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We traveled for a month. We left on 7th October and on 7th November 1941 we arrived in Sosedkovo, the village of the Nizhniy Tagil timber enterprise [the town of Nizhniy Tagil is located in the Ural, Russia, 2,500 kilometers from Kiev]. We were accommodated in a local house. The owners were good to us. They let us wash ourselves – it’s hard to describe how dirty we were. They put our clothes in the stove to kill the lice. We stayed with this family a few days until we got a place in a room in a barrack. There were sheets and blankets that served as partials in this room. We were lucky to have a stove in our part of the room.
My father became a janitor at the fuel storage facility of the kolkhoz of the timber facility breeding horses and cattle. My younger brother Srul also got a job there. He was someone’s assistant. My father and Srul walked about eight kilometers to work from the village. My mother and I stayed in our cold room. We stayed in bed and tried to warm each other up. We couldn’t wait until my father came home. There was a canteen for workers at the kolkhoz, where my father got some leftover food for us: soup or cereal. This was our only food for the day. We got some potatoes in the village, but they froze because even the walls in our dwelling were covered with a layer of ice. We exchanged everything we had for food and wood. My mother displayed her dresses and blouses on our bed and the locals came and took them away for a bucket of potatoes, a jar of milk or a piece of butter. Sometimes people brought us potato peels and my mother made potato pancakes from them.
My father became a janitor at the fuel storage facility of the kolkhoz of the timber facility breeding horses and cattle. My younger brother Srul also got a job there. He was someone’s assistant. My father and Srul walked about eight kilometers to work from the village. My mother and I stayed in our cold room. We stayed in bed and tried to warm each other up. We couldn’t wait until my father came home. There was a canteen for workers at the kolkhoz, where my father got some leftover food for us: soup or cereal. This was our only food for the day. We got some potatoes in the village, but they froze because even the walls in our dwelling were covered with a layer of ice. We exchanged everything we had for food and wood. My mother displayed her dresses and blouses on our bed and the locals came and took them away for a bucket of potatoes, a jar of milk or a piece of butter. Sometimes people brought us potato peels and my mother made potato pancakes from them.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Fira Usatinskaya Biography