The Story of Rivka

Before World War II the Yosselevska family led a happy life in the village of Zagorodski, near Pinsk, highlighted by the births of the children Chaya, Feige, Rivka and a brother named Moshe. Their father had a leather goods shop and was considered one of the notables of the village.

Rivka Yosselevska was married in 1934 and had a daughter named Merkele.

But the family's feelings of security collapsed, when Hitler and Germany invaded the country. The brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror and the family was herded into the Jewish Ghetto with five hundred Jewish families.

In the summer of 1942 the Einsatzgruppen arrived. They were mobile killing units of the Nazi SS, established for the purpose of murdering Jews, Gypsies, political leaders, the intelligentsia. They followed German armies into the Soviet Union in June 1941 and executed over a million.

They surrounded the Jewish Ghetto, ordering the families to stand for a roll call all day. In the evening a truck arrived and Jews were loaded onto the truck. Many were ordered to run after it.

The Holocaust

Along with her little girl, father, mother, siblings, relatives, friends, and villagers, Rivka Yosselevska was shot, naked, in a pit - miraculously she survived.

During the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, on May 8, 1961, she bore witness about what happened ..

- Louis Bülow