Two months ago, I learned the truth about my family history.

Ever since I was a child, I have been told about my paternal grandfather, Samuel Kitrosser. Born in 1912 in Soroki, a small town in Bessarabia,1 Sam immigrated to the United States in 1936. He settled in Massachusetts where he and his wife Helen had three children.2 Although Sam passed away when I was only one, he has remained present in my life through stories. At family functions, I heard about how Sam could speak five languages. At home, his picture—taped to the cabinet above the yellow pages—presided over our kitchen. Yet it was as though Sam’s history had begun in the United States. Nothing was ever said about Sam’s life in Soroki, or about what happened to my great grandparents, who stayed behind. Over and over I heard that Sam had left Europe for a better life and that when he had arrived in the United States he stopped practicing his Jewish faith.3 Prompted by curiosity and a Rhetoric assignment, I began searching for the life that Sam had left behind.

I started with a simple question: Why did Sam leave Soroki? To answer that question, I first looked to my father. If anyone were going to know about Sam, it would surely be his children. I called him late one night and explained that I was interested in Sam’s story. He paused for a moment after I asked about Sam. Then, in a hushed voice, he told me that Sam would not want me to focus on his past, but would want me to look towards the future. While the sentiment was all very heartwarming, it only left me more curious. My father reluctantly went on to say that Pop had left Soroki in 1932, a week before a flood destroyed my great-grandfather’s lumber business and left them broke. It was luck and good timing that allowed Sam to escape an increasingly anti-Semitic homeland. I learned that Sam’s parents were well off and respected within their community. I assumed they had passed away before World War II; however, to my shock, my father told me otherwise.4 He stated, almost matter-of-factly, that they were killed in the Holocaust, as if this was information I already knew. He informed me that my great grandfather was shot in the town square alongside other male Jews in Soroki and everyone else was taken to a concentration camp, including my great-grandmother.

Taken aback, I asked my father to repeat this shocking news. This was the first time I had heard this information about my family. How was it possible that I had never heard this history before? Had they kept me in the dark intentionally? I felt as through I had uncovered a dark family secret. I have always identified with my father’s side of the family, more than my mother’s, as it has a deep and rich history which has always enthralled me, even before I learned this history about my great-grandparents.5 I was fascinated by the stories of how my grandfather worked for Polaroid and my great uncle’s photography was on display in a French museum.6 I had come to identify with this history, but I felt the need to fit this new piece of information into my identity. This caused me to shift my focus away from Sam and towards my great-grandparents. In my search for answers about my great-grandparents’ death, my father suggested some family history sites to explore.

Thanks to the diligence of my uncle and some distant cousins, there are two online archives dedicated to Kitrosser genealogy. In 2005, my uncle compiled transcripts, documents and pictures about Sam’s life and put them into a website, aptly named Kitrosser.org. Some distant cousins collaborated and compiled yet another website, with one of the links containing a letter from the Red Army to Sam, detailing what happened to his parents. 7 But before I could understand these details, I needed to get some basic information from my cousin’s website.

According to the website’s genealogy, Sam’s parents, my great-grandparents, were Huna and Bluma Kitrosser. They were from Soroki which, at the time, was located in Romania.8 Huna had been killed along with other Kitrossers and Jewish townspeople in the Soroki townsquare on July 17th, 1941. Bluma had been taken to Lager Verguzhan, a work camp where she passed away under presumably horrible conditions. There is a memorial to the victims of the July 17th massacre in Soroki which lists the names of those who lost their lives. Huna is number six on the list.9 Seeing his name graven in stone on that monument made my research real. What had only been a story now had evidence that showed truth. I felt comforted in knowing that someone had cared enough to memorialize this tragedy, validating the victims and people like me who are searching for answers. I let the shock of seeing this memorial settle with me before I continued with my research.

