Tag #155136 - Interview #103703 (Lubov Rozenfeld Biography)

I have dim memories about our trip across the Ural in a freight train for coal transportation. Frosia told me that I was black with coal and when the train stopped she took me off the train to wash me. The train moved on all of a sudden, and Frosia managed to jump on the footboard of the last railcar with me. The footboard broke all of a sudden, and fortunately, a soldier managed to grab Frosia. During air raids my brother screamed: ‘I don’t want to be killed by a bomb!’ When the train stopped during air raids, we jumped off to hide in the fields. We arrived at Vereschagino (about 2 thsd. km from Kiev) Molotov region. I remember that we lived in a wooden house on the 2nd floor. There was a green meadow near the house. My mother told me that my father worked in a railcar depot for a short time and then he volunteered to the front. My mother was chairman of a kolkhoz. They manufactured clay pots and she brought some home to cook in them. Somebody made us a steel stove with exhaust holes at the bottom. I put sticks in the stove and lit them and could see flames through the holes. My mother’s sister Dosia, May and grandmother Bela lived with us. I remember how May bought wild strawberries from local boys and dropped them incidentally. My brother and I burst into tears. Later Dosia and May moved out and grandmother Bela stayed with us.