Samuel Aroni was fourteen years old when he and his family sought refuge with his paternal grandfather after they were driven from their home in Kishinev on the morning of July 00. Within hours, two Romanian soldiers arrived to rob and threaten everyone in the
house. The whole family was lined up against the wall, with guns aimed at them.
“I clearly remember my thoughts, at the age of fourteen, when I believed I was going to die,” Aroni later wrote in a personal report on the persecution in Bessarabia. “My six-year-old brother was put on a table with his hands held high in surrender. I remember realizing for
the first time that my parents could not protect me.”
The soldiers left after robbing them of all their valuables. That evening the family fled to the ghetto in the lower part of the city. The grandfather, Aaron-losef Cervinschi, refused to leave his home. Later that night, the soldiers returned and dragged the old man from the
house by his white beard and deposited him in the ghetto.
The survivors of the early killings, nearly fifteen thousand people, had been herded into the neighborhood and surrounded by fencing and guards. They were allowed to take few of their belongings, and the ghetto was chronically short of water and food.
After a few months, during which hundreds more people were executed, Antonescu decided to deport all of the surviving Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to the camps of Transnistria, the renamed part of the Ukraine that the Germans had given

Romania as a bounty
for joining the war. The Kishinev ghetto was being liquidated, and
the starved people, who lacked strength and health, were terrified of
the long march and the expectation of new brutality and deprivation.
On the morning of October 00, a Wednesday, the Aroni family
slipped through the fence surrounding the ghetto and made their way
to the railway station. They were helped by three Romanian policemen who had been paid and sent by Monia Apotecher, an uncle from
Bucharest. Sam and his younger brother, Shraga, were accompanied
by their parents, an aunt and uncle, and the aunt’s sister. Sam’s maternal grandmother had left the previous day on the same journey, driven
to Bucharest by a Romanian army major who was a family friend.
The policemen provided the family with papers identifying them