THE JEWISH-ROMANIAN FAMILY THAT SPENT TWO YEARS HIDING FROM THE NAZIS IN A GOLD MINE

The Jewish-Romanian Family That Spent Two Years Hiding From the Nazis in a Gold Mine

Liku Rifca Carmi and her family spent over two years from 1943 to 1945 sheltering from the Nazis in northern Romania. Now nearly 88 and living in Jerusalem, she recalls the hardships and horrors – bloodsucking leeches, dankness and darkness – and the words that haunted her mother to her dying day

May 05th, 17PM May 05th, 17PM

As a child growing up in northern Romania, Liku Rifca Carmi (née Marcovici) wanted for nothing. The inquisitive, fiery 5-year-old lived with her parents and six siblings in a large house maintained by two housekeepers, and a tiny white dog who never left her side. Her father Shlomo made a comfortable living as a merchant and, despite lacking a formal education, supplied his family with the finest things.

So when they were told in April 1943, just before the Passover holiday, that all of the Jewish families in Sighet must report to the town's train station in 10 days' time to be taken to a marvelous place that had anything they could possibly want, Shlomo was suspicious. He reached out to Petru, a Christian friend he had known since childhood. "He was a coal miner, and he knew the forest and the mines and the animals' hiding spots," Carmi explains today. "And my father turned to him for help in hiding us, until this thing would end."

Carmi is now nearly 88 and living in Jerusalem. There are certain parts of her past that she remembers so clearly, and other parts where family members have filled in the gaps. "When it comes to history, there are other people who are writing and have written it better than me," she says. "My intention is to tell my story and to bring awareness to it, to my family, to what happened to us during World War II."

She talks to Haaretz from the waiting area of a Tel Aviv hospital – a short inpatient stay could not deter her from speaking.

Petru (not his real name, but Carmi, who did not get confirmation from his family before telling this story, would rather keep his identity private) knew of an abandoned gold mine in the forest. It had potable water running through it, "and as someone who works underground, he knew the value of that."

It sounded to me, as a little girl, like an adventure. Going with mom and dad to hide in a gold mine in the forest – it sounded like a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

Before the Jews were to depart to their unknown destination, Shlomo gathered the family and told them they would not be going – they would be hiding instead – and that they could not tell a soul. "It sounded to me, as a little girl, like an adventure. Going with mom and dad to hide in a gold mine in the forest – it sounded like a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale," she recalls.

"We understood [what was going on] when we were there, and we sat on the stones, and the ceiling was full of flecks of gold glittering like stars. But there were leeches and dampness and darkness. We needed to cover our bodies and faces so the leeches wouldn't fall on us, and if they did fall on us, so that they couldn't suck our blood. That was when we started to understand that we're in a very, very difficult place, and one that isn't humane."

They would enter through a tiny door, and Petru taught them that if they started to get a sweet taste in their mouths, it meant they were running low on oxygen. But despite the hardships, they were safe from the Nazis and police searching for hidden Jews.

In the mine, they would play chess with pieces carved out of wood by the oldest brother, Mendy, and their mother Lea would teach them to sing. Petru would also bring supplies and food, signaling his presence to the family with a whistle.

Then one day, about three weeks into hiding, someone came to the mine and whistled the family's tune – but it wasn't Petru.

'You're in grave danger'

Blanca, Carmi's 15-year-old sister, had a Jewish boyfriend – a 20-year-old who rode a motorbike and wore a leather jacket. Carmi prefers a fake name for him too: Jacob.

"My parents didn't like him, even though he wore a kippa," she recounts. He wasn't welcome in their Orthodox household and the age gap was seen as extreme, even for those days. But despite her parents' protests, Blanca had continued seeing Jacob.

Blanca told her boyfriend the family was going into hiding and Petru was protecting them, so Jacob paid Petru a visit. The young man convinced him that he knows the family and was entrusted with their secret, so Petru revealed their hiding place. Jacob arrived with wagons full of provisions: toys for the children, bread and wine, the pipe tobacco Carmi's father loved. "He brought us food – smoked meat, which was pork, of course," Carmi recalls. "Our parents didn't eat it, but we did," she smiles.

"He was like a little messiah. He spread out a tablecloth, sat us down and we had a picnic amid that hell," she recalls. "And at the end of this festive ceremony, he says, 'Mr. Shlomo, you're in grave danger, as are your children. They're looking for you.'"

Jacob was disguised as a laborer and spent his days working the fields. Carmi recalls him saying: "Look how I'm dressed – I'm in the field, working, eating. I'm not hiding among the fleas in a dank mine. If you give me the three oldest children, I'll take them to work with me. But I can't take the little ones; you'll need to take care of them. But you're in danger and you need to leave here immediately."

