Yefim Rozenberg. Childhood cut short by war

                Translation by Roza Rabzi
                Proofread by Michael Maidenberg



Childhood gives a push to everything in one’s life. It is always with us, and each person has one of his own. The generation of boys in the former USSR to which I belonged was doomed to live it under war. And God forbid our grandchildren from living through both my and those boys experiences. Only few of them have survived until to-day.
Still fewer and fewer are those who have confronted the war face to face, who remember vividly true realities of those years.
War has many facets. A lot of books on war, numerous films, documents, evidences, stories, artistic presentations, photos, variegated forms of its depiction and reflection, sometimes contradictory, sometimes untrustworthy, or purposely sham, sometimes unintentionally distorted, sometimes skillfully fabricated – of all sorts and varied inconsistencies. It seems I know a lot about it.  I have read a lot.
But all the same, having perused heaps of books on the War published in different years, rarely had I come across the plots setting out in details one of its, in all probability most complicated, constituents – evacuation of innumerable people forced to change dramatically, in no time, their everyday lives, their jobs, their life-styles, and even ages – having matured or become senile during the process.
Both fiction and non-fiction lack a comprehensive description of huge human masses moving eastward from the west, of their lives, severities of their escape routes, hardships, and loss of their loved ones, peculiarities of their sojourn in a foreign land, and their relations with native residents.
The gigantic scale of war-time evacuation, its earliest several months in particular, was new for the world. According to official statistics, several million people were organized to be evacuated by railroad only from the country’s west to its east, north, and south-east. The figure is smashing as it is, but about the same number of people should not be forgotten who were moved in the reverse direction to participate in the battles. And those who were destined to escape the battlefields started their own long ordeal in the initial weeks and months of the War.
I feel myself a tiny grain of sand in that human ocean. But I admit however that I can have a say in discussing those days.
I shall try to restore duly what I have passed through and experienced in the years that were etched forever both into my life and lives of the generation of lads born in the late twenties who were under draft age in 1941-1945 which may have contributed to their survival.
I wish the memory of the horrible tragedy experienced by our people in the twentieth century to descend to the following generations despite everything. You can forget the good. But never this sort of thing.

                AN ESCAPE TO NOWHERE

My father’s death forced my mother to look for a way out of situation. In a year she decided to move to her parents – Elya and Molka Balaban - who lived in the town of Yampol located in the immediate vicinity of the border between Soviet Union and Romania.
Just in two weeks prior to the war all our household belongings (furniture, clothes, etc.) were sent to Yampol. We were left with absolute necessities only as we intended to travel to Yampol by train in the nearest future.
But our plans were not destined to come true.
On June 22, 1941 Germany has surprisingly attacked Soviet Union without declaration of war. I was twelve then.
I have just finished my fifth school year, and as I can remember now, was rather a smart and educated boy. I used to read avidly, and made attempts to understand the political atmosphere of those years.
These were still the initial days of the war, but German army has already occupied an enormous territory. In about two weeks since the war has begun their army was close to our settlement.
Boys as we were then, we were intrigued. We could not realize what was going on. For us it was a grand adult game. At our school the so-called “eradicative squads” were organized to resist the German subversive activists. All of us “brave soldiers” were “armed” with a single small-bore sport rifle without cartridges; each one however was given a gas-mask. Our proud patrol headed by a school military instructor protected the wells (no other water supply in the settlement)* from being poisoned by “the spies”.
The sky overhead was full of German aircraft squadrons. They flew to bomb Minsk, Kiev, and Moscow. The German pilots felt themselves sovereign masters of the skies. Soviet airplanes tried to resist them, though more often they were shot down and burnt while falling.
I have watched one German airplane, however, being shot down. Two pilots were lucky enough to escape by a parachute jump into the nearest forest. The whole settlement, armed with whatever they could, hurried into the forest in search of them.
The pilots were found sitting at a brook engrossed in animated intercourse. They were not afraid of us. Captives as they were, they none the less presented some force backing them. And driven by sheer curiosity we tried to talk to those pilots until militia* officers came and took them.
No sooner had we crossed our window panes with paper strips to protect ourselves from possible sharp fragments of glass sure to appear after bombing than the rumor was spread by our local authorities that all wishing to be evacuated can start. And surely they turned up: these were the families both of the Communist Party local leaders and Soviet officials equated to them, leaving aside overwhelming number of Jews. And it was them, the Jews, who majored among the people evacuated eastward.
On June 3, 1941 the Germans were already right up to our neighborhood; our settlement has escaped bombardment only due to its plants that were of no interest. That was the day of our evacuation to the place designated for us by the sugar plant officials.
Another reason for remembering the date was the fact that since the beginning of the war it was the day of Stalin’s first public speaking. We heard him hypocritically addressing the nation, “Dear brothers and sisters”, and could not even imagine that after many long years that “leader’s” true impact on the fates of people in our country would be disclosed.
But those days that kind of address has inspired even greater surge of love to
Him.  People wept listening to the speech and elevated Stalin to nearly God’s level; they felt sorry for him and inwardly vowed eternal love and allegiance.
And his concluding words, “Enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours!” gave people confidence despite the dire straits the country was in.
Victory is just ahead and it is inevitable – the idea seemed obsessively evident for everyone who heard the speech. And victory did come, but not as soon, and owing to unimaginable human sacrifice. 
We never gave a thought then to a way the evacuation was organized; who was in charge, and when everything had been scheduled. Looking back into the past I feel amazed and stunned to-day: the war started quite of a sudden, with German troops invading huge territories in a flash, causing panic and confusion. And that was a country with population who believed devotedly that if a war started, “…the enemy will fall onto his own land under the mighty bloodless blow…” (Words of the popular patriotic song of those days).
But small railroad station Turbov, none the less, had echelons* standing ready to meet us; they consisted of regular freight cars having two square openings in the upper corners and a broad sliding door in the middle for loading and unloading. The interior was filled with two-tiered plank beds.
My mother and I reached the station on feet with a single small valise. I have mentioned already that almost all our belongings had been sent to her parents just before the war began. Who could have guessed in that country, leaving aside our Turbov that the war would not start at some other place but at the very threshold of our home?
Those who used to read newspapers, and they were read by all adult people, could have bet on friendship with Germany to be strong and durable. It simply could not be other way for it was written in the newspapers. And no way otherwise! The newspapers were supposed to be always the supreme truth.
And provided our things were still left in Turbov they must have been lost anyway. We could not manage more than we have taken with us. My mother surely could not anticipate the forthcoming, being unaware what evacuation may present. Thus she was accurate in thriftily locking the apartment and putting the key into her bag. It looks both na;ve and sorrowful to-day.
Because as soon as the news about evacuation has spread across the sugar plant neighborhood our houses and household buildings, as well as administrative and outbuildings, and shops were surrounded by peasants on carts. Notwithstanding they were watched by the goers they burst open the doors to loot. No one was going to hinder them. It looked a trivial routine without incidents. A complete anarchy in the settlement. And those from the ruling body, if there still remained the ones, were busy preparing evacuation of their own.
Another interesting moment: the sugar plant with its whole equipment was ready to be evacuated. Wasn’t it striking? It was July 3, 1941; only 10 days after the war had burst out. Front line was stretching just along our settlement.
But the non-strategic plant’s equipment, however, was organized to be removed to the eastern regions of the country. Hence, the authorities must have envisaged that   option too.
Sugar is produced from the grown and harvested beetroot. Thus the plant personnel with families were destined to the state agricultural enterprise in Voronezh region.
I remember going alongside my mother to the station. I had a school bag in my hand, and a real gas mask was hanging over my shoulder – “ammunition” for personal safety!
People occupied the freight cars. The train started eastward, to a future unknown to its passengers.
A new period of my life has begun. Neither I, nor my mother ever came back to Turbov… Ahead were four years of war-time life, life in a foreign land, years of starving, need, fear, hardships, sufferings, and years of my rapid growing up.


