Elizaveta Bershadskaia was born in Chernyatka in 1927. Her father was a barber and was also born in Chernyatka. Her mother was born in Bershad and worked as a seamstress. She had two brothers and a sister. She moved to Bershad at the age of 13, and spent much of the war in the Bershad ghetto. We interviewed her on July 18, 2002 in Bershad.
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Bershad, Ukraine
In the Bershad ghetto during the war, the Romanian gendarme Lieutenant Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu protected the Jews from excessive violence and allowed for the functioning of a small market, at least until his dismissal in August 1942. In this clip, Elizaveta Bershadskaia explains how her family survived in the ghetto by selling wood and purchasing polenta in the ghetto market.
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.