I consulted the transcripts that my uncle had compiled within Kitrosser.org. I hoped to hear about daily life in Soroki from Sam himself, even some information about his parents. I thought he might mention their passing. One of the documents was a word-for-word transcript from Sam. When Sam was nearly 90, my aunt interviewed him in hopes of having this information for future generations. Sam was asked about everything ranging from life in Soroki to how he met his wife to his love of photography. That information now lies in word documents in a small corner of the internet. Thus, I was able to learn about life in Soroki. Sam had a strong memory as he was able to remember the names of people he knew in his 20’s.10 Perhaps the most noteworthy portion of the transcripts are about the Romanian army and World War I.

Although Sam left Soroki in 1932, his recollection of the presence of war in his life offers interesting insight into what life was like in his small town. Sam recalled that Soroki “had a significant number of Russian government employees (about 40% of the population), another 40% were the professional Jewish population, and the remaining 20% were family groups of Germans, Polish, Czech, and Moldavians.”11 Everyone was clearly close knit as he could even recall the full names of his school teachers and Soroki’s town doctors.12 Sam described the social life in the 20’s by stating, “Not having close by rail connection, and with rather poor road system, Soroki became cut off from commercial activities. The emphasis of the town activities now shifted to the secondary education schools and created a higher degree of friendliness between the original population.”13 However, Sam’s reality was a different picture than he creates. Although he described the town as being quite isolated, he detailed a constant military presence in his hometown:

The appearance of the Romanian Army indicated the end of WWI and brought many unpleasant encounters; and, at the same time, perhaps a hope for a more normal environment. Our house was occupied by the Romanian Army and was used as one of their headquarters. We have been able to maintain reasonable communications with these new people, and gradually, the house was released for our personal use.14

This mention of the Romanian Army took me aback. Having strangers set up camp in your home is no small detail to neglect when describing your life, yet Sam chose not to elaborate on this portion. This theme of neglecting to elaborate was consistent throughout this transcript, but whether this was due to his feeling that these occurrences were normal or that they just were not noteworthy enough to elaborate on, eludes me. Sam describes the start of World War I as characterized by a personal event for him, specifically, the deportation of his nanny: “As a German citizen from the city Halle, she was not permitted to reside in [Soroki] any longer, and she was deported under police escort.”15 A hostile atmosphere was always present before and after Sam’s departure. This clearly depicts life in Soroki and what it was like going into World War II. While Sam’s accounts offer insight into daily life in Bessarabia throughout the 30’s and 20’s, I was still left questioning what exactly happened to Huna and Bluma. My family’s archives offered little specifics into who killed my great-grandparents. Who was responsible for their passing?

I began looking to sources outside my family. I searched for resources that would lead me to a timeline of events. The problem was, the event I was looking for didn’t seem to exist. I put everything into the Boston University Library search bar; ‘Soroki’ yielded 149 results, but none to the Soroki massacre of 1941; ‘Bessarabian Massacre’ yielded 107 results with only minimal relations to Soroki.16 Needless to say, I was disappointed. ‘Holocaust’ retrieves thousands of titles, whereas ‘Soroki Massacre’ retrieves none. In a desperate attempt, I found a search that yielded the results I was looking for: ‘Moldovan Holocaust’. An article appeared titled, “From Silence to Justification?: Moldovan Historians on the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Transnistrian Jews.” Vladimir Solonari, a history professor at the University of Central Florida and a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, notes in this 2002 journal article that many omit details about the Holocaust. Solonari offers insight into why it was so hard to come across information that related to the Holocaust in Soroki. “The Moldovan archives were opened following the downfall of Communism” writes Solonari, but the topic of Moldovan and Romanian involvement in the Holocaust and World War II was brought to the forefront of discourse in the 1990’s with the downfall of the Soviet Union and its censorship.17 Communist historians said that “the Great Patriotic War was a war of the whole Soviet people… against fascist (Nazi) barbarism.”18 The Soviet discourse made no mention of the Jews and often noted “only Communists….among those who were to be liquidated immediately” as they were “waging war [on the] soviet people as a whole”.19 They did not mention that it was mainly Jews who were targeted but instead said that nationalities were targeted, dissolving the narrative that Jews were even included in this genocide. When Jews were mentioned, they “were always last in the list of nationalities said to have been targeted and to have suffered under occupation.” 20 I was shocked to realize that this topic, as my library search had suggested, was relatively new. Although Solonari provided clarity as to why it was difficult to find sources, I kept looking. I realized I could not go into specifics like with other Holocaust events like Auschwitz, or with people like Anne Frank; I had to go broad. I decided to base my research not solely on Soroki, but on Romania and Bessarabia.

