Tag #136748 - Interview #77995 (Liana Degtiar)

We had to move forward. We took a train to Rostov. There was a big junction station where there were crowds of people. The Germans never stopped bombing, there were air raid alarms. What were we to do? We ran under some tents at the station. Their roofs were covered with some steel sheets. The bullets echoed hitting on them. It was so scary! People huddled up to one another. We finally managed to get on a train heading east. We arrived at Makhachkala [today Russia]. The front line was advancing to the east as well. In Makhachkala we boarded a freight boat. I don't remember how long it sailed for. The deck was full of old people, children, babies and their families who had left their homes. There were attacks on us from the air. I also remember that there were problems with the toilets. There were long lines to the toilets. We arrived in Krasnovodsk [today Russia] where we took a train to Stalinabad [today Tajikistan] where my father received an order to go to work at the Kurgan-Tubinskaya region, Oktiabrskiy district, site of Vahshstroy [Construction of a big irrigation system in the Vahshskaya Valley on the Vahsh River in Tajikistan]. This construction started before the war and there were American engineers involved. Bruno Jasienski wrote a novel about this construction. [Bruno Jasienski (1901- 1938): Polish and Russian Soviet writer, lived in the USSR since 1929. The novel the interviewee is referring to is called 'Man's slough'.