Miracles Kept Simon Alive and now Hesed is Delivering Him Hope

As the Nazi onslaught of Kiev approached, one of Simon’s neighbors suggested evacuating him and his sister with her own family, but it was too late. As their train was leaving the station, it was bombed; only those who jumped out of the burning cars survived. Eleven-year-old Simon and his sister narrowly escaped the flames.

The young boy wandered in the forest for roughly one month until he got back to Kiev, already rife with Nazis. When he asked for his family, the neighbors pointed to a crowd of Jews being ushered along the street by gun-bearing officers, policemen and dogs. In that moment, Simon rushed to hide behind the column of a building but a policeman spotted him and pushed him into the convoy. "People were being beaten and abused. Everyone was moving forward to find their death in Baby Yar," explains Simon, who says he will never forget the scene — mothers with babies, stretching their hands to the sky, wailing in Yiddish "Gotteinu, wo bist du…?" (God where are you?")

The Nazis began to shoot; people were falling into the huge ravine by dozens, one on top of the other, screaming and praying. Simon felt an acute pain, fell and lost consciousness. He awoke in the middle of the night under the weight of dead bodies. Terrified and still hearing gun shots, Simon scrambled out from under the carnage and crawled to the nearby cemetery, where he hid in a tomb until he was able to get back to Kiev. There, Simon’s neighbors washed him, gave him clothes and sent him on his way; a fellow neighbor had become a policeman and they feared for their lives.

After weeks of further wandering and hiding, Simon joined an evacuation train heading to Russia. He lived out the rest of the War on the edge between life and death, surviving by what he refers to as "miracles."

Today Simon lives with his wife, Mina, in Berdyansk, a small town in the Zaporozhye periphery. "Hard memories of the war are stones in my heart that I am carrying throughout my life," says the elderly man.

Clients of the local JDC-sponsored Hesed social welfare center, Simon and Mina are regularly visited by young volunteers who come to celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays with them. "If not for Hesed I don’t know how we would manage," Simon adds. Among other services, the couple receives home care three times a week, hot meals-on-wheels, medicines, medical consultations and winter relief. "It is giving us more than just food, it is giving us hope."