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World Jewish News
Mowgli of the Holocaust: Jewish Boy Lived With Wolf Pack for 3 Years
22.04.2009
Today, a special annex to the Maariv newspaper, dedicated to the Remembrance Day of the Holocaust and Heroism of European Jewry, contained the memories of the 82-year-old Moshe (Mishka) Zilberstein, who had been hiding from the Nazis in a wolf pack for three years.
When the war began, Mishka, together with his parents and brothers, lived in Bielostok. In 1941, his entire family was sent to Auschwitz, but he found this out only many years later. After he was almost beaten to death for trying to bring food to the Bielostok ghetto, the 10-year-old boy fled to the woods.
In the interview with "Maariv," Moshe talks about how for the first few months, he wandered the forest on his own, surviving on what he could find, until he stumbled upon a wolf pack with small wolf cubs, which took him in.
As a result, after three years of wandering with the pack he went into the Belarusian woods, where he was picked up by the Red Army soldiers who named him Mishka (he had forgotten his name by that time) and transferred to
the home front, to Siberia.
After the war he managed to return to Bielostok. In 1948, he moved to Palestine and was mobilized almost immediately. He participated in the War of Independence, served in the Navy, then in the Merchant Navy. In 1955, he got married, and raised children.
But the first listener of his story was his granddaughter, who wrote about her grandfather in a school composition.
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