The family was safe in the mine, Carmi says. No one suspected their hiding place. But Jacob knew he couldn't ask for Blanca alone, so crafted the pretext of asking for her older brothers, Mendy and Fulli, to come as well.

Heeding his warnings, the family packed up their supplies and left their makeshift bunker – an experience Carmi remembers to this day. They crossed a small bridge over the river that ran near the mine, "and we got to a field of green grass and the tallest trees – you could climb them and reach the sky. … The moon was full, and cast a shadow under the trees. And we sat in that shadow and talked about how we would need to separate."

It was agreed that the three oldest would go with Jacob, but young Blanca was still unsure. "She asked my mother, 'Mom, what do you say? Should I go, or stay here with you and the little ones?' My mother knew that she wanted to tell her 'Don't go, he's just boasting, I don't believe him. He just wants to take you, and he's putting on this show.' But she was afraid to give her advice at a time like this so she told her: 'You do what your heart tells you.' And Blanca, who loved him, went with him."

Carmi says her mother regretted this to her dying day. "We never saw Blanca again."

In the hours that followed, as the parents and the young children – Shimshon, Tzila, Liku and her younger brother Bumi – assessed their next steps, Mendy, who was about 18 at the time, came back to them. He didn't want to leave his parents to tend to four kids by themselves. He said he knew of a shack from his time in the mountains that they could try to hide in, and the family hiked the granite peak in vain trying to find it. She remembers the time spent in silence clinging to Bumi, waiting for the older ones to help them scale the rock face.

Carmi: "My father said, 'Guys, we survived in order to grow and enlarge the Jewish people. We need to marry and have children and start new lives.'" He would couple up suitable candidates, and wed them in the house.

Carmi later learned that soon after they split from the family, Jacob, Fulli and Blanca were caught by the Nazis. "And Jacob, this big macho man who rescued them, leapt into the river and disappeared. The Nazis shot a few bullets into the river and thought they killed him." In the end, he survived the confrontation – and the war.

"As a young girl, after the war, I thought about asking him a hundred times: how could you leave them alone and jump into the river? You came as a rescuer, as a messiah, and then you left them alone with the Nazis and went on your way. … To this day I regret [that I didn't ask]. It was so important to me, and it's still important to me," she explains. "But my father would always say: 'In difficult and complicated times you can't judge someone, because we don't know what's right and what's wrong.' But Fulli and Blanca were left with the Nazis."

At the local police station, a sympathetic officer who knew the family offered the siblings a way out: one could escape, but one would have to stay. Blanca, who wasn't familiar with the forests and couldn't find her way back to the family, chose to stay, but Fulli refused to leave his sister by herself. The two were brought to a train station in Budapest and sent to Auschwitz.

Terrible abuse

With dawn approaching and nowhere to hide, the family decided to return to the mine. Still aided by Petru, they sought refuge in other hiding spots when they sensed danger, including homes of Petru's friends. They stayed in a barn loft above a herd of sheep, and were almost caught by Nazis searching for Jews, who fortuitously decided not to climb the barn's ladder. Petru also took them to his own home – a major risk for him and his own family.

Petru didn't only supply them with hiding places and sustenance, but information as well: he kept them abreast of the war as it was unfolding in Europe. He had also received information that Jacob, Fulli and Blanca had been caught, but shared this information with Shlomo and Mendy alone, who kept it from the sensitive Lea. To keep up appearances and bolster her spirits, Petru forged correspondences from her son and daughter, updating Lea on the charmed lives of Fulli and Blanca in the fields, and provided excuses on their behalf when she requested that he bring the two children to visit them.

One day – given by Carmi as May 5, 1945 – Petru came to the mine to tell the family he had come to take them home. The war was over. The Nazis had retreated.

"It was very hard for us. It was daylight and we'd been underground with no air for about two years. We were blinded," she recollects. "When you go out into the sun, it's so sharp." Carmi believes she's had eye problems due to her time in the mine.

They were also in a sorry state. "We were full of wounds because the conditions weren't sanitary. For example, I had a huge wound on my arm, and I remember that I would look at it and see little white bugs, like worms, playing in it." The family was infested with lice and plagued by the leeches that would fall from the ceiling. But it was over. They had survived.

On their way home, they saw that Sighet had been reduced to rubble but that their house stood intact: the SS, who were impressed by its grandeur, had used it as a local base. One of their housekeepers, Flora, had remained there, cooking and cleaning for the soldiers, and undergoing terrible abuse by night.

