Nisen Yurkovetsky was born in 1917 in Tulchyn. His parents were killed in a pogrom when he was less than two years old, and he was brought up by his grandmother. His father had been a barber. He trained as a chauffeur in Bratslav and fought in the Finnish War. He was injured fighting for the Red Army in the early days of the Second World War. After his demobilization, he ended up in the Pechera concentration camp and the Bershad ghetto. He later rejoined the Red Army. After the war, he continued his work as a chauffeur in Bratslav
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The Tulchyn Pogrom“Misha Katsop”
Tulchyn, Ukraine
Relations between Jews, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans were highly complex affairs in Transnistria, where the power structure was nebulous and constantly being negotiated and revised. Survivors tell many stories of Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian peasants, and Jewish prisoners risking their own safety in order to protect life. That is how they survived. Those who did not survive have no such stories to tell.
Local Ukrainians sometimes provided spiritual support. In this clip, Nisen Yurkovetsky remembers one Christian, whom he called Misha the Russki (literally Misha Katsop), who smuggled a Torah scroll into the Pechera concentration camp for the Jewish inmates. Misha had lived in the Jewish quarter of Tulchyn prior to the war, spoke Yiddish, and was friendly with many of the Jews in the town. Yurkovetsky had been close to Misha’s daughter before the war. Thanks to Misha’s Torah scroll, the camp inmates were able to pray in a part of the building they called the synagogue.
The influx into the camp of religious Romanian Jewish refugees also contributed to a spiritual revival among the Soviet Jews, who had been more distant from organized religious life. “There were people learned in Judaism who knew all types of things,” explained Yurkovetsky, and these people would lead services in the camp.
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)