The general route taken from Nikolayev to Paris - over 1000 miles - some on foot.
Getting Out of Russia
The following accounts are excerpted from recollections either dictated or written by the people named.
Dave Chayt dictates: It was about 1910 when we left. Maurice already had left after the pogrom. Following him was Jacques. Then my father went. The rest of us remained with our mother. That was eight of us. Yvette and Pauline were born afterward, in Paris. Maurice sent papers for the rest of the family to come. From Nikolayev* we went to the end of Russia there. I remember we had to cross a border. We walked across early in the morning. It was a border with Germany. No, from Russia we went into Poland, and from Poland we had to cross a border. In Germany, I remember a building with a wooden fence around it. There were a lot of refugees there. After the pogroms, a lot of Jews left. Parents would send away their elder children to save their lives. The Jewish people that were there used to peddle and deal with all kinds of products in the market. I don't remember how long that journey was.
| I do remember going into that house there and that while we were crossing, my mother had given me a kettle of water. It was so early in the morning. The sun was just coming out and it was getting daylight. I had followed the whole line. The kettle (``chienik'') was getting lighter. By the time we got there, they wanted water and there was no water in it. Inside of that house they gave us water, bread and cheese. From there, somehow they got the train and we went to Paris. | The general route taken from Nikolayev to Paris - over 1000 miles - some on foot. |
Pauline Shernicoff writes: My brother Dave recalled some of his early memories. At about the age of 5, after the Russo-Japanese War, he and a friend saw Cossacks running to Fetter (uncle) Bennie's house in Nikolayev on the Black Sea near Odessa. They ran in to find that Papa (Zaida) had been hit over the head and everyone was around him. Moishe Ber, the oldest of our family, had joined a group called the Social Democrats. They were actively fighting back the Cossacks. It was a very dangerous undertaking. One day, a friend of Anna's (the eldest sister) who was a young gentile man and who was attracted to her, came to the house to advise my parents that it was imperatively urgent to get Moishe Ber out of the country. His friends has been discovered in the woods and had been arrested. Moishe was forced to leave Russia and to go to Paris.
Dave also revealed that Mamma's father Avram Itzack earned his living by periodically leaving his shtettle, (village) Reginivka, to peddle clay pottery that my Bubba Leah (mamma's mother) made.
It was difficult for a poor Jew to attain an education. However, Moishe Ber and Sarah went to Gymnasia, equivalent to High School in the States. Dave remembered going to Hebrew school as a child. Soon after Moishe Ber left Russia, Papa Zaida) followed with Jacques. Then in 1910 Mamma followed with the rest, Anna, Sarah, Bassy (Berthe), Manya (Marie), Dave, Herschel (Harry), Esther (Estelle), Israel (Jules). They left Nikolayev by crossing the Polish and German borders with great difficulties. In Germany they were detained in a refugee camp until they could continue on to Paris.
Yvette Levine writes; My brother Maurice had a friend (who was not a Jew but a friend of the family) who worked for the police department. One day he came to the house and told Maurice (tipped him off) that he had better get out of Russia and as soon as possible because there was an order out to pick him up and put him in the Russian army to fight the Japanese. Since defending the country in which his own friends and family were being murdered by the very same soldiers of the Czar was not his idea of how to spend his life, he took the advice and fled to Paris France, where he established a shoe factory.
Jules Chayt Writes; I was born in Nikolayev, Russia, on the first day of Passover in 1910. We (I) left Russia that year at the age of six months to rejoin my father and brothers in Paris, France, where they had settled a few years earlier
* Nikolayev - the current spelling (according to the CIA World Fact Book - 2004) - is Mykolayiv. -- I have left the spelling as Nikolayev since that is closer to correct for the time. i.e. the city was named for Czar Nicholas - probably something the previous Soviet regime preferred not to remember.
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