Sofia Palatnikova is the sister of Tatiana Marinina. She was born in 1927 in Teplyk. Her father was a butcher. In the 1930s, she moved to the Lunacharskii collective farm in Crimea. She went to a Ukrainian school for six years, but her schooling was interrupted by the war. She survived the war in Teplyk and Bershad, and in camps in Bratlsav, Haysyn, and Raygorod. After the war, she worked in an industrial complex for twenty-two years.
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“as soon as they attacked, they were already here”
Teplyk, Ukraine
In this clip, Sofia Palatnikova tells of her family's attempts to flee Teplyk before the town fell to the Germans on July 26, 1941. The family, however, waited too long--"as soon as they attacked, they were already here," explains Palatnikova. The Germans caught up with them and forced them to return.
Toward the end of 1941, the Germans established ghettos in most towns, restricting Jewish residence to one or two streets. There they were put to work, first performing mundane household chores for the Germans and then, when winter fell, performing manual labor clearing the roads of snow. Palatnikova recalls that Christians were put to work as well, but that the Jews were singled out for brutal treatment.
Sometimes the ghetto streets were surrounded by barbed wire, but more commonly--as in Teplyk--they were open ghettos with no physical boundaries demarcating them from the rest of the town. The Jews were required to wear an armband with a Star of David and were prohibited from leaving the ghetto area except for forced labor.