Nisen Kiselman was born in Tomashpil in 1927. He is a cousin of Pesia, Sasha and Lev Kolodenker, as well as the husband of Pesia Kolodenker. His father was a coachman and his mother was a homemaker. His father died during the famine in 1933, leaving his mother to care for Nisen, his sister, and his four brothers. During the Second World War, he was confined to the Tomashpil ghetto, where his mother and sister were both killed by the Germans in a massacre. After the war, he joined the Red Army and served for seven years.
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Tomashpil Massacre of August 4, 1941Inside the Ghetto
Tulchyn, Ukraine
The Germans captured Tomashpil in late July 1941, and remained in the town for eight days before Romanian gendarmes moved in to take over control. Once Romanian authorities took control of the territory they established ghettos in each town, to which Jewish residence was restricted. In Romanian terminology, the space of Jewish residence was called a “colony,” whether it was located within a distinct quarter of a city, as in a ghetto, or outside the city, as in a camp.
Romanian authorities established about two hundred of these concentration points, most of them with only a few dozen residents, throughout Transnistria. Of the fifty-three ghettos in Mohyliv district, for instance, twenty-six had fewer than one hundred and fifty people in them, and only two imprisoned more than one thousand people.
In Tomashpil, Romanian gendarmes established a ghetto by stringing barbed wire around two streets and ordering the Jews to stay within the confines of the wire.
The semi-porous barriers of barbed wire that surrounded the Tomashpil ghetto, allowed for continued interaction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish world throughout the war. Although Jews were prohibited from leaving the ghetto except for work, those inside could receive assistance from non-Jews outside the ghetto, or could trade what little they had for food.