Tag #155139 - Interview #103703 (Lubov Rozenfeld Biography)

In early 1944 the radio committee called for my mother from the evacuation. We went back in a freight train. It was cold and we had to burn my brother’s skis. He cried a lot after them. We also sailed a boat along the Volga and I remember my mother trading clothes for food products. She gave me a piece of white brick-shaped bread with a lump of sugar: this was an incredible luxury. Then we took a train again. When we returned to Kiev, it was ruined. Our house in Podol was there, but our neighbor Fania moved in our room. She even didn’t want to return our furniture. My mother received a dwelling from the radio committee in the very center of Kiev in Kreschatitskiy Lane. In the past it housed a brothel: on the 4th floor on both sides of a long dark curved corridor there were 11 square meter rooms. We received two rooms. This was a pre-revolutionary building with high ceilings, but there was no elevator. There was a stove in the room and we carried wood from the basement to the 4th floor. My brother had hernia afterward. Our neighbor Fania finally gave us back 4 cabinets, but she didn’t return our bed and we slept on the floor at the beginning. There were other employees of the radio committee living on our floor: singers, pianists and conductors. There were many tables and a sink in the common kitchen. When in the evening we turned on the light in the kitchen, the cockroaches scattered around in all directions. We cooked on primus stoves [editor’s note: Primus stove -a small portable stove with a container for about 1 liter of kerosene that was pumped into burners], before gas stoves were installed. There were two toilets and one bathroom where there were lines to get in. Life was funny in our communal apartment [21]: at night our neighbor Kolia often chased after his mother-in-law threatening to beat her and she used to run away from him in the corridor screaming. My mother was the only one, who opened the door and pronounced with a well-set voice: ‘Stop this scandal! The children are sleeping!’ Kolia replied in a drunken voice: ‘I am not doing anything to her. She screams on purpose’. Our neighbor Vova usually made a lot of noise in the afternoon teaching his ever changing wives. Singer Galina Sholina living in the room across the door to our room gave me a little doll. This was the first doll in my life.