To make sure I was not overlooking key publications, I approached Boston University Modern European History Professor Jonathan Zatlin, whose concentrations include Jewish history. My hour long talk with Professor Zatlin offered me insight into what books may aid my research. One of the books he mentioned was a history book by Peter Longerich, a prominent Holocaust historian. In Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Longerich offers in depth analysis into World War II, but focuses specifically on the Holocaust to make use of “the opening of the Eastern European archives at the beginning of the 1990s.”21 He notes that although “This book first appeared in Germany in 1998…. For this [2010] English edition, the whole of the original text was revised to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies.”22 Longerich backs up Solonari’s claim that a lot of this Holocaust research is new, even within the last 10 years. His book includes five parts, of which I focused on Part III, “Mass Executions of Jew in the Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941.” In this section, Longerich explains that the massacre of Jews in Romania was not only derived from German invasion and occupation, but that it was backed by non-Jewish Romanian Nationals. Prior to 1941, Germany planned to launch a war against the Soviet Union.23 This offensive had four main goals for war; one was to establish a settlement in Eastern Europe which “was also intended to form the basis for further biological expansion of the ‘Aryan race’ and in that manner to provide the ‘human resources’ for future wars of conquest.” 24 The second reason was that an eastern offensive would block the Soviets from getting critical supplies that came from agriculture in places like Bessarabia.25 The third reason was pure anti-Semitism disguised as military strategy: “it was precisely [the Nazis’] ambivalent assessment of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—belligerent on the outside, feeble on the inside—that offered a form of legitimation for a war in the East that bordered on self-delusion.”26 The fourth was a desperate desire for war.27 In the early months of 1941, German troops launched an occupation and seizure of resources in Eastern zones, forcing the starvation of the land’s occupants.28 Longerich notes that it was a combination of both the German army and Einsatzgruppen, 29 along with the cooperation of the Non-Jewish population in these areas, that led to the successfulness of these mass murders.30 Longerich points out that it was not only the Germans who played a role in this but Romanians too: “Romania was an ally that had pursued a policy of ‘solving’ the Jewish question since the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union using a mixture of pogroms, massacres, and violent expulsions.”31 Following orders from their government, Romanian troops also worked to expel the Jews.32

Despite the history that Longerich had to offer, I was overwhelmed by all the information in his book. At nearly 600 pages, it was filled with general information about the War and with lots of numbers and statistics, I was very disheartened at the lack of connection to what people actually experienced. While I put the book down with more knowledge than before, I needed to narrow my perspective on the war and so turned to more specific sources. I found ” ‘He Spoke Yiddish like a Jew’: Neighbors’ Contribution to the Mass Killing of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, July 1941.” The title alone excited me. I was finally finding sources that had the right location and the right time: July 1941. The article’s author Simon Geissbühler, a “political scientist and historian,” focuses on how neighbors contributed to the violence against the Jews.33 “The idea that Germans were the only perpetrators of the Holocaust—a notion that dominated public perception and even research for many years—has long since been proven false,” writes Geissbühler.34 He continues, “Most massacres were carried out by Romanian soldiers…German troops and members of Einsatzgruppe D took part in some. Elsewhere, the local Romanian and Ukrainian population either participated in the murders or initiated [killings] on their own.” 35 Like Longerich, Geissbühler made note that only through the participation of civilians could the Holocaust have been as extreme as it was. Tragically, in the run-up to the war, few people could imagine that their next door neighbor would turn on them. Sam said that Soroki was a small town, which made the idea that your neighbor could kill you difficult to imagine to many residents. I now had a third group of people who would have been the perpetrators of my Huna and Bluma’s demise: friends and neighbors. These civilians “seem to have felt it ideologically and politically ” ‘right’ to kill.”36 Although they sometimes acted on their own, writes Geissbühler, “when Romanian troops marched into small towns… and began randomly and unsystematically to shoot Jews in their homes or in the streets, local perpetrators joined in…” 37 It is no leap to conclude that Soroki may have experienced a similar fate among its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Geissbühler insists that civilians let these massacres happen. No one stood up to the Romanians or Germans as “[a]lmost nobody opposed them”.38 Huna and Bluma most likely did not expect their neighbors to forsake them, yet there is evidence of neighbors contributing to these heinous acts.

