Arie Weber was born as Leib Weber in 1913 in Bănila, Bukovina, which was then a province of Austria-Hungary. In November 1918 Romania annexed this province and, in June 1940, Northern Bukovina was annexed by the Soviets. (Today Bănila is Banyliv Pidhirnyi, Ukraine.) In the early 1930s Leib was drafted into the Romanian army for three years. During the Soviet occupation of the area in 1940-1941, Weber served the Soviet authorities in various functions.
When the Romanians were again ruling Northern Bukovina between 1941 and 1944, Weber was arrested as a former collaborator with the Soviets. Later, together with his family, he was deported to Transnistria: parts of Moldova and Ukraine between the rivers of Dniester and Southern Bug Rivers, that were annexed by Romania. The Weber family was incarcerated in the ghetto of Kopaigorod. In the ghetto Leib's parents and sister died of typhus, but he and his younger brother Eli survived.
In March 1944 Kopaigorod was liberated by the Red Army. The Soviets immediately drafted young and not so young men, both Ukrainians and Jews, into the Red Army. However, on the first days of the military training in the nearby town of Bar, the order came for all the Jews who had been liberated from camps and ghettos to go home; they would be drafted from their place of residence. Weber did not see any reason to go to his hometown of Bănila, where no vestiges of Jewish life remained, and instead went to Czernowitz. There the military commandant of the city gave him a choice: either to be drafted as a worker and sent to the coal mines of Donbass (eastern Ukraine) or to enlist in the Red Army. Weber chose the second option. As a result he was drafted the day after his meeting with the commandant.
Since Leib Weber had already had some military experience from his service in the Romanian army, his training was short. In May or June of 1944, he was sent to the front in the area of Stanislav (formerly Stanisławów, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). There Lev Davidovich Veber, as Leib was registered in the Red Army, volunteered to join a reconnaissance company. "Think well [about this], you are Jewish", his commander said to him, meaning that if Weber would be captured by the Germans, he would be shot on the spot. However, Weber remained firm in his decision.
During one of his first missions, together with his comrades, Weber captured three Germans who provided the Soviets with the information they wanted. Weber, who was fluent in German, served as the translator during their interrogations. He took part also in other intelligence operations. However, at the end of June, after only two weeks of combat service, Weber was seriously wounded while carrying out a mission in enemy territory. His comrades brought him to the medical department of his regiment. Long months in hospital followed and, in March 1945, Weber was categorized as being disabled and released from the Red Army.
Weber returned to Czernowitz, where he worked in a hospital. In March 1946 he registered for repatriation to Romania. When there, he established contacts with the Jewish clandestine organization Brikha, which was smuggling Jews to the Land of Israel. In July 1946, Weber departed from Yugoslavia by sea and, in the same month, arrived at his destination. There he had to spend a month in the British detention camp in Atlit, but was then released and reunited with his sisters and elder brother, who had lived in the country from before the war.
In Israel Leib Hebraized his named to Arie. His brother Eli, who had survived the Kopaigorod ghetto together with him, fell as a soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948, during the War of Independence.
[following his book of memoirs, Arie Weber, Zihronot miyemei hashoa vehagvura, 1941-1946
