Sara Gvinter was born in 1930 in Bershad. She is a niece of the violinist David Oistrakh. Her father, who died when she was young, was a carpenter, and her mother was a cook. During the Second World War, she was imprisoned in the Bershad ghetto and the Pechera con- centration camp. She was shot by the Germans during a mass shooting outside Pechera, but survived and pulled herself out of a mass grave. She worked for the partisans briefly in the Bershad region. She returned to Bershad after the war, married, and worked as a seamstress.
Other Interviews:
SurvivalLet It Be Enough!
The Synagogue Cellar
Bershad, Ukraine
Sara Gvinter spent time during the war first in the Bershad ghetto, then the Pechera concentration camp, and then--after her escape from the camp-- back in Bershad.
During the fall of 1941, large convoys of deported Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were being relocated into several towns selected to receive the deportees, including Mohyliv-Podilskyy, Sharhorod, and Bershad. The influx of tens of thousands of individuals from Romania into the already congested ghettos led to massive overcrowding: by late 1941, the population of Mohyliv-Podilskyy swelled to 19,000, Shagorod to 7,000, and Bershad to more than 25,000.20 Sara Gvinter remembered: “And then refugees started to come in. . . . There were ones from Edinet, Chernivtsi, Moldova, Mohyliv-Podilskyy, and from other districts. So many people.”
Many of the Romanian Jews who were herded into the ghettos arrived already sick and tired after enduring forced marches across the Dniester River, and living in stables and other temporary dwellings along the way. 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. Many of those without material assets came with spiritual sustenance—a resilient faith in God and intimate familiarity with religious ritual. The revival of spiritual life helped sustain some whose faith had been repressed by twenty years of Soviet rule.
In Bershad, the Romanian gendarme Lieutenant Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu protected the Jews in the ghetto from excessive violence and allowed for the functioning of a market in the ghetto, at least until his dismissal in August 1942.
After Petrescu’s dismissal, the new gendarmerie further restricted the importation of food into the ghetto. By 1943, nevertheless, some semblance of institutional functionality had been achieved in the Bershad ghetto with the establishment of a hospital, an orphanage, and schools, much of which was made possible with the assistance of aid from the Jewish community of Bucharest.