Lou Hoffer

We found out from my uncle Srul, who was in the Soviet government, that the Soviets had prepared three different lists of names of people to be sent to Siberia. We were on the second list. It never happened because the war broke out and Vizhnitz came under Romanian control again.

Under the Soviets it was important to have a job, any kind of job, because those that didn’t were sometimes sent to Siberia. My dad’s job had been to evaluate parcels of forests. He tried to do this work again, but under the Soviets he couldn’t because under their control, forestry was at a complete standstill. So to survive and to stay on the good side of the officials, my dad got a job looking after poultry in a large place. There wasn’t anything else he could do. Soviet methods were foreign to us and we found it hard to adapt. When my dad was given certain orders on how to feed the poultry he realized that they would die with that method. When they did start dying, he gave up the job. He then started to look for other work. We managed to get by because we had a little bit of reserves and we had connections within the villages and of course the fact that my grandparents both lived on the acreages helped.

The positive change in Vizhnitz was the opening of two types of schools. One was a Russian school for upper grades and one was a Yiddish school with six grades. My brother and I both attended that Yiddish school with about two or three hundred students. I was in Grade 6. Everything was taught in Yiddish except the Russian language, which was an hour a day every day. The head of the school was a very nice Russian person who loved the Jewish kids. One other teacher came from Odessa and taught geography. I was happy in the Soviet school, which was superior to the Romanian system. I loved it and I was one of the best students in the school. My marks were at the top. It took me fifteen minutes to get through my exam and a lot of the other students were struggling so I helped them write their exam.

As a matter of fact, the Soviets saw potential in me. This was in late 1940 or early 1941 and, at the Soviet’s government expense, the officials wanted to send both me and a cousin of mine to summer camp when the school year was over for being the top students. I was supposed to leave in June, I don’t remember the date exactly, but because the situation in Vizhnitz got tense I didn’t go and thank God I didn’t. I could have gone and probably just disappeared – who knows where I would have ended up. It was the end of my formal education.

I was curious to see what was happening in town after we left. I didn’t tell my parents what I was going to do but I walked back approximately one kilometre and I saw that the local population had started looting the Jewish houses. They were carting off everything that was left behind, furniture, bedding, clothes. When I saw that, I saw enough and I returned to the railroad station.

I don’t remember if the Romanian gendarmes who gave us orders were armed, but probably they were. I don’t remember seeing beatings or hearing shots while we were being loaded into the cars. We were more or less packed in but not in an extremely forced way because people obeyed. There were ramps into the cars and I think fifty to sixty people were crowded in. As the train left the station, at around ten in the morning, Jewish life came to an end in Vizhnitz.

At the time I didn’t even think: where are we going and why are we going and what’s going to happen when we get there? The general feeling was that it wouldn’t be so bad, we would find work, and manage. Now that I think back, I believe it was all part of pre-planned propaganda so we would do as ordered.

Inside the crowded car people tried to find a way to sit but not everyone could because there wasn’t enough room. Some people who sat were shoklen zikh (shaking) until they fell asleep. It was uncomfortable, but we kind of accepted it. I don’t remember any sanitary facilities inside the car.

The train stopped approximately two hours after leaving the station. The train had to cross a narrow bridge and they weren’t sure the bridge was strong enough to support the train with us, the “cargo.” We were forced out of the cars and made to walk across that bridge and then we got back into the cars. By the time we stopped five people had died so they made my dad and some other people bury them right at the edge of the river there. I didn’t go to the gravesite but I heard what they did. And then the train took off again.

We travelled the rest of the day and night until around six o’clock in the morning and then the train stopped. Since it was early October, it was still dark. We looked out a little window and saw a forest and we also heard what sounded like the rush of a river. For a while it was quiet and then we heard shooting. The doors to the cars were opened and we were told in Romanian to get out. As we did, I ended up in a ditch in water up to my chest. I was soaked, but I managed to get out. Outside, there were Ukrainians with sacks and Romanians with dogs. The Ukrainians wore distinctive clothes, so we knew who they were. We were lined up five to a row and told to walk in a certain direction. We were very tired and frightened and we didn’t know what was happening. In the distance we saw lights, like lamps, and the gendarmes told us to walk toward it. It wasn’t very far but it was wet and the road was muddy. We walked no more than an hour, but it was miserable.

