Penina Zeitchik was just 3 years old when the Nazis approached the little town of Lubieszow, where she lived with her family. The town had been part of Poland before World War II, but in 1939, it was occupied by the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in which Germany and the USSR had secretly carved Poland between them.

Once home to some 1,500 Jews, during the Soviet occupation, the Jewish community swelled, with refugees fleeing the Nazi reign of terror. But in 1941, Adolf Hitler tore up his agreement with Josef Stalin, and, within weeks, the Nazis were on Lubieszow’s doorstep.

Most believed that the Red Army would swiftly reconquer the town once the Nazis took it. Nonetheless, Zeitchik’s parents decided that it was more prudent to flee east, leaving town ahead of the German invasion, together with her mother’s young sister, still a teenager.

“We lived with my grandmother, who remained behind,” recalled Zeitchik, who was born Penina Falchuk. “When we left, there was a duck in the oven, and my mother kept on telling my grandmother to make sure it would not burn. That’s how sure we were that we were coming right back right away.”

But the Falchuks would never see their house again, nor the grandmother, or an uncle, aunt, and two children who lived nearby. Returning after the war to Lubieszow in what is now Ukraine, the Falchuks found their home and all they once knew utterly destroyed.

Today, after an eight-decade journey through Uzbekistan, Berlin, Munich, and New York, Zeitchik has found a home of another kind — one she had yearned for since her childhood.

On February 18, at the age of 86, she fulfilled her lifelong dream of immigrating to Israel, arriving with the assistance of nonprofit Nefesh B’Nefesh.

Zeitchik spoke with The Times of Israel over a video call on the eve of Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began on Monday night. To mark the day, she planned to gather all her grandchildren in Israel for the first time to share her experience during those dark years.

After leaving Lubieszow, the Falchuks kept moving deeper into Russian territory, eventually reaching the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.

“The Nazis kept coming behind us, so we wandered for quite a while, until we got to Uzbekistan,” Zeitchik said.

In Uzbekistan, the family was no longer targeted as Jews but still had to grapple with the challenges of life in the Soviet Union at the time, which meant........

© The Times of Israel