Semyon Skliarskii was born in Lypovets in 1926. His father was a furniture maker. His mother died when he was three years old and his father passed away four years later. He was brought up by his mother’s sister. He began his schooling in a Yiddish school, and completed his education in a Ukrainian language school. He survived most of the war in hiding in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Toward the end of the war, he joined a group of partisans. After the war he worked as an accountant. He married a woman from Bershad in 1951 and moved to Bershad in 1969.
Other Interviews:
May 27, 1942: Zhornyshche“don’t run into the forest”
Bershad, Ukraine
Semyon Skliarskii and his half-brother Yasha spent much of the spring of 1943 hiding out in the town of Zhornyshche. It was there that a girl, about twelve or thirteen years of age, convinced them to follow her in a quest to seek out and join the partisan fighters they had heard were seizing control of the forests, working with Moscow to disable the enemy from the rear. The girl’s father, a glazier, had gathered together a group of about a dozen people, all of whom were to head out together into the forests. On the appointed day in the summer of 1943, they secured food supplies and set off south from Zhornyshche toward the village of Krasnenke.
On one of the first nights, a Friday evening, as they rested on the edge of the forest, Skliarskii had a vision, in which the Messiah or God Himself, came to him to warn him that there was going to be a fire and he should not to go into the forest, but should run instead into the fields.
Suddenly, two Don Cossacks fell upon the group. Everyone scattered, running into the forest, except for Skliarskii who found refuge instead, as the Messiah had instructed him, in the fields. In the open field, he ran down a hill and into a waterfilled gulley. He splashed through the stream and managed to elude the Cossacks. The other members of his party, those who ran into the forest, were overcome. Yasha survived by climbing a tree where he hid as the shots rang out below.
As Skliarskii was telling us this story, he pulled out of his pocket a piece of paper onto which, after the war, he had inscribed the words of the Messiah so that he would forever remember how his life had been saved. In his interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Skliarskii confided that the experience turned him into a believer.