Tag #117639 - Interview #100514 (Frieda Shteinene)

It was hard to describe our meeting with mom. Sister Nina forgot me completely and even took me with children’s hostility and jealousy. Since my hair was still very short, she tease me ‘shaved gord from broken pot’. Gradually we started getting along. We moved to Kirov [about 400 km from Moscow], where my grandmother Mina, her son Iosif were living. Grandmother worked as a warden at selection station, and Iosif was a worker. We settled in the hostel of the glove-making factory, where mother was offered a job. The factory was evacuated from Poltava. Here a lot of Jews- evacuees from Ukraine and Byelorussia, were working. Grandma and we lived in different ends or the town, our hostel was on the bank of Viatka river. There was a grief- Iosif died and grandmother got sick from that hard sorrow. She had lobar pneumonia, requiring hospitalization. We had to look after her. Mother got the cuttings from the gloves and made children’s clothes from them. We took them to the market, sold and bought butter, honey and wheat bread with that money. Then we walked along the rails across the city to grandmother’s hospital. No matter how hard it was, but grandmother Mina recouped. She moved in with us, when she came back.