Drogichin, Belarus (pages 328

[Page 328]

[photo:] R. Moshe Schwartz and his children: Baruch (top), daughter-in-law Rachel, Rivka, Avraham, etc. All perished. May G-d avenge their blood!

        I was ill and broken, and an ambulance from UNRWA took me straight to a hospital. Lieutenant Kaplan, an American Jew, took me to a German hospital in Linz, Austria, and put me in the care of a German doctor, telling him that I was a Jewish woman, a victim of Hitler. The doctor and his assistants looked at me pitifully.

        After six weeks I left the hospital in good health. I got better only because I lived through the fall of the Germans! I was taken back to the DP camp, and I cannot even describe the joy my children felt when they saw me. My children told me that there was stir in the camp when they found out that the soap we used in the camp that carried the letters “Riff” was made from human fat, from the fat of our tormented Jews (i.e. clean Jewish fat). Jews went to complain to UNRWA, and went to the German store that sold the “Jewish soap” and tried to break the windows. UNRWA immediately ordered the German store to bury the boxes of “Jewish soap.” (Is that all that the UNRWA personnel did? What a “humanitarian” action….. W.)

        In 1946 the camp in Steier was transferred to Brona, where Hitler, may his name and memory be obliterated, was born. We would pass by the accursed empty house that stood next to the road not far from the camp where we stayed, and we would spit on the place where the biggest thief in history had lived.

        One day we heard a report that the Red Cross would be distributing packages to us, and we should clean up our dormitories. An American commissioner came through with his secretary; he was the head of UNRWA. We all went to surround the secretary, who was dressed in a military uniform, and who spoke to us in fluent Yiddish. She asked who had relatives in the United States. I said that I had a brother and sister in the United States. She took an interest in me and wrote down the address of my sister. A month later I received a letter from my sister, who found out that we were living in a DP camp. My sister immediately sent off affidavits for my children and me.

        In September, 1946, my children and I arrived in the United States and settled in New York.

[photo:] American and French soldiers at a mass grave in Germany.

[Page 329]

Naftali Hoffman, May G-d Avenge His Blood

Naftali Hoffman, a son of R. Binyamin Moshe the ritual slaughterer and Beila Hoffman, was born in 1896 in Drohitchin. He earliest education was in the kheder school and with his father. Later he studied in the Mir Yeshiva. Naftali learned ritual slaughter and practice it for a short time.

In 1918, Hoffman got married in Kovel, and became involved in the stock market. In 1925 he and his family moved to Byalistock, where he got involved in the wholesale fruit business on a large scale until 1939. Naftali, his wife Slava, two children and Beila perished. May G-d avenge their blood!

[Photo:] Left is Miriam (Mariasha), daughter of R. Binyamin Moshe and Sarah-Beila Hoffman, the wife of Rabbi Yosef David Schub, and died on the second day of Shavuot, [May 24] 1920. Below: Miriam's children, Nechama and Binyamin-Moshe. Below right: Berl Prager, a nephew and Naftali (above), and a brother. All perished. May G-d avenge their blood! See pp. 133, 149, 150 and 288.

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