The Holocaust is always tied up in my mind with two sets of people: those who survived the camps and made it to freedom in the West and those who perished. But a few weeks ago, I came across another group: Jews who lived through Nazism only to suffer decades of persecution under Communism.

Take Ruth and Toni Usherenko for example, two women I met at a synagogue in Brooklyn recently. Ruth and Toni were born in Berlin shortly after the First World War. Their Russian father was a former prisoner-of-war, who had stayed on in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles and married a German.

During the 1930′s, the Usherenkos gradually lost their liberty. On Kristallnacht, in 1938, men broke into their home and beat the girls’ father. A few years later, he was sent to a concentration camp where he died. The women were sent to a succession of work camps.

Towards the end of the Second World War, because of their Russian-sounding surname, the Usherenko women were passed to the Red Army as part of a prisoner exchange. The Soviets were instantly suspicious of their German-Jewish prisoners and promptly sent them to a labor camp in Siberia.

“In Russia they called us ‘Kike’ and ‘Fritz’,” Ruth told me. “They didn’t give us anything. Many people died of hunger. The dead were left in the forest for the wolves.”

The sisters spent ten years in Siberia before finally being freed in the mid 1950′s. They made their way to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, where they eventually found work as milliners. They spent the next 20 years in Dnepropetrovsk, unable to practice Judaism freely. In 1981 they immigrated to America, where for the first time they could mark festivals and live openly as Jews.

You can read my recent story about other Russian-speaking Holocaust survivors, in the Forward, here.

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