Donia Presler was born in 1929 born in Tulchyn. Her father was a musician. Her mother worked as a glazier. She had two sisters, one of whom died in the Pechera camp. She finished four years of Yiddish school. During the war, she was imprisoned in the Pechera camp for four years.
Other Interviews:
Passover SoupShow Trial in the Camp
Inside the Camp
A Little House with a Dirt Floor
A Family Played the Fiddle
Avrum-Yosl the Glazier
The Torgsin Store
Homentashn
“Christ has risen”
Tulchyn, Ukraine
Donia Presler survived the war in the Pechera concentration camp, a camp established by the Romanians on the shores of the Southern Bug River. The camp held some 9000 Jews, many of whom starved to death.
Some of the younger inmates, though, were able to survive by escaping the camp and begging or trading for food with Ukrainians in nearby villages
Initially, the inmates relied upon the nearby residents of the town of Pechera for sustenance, but eventually the town residents tired of giving alms, and the inmates who managed to get out were forced to go begging in more distant villages, in Vishkivtsi and Bortnyky. Some even forged across the Southern Bug to Sokilets, where the Germans were stationed. A few former inmates spoke of escaping the camp for multiple days at a time, traveling from village to village in search of food, before returning to the relative safety of the camp.
In this clip, Donia Presler remembers how once “during their Passover,” she says of Easter, she and a few girls managed to get some food from older Ukrainians, who had pity on the children
When we came to Pechera, people had already stopped giving out food, and they sent us further, so we walked further. If the herdsmen—young boys of ten years old with cows in the fields—got hold of you they would immediately kill you. It was worse being caught by them than by the police. They would cut you to pieces. So we hid behind the haystacks. When they took away the cows for the night, we showed up in the village. The older people would take pity on us. We would come and say “Christ has risen” and they would reply, “Truly, He is risen.” People would give us a piece of bread, or two potatoes, or beetroot.
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)