                ECHELON

The train was moving slowly. You wouldn’t bet on when and where it may stop, or start anew. It was all unpredictable.
Those eastward-oriented trains surely were wild. Railway crossing points were our most often stops. Pending the troop-trains coming from the opposite direction sometimes it took several hours to start moving again. They passed us with their open platforms set with Soviet tanks bearing white-paint mottos: “Forward to victory!”; “For the Motherland!”; “For Stalin!” We were especially inspired by a “To Berlin!” one. It bore some hope in itself. The refugees cried encouragingly from their freight cars, “Hurrah!”; “Beat the enemies!”; “Come back victorious!”
And it was a natural impulse of common people in uncommon circumstances. It was not inspired by propaganda. No hostility to Soviet power. People were obsessed with love to Stalin and hope for a forthcoming victory and return to a peaceful life – all that inseparable from his name. These were sincere feelings.
There was mutual support on the way. Hot meals were awaiting us at the large stations while we were forging ahead to the east. Food was brought to the very car doors. Local residents used to gather toward the time of the refugee echelons arrival… They eyed us with pity and surprise: “How come – war refugees?!”
We received bread, baby food. Sanitary leaved too much to be desired of course but our belief that all that was not for long: the enemy will be defeated very soon as Stalin had promised – backed us up against all hardships of that extraordinary trip.
I remember our echelon consisting of freight cars for the most part and several passenger ones.  And common people felt exasperation towards the families of Soviet and Communist party officials of high standing that had advantages even in those conditions going in the passenger cars and alleged to have all their possessions with them, this being the reason why many people were left behind due to the lack of place.
I would like to stress that it was behavior, the situation itself that caused indignation; the reason itself was not related to the Soviet power. We had a simple explanation – “Stalin could not know about all the mess. When in the know – punishment is due”. Those years were special for quite naturally blaming “people’s enemies” of subversive activity causing diverse violations in all spheres of life. My to-day’s substantial knowledge of those “people’s enemies”, their fates, and their huge count in particular, makes me indignant with the unfair practices of their “treatment”.
At some station once a rumor was spread that a car with the captured German women pilots was added to our echelon. We ran for it. Windows were barred, and two armed soldiers were on guard. We saw women’s faces behind the grating. Indignant mob started crying, “Assassins”, “fascist bastards”, “damn you”. We, the boys, tried to hit the car windows with stones.
By that time we already knew about our cities and towns bombarded by German aviation, thus our hatred to German women pilots was natural.
The guards have at last pacified the amassed: “Hey, guys, these are no Germans. They are wives of “people’s enemies”. We take them to Siberia”. At one instant we have all noticed the tear-stained eyes of the imprisoned women behind the grates. I remember how the assembled people became silenced at once and without uttering a word went back to their cars. What could have been their thoughts at that moment?!
Our echelon was heading slowly for the east. Several weeks have passed and willy-nilly we got accustomed to the specific echelon life. Those who have never experienced it can’t even imagine to-day what it was. As the saying goes, “God forbid survive what you can get used to”.
The cars were “populated” with women of different ages, children, and elders. All men eligible for military service were quickly and orderly enlisted during the initial two or three days of the war.
Conscription was organized as follows. All Soviet enterprises, institutions, offices, and agricultural units used to have special secret plan “in case of war”. Following the instruction from “above” it was cut open on July 22, 1941 by the corresponding top managers and put into practice: all draft-aged men of eighteen and up were gathered at the induction centers – at schools, clubs, cinema theaters, and other pre-specified places. Thereafter all conscripts were placed into the freight cars of troop-trains waiting ready for them to be taken to their destinies. On-site arming and fitting out with uniforms were essentially out of question of course. Thus the excessively armed German Panzer divisions preceding their attacking army were amused by almost negligible resistance.
Some modern films about those days featuring conscripts sent off to army with music; mass meetings with farewell speeches and “beat the enemy” appeals; parting with loved ones; faith vows, and such other script fantasies cause my ironic curiosity. This theme is almost foreign to documentary films.
I remember how it looked like in Turbov. In the first days of the war the troop trains were formed at its railway station to entrain the selectees from the neighboring settlements. We, the boys, surely were hanging about gazing at what was going on. And what we saw was tearful. The platform and rails were packed with women clinging to “their own” men – husbands, brothers, and sons. Few militiamen and officers tore them off by force. It was as if everyone understood that those “the very first” would perish or be captured by the Germans in their first battle. And what battle it could have been? Better say massacre.
It was neither cry, nor moan, or weeping that made the air dense – it was the savage women’s wail. And when the conscripts at last were entrained and those who saw them off pushed aside the train started moving. Crowds of maddened women rushed in its pursuit. Still wailing, they followed the train, stumbling and falling, until it passed out of sight
Every troop train taking the selectees to the battlefields was seen off in the same way. You’ll never see a film featuring such a harrowing parting of the living with the living ones. But is it apt for a film? That horror can be kept only in one’s memory after going through it. It will stay there forever, and will go with you.
While approaching our destination the inhabitants of the echelon were quite peaceful towards one another recognizing transiency of their mutual existence, and endured conditions of freight car life. Women who constituted the fat part of refugees almost never quarreled or conflicted though all of them suffered from the absence of elementary sanitary conditions. And despite it was summer and very hot sultry weather situation in the car was rather bearable.
The shops close to the stations still had some food left. The farmers used to bring vegetables and fruits to the echelons. Many of us had made provisions for a journey. Money was still valued, and distributive system was not introduced yet.
At railway junctions with crossing lines where huge transport streams were formed sometimes several echelons were accumulated hosting the refugees from different western regions of the country.
At one of the stations once my mother has found an echelon from the place where her parents lived. The hope to find them in that echelon was next to nothing. But she went seeking. And in one of the cars she found people from Yampol who told her that her parents refused to be evacuated. They remained at their place. They must have thought – as many those days – that Germans were a cultured civilized nation that never was reported to be something terrible by Soviet propaganda in the years of Soviet-German friendship.
Nobody could know anything about atrocities, taunts, about “the final decision on the Jewish issue” being one of the German fascism purposes; nobody knew and could imagine anything like that either. Both my grandfather and grandmother were not exceptions, thus they decided not to move into the unknown.
Those who had witnessed their last days let us know about it only much later. My ancestors’ life end appeared tragic. On a summer day of 1941 my granny was beaten to death with a rifle butt, and my grandfather was imprisoned into the concentration camp where he perished later on.
Yet of all that – I shall repeat – we were unaware: those were the initial weeks of the war.

                THE VORONEZH PAUSE

After several weeks of moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the retreating Red Army we arrived to Voronezh wherefrom we were sent to a state agricultural enterprise in Mikhailovka village.
We were temporarily placed in the cinema theater situated in a small park. Our “community” comprising several dozens of families had to stay there a few days. Local officials were prompt in providing us with roof and heat.
As soon as we were settled I rushed into the street. I could not wait to see where we found ourselves. Here I need to stress that a lot of children have arrived. But I appeared to be the oldest – the others were much younger.
I can’t help but tell here in detail what has happened there. How come that just in that Russian out-of-the-way place I have personally, and not through hearsay, come face to face with a horrible phenomenon. Anti-Semitism! Unfortunately, this phenomenon has not spared me being permanently present and influencing my fate.
Mikhailovka was the first place for me to encounter and remember for my whole future life that disgusting human derangement.
In the park I was stopped by a group of 14-15 years old teenagers. Aware that we were the refugees from Ukraine they asked if we had Jews among us. Unafraid, with nothing to hide, anticipating no dirty trick in the question, not in the least ashamed I answered readily, “Surely we have, I am a Jew myself”. And right away a punch in the face followed then another one, and more. I was lucky to have an adult appearing for a moment in the street which caused the boys to disappear. But since that day I have become a target for the fists of all the local boys, whether they were older or younger than me. Meeting me in the street they strived to beat me crying “Beat the Jew!”
Surprisingly, I was ashamed. It appeared I was to blame! It appeared I must be beaten and despised!
That feeling was a painful endurance for I tried to understand what it was all about. I spared even my mother from recognizing the fact. I felt shy. I appeared to be unlike others! I could understand nothing – and still can’t.
I still do not grasp the reasons for the to-day’s anti-Semitic ideology. I am aware of them but do not understand. We, the Jews, accept it as an established disaster that exists beyond our conscience. But why?
In the inner Russia, not even in a city but in rural province, in that entire neighborhood one would not find if only a single Jew! For those boys I must have been the first Jew in their lives they have met. But hatred to Jews was alive in them as alive are the invisible microbes in human bodies.
Like a living genetic material, anti-Semitism must have been introduced into those lads with maternal blood and milk, being for them a natural state of human existence. And how else could it have sprung there? Who else, but the parents and adult entourage could have installed such a hostile attitude to Jews in those village guys? Its roots can be traced back into the far-off centuries. It has still survived until present day. Coming of age, the former children make it a generally accepted rule. Moreover, this rule becomes sometimes an adopted part of state policy.
After that first encounter with anti-Semitism so many decades have passed – and I am still unable to imagine any other explanation for its persistence.
The long and short of it, we had to live in the environment we found ourselves in. We were given a small room in the community. We acquired some household utensils and crockery.
Little by little refugees settled down to work – whichever they could find. My mother was accepted to the local managing office as an accountant.
But until then we joined all able-bodied local residents in the fields. It was harvest time. We mowed down the wheat and the rye, threshed it, and took to the barns. I too had to learn all that.
Thus at twelve, in the first year of the war I started working. After the simple “womanish” work of binding the cut cereals into bundles I was entrusted with combine harvester. It was in tow of a tractor those days and easy to control.
After that I was ranked higher to the accounting clerk with a pretty decent salary. I used to make the round of the fields mounted on a saddle-horse assigned to me as a sort of personal and service transport.
My age never hindered me in that work. The war was on, manpower was limited. I appeared rather competent for that job and worked conscientiously.
I remember how often we, the refugees, were amazed by the local residents’ attitude towards their work. They worked reluctantly and strived to get a nap just in the height of the harvesting; organized prolonged breaks. The refugee women tried to make them understand that they should work faster and more conscientiously – for it was bread they harvested! Both people and front* needed it.
Smiles were the answer. They joked, “It is war all the same, and the Germans will come soon”.
I have heard a retort from a girl once, “Get bouquets ready – German bride-grooms are coming”. And strong young country girls smiled gaily and joked trivially about it confusing naively war with fun.
Here I can’t help telling about an episode of several years after that, in 1945, just by the end of the War, still stuck in my memory. We were returning to Ukraine from evacuation. In the waiting-room of some station a group of young, strong, well-fed women was standing. They were nicely clad, with make-up and fine modern hairdos. High-quality leather suitcases stood behind them.
Our worn out mothers, looking older their real ages after four terrible years in a foreign land were gazing at those Russian in their appearance women in surprise. They turned out to be German captives who were on their way back from Germany where they worked as house-maids, cooks, nurses, and fulfilled other unskilled work.
I will not give comments to the episode I have witnessed myself. I know what foreign land, slave labor, in war-time particularly are; I simply narrate what I have seen with my own eyes. I guess those women used to work at some “good” households (those surely must have been), and in passing have picked up “trophies” from the plundered Germany.
I always was a hard reader; I couldn’t imagine life without books. I spent my leisure time going to Voronezh from Mikhailovka to a library. I read books, magazines, sometimes went to the cinema. Advent of the front line was not felt in rural area, but in Voronezh itself tension was growing. Like a rising tide, the signs of the approaching front were scattering over the city streets. Military men from different kinds of troops and of different military ranks have noticeably grown in number. Anti-aircraft artillery and special “sound-locators” were installed. That device used in war-time looked like several pipe-sockets to reinforce the capacity of human ear: you could hear the boom of the advancing enemy planes and sound the air alert.
Moreover, the city perimeter was guarded by numerous barrage balloons connected by metal gauze raised as high as several meters above the earth and intended to protect from the low altitude bombers that aimed at vital municipal and industrial objects.
Those days Voronezh was one of the largest and perhaps the major aircraft construction city in the country.
The city was getting ready for defense. The able-bodied population built trenches and anti-tank barriers, squads of elders and women “volunteers” were organized to help army. And soon the bombing got under way.
Watching the rapid approach of the front people felt – the city was doomed. Amidst us, the refugees (Jews for the most part), who lived in the immediate vicinity of Voronezh panic started to aggravate slowly. “What shall we do?” We had among us several elderly or unfit to be enlisted men. It was them who organized the “managing” initiative group – “onwards and as far as possible!” It was them who called, “it needs moving!” Eternal Russian questions: what to do? What to start from? And the like Jewish questions: to go, not to go, where to go, what for, and how to go? But still – to go!
I can’t help mentioning, as a joke, that the same appeal was heard several decades later when thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union, and after its collapse – from its former constituent republics - have started out, but this time they were heading for Israel, America, Australia.
What is the most paradoxical – to that same Germany from which had fled in horror in nineteen forty first. And in this way the circle I have found myself in is now closed.
The “it needs moving!” appeal must have been recurrent since the historical exodus from Egypt, and there are periods when it makes the restless, often oppressed, humiliated, and persecuted Jewry move into the unknown. As far as possible from calamity as they imagine… But is there a place without it?
I wonder if (God forbid) “something” will take place in America – where to its Jews will go? Returning back to Russia can’t be excluded, the same way as China is out of question. Though…? Inscrutable are the ways of God our Lord!
The above initiative group acted promptly: about the same people in a body gathered their belongings and left Voronezh for the east. Our exit was legally sanctioned.
Now we were moving to the “Volga Region Germans” Autonomous Republic existing those days, to its Gryazi station, to be “settled temporarily”.
As it became known later, ethnic Germans were deported therefrom in 1941. Stamped “hostile-minded anti-Soviet nation”, they were taken to the Siberian and Far East concentration camps.
We were leaving Voronezh land where we had paused to gain breath. Recollecting that time to-day I cannot but express my gratitude to it.
People expecting the echelons were gathered at the station. They were abundant. All waited for the echelons to be made up.
The station waiting-rooms could not host all of us, so the railroad station neighborhood was packed with refugees. My mother and I managed to squeeze ourselves into that human mass which occupied the floors in the station building. We spent several fearful days and nights there.
By that time Voronezh already was within the front action zone. It was bombarded every night. If it were cloudy days the raids were continued, the sky staying free from planes only on sunny days. The German command was methodical and careful. They never used aviation on clear days fearing great loss of aircraft and pilots due to good visibility and intense anti-aircraft artillery defense of the city. Soviet aircraft in the skies over the city were as if absent. I have never seen dog-fights there. The barrage balloons hovering around the city were put down in the morning.
It was only on cloudless days that mother could make her way through the city to get some provision. The suitcase with foods packed to sustain us in our travel was stolen at the railway station just in the first days of our staying there.
The most awful were the night bombardments: the city was muffled up in darkness (for the sake of camouflage), and the bomb shelter could not been even imagined for it was not intended for that multitude of people from the railway station. The city defense ceased resisting, and the end was at hand. We were sitting amidst darkness listening to the roar of the bursting bombs and waiting for our death to come.
We were lucky, however: one of the days of hopeless waiting was crowned with an incoming echelon. We were allotted a freight car with plank-beds which we made cram-full.
A steam-engine was attached and we were taken away from war. As far as possible from bombing, from permanent fear of missing time to leave, of being involved into that massacre, of horror and death waiting for us all. We got out of a hell, we are lucky! We did not worry about the future, we were not scared by inconveniences and the unknown. We are alive – and only this matters.

