Reserve your Visit
Online Store
Support Us
Shirt that Petachia Blickstein received in Iasi after liberation
Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection
Courtesy of Petachia Blickstein, Tal Aviv, Israel
On the evening of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) 1941, the Blickstein family from Czernowitz, Romania, was forced to enter the ghetto and two weeks later, Petachia, his mother and two siblings were deported to Mogilev in the Transnistria region. 18- year-old Petachia, the youngest son, was sent to various labor camps in Transnistria. With time, Petachia's clothes wore out and he had to wear cement sacks instead. In his testimony, he describes the situation at the Trichati camp on the banks of the River Bug, where he was a forced laborer in the Krupp factory:
"It is impossible to describe the suffering there… Every act was accompanied by blows… [I was] thin and my body was covered in sores as the result of malnutrition. I was naked except for the cement sack that was my shirt…"
In August 1944, Petachia Blickstein was transferred from Transnistria to Iasi, where he received real clothes for the first time.
"We travelled and travelled until we reached Iasi… on the border… they gave us shirts. Then I threw my cement sack shirt away… [In the camp] we had made [shirts] from sacks of cement and they were two or even three layers thick, and we made holes for the arms and they kept us warm… Then they gave me this shirt …. this was my first shirt after the cement sacks and I have kept it all these years. I kept it folded neatly in the cupboard."
Iasi was liberated by the Red Army in August 1944.
Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection
Courtesy of Petachia Blickstein, Tal Aviv, Israel