Geissbühler offered the most comprehensive overview of the information I was looking for, detailing events and offering primary evidence to support his account of what happened. He even suggests that, in Soroki, neighbors were partially to blame: “In [Soroki], neighbors not only occupied Raisa Zalman’s parental home and stole all of the furniture, but even took the family portraits.”39 There was a complete lack of empathy when it came to the murders of small town’s population, taking items that had little monetary but mostly sentimental value. Anti-Semitic rhetoric, pushed on the Romanian population for years, justified these acts of pillaging and killing.40 What’s more, Geissbühler suggests that in northern Bessarabia, where Soroki is located, “primarily Romanian—not German—units carried out the first wave of attacks on Jewish civilians.” 41 This leaves room for the possibility of who actually committed some of these atrocities. I decided to focus on Romania’s involvement as “ethnic Romanians… played a larger role in Bessarabia.42

While I was looking through my sources, I scoured them for mentions of July 17th, 1941, but none yielded any results. I was getting closer to an answer; I could feel it. I needed to narrow down my research, maybe not to the place but to the date. What was happening around that time?

Longerich offered insight into the summer of 1941 but he failed to mention anything about July 17th. There were no mentions of July 17th in any of my sources until I read “Romania: Annihilation Aborted,” by Jean Ancel, a Romanian-born scholar of the Holocaust. Written for the non-specialist as an introduction to the topic, this was perhaps the most straightforward piece with little analysis but more facts and dates. The frankness this provided was refreshing and I finally felt like I was getting somewhere. Ancel chose to include some primary sources to aid in his writing, but unlike some of my other sources it was not an overwhelming amount of material and provided testimonials to prove what happened, like orders given from generals. In the list of fact and dates within his writing I was able to hit my own personal jackpot: “The seventeenth of July marked the beginning of the liquidation and deportation of Kishinev’s fifty Thousand Jews, On that day alone several thousand Jews — perhaps as many as ten thousand —were killed.”43 After all my research, I was shocked that I was able to find the date I was looking for. I felt a sense of relief and happiness like I had pieced together a puzzle.

To make sure I had not skipped over anything in my research, I went for one last internet search. That’s when I found some finality and clarity, or so I thought, in German-based website, Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe, that offers the public information portals about Jewish sites throughout Europe44. One of the memorials referenced is the same as the one on my cousin’s website. A picture of the stone memorial, “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism.” is displayed on both webpages, both with my great-grandfathers name.45 Based upon my previous research, I was able to confirm some of the information, for example, I discovered that “In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia – which had since 1918 been part of Romania – including Soroki. Following the joint invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, German and Romanian troops occupied the town in July.”46 This lined up perfectly with Ancel’s, Solonari’s, and Geissbühler’s assessment. However, the website states that “the Romanian authorities later deported almost all of the Jewish residents of [Soroki] to Transnistria.”47 My cousin’s website had stated that Bluma was sent to a work camp which partially contradicts this information. It could be possible that this website is generalizing the information, based upon the fact that work camps and concentration camps like the ones in Transnistria were very similar.48 Another conflict in my information was that the memorial that Huna’s name is on “honours the 41 Jews murdered on Bekirovskiy bridge,” not in the town square.49 It is explained that “About 200 Jews from [Soroki] were shot by Romanian constabulary in July 1941,” from which I assume that the 41 Jews are included in that number.50 This account suggests that Romanian Forces were to blame, a marked difference from my cousin’s website which states that “Huna and Bluma were caught during the first days of Nazi occupation.”51 Is the term “Nazi” used loosely here? My relatives may have jumped to the conclusion that any killings were carried out by Germans, but research points to actions by locals, instigated by the Romanian Army. The Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe also states that while German troops advanced into the USSR, Romanian troops stayed behind and occupied Soroki.52 Yet, this again contradicts Geissbühler’s work, where he mentions that neighbors had occupied and raided a Jewish resident’s house in Soroki.53 Were my sources wrong or was this website wrong, or was it possible that both neighbors and Romanians took part in this massacre?