                ON THE WAY TO SIBERIA

Leaving Voronezh our train was bombarded. It pulled up short, shouts and shooting were heard. Panic-stricken people rushed out of the cars and scattered across the fields. Two or three German planes were soaring over firing from machine-guns. It lasted less than few minutes.
It is beyond my powers to convey a feeling of death nearing you, your seeming state of being killed. Some people were killed just beside me. My mother, her eyes widened frantically, was hauling me somewhere with her arm. In her other arm she was dragging a suitcase. Recollecting that senseless rescue of the suitcase some time later we made jokes and laughed (very “funny” it was for us!)
Those dreadful minutes have etched the smell of death into my memory forever. My life was rather rich in evidencing different death patterns rather closely. Memory does go blunt at times losing its physical poignancy. But when a human being is perishing besides you with his body torn asunder into a bleeding formless mass, and the like – you’ll never forget it.
In a little while after the fire people regained conscience. We were fortunate to have only few victims. There was a hospital-car in our echelon, and the wounded were given help. Everybody occupied their places. The train started.
Our car, our “wheeled home” attached to the like ones hosted about fifty persons.
Metal stove occupied its center. Summer was almost gone, autumn was coming. The stove was akin to a pre-war comfort and at the same time it was related somehow to life of the Stone Age cave-dwellers – the fortunate holders of fire. Leaving aside that salvatory metal stove, people themselves, and their squalid belongings there was nothing else in the car.  Neither blankets, nor sheets, or pillows. All of us were clad rather lightly, without winter wear.
Everyday trivialities of human life turned out quite a conundrum. No wash-stands – well, one can survive without being washed. But how you can pass without lavatories?
The train was sure to stop at stations, junctions, flag stations. People rushed from the rather high-floor cars having no steps or ladders. There was mutual help in trying to land safely and get back. As trousers were not women’s wear those days one wouldn’t call the sight aesthetic.
People “squatted down” under the cars, beside the cars, amid the cars – where one could find a place, men next to women. No shame, you bet! You had to hurry. The train could start any moment. Those especially modest who went far under the cars ran risks. A woman under the neighboring car was overridden by a starting train. I remember wildly, hysterically hauling people who have seen that.
Considering that both eastward and westward lots of echelons without lavatories were travelling their traces at railway stations looked like a dense carpet of human waste.
When an echelon was stopped at the remote side-tracks of significant stations it was an ordeal to make one’s way across those “minefields” (as the foul railroad neighborhood was called).
But it was a vital necessity to make that way, basically to find water. We had no buckets. People streaming to some single water distributing bib-cock fell to blows with each other for getting a place to fill their kettle, bottle, or can.
Lice were the eternal companions of the frowsy human clot. Overcrowding, tight nearness of sleeping without underwear change favored their phenomenal multiplying. The chance to be saved of them was null. They tortured immensely, especially kids were harmed.
At significant stations, however, in order to avert danger of disastrous epidemic outbreaks all underwent the so-called “sanitizing”. The echelon was taken to a side-track. Its inhabitants were herded in the sanitary inspection premises consisting of three rooms: cloakroom, bathroom, and clothing room. Those to be treated (men and women in turns) in groups of forty-fifty persons heaped their clothes on the cloakroom floor – all together: overcoat, underwear, stockings, socks, underpants, shorts – and entered a bathroom where a wash lasted twenty five – thirty minutes. During this time their clothes were loaded into the metal wash-tubs and driven off for thermal treatment where they were steamed thoroughly with high-temperature steam. When we entered the clothing room after bathing we stumbled on a heap of the “well-done”, damp, and reeking clothes.
Where are you, the great antique and modern artists, creators of outstanding pictures and photos! Just imagine a scene of 1941 autumn: several dozen naked women digging in the dump in search of his clothing– isn’t it a subject for the outstanding war piece!
And another quite simple everyday problem. The cars were not lit. Neither lamps, nor lanterns, or candles – and besides, where should they have come from? In the daytime it was at least a little lighter. Two tiny windows and half-open door could not let the sufficient light in. The car was shaded. But this was rather bearable yet. The eyes got accustomed and light deficiency could be tolerated. But with the onset of night we had to stay in complete darkness until morning. What we were doing? Simply were laying on our plank-beds tightly pressed against each other and blindly touch-hit the lice. It is quite possible when the lice make dwelling nests in your clothes. Women were talking, talking, talking, or squabbled.
We were happy with only one achievement of mankind present in our wheeled “home”. Due to our stove we did not feel cold. We could get warm, boil a kettle, or even cook a pot of frozen potatoes.
The stove fire was on all the time. For that purpose we used to steal coal from coal rucks on the station tracks meant for the locomotive fire-boxes. It was a dangerous thing. The coal used to be guarded by the armed sentry.
I don’t remember exactly, but judging from the dates of Voronezh campaign we had left it in the late August 1941, and information about the Germans defeat near Moscow caught us somewhere on the way in Western Siberia where weather was awful cold then.
Of special concern on our endless (as we thought) way to the unknown destination was worry about our daily bread.
As scarce foods drawn from Mikhailovka have come to their end (I have mentioned elsewhere that above all our suitcase with food was stolen), and our small money got devaluated, we found ourselves starving. You could buy nothing at the stations even if you had some money – the shop shelves were empty. At the station farmer markets and at the car doors whereto the local market women came running, the most vital foods – bread, cereals, and vegetables – were priced beyond one’s imagination.
The so-called “natural barter” became very popular soon. Food was changed for things – garments, valuables, gold and silver trappings. The major barter products were bread and potatoes. A bucket of potatoes could have been exchanged for a gold ring. And it did was exchanged – and what else was left to be done?
Am I to move the reader to pity with my memories of crying hungry children, of women’s legs swollen from hunger, of elders’ hungry faints? I don’t think so. Those who never knew what real hunger was are unlikely to understand.
But with all that we, the refugees, at union stations were still given help within powers of local residents. How else we could have survived? Foodstuffs distribution offices were organized where we could, overcoming great difficulties (lack of information, endless queues, muddle, submitting legal papers on every occasion, etc.), receive bread and other foods to sustain us against starving.
To receive that payok* a passport had to be presented whereto a special note was inscribed to exclude duplication. Its major product still was potatoes. Ration, water, fuel, and lavatory problems had in their trail other negative effects. Primarily it was risk to miss the train. Examples were abundant when people in their search of food, water, or lavatory could not find their echelon after returning back. Considering total lack of any information on the echelon destination or its route, it caused months-long ordeal, attempts to find those of kin, and to human tragedies sometimes.
I am unable to recollect exactly to-day but our forced journey took many weeks, no less than two or two and a half months anyway. Sometimes train departed soon after arrival, but now and then it could stay detained for several days. Train schedule was related to many reasons beyond our competence, the overladen single track of the Trans-Siberia Railroad leading from West to East included. At every short or long railway span the trains had to stop waiting for the approaching ones. These stops took hours. Westward directed troop trains had undeniable advantage of course.
With all those adversities, however, we were disturbed by lack of information. We knew nothing about the fates of our kin, about the front, or our country, or the world developments. Scarce information could be got from a chance three-four-days-old newspaper, from radio at some station, but mostly from intercourse with counter-train soldiers and other echelons inmates. What was passed by way of mouth to each other? Thus rumors accumulated: the most diverse – bad and good, hopeful and disillusioning, truthful and false.
I remember our joy when having got a newspaper somewhere we read about the Germans rout near Moscow. I remember both our pain and admiration when reading
And re-reading the handed over from car to car articles of Ilya Ehrenburg, a popular writer those days.
While moving meanwhile along the bridge connecting Saratov and Engels cities we have crossed Volga River and passed by that same Gryzi station in the Volga Region Germans Autonomous Republic whereto we were destined according to our papers.
That fact was of no significance though; we were lost in the mess of echelons, cars, and people going from everywhere to nowhere.
Those living conditions could not but tell on the human health. But what was most strange – we had neither of “traditional” sicknesses such as grippe, tonsillitis, flu. Infectious diseases occurred, but we were lucky not to have them epidemic.
Those who are not in the know of our country those days, those who were born much later than the war end are sure to be interested after having read the above: how one could live in that environment? But nevertheless, we did survived.
Our echelon was moving slowly to the East, and we had absolutely no idea when that journey would end. Surely it could not be eternal?
I may seem drawing an over-ugly picture, laying it on thick. Of course not, I simply try to give a trustworthy account of the atmosphere those days, events chronology without subtilizing both my own feelings and emotional experience, as well as psychology of people who found themselves in the unbearable living conditions.
We passed by Uralsk, Orenburg. At last we appeared at Orsk where the weather kept intensely frosty. Without winter overcoats, hats, gloves, and what is crucial – footwear – we seemed to be doomed. But the survival fight was still on: we bandaged our arms and legs with some rags, newspapers.
Our nutrition was mostly frozen potatoes. I had only summer footwear. My feet were frostbitten what makes itself felt to this day.
We have already guessed that in accordance with elementary geography we had only one route left for us – further on into Siberia. It was doubtless. And here His Majesty Chance has played one of its rather rare kind tricks on us. We have already noticed the station trackmen informing the echelon master about something after they had tap-inspected the wheels of our car. Nobody knew what was said.
But once, while in Orsk, our populated car was uncoupled and driven to the station dead end. We spent several days in complete ignorance, and nobody could explain clearly what was awaiting us ahead and what we were to do. Being a part of the echelon before that, the authorities had to deal with our progressive movement, if only through necessity of releasing the tracks for other trains; but now we stopped being a nuisance and nobody was interested in our fates.

