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The Germans were attacking; they were already in the Northern Caucuses. There was danger that they could capture those territories. My father went away with the group, while we were first sent to Sverdlovsk and then to Semipalatinsk where we had to join the Ivan Franko Theater.
Semipalatinsk was a terrible steppe town. It cannot even be described. It was full of famine, cold, diseases, steppe; it was not just cold – it was arctic frost. I remember how my mother had to go outside with our neighbor and saw wood woods; they could not do it during the day because they were all too busy. Workers of the theater labored as hard as people of other professions. There I was the first-year student of the Teachers’ Institute. I majored in mathematics. I remember I had to walk a long distance, several kilometers, in order to get to that institute. But I lost two years of studies anyway, and when I went to university in Kiev I was already 19, and even though I studied there for two years, it was all in vain.
Then we went with the theater to Tashkent, where the Kiev Polytechnic Institute was located at the time, and I again became a first-year student of the physics and mathematics department. I spent one semester there. So, on the one hand, I studied mathematics all that time, but on the other hand I lost 2 years of studies, because my major in Kiev was absolutely different.
Semipalatinsk was a terrible steppe town. It cannot even be described. It was full of famine, cold, diseases, steppe; it was not just cold – it was arctic frost. I remember how my mother had to go outside with our neighbor and saw wood woods; they could not do it during the day because they were all too busy. Workers of the theater labored as hard as people of other professions. There I was the first-year student of the Teachers’ Institute. I majored in mathematics. I remember I had to walk a long distance, several kilometers, in order to get to that institute. But I lost two years of studies anyway, and when I went to university in Kiev I was already 19, and even though I studied there for two years, it was all in vain.
Then we went with the theater to Tashkent, where the Kiev Polytechnic Institute was located at the time, and I again became a first-year student of the physics and mathematics department. I spent one semester there. So, on the one hand, I studied mathematics all that time, but on the other hand I lost 2 years of studies, because my major in Kiev was absolutely different.
Period
Year
1942
Interview
Anna Iosifovna Ulik