SURVIVOR
Continued from Page 22
Sherman said. “I took part in all the wars. I was a fi ghter.”
Sherman was born the youngest of four siblings in a small
town in Poland, now Ukraine, called Mlynov. His father
worked as a kosher butcher in the town, which was mostly
comprised of Jews, though it had a diverse population that
included Poles, Ukrainians and Czechs. In a 2014 interview
with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sher-
man described Mlynov as similar to Anatevka in Fiddler on
the Roof.

Th e Soviet Union took over Mlynov in 1939 when Sherman
was 8, resulting in an almost immediate shortage of foods and
goods. His father found ways to get things for people, which
eventually landed him in trouble with the Soviet government.

Th e family was forced to move to Dubno, Ukraine, where
his father worked taking care of a commandant’s horses.

Two years later, when Sherman was in Mlynov visiting his
grandmother, planes fl ew overhead and bombed a military
airport near the town in the middle of the night. Later that day,
planes bombed again. Some of the bombs fell in the town, and
a few people died.

“In the morning, we got up,” Sherman said to the Holocaust
museum. “Everybody knew it — a war.”
Just a few days later, Germans came into the town, and
there was a shootout between them and the Soviets. Soon aft er,
the Germans took over Mlynov.

One of the fi rst things the Germans did was kill the rabbi.

Slowly, they began to establish a judenrat.

24 MAY 10, 2018
Ezra Sherman in the Palmach
THE GOOD LIFE
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