Selected text
In August 1941, when I came to the university, I obtained evacuation documents for the rest of the girls, bread cards and cards for 400 grams of candy. Before leaving Kiev I went to see my Uncle Zeidel to take him with me. He refused to leave. He couldn't even move, because his whole body was covered with abscesses.
I went to Lemeshovka by changing from one train to another. My friends were waiting for me there. We went to Kharkov on foot. On the way I walked until my feet were covered in blisters and couldn't go on. I decided to wait for a train at the railway station of Lemeshovka. My friends left me again. My best friend Ida Mahagon said, 'I understand that we cannot leave you here, but I'm too scared to stay. If we get captured by the Germans we won't be able to escape'. I stayed alone on the platform at nighttime. I was lucky. A train full of soldiers arrived. They pulled me inside, and soon I caught up with the girls again. Changing vehicles we reached Kharkov on the third day. It became clear there that the university was preparing for evacuation in Kzyl-Orda.
Kiev was occupied, and it was clear that the Germans were coming to Kharkov. Other girls and I went to the mobilization office to volunteer to the front. We were told that students had to continue their studies and weren't allowed to recruit. I found Isaac's relatives in Kharkov and told them that I was going to join my parents in Fergana. I left the address of the hospital with them for Isaac. We still didn't believe that the fascists would go too far in our country and we, 12-13 girls, headed to Konstantinovka in Donbass where a brother of one of the girls worked as chief engineer at the chemical factory. We were hoping to get a job there. In Konstantinovka we only met this man's wife with her baby. She told us that he had been recruited to the army, and the factory was getting ready for evacuation. We helped her to get packed to go to her relatives in the country. Then we went to the railway station.
Changing trains we headed to Kzyl-Orda where we knew the university was going to evacuate to. We slept in railway cattle-cars. We were dirty, freezing and starving. We got off near the town of Engels in Saratov region [1,250 km east of Kiev]. It was the capital of the German Volga region. The town was empty. Nice and clean houses were empty. We were struck by this emptiness. We didn't know that the Germans had been deported to Kazakhstan, just like some other nationalities that the authorities had found suspicious, 13 as soon as the war began. They didn't have time to pack their luggage and left all their belongings behind. We washed ourselves in one of the houses and found some clothes. There was nobody to ask permission to take the clothes, so we changed and moved on.
After about three weeks we had covered another 300 km on passing vehicles or on foot and reached Kzyl-Orda at night. Kzyl-Orda was a small town in a desert in Kazakhstan, Middle Asia. Its population was Kazakh. Kazakh people had no education and led a patriarchal way of life. We fell asleep on the railway platform. I woke up at night and saw a moving whitish tape. I took a closer look and saw that these were lice. I woke up my friends. We left the station and fell asleep in a park nearby. It got very cold at night, and some of us fell ill. The girl whose brother we looked for in Konstantinovka had a high fever, and we took her to hospital. I left the most precious thing that I had with me - my mother's woolen shawl - with her.
We went to the town which was located about 20 km from the railway station. We found out that the university wasn't going to open for a while, because it was difficult to find sufficient facilities for both the Kharkov and Kiev universities in such a small town. I decided to go to the place where my parents were. I asked my fellow students to notify me as soon as the university would begin to operate. I covered over 800 km to Fergana on foot and any transport, train or a vehicle, driving this direction.
I found my parents and sister in Fergana. They lived in a small plywood hut that had served as a shed for silk worms. My father's sisters also lived nearby. Aunt Lena worked at the hospital. There was a hospital deployed at the Kuwasai station near Fergana, and Aunt Lena found me a job as a nurse there. Soon the hospital was converted into a mobile military hospital and sent to the front. Near Kharkov the train was bombed, and I was scared of the horrors of the war. Survivors and personnel moved to Markelan, which was not far from Fergana. I had a small wound on my right leg, but I recovered soon and returned to my duties.
The hospital became a typhoid hospital. Our patients were soldiers and officers. I had to learn how to give injections, dress wounds and assist doctors - I had to do everything that I had been so afraid of doing before. The thing was that only Valia Shulman and I had some medical training. The others working there were girls that had just finished school. I became a member of the Communist Party in this hospital. It was easy to become a party member during the war. They admitted all people that had been at the front. I wished to belong to the advanced part of society, to be a communist, to fight the enemy. There were a few girls, overwhelmed with the feeling of patriotism. The leader of the party unit conducted a meeting where he handed our party membership cards over to us without any special ceremonies. We took an oath to be patriots and defend our motherland.
