Interview

Let It Be Enough!

Bershad, Ukraine

Sara Gvinter survived the Pechera concentration camp by literally crawling out of a mass grave. The Pechera camp was situated on a cliff overlooking the Southern Bug River in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. The other side of the river was part of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, under the direct control of the Germans.

In this clip, she remembers when in 1943 a German punitive brigade crossed the river and massacred a group of Jews. She was among those shot and left for dead in a mass grave.

She remembers one family from Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), whose members were all shot in the grave with her. The memory of one young child, in particular, continued to haunt her the rest of her life. In this clip, she recalls a song that the child's father used to sing.

The song itself is derived from another Yiddish song from Bessarabia and Bukovina that laments the anti-Jewish atrocities committed by Ukrainian brigands during the 1919–1921 pogroms.

The song, Eykho, likely entered Transnistria with the deportees, and was reworked to refer to Nazi atrocities. Thus, Gvinter learned it from Max, the deportee from Chernivtsi.

In the earlier version, the singer alludes to Eicha, the biblical Lamentations, and includes the same refrain, begging the heavens to “cast a glance” and “let it be enough” as well as several lines from the verses, including “little children taken from their mother’s breast” who are “thrown in the rubbish,” and “elderly Jews with gray bears,” who are “thrown to the ground.”

The crucial difference between the two versions, though, is that the biblical references have been dropped. Gvinter does not associate her song with Eicha, most likely because the biblical book had no resonance for her, if indeed she had ever heard of it: she no longer lives in a world in which daily events are measured in accordance with biblical precedents and archetypes.

Other versions of the song that were recorded in Polish ghettos during the Second World War also include verses about holy books being torn to pieces and synagogues turned into stables, both of which are excised from Gvinter’s variant. By the time Nazi atrocities began in Pechera, the holy books had already been forgotten and many of the synagogues had already been reallocated, if not to horses, then to communists.