry heavy bags of grain…. He bought a truck, he bought buses, and you name it. And by the end he was a wholesale jeweler dealing with only gold.”

Life was very tough in Romania, but it was not so easy to leave. Initially they had applied for the whole family to leave. By the end, they applied again, without Carl. Moscu, Estera, Saul, and Isac left Romania in 1965. “We waited in Italy for seven months for American papers because Saul and I were in the Romanian Army, and they had to make sure that we are not communists trying to come to the United States.”

Isac “came here on Friday. Monday morning, I went to work in a factory. I worked two jobs for a year…. I couldn’t believe it, I used to take my mother shopping and for $30 we used to fill up two baskets of food and food was so available and so abundant, so much food. It was just being in Heaven…. In Romania even with money you couldn’t buy food. You were able to buy meat two or three times a year and you were limited to like a kilogram, 2.2 pounds, for a family…. I had never seen oranges before I came to America. I never ate bananas. There were so many foods, I was just amazed everyday with how much America is…. I remember how terrible the years were when I was a small child. Very malnourished. My chest was and still is very small because we didn’t have any calcium intake.”

Isac met his wife, Miriam “Mia” Rosenthal, in 1968. They have two children, Herbert Ușer and Shirley [Cetner].

In 1970, Carl, his wife Nety Iancovici and daughter Laura went to Israel, where they had family. They had a second daughter Annette in Israel. “In Israel it was easy because everybody tried to help us to accommodate, including the family which was established already in Israel. We even bought a house in Israel, and my wife and I had jobs there and we had a car. Fortunately, from Romania I succeeded to transfer some money there. After the 1973 war, I was on both sides of the war and even in the north and even in the south and I was kind of tired of war and I decided to come to the United States. And in the United States it was not easy to get used to. But here we had my brothers, which helped me, and we managed to have a decent life.”

Carl would like “Everyone to appreciate the life we have here and to appreciate that the parents are helping them to advance in life.”

 

Date of Interview: February 7, 2024

Length of Interview: 53 Minutes

Interview & Synopsis by: Zieva Konvisser, Zekelman Holocaust Center

Videographer: Mark Einhaus

Editorial Comments: Miriam Ușer, Nety Ușer, Shirley Cetner

 

*Additional comments from Isac Ușer to Shirley Cetner (February 8, 2024)