Khonia Epshtein was born in the town of Shepelevichi, in the Mogilev region (Belarus), in 1926. The town was situated at a major crossroads, and thus highly developed. He grew up in a traditional family that observed all the Jewish holidays. The Epshteins were relatively wealthy. Khonia's maternal grandfather, Simon Soloveichik, owned a small factory producing tar and turpentine, while his paternal grandfather owned a cobbler's workshop, and was married to a rabbi’s daughter. Khonia’s father Borukh was a shoemaker, too. In 1911, he was drafted into the Tsarist army, and took part in World War I, where he was decorated with the Cross of St. George – the highest award for personal courage. Khonia’s mother was named Malka. He had two brothers and a sister. The Epshteins had many relatives in Shepelevichi and the surrounding area, and the members of the extended family were in constant communication. Khonia attended a school whose student body included both Jews and Belarusians.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, the Epshteins, like many of their neighbors, refused to leave Shepelevichi for some unknown place. They hoped that the Germans would not harm the Jews, focusing instead on the fight against the Communists. The Nazis did not reach Shepelevichi until September, by which point news of the mass murder of the Jews had reached the area.
As soon as the Germans had occupied the town, they murdered all its Jewish men in a gas van, but Khonia’s father was accidentally spared. Shortly thereafter, the town was gripped by a famine, and the family survived thanks to the father's work, for which he was paid in food, rather than money. In order to help him out, Khonia, too, began to work as a shoemaker. Soon, Borukh Epshtein was killed by the Nazis. After his death, the local Nazi collaborators began to mistreat the family, robbing them of all their possessions. Although the locals had not been particularly antisemitic before the war, this prejudice now manifested itself. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis set up a small ghetto in Shepelevichi, and all the surviving Jews had to live on the same street, several families to a house. During one of the murder operations, Khonia and his mother were marked for death and assigned to a group of people who were going to be shot. However, one of the collaborators, whose son was a schoolfriend of Khonia’s, saved them. Only twenty of the ghetto inmates (including Knonia, his mother, and all his siblings) survived the massacres, and the Nazis transferred them to another village. Now, all twenty had to huddle in two derelict houses on the edge of that settlement.
When the Nazis came to liquidate this last group of Jews, Khonia’s mother told him to hide in the cellar. That cellar ran very deep, and the boy managed to find a spot under the house that the killers could not reach. The Nazis killed the rest of his family and the other Jews, yet they knew that there was one boy still unaccounted for, in hiding. For four days, the Nazis tried to flush him out, firing into the cellar, disassembling the floor, and waiting for him to die of thirst and starvation. Khonia was indeed exhausted from thirst and nervous shock, but he managed to escape into the forest at night. He soon ran into a group of partisans, and, after an interrogation, they allowed him to join their unit. That was a stroke of luck, since the Soviet partisans were often reluctant to accept Jews (especially teenagers) into their ranks, and antisemitism was rampant among them, too.
Until 1944, Khonia fought with the Belarusian partisans in the forests not far from his native town. His deep familiarity with the area and its inhabitants helped his unit survive and carry out its military objectives. He was wounded once. After the liberation of the region by Soviet troops, he was attached to the regular army. In the course of the war, he received two orders.
After the end of the war, Khonia Epshtein returned to his native region, graduated from the Pedagogical Institute, and went on to work for many years as a teacher at different schools in Mogilev and the region. He later immigrated to the USA.
Related Resources
Khonia Epshtein's recollections:
Finally, the town was left behind. Immediately beyond it, there was an old, disused sand quarry. The column was ordered to halt. This was the place, then. Then SS officer and the headman, Lyavon Polyakov, stopped on the lip of the pit and conferred out of earshot. Finally, Polyakov approached the column and started dragging people out of it one by one, herding them together into a separate group. Thus, not everyone was to be killed together; this group would go first. Apparently, there were too many people, and the higher-ups had determined that the pit could not accommodate everyone. Lyavon grabbed our neighbor, Bronya Ratner. She barely had time to push her two-year-old daughter, Sonechka, toward my mother. Mother scooped Sonechka up and began to cry:
-- Lyavon, let Bronya go! What am I going to do with such a little girl? Let Bronya go, Lyavon!
The headman stopped for a moment, nodded, smirked into his beard, put Bronya back, and… pulled me out of the column. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, like a puppy, and flung me toward those who were still alive, but who might have been considered dead already – seeing as they had less than an hour left to live.
-- Lyavon! – Mother fell to her knees. – Release Khonia! Let Khonia go, Lyavon, I beg you, in the name of God!
This Lyavon knew me. His son and I had been classmates, and I used to help him with the math homework and visit their home.
Lyavon stood over Mother in silence, and then he turned back and said something to the SS officer standing nearby. Both men broke out laughing; he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and flung me back into the column – in exactly the same way as he had previously assigned me to the group of those doomed to die.
The elderly, scrawny Shivya, Bronya's mother, gazed silently at the sky and seemed serene, as though she wished to see God Himself and say some tender words to Him. For a long time before this day, the blackest in her life, she would fast and pray twice a week – on Mondays and Thursdays, – and now she wanted to ask God whether He was aware of these fasts, whether He had heard her prayers. However, as luck would have it, the sky was covered with a grey pall of shaggy cloud, and the aged Shivya did not see or hear a thing. Finally, she shook her white tufts of hair, spat, and said in a hurt tone:
-- Fertig taneisim vi in tokhes arangiste! (a garbled Yiddish sentence meaning: "Forty fasts my ass!" – i.e., "All my fasts, all my piety and religious observance, have been in vain!")
She fell silent, cast a farewell glance at her horror-frozen daughter and granddaughter, who had been granted a stay of execution, and withdrew into herself. There were about fifty of them, women of various ages and children.
From: Yad Vashem Archives, O.33/3148
