Tag #155221 - Interview #103686 (Ilia Rozenfeld Biography)

On the morning of 22 June I was preparing for my exam in geodesy. I was turning a knob on my radio. I liked radios and assembled radios listening to different radio stations. There were different channels on the radio and I grasped something in German about some ‘losses’ of the soviet troops and their retreat. I called my mother who had fluent German and she was also surprised to hear those strange messages. At 12 o’clock we listened to Molotov’s speech 22 who said that the war began.  At first it was rather quiet in the town. My family and aunts decided to evacuate and were waiting for the official evacuation of our college. There was no panic in the town, but the streets were deserted as if all residents had left for resorts all of a sudden.