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I remember some vague alarm that everybody felt at the beginning of war on 22 June 1941. My father was immediately called to the army. Before he left he managed to make some arrangements for my mother to go to work at the military hospital. She worked as an accountant and document assistant. My father thought it was better this way and he was right. The hospital evacuated to Astrakhan [a town in Russia in 1200 from Moscow where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea] and we evacuated with this hospital leaving our home and belongings. Our housemaid took our valuables to her home in a village. We had beautiful carpets and old gobelin pictures. She kept them in a cellar where the carpets got rotten. The pictures were all right and I have them in my apartment now. Our dog, a beautiful pedigree spitz, perished. Germans killed it. They knew who the dog belonged to. They said ‘Jude’ and killed it.
In Astrakhan we were accommodated in an apartment. My mother wasn’t on military service, but she wore a uniform with no badges of rank. On 1 October 1941 I went to school and my brother went to a 24-hour kindergarten. There was one such kindergarten for evacuated children whose mothers had to work long hours. At that time I faced anti-Semitism again, although there were no Jews in Astrakhan before the war and there could be no roots for local anti-Semitism. We lived in a terrible neighborhood for exiled enemies of the Soviet regime. They were mainly former kulaks and wealthy families from Ukraine. Their anti-Semitism went back to pogroms in the 1910s [17]. Their children must have told their parents that there was a girl with a very strange name of Sarra [Editor’s note: Jewish names were targets of mockery, vulgar jokes and abuse at the time]. Their parents probably explained what it was about and they beat me brutally saying that they were beating me for being a ‘zhydovka parchataya’ [kike]. I was a weird child. I was very quiet and never fought back. I came home and told my mother: ‘Mom, take it easy, but I shall never go to school again and I shall never go out to play with children’. I didn’t go to school for a year. Teachers from school came to talk me out of it and commissar of the hospital came to talk with me, but I didn’t change my mind.
About half a year passed when the owner of the apartment Lutikova said: ‘I am so lucky that you are not Jews. Other apartment owners have Jewish tenants’. Actually, 75% of hospital employees were Jews. My mother slept overnight and in the morning she packed and said: ‘I need to tell you that I am a Jew’. The hospital sent a truck to pick us and we moved to the hospital. I didn’t go to school. I studied at home, helped in the hospital, did housework and went to help an old woman, our neighbor, to water her vegetable garden and she gave us vegetables from her garden. I remember that this old lady gave me five apples on my birthday.
In Astrakhan we were accommodated in an apartment. My mother wasn’t on military service, but she wore a uniform with no badges of rank. On 1 October 1941 I went to school and my brother went to a 24-hour kindergarten. There was one such kindergarten for evacuated children whose mothers had to work long hours. At that time I faced anti-Semitism again, although there were no Jews in Astrakhan before the war and there could be no roots for local anti-Semitism. We lived in a terrible neighborhood for exiled enemies of the Soviet regime. They were mainly former kulaks and wealthy families from Ukraine. Their anti-Semitism went back to pogroms in the 1910s [17]. Their children must have told their parents that there was a girl with a very strange name of Sarra [Editor’s note: Jewish names were targets of mockery, vulgar jokes and abuse at the time]. Their parents probably explained what it was about and they beat me brutally saying that they were beating me for being a ‘zhydovka parchataya’ [kike]. I was a weird child. I was very quiet and never fought back. I came home and told my mother: ‘Mom, take it easy, but I shall never go to school again and I shall never go out to play with children’. I didn’t go to school for a year. Teachers from school came to talk me out of it and commissar of the hospital came to talk with me, but I didn’t change my mind.
About half a year passed when the owner of the apartment Lutikova said: ‘I am so lucky that you are not Jews. Other apartment owners have Jewish tenants’. Actually, 75% of hospital employees were Jews. My mother slept overnight and in the morning she packed and said: ‘I need to tell you that I am a Jew’. The hospital sent a truck to pick us and we moved to the hospital. I didn’t go to school. I studied at home, helped in the hospital, did housework and went to help an old woman, our neighbor, to water her vegetable garden and she gave us vegetables from her garden. I remember that this old lady gave me five apples on my birthday.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Irina Lopko