My name is Sidonie née Müller, and I was born in 1921 in Stane?tie, near Czernovitz, where my father was a clerk of the court, which for a Jew was a respectable position. After having completed our primary school education, my parents sent us, my sister and myself, to attend the grammar school in Czernovitz.  This was a Romanian state school, yet most of the girls there were Jewish. After four years, at my parents’ behest, I entered a commercial college, in order to learn something practical. For me this was not practical enough, and so, almost against the wishes of my parents, I joined a goldsmiths’ business. I believe that this profession greatly alleviated my entire family’s survival in the awful years between 1940-1946.
During the first year of the Russian occupation I worked in a business that had been nationalized, and which was composed of a large number of smaller goldsmiths’ workshops, so that I was safe from the deportation to the Dombas (coal mines). That was where they sent women who had no children, never to be seen again. I was 19 years old, I married my fiancé, Berthold Gross, immediately after the invasion of the Russians, and we remained sweethearts until his death. He died in 1986.
While I was working in the business, I came close to following a political career as well; I was appointed as secretary of the M.O.P.R (the international workers’ party) simply because I was the only one in the firm who could read and write Cyrillic script. My mother had hastily taught me this.
Things became more chaotic day by day; arrests, interrogations that lasted all night, culminating in the arbitrary deportations of thousands of Jews to Siberia. We were spared, as the Russian officer who had occupied a part of our apartment, could not get possession of it, since he already had an apartment in Kiev, where he had a wife and child. (He told us this himself).
In 1941 war broke out; the Germans and the Romanians came and they brought with them death and the end of Jewish life in Bukovina. They murdered indiscriminately in the streets, in the houses, wherever they found Jews. It seemed as though their main concern in this war was the annihilation of the Jewish population. They were certain of vanquishing the Russians after the latter had taken flight in panic.
We were driven into the ghetto and from there into the camp in the Ukraine (Transnistria). We succeeded, almost in the last moment, in escaping from the cattle truck. We were in hiding, and by chance, we discovered that my former co-workers were looking for me. A Romanian wanted to set up a large jewelry business, and I was one of those needed for this. I was very unwilling to go there, not wanting to believe that such a miracle was possible; maybe it was a trap? The way to the place was in itself dangerous. Still, I went and I was received as a human being (not like a Jew), received papers, was considered “economically valuable”. My family and I just couldn’t grasp this. It was a miracle, I began to work. Shortly after this, my husband was sent to Romania for half a year for forced labor. We would have liked to believe that we were secure from deportations, yet this was not to be. The deportations to the camps between Dnjestr and Bug, where the German army was in control, continued. We often had to hide; precisely in those streets which one believed to be safe, people were rounded up and deported. Things became a little easier with news of German losses in Stalingrad. And one morning the Russians were there.  We were hoping for another miracle and this came in the form of an officer, who was looking for accommodation to billet other officers. He liked our apartment and promised to arrange our emigration. We were not sure whether we would arrive in Romania or turn up in Siberia, but at least there was hope. We made it in May 1946; we were in Bucharest. I immediately began working in my profession, and my husband found work as an accountant.
We remained in Bucharest for four years; we made every effort to reach the newly established State of Israel, but without success.
One day, quite unexpectedly, my uncle, Prof. Leo Stern arrived from Vienna. He came as the guest of the Romanian government; at the time he was a member of the four-power conference in Vienna. He managed to obtain passports for us, and we traveled to Vienna. We stayed for almost a year in Vienna, where my uncle spoiled us shamelessly; yet our constant dream was Israel. In the meantime I was in the last stages of pregnancy and wanted to give birth in Israel. We arrived in Haifa in 1950, and two months later, my son, Nathan, came into the world. The absorption difficulties we had were almost insuperable, but we pulled through in the end. My husband and I started working; I worked in various goldsmiths’ workshops for 15 years and then became a partner in a boutique for antique jewelry.
I decided to write “Manfred Stern alias Emilio Kleber”, the book about my uncle, after I found letters, pictures and books among the property left by my mother, which induced me to write the story of the Stern brothers. Its success exceeded all expectations. Historians had heard of the heroic soldier, but knew nothing of the origins, the childhood and youth of this Heder-boy, as he himself writes in one of his letters to his sister, my mother.
Apart from this I have published material in the information pamphlet of the Irgun Olei Merkas Europa, mainly literary reviews on the topics of “ Czernovitz and Bukovina” and the life of the Jews, and have also given several lectures on these subjects in the B’nai B’rith Lodge.
At the moment I am working on several short stories depicting the life of the Jews in Bukovina, as it was before the last war. I consider this important, for Israeli youth know little or nothing of this.

As an Israeli and as a grandmother I am proud of what we have built up in our country, and I have only one wish: “May G –d continue to protect us.”

(picture)  Sidi Gross, Winter 1999
 
 
    Translated from the German by Hannah R. Horowitz
          2002