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I was responsible for receiving bread at the evacuation points on the way. We were passing Buguruslan near Orenburg, when I saw a train taking Chechen people into exile. There were automatic guns in the windows, and people on the train screaming and dying with nobody to bury them. I will never forget this horrific scene.
In Tashkent we saw David, Papa's younger brother and his family. They had relatives in Tashkent and moved in with them. We headed for Frunze where we stayed until the end of the war. We arrived in Frunze on December 21, 1941. Although we were suffering a lot from fleas, we went directly to the concert of Klaudia Shulzhenko, a famous Soviet singer, at the Philharmonic. In Frunze we rented a room that we shared with the family of papa's sister. Our next door neighbor was a Russian man who had been arrested and sent there by Stalin. He gave shelter to Ivan Krauze. He became a gorgeous bass singer and a People's Artist of the Soviet Union. I also became closely acquainted with the family of Natan Rachlin, a famous musician.
We were miserably poor during the evacuation. Ziama Katsanov, an acquaintance from Kiev, helped Papa to get a job at a shop that manufactured colorings for lemonade. There was a bread shop there where we received bread in exchange for our bread cards, and my father had a card. My mother went to work as a nurse at the hospital. We were so poor that we celebrated the liberation of Kiev in November 1943 with two sugar beets that Papa received at work. My mother cut them into cubes and boiled them and we had this sweet water. I also remember Papa telling us that he was offered a slaughtered horse but he refused to accept it. He said he remembered the sweet taste of horsemeat from the period of the Imperialistic War (World War One) and he couldn't accept it.
I studied at the governmental secondary school #3 in Frunze. I still have the picture of our class at the prom party in 1943. Forty-eight out of our forty-nine member student class were in the evacuation, and almost all were Jews. After school I enrolled in the English Department of the Pedagogical Institute. Simultaneously, I studied the history of music, music literature, harmony and solfeggio and took piano lessons. My teachers were professors from the Moscow Conservatory: Vladimir Vlasov, Vladimir Ferre and Michail Arkadievich Rauchverger. They taught me for free. My only payment to them was the love and admiration I had for them which never faded.
In Tashkent we saw David, Papa's younger brother and his family. They had relatives in Tashkent and moved in with them. We headed for Frunze where we stayed until the end of the war. We arrived in Frunze on December 21, 1941. Although we were suffering a lot from fleas, we went directly to the concert of Klaudia Shulzhenko, a famous Soviet singer, at the Philharmonic. In Frunze we rented a room that we shared with the family of papa's sister. Our next door neighbor was a Russian man who had been arrested and sent there by Stalin. He gave shelter to Ivan Krauze. He became a gorgeous bass singer and a People's Artist of the Soviet Union. I also became closely acquainted with the family of Natan Rachlin, a famous musician.
We were miserably poor during the evacuation. Ziama Katsanov, an acquaintance from Kiev, helped Papa to get a job at a shop that manufactured colorings for lemonade. There was a bread shop there where we received bread in exchange for our bread cards, and my father had a card. My mother went to work as a nurse at the hospital. We were so poor that we celebrated the liberation of Kiev in November 1943 with two sugar beets that Papa received at work. My mother cut them into cubes and boiled them and we had this sweet water. I also remember Papa telling us that he was offered a slaughtered horse but he refused to accept it. He said he remembered the sweet taste of horsemeat from the period of the Imperialistic War (World War One) and he couldn't accept it.
I studied at the governmental secondary school #3 in Frunze. I still have the picture of our class at the prom party in 1943. Forty-eight out of our forty-nine member student class were in the evacuation, and almost all were Jews. After school I enrolled in the English Department of the Pedagogical Institute. Simultaneously, I studied the history of music, music literature, harmony and solfeggio and took piano lessons. My teachers were professors from the Moscow Conservatory: Vladimir Vlasov, Vladimir Ferre and Michail Arkadievich Rauchverger. They taught me for free. My only payment to them was the love and admiration I had for them which never faded.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Larissa Khusid