55 Years Together

My name is Barskyy. First name Volodymyr, Yiddish name Velvl Ben David. I’ve been on the board of the Jewish Community of Regensburg for eight years now. My wife and I have been running the Shalom senior citizens’ club for fifteen years. As a board member, I coordinate with the rabbi, organize the lesson with him, and arrange the Jewish holidays. We also have a popular chess club and we founded a library. We also have our own page in the Munich newspaper Jüdisches Leben in Bayern (Jewish Life in Bavaria). My wife and I met in Czernowitz, where we went to school together after the war. We arrived in Czernowitz in the late 1940s. I went there voluntarily. My wife escaped the Russians. During the war, she had spent two and a half years in the ghetto in the village of Bandurivka in Transnistria. We’ve been together for fifty-five years. When we came to Germany, I was sixty. Almost retired. But I’m not used to not working. That was hard at the beginning. I had a heart operation here. At age 64. Quadruple bypass. If we had stayed in Ukraine, neither of us would be alive now. The photo shows all five of us: my wife, my three sons, and me. At this point we have five grandchildren and one great-grandson.