Fillip Fuhrmann was one of my mom's older brothers. He was born in 1917 in the town of Frydek-Mistek, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Czech Republic). In 1941, when the Cernăuți ghetto was organized, Fillip was a student at Univercitatia Regale Carol 1 din Cernăuți (Chernivtsi National University named after Yuri Fedkovich). As a student of the Department of Biology at the university, Fillip was known for his love of studying science and mathematics and for his talent for drawing and sketching the buildings of his beloved city, Cernăuți, and its University. He helped his parents to pay for the university tuition while tutoring other students in mathematics.

During ten months in Cernăuți ghetto and in the Mogilev ghetto, Fillip experienced cold and hunger, became ill, and survived typhus, but was nevertheless registered in the Mogilev ghetto as a person healthy enough to be sent “to work” to Germany. My mother was the last person in our family to see him alive. It was mid-September 1942, and Fillip was held at the train station; he was in a coat, without boots, in slippers, standing between a crowd of hundreds of young men and women deported from the Mogilev ghetto to the death camps, where they were shot. At the time of his death, Fillip was 25 years old.

The information is recorded from the words of Rita Melamud Kaufmann (December 2023) 

Photo: Fillip Fuhrmann, Cernăuți 1937  (granted by Rita Melamud Kaufmann)