Rita Shveibish was born in 1936 in Tulchyn. She grew up with two brothers. Both of her parents were born in Tulchyn. Her father delivered products for a welding shop. She survived the war in Pechera. After the war, she trained in Vinnytsya as a nurse, and worked as a nurse for fifty years in Tulchyn. Since her retirement, she has been director of the Jewish community of Tulchyn and has been active in establishing memorials for the murdered Jews of the town.
Other Interviews:
Inside the CampBessarabian and Bukovinian Jews
Tulchyn, Ukraine
The Romanian authorities who seized control of Transnistria hoped to use it as a dumping ground for the Jews they were expelling from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina—the provinces that Romania had acquired from Russia and Austria in the aftermath of the First World War, which were then seized by the Soviet Union in 1940 before being recaptured by Romania the following year. Romanian authorities sought to expel the Jews ostensibly in retaliation for the alleged Jewish support of the Soviet occupation. In reality, the Jews were victims of an extensive Romanian ethnic purification campaign. The little that has been written on Transnistria has focused on the fate of these approximately 150,000 Jewish deportees.
Between October 13 and November 15, 1941 another 46,000 Jews were deported across the river, this time mostly from Czernowitz in Northern Bukovina and several southern Bukovinian towns, including Suceava, Radauti, and Vatra Dornei. On November 7, 1941, about 9,000 Jews from Dorohoi were added to the deportees. For the initial deportees, Transnistria was only a transit point in their journey across the Southern Bug into German occupied territory, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. But in November 1941 the Germans began to fear the spread of disease across the border and halted the deportations across the Southern Bug, resulting in the establishment of “colonies” of Romanian Jews between the two rivers. During the course of the war, about two-thirds of the Romanian deportees perished either during the forced marches across the Dniester, at the hands of German soldiers in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, or from starvation or disease in Transnistria.
The refugees, who tended to come from wealthier and more urban communities than those of Vinnytsya Province, brought with them valuables and money they had managed to salvage when they were forced out of their homes. The Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews who sometimes arrived with valuables were initially better off and able to trade their jewels for food. This created resentment between the two communities, some of which persists to this day.
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)