One evening I bent over a Polish patient and felt a bite on my forehead. It turned out to be a typhoid louse. Shortly afterwards I fainted. I had typhoid with complications: pulmonary edema, encephalitis and phlegm on the leg that had been wounded. The doctors were going to amputate my leg, but fortunately there was a talented surgeon from Leningrad in this hospital, whose wife and child had perished in the blockade of Leningrad [17] some time before. He performed a surgery on my legd and saved it.
I received quite a few letters from friends while I was ill. There was one from Isaac. There was so much love and care between the lines of this letter that I didn't even care to answer letters from other young men. I understood that Isaac Gragerov was the gift of my life. After about two months I resumed my work duties, although I was so weak that I fainted every now and then. Then I received a letter from the university, inviting me to come back to resume my studies. I wanted to continue my studies, but I felt sorry to leave the hospital. I had a discussion with the director of the hospital, and he promised to notify me as soon as the hospital would be ordered to the front again.
I arrived at Kzyl-Orda a month before New Year's Eve of 1942. I settled down in a hostel, passed my exams and took to my diploma thesis. I also worked at a shop established by professors of the university. I defended my thesis. Its subject was the generation of spirits from wastes of Kzyl-Orda rice. At that time I received a letter from the director of the hospital telling me that they were to be sent to the front. He also specified the time when their train would be passing Kzyl-Orda. Letters took a long time to reach their destination in wartime, and it turned out that their train was to arrive at Kzyl-Orda half an hour after I received the letter. I ran to the station to catch the train. I didn't have any documents with me, and they didn't have the right to take me along without documents. I asked the conductor to keep the train for two hours for me to get my documents. When I came back the train was gone. I was awfully upset and still have the feeling of hurt and loss. I worked in Kzyl-Orda for a few months when I got assigned to the position of head of laboratory at the iodine and bromine factory on Chiliken Island in Turkmenistan. My friend wrote a poem about our life in Kzyl-Orda that I still keep. It is an accurate description of our life there.
Some time we shall have a cup of tea and will recall like an old anecdote the brew we had at the hostel in the year of 1943 that we shall remember. The weather so freezing that even dogs tried to hide away. Macaroni soup once a day that was hard to get. And bread that was so little that we could feel no taste of it. Two spoons for the four of us and one bed for two. An oil lamp on a dark evening in the fall. Porridge with melon on Sunday, spiced with smoke for misfortune, And Zhenia's ballads in the evening, oh, yes, she does sing well. And her concert gets straight to the sole especially when the stomach is empty. We read Green before going to bed and Kuprin books aloud, And had a life with no makeup, no holiday drunkenness or wine. We were sober after parties and discussions, We drank tea from shaving sets and ate bread that we had saved. Some time at tea, under a lampshade where it is as bright as on the brightest day, We shall recall the brew in the hostel and make a mention of our friendship with a kind word. .
I arrived on Chiliken Island in a fisherman's boat. We came across the Caspian Sea from Krasnovodsk to this island - now it's a peninsula. There were iodine deposits and deposits of other chemical elements on Chiliken. In the 1930s a big factory was constructed there. It wasn't a big island. There were just a few villages, two or three stores, one school and an iodine-bromine factory. The majority of the population of this island worked in this factory. They were Turkmen. They were very poor people that had no education, but there were also employees from other areas. There were also few of us that had been sent to this factory on assignment upon graduation from higher educational institutions.
There was sand on this island, clear seawater and bright sunlight. There was one saxaul tree, and local schoolchildren came to look at it to see what a tree looks like. I stayed in the hostel. Although there wasn't enough drinking water and bread, no books, theaters and cinemas, I recall this period of my life with pleasure. There weren't enough qualified engineers at the factory, and I had to conduct training classes in mathematics, chemistry and physics. I was also elected secretary of the Komsomol unit of the factory. I was responsible for amateur clubs - dancing and theatrical groups and choirs - to make our dull life more colorful. We cooked at the hostel in the evenings and had meals together.
There were eleven other tenants in my room in the hostel. These girls were of various nationalities and came from different areas of the country, but we got along well. We supported each other and shared all food that we had. My job assignment lasted three years. I was a good employee and after three years had passed my management was very reluctant to let me go. My manager promised me promotion and further transfer to Moscow, but I dreamt of seeing my beloved Kiev again. I hadn't heard from Isaac for a long time. I had no information about him and was hoping to see him in Kiev. I had to make a plot. I had a friend, former partisan, David Shakhnovskiy. He had been in love with me a while ago. He went to my management in Moscow and said that he was my husband and wanted his wife back home. They let me go, and I returned to Kiev in 1946. It was in ruins after the war, but how I longed to see my city!
