Moris Bronshteyn was living in the Jewish community of Djurin in his native Ukraine when he learned that Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation was interviewing survivors. He soon became the foundation’s key person in the region conducting interviews in the 1990s in Ukraine and, later, in the United States. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1997 and lives in Walnut Creek.
In all, Bronshteyn spoke with more than 70 survivors, whose stories will live forever in the Shoah Foundation’s Los Angeles-based archives.
Now, some of Bronshteyn’s interviews appear in his book “Dead Loop.” The title refers to the Pechora concentration camp, commonly known as the “dead loop,” where many of the interviewees were held during the war.
The camp had no gas chambers or crematoria, according to Dmitri Sled, who translated the accounts from Russian into English. “Rather, it was a starvation camp: people were simply shoved through the gates and left to their own devices,” he writes in the book’s foreword. “With no access to food, with limited access to water — and with various epidemics raging without the camp’s overcrowded confines — hundred of prisoners would still die of these ‘natural causes’ every day.” Pechora and the surrounding area were under Romanian military rule, given to Romania by Hitler.
Bronshteyn is a graduate of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute who worked in the energy industry and took an active role in Jewish community organizations in his native country.
“Dead Loop” by Moris Bronshteyn (Lulu.com, 287 pages)
Naomi Lavori has published her first book at the age of 81. “The Chain Link Fence,” a memoir, details her childhood in Brooklyn and troubled relationship with her eccentric mother. A former dancer and schoolteacher who still takes ballet class, Lavori is a Stanford resident and member of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.
“The Chain Link Fence” by Naomi Lavori (River Sanctuary Publishing, 86 pages)