Efim Gimelshtein was born in 1935 in Minsk in the Soviet Union (Belarus) to Mikhail and Rachel Yudovich, traditional Jews who spoke Yiddish at home. His grandparents lived with them.
In June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Efim's father was recruited into the Red Army, and was killed in battle.
About a month after the German occupation, the Minsk ghetto was established, and Efim and his family were imprisoned there. He witnessed the murder of Jews in the courtyard and the blood of the murdered flowing on the ground. He observed Jews hanged in the square, and soldiers and policemen with weapons and dogs forcing convoys of Jews out of the city. He saw Jews being put into a vehicle, where they were apparently gassed to death. He and his mother survived several aktionen carried out by the Germans among the Jews of Minsk.
Pinchas Dobin, Rachel's brother-in-law, was a stove builder. In 1943, Pinchas and his sons dug a hiding place under the house next to the Jewish cemetery in the ghetto. The entrance to the hideout, intended for seven people, was through a heating and cooking stove. Pinchas placed food and water in the bunker.
In October 1943, when the Germans began to liquidate the Minsk ghetto, 26 people entered the bunker, including Efim, who was the youngest child there. They sat in almost complete darkness, distinguishing between day and night only by the faint light that entered through a small airhole. Rats tried to gnaw their fingers and toes. After the food and water ran out, Efim's mother would leave the bunker, and approach Russian acquaintances for food. Those in hiding began to die of thirst, hunger, weakness and disease, including Efim's grandmother. The others buried them in the floor of the bunker. The soil removed from the graves was sprinkled in the bunker, and thus the floor rose, the ceiling became lower and the bunker space kept shrinking.
During one burial, water suddenly burst into the bunker. Fortunately for those in hiding, the rising water stopped.
They stayed in the bunker for nine months.
On July 3, 1944, Minsk was liberated, and the group was discovered by Soviet soldiers. Only 13 of the 26 who entered the bunker survived. They did not have the strength to walk, and their vision was impaired due to being in the dark for so many months. Soldiers carried them on stretchers to a hospital. Efim was hospitalized for three months. After the war, his mother married Yakov Gimelshtein, a partisan whose entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. Yakov treated Efim like a son.
In 1992, Efim and his wife Rivka immigrated to Israel. He volunteers at Yad Vashem and tells his story to groups of Russian-speaking students.
Efim and Rivka have two sons and five grandchildren.
