Froim Roitman was born in 1926 in the Jewish village of Velyka Kisnytsia (in Russian: Velikaia Kosnitsa) near Iampol, in Ukraine, close to the Romanian border. His father Itskhok worked in trade. The family was religious and had seven children. In June 1941, some days before the Soviet-German war began, Froim (Froikale) finished 9th grade in school.
After the war started, the Iampol recruitment office assembled all the boys between the ages of 15 and 17 and sent them, led by Red Army officers, on foot to the Soviet rear for pre-conscription training. Within a short time the column was intercepted by the Germans. The Germans took all Jews from the column and shot them on the spot, but let the Ukrainians go home. Froim survived because he was fair-haired and because his Ukrainian friend Fiodor Savitskii told the Germans that Froikale was also a Ukrainian.
Froim Roitman went to Iampol, but soon rumors circulated there that he was a Soviet spy. His family decided that for the time being it would be safer for him to hide in the Iampol ghetto, that was under the control of the Romanians (Iampol was in the area of Transnistria). In 1942, the male members of the Roitman family were sent to the Romanian forced labor camp at the Ladyzhenskii quarry. In 1943 Germans came to the camp and took the able-bodied boys for construction works in Nikolaiev, on the Black Sea. When the Red Army liberated Nikolaiev in March 1944, out of 40 boys taken by the Germans in 1943, only two, including Froim, were still alive. After liberation, Froim learned that his father and some other relatives had died in Transnistria.
In July 1944 Froim, who was not yet 18, was drafted into the Red Army. Froim was eager to take revenge for his father and other relatives. He learned the skills of setting and defusing mines. A short time after, he was seriously wounded in the shoulder and in the lungs. After being released from hospital, Froim was sent to Eastern Prussia, where he met VE-Day.
In June 1945, almost a month after VE-Day, Private Froim Roitman, still only 18, was killed attempting to clearing a Prussian town of enemy mines.
Froim's step-brother Zis (Soviet documents give his first name as Aleksandr) Roitman, who was born in 1905, was drafted into the Red Army in June 1941. In the same year Aleksandr was declared missing. He never returned. Zis's wife and their three little children perished in Transnistria.
