The Ghetto Diary (Miriam Bercovici)

The pandemics in Transnistria

In the middle of February 1942, Miriam Korber, being in Djurin (Transnistria), is noting in the diary she keeps, about her grandparents' death in the Mogilev ghetto.

Monday, February 16, 1942

"My grandparents died. They died one after the other in Moghilău, the grandfather on January 3, the grandmother four weeks later. (…) My childhood memories, dear memories, tormenting by their beauty, keep coming into my mind. In these memories, grandfather and grandmother have a crucial role because the most pleasant hours, at that young age, I spent at their home, with them.

Dear old people: the eternally busy grandfather, either with the shop or in the workshop, but always with a smile and a right word for his Mimica, the reddish and freckled niece who was spinning among his things and confused him. (…) Grandma was a storyteller. She made up stories and told them with outstanding talent. Sisi and I, with our heads in her lap, were listening carefully, concentrated as never after that I was, not even in school, nor on another significant occasion. Stories with dragons, beautiful girls, fairies, master birds, good mothers, and bad people. (…) I remember my grandparents with love and sadness.

What remained of their lives? What did they work for? Why did they have to die alone? What sins did they have to atone for, and whose sins? Their sins atonement should not have been so hard, for their sins were not so great. They always worked hard, had God in their minds all the time, and yet, like others better and worse than them, died, and who knows when and how their children will be able to come to them, visit the tomb, and pay them honor. I'm crying, dear grandparents. You no longer have sins; you atoned for them very hard during the last weeks of your life. Maybe, if there is a future life, perhaps in the near or distant future, we will meet again, and then I will be, as I have been until now, your Mimica, your dear niece. Sleep in peace and pray for us, if the prayers of the dead have value for the livings" fragment of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, The Ghetto Diary, Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2017, pp. 54-55).

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According to the Mogilev death register, Abraham Mendel Korber, Miriam Korber-Bercovici's grandfather, deported from Câmpulung, died in Mogilev on January 4, 1942. He was 74 years old. His wife, Taube (Toni) Korber, Miriam Korber-Bercovici's grandmother, died 27 days later, on January 31. He was 72 years old.

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In February 1942, the German Commissioner, General Oppermann, wrote Transnistria's governor, Alexianu, about the Jews who died daily in the villages of southern Transnistria and about the misery of the shelters where Jews had been accommodated. The German official demanded measures from Alexianu so that the epidemics would not spread in the German villages or pass beyond the Bug, in the territory administered by the Germans.

"In Transnistria Territory villages, to the West of the Bug, there are near the border, many thousands of Jews accommodated in short and too small shelters. A large number of Jews die every day, and they are bearly and superficially buried (…)"