THE HERSH SEGAL COLLECTION

Very few Jewish children survived the holocaust (approx. 11%). During the formative years of their lives these children witnessed and experienced the horrors of the war and these decisive experiences followed them like shadow in the years that followed. While they went through rehabilitation in children's homes and educational facilities, some of those rehabilitating them (Teachers, instructors, most of them survivors themselves) encouraged the children to share their story. Hence throughout 1945 - 1949 a large body of child holocaust survivor's testimonies was recorded. Hersh segal was one such teacher at the orphanages in Bacau and Gura Humorului, Romania, who encouraged his pupils to write about their experiences during the war. The students were all survivors of the deportation to Transnistria, a region in Ukraine, where due to the harsh conditions of cold, hunger and disease only few survived and many had been orphaned. Hersh Segal was born on 8 December 1905 in Novi Strilyshcha (Austro - Hungarian empire at the time, now Ukraine). At the Outset of WWI his family fled to Praha (Prague), where they lived as refugees until 1917. They then travelled to Chernivtsi, Ukraine. In 1925 Segal completed his mathematics and physics studies. After his military service, he returned to Chernivtsi, where he worked as a school teacher until 1941. In 1946 he moved to Bacau, Romania, where he worked as a mathematics professor until his immigration to Israel in 1962 where he continued to teach until his death in 1973.

Hersh Segal collected the testimonies of child holocaust survivors who were deported during the war to Transnistria. Some of the Testimonies were collected in 1946 at the Jewish orphanage in Bacau, and the rest in 1947, at the Jewish school in Gura Humorului, Romania. The children were aged 12 to 18 at the time, and some never went to School before. In their testimonies, the children describe their Experiences in the ghettos and camps of Transnistria between 1941 - 1944 as well as following liberation. Songs that were sung in Transnistria are also attached to some of the testimonies. The testimonies were written mostly in Yiddish in Latin script or Romanian.

In 1958 Segal gave the entire batch of testimonies to the poet Naftole Herts Kon so he would take them with him to Poland and from there send them to Israel. The poet took the material with him but when he arrived in Poland the secret police arrested him and confiscated the material. They released him after a while and returned him the testimonies. He eventually arrived in Israel with all the material and returned it to Segal. Following Segal's death in 1973 the entire original collection was donated to the GFH.