                THE ROUTE IS CHANGED

It was not until the inhabitants of our car started making a fearful fuss in the offices of the Orsk station threatening with complaints to “Stalin himself” that the repair men appeared at our car. The changed something in it, something was repaired under it… Several days more passed. And then one day an elderly station worker looked into our unfortunate car.

“Hey, you ought not to go to Siberia. You’ll perish there! Would you like to the South, to warmth?” “We do!” was the mutual uproar of our miserable car inhabitants seeming to breathe out their last. He rushed out once more. Sometime after he returned followed by a man in a red service cap (controller to all appearance) who ordered the pusher to hook our car, and… couple it to the southward echelon!
And in this way, owing to a plain worker, our route was changed, and our further fate together with it. The train was moving southward. Again – a span, a stop, approaches train, moving restart… Days and nights. Hunger, despair, obscurity. But well, there is indeed Aktyubinsk already, warmer, warmer… still warmer… Kyzyl-Orda…
At a station amid Golodnaya [Hungry] Steppe one morning we saw a camel Cade and natives in the striped robes who were gazing at us.
Central Asia! Aral Sea (it existed still those years). Fish, fish, fish! We stuffed ourselves with fish. Amu-Darya! We recollected the school geography textbook! The faces of our car fellow travelers softened. Fruits, vegetables! And abundance of all that!
Kindhearted local residents regaled us with refreshments puzzled by the “miracle” in freight cars brought to them and mumbled something in their undecipherable language.
Clear blue sky, night stars! No shooting, no bombing, no aircraft hum overhead! Electric light at the stations! The windows are not pasted over with paper and newspapers! No sirens wailing! It seemed unreal!
And at last – the long-expected city that has taken its stand as an evacuation legendary, informal capital, and its symbol – Tashkent!
Arrival to Tashkent was anticipated to be the end of our long-suffering epic. But somewhere, someone (can’t it be the unforgettable Moses pointing finger?) must have been “managing and distributing”. And we, who were eagerly anticipating the order to unload, were driven further, to another “promised land”.
The railroad part of that evacuation “exodus” soon came to its end. After a while we alit at last from our car to solid earth in one of the Uzbekistan administrative centers – Namangan. As if from aboard the ship after the stormy gale.

