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
Photo provided
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



About two months aft er the Germans invaded, Sherman went
back to Dubno, where his siblings and father were. Th ey lived
near a cemetery, where he witnessed mass executions of Jews. He
was 11 years old, and it was the fi rst time he saw someone killed.

Aft er the second execution, where 300 were killed, he returned
to Mlynov.

In April 1942, the Germans established a ghetto in the town.

Sherman slept there at night, but during the day, he crawled out
under the fence and helped gentile farmers in exchange for food.

One day, the Germans began rounding up the Jews near the
synagogue and taking people into a house across the street to
search them for their belongings, before they directed them onto
a truck and, from there, to a killing fi eld. Everyone knew what
was about to happen — they had dug the graves themselves just
a few weeks before.

Sherman went to hide in a shack in the ghetto. When
Ukrainian police began to search the ghetto, he fl ed.

“When I ran away from the killing area, I was 12 years old,”
Sherman said. “Th e next night aft er that, I already didn’t think
like a 12-year-old boy, and I start to think like 30 years.”
Sherman eventually went into the woods and spent several
months surviving with the help of mostly Czech farmers. He
lived that way for more than a year, until 1944, when Soviets
liberated the area.

Sherman no longer had to hide. He befriended the colonel
of the Soviet troops staying in the area and, one day, the col-
onel asked Sherman to join them and become the son of the
brigade. Th ey made a uniform for him, and Sherman made
the troops vodka. He went with the brigade as they liberated
Ukraine and Poland, from Mlynov, to Lviv, Krakow, and fi nal-
ly to Berlin. He saw Auschwitz just a few days aft er it had been
liberated and was in Berlin for the battle that ended World War
II’s European theater.

At 14 years old, Sherman had already seen things most people
never do during an entire lifetime. But his story was still not over.

Aft er the war, Sherman reconnected with his oldest brother,
who had survived by fl eeing to Russia. Th e two moved illegally
to the Mandate of Palestine in 1946.

Sherman ended up on a kibbutz, which also served as a
training ground for the Palmach. When the Israel War for Inde-
pendence broke out in 1948, he worked securing kibbutzim. He
found that his familiarity with weapons from his time traveling
with the Soviet brigade helped.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Sherman said. “We fi ght for our
lives. We didn’t have anywhere to run. We couldn’t retreat.

Where, where will we retreat? To the ocean? Th at was the mood
from all the soldiers.”
During this time, Sherman knew Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe
Dayan and Shimon Peres. Rabin, he said, was a brilliant and hon-
est person, while Dayan was a great fi ghter and Peres, not much
of a fi ghter, did other great things.

When the war ended, Sherman said he and the other soldiers
didn’t have time to refl ect. His main preoccupation was where to
sleep and eat.

“We used to, every night, go out for operation, and during the
morning, we used to come back ... and we always got dead, one
soldier or two, and we used to bury them and then go to sleep
because in the evening, again, we used to prepare to go out for
SEE SURVIVOR | Page 26
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