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 Family Played the Fiddle
Avrum-Yosl the Glazier
"Christ has risen"
The Torgsin Store
Homentashn
A Little House with a Dirt Floor
Tulchyn, Ukraine
Donia Presler remembers the communal aspect of shtetl life very well. A popular picture often found in literature as part of a romantic perception of the Shtetl. Donia reminisces cheerfully about eating, dancing and singing together. But even Donia's account does not escape reality and describes the existence of sheer poverty in the shtetl.
During the Civil War, the fledgling Soviet State sought to orient all its resources toward fueling the Red Army’s efforts by instituting an economic policy known as “War Communism.” In the infancy of the Revolution,the engineers of Soviet ideological and economic policy believed they were implementing pure communism and foresaw world revolution close behind. The state nationalized the banks and large industry,centralized industrial management, introduced a state monopoly on trade, and criminalized private enterprise and exchange.
These policies disenfranchised anybody who employed hired labor, received income from sources other than employment, or worked as private merchants,brokers, or religious functionaries. Jews predominated in each of these categories. Living mainly in the urban centers, where commerce and industry were most concentrated, Jews were subject to the worst of the military requisitions and property seizures.
Relying overwhelmingly on private enterprise and trade for their livelihood — the two occupations most targeted for elimination by the new government — the Jewish middling class was one of the major victims of the Revolution. Jews, who accounted for just 5.4 percent of the total population of Ukraine, constituted 45 percent of disenfranchised people, based on figures from 1925–1926.
Many Jews thereby lost the emancipation rights that the Provisional Government had only just recently awarded them. Previously persecuted for their religious beliefs, they now faced persecution instead for their sociological and economic status.
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)