Miriam Paltiel Nevel

The day before Passover, Father, a widower, had to go to work, and we three children waited out the long day in our Siberian home—a shack devoid of heat, running water, and food.

He is intent on the names printed in the thick ream of pages that sits in front of him. He reads the names, and from time to time uses a large black fountain pen to mark a name with an X.

Yisroel smiled. “Oh!” he said, “Now I want you. You can speak!”

I was an orphan. And I was shoeless.

The sight that greeted us was not at all what one would expect to see at a parade. There was no music, no cymbals, no clown twirling batons and making people laugh and letting everyone know what was being celebrated. In fact, it soon became clear to me th...

World War II had finally come to an end. My family was back from Siberia, where we had spent most of the war years . . .

The Synagogue The Great Choral Synagogue in Moscow was a for-show place of worship, like others in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Stalin had ordered his soldiers not to close this synagogue or the two Christian Orthodox churches in Moscow, so that when fo...

Ivan Stepanovich stood on the platform, looking forward to Eliezer Paltiel’s trial the next day. This time, he felt certain he would be rid of the rich Jew once and for all. Afterwards, the Jew’s guilt could easily be used to incite a pogrom that would be...