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This is a picture of my uncles and their friends. Standing second from right is Shmil Shnaiderman, my mother's brother, and standing on the very right is Shaya Fishman, the future husband of my mother's sister, Sheindl Shnaiderman. The photo was taken in Faleshty in the 1930s.
My maternal grandparents, Shloime and Perl Shnaiderman, had seven children, five daughters and two sons. My mother's sister Sheindl was born in 1913, and her brother Shmil in 1918. The boys studied at cheder, the daughters were educated at home. They had a teacher from cheder who taught them Hebrew, Yiddish, the Torah and Talmud, history, literature and mathematics. They spoke Yiddish at home.
Shmil finished a course for tractor drivers and began to work in a tractor crew. He was single. Shmil went to a collective farm before the war. He was captured by the Germans, and we never heard from him again. He must have perished in captivity.
Sheindl got married to Shaya Fishman in the winter of 1939. They had a chuppah installed in the synagogue. The war began on 22nd June 1941. On Saturday night we were woken by the sound of distant explosions. We thought that this was another military training, which became a routine during the Soviet regime, but in the morning we heard that the war had started and that German and Romanian troops occupied Faleshty. We became captives.
At the end of June the Germans ordered all Jews in Faleshty to come to the main square. Communists and members of their families were taken away and shot. My grandfather Shloime, Aunt Sheindl and her one-year-old daughter Esther, my mother's pregnant sister Nehama, her husband Shopse and his mother, Rivke-Surah Tirerman, were shot that day. About 200 people were killed that day. The rest of us were taken to the ghetto.
Aunt Sheindl's husband survived. In the middle of June 1941 he went to see his relatives in Beltsy. He was arrested by the Romanians there but pretended he was Georgian and they released him. He moved to Balta, Odessa region, and worked for a Romanian owner of a fur shop until the end of 1944. In 1944 he volunteered to go to the front to take revenge for his family. He was killed in action near Budapest.