The lights turned out to be flames from Primuses, gas camping stoves. There had been an earlier transport of Jews from Suceava and they were spread out in an open field. They were a little more prepared, or wealthier, than we were and had brought the stoves with them. When I reached the field with my parents and my younger brother I was so exhausted that I collapsed on some of our belongings and fell asleep. When I woke up I heard something about burying people. It turned out that next to where we had settled in the field there had been a family – a man, his wife, and his mother. The man had been a druggist and he and his mother had taken drugs to commit suicide. I knew what had happened because people were talking about it and I heard what they were saying. My dad said, “We can’t leave them here,” so he and others buried them at the edge of what looked like a little forest. They had just enough time before the Romanian gendarmes came and said we had to line up again in the same formation and walk toward what looked like a small town.

We were frightened, hungry and tired. We did what we were told to do or else they would have killed us. We had no choice. We had no way of resisting.

We walked to the town, which turned out to be Ataki. The Romanian gendarmes told us to take shelter in the empty houses. I didn’t wonder why they were empty, maybe other people did, but to me it was just an empty house. I was once again so exhausted that I collapsed inside. When I woke up a few hours later, around four in the afternoon, I wanted to know what was going to happen so I went outside to find out what other deportees knew. The gendarmes announced that the next morning we had to walk to the edge of the River Dniester where there was a barge that would ferry us into the Ukraine.

In July and August of 1941, the Germans and Romanians had occupied the Ukraine. Romania was given the territory in southwest Ukraine between the River Dniester to the west, the River Bug to the east, the Black Sea to the south and a line beyond the city of Mogilev-Podolski to the north. The area was placed under military administration and renamed Transnistria, which in Romanian means on the other side of the River Dniester.

As I returned to the house where my family had taken shelter I noticed written messages on the outside of the houses. One said: “We are being killed. If you come by here and survive please say Kaddish[the mourner’s prayer] for us, tell the world what happened to us and don’t ever forget us.” Everywhere I looked, the same message was written in Yiddish and Romanian, inside and outside of houses with mezuzahs on their doorframes. The Jews of Ataki had been killed. These messages got etched in my brain and are still there. I’ll never forget them. Even though I read these messages, I didn’t fear for our lives. We didn’t know our fate; we thought that we’ll go over there, find work, something. I didn’t know.

The next morning we walked to the River Dniester and we were loaded into a large barge. We were tightly packed in and there were also some German soldiers. There were so many people that the water rose to approximately four inches from the top and I was afraid that we’d drown, but we made it across with our belongings. There was a cable that was used to pull us across the river and we got off the boat in the late afternoon. As soon as we crossed the River Dniester to the Ukrainian side, we were in the territory of Transnistria. We were now stateless, homeless and we didn’t know what to do next.

Transnistria was the area that Jewish deportees from the Romanian provinces of Bukovina, Bessarabia and the northern regions of Moldova were forced to resettle in, to de facto ghettos that were called “colonies” by the Romanian government and that I call Lagers (camps). The Romanian method for annihilating Jews was for the most part different from the Germans’, although there were mass murders and pogroms in certain parts of Romania. The difference was that in transporting Jews across the River Dniester and letting them fend for themselves, I think they believed that we wouldn’t last very long. The aim of the Romanian fascist government was to send us there to die.

Bartering was the way to get something you wanted for something that you had. If you had a suit, and a suit was very desirable, and you wanted a sack of flour for it, you would display it at the market. A peasant who wanted it would ask what you wanted for it and you might come to an agreement. You were happy to go home with what you had bartered for and the peasant was happy with getting what he wanted. We Romanian deportees were the foreigners, with foreign goods that the Ukrainian peasants wanted and were very willing to barter for. They didn’t have the things we did; they liked our clothes, our sweaters, our shoes. We had bed sheets that were desirable, some women’s skirts or clothing, the normal things. We couldn’t bring a lot to begin with and what we brought didn’t last very long. We bartered away everything we had. Some people bartered away their shoes and then they had to wrap their feet in schmattes, rags. As long as you had things to barter, you could survive.

