Chaos erupted in the ghetto while young and old, babies and disabled Jews were gathered and forced to wait for days on end out in the open. I will never forget the local people, jeering at us and calling us dirty names solely because we were Jewish. Thousands of us were all herded into boxed wagons of cattle trains that took us to Attachi on the Bessarabian side of the River Dniester.  There, we were walked by the menacing Nazi guards, through the horrendous, muddy terrain and mountainous region to the labor and concentration camps, to await our fate.

My great-grandparents were too old and frail to navigate the terrain. They stopped to rest and pleaded with the guards to give them time to gather their strength but were shot in front of all of us and left on a mountainside to bleed to death. We could not even bury them or say Yizkor – the prayer for the dead. Others from our town were also shot, as the Nazi troops killed those too old and fragile to march with the others. I was nine years old when this happen and I have never forgotten.

There was a big bottleneck in Attachi at the crossing of the Dniester. The way across was to march over a very busy bridge or to ferry across the river on crowded barges. The choice was purely a matter of luck. Tens of thousands of Jews were forced to march across that bridge to Transnistria. My family finally reached the village of Tropova and were taken to a barracks complex – the Camp or Lager, as was the term. Conditions there were terrible.

The heavy Ukrainian winter was upon us; there was no heat, everyone slept on cold floors, and had very little food to eat. Romanian gendarmes would appear at all hours, demand a roll call and pick up able-bodied people who were then sent out to join the forced labor brigades and never heard from again. My brother was on the line of those to be sent to the front, but the guard became distracted and Dov ran away and safely hid.

During that winter, we were plagued with the scourge of a typhoid fever epidemic. It raged throughout the camps of Transnistria unchecked and devoured tens of thousands of Jews. The hygienic conditions were deplorable: no water, no bathrooms and no toilets. The Jews lived jammed into overcrowded quarters, dirty and infested with lice, which just spread the disease. There was no doctor, nor medical supplies.

At some point, my only pair of shoes wore out and I opted to walking barefoot. That was fine for a little while. One day I stepped on a rusty nail with my left foot. At first, I didn’t tell anyone about it, to save my parents from aggravation. However, my foot became infected and began to swell up. It also became quite painful and I started to limp. Soon pus began oozing and gangrene was about to set in.

I couldn't walk at all and had to stay in bed. The situation was very serious, and I was in dire need of medical attention. By sheer luck, the authorities finally acceded to sending a doctor to the Camp at about that very time. The doctor’s name was Israel Chalfen. He immediately came to see me and went to work on my foot. It is safe to state that without his speedy intervention, I would have lost my foot if not my life. Although Dr. Chalfen had no medications, he was able to arrest the infection, clean and disinfect the wound and promote its healing. My family befriended the doctor who quickly became our hero.

Our fears were finally allayed, and our prayers came true when the Soviet Army arrived. The Jews were tired, exhausted, emaciated, left with broken hearts and sad memories, but a strong spirit and much hope. Note the strange irony of fate: the start of this tragic interlude begins with the disruption of our idyllic life by the invasion of the Russian Army in 1940. It comes full circle with liberation by the same Russian Army, four years later!

My family was still in Tropova on April 23, 1944, the date of my birthday. This was not just an ordinary birthday, but my Bar Mitzvah. Surrounded by my parents and brother, I was made aware of the importance of the day and together we expressed happiness to have survived the ordeal. We made it! Transnistria, the graveyard for a quarter of a million Jews - is referred to as the Forgotten Cemetery of the Holocaust.

Some of the Transnistria survivors followed the Soviet troops and succeeded in reaching Romania. My family, was too exhausted - drained physically, mentally and emotionally and we decided to stay in a region known as Czernovitz at least for a while. The ultimate goal was to get out of Europe. Most of the returning survivors also congregated in Czernowitz in lieu of any other refugee-friendly place. My parents found jobs at the Jewish Hospital in Czernowitz. They were given very skimpy living quarters at the hospital that seemed nevertheless palatial compared with what they left behind. We had a toilet, shower, running water and electricity to boot!

In 1946 my family received permission to leave the Soviet Union and repatriate to Romania.  My family received the one-way traveling documents to Israel in December of 1949. We renounced our Romanian citizenship and set out the same month on a boat voyage to the State of Israel. My brother Dov had gone ahead and was already settled in Israel with his future wife, Raia Gendler. On boarding the boat, my parents and I went through a custom check. To my complete dismay, my new collection of stamps was confiscated. This was a painful personal blow, since stamp collecting was a newly acquired hobby that I enjoyed immensely.

We arrived to the Port of Haifa in the middle of December 1949. I applied to the Haifa Technion, the only engineering school in Israel at the time and was rejected, due to my lack of a formal education. I decided to look for a school in America, especially since my Uncle Morris could sponsor me. It took some work to get through the bureaucracies, but I was accepted to the New York Institute of Technology.

In July of 1956 I was off to the United States with twenty dollars in my pocket. That was the maximum amount permissible in foreign currency at that time. My whole family saw me off at Haifa as I boarded a Zim Liner for the voyage across the ocean to America. Uncle Morris and his wife Eleanor greeted me on July 27, 1956 when I arrived into New York harbor. They took me to their home in Mount Freedom, New Jersey. After a few days of familiarization, I embarked on a plan for action. My goal was to go to school and prove to myself and my uncle that I could make it on my own

My social life centered on the Israeli Students Organization in Manhattan. They scheduled their own weekly activities or participated in events with other organizations. One such event was an evening party with an American Jewish Congress chapter from Brooklyn. The hostess on this occasion was no other than the charming Gloria Koss. Although I attended the party with a date, I quickly took my date home and returned to the party. It was just my luck that the coat rack that was overloaded happened to collapse just when I walked into the ballroom. All coats dropped to the floor. I jumped in without hesitation and took care of the whole mess. Gloria was very impressed, thanked me profusely and in the process of exchanging niceties I also wound up with her phone number.

I married Gloria on April 19th, 1959. My daughter Naomi was born on April 20th, 1961. We decided to move from Queens, NY to Monsey in Rockland County to be closer to Gloria’s parents. I switched jobs to a Paramus, NJ company which manufactured sizable audio systems for hotels, convention centers and stadiums, Bogen Corporation.

The job with Bogen afforded me the ability to continue with my education at night, at nearby Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ. The company had a tuition refund program that I took full advantage of. By 1972, I had earned my Bachelor’s Degree and with that came a job promotion to Project Engineer. Six years later, in 1978, I earned a Master’s Degree.

One of the more challenging projects I headed was the design of an elaborate audio evacuation system at the newly rebuilt MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. The hotel, which had been engulfed by a tremendous fire, reopened on July 30th, 1981, eight months after a fire that focused worldwide attention on high-rise building safety. Their audio system was operated in conjunction with a fire alarm system that allowed complete monitoring of any location of the hotel by a central command center. The system covered 2,900 rooms, 42 convention center meeting rooms, showrooms, casinos, elevators and the pool area. After its installation I worked with local fire marshals to check out the system’s performance. I stayed at the Dunes Hotel, with Gloria, for a week. The inspection went well and they received final approval. The project was a big success.

In 1980 I was promoted to Director of Engineering and in 1981 to Vice-President of Engineering. I was in charge of a team of over thirty engineers, technicians and draftsmen. My duties extended beyond the affairs of the engineering department. I became part of the management team of a mid-size company of 200 employees. I visited companies in the Far East to source new products and to shift some of the manufacturing overseas and was on the cutting edge of outsourcing to Asia.