Tag #128893 - Interview #78072 (elkhonen saks)

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the German army was moving ahead very quickly and approached the southern border of Estonia a month later. My father was in Tallinn. I was 14 years old and didn't know what to do. My old nurse Zelma wanted me to stay with her and promised to hide me if necessary. But I was rescued by Tsilya Slomka - she had been my mother's friend. Without asking anybody, she took me to the station and put me on a train to Tallinn. After three days Ite was evacuated to Russia together with the Estonian Communist Party and Komsomol executives. And from Tallinn all of us, my father and other relatives, were evacuated to Russia, too.

The front stopped for a short time on the Emajygi river, and northern Estonia remained unoccupied by the Germans for another month. Some Jews just didn't have time to flee from southern Estonia, but everybody had a chance to escape from the northern part, if they wished so. Only the old and the sick remained behind, as well as all those who didn't believe the stories of atrocities committed by the fascists, but considered it pure Soviet propaganda instead. All of them were murdered, of course.

The train, which took me, my father, my grandfather Yehuda, my uncles and aunts and their families away from Tallinn, was heading for the town of Ulyanovsk [750 km east of Moscow]. But at the station of Kanash in Chuvashia [an autonomous republic within Russia], all the evacuees were taken off the train and transported to Chuvash villages. There we were housed in country log huts; several families in one room. We lived in the same room with my mother's sisters, Blume and Basya, and another family. Jobs were impossible to find there. To survive, we had to sell our belongings and clothes. Soon we understood that we would hardly last long this way. And then Uncle Josef, my father's brother, gathered a group of evacuated Jews, about 30 people, and we went back to Kanash railway station. There we bribed the chief of the station, who told us to get into a commodity car, hooked the car to a train and asked where we wanted to go. For some reason, we chose Alma-Ata. The chief of the station wrote 'Alma- Ata' on the side of the car, and on our way we were.

We had been travelling for almost a month along Siberian roads before we got to Alma-Ata. The town was filled with refugees, and we went further on. At last, we found ourselves in northern Kazakhstan in the small town of Turmashi. We lived there for almost a year. I went to a Russian school, finishing the 8th grade there. That was the year when I learnt Russian. Living in Turmashi, we kept inquiring about our relatives. My father and I learned that my sister Ite was working near Moscow, in Egoryevsk. During the war the Communist Party, the Komsomol and the economic leaders of Soviet Estonia lived there. Ite worked as a journalist with the Central Komsomol Committee of Estonia.