I went to Lemeshovka by changing from one train to another. My friends were waiting for me there. We went to Kharkov on foot. On the way I walked until my feet were covered in blisters and couldn't go on. I decided to wait for a train at the railway station of Lemeshovka. My friends left me again. My best friend Ida Mahagon said, 'I understand that we cannot leave you here, but I'm too scared to stay. If we get captured by the Germans we won't be able to escape'. I stayed alone on the platform at nighttime. I was lucky. A train full of soldiers arrived. They pulled me inside, and soon I caught up with the girls again. Changing vehicles we reached Kharkov on the third day. It became clear there that the university was preparing for evacuation in Kzyl-Orda.
Kiev was occupied, and it was clear that the Germans were coming to Kharkov. Other girls and I went to the mobilization office to volunteer to the front. We were told that students had to continue their studies and weren't allowed to recruit. I found Isaac's relatives in Kharkov and told them that I was going to join my parents in Fergana. I left the address of the hospital with them for Isaac. We still didn't believe that the fascists would go too far in our country and we, 12-13 girls, headed to Konstantinovka in Donbass where a brother of one of the girls worked as chief engineer at the chemical factory. We were hoping to get a job there. In Konstantinovka we only met this man's wife with her baby. She told us that he had been recruited to the army, and the factory was getting ready for evacuation. We helped her to get packed to go to her relatives in the country. Then we went to the railway station.
Changing trains we headed to Kzyl-Orda where we knew the university was going to evacuate to. We slept in railway cattle-cars. We were dirty, freezing and starving. We got off near the town of Engels in Saratov region [1,250 km east of Kiev]. It was the capital of the German Volga region. The town was empty. Nice and clean houses were empty. We were struck by this emptiness. We didn't know that the Germans had been deported to Kazakhstan, just like some other nationalities that the authorities had found suspicious, 13 as soon as the war began. They didn't have time to pack their luggage and left all their belongings behind. We washed ourselves in one of the houses and found some clothes. There was nobody to ask permission to take the clothes, so we changed and moved on.
After about three weeks we had covered another 300 km on passing vehicles or on foot and reached Kzyl-Orda at night. Kzyl-Orda was a small town in a desert in Kazakhstan, Middle Asia. Its population was Kazakh. Kazakh people had no education and led a patriarchal way of life. We fell asleep on the railway platform. I woke up at night and saw a moving whitish tape. I took a closer look and saw that these were lice. I woke up my friends. We left the station and fell asleep in a park nearby. It got very cold at night, and some of us fell ill. The girl whose brother we looked for in Konstantinovka had a high fever, and we took her to hospital. I left the most precious thing that I had with me - my mother's woolen shawl - with her.
We went to the town which was located about 20 km from the railway station. We found out that the university wasn't going to open for a while, because it was difficult to find sufficient facilities for both the Kharkov and Kiev universities in such a small town. I decided to go to the place where my parents were. I asked my fellow students to notify me as soon as the university would begin to operate. I covered over 800 km to Fergana on foot and any transport, train or a vehicle, driving this direction.
I found my parents and sister in Fergana. They lived in a small plywood hut that had served as a shed for silk worms. My father's sisters also lived nearby. Aunt Lena worked at the hospital. There was a hospital deployed at the Kuwasai station near Fergana, and Aunt Lena found me a job as a nurse there. Soon the hospital was converted into a mobile military hospital and sent to the front. Near Kharkov the train was bombed, and I was scared of the horrors of the war. Survivors and personnel moved to Markelan, which was not far from Fergana. I had a small wound on my right leg, but I recovered soon and returned to my duties.
The hospital became a typhoid hospital. Our patients were soldiers and officers. I had to learn how to give injections, dress wounds and assist doctors - I had to do everything that I had been so afraid of doing before. The thing was that only Valia Shulman and I had some medical training. The others working there were girls that had just finished school. I became a member of the Communist Party in this hospital. It was easy to become a party member during the war. They admitted all people that had been at the front. I wished to belong to the advanced part of society, to be a communist, to fight the enemy. There were a few girls, overwhelmed with the feeling of patriotism. The leader of the party unit conducted a meeting where he handed our party membership cards over to us without any special ceremonies. We took an oath to be patriots and defend our motherland.
