Tag #118887 - Interview #91238 (Judel Ronder)

We took the train and headed to the South. I had spent for several days at the train station in Chelyabinks, wherefrom we left for Aktyubinsk. Finally we happened to be in Tashkent [now the capital of Uzbekistan, about 3500 km to the South East from Moscow]. We had spent several days at the train station and then left for a calm city Ferganu, located one kilometer away from Tashkent. We found a job, washed lemonade bottles. In the afternoon we had tea with rusks in the café as we could not afford anything else. We spent the night on the bench in the central park. Fall came and the nights were getting colder. We decided to look for the job offers with lodging. We turned out to be in kolkhoz 17 party congress. We were housed in covered wagon. All we had inside were quilts. We worked in the field harvesting cotton. The day norm was unachievable for us hungry people and we put the stones in the harvested cotton. Before going to work in the morning we ate the onion as there was a lot of it and had water from the dirty canal along the street. Some locals were sorry for us and gave us some food, others teased us. I remember, one time a rich man was riding a donkey and eating dried apricot and we followed him and picked up the pits. I do not know how we would survive the winter in the poor kolkhoz, but we were lucky to be demobilized in the army in December 1941. We were sent in Balakhna, Gorky oblast, where the 16th Lithuanian division [13].