I felt confused and overwhelmed. Does one truth exist? While my sources did not contradict one another outright, many seemed to offer different ways of discussing the same event; They were all slightly different versions of the truth. While no one can deny what happened in Romania and to the Jewish population, the details concerning it are still fuzzy. During World War II, there were so many things happening at once, that it can be hard to keep track of everything. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of my research, I felt as though I could compose a basic timeline of what led to my great-grandparents demise:

Prior to the 40’s, anti-Semitic propaganda had been spread throughout Eastern Europe and into Romania and its provinces. In 1940, Romania was forced to cede “Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR” as a result of “a secret understanding with Nazi Germany [and the USSR].”54 In looking for someone to blame, Romania turned to the Jews as “[they] were made a scapegoats for that disaster, justifying their robbery, expulsion, or murder in 1941.” 55 At the same time, Hitler launched an offensive with four goals, the main being to starve out the Soviets by seizing agricultural land in Romania.56 Germany took back their secret understanding with the USSR and in early July of 1941, German and Romanian troops launched Operation München, a combative operation to get Bessarabia and Bukovina back.57 This operation resulted in the combination of not only German and Romanian forces, but civilians, killing the Jewish population.58 The Soviet Union gave back the two provinces to Romania, but that did not stop the killing as troops sought to kill anyone they felt was in collusion with the Russians including the Jews. 59 Troops made their way though these provinces killing an estimated 100,000 Jews from July – August of 1941.60 Thousands more were sent to camps. By the end of the war, it is estimated that “The Romanian Authorities were responsible for the disappearance of at least 400,000 Jews.” 61 While this timeline seems confusing, this is what proves to be the most concrete information in my research.62

Discovering this history has been exhilarating but exhausting.63 Over the past two months I have gone through a grieving process that I have never experienced before, grieving for people who barely knew me or never met me. First for Sam, my grandfather, who I never knew and probably never will, no matter how hard I try. Secondly, for Bluma and Huna, my great-grandparents, who will never know how much their tragedy has influenced my life. I come out of this paper as I suspected I would; I have opened more doors than I have closed in answering why and how my great-grandparents died. Bluma and Huna were probably close to starvation before Huna was slaughtered by the Romanian Army and Bluma was sent to Lager Verghazen or Transnistria. I recognize that I cannot turn back time to stop those events from happening, but I also recognize that analyzing research cannot give anyone a full picture of what happened. We were not there so we will never know. What we need are first hand accounts of these events published on a larger scale than just academically.

Research into the involvement of Romania in World War II has made me realize that there is still much left to be done; research on this subject is not comprehensive and the recent publication of documents and archives that link Romania to the war leave much to be uncovered. Romania is often left out of Holocaust discourse and that should no longer be the case. Scholars like Solonari and Geissbuhler are helping to piece together the tragedies that took place in Romania and bring them to the forefront of the academic world. They serve as models as to what a complete Holocaust history may look like. If we focus entirely on Western Europe, as scholars generally do, we forget people like Huna and Bluma. The sources I found for this paper are filled with numbers, war plans, and small anecdotes, but they lack a human connection. The Holocaust of Jews in Bessarabia should not be boiled down to maps and statistics, for this dehumanizes the event. The victims were people like my great-grandparents; they were mothers, daughters, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, sons, fathers, and friends. They were people. We need more research, time, and effort put into making this portion of the Holocaust see the light of day. Holocaust history is not done being discovered and I am not done discovering it.

Illustrations

Notes

1. Soroki is often referred to as Soroca in my sources, so I have made the necessary edits in them for clarity. Bessarabia is currently known as Moldova, a country that borders Ukraine. In the 1940’s Bessarabia was a province in Romania.

