Abram Shmoish was born in 1917, in the town of Snitkov in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine. His father, Yitzik Shmoish, was a tailor. Abram attended a seven-year Yiddish school in Snitkov, where he developed a passion for Yiddish literature, devouring the works of Sholem Aleichem and reading newspapers in that language, such as Zei Greyt ("Be Prepared;" the organ of the Young Pioneers) and Der Shtern ("The Star").
Afterward, Abram moved to Odessa and completed the School for Working Jewish Youth, which was sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Upon the orders of Lazar Kaganovich, a prominent Soviet leader of Jewish origin, Abram and thirty-six other students from the school were sent to Birobidzhan, to work on building a railway. Later, he was drafted into the Red Army, and served for two years in the Soviet Far East, before returning to his hometown of Snitkov.
Back in Snitkov, Abram worked at the "Culture" collective farm alongside his parents, until the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June 1941. He was then sent to a heavily fortified area on the Romanian border near the Dniester River. As the Soviet troops retreated to Odessa, Abram found himself in a rifle unit that suffered heavy casualties, with only thirty-eight survivors out of 218 soldiers. They kept fighting, despite their disorientation and the desertion of their commander. The situation was dire.
Abram eventually managed to return home, but in September 1941 Snitkov was occupied by the Nazis, who proceeded to set up a ghetto in the town. Until August 1942, Abram and his family lived in the ghetto. They were then relocated to another town, where the children, women, and elderly people were separated from the other inmates and killed, while the young and able-bodied individuals were used as forced laborers.
Abram was among the eighty-eight inmates of the ghetto (whose original population numbered 2000 people) who were sent to a labor camp in the town of Letichev. He remained there until December 1942, and then escaped. He made his way to Transnistria, moving from town to town in the region of the city of Mogilev Podolski.
There, Abram was arrested by the Romanians and sent to Tulchin, to work in peat extraction. However, he once again managed to escape, by jumping off the train that was taking him there. He found refuge in the town of Ozarichi. At this time, Abram met Roza Shefler. After the Red Army had liberated the area in 1944, the two married.
Abram was then appointed commander of a rifle battalion. He went on to fight for four months near the city of Iași in Romania, and later also in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. In 1944, he was awarded the Order of Glory, 3rd class. He met V-E Day in Austria. Abram continued his military service for over a year after the end of the war. Following his discharge, he was reunited with his wife Roza Shefler in Chernovtsy. His father, mother, and two sisters had been murdered by the Nazis.
In Chernovtsy, Abram worked as a technician. In 1948, he greeted the establishment of the state of Israel with enthusiasm, and in the early 1970s the Shmoish family moved there.