"What we hear about [the hostages] in Gaza, I hope – I don't know – that Flora didn't experience the hell that they're going through." The other housekeeper, Irina, had made the mistake of telling the occupying Germans that she loved and missed her Jewish employers, and was sent to Auschwitz as well.

"When it was time to go to sleep, we weren't used to sleeping on beds – we were like animals," Carmi recounts. "I had a normal bed, but I remember that it suddenly seemed enormous and that I would get lost in it. I would sleep on the floor, next to the bed."

Back home, the family came across local Christians. "They would say, 'Mrs. Marcovici, we saw Blanca, how she was abandoned and how she cried, how the police took her.' That was how we learned that Blanca and Fulli were caught."

When it was time to go to sleep, we weren't used to sleeping on beds – we were like animals. I had a normal bed, but I remember that it suddenly seemed enormous and that I would get lost in it. I would sleep on the floor, next to the bed.

Shlomo had met a young woman in town who had been Blanca's bunkmate in Auschwitz. A week before the Americans and Russians came, Carmi says, the Nazis knew the tide was turning against them. They took the remaining Jews on the death marches, including Blanca. She had died of exhaustion on May 5, the day the family left the mine, at age 16. Carmi's mother never forgave herself for allowing Blanca to leave them.

Fulli did eventually return. He had survived the camp by the skin of his teeth, working in Adolf Eichmann's kitchen, collecting the bodies of the dead and evading the selection process. He knew where his sister was and what she was doing, but there was no way to see or speak to her. When the camp was liberated, he was sent to a displaced persons camp in Belgium, where he met Ruth, who he would go on to marry, and he moved to Austria with her.

The Marcovicis' large house would become a meeting place and shelter for Jews who survived the war. Most of them were young people – the older ones had largely been murdered – and Shlomo saw an opportunity to play matchmaker.

"My father said, 'Guys, we survived in order to grow and enlarge the Jewish people. We need to marry and have children and start new lives." He would couple up suitable candidates, and wed them there in the house.

Homecoming

In 1950, the family decided that, in Carmi's words, "they would go home." The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was paying to bring Jews from Romania to the fledgling Israel, and her father jumped at the opportunity. They disembarked at the port of Haifa and were loaded onto a truck to take them to their next station.

"When we got off, my father knelt down, with his long beard, and kissed the ground, and started talking about how God helped us get to the Holy Land and so on and so forth, and my mother cried – women, as usual," Carmi says. They lived in tents, sleeping on hard beds provided to new immigrants by the Jewish Agency.

Despite the hardship, Carmi's recollections are positive. She speaks enthusiastically and warmly about the hot cocoa and mandarins of their food rations: "Whatever they gave us to eat, we were happy."

From there, the family shifted from one place to the next – including a stint in an ulpan [study center] where Shlomo almost accidentally got his daughter married off to a young Persian boy by saying "yes" to questions he didn't understand – until eventually settling in Netanya, just north of Tel Aviv.

And what of little Liku? She describes herself as a curious, defiant student with a big imagination – a girl who insisted on going to religious school with her brothers, but was then expelled for gluing the rabbi's beard to the table when he fell asleep.

Her studies continued, though, and after being unable to get into the Hebrew University's law program, she chose neuroscience instead. Which brought her to Hadassah Hospital. She eventually became the manager of the electroencephalography (that is, brain scan) institute there.

She went on to meet her husband Adi, who passed away 16 years ago. "As I see it – and I'm not shy, as you can obviously see – he was the most charming man in the world. He was my first boyfriend, my love, the father of my children, and also the man I could argue with endlessly." They have two sons. One has two stepchildren from a wife's previous marriage, and the other adopted a baby from Romania, who is now 24 and particularly close to his grandmother.

Much of her family eventually scattered, finding themselves comfortable lives in North America and Europe. When asked if she is happy that she stayed in Israel, Carmi does not mince her words.

"Honestly? No," she says. "I see my family [abroad] being born to work and live. Here in Israel, we are born to die and fight. All the time, even during peacetime, there are terror attacks – there's no peace, and there never will be. Recently, with what's been happening, we suddenly opened our eyes and saw that nothing works. It's all hot air. Is there one ministry that you can call a ministry?"

She says that in the north, there seems to be no plan for those who have been evacuated from the reach of Hezbollah's missiles. "It hurts me. I'm very upset about it, but I could never live anywhere else: the Land of Israel is the Land of Israel. I am very, very, very, very thankful that my father and mother brought us to Israel. But the disappointment in the management – we're all up in the air, we have no idea what'll happen tomorrow. It's a terrible thing."

2024-05-05T14:21:32Z dg43tfdfdgfd