                WE ARE THE NEW ASIANS

We did not stay too long at the square neighboring the  Namangan railway station. The weather was rather chilly. Several hundreds of people in the square were soon distributed without going into details as to their profession, or skills, or age. “Sorting” was quick.
Our group of about the same number as in the car was prescribed to live, and work, and wait for the war end (those who would survive) in a  Djida-Kapa kishlak (Uzbek village).
Soon a transport from that kishlak arrived. It was arba – the sole vehicle for transportation of weights and often (as was with us) people also. Arba was a large wheelbarrow with two shafts and two wheels of up to 2 meters in diameter and a platform for load. Between the shafts a horse was harnessed carrying a wooden saddle on its back occupied by a “driver”. A smaller arba was drawn by a donkey; its back was also saddled. The wheels height made impassable mud and bad weather negligible.
There were no cars in that vicinity, and Russian-style carts were unknown.
I would like to mention that Uzbekistan of those days had still another carrier – rather exotic and purely Asiatic – a camel. Neither arba, nor cart were needed, the camels were simply burdened. And a superior carrier it was: low fuel consumption (pasturage – camel’s thorn); self-sufficiency (for days without food); high cross-country ability (long, high legs – moves across any road, impassable ones included); “super cross-country carrier” – in conception of that long past Uzbek reality.
After dozen and a half miles along the narrow clayey country-road were left behind our “caravan”* has arrived into… medieval times as we perceive them in our conscience.
That Djida-Kapa big Uzbek kishlak had a kolkhoz* where we were to stay, work, and… remember it all our lives long.
I am asked from time to time, “Efim, how you can bear remembering all that?” And I answer, “To forget – that’s what I can’t”.
Djida-Kapa kishkak was a big one. Five kolkhozes occupied its territory. Their management offices were in the neighboring buildings in the center. Just there the nearest to them wasteland overgrown with weeds was adorned with five identical Stalin sculptures.
Five kolkhozes – five sculptures. About two and a half meters each. Those sculptured cement-cast Stalin’s were almost shouldering each other “looking” at the goats and sheep grazing around and at one another.
Who can remember to-day that the like sculptures of the “great leader for all times and people, our own father and teacher” during his life-time numbered hundreds of thousands throughout the country?
I remember how those sculptures were eliminated after the Stalin’s death and disclosure of his cult. Many of them were thrown into the pits dug nearby, and committed to earth. I imagine the puzzled archeologists of the future who have dug out at the territory of ancient Russia stretching on both sides of the Ural Mountains those innumerable man-made idols – graven images of a moustache man!
“Medieval” term was used purposefully. It is impossible to otherwise describe the mode of living, culture, morals and manners, customs, implements of production, methods of cultivation we have seen. It was another civilization, absolutely unfamiliar for us, although it was presumed to be a Soviet socialist one, wherein we had to learn how to live.
As for socialism, well, as we soon understood it was native, local one with almost undetectable changes in the executive powers originating from long before the 1917 revolution. Anyhow, the dekhkanes – Uzbek farmers – perceived it as unchanged.
The kolkhoz chairman appointed “from above” against being elected properly from their midst was taken for the former bay – a landlord. His “courtiers” forcibly urged people to work. The workers were not paid.
We, the evacuated, were treated in a little bit different way than the native farmers - guardedly. The local authorities were na;ve to regard us as being sent by Stalin’s – a “celestial” - personal instructions, and we were not to be treated as the local natives; at the beginning we were not forced to work: there was understanding that worn-out and starved women and children could not be of great help.
   When we started to work later on we were given rice soup with flat bread (johnnycake) during lunch break directly in the fields. On “happy” days the “good” foreman could provide us with even one and a half flat bread. And it was the sole remuneration of our labor.
But all this was still ahead. And just now we were driven to some incomprehensible structure. It turned to be a cotton drying room.
We occupied a large room adjacent to it, the forty square meters of which had become our home. Waiting for our arrival, several dozens of metal cots not exceeding a meter and a half-length each were installed. Earthen floor. Wood-burning stove. Our living accommodation was in semi-basement, with two glazed windows below ground level. It was always dark owing to the heaps of cotton covering the windows outside. No water supply, no lavatory, not to speak of electric light - a sort of science fiction.
The sleeping places were assigned quickly. Three in a row, the beds were pushed together across. A sort of separate “family” compartments appeared. The kolkhoz officials gave us a little flour, rice, kerosene.
We were favored by the kishlak residents who presented some household utilities to us – buckets, crockery, and kerosene lamp. We were happy and did not grumble. We couldn’t wait to start human living at last. To be short, a perforce “commune” was organized.
The military men spouses started receiving money according to the attested certificates (a part of a front-line husband wages if he was alive and not in captivity). Something else could be bought for that money, although at a fabulous price.
My mother and I were a separate family. There were only two of us. No army men in our family, father having passed before the war started. Thus, we obtained neither money, nor provisions. What was our food then? From time to time two or three kilograms of flour or rice were apportioned.
I give the military men wives their due who received bread payok* for their families. Distributing bread between their family members and catching my hungry eyes they used to cut off a tiny slice for me too. And such was my nutrition at the beginning, until I started working.
We barely survived the 1941-42 winters. South as it was, but still it was a cold winter. No help could be expected from anywhere. The local residents starved, and we starved. The typhoid and other diseases became more commonplace.
That winter was marked by a young woman’s death of typhoid, which has orphaned her two kids. We watched a four-year-old girl die of dysentery. I pity to note it being no stress to anybody. People became hardened and blunt under the circumstances, with the feeling of doom prevailing over their own existence.
Kolkhoz used to provide us with turnips and fodder beet. But you had to know the way to boil it to become edible. With single small stove and without fuel, with so many people around it presented rather a problem.
And suddenly a”criminal” decision dawned upon us. Both windows of our room were completely blocked by cotton heaps from outside. And we made up our minds. Taking out a piece of window glass, we started fishing out cotton to use it as a fuel.
It is unimaginable what we could have undergone if it became known. The most
Likely version was the NKVD* – state structure for guarding public order and law in USSR  (and they were everywhere, in any smallest god-forsaken place of the enormous country) considering it to be an act of state sabotage, subversive activity, embezzlement at best. But we were preoccupied with one and the only thing:
Never to lose that inexhaustible fuel source.
Raw cotton burns badly, it smolders. But we managed to warm ourselves, to prepare our plain brew of turnip, fodder beet, bran, and even some rice. We used to get it from time to time.
Mornings through evenings food was prepared in turns. Boys and girls of upper age were sitting around the stove controlling the process and informing the adults,  “steaming already”. And oh, the joy of it: “boiling!”
War was war of course. Sentry – patrol were posted. They were watching the outside in order to give an advance notice about the unwanted visitors because nobody had to see what we were burning in our stove.
I have mentioned elsewhere that it seemed to be medieval times. Having to face it against our will we behaved accordingly.
Neither kerosene for lamps, nor candles – and even to that we have adapted. In the midst of our commune a folk handyman and sage teacher was found.
We had an elderly woman among us who had spent her whole life in a god-forsaken village and was village-life-wise. She taught us how to find edible growth, medicinal herbs. She enabled us to light our room in the evenings, if only to a small extent. It was very simple: you had to split into thin strips the wooden planks from the broken old boxes. Days were spent in preparing the required quantity of those dried pine planks. In the evening, with growing darkness, somebody – the boys were about to fight for the right to do that – started that solemn performance. With a match fire was set to the first plank, the next got fire from the first, and so on, and so forth. A plank was on fire for few minutes, illuminating the room.
The same old woman has personally planed a special element and taught how to make threads. Cotton provided raw material. And it was abundant. To knit those threads into sweaters, jackets, socks, shawls – was a routine business.
In the dim, flickering light of burning planks the women spent their evenings in incessant knitting, and sang melancholy Ukrainian songs.
We did not need water – it was plenty. The system of irrigation ditches, aryks, served an uninterrupted “water-supply”, unrestricted and damage-free.
Aryks – the artificial irrigation ditches with irrigation water, whether broad or narrow, deep or shallow – went along the sides of the streets passing through industrial premises, stock-raising farms, collective-farm (kolkhoz) fields, the peasant farmsteads and vegetable gardens.
Aryks became the single water-supply source. We took water therefrom to drink and to prepare food. In the aryks we washed laundry, washed ourselves, bathed. It was true handy! You are thirsty – come up to aryk at any place, stoop over, palm up some water and quench your thirst. A little upstream just in that aryk children bathe (and urinate). And further upstream the diapers are washed. No one is surprised and going to complain – everything is as it should be. And how could it be otherwise? It is a habitual life for the Uzbeks, and now we lived the same way.
I evidenced a scene once when an obvious consumptive was spitting blood into aryk from which a man downstream was drinking water scooped with his hands.
Sometimes the unique potential of human brain to remember some insignificant, negligible incidents of many decades ago stuns me. Just in aryk connection a funny episode remained in my memory. Though it depends…
I was sitting in a tree in somebody’s orchard stuffing my bosom with apricots. Quite a trivial pursuit of a hungry boy. It was an early morning. The proprietor’s house is in the immediate vicinity. Some noise is heard out of doors from under the mosquito-protective gauze bed curtain.
I was about to finish my hasty work, climbing down and running away. But suddenly  from under the curtain a naked Uzbek emerged and headed to aryk – just to the one over which I was sitting three or four meters high in the tree.
Without noticing me he started washing his privy parts. He was not bothered by thought that someone might be drinking water from that aryk downstream, but I was horrified by imagining what would await me if he caught me. I was lucky to escape safely.
It needs to be mentioned that the natives became less sympathetic to the refugees since our arrival due to their increased number. Vivid manifestation  of the changes became especially evident  when an orphanage had arrived into the kishlak.
Three 17-year-old lads from Odessa have appeared once at our place. Their tales of how they had managed that way without parents, relatives, or simple acquaintances now escape my memory. They must have missed their train, or found themselves lost in the turmoil and mess of the war. They were good boys. Judging from their behavior and speech manner – from cultured families. They had nothing with them – neither food, nor clothes – except for those on them.
The kolkhoz has clad them in the identical striped wadded trousers and jackets. They looked like twins. They slept where could find place, ate what they managed to get or steal. What else could they do? Sometimes they visited us. Ever smiling, witty – pure Odessites, never desponding, with jokes and humorous tales; they were interesting for us.
Soon one of them was killed. Hacked to death with an axe. I guess he penetrated into somebody’s orchard or vegetable garden. A regional inspector came who used to walk around the kishlak carrying the blooded axe. But he did not manage to find either the owner of the axe, or the killer.
I’ll tell what happened to another one. Once we were loading the cotton that was stored in open air. The collected cotton is stored in rectangular stacks four or five meters high. The stack base is provided with through, rather spacious ventilation tunnels.
An unpleasant smell spread soon. It became more and stronger as we unloaded one of those stacks. At last we stumbled over its source – it was a decomposed corpse of another Odessite. They were known to have their nightly lodging in those tunnels – they were warm and comfortable there. He must have been covered by that tons-heavy cotton heap. Or he might have been killed too, and hidden. The officials were not disturbed by the fact. And still there was none to worry about the passed Russian waif.
The third Odessite moved to our drying room and became for a while as if a part of “his own family”. When he reached eighteen years we saw him to the army ranks.
Finding ourselves in a far-off uncivilized kishlak, we had no access to the outer world. There was neither post-office, nor telephone, nor radio. They had only a post-office manager who used a donkey-harnessed cart to go at regular intervals to a regional center – Uychi settlement. He received newspapers, mail – all that was distributed among the postmen who delivered it to the addresses. One of those postmen I have become later on.
One can certainly understand the families that were not aware of their front-line soldier addresses, as well as those soldiers themselves who did not know where their families were. Year of 1942 was the toughest in this respect. My mother and I were also in the dark as to whereabouts of our relatives. Later on communication between people scattered across that enormous country was put right: a special center was established – the state information bureau in Buguruslan city where information was gathered. Mother sent a request and soon we got the address of our close relatives who were evacuated from Chernigov. They lived in Naryn (Kirgiz Republic). It was an invaluable moral support for my mother to have a chance for communicating with them. But they also were ignorant as to the fate of her parents. Their tragedy was not disclosed until 1944 when Yampol, the town of their residence, was liberated.
What was going on in the world, and in the fronts, which was of the utmost interest, we could get to know from the national Russian newspapers “Pravda” and “Izvestiya (News)” that were very late in reaching us. Arrival of those newspapers was taken as a little holiday and more so if along with the front-line news they contained Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles and poems by Konstantin Simonov (a popular war-time lyric poet).
Those days were rich in different problems, quite unexpected sometimes. It could be a panic fear we had to go through, or even personal safety issue. A group of unprotected and mostly young women living in one place inspired “morbid” interest in the local “Don Juans” [philanderers]. Under pretty well doze of wine they approached our abode at daytime at first – “delicately” and sometimes at nights, far gone in intoxication they tried to enter by force, with curses and threats. Panic-stricken women locked themselves and withstood the “siege” by drawing the table up to the door and backing it up.
They feared to leave the room at nights, and there was a bucket suitable for the lavatorial needs.
Nobody was there to complain to. No police in the kishlak. When the kolkhoz chairman was addressed he simply shrug his shoulders being unable to understand what he was asked. What is more, we did not know Uzbek language and had to convey our request into pantomime.
Lack of language, inability to understand a great deal of what was said, and failure to clearly formulate a request or complaint have merged into a grave problem of our Uzbekistan life.
Those who found themselves in Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, Namangan, and even small townships had easier life. Russian language was understood however by many Uzbeks there. But in kishlak you could not find one speaking or understanding Russian. At the same time subsistence was more easily got there. Especially since we learned the Uzbek language. Within the prime necessity at first, and better and better with years. And we, the boys, at all times mixing with local kids, were quick to grasp it first. 1941 through 1945 when I lived in Uzbekistan I have become rather fluent in the Uzbek language. And later on it was still on my memory. Youth acquisitions stay with one forever.
I still have a perfect command of the Ukrainian language, being my native since childhood.
In winter 1942 my mother has caught jaundice. She needed to be hospitalized urgently. There was a “hospital” in the kishlak – a unit with a doctor and two or three women – nurses and nurse aids – and a carter.
The doctor came, examined the patient and promised to take her to the hospital, for which purpose transport was to be sent. Soon “ambulance” has arrived: it was a narrow four-wheeled cart drawn by a horse.
The carter put my mother into the cart with my assistance and treating me without excessive consideration turned me out: no big shot, after all, so pad the hoof, “no peace through you, I wanna you better peg out at home”.
Still more difficult times have come; I had to take care both of myself and my mother now. The hospital nutrition was insufficient of course, and medical treatment was below all standards.
Hospital was a long way off, and to reach it one had to get across an old large cemetery bordering with it (true handy!). Leaving the hospital once and crossing the cemetery I got trapped in the old burial place. According to Muslim custom, a grave with the deceased wrapped in a sheet is shielded with logs and earth over them. The logs got rotten, and I fell through getting rather an unpleasant experience.
However, all this has also faded away, and mother recovered, and life was going on.
My mother, by the way, in 1942 was thirty – only 17 years older than me, bore her age well, and was taken for my elder sister.
It is an uneasy task to name all hardships we had to overcome in Uzbekistan due to its specific climate. High temperature (heat up to 400C and more), abundant water-retaining places (rivers, canals, aryks, and water-saturated rice fields) presented favorable conditions for diverse living creatures: snakes, poisonous included; tarantulas; scorpions; centipedes, and other creepers inhabited dry land, water, and human abodes.
During the hours of darkness the air was thick with shrill ringing of the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. The local residents spent nights in special gnat-protecting gauze tents, it was hot and stuffy inside but it was a sole protection. We took the bloomers the Uzbek women used to wear to be a fashion style, but after our women have got their legs covered with gnat-bite sores and scabs they started wearing those baggy trousers too. 
The ceilings in their houses were wooden beams rolled tightly together; hosts of malignant insects used to nest there. Those “neighbors” made me suffer once: in my sleep I felt a sudden pain in my right arm. Under the light we saw a big, perennial (according to his many-sectioned tail) greenish-yellow scorpion, the one that had stung my arm. It surely was “lacerated”, and I had a terrible pain in my shoulder joint all night long. An Uzbek woman, our neighbor, has spread some antidote ointment over the wound:  cotton oil mixed with scorpion poison. We were scared to death because all that took place in May when the scorpion bite, particularly if it was an old one, was the most dangerous. But by the morning I got better and survived.
Winter of 1942 meanwhile was coming to its end. We were moved to another communal lodging – a big room in one of the buildings at the kolkhoz farmstead. New furniture appeared: the Uzbek four-square wooden divans, more comfortable compared to the previous sleeping places. Windows were not shaded, and we had light in day-time.
And day after day through the windows we could watch one of the Uzbek mounted division unit soldiers instructed and trained before being sent to a front-line. Our intercourse with the soldiers was an unbelievable mix of gestures and Russian-Uzbek languages. Besides, they frequently helped us with foods.
By that year spring hunger has become dominating, the kolkhoz storehouses were empty, local population was starved, provisions came to their end or were tax-delivered to the state; and a novel was still far ahead. Situation was much worse in towns. Sometimes I had to visit Namangan; the sight of the starved, barely moving, and mostly simply lying at the street side’s people was terrifying.

