I wrote "There is book ..." But a Mod deleted it. So here goes:
[gmod]Actually your previous post wasn't deleted, it just didn't get passed for posting by the Moderation team. Posting only "There is a book..." and nothing else all the time hardly adds to the discussion, unlike this post.[/gmod]
THE SECRET OF PRIEST?S GROTTO / A Holocaust Survival Story by Peter Lane Taylor with Christos Nicola 2007 64 pp, many colour photos. Kar-Ben Publishing, Minneapolis, USA. ISBN-13: 978-1-58013-260-2. About ?6.00
Priest?s Grotto is better known today as Ozernaya which is Ukrainian for Lake [Cave]. It is the second longest gypsum cave and the ninth longest cave in the world with a length of 124 km. But the story begins between 1942 and 1944 during the Nazis occupation of the Ukraine. Over 95% of the Jews perished, but this is the story of how 38 members of the Stermers, the Dodyks and the Kurzs families survive by hiding in two caves. The first cave was, Verteba, a semi show cave, which was unlikely to be visited in the winter. Fortunately they made a second escape entrance, which they used when the Nazis discovered the cave. They quickly made their way to Priest?s Cave, and their total time underground was 344 days. At the time this was a world record. Although the book does not mention it, this record was broken in 1969-1970 when Milutin Veljkovich spent 463 days in Samar Cave along with 10 chickens and 5 wild ducks.
Some of the local Ukrainians helped the Jews by selling them food, but others came close to bringing down their destruction, at one point even attempting an armed assault against the Jewish men who were trying to haul sacks of grain into the entrance of the cave in the middle of the night.
The people in the cave could not afford to illuminate the darkness, but had to conserve candles and fuel. This meant that they only lit candles for a few minutes, several times a day, in order to prepare meals. All other times were spent in complete and total darkness. Whilst Milutin had ample food, near the end of their sojourn, those in the Priest?s Grotto, were reduced to eating raw potatoes to save on fuel .
One of the survivors, Pepkala Blitzer, a four-year-old girl when she and her family sought shelter in the caves from the Nazis, later recalled how she had completely forgotten about the sun or daylight. Eventually, one day in early April 1944, one of the Jewish men found a bottle lying on the floor beneath the entrance to the cave. Inside was a message from a friendly Ukrainian farmer, which read: "The Germans have already gone." A few days later, the entire group of Jews hiding in the cave finally left their refuge. Standing in the bright sunshine, Pepkala asked her mother to put out the bright candle, because it hurt her eyes too much. She was referring to the sun, which she could not remember having seen.
In the chaos that followed the Russians? liberation of the Ukraine, the families made their way to a displaced person?s camp at Fernwald in Germany and from there went on to Canada and the USA where their descendants still live.