We bartered for potatoes, flour to bake bread, basic things. I don’t remember buying cheeses but there was some kind of yogurt, I think they called it kallatoucha, and that and milk were the staples of our diet. We adjusted to the reality that food was going to be scarce and we would not have enough; as long as you had desirable things to barter, you wouldn’t starve. Extreme hunger started a year later but during this time we were still often hungry. The local Jewish people of Shargorod were faced with the same struggle to survive as us but they didn’t have foreign goods to barter with that the Ukrainian peasants wanted; they had the same possessions as the peasants.

As time went on and people bartered away most or all their belongings, starvation started to set in. People who couldn’t speak the language or were too old or too young or didn’t have any agricultural background started to die very quickly. In summer, we saw wagons loaded with the dead and in the winter, the sleds. There was no end to it. People faced malnutrition, starvation, dysentery, typhus. Every second or third day, people collected the dead bodies.

During 1942 and 1943 our situation got desperate. We got to the point where we didn’t have anything to eat and we faced either starvation or making the decision to sneak out of the ghetto. Sneaking out wasn’t difficult because there were no fences or guards to keep us in. The danger was if you got caught – your survival depended on who caught you. If it was a Romanian soldier and he suspected you were a Jew and he was a reasonable human being, he would give you a good kick in the pants and tell you to go back to Shargorod; if they felt like it, they would beat you up or kill you with a rifle.

Because my family had experience with farm work and being among peasants and, as I mentioned, could speak Ukrainian, we had an advantage. We weren’t like the sophisticated urban type; we were more of the common people. In 1942, my brother was fourteen, I was fifteen, my dad was forty-four and my mother was thirty-eight, so we were young and strong enough to able to fight for survival. I can’t fully explain it but we did fight; we didn’t give up.

We reached Halifax on March 22, 1948. As the boat got close to shore, we looked down and we saw well-dressed people; in comparison, we were dressed in schmattes, rags. We didn’t have much but I asked Yosel, “What are we going to do with these schmattes? They’re going to laugh at us.” We decided to get rid of them; we just threw two or three parcels overboard. We kept our winter jackets and other heavy clothes as well as some basic clothes. When we went through the customs we had maybe a few dollars but other than that we didn’t have anything. 

In Halifax we were put up in the private homes of Jewish people who had volunteered to have us. Yosel and I ended up with very nice people who took us into town and bought us chocolates. They treated us very well and it was like they couldn’t do enough for us. A couple of days later, we were put on a train into Montreal. 

Our group of refugees was divided, with some people staying in Montreal, some going to Winnipeg and others to Calgary. From the train that was en route to Winnipeg, we continued our journey to Hoffer, first stopping in Estevan, Saskatchewan. 

When we had left Montreal, the flowers were still blooming and the grass was green. When we got into Estevan, it was still winter. That first night we arrived, we stayed in a hotel owned by a Mr. Zelkovich. The family was very nice to us and they wanted to hear our stories. The next day they put us on a train to Hoffer, Saskatchewan. The train felt like it was travelling in a tunnel because the snow was so high on each side. You could only see the top five inches of the telephone poles. It was unbelievable! When I saw all that snow, I questioned our decision to go to Hoffer.  I said to my brother, “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into here”? But he was calmer and replied, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

***

When we arrived, my first impression was of the mountains of snow and the isolation. I wasn’t particularly enthused by what I saw. There was just a little caboose for a station, a general store, a couple of buildings here and there. There was a railroad train that used to go once every second or third day from there all the way to a town called Minton, Saskatchewan, which was the end of the line, and then it would go back to Estevan and Winnipeg. At that time, there was no electricity in Hoffer and people had to use these kinds of pumping lamps for lights, kerosene lamps. There was no running water, so people had to use a well. 