                NO WORK – NO FOOD

After several months in the Uzbek kishlak we got accustomed, took our bearings, mastered the language to some extent, got acclimatized, and - if it were not for the damned hunger!!! – understood that it was the place where one could live. And as if grasping it, the kolkhoz officials set all able-bodied members of our commune to socially useful labor: stop arsing around, we are short of workers. Which fact was actually indisputable?
I was 13 by that time and with a good reason was regarded able-bodied. A material remuneration was promised: a wheat johnnycake – daily. We were organized in a team and given a foreman – young tuberculosis-sick Uzbek left unenlisted due to his illness; a small arba was provided pulled by a donkey, and work was  allotted.
The work inferred removal of dung from the farmsteads with cows to fertilize the fields. Our fifteen-or-sixteen-strong women and teenagers team armed with spades and hand-barrows used to move along the streets, the foreman inquired if any dung was available, and we took the contents of the flea-pits outside, to the cart pulled by a donkey. At noon the foremen brought hot johnnycakes, and even the most exquisite food could not stand the comparison with their taste.
I am at a loss recollecting all diverse and numerous works I had to fulfill in the kishlak those years.
One may assume the to-day’s agricultural methods and tools to be not the same, but then we were simply stunned to come across the Middle Ages. Manual farming was specific for most of the land, it was hoed.
Wooden plough, an attribute of olden times from the school textbooks was still widely used. The plough was dragged either by a man-driven horse or cow.
Rice cultivation was the most labor-intensive and killing. After digging up a field it was water-flooded, and rice was planted into a half-meter deep water. With sprouts above the water, two weedings were needed when you had to stoop under the burning sun to dig out the weeds trying to hand-extract them with their roots. Water was infested with diverse “stinging” insects and snakes.
Unaccustomed to that kind of work, our women had their legs and arms covered with sores and boils. Neither preventive, nor treatment means were existent. It was a painful hell of a job. But it had to be done, and the task had to be accomplished, and only then you could get a johnnycake with an added half (!) and thick rice soup, with horse-flesh sometimes, boiled in a large cauldron just on the spot.
And what a luxury it was to straighten the back in the awning shade, to nestle down and savor such “delicacies”!
The principal crop in Uzbekistan is cotton. Its significance can hardly be overstated, especially in war-time. It is not merely cotton fabric but also raw material for weapons-grade powder without which weapons become useless. Hence, cotton has become a strategic produce.
I had different occasions to experience all kinds of cotton tending and picking. Snapping was the acme of the cotton campaign: the work itself was not tiring but the imposed outturn figure was scaring: fifty kilos a day; it is enormous weight for dry cotton. For us, the refugees with no experience of the kind that quota was unrealizable, but we tried hard and notwithstanding all complications got our field dinner.
The snapped cotton was packed into the huge stacks right on the spot and stored in the open air where it could not stay for long: autumn was coming with its rains, and the cotton had to stay dry to be delivered to Namangan cotton-cleaning plants for further processing. Transportation became a problem.
All transportation means were used: horses, donkeys, even camels – but it was insufficient: thousands tons of cotton had to be delivered to their place of destination.
Military situation was tense; the second front was impatiently awaited to be opened in Europe by our allies America and Great Britain. Gun powder was a vital necessity for ammunition producing plants.
America appeared of considerable technical assistance then, in 1944: to help us meet a transportation issue the required number of “Studebaker” powerful trucks were delivered in rather intricate ways along with the several dozens of American instructors and Soviet military units manned with soldiers – the drivers.
After a short training period the Americans left, and the plants were regularly supplied with cotton brought by “Studebakers” driven by Russian soldiers.
But the problem still remained open: the plants were in need of manpower, and majority of men were at the front. Yet that issue was quickly settled by a “sage” Josef Stalin known never to have problems with slaves.
Uzbekistan, like the rest of the country those years, had abundant local “people’s enemies” repressed for different “crimes” invented by Soviet powers.  Why drag them along all that long way to Siberian camps if they could be of use right where they were! The cotton-cleaning plants were promptly barbed-wired, watch-boxes were provided in all corners, primitive dwellings were constructed (no Siberia really – warmth!), and the plants obtained free manpower.
Those “zones” within the city limits encouraged the convict relatives to communicate with them over the barbed wire, to throw bread inside. I have watched once how it was: we had an Uzbek acquaintance whose brother was accused of “jabbering”: he put the German small arms above the Soviet – well, and a prison term he got “for spreading hostile propaganda”. Now brothers could communicate only through the barbed wire and… were careful about their words.
Besides its intended application cotton is of great help in the local residents’ domestic existence: after snapping the stems are cut out and delivered to homes to become the principal fuel. Much later, when mother was working at the kolkhoz managing office, she could use temporarily a donkey with a small arba. Perched in its saddle I took home the required fuel.
Those who will read these memoirs are likely to criticize me for the excessively detailed picture of my environment; both nature and technology of jobs I had to do; description of certain people; everyday life, morals and manners of the whole nation. They may be right. But it was my habitat: it got changed from time to time making me adapt to it and resisting all my attempts to modify it.
There were several instances when I found myself at the life’s cross-roads having to start all over again which often caused irretrievable effects. But all that was yet ahead of me being only thirteen then. And I describe atmosphere of my childhood when I lived and perceived the world through the prism of war, asperities, and hunger.
Severe summer of 1942 has come. Along with fighting the hunger our thoughts were occupied by the depressing news from the fronts. Not a day seemed to come without news of another surrendered city, of new destinations brought into action: Rostov, Kalinin, Stalingrad, and North Caucasus… And how much more they will number!
A lot of new refugees have joined us at the kishlak – from Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and Minsk. Many families found themselves scattered across the different regions of Russia, Middle Asia, and Siberia. But having even found their relatives, people could not join them: although the train service was available – I mean passenger trains, and not echelons – one had to acquire a special permit, all private travels between the cities were prohibited.
It was that summer when a prominent event has occurred in our kishlak. A large orphanage was established in Djida-Kapa for several hundreds of so-called “war children” – the orphaned ones, lost during journeys, or abandoned by parents. A lot of the repressed “people’s enemies” children were among them. Those teenagers (mainly 10-14 years old) have become a permanent headache for the kishlak residents. Undernourished at the orphanage, they hunted the kishlak, homesteads, gardens, and orchards looking for food.
The most important for us, evacuated Russian-speaking children, was a seven-year Russian school established owing to the orphanage presence.
I have missed the previous year, but that autumn could start my sixth grade. New acquaintances appeared, new friends, the boys like me.
But we didn’t play games – we had to procure food to supplement our meager living. We have tackled the problem in our own way bagging fruits from the private orchards. Setting out on our “hunt” we took the prefabricated hook-end long sticks with us. We climbed over the orchard-enclosing wall or a tree and cleared branches of the fruits which were hidden under the shirts and stuffed into the pockets. Surely we ran hazards. We could be beaten black and blue or even got maimed by the embittered orchard owners. But our hunger prevailed and besides, we wanted to treat our moms to fruits.
But above all was fishing in which I was instructed by one of my friends.  I have mentioned elsewhere that water reservoirs were abundant in that neighborhood: canals, lakes, significant aryks and deep Syr Daria River of course; all those full to the brim with fish. Early in the morning we went to the selected place, cast our primitive fishing-rods and watched the bob; and it was such a pleasure to observe its movements when fish bited. That instance you had to be smart and fast: fish had to be timely yanked and pulled ashore – a cat-fish or a big sazan. Fish became an invaluable support for us – my mother and me – throughout all our undernourished years in Uzbekistan.
Every now and then, when catch was substantial mother scaled fish, salted a little and I went to the Namangan market to sell it; earnings were spent on bread and other foods.
The same year by the end of summer my mother, having mastered the Uzbek language more or less, has found a place at the management office due to her bookkeeping experience. Surely it was easier as against the field work.
Our commune has gradually dispersed, and owing to my mother whose work was appraised we were allotted a separate room at a house of an Uzbek woman with two children whose husband was at the front.
We furnished our dwelling: two beds, a little table, a couple of chairs. It was a palace compared to all our previous habitations. Glassless window with a shutter; walls with niches for household utensils; a stove. Earthen floor, as everyone had it, was matted.
Waking up one day in the absence of mother who was at work I heard rustling under the bed. I was terrified to spot a big snake puttering there. I jumped out of the window and fetched our landlady’s son, two years older than me. With unruffled calm he took the snake out assuring me it was not a poisonous one, but it took long until I could recover from the experienced horror.
On September first, 1942 I began the sixth grade of the Russian seven-year school after a year-and-a-half-break in studies. Certified teachers in all subjects were found among the refugees, or sent from Namangan.
And I have to stress once again: it was an extremely lean year; “attached” to the collective-farm (kolkhoz) refugees like us used to receive from time to time some food handouts, but the teachers had only wages insufficient to buy enough bread. With three or four hundred grams of bread a day they were always hungry and emaciated.
I recollect a Russian language and literature teacher, a Muscovite, an excellent teacher and very kind person. His looks were awful, it must have been the last stage of dystrophy, but he had to work, to give lessons and keep up discipline. And we (oh, that children’s cruelty!) behaved outrageously with impunity. Standing beside his back we aped him, with a drop under his nose and laughed when, weak as he was, he could not whisk it off. Soon he passed away from exhaustion and we felt pity recollecting him. Maybe because a new, more strict teacher has replaced him.
Once we were visited by a chemistry teacher. She asked my mother if perhaps her son needed help in preparing lessons. Mother was surprised by her visit, but when that lady openly asked if we had something to eat, everything clicked into place: her face got swollen from hunger. My mother fed her, gave some food to take along, and the teacher thanked and wept… of shame.
Everything was in need. Garments, footwear, medicine, kerosene. Salt was very difficult to get, frequently we went without it. A hundred grams of salt could be a present from a visitor.
Absence of matches was a separate problem: they simply disappeared from everyday use. We were unsuccessful in our attempts of striking fire from a flint like primeval people. But the decision was simple: we rolled up a handful of straw and roamed the kishlak looking for fire.
Walking along the street and knocking at the wicket-gates we asked, “Ut bar?” (any fire?). If hearth was on, that straw roll was taken in, laden with a couple of hot coals, and returned. To share fire was a sacred duty of anyone, and we never were refused. At home that smoulder turned into fire.
The long-expected new harvest time has at last come. The belly-pinched people seemed to be expecting nothing better than that event of their lives. Rice has formed ears, fields were drained of water, and rice was left to ripen under the baking Middle-Eastern sun. Then rice was hand-mown. Wheat kept almost abreast with it. It was mown in the like manner and bound into bundles.
All that harvest was taken to the special round plots of rammed earth. Grain was thrashed there. A wooden pole marked the center of the plot. A wooden shaft was fastened to it with five-seven belts pulled by cows and sometimes by horses. Rice or wheat bundles were arranged in a circle and… the process started.
We had only to hurry them up – and the boys, me included, eagerly did the job; the animals went circle after circle hoofing the crop to let grains out of the ears. Straw was taken away after that, and grain was fanned by up casting it with wooden shovels for the mild wind to blow husk away.
Well, and next was – “all to front, all to victory!” The whole harvest was to be delivered over to the state, and so it went. Grain loaded carts went to elevators and barns. Women, elders, teenagers, and the sick – all who had grown that crop received nothing. They survived without complaints owing to their gardens and to what they surely had to steal from the fields.
