NO PLACE ON EARTH

This afternoon we went to see a movie. The family lives near me!

Astonishing bravery of the Jewish family who escaped the Holocaust by hiding in an underground cave – for a year-and-a-half

• Esther and Zaida Stermer and their six children lived underground to survive
• They were among six Jewish families who avoided being sent to their deaths
• Their astonishing story will be told in new documentary No Place On Earth

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304533/Jewish-Stermer-family-Ukraine-hid-cave-escape-Holocaust.html#ixzz2VfXEX0u7 
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A Jewish matriarch was so determined to protect her family from Nazi persecution, she hid herself and them in an underground cave until their country was liberated – eighteen months later.

Esther Stermer lived a peaceful, rural existence in a small Ukrainian village with her six children until the Germans invaded in late 1941.

Hellbent on annihilating the Jewish people, the soldiers rounded up more than a thousand Jews and sent them to their deaths.

 

Several Jewish families escaped the Holocaust thanks to the courage of Esther Stermer, front row, second from left

 

Sam Stermer, in green, and his brother Saul Stermer, with yellow kneepads, revisted the cave nearly 70 years later

But Mrs Stermer and her husband Zaida were determined that their innocent family would survive, whatever it took.

So, she and five other Jewish families from the area packed up their belongings one cold October night in 1942 and fled, in the dark, to a sinkhole masking the entrance to an underground cave, five miles north of their home in Korolowka.

A new documentary, No Place On Earth, tells the story of Mrs Stermer’s courage more than 70 years ago.

 

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<p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; min-height: 1px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left; “>She and her family had already survived one year of German occupation, but knew that the shadow of death was creeping ever closer.

Her son Sam Stermer, now 86, told ABC News that the family’s secret was their utter determination never to give in.

The cave they settled in was pitch black, damp, and lay beneath ground that Nazi soldiers would march over, deep in the Ukrainian countryside.

 
 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304533/Jewish-Stermer-family-Ukraine-hid-cave-escape-Holocaust.html#ixzz2VfXQvSSQ 
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