The Hoffers knew we were coming but I don’t remember whether we communicated with them or others did. Mayer Hoffer, who owned the general store, sent a sleigh with a team of horses for us. My brother got excited; he liked that. It was only a very short distance to Mayer Hoffer’s store and after greeting him and his wife I told them I’d like to go and see Israel. Mayer called a man and sent us with the sleigh to see Israel. Israel lived in a nice house probably about a mile from Mayer’s place. When we arrived, I knocked on the door and a man with grey hair opened it. The first thing he said to us was, “Did Mayer tell you that you were going to stay with him?”  Well, that’s something I haven’t forgotten. I came from hell to Hoffer and he didn’t even say hello or ask us into the house. I answered that yes, I knew we were staying with Mayer. I closed the door and returned to Mayer’s place. 

I couldn’t help but think of the different kind of reception we were given in Montreal or Winnipeg and the kind of reception we were given here. I realized that there wasn’t much we could accomplish here. These people were farmers and as far as if we were relatives, it didn’t mean much. They needed labour. Maybe they sympathized in some respect; I don’t know. 

The Hoffer brothers, Israel and Mayer, started to pioneer the land about fifty kilometres from Estevan in 1905, with support from the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). In 1891, Baron de Hirsch, a philanthropist, had established the JCA to encourage immigration from Europe to agricultural colonies in various countries, including Western Canada. 

When we arrived in the area, there were established Jewish farmers. There were some in Hirsch, Saskatchewan and some in Lipton, Saskatchewan; Hoffer was a part of the Sonnenfeld Colony and I believe there must have been about twenty-five to thirty Jewish families there at that time. They all had a quarter, two quarters of land but making a living out of their farming enterprises was almost impossible. There were also gentiles farming in the area. The relationship was cold, not friendly, but the gentile farmers kind of accepted the Jewish farmers and they each learned to live alongside one another. The Jewish people struggled very much under difficult circumstances and also because they had to give a share of the crop back to the JCA. The land had been rented, not given to them. Everyone was independent but they all worked with the Jewish Colonization Association.

Mayer gave us accommodations in an old granary where there were two sort of beds for us. We were given food and we had to work. It was around the middle of May, and seeing all that snow I thought that it would never go away, but spring actually arrived one week later. So, it wasn’t bad. We got up at six in the morning and worked until sundown. We were pretty glad to work — we were young and we regained a little energy and we enjoyed it.

We spent the summer working on the farm and we were eager to do things so we were pretty good workers. They taught us how to operate a tractor and how to drive a truck. They paid us fifty dollars a month with room and board, and from the fifty dollars we sent home money and parcels to our parents. In Canada my brother and I both worked very hard. Our main priority was to get our parents and our youngest brother, Simcha, out of Europe to Canada, but we were struggling ourselves. We had to pay for their tickets, we had to send them some money, and we needed money as well. It was tough and we went through many hardships. Yosel and I never hesitated for one minute to spend our last dollar to achieve our goal, and we eventually succeeded in bringing our family to Canada.

It took me awhile to learn to speak English. In Hoffer we wanted to meet the local boys and girls and they wanted to meet the two boys who came from overseas. Somehow, we managed to communicate. Soon after we arrived in Canada, Yosel became Joe. My name, Leizer, was a problem since the name Leizer was familiar only to Jewish people and it was strange to gentiles. When we met the local kids, Joe was no problem, but these kids started calling me “Lazy” instead of Leizer. I didn’t know what lazy meant but when my supposed relatives heard them call me Lazy they objected. So, my name changed to Lou.

When fall came, after the harvest, we had saved a few dollars and I told Joe that I wasn’t staying in Hoffer for the winter. The Hoffers weren’t very happy that we were leaving — we were cheap labour — but it didn’t make any difference. I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to stay. As far as us being related, they were from the same general area but we didn’t think we were relatives. In general, the majority of the people in Hoffer, as much as they sympathized with us, were preoccupied with their own people.