A certain amount of grain was left in the kolkhoz own barns for possible unforeseen needs which included providing us, the refugees without their own properties.
Garments or footwear presented about none special problems due to the warm climate. And did we really need much? Material made by the local weavers was available, and more so that we gradually have slipped into the Uzbek style. Men used to wear plain sackcloth shirts and formless white cotton trousers. At whichever season a striped cotton robe was worn over that, legs were thrust into sandals, in winter at the fields – into the boots. Women used to wear embroidered scull-caps, always wide and colorful dress, baggy pantaloons, and footwear – plimsolls. Women, young and unmarried in particular, undoubtedly tried to diversify that outfit varying material quality and coloration.
In my description of the Uzbek women’s outfit I cannot miss their mode of life and social standing, at least at the time of my stay. The majority of the married Uzbek women, whether they were rural or urban, had to hide their faces from men and wear paranja (yashmak) – thick black horse hair gauze. To have it fixed on the head they put a sort of a round bagel made of braid over it, thus covering their face and the upper body. Still over that they put a coat-resembling cape to hide the back of their whole stature.
After wedding the girls put paranja on and wore it throughout their lives. Only at home, in the absence of strangers they could do without it. Only the husband and those of nearest kin could see their faces. In order to escape wearing rather heavy paranja when going out into the street for a short stroll, she covered her head with a thick cloak and held it in her arms to shield herself from being ogled by men.
Wearing paranja was not related to oppression or absence of women’s civil rights by local residents. It was absolutely common and requisite even from the women’s viewpoint. And more to it, the Uzbek women disapproved our women for their open faces believing it was sinful and improper. I was extremely flattered watching women hide their faces from my eyes when I was only fourteen or fifteen. I felt myself a          he-man at those moments.
Limiting herself to a cape while in kishlak, a woman had to wear paranja going to the city.
That habit presented serious perplexity during war-time. The public centre of Namangan, like of any other settlement of the country those years, was market with its crowds of people. Deserters, i.e. men in hiding to escape conscription, wore paranja to mask themselves. Round-ups were involved from time to time to catch them.
Market was cordoned off by militiamen and military patrols. Only one exit was left passage-free – the gates where paranja was rudely torn down to see who was under it. All were panic-stricken, wild cries and yells rent the air, but the fugitives were sometimes caught in that manner. Their fates are sorrowful and inexorable. They were shot without trial. To punish them and intimidate the others.
Everyone knew what had happened in our kishlak. Two fugitives were found, taken to the fields, and shot.
Autumn of 1942 has come. Task-work in the fields was over, rice, wheat, vegetables, fruits, grapes were harvested, as well as the major product – cotton. Life became easier and more copious.
About this time “Uraza” was at its end – a month-long fast when one was allowed to eat only after sunset. The last day of “Uraza” is celebrated with inevitable festive pilaw. Kishlak comes to life, aroma of pilaw fills the air, kids deliver it in fine dishes to friends and relatives – very nice and strictly observed tradition. That rite is of no religious significance but might have religious origin.
As a matter of fact, exercising Moslem religious rites was not specific for the kishlak life with neither mosque, nor mullah.
Autumn was time for the flocks to return from the upland pastures where they have been grazing since spring. It was a truly absorbing sight: a column of animals dragging down from the Tien-Shan mountains with Afghanistan behind them, and along the kishlak main street at their foot; animals had their yield beside them – the extremely nice lambs and baby goats.
We could only feast our eyes upon the Tien-Shan snow-capped peaks; it was a long way to go, difficult and dangerous: settled down in the mountains were the so-called “basmaches” – well-to-do local farmers who escaped thereto during the civil war after the 1917 revolution. They persevered in combating the Soviet power brought to their land by Red Army.
By the end of 1942 my mother turned out the kolkhoz deputy chief accountant. We were provided a room in an office building occupied by other “smart” persons: the evacuated teachers, registered nurses, a druggist, etc. – all of them with their families. My mother was hold in respect, and her position enabled us to have additional provision from food in stock, and moreover, we were provided with a small plot at a rice field which we cultivated ourselves.
I have matured, got stronger, and attended the school sixth grade regularly; in April, 1943 I became fourteen.
The same summer my illegal trespassing “activity” on gardens and orchards with subsequent withdrawal of fruits and vegetables has become legal and lawful: I started working at the local stock-piling station. It was a part of the state tax agency dealing with collection of tax in kind from the rural population in the form of fruits and vegetables.
Our work was simple: a group of the evacuees-teenagers (local teenagers never participated in that “dirty” business)* led by a foreman on a donkey-pulled cart went along the kishlak streets and fearlessly (we knew we were “under the state protection”!) robbed the orchards bringing boxes with fruits to the “supply depot”. Stunned owners were left with a negligible piece of paper saying, “Fruit tax exempt”.  Fruits were never weighted or taken stock of; city transport used to withdraw them somewhere.
Such was my work during summer holidays. Our family was sure to have a plentiful supply of fruits without my risk to be caught.
Together with that principal job I spent summer of 1943 fishing; owing to the above we had ready money from selling both fish and rice from our own plot.
Those wares were sold at the Namangan market whereto I used to go on foot covering 10-12 kilometers; I was fourteen and it presented no difficulty for me. Now we could buy clothes, footwear, and “urban” bread.
While in the city I used to spend several hours at the local reading-room with books and magazines which I missed badly in kishlak.
That year – 1943 – situation at the fronts: Stalingrad, Kursk, and other victories of the Red Army installed optimism and hopes for the nearing end of the war and returning home. Oh, how far off that end was, but our faith has got strength and became deep-seated which facilitated our lives.
I made friends with a neighbor – a physically strong big guy unenlisted due to some illness; a professional swimmer, he was a life-guard before the war. He trained me, and by the summer end I could cross the broad and tumultuous Syr Daria River unassisted.
My friends and I spent our leisure time rambling for hours over the country and finding new ponds, lakes, streams, overgrown shrubs and reeds where unseen before birds were nested – partridges and even pheasants; we felt ourselves the ground breakers of the places where no foot may trod.
We were experiencing dark times, but a keen interest to the outward things together with natural youthful optimism prevailed. And to-day, indulging in retrospection without claims to originality I say openly – happy was that time of our lives; and future... those thoughts escaped us.
In autumn I started my seventh and the last, graduating school year. That 1943-44 school year was in no way remarkable for my mother’s and my lives. Mother worked hopefully anticipating news on liberating the area where her parents lived – the Soviet Army was impetuously attacking, and an everyday list of the liberated towns and villages dominated in the summaries of front* operations.
A new hymn of the Soviet Union (the to-day’s Russia hymn follows its tune) was studied everywhere; Soviet soldiers and officers got straps to their shoulders – it was uncommon for us; a lot of wounded in the war appeared and we were raptured by their medals and orders. My “personal life” was nothing extraordinary except for the…
Love has approached me – clean, childish, exalted, and… incomprehensible in my 15 years. This moment should not be omitted in describing my life.
It was mathematics that gave a push. I wasn’t a bad student, and finished the seventh grade a straight-A student, but mathematics was my weak point – it didn’t come easy to me, moreover so that I didn’t like its teacher and it must have been mutual dislike – I felt her unfriendliness towards me. She was a just that year newcomer from Namangan who was accommodated with her family – her sister with two children – at our house, and became our neighbor. It was a family of native Muscovites.
I made friends with her nephew Yura and from his talks gathered that judging from the maths teacher’s tales (and no doubt she used to share her experiences with her family) my reputation was not high with them. Yura had a sister – Sophochka Chernyakova, a handsome slim girl about my age. Her emergence made my consciousness unpredictable: I got to thinking about her with increasing frequency; I longed for provoking her return sympathy and attention. And understood that my face had to be saved, and the only way was through her aunt – an awful shrew as to me; to be strict, it had to be through her subject, maths I meant.
And I got down to the hated mathematics. After a time I was amazed to realize it was a comprehensible (thanks love!) science. All successive years, by the way, at school, at the institute mathematics was not a problem for me. I was raised in her estimation at once, and she turned out a friendly and sympathetic young woman for me.
With Sophochka we made friends, started feeling mutual attraction, and sought each other’s company; the whole world seemed to be shrunk to the two of us. I got ill once, caught high fever; and a faithful friend, she was permanently with me. We seemed to be close by all the time, and even mentally we were together. At the beginning of 1945 Sophochka went home to Moscow with her family, we pathetically bid farewell to one another – and she disappeared from my life.
Radio in the kishlak was absent. News came with the newspapers, at random and very late. One may be amazed to-day at the speed the front and military songs got spread and passed to friends and relatives. We never knew the names of their composers and poets, but each one was met like a small holiday. Listening to them nowadays I recollect involuntary those bygone years when I have heard them for the first time, and people who surrounded me then.
In the meantime 1944 were on. I celebrated my fifteenth birthday, finished the seventh grade, and said good-bye to the Djida-Kapa kishlak: the next year I had to start my school in the city.
In the summer of the same year I was offered a job of the kolkhoz letter carrier “as a literate person with incomplete secondary education and command of both Russian and Uzbek languages”.
Carrying letters turned out not as easy as I surmised at first: the streets, lanes, and the farmers’ separate residences – several hundreds all together – had neither numbers, nor names. It was my everyday headache when I received at the “central” post-office a pile of letters. Each address presented a puzzle, with numerous namesakes in the neighborhood. I had to resort to the help of surroundings: acquaintances, neighbors; sometimes letters needed to be opened to find “distinguishing features” of the addressee.
You could not be mindless of those letters; their three-cornered majority arrived from the fronts without envelopes and with the return address “field mail”. People lived awaiting for these letters with hope… and fear.
But it was not long when an unexpected and horrible reverse side of my seemingly harmless work turned out: the pioneering death notification appeared which I had to deliver to the instantly gone distraught with grief parents, wife, children…, then the second, third. I became a devil incarnate, death messenger; I was regarded with horror when knocking at someone’s door. In contrast to being gladly met when I brought a long anticipated “good” letter for which I was given some food and unfailing ruble or two, I was horrified by the above situation expecting violence or even stones thrown at me. Willy-nilly I had to invent a way to escape watching shock I was made to cause in people. After verifying the address I handed the death notification to the neighbors, and it appeared the best possible way out for me.
And the succeeding night through, I don’t know why but it occurred nightly, violent cries and wail of the special hired weepers were heard from the sorrow befallen house; and up to the dawn the ritual was going on heard for a long distance; and people cursed the war.
Speaking of cries, sobs, and loud wails I recollected the same reaction but on another occasion. And the reason for those lamentations was the night of the so-called “military tax” and “military loan” withdrawal.
If employees of the state institutions and enterprises had specified sums deducted from their wages, the farmers having no money of their own had their taxes in kind withdrawn in the most severe and barbarous manner.
It was done at night – at day-time the potential tax-payers could escape. From the district town a car used to come full of militia representatives and a couple of volunteers; if the house owner had no money to ransom himself a withdrawal took place, better say a legalized robbery of private property. Taken was all that got within easy reach: a domestic animal, whether cow or sheep, blankets, carpets, plates and dishes, “surplus products”. Air was thick with horrible cries and wail of the “tax-payers”, but people were afraid to interfere unaware what the next night would bring and who would be the next victim.
Whereto the withdrawn property was taken and how it could be turned into the “contribution to the front” nobody knew. A fat part of the robbed (you can’t name it otherwise) sank into the warehouses and got to the chief executives.

