"All my girlfriends, all my relatives, all my neighbors are in here," Ms. Usherenko, 79, said of the macabre encyclopedia, which the German government issued several years ago as part of a broader reparation movement. Beside her sat her sister, Toni Usherenko, 85, equally diminutive and delicate, who spoke in the same halting hybrid of Russian and English. The two live a block apart in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, maintaining a closeness forged during World War II and later in a Siberian prison camp. "She's without a husband; I'm without a husband," Ruth Usherenko said; both are widows. "I'm all alone in this house." The sisters spent their early years in Neustrelitz, a town in northern Germany. After their father, a tailor, became a target of Nazi intimidation, the family moved to Berlin. In 1936, Toni Usherenko said, she was sent to a resort where the SS performed medical experiments on her. Two years later, the family endured Kristallnacht, a pogrom in which Jews were attacked and their homes and businesses ransacked. The girls' father was badly beaten in the riot, suffering a heart attack and a damaged kidney. Three years later, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he perished. Weeks after their father was apprehended, Ruth, Toni and their mother were taken to Gross-Rosen , a work camp, where they toiled day and night and slept on the floor, 15 to a room. In 1945, the three women were sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in Siberia; they were considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance. "We couldn't speak one word of Russian," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "They didn't feed us. When people died, they didn't bury them — they put them in the forest and the wolves were eating them." So complete was their isolation that they did not know when the war ended. "Stalin passed away in 1953, and they released us in 1955," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "A woman came to us and said, `The war is over.' " The three women settled in the Ukrainian town of Dnepropetrovsk, where they worked as milliners. The sisters married — Ruth to a shoemaker and Toni to an aviation engineer — and in 1981, after years of trying to leave the Soviet Union, the families were able to emigrate to Brooklyn. In 1984, Ruth and her husband bought the two-family house where she still lives. She rents out the top floor for $600 a month. Her other income includes $547 a month in Social Security payments and 400 euros a month — about $567 — in restitution from the German government. Although the house is paid off, its upkeep is expensive. Heat and electricity costs exceed $400 a month, and after property taxes and insurance and water bills, she is barely getting by. She pointed to parts of the ceiling that were peeling away, explaining through an interpreter that she needed money to repair her house — and her teeth, some of which are missing. "I need new dentures," Ms. Usherenko said, baring a flawed grin. When she was turned down for a Home Energy Assistance Program grant to pay her utilities last February, Ms. Usherenko approached Selfhelp Community Services, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. There, she met Vicka Goldenberg, a caseworker who drew on the fund to pay for a roof renovation ($1,936) and to settle an electric bill ($363). Ms. Goldenberg is also working to involve Ms. Usherenko in several relief programs, which they hope will close the gap between her income and her expenses. But having money for heat is most important to Ms. Usherenko, perhaps because the cold is a reminder of the frigid decade she spent in Siberia. "They put us in a cold school, no steam," she recounted. "We had one blanket for me, my mother and my sister. Everybody died."This helps explain what happened to the Jews after they were "liberated" by the Soviets and why many people thought their relatives were dead.
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