65 years later, son finds Ukraine grave he dug by hand

Ze'ev Orenstein recently succeeding in tracking down the grave he dug for his mother 65 years ago and laying a tombstone there.

For most of his life, Orenstein, a taxi driver from Haifa, did not know where exactly his mother was buried. All he knew was that during World War II, he had buried her body in a remote patch of forest in the Ukraine.

Last month, Ze'ev finally said a prayer on his mother's grave for the elevation of her soul. "All my life I've dreamt of this moment, but I never imagined that I could ever fulfill it in a such a dignified manner," he told the group of Chabad Hasidic Jews who attended the service, along with students from a nearby school and local residents.

Ze'ev Orenstein remembers the day he buried his mother near the small village of Pasynka, in Transnistria - a region stretching along Moldova's border with the Ukraine. It was the winter of 1942, and he was 12. "I didn't know what to do. Luckily, I was friends with a couple of boys from the village where we had stayed. We found some wooden planks and carried her body to the woods. I didn't remember where exactly we buried her, only how hard it was to dig in the frozen soil. It took us the whole day," he recalls.

Before the war, Ze'ev's parents and his four brothers resided in the city of Dorohoi in Botosani County, in the northeastern tip of Romania. Shortly after the war broke out, Ze'ev's father was taken away for forced labor. He never returned.

His mother, Brana, and their children were deported in the winter of 1941, along with 150,000 Jews from the region for "resettlement" in Transnistria in the southern Ukraine. Their deportation was ordered by Ion Antonescu, Romania's prime minister, who had received autonomy over Transnistria from his Nazi allies.

Ze'ev and his four brothers contracted typhus, which became an epidemic, decimating the population of Jewish refugees in the region. That winter, Ze'ev saw his brothers waste away until they died. He survived the illness and recovered, but frost bite to his feet made it impossible for him to walk. His mother had to carry him on her back.

Eventually, the mother and child found shelter in the small village of Pasynka, where they survived for another year by panhandling. But the traumatic experiences that Ze'ev's mother had gone through cost her the will to live, and she was fading away as her health began to deteriorate.

Orenstein does not like to talk or think back on his mother's last days. "She would say: 'My children are dead and now I have nothing to live for,'" he recounts.

A local family of farmers adopted Orenstein after the death of his mother. After the war ended, he returned to Dorohoi. He was taken in by the American Joint Distribution Committee and put in one of the organization's orphanages.

In 1946, the 16-year-old Ze'ev was smuggled into Palestine onboard a ship of Jewish refugees. But his troubles were not over. Ze'ev was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and hospitalized in Kiryat Motzkin for two years, until he recovered. He eventually married and fathered a family.

Several weeks ago, Orenstein signed up for a organized trip to Transnistria, with the intention of finding his mother's grave. He brought a granite tombstone along, written in Hebrew. An old lady from Pasynka showed him a spot where Jews were buried.

"I was especially touched when I showed the schoolchildren were my mother was buried, and asked them to take care of the grave," Orenstein said. Next year, he intends to visit the graveside with his family from Israel.

'With each passing day their numbers dwindle'

My grandmother, Cherna Berkowitz, was also among the dozens of thousands who were deported to Transnistria. Cherna survived the Holocaust and kept a journal where she wrote about her experiences. In an entry from November 23, 1941, she described the arrival of refugees from Dorohoi - the city from which the Romanian authorities had deported Ze'ev Orenstein and his family:

"The deportations resumed. Women, elderly people and so many children in the freezing cold. With each passing day their numbers dwindle as more of them die.

"Dorohoi, people say. We send the children to give the newcomers some warm tea. They return with horror stories. The men were all at work when they deported the women and children. We have one woman with three small children, one of whom is not yet weaned. All she has are rags and a few pennies in her pocket. The soldiers round up the arrivals and order them to march on."