Listen to Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 6
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 6
Chapter 1. Born The First Week Of The War. (EXCERT)
I was born on the first of July 1941, in Moscow USSR. My parents had two daughters
before me. The oldest, Galia, was seven years old and the middle one, Lena, was
five. My father wanted a son. He told my mother that if she had another girl, he
wouldn’t even take the baby home from the hospital.
On June 22nd of that year, Stalin came on the radio and announced to the Soviet
people that the USSR was at war. The German fascists had invaded Russia.
It was just eight days before I was born, and my father was called up to serve in the
army and had to leave Moscow exactly a week before my birth. My mother was then
left with her two daughters and the new baby, me. What irony. “Another girl!”
During the first couple of months of the war, the citizens of Moscow were in a panic.
Word went around that the Germans would take Moscow in no time, and would do
terrible things to the people, especially to the Jews.
My father’s whole family all lived in Moscow. He had one sister, who was the eldest,
and eight brothers. None of them went to war except my father and his youngest
brother Ezie, who had no children. Nevertheless, none of them offered to help my
mother with her children, so she felt very much alone and in danger. She had a friend
in a similar position, whose husband had gone to the front leaving her with their two
children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of eleven. The two women decided to leave
Moscow before it was too late.
The only help my mother got from my father’s family was through his eldest brother
Naum, who had an important post with the Ministry of Transport. He provided her with
a railway car, the kind used to transport animals. It was all he could manage since
almost all the passenger trains had been commandeered by the army.
The wagon was hooked up to another twenty or more cars of different kinds, carrying
animals, machinery, chemicals, and thousands of refugees heading east. The whole
railway system was in total confusion. There were delays and long stops, endless
days and nights spent on sidings, cars hooked up and then disconnected, sudden
changes in orders, trains rerouted at the last minute and sometimes whole trains
literally going around in circles.
My mother and her friend often had no idea where they were going or where they
were. It took them more than two months to reach Bugulma in the Tatar Republic, a
little more than a thousand kilometres from Moscow. There, they were told they could
settle in one of the nearby villages.
My mother became very ill on this long journey …
Chapter 2. Always Hungry. (EXCERT)
My very first memory goes back to when I was between two and three years old. This
period of my life is registered so vividly in my mind that I’ve remembered it all my life.
Even now, I can visualize the episode and hear a child’s scream and almost physically
feel the pain.
The episode was very short.
I understand that the woman who breast-fed me and took care of me, at some point
couldn’t feed me with her own milk anymore. She had no interest in an extra hungry
mouth anyway, when she didn’t have enough for her own children.
I remember myself as always being hungry.
Sometimes I couldn’t fall asleep because of hunger pains …