                NAMANGAN

Time for school was nearing. I was to start independent life in a town where my mother had rented a room for me at her acquaintances for a respective sum. I spent the 1944-45 school year in Namangan. The rest-days were spent at my kishlak home where I indulged myself on my “native” element; met Sophochka and friends.
The Uzbeks among whom I existed during evacuation, by the way, have “baptized” me (I don’t remember the reason) Mirzaraim, the name I got so accustomed to that even introduced myself by that purely Uzbek name.
In Namangan I plunged into civilization: electric light, radio, numerous Russian societies, and other attributes of modernity.
I remember how well after the Crimea had been liberated Namangan has accepted several freight echelons with Crimean Tatars. They have made it clear for us that Crimea was “cleared” of that full nation because of “collaboration with the German invaders”.
It was strange to see women, tender age children, and elders accused of treachery.  There must have been the reasons, but the very scale of the “action” could not but struck with its mass character, efficiency, and orderliness – like all implemented under the leadership of the “great Stalin”.
The operation took twenty four hours all in all. In Uzbekistan those people with their hastily grabbed poor belongings were met guardedly by the officials who rendered almost no help in their new lives and destined them to self-survive.
In the early 1945 my mother received tragic news: a letter from the liberated Yampol – the settlement where her parents were left during occupation – contained information about their being in ghetto; they were unknown to be alive still. By that time we knew what had happened to Jews within the invaded areas, thus our hope to have grandmother Molka and grandfather Elya Balaban alive was illusory.
As it became known later, my grandmother was rifle-butted when she left the ghetto territory to change something for food. Just then mother’s underage sister Rachil also perished.
And my grandfather was lost in a concentration camp whereto he was taken together with other Yampol ghetto inhabitants.
After Odessa was liberated we learned about my father’s four sisters who got lost with their families during the German-Romanian occupation of the city.
Just at that time my father-in-law Ilya Miltsman’s relatives – eighteen persons on the whole – were exterminated.
That is what Holocaust turned out to our family! Nothing but indignation can only be aroused by the modern interpreters of history who deny it!
Documentary witness on our family tragedy during Holocaust please find enclosed in the Appendix to this book.
It was not until I got to America that I came to know from the Maidenbergs, our American relatives, reliable details of my grandmother’s death told by a survived witness.
Should I narrate about my mother’s state after such a crook in the lot, and more so that by that time due to the hard emotional experience, hunger, hardships, and severe climate she got a grave illness – pellagra. Sores on her swollen legs were unbearable to look at, as well as pain she experienced. To escape pellagra-induced possible after-effects the doctors were unanimous in advising change of climate.
The war was coming to its end; battlefields were transferred to Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other East European countries. At the large-scale maps we were happy to mark with small flags cities taken by our army, the unknown strange cities.
I was sixteen by that time and have received my first passport.
Looking back I realize that I have had more than enough of life experience in my childhood, boyhood, and youth. But had it been of any use further on? I don’t know. I have no affirmative answer to that. Excessively contradictive that time was, and the very experience itself is full of diverse contradictions.
And at last the so long awaited for flag on our maps has appeared. Berlin was taken! The day has come which was so intensely and impatiently anticipated all those long years. The day has come, so sincerely looked forward to. The day of great joy mixed with equally great sorrow. Ninth of May, 1945! Victory! Hitler’s burned corpse…The war was ended!
Whatever is said to-day about the past war it was the event achieved through suffering both of army and the nation on the whole… and my child labor during war-time was also a tiny contribution to it.


    *Militia – law enforcement units, in the Soviet Union the same as police.
*echelon – a special train for transporting large quantities of people in war-time. Consisted of cars used for cattle or cargo.
*front – hostilities zone. Generally used to stand for “war”.
*Payok – strictly rationed quantities of food .
* Caravan – a succession of camels moving one after another; a camelcade.
* Kolkhoz  - forcibly established agricultural cooperatives with socialization of their privately-owned land and livestock, a collective-farm .
*The reader of the present story, living in another country and in other times cannot but be puzzled by great number of the stropped (“--”) words and expressions.
My narration is specific for its irony, sometimes sarcasm, mockery that imply official use of those terms in the depicted times in media, in reports and speeches of Soviet ideologists, in our socialist vocabulary. 
*KGB – the state security organ (structure).   
*NKVD – state structure for guarding public order and law in USSR