2. “Kitrosser.” 2005, Accessed April 11, 2018, Kitrosser.org/documents.

3. According to my father, Sam stopped practicing because he felt as if God had betrayed him. He was shocked at what happened to his parents and gradually stopped practicing his faith, sending only 2 of his children to a Jewish day school before deciding not to send the third, my father. No one in my family currently practices Judaism.

4. Anti-Semitism can be defined as the hatred of people from the Jewish faith and was one of the key foundations of Nazism.

5. In terms of genetics, I have no blood relation to my mother, but I do on my father’s side. This caused me to feel more connected to his side of the family from a young age. I found comfort in being able to identify relations through direct lineage unlike what I could do through my mother’s side.

6. This is information I have gotten from my family over the years.

7. The Red Army was the army of the Soviets during the early 1900’s. This letter is included in the Appendix. (From Britannica)

8. Jean Ancel, “Romania: Annihilation Aborted,” In How Was It Possible?: A Holocaust Reader, ed, Peter Hayes, 545-69. (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 547. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bu.edu/stable/j.ctt1d9nhk3.50.

9. A photograph of the memorial is included in the appendix.

10. Kitrosser, “Kitrosser,” 2.

11. Ibid., 2.

12. Ibid.,17.

13. Ibid., 2.

14.Ibid., 27.

15. Ibid., 6.

16. “BU Libraries,”Boston University Libraries, Accessed May 05, 2018, https://www.bu.edu/library/.

17. Vladimir Solonari, “From Silence to Justification?: Moldovan Historians on the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Transnistrian Jews,” Nationalities Papers 30, no. 3 (2002). Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 10, 2018), 440, doi:10.1080/0090599022000011705

18. Ibid., 437.

19. Ibid., 437.

20. Ibid., 440.

21. Peter Longerich, Holocaust The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1.

22. Ibid., 9.

23. Ibid., 179.

24. Ibid., 179-180.

25. Ibid., 180.

26. Ibid., 180.

27. Ibid., 180.

28. Ibid., 182.

29. Einsatzgruppen were German police death squads. (Taken from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website)

30. Longerich, Holocaust,196.

31. Ibid., 201.

32. Ibid., 202.

33. Simon Geissbühler, “”He Spoke Yiddish like a Jew”: Neighbors’ Contribution to the Mass

Killing of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, July 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28, no. 3 (2014), 442.

34. Ibid., 441.

35. Ibid., 430.

36. Ibid., 431.

37. Ibid., 431.

38. Ibid., 442.

39. Ibid., 439.

40. Ibid., 439.

41. Ibid., 430.

42. Ibid., 442.

43. Ancel, “Romania”, 549.

44. This title is translated from German. The untranslated title reads: Gedenkstättenportal Zu Orten Der Erinnerung in Europa.

45. “Kitroser / Kitrosser,” Accessed May 05, 2018, http://grupoandes.net/kitroser/hunaEnglish.htm.

46. Uwe Seemann, “Gedenkstättenportal Zu Orten Der Erinnerung in Europa,” Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance, Accessed May, 05, 2018, https://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/1091/Memorial-to-the-Victims-of-Fascism-in-Soroca#.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. “Kitroser/Kitrosser,”

52. Seemann, “Gedenkstättenportal Zu Orten Der Erinnerung in Europa”

53. Geissbühler, “‘He Spoke Yiddish like a Jew,'”439.

54. Vladimir Solonari,. “Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 4 (2007), 755

55. Geissbühler, “‘He Spoke Yiddish like a Jew,'”439.

56. Longerich, “Holocaust,”180.

57. Geissbühler, “‘He Spoke Yiddish like a Jew,'”430.

58. Ibid., 430.

59. Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 755.

60. Ancel, “Romania,” 550.

61. Ibid., 565.

62. As a scholar, I recognize that I may have misinterpreted some of this information, but I believe it to be an accurate assessment of events.

63. My father recently told me that Sam tried to get his parents out of Soroki, but that they did not want to leave their house. Sam’s two older brothers left Soroki years prior to Sam’s departure.

Bibliography