One evening I bent over a Polish patient and felt a bite on my forehead. It turned out to be a typhoid louse. Shortly afterwards I fainted. I had typhoid with complications: pulmonary edema, encephalitis and phlegm on the leg that had been wounded. The doctors were going to amputate my leg, but fortunately there was a talented surgeon from Leningrad in this hospital, whose wife and child had perished in the blockade of Leningrad [17] some time before. He performed a surgery on my legd and saved it.
I received quite a few letters from friends while I was ill. There was one from Isaac. There was so much love and care between the lines of this letter that I didn't even care to answer letters from other young men. I understood that Isaac Gragerov was the gift of my life. After about two months I resumed my work duties, although I was so weak that I fainted every now and then. Then I received a letter from the university, inviting me to come back to resume my studies. I wanted to continue my studies, but I felt sorry to leave the hospital. I had a discussion with the director of the hospital, and he promised to notify me as soon as the hospital would be ordered to the front again.
I arrived at Kzyl-Orda a month before New Year's Eve of 1942. I settled down in a hostel, passed my exams and took to my diploma thesis. I also worked at a shop established by professors of the university. I defended my thesis. Its subject was the generation of spirits from wastes of Kzyl-Orda rice. At that time I received a letter from the director of the hospital telling me that they were to be sent to the front. He also specified the time when their train would be passing Kzyl-Orda. Letters took a long time to reach their destination in wartime, and it turned out that their train was to arrive at Kzyl-Orda half an hour after I received the letter. I ran to the station to catch the train. I didn't have any documents with me, and they didn't have the right to take me along without documents. I asked the conductor to keep the train for two hours for me to get my documents. When I came back the train was gone. I was awfully upset and still have the feeling of hurt and loss. I worked in Kzyl-Orda for a few months when I got assigned to the position of head of laboratory at the iodine and bromine factory on Chiliken Island in Turkmenistan. My friend wrote a poem about our life in Kzyl-Orda that I still keep. It is an accurate description of our life there.
Some time we shall have a cup of tea and will recall like an old anecdote the brew we had at the hostel in the year of 1943 that we shall remember. The weather so freezing that even dogs tried to hide away. Macaroni soup once a day that was hard to get. And bread that was so little that we could feel no taste of it. Two spoons for the four of us and one bed for two. An oil lamp on a dark evening in the fall. Porridge with melon on Sunday, spiced with smoke for misfortune, And Zhenia's ballads in the evening, oh, yes, she does sing well. And her concert gets straight to the sole especially when the stomach is empty. We read Green before going to bed and Kuprin books aloud, And had a life with no makeup, no holiday drunkenness or wine. We were sober after parties and discussions, We drank tea from shaving sets and ate bread that we had saved. Some time at tea, under a lampshade where it is as bright as on the brightest day, We shall recall the brew in the hostel and make a mention of our friendship with a kind word. .
I arrived on Chiliken Island in a fisherman's boat. We came across the Caspian Sea from Krasnovodsk to this island - now it's a peninsula. There were iodine deposits and deposits of other chemical elements on Chiliken. In the 1930s a big factory was constructed there. It wasn't a big island. There were just a few villages, two or three stores, one school and an iodine-bromine factory. The majority of the population of this island worked in this factory. They were Turkmen. They were very poor people that had no education, but there were also employees from other areas. There were also few of us that had been sent to this factory on assignment upon graduation from higher educational institutions.
There was sand on this island, clear seawater and bright sunlight. There was one saxaul tree, and local schoolchildren came to look at it to see what a tree looks like. I stayed in the hostel. Although there wasn't enough drinking water and bread, no books, theaters and cinemas, I recall this period of my life with pleasure. There weren't enough qualified engineers at the factory, and I had to conduct training classes in mathematics, chemistry and physics. I was also elected secretary of the Komsomol unit of the factory. I was responsible for amateur clubs - dancing and theatrical groups and choirs - to make our dull life more colorful. We cooked at the hostel in the evenings and had meals together.
There were eleven other tenants in my room in the hostel. These girls were of various nationalities and came from different areas of the country, but we got along well. We supported each other and shared all food that we had. My job assignment lasted three years. I was a good employee and after three years had passed my management was very reluctant to let me go. My manager promised me promotion and further transfer to Moscow, but I dreamt of seeing my beloved Kiev again. I hadn't heard from Isaac for a long time. I had no information about him and was hoping to see him in Kiev. I had to make a plot. I had a friend, former partisan, David Shakhnovskiy. He had been in love with me a while ago. He went to my management in Moscow and said that he was my husband and wanted his wife back home. They let me go, and I returned to Kiev in 1946. It was in ruins after the war, but how I longed to